05.03.13
Posted in Asia, Bill Gates, Microsoft at 2:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet more depressing stories about government officials kowtowing to Gates and his monomaniacal gang
LAST month we chastised AICTE for its latest (not the first [1, 2]) sale of Indian children to the foreign abusive monopolist, Microsoft, whose criminal activity is unique and truly deserving of a boycott. The Indian Express has an article about it and it is titled “Against freedom” [via Atul Jha]
“Why the AICTE’s decision to partner with Microsoft is unimaginative” is the summary and it frames the situation as follows: “The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has become Microsoft’s biggest customer for cloud services. By June 30, students and teachers at 11,500 technical institutions will be locked down to Microsoft’s online productivity applications and storage. Cloud services reduce the cost of computing and increase reliability, so this is a good route to go. But a better fork in the same road could have been taken. What would it have cost to develop a free and open source cloud? Or to catch the interest of free and open source software providers who already offer such services to large populations? Even if big brands are in favour, Microsoft has competition which may have been more open.
“Comparisons between proprietary and free and open systems usually focus on the cost advantage — free means free to use. It is a compelling argument for poorer countries that face the challenge of educating, skilling and connecting large populations very rapidly. But the real, long-term advantages lie in the alternative meanings of free — free to play with, free to change, free to reprogramme, free to apply to unintended purposes. And most importantly, free to learn from and free to share. When the users of a system have technical interests, the potential gains from these flavours of freedom are immense. Instead of being passive users of a locked system, they would be encouraged to be curious, to tinker with the very tools they use and innovate ways to adapt them to their needs — or to future needs. The cloud itself could be adapted. And users would have access to at least 40,000 software packages to use, study or get involved in developing.”
It has long been the ambition of Microsoft to use state mandates to indoctrinate populations at taxpayers’ expense (passing cost to leverage tax). Bill Gates publicly said, “they’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Right now, using the Gates Foundation, Gates seeks total control of education, going far further than just IT.
Toby showed me this new report which he says is about “Pro-Bill Gates propaganda is part of mandatory Washington State tests for grades 3-8… How predictable”
Here is what the post says:
In a 3rd grade student workbook for MSP Reading Assessment preparation, which is a Washington State mandated test for grades 3 through 8, a parent found this question:
Dora Taylor sums up with: “Propaganda fed to our children? Gates and his foundation are starting to feel the heat of controversy over his ideas of how public education should be managed as well as his investments in Monsanto. a company that produces GMO seeds. This pushback is happening in his own backyard and around the world.”
As we shall show in a later post, Microsoft veterans now directly manage many of the public policies in this state. The Monsanto agenda is also being promoted in Washington universities in particular with funds from Gates, a Monsanto shareholder and part-time lobbyist. It’s a nice way for the food monopoly to pass a bribe to academics while making it look like charity.
India, one of the main victims of Monsanto (high suicide rates due to Monsanto-induced debt and record yield without GMO dependence), should reject this cult of monopolies and choose freedom to assure a promising future for the next generation. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I currently run Fuduntu Linux on my main desktop PC. Until just recently I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows 7, but I finally wiped Windows (hadn’t actually needed it for a long time) and installed Fuduntu, which came really highly recommended. I’m loving it so far. Meanwhile I also have a Samsung Chromebook and an Android phone. We have a bunch of other laptops in my family, but my 12-year-old son is constantly installing new distros on them (he got the Linux Diversity collection for Christmas), so I couldn’t tell you what’s on them at the moment. 
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A couple of years into my IT studies and I came across Ubuntu 6, tried it and immediately got hooked. I tried many flavours of Linux and at some stage sported over 10 partitions on my laptop but finally settled back to Ubuntu Linux.
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On the instructions of e-court committee Supreme Court of India and the Chief Justice, Mr. M. M Kumar and Mr. Justice Mansoor Ahmad Mir, Judge Incharge e-Court Committee, High Court of Jammu & Kashmir, the continued training on “Ubuntu Linux Awareness Cum Training Programme under Change Management” for the Judicial Officers of Jammu and Samba districts was held on April 28, 2013 at J&K State Judicial Academy,
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John Browning. I’m a systems programmer/engineer for a privately held software company that makes statistical software. I also contribute to Engadget.com in my spare time. At my day job I manage high performance clusters/grids running RedHat Enterprise Linux. I’m responsible for creating a lot of tooling and automation, mostly in Perl. I get to invent cool new ways of doing stuff. I’ve been playing with Conary as of late. I’ve been using Linux since I was a tween.
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Today, my mother showed me an article she read in a local newspaper. It was about Linux, free software, and how students from a private university (probably the biggest private university here) were using FLOSS.
The article mentioned the benefits of FLOSS in educational contexts and how those students were using GIMP, LibreOffice, and Linux, of course.
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Server
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Linux tends to be associated with x86 hardware in a business context, but some well-known companies are running it on mainframes.
“All of the large banks are using it [Linux on IBM System z], but don’t want to talk about it,” CA Technologies distinguished engineer Scott Fagen told iTWire.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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I’ve often criticized Canonical and Ubuntu. In fact, I’ve criticized them often enough that some people are convinced that I have a grudge against them. But there’s one point on which I’ll defend them: their decision to minimize the use of the word “Linux” on their website and in other public communications.
This policy is not new, but it is periodically rediscovered by various members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. It rarely fails to provoke outrage. Is Ubuntu pretending it isn’t dependent on Debian and several dozen other upstream projects? The rediscovers ask. Is Canonical trying to claim credit for all the work of others that goes into Ubuntu?
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Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin is likely one of a handful of people in the world who has had a front row seat to the largest collaborative development effort in the history of computing, Linux. He understands that speed of innovation and quality of software development is dictated by forward thinkers who are working in collaboration.
That is why he was recently invited to speak at TEDx about what the technology industry has learned from Linux, and specifically its creator Linus Torvalds, and how some of those lessons can be applied to a variety of efforts and projects across geographies and disciplines.
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A web hosting company has publicly shared their thoughts on the Btrfs file-system for Linux. While often discussed as the next-generation Linux file-system, Btrfs isn’t fully baked for use in a production world quite yet.
Anchor, an Australian web-hosting company, shared their findings after doing extensive research and testing of Btrfs. Overall, the Btrfs experience was “very positive” but they ran into regular issues with hung tasks during snapshotting, a bug causing CPU soft lock-ups, problems when filling up a Btrfs file-system, and some other shortcomings.
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The Automotive Grade Linux workgroup aims to get more open source technology in vehicles
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From data centers to embedded sensors, energy use is one of the toughest issues facing computing. The Linux kernel community has already made great progress in boosting energy efficiency, but there’s still more work to be done to optimize Linux systems, with one area of focus on power-aware scheduling.
LWN editor Jon Corbet presented an overview of the issues and potential solutions for improving power management with the kernel scheduler in his Linux kernel weather forecast keynote last week at Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. And breakout session presentations by Preeti Murthy, a software engineer at IBM, and Morten Rasmussen, who works on the power management team at ARM, went into further detail on the kernel changes. All three presentations are available on YouTube and embedded here for your convenience.
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The Linux kernel is finally able to use SSDs as hard-disk cache. Changes to the network subsystem promise to improve the way server jobs are distributed across multiple processor cores. Linux 3.9 also includes drivers for new AMD graphics chips and soon-expected Wi-Fi components from Intel.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest back-end to be published for Wayland’s Weston compositor is for Red Hat’s SPICE.
This new Weston back-end supports SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) remote rendering protocol as used by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on the desktop. There’s been a lot of SPICE driver activity as of late with a QXL KMS driver and talk of a potential Gallium3D wrapper driver. This new driver though isn’t out of Red Hat.
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Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.14.99.1, the first X.Org Server 1.15 development snapshot ahead of the official release in the second half of 2013.
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Benchmarks
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One week after delivering updated Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, we have to share this morning similar results for the open-source and reverse-engineered “Nouveau” Linux graphics driver compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. While the Nouveau driver has come a long way and does support the latest Fermi and Kepler GPUs, it’s not without its share of shortcomings. Eleven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were used in this latest Phoronix comparison.
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Applications
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On the weekend Michael Natterer implemented a new feature that was often requested by painters: Canvas rotation.
The canvas rotation feature lets you set an angle for the whole view of the image window by pressing SHIFT+Middle mouse button. You can also set it by 15° steps when pressing CTRL+SHIFT+Middle Mouse.
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My last several articles have covered lots of software for doing research in the sciences. But one important area I haven’t covered in detail is the resources available for teaching the next generation of computational scientists. To fill this gap, you can use the code provided through the Open Source Physics project. This project is supported by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and it offers several different packages for doing simulations and analysis.
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No tablet would be complete without instant messaging. Thanks to awesome bachelor thesis work we had a non-working mockup of an active client. This active client remains separate from our desktop work.
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I have a list of tools that are veritable Swiss Army knives — things that can do so much that I could probably dedicate an entire week on how to use them.
On the other hand, they don’t have much of an interface, which makes them only vaguely interesting to me as console applications.
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Nightingale is an audio player with a beautiful interface with a wide range of supported audio formats, all with multi-platform support. Being the fork of Songbird, it offers the user a lot of cool features like the ability to play MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WMA etc formats, Mp3 download feature, Last.fm integration and much more.
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GNU/Linux is ruling the roost today – it dominates almost every aspect of our lives by powering devices that we use without consciously knowing that it’s running Linux. One area where GNU/Linux is still behind is the consumer desktop market which is dominated by Microsoft.
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On a regular basis, we at OStatic compile documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications. For example, you can find our collection of free, online books on open source tools here, including guides that can get you started with Blender, GIMP and more great open source applications.
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And even though the old, old web page vanished and the Wikipedia page has been summarily deleted, I still plop down my money on e3 in any match against any other text editor, any place, any time.
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Tired of the default KDE themes, color schemes, and wallpapers? Then try Caledonia, a bundle containing everything you need to spice up your desktop. Caledonia comes with a set of high-quality wallpapers, a KDE Plasma theme, a splash screen, a KDM theme, and a color scheme. You can download individual parts, or you can use the Caledonia Downloader shell script to grab the entire bundle.
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Hotshots is a screenshot tool with some editing features. It is particularly suitable for writing documentation (as used in the following chapters) but you can use it to highlight some details on a map image or what ever you want.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail final is almost out. The final release it scheduled for release on April 25. After you actually get done with the installation, there would likely exist a heap of things you still need to take care of. This post will share some interesting insight and ideas about what you can and should do after a successful installation.
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Games
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INSURGENCY is a first-person team-based shooter for up to 32 players designed for Windows® PC and Mac OS X (and in the future, Linux), using Valve’s Source Engine. INSURGENCY is based on the popular total conversion for Half-Life 2 – Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat – that saw more than a million free downloads and was awarded the ModDB “Player’s Choice Mod of the Year” in 2007. It is a highly intense, realistic experience. This means no cross-hairs, realistic weapon damage, and careful maneuvering.
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Monster Loves You! Recently popped up on the SteamDB so I decided to do my usual checks and get in touch with the developer to see if it is actually coming.
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While Nemesys Games is going to release its racing game Ignite for Linux only after releasing it for iOS, the developers of SCS Software have already started the closed beta of Euro Truck Simulator 2 for Linux. The game was voted on Steam Greenlight for inclusion in the Steam games catalog by the gamers community.
In this simulation game, the player takes on the role of the truck driver and is responsible for the transportation of various commodities across Europe. Moreover, the player has the influence on the business affairs of his company and crucially influences its success.
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The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief, an adventure game developed by KING Art and published by Nordic Games, will arrive on Steam for Linux on June 20.
The developers from KING Art are best known for “The Book of Unwritten Tales” series, which has been very well received by gamers and critics alike.
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Some colleagues of mine are asking users if they would pay for Linux. Given that folks pay for Windows and Mac, why wouldn’t they pay for Linux? Some of the answers so far are quite interesting. Perhaps they’re not as you’d expect.
Linux users are known, among other things, as being cheapskates. That was the excuse many larger gaming houses cited as why they quit porting to Linux. Some distribution leaders find the exact opposite. Besides all the business sponsors, Linux Mint rakes in over $5,000 a month in user donations. Many others have donation buttons and some raise respectable numbers. Certain software makers have raised some decent funds from Linux users, like the Humble Indie Bundles. But as a general rule of thumb, Linux users ain’t paying for shift.
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Surgeon Simulator 2013, the Bossa Studios developed “darkly humorous” sim has released the full version of what was once a prototype developed for a 48 hour game jam. Video of yours truly playing that prototype with poor audio mixing up above.
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The 39 Steps, a revolutionary type of game that tries to combine literature, gaming and film into one experience, will launch on Steam for Linux.
The developers from The Story Mechanics have gone to great lengths to replicate the environments of 1914′s London, according to the original John Buchan texts.
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Kairo, a puzzle game developed by Richard Perrin and published by Lupus Studios, has been released on Steam for Linux and on multiple platforms.
Players will enter the lost world of Kairo and start to explore ancient and forgotten monuments.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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So I decided to implement it.
The phishing used several method that KMail try to detect…
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Ever since a certain free software company decided to no longer be part of the larger ecosystem, I have seen lots of strange news postings whenever one of the KDE workspace developers mentioned the word “Wayland”. Very often it goes in the direction of “KDE is now also going on Wayland”. Every time I read something like that, I’m really surprised.
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KlyDE, a light weight KDE experience was announced recently, there is a lot to know about this new project. We reached out to Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE community manager and one of the core team members of the KlyDE project to understand more about this project. Read on…
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Last week, members of the Plasma team met in Nürnberg, Germany to discuss open questions on the road to Plasma Workspaces 2. The meeting was kindly hosted by SUSE and supported by the KDE e.V.. For the Plasma team, the meeting came at a perfect point in time: porting of Plasma to a new graphics has commenced, is in fact well under way, and has raised some questions that are best discussed in a high-bandwidth setting in person.
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The road to Plasma Workspaces 2 has been laid out as the Plasma developers recently met in Nuremberg, Germany, to discuss their open issues around future developments. A new version of the KDE desktop will be based on version 5 of the KDE platform and on Qt 5, writes KDE developer Sebastian Kügler. It will be designed to run on X11 as well as on Wayland. With Wayland, KWin will be used as the compositor.
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Dear KDE Community,
meet the mailing list where you can now talk about non-technical topics relevant to our community: kde-community. From a debate about our next conference to discussing our collaboration with other organizations and our goals as KDE community, this list is for anything which does not fit on the KDE development lists.
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When I arrived at Tokamak 6 last week Alex was studying D-Bus communication between various applications. Before I had a chance to really sit down he complained about KWin talking to kded whenever for example a window got moved. This didn’t make much sense, so we had a look at it.
As it turned out that was KWin sending out notifications. Which immediately raised the question of why? Why would a user want a notification that he started/finished moving a window? After all it’s an action the user triggered. What should be done with the notification? Show a message? “You successfully moved a window!”, yes thank you I can see that on the screen. Play an annoying sound? Pling! Hopefully not.
Looking at what KNotify supports only logging to file or running a script make sense in response to the notifications emitted by KWin. But for logging to file it’s rather questionable why one would want that and why one would do that from inside a window manager. So what remains is running a script – fair enough that can be useful.
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KO GmbH, a Germany firm, has announced the commercial support for Krita, one of the commercial-grade sketching application. KO GmbH, the Magdeburg based company, was co-founded by Krita maintainer Boudewijn Rempt. We reached out to Rempt to talk about Krita and the commercial support for Krita. Read on…
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Ready to rock out with KDE’s premier music management application? Let’s rediscover our music with Amarok.
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The future of the KDE desktop was planned earlier this month at a developer event held at the SUSE headquarters.
Already we wrote about the results of KDE, Unity, GNOME, and Razor-Qt developers meeting up at SUSE’s Nürnberg offices. There were also clear statements about KDE support for Wayland. Now over on the KDE web-site is a nice summary of their Plasma planning.
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Here we are, finally ready for the 2.3.0 release. After the 2.2 one we targeted some things to fix and features to implement. We now are in the “almost done” level, meaning that quite all things have been done and that the code push is (hopefully) release level.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Now we can browse the albums and their content making it our most complete view. Playback to the albums view and songs view is in development (works but is buggy).
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While many of you, GNOME fans, are still enjoying the newly released GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, the GNOME developers are working hard on the next major version, GNOME 3.10, due for release this Autumn.
GNOME 3.10 will include many new features, such as automatically updated extensions, focus-caret tracking and color tinting functions for GNOME-Shell, new Maps and Videos apps, as well as Git integration and porting to the Wayland display server.
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The GNOME 3.8 release kept me pretty busy. In the run up to UI freeze I was focusing on tracking bugs, providing guidance and testing. Then it was marketing time, and I was spending all my time writing the release notes as well as some of the website. (Kudos to the marketing team for a great 3.8 release, btw.)
With 3.8 behind me, I’ve been able to turn back to some good honest design work. I’ve been looking at quite a few aspects of GNOME 3, including Settings and GNOME Shell. However, in this post I am going to focus on some of the application design activities that I have been involved in recently. One of the nice things here is that I have found the opportunity to fill in some gaps and pay some attention to some of the long-lost applications that are in need of design love.
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PCMan has created what looks like a qt fork of PCManFM, and there are some indications there and elsewhere that other LXDE components may be moving in that direction.
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Are you a proud Linux user? Do you want to express yourself and show your friends and people around you what is your favourite Linux distribution? You can help the Linux community to grow and enhance your notebook by buying unique Linux-themed stickers and key chains on UnixStuff.net.
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Our last distro was an Ubuntu 10.04 respin that housed the educational apps and games that make the reglue respin unique. In that support for that LTS is now gone, we’ve had to move on to find another long term solution for Reglue.
This wasn’t an easy decision to make.
Reglue is challenged in many areas. Besides the financial struggles we face, there just isn’t a lot of time to spend adding and removing individual apps and games on each computer. Many days, I am the only one working. When those machines hit my workbench, I need a one-stop solution.
Get it on the bench, get it working, and get it in the Ready Stack. SolusOS is my solution.
Just to give you a peek behind the curtain, there were some in the organization that balked at my choice. Given the recent turmoil in The Linuxsphere, the question was asked pointedly:
Is a small developer choice going to last for us?
It’s an honest question.
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Also in the mag we’ve more on the UEFI debacle, a roundup of image editors, an inside look at audio editing with Ardour, Hotpicks and a gaggle/pride/murder of brain-expanding tutorials. Have fun!
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To celebrate the cover feature on the latest Linux Format, we’ve built a web app that helps you find out which Linux distro is right for you. Just enter details of what you’re looking for, and it will pick your perfect distro match.
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After posting my Pantheon DE review, a lot of people emailed me, telling me that what I did was wrong, namely install this desktop environment from a PPA and run it on top of a Ubuntu desktop. All right then, so what should I have done, I asked politely. They said, test elementary OS, which is a Ubuntu fork all right, with the Pantheon desktop environment on top it. Aha. Same thing? Supposedly not. Go figure.
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ROSA is glad to announce version 2.0 of its environment for building and developing open software – ROSA Automatic Build Farm (ABF). The system got more than 100 different improvements which will help developers and maintainers to effectively control the whole life cycle of distributions (from creation of a source code to building ISO images).
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Recently I’ve posted an article about the Windows manager and desktop environments that use less resources on Linux and thanks to a comment of Sebastian I’ve discovered Livarp, a lightweight GNU/Linux Distro.
Livarp is a DEBIAN-based distro that tries to take the best part of available Debian GNU/Linux applications without loosing accessibility or design, special attention was paid to the documentation that in a simple page collects all the most important information you need to know on the available software of this distribution and how to configure it.
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New Releases
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Today’s Distrowatch Weekly brought the news that a new distribution has been added to the official Linux database. You know what that means. It’s time to boot ‘er up.
SolydXK is a Debian-based distribution aiming to easy to use, stable, and secure. Founders believe SolydXK would be suitable for home and small office settings. SolydXK comes in two flavors: SolydX featuring the Xfce desktop and SolydK featuring KDE. SolydXK began life as a variant of Linux Mint Debian with KDE, but later broke away and became its own distro. Its inaugural release came just two weeks ago and was promptly put right smack on this month’s cover of Full Circle Magazine. SolydXK 201304 features Linux 3.2.39, Xorg 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, and Firefox 19.0.2.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Paris the 15th of April 2013: Mandriva S.A. has released a host of security fixes as well as new addons for its server platform, Mandriva Business Server.
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The PCLinuxOS distribution was originally based on Mandriva, but has since split off and become an independently developed project. PCLinuxOS is a rolling-release distribution with the dual aim of being both powerful and easy to use. Officially PCLinuxOS ships with the KDE desktop interface, while community editions are available which provide Xfce and LXDE flavoured download images. The latest release of PCLinuxOS, version 2013.04, is significant in that it marks the first time the project has released 64-bit builds of the operating system. The new 64-bit builds are made available alongside the usual 32-bit ISO images. Aside from the new architecture support the latest release carries few new features, focusing mostly on updating existing software. In particular the latest release features the new KDE 4.10 desktop.
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Gentoo Family
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Some weeks ago I got an early version of the BeagleBone Black from the people at Beagleboard.org to create the documentation I always create with every device I get.
Like always i’d like to announce the guide for installing Gentoo in the BeagleBone Black. Have a look at: http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/beagleboneblack/install.xml . Feel free to send any corrections my way.
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro Linux distribution describes itself as a “user-friendly” version of the popular Arch Linux platform. Manjaro Linux still follows Arch in a rolling-release manner, but it’s designed to offer greater user-friendliness and accessbility, complete with an easy installation routine.
Beyond having an easy-to-use GUI installer, Manjaro is available in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors and also comes in spins for Mate, LXDE, KDE, and Xfce. Two weeks ago marked the Manjaro 0.8.5 release and then released last week were the MATE/LXDE/KDE desktop flavors to Manjaro 0.8.5. Being curious about this Arch-based distribution, I fired it up on a test system today.
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Within a short span of time, Manjaro seems to have hit the right cord with Linux users. In last 8 months, it had 6 major releases with almost all desktop flavors available in their kitty and currently ranked within top 10 in Distrowatch. For those uninitiated to Manjaro, it is an user-friendly spin of Archlinux with popular desktop environments which just works once you boot up. To me, Manjaro is going the Linux Mint way, to provide highly functional, pre-configured Linux distros to make Linux easy for those who are uninitiated. That they are going in the right track is evidenced by the popularity of the distro within a short span of time. Their first release of Manjaro 0.8.0 XFCE was on 21st August and now their fifth upgrade is out within 8 months!
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I’ve written lots of distro reviews over the years, but every once in a while I find a new one that turns out to be a delightful surprise. Manjaro 0.8.5 is definitely one of those. Manjaro is based on Arch Linux, and promises to provide an easy to use distro that is still highly customizable.
Arch Linux has a reputation for not being as accessible for non-technical users as some other distros, so I’m happy to see Manjaro 0.8.5 change that and offer an alternative that combines the power of Arch with ease of use. Like Arch, Manjaro is a rolling release distro. So once you install it, you won’t need to install another release later on to keep it updated to the latest version.
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Slackware Family
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Slackware 14 was released 17 months after the previous release and in theory there should have been a massive bump. While a lot happened under the hood, for example the introduction of kmod and gtk+ 3, it just felt like more of the same on the desktop and not really worth the upgrade from 13.37, in particular if you’d already updated your stock kernel before. With a Linux kernel 3.2.29 and KDE 4.8.5 the new release seemed quite modest and middle of the road at the time.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating restated by analysts at TheStreet in a research report issued to clients and investors on Tuesday, Stock Ratings Network reports.
The analysts wrote, “Red Hat (RHT) has been reiterated by TheStreet Ratings as a buy with a ratings score of B. The company’s strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its robust revenue growth, largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, growth in earnings per share, increase in net income and good cash flow from operations. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had lackluster performance in the stock itself.”
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Fedora
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Jaroslav Reznik posted late last week that Fedora 19 Alpha would be released tomorrow as rescheduled. Fedora 19 will feature things like MariaDB instead of MySQL, Scratch programming environment, optional Syslinux, systemd cron and chroot services, predictable network device names, new first boot wizard, 3D printing, and more Anaconda UI work. Fedora 19 is expected for release July 2, the next development release is due May 28.
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An alpha version of Fedora 19 has been released, so it’s a good time to take a sneak peek at what Fedora 19 will have to offer users. As always you should note that alpha releases like Fedora 19 should be considered for testing purposes and fun only. You should not rely on it as your daily desktop distro.
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The much awaited Fedora 19 “Schrödinger’s Cat” alpha release has arrived, as announced here. In case you haven’t been following the evolution of this version of Fedora, it’s been through a number of delays due to issues pertaining to the UEFI Secure Boot scheme that has gained notoriety for helping lock many Linux users out of Windows 8 machines. Fedora has been one of only a handful of Linux distros that have been easy for users to put on some Windows 8 machines, due to UEFI workarounds.
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Debian Family
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I came across a review of Linux Mint Debian Edition recently and decided to try it out. The review is quite comprehensive as to how Mint installs, what it looks like, and the software it comes with, so I’m just going to add a few points of my own.
Linux Mint Debian Edition is based on “tested snapshots of Debian Testing”, so you get more recent software than Debian Stable, but with a more stable system than Testing. Debian Testing has been frozen for months as the bugs are knocked outgoing towards the new stable version, and even before that it had been pretty stable for many months. No surprise that Debian Mint is also very stable. I don’t know what it will be like when Testing is unfrozen and a cascade of new updates arrives. It would have been more interesting to test it then. Maybe I’ll try it again in a couple of months when Testing really is ahead of Stable.
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Neil McGovern, on behalf of the Debian Release Team, announced the target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release of Debian 7.0 “Wheezy”.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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German hardware company Cirrus7 are gearing up to release a new Ubuntu-powered PC.
The aluminium-cased Cirrus7 Nimbus is tiny, measuring just 22cm x 22cm with a height a smidge over 5cm.
But since “mini-PCs” aren’t exactly hard to find Cirrus7 have made sure the Nimbus will stand out by making it fanless. From what we can discern the aluminium case is also a passive cooler, able to tame the heat from an Intel Core i7-3770T with a max TDP of 45W.
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Canonical has recently announced the winning wallpapers approved for Ubuntu 13.04. Canonical conducts this contest through Flickr and relies on user submissions. Ubuntu13.04 is scheduled to be released soon on April 25th, but you can get the wallpapers now if you want them.
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The release of Ubuntu 13.04 is less than a week away, bringing with it some refinements to the Unity interface that users either love or hate. But Ubuntu with Unity is far from the only choice for Linux lovers or those looking to avoid Windows and OS X.
In addition to the many Linux distributions such as Fedora, Debian, or OpenSuse, there is a thriving open source community maintaining desktop operating systems based on Ubuntu code but with different user interfaces. These often have whimsical names like “Kubuntu” and “Xubuntu.” While you can download the standard version of Ubuntu and apply a different user interface to it, most of these alternative distros are built with a non-Unity interface in mind from the start.
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Hard core Linux fans won’t care for it, but for the average user the new Ubuntu desktop Linux has a lot to offer.
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Canonical has released the latest version of Ubuntu, code-named “Raring Ringtail”. The H looks at what is new in the release, which its developers claim is one of the snappiest and most good looking versions of Ubuntu yet, but which otherwise seems rather low on features.
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Some of the features that were to be included in Ubuntu 13.04 have been shelved in favour of presenting a polished and solid release, with most of the improvements residing behind the scenes. As a result, Raring Ringtail may seem a bit of a disappointment.
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Raring Ringtail for Ubuntu desktops and servers now ready to download.
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In October 2012, Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth, blogged that Ubuntu 13.04 would be developed in private, so that the release would be a “magician’s reveal.”
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The release of Ubuntu 13.04 today sees the latest version of the popular Linux distribution visibly changed little from its predecessors. Canonical has chosen to emphasise the engineering process changes and improvements in quality that came from those changes, such as a more responsive desktop and better visual ambience, in 13.04 and made it clear that any radical changes, like the incorporation of the Mir display server, will happen in October’s release of Ubuntu 13.10.
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Mark Shuttleworth made the controversial decision to move Ubuntu Linux to the Unity interface back in 2010. It’s a decision that provoked lots of argument, but with the Ubuntu 13.04 Linux release out this week, Shuttleworth remains confident he is moving in the right direction.
In an exclusive video interview with Datamation, Shuttleworth reflected on the difficult decisions and transitions he has had to make with Ubuntu Linux. Overall Shuttleworth stressed that he deeply cares about the community and its opinions as Ubuntu Linux continues to evolve.
The Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail release is set to be officially available on April 25th. The new Linux distribution will continue the evolution of the Unity desktop interface and provide updated applications. Shuttleworth described the release cycle, which pushes out new Ubuntu releases every six months as, ‘performance art’.
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LINUX DEVELOPER Canonical has said the improvements in resource usage in Ubuntu Linux 13.04 are due to the firm’s ongoing work to adapt the distribution for smartphones and tablets.
Canonical claims that its latest Ubuntu 13.04 release uses less resources, citing improved boot times, lower memory usage and better power management. Canonical CEO Jane Silber told The INQUIRER that the improvements are due to the firm’s work on bringing Ubuntu to smartphones and tablets.
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While there isn’t yet a release yet of Ubuntu in the Linux x32 ABI flavor, some packages now found in Ubuntu 13.04 make it easier to setup this binary interface that brings some 64-bit advantages to the 32-bit world.
The Linux x32 implementation is a native 32-bit ABI for Intel/AMD x86_64 systems for software that doesn’t need 64-bit pointers but can benefit from features assumed by 64-bit x86 processors. There’s been mainline Linux kernel support, GDB debugging support, glibc support, and GCC support.
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And back we are with a list of some great books about Linux. Though this time, unlike our earlier post, we’ll be focusing just on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu, which is the most popular Linux distro around, has been one of the principal reasons that Linux ever took off as a mainstream operating system. Before Ubuntu, Linux was almost inaccessible to the so-called ‘normal user’. And, even though Ubuntu, now, is as easy to use as Windows, or even Mac OS X, underneath those glossy icons and helpful tooltips lays a system that is so powerful only few people manage to understand.
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Ubuntu 13.04 has been released, so it’s time to take yet another look at Canonical’s popular distro. This time around Ubuntu’s code name is “Raring Ringtail.” It appears to be a reference to the ring-tailed cat. I had no idea what a ring-tail cat is, so of course I googled.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 13.04 is officially release just now! At the same time, Ubuntu Tweak got an update too. This time, it’s Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.4!
Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.4 is still a maintenance version, the support for Ubuntu 13.04, and fixed some critical bugs. Like this one:
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You’ve installed Ubuntu 13.04, followed our ’10 Things to Do’ guide, and now you want some top-notch apps to use on it.
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Raring Ringtail, the newest Ubuntu release, is landing with a thud, based on early reviews. It might have some appeal for businesses, though. “In essence, they’re aiming for a more predictable experience, and I think that could make this a potentially interesting offer for businesses that want to get out from underneath the cost and upgrade cycle of Windows,” said tech analyst Charles King.
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You may have seen the official announcements of Ubuntu 13.04 this week, or our coverage of it, but the analysis of this new version of the popular Linux distribution just keeps on coming. One of the most important things of all to realize is that the Ubuntu Server 13.04 release that became available this week includes capabilities based on the “Grizzly” release of the populuar OpenStack cloud computing platform, and deepens Ubuntu’s relationship with OpenStack.
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First the bad news: most of the big new features planned for Ubuntu 13.04, or Raring Ringtail, haven’t made it – they’ve been pushed back to 13.10, due in October. Despite this, the Ringtail is actually rather good.
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On April 25, Canonical published details about MySQL vulnerabilities for its Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating systems.
According to Canonical, several security issues have been fixed in MySQL and this update includes new upstream MySQL versions to fix these issues.
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The recently released, Ubuntu 13.04, not only brings up-to-date packages (including LibreOffice 4.0), which is pretty usual, but according to its ‘Release Notes’ page, ‘Unity’ desktop 7.0 too brings noticeable improvements, concerning memory consumption & performance.
On a side note, I know this might sound a bit weird, but from all the Ubuntu versions that I’ve tried over the years, the best performing ones (less bugs & solid performance) were the ‘ .04′ numbered versions, the ones that get released in April. Where the ‘.10′ versions are usually buggy.
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Canonical’s Mir Display Server now has a simple demo shell as well as a multi-window compositing demo.
In continuing to monitor the public Bazaar development repository for Mir, there isn’t too much to report on this week. The only highlights were:
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A test of the newly-released Ubuntu 13.04 release across four systems shows it’s a solid release. But if you’ve previously been a fan of Ubuntu or feared it, this isn’t the release to make you think otherwise.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu 13.04, the KDE-based Ubuntu flavor, has been released yesterday. Let’s take a quick look at what’s new.
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Lubuntu is one of my favorite distros for it’s amazing resource efficiency and functionality. It may not be the most eye-candy in the Ubuntu clan but definitely the most resource efficient. LXDE traditionally consumes lower resources than Gnome or KDE and even XFCE. And most importantly, it is customizable enough to make it look really attractive. Though the release note of Lubuntu 13.04 didn’t state a whole lot of incremental improvements, still I was interested to check it out.
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I haven’t checked out Fuduntu in over a year. I wasn’t particularly planning to do so either, because I wasn’t exactly expecting huge changes. But then I saw some news that changed my mind.
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The people behind some Linux distros have “the warrior mindset,” observed Google+ blogger Brett Legree. They “choose the road not taken, … chart their own course and stand out. I would say that Fuduntu is one of those, and from what I have read in the past few days, I do believe that the warriors who are part of it have something very special in store. I believe that they are up to the challenge.”
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Bodhi Linux is a Linux distribution which uses Ubuntu’s long term support releases as its base. Upon this stable base, which will be supported for five years, the Bodhi developers add the Enlightenment desktop and up to date applications. The result is a small, very fast Linux distribution which, thanks to the malleability of Enlightenment, sports a highly flexible interface. Bodhi can run on three different architectures (both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 along with ARM) and, according to the project’s website, Bodhi can be run on personal computers with just 128MB of RAM. The project has an attractive website which contains a good deal of useful documentation.
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For the last three weeks my wife and I have been traveling, which has given us both a chance to try out Linux Mint 14 with MATE on her netbook and my laptop. So far, I’m favorably impressed.
I’ve already reported that Mint was easy to install on both machines, except for one well-known bug which I’m sure will be fixed in the next release. I’m happy to say that, except for one glitch, it has worked perfectly on both machines.
1. I like the MATE desktop environment (a fork of GNOME 2). I particularly like how the pop-up Start menu works. You can switch easily between “Favourites” and “All Applications.” When showing “All Applications” the applications and categories appear in two columns, and it’s easy to scroll through the applications. I came to dislike how KDE4 implemented this; whereas I find the MATE way easy to use.
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Today, Canonical have released Raring Ringtail, the latest version of their Ubuntu Linux distribution. Here at Tuxradar, we like Ubuntu, but we don’t like the way they send all your desktop searches to Amazon. We want to be able to use our computers without Jeff Bezos seeing all our data. So, we’ve created Privacy Enhanced Ubuntu. It’s exactly the same as Raring Ringtail, but doesn’t return Amazon results for searches in the default lens. There’s still an Amazon shopping lens there if you want to use it (click on the shopping bag icon in the dash).
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It’s the end of April, so that means that there’s a new release of Ubuntu. Well, actually, no – it means that there are eight of them. Don’t like standard Ubuntu’s Mac-OS-X-like Unity desktop? Here’s where to look.
There are umpteen “remixes” alongside the eponymous distro. These mostly differ by having a different desktop – and therefore overall look and feel – but also in some cases different preinstalled apps. There are more than one hundred – many moribund, very specialised or otherwise of little interest – but seven enjoy official recognition. I’m going to look at the “Big Four” – Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME. All have a different interface from the standard distro, meaning something for everyone.
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Trisquel is a 100 per cent ‘free as in free speech’ GNU/Linux distribution started by Rubén Rodríguez Pérez nine years ago.
“It started as a project at the university I was studying at. They just wanted a custom distro because… everybody was doing that at the time!” Pérez says.
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An enlightened versions of Ubuntu, Bodhi is an incredibly lightweight and highly customisable distro using Canonical’s base. Is Bodhi crippled from this, or much better?
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Plair says it is now shipping its “Plair” media-streaming device to U.S. customers. Unveiled earlier this year at CES, the $99 embedded Linux-powered gadget is said to provide AirPlay-like beaming of multimedia content from Apple, Windows, and Android devices to “any HDTV” with an available HDMI port.
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As guys from/around Texas Instruments promised there is new Beaglebone Black on a market. Faster, cheaper, with video output and other extras. For me it looks like Raspberry/Pi killer done right.
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We’ve covered Android-powered PCs-on-a-stick extensively here on TG Daily. But what about a PC-on-a-stick specifically designed to run the Linux version of XBMC?
Well, a crowd-funding project at Indiegogo wants to make it so and is building on the idea of various Linux-based operating systems designed to run XBMC on the wildly popular Raspberry Pi.
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Phones
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Spanish manufacturer/seller Geeksphone already has run out of the two Firefox OS phones that went on sale for developers today.
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The developer test phones for Firefox OS are now on sale. They’re being produced by Geeksphone, a small Spanish outfit that used to make Android handsets for true open-source cognoscenti and that is now backing Mozilla’s operating system as the way forward.
Geeksphone is far from the only company pushing Firefox OS – operators seem especially keen, largely because they want to shake up the Google/Apple smartphone duopoly. However, it is the only firm thus far to start selling devices using the operating system (ZTE will also sell Firefox OS phones from around the middle of the year).
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A hosting company calls for hosting companies to support the open source software that makes them successful
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It has been a few weeks since I posted an article here at The ERACC Web Log. I have been kicking around some article ideas, but nothing has gelled until today. I do have some projects going that I will be writing about once they are done. I do not believe in writing articles just to have new content. In that direction lay mediocrity. I prefer actually having something worthwhile to write about. At least something I think is worthwhile.
A recent event with a local client has started me thinking, again, about Microsoft, Apple, FOSS and vendor lock-in. I am not a proponent of vendor lock-in. This screen capture of my VirtualBox Windows XP Professional test VM speaks to that.VM with XP-pro on fluxbox window manager under linux
This local client had decided to abandon Microsoft and change out their office systems for new hardware with new operating systems. Thus already requiring retraining and all that comes with such a change. Of course, I made the pitch for Linux with all FOSS. In general, they only use their systems for e-mail and creating quote documents for clients. Under FOSS systems, the e-mail is covered with any number of FOSS e-mail applications, while the quote documents are covered with LibreOffice to create PDF files. One of the systems does run accounting software for billing and payments. But they do not do their own payroll, so LedgerSMB would work for their billing and payments accounting system.
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Earlier today Sonatype released the results of their annual survey. The survey looks at the extent to which developers use open source components, with a particular focus on how they balance the competing needs of speed and security. The data makes it clear that security is very often not the priority.
The results of the survey show the massive extent to which developers now rely on components. Of course, this has been the case for many years, but the full maturation of the concept of component assembly rather than code writing is well illustrated here.
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Takers are people who, when interacting with another person, are trying to get as much as possible from that person and contribute as little as they can in return, thinking that’s the shortest and most direct path to achieving their own goals.
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Events
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Another in the series of public meetings to be hosted by the OSI around its next face-to-face board meeting, OSI will also host the non-profit DC Metro Open Source Community Summit at the Mayflower Renaissance in Washington, D.C. The May 10th, 2013 program will include short sessions by some of our OSI board members and an “unconference” format for maximum attendee participation, collaboration, and learning.
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Toward the end of this week — well, Thursday to be exact — I’ll be loading up the car with a few laptops, about 100 pieces of CrunchBang media (DVDs, not CDs), a paper #! banner, my daughter and her equipment and we’ll head north to Linux Fest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington on April 27-28.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The last week has been filled with uncertainty in regards to proposed Firefox customization changes in the wake of the Australis theme release. Mozilla was heavily criticized for its initial proposal, both here on Ghacks but also on platforms such as Reddit, and posted a second proposal soon thereafter. The core issue at hand was that many users felt that Mozilla decided to take away customization options that were pare of the Firefox web browser for a long time, and that it did not really care about the opinion of the browser’s users. Some feared that Firefox would become just like Google Chrome, a browser that is offering barely any customization options.
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Update: In a post to his own Tumblr blog, Hansen says he believes Opera’s lawsuit is centered on the “Search Tabs” function of Firefox that was demonstrated in the video alongside “Junior.” Hansen claims the feature was originally a concept he developed for an open-source browser of his own he started working on after leaving Opera, which he called “GB”—a browser for which the revenue from searches would be donated to “green” causes. “In the summer of 2008, Opera’s founder and CEO at the time, Jon von Tetzchner reaches out and asks if I want to contribute more to Opera,” Hansen wrote. “I tell him about GB and propose that we could develop GB as a rebooted and simplified Opera browser. He is very interested, but when we start to talk business, and I tell him that I want no salary and no shares, but 1% of the search revenue as compensation, he says that’s not possible. So there is no deal. In fact, there is never any kind of deal or transfer of ownership of GB concepts to Opera.” A year later, Opera brought him on as a consultant; some of the design proposals he made during that period were based on his ideas for GB, he claims.
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SaaS/Big Data
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In the wake of last week’s well attended OpenStack Summit, there has been much discussion of the state of the project. As is typical, this ranges from heated criticism of the project’s community, governance or technology to grandiose claims regarding its trajectory and marketplace traction. And as is typical, the truth lies somewhere in between.
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Databases
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How will the planned merger between MariaDB creator Monty Program DB and support firm SkySQL strengthen the hand of the open-source fork in the wider MySQL world? We talk to the new company’s CEO.
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Fans of MySQL have expressed alarm at the direction that Oracle is taking the venerable database. Last fall, three extensions for MySQL were released by Oracle, but only for the enterprise version and not for the free, open-source edition. SkySQL said it would support both MySQL and MariaDB, and that MariaDB would always remain open source.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle’s whack-a-mole with Java security follows a decade of technical debt. But why won’t it turn to open source community for help?
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Funding
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Software Freedom Conservancy have announced a fundraising campaign for an Open Source non-profit accounting system. The campaign seeks to raise $75,000 to fund a full-time developer for one year to first reevaluate existing solutions for their viability as a non-profit accounting system, and then improve and augment the best available system to create a new solution that will help non-profits around the world manage their finances better.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a motivated and organized tech-friendly Boston-based individual to be its full-time outreach and communication coordinator.
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BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the TPE-N150USB Wireless N USB Adapter, sold by ThinkPenguin. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The TPE-N150USB can be purchased from http://www.thinkpenguin.com/TPE-N150USB. Software certification focused primarily on the firmware for the Atheros AR9271 chip used on the adapter.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Dream School is coordinated by the School of Kasavuori, in the municipality of Kauniainen. The project is already used by 15 schools across the country. “At the end of this year that number will have doubled”, expects Allan Schneitz, the project’s coordinator and a teacher at the School of Kasavuori.
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Licensing
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This diversity is a testament to both the ingenuity of the teams responsible and the rights enshrined within the GPL. But more than anything else, it’s the ‘freedom’ found in the licence that has made Linux what it is today – an operating system found in the smallest and largest of devices; underground, underwater, in your hand, in space, at school, at the office – everywhere.
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Openness/Sharing
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Here in the tech world, it’s become increasingly common to see market research and reports testifying to the growing ubiquity of open source software, such as the one just last week from Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners indicating that open source is “eating” the software world, as the authors put it.
What’s typically not recognized, however, is that this trend toward openness in software is just one piece of a much bigger picture. In fact, openness is a trend that’s taking hold throughout numerous aspects of the modern world, to the benefit of everyday people like you and me.
“Open,” in other words, appears to be the future – whether we’re talking software or beyond.
Ready for a quick tour? Most Linux advocates are already well aware of the benefits of open source when it comes to software, but here are two other kinds of openness I’ve come to appreciate from the writing I do outside the tech world.
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Open Hardware
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3D Printing is all the hype these days, at least among some communities. What it really is however spans a lot of different things, several different uses and in general many different realities. 3D printing has actual uses in lots of industries and can be considered to be born out of the need for more rapid prototyping. But it’s far to be the whole story about it. Rapid prototyping is clearly a well identified use of 3D printing, however new uses, from art to spare parts production (and more) have proven to exist as well. To this day, 3D printers that are affordable come in two different kinds and target a market that’s generally seen as a hobbyist one (not that it’s a wrong way to perceive it).
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Programming
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Challenge #6 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a Guile CGI script that accesses a MySQL-family database. It is the second challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.
The Guile 100 Programs Project is an attempt to collaboratively generate a set of examples of how to use the GNU Guile implementation of Scheme.
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…obligations that are packed down into this term, user?
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THE UK GOVERNMENT has shown it’s at the forefront of modern technology and online services with its latest form for claiming benefits online.
Those who want to claim either Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Overseas State Pension can simply visit the Gov.UK website, where they are then pointed to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) website to fill out a form online.
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Hardware
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Security
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Researchers at web security firm Sucuri have discovered modified binaries in the open source Apache web server. The binaries will load malicious code or other web content without any user interaction. Only files that were installed using the cPanel administration tool are currently thought to be affected. ESET says that several hundred web servers have been compromised.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Authorities have identified four more sets of remains of first responders who battled last week’s fire and explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Wednesday’s blast and injured more than 200, according to officials cited by .
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Bodies include those of firefighters who were tackling a blaze at the West Fertilizer Company when blast occurred
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Expert says Occupational Safety & Health Administration, which last visited West in 1985, is ‘undermanned and overloaded’
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Engineer becomes ninth person to be detained over country’s worst industrial accident, as number of deaths climbs to 501
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As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities – the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.
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We are asked to believe that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was identified by the Russian government as an extremist Dagestani or Chechen Islamist terrorist, and they were so concerned about it that in late 2010 they asked the US government to take action. At that time, the US and Russia did not normally have a security cooperation relationship over the Caucasus, particularly following the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. For the Russians to ask the Americans for assistance, Tsarnaev must have been high on their list of worries.
In early 2011 the FBI interview Tsarnaev and trawl his papers and computers but apparently – remarkably for somebody allegedly radicalised by internet – the habitually paranoid FBI find nothing of concern.
So far, so weird. But now this gets utterly incredible. In 2012 Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is of such concern to Russian security, is able to fly to Russia and pass through the airport security checks of the world’s most thoroughly and brutally efficient security services without being picked up. He is then able to proceed to Dagestan – right at the heart of the world’s heaviest military occupation and the world’s most far reaching secret police surveillance – again without being intercepted, and he is able there to go through some form of terror training or further Islamist indoctrination. He then flies out again without any intervention by the Russian security services.
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Really? 30,000 attacks analysed, including researching the internet traffic of the perpetrators and their public statements?
That is rather a lot of work. Firstly you have to identify the attack and identify the perpetrator. Then you have to access their internet use and go through it looking for relevant reading, comments or relevant messages.
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Cablegate
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But I want to focus rather narrowly on one point. Assange talks at length of his disappointment at the presentation of the State Department cables by Wikileaks’ mainstream media partners. In relation to the Guardian, among other things he says this:
“The Guardian redacted two thirds of a cable about Bulgarian crime, removed all the names of the people who had infiltrated – the mafioso – who had infiltrated the Bulgarian government. Removed a description of the Kazakstan elite, which said that the Kazakstan elite in general were corrupt, not even a particular name, just in general! Removed a description that a an energy company out of Italy operating in Kazakhstan was corrupt, so they have redacted for naming of individual names of people who might be unfairly put at risk, just like we do–that is what we require of them. They have redacted the names of mafioso, individual mafioso because they are worried that they might get sued for libel in London by this mafioso. They have redacted the names… they have redacted the description of a class of Kazakhstan elite, a class has been corrupt, and they have redacted descriptions of individual companies being corrupt because they don’t want to expose themselves to any risk at all.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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To turn the public off climate change, right-wing media is blaming scientists for hurting kids and being puppets of totalitarianism
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Finance
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Robert Johnson: I think the, call it the oligarchy now is audacious. They don’t really care if they’re legitimate. There was a time – you know, I always hear Jurgen Habermas was paraphrased by saying, “Legitimate if you can, coerce if you have to, and accommodate if you must.” And I think we’ve gone past – I almost started, this was really eerie because we didn’t compare notes – I almost started my discussion about John Ralston Saul’s book, The Unconscious Civilization, and I think we’ve gone beyond – I’m grateful we have gone beyond the unconscious civilization. A lot of people don’t buy the package anymore that’s emanating from those corporations you talked about.
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Large banks, like small ones, would be financially responsible for their own actions
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The suit does not include the issue that has many members of the investing public outraged: the appropriation of customer funds. But even though the specific failings are familiar to anyone who has been following this sorry affair closely, reading them together is a reminder of just how astonishingly irresponsible Corzine was as an executive. One of the basic requirements of a trading operation is you need to have solid controls and reporting. Yet Corzine instead entered into a outsided trading strategy that produced accounting earnings but drained liquidity. It’s frustrating that the suit misses this element, that the trade actually had a two day funding gap on top its other defects, including the fatal one, the risk of increased haircuts on a levered trade. That meant it drained cash even when it was showing accounting profits…
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A judge is being asked to decide if HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) acted illegally by letting investment bank Goldman Sachs off part of its tax bill.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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If nobody from the LSE is ever allowed into the terrible North Korean dictatorship again, that will be a bad thing. But the benefit of the very wide spreading of truth by John Sweeney’s documentary is worth a very, very great deal more. The academics of the LSE may not entirely use their “access” to lick Kim Jong Whatever’s arse. But the said academics certainly don’t want to be associated with the spreading of the obvious truth that the said arse reeks to high heaven.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Apparently the Communications Data Bill is dead. I wonder for how long? It’s a zombie bill that has been killed before…
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A coalition of international and european organisations, including Access, Bits of Freedom, Digitale Gesellschaft, EDRI, La Quadrature du Net, Open Rights Group, and Privacy International, release a commun campaign and website, nakedcitizens.eu. The site allows concerned citizens to contact their representatives in the European Parliament to urge them to vote in a way that ensures the protection of their fundamental right to privacy.
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Today’s Times newspaper leads with an important development on the Communications Data Bill.
A group of ten leading academics and computer science experts have added their voices to the growing chorus of objection over the bill, far beyond the scope of merely tinkering with the drafted legislation.
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As our Freedom of Information request shows, Between 2009 and 2011, HRMC made 41,351 snooping requests for details of phone calls and mobile texts. The only police forces to make more requests in the same period were the Metropolitan police and Merseyside police.
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SNOOPING tax inspectors have made 41,351 requests to see details about people’s private communications in the past three years, The Sun can reveal.
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Tax officials used intrusive powers to rake through Osita Mba’s personal data in attempt to prove he had spoken to the Guardian
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Authorities in Japan are presumably worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime and, in a bid to stem one of the sources of anonymous traffic, the National Police Agency (NPA) is asking ISPs to block Tor.
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Civil Rights
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Since the horrific bus rape case, the problems of rape in India have been firmly on the western media agenda. Today BBC World is carrying two different and terrible stories – one of the rape of a five year old girl in Delhi, and one of the death of a rape victim in a botched abortion.
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First, just in case it’s not utterly obvious, I’m glad that the two murderous cowards who attacked civilians in Boston recently are off the streets. One dead and one in custody is a great outcome.
That said, a large percent of the reaction in Boston has been security theater. “Four victims brutally killed” goes by other names in other cities.
In Detroit, for example, they call it “Tuesday”.
…and Detroit does not shut down every time there are a few murders.
“But Clark,” I hear you say, “this is different. This was a terrorist attack.”
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Lord chief justice issues urgent guidance to judges following court of protection’s imprisonment of Wanda Maddocks
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Perhaps the best way to understand what this report has to offer is through the understanding that the USTR, while wearing an official, government hat, actually represents the interests of a very specific group of American companies. Many of the report’s observations highlight not the state of the countries being discussed but the fear which those companies represented by the USTR have of rival economies there. In many ways, the Special 301 report is actually illustrative of a conflict within the USA itself. Economies such as Ukraine — newly vilified in this year’s report — are popular destinations for outsourcing from the USA, powering the disruptive American businesses challenging the dominance of the companies which grew huge in the last century.
There’s no doubt that being listed in the Special 301 report is a diplomatic issue. One has to wonder how appropriate it is to the new meshed economy, though.
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Special 301 is an annual report by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) which places countries on a “watch list” if USTR would like to see greater changes in their intellectual property rules or enforcement practice. This year’s report came out May 1st. We pay attention because USTR relies heavily on comments from big business, and USTR’s opaque standards and criticism of other countries could stymie the development of public interest policies in areas including health. For example, countries have sovereign rights to issue “compulsory licenses” on pharmaceutical patents. Compulsory licensing authorizes price-lowering generic competition with patented drugs in exchange for royalty payments to the patent holder. It’s a key strategy for improving access to affordable medicines, especially in developing countries.
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Copyrights
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On 25 April next, the “International Trade” (INTA) committee of the European Parliament will vote on a draft resolution on the proposed EU-US trade agreement, the “Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement” (TAFTA), also touted as the “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP). After the ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and CETA fights, once again the negotiators of this new trade agreement try to use it as an opportunity to impose online repression. With Thursday’s vote, Members of the European Parliament can and must remove “intellectual property” provisions from the negotiations, and avoid an undemocratic trade agreement that will inflict the worst of both regimes’ rules on the other party. Instead, the current version of the resolution that will be put to vote on Thursday proposes to “include strong protection of intellectual property rights (IPR)” in TAFTA.
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Today, the “International Trade” (INTA) committee of the European Parliament adopted a resolution1 on the proposed EU-US trade agreement – the “Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement” (TAFTA), also touted as the “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP). The Parliament unfortunately decided to ignore the calls of civil society groups to keep “IP out of TAFTA”.
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Following an undercover police investigation, the Vice President of Lithuanian Anti-Piracy Association LANVA has pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges. Vytas Simanavicius, known for his efforts to curb online piracy in the Baltic country, faces up to eight years in prison. Because of the looming incarceration, his role as an expert witness in a Microsoft court case against a local BitTorrent site has become uncertain.
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Last week Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was charged with hacking into companies and a bank. While it’s no surprise that the news traveled quickly through the media, one might have expected that Gottfrid himself would be one of the first to hear the news. But Gottfrid’s mother Kristina informs TorrentFreak that her son learned of the charges by watching TV news in his cell. Even today he still hasn’t seen a copy of the lawsuit.
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Bo Jiang, the Chinese national accused of spying on NASA, was formally charged in a Virginia court this week — not for conducting espionage, but for downloading porn and pirated movies to his computer. A former research contractor at NASA’s Langely Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Jiang was originally indicted on March 20th, when federal investigators arrested him just before he departed on a one-way ticket from Washington, DC to Beijing. At the time, authorities accused Jiang of sharing sensitive information with the Chinese government — he had a NASA-issued laptop with him at the time of his in-flight arrest — but as Bloomberg Businessweek reports, it now appears that their fears were unfounded.
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U.S. Ambassador to Australia Jeffrey L. Bleich is back once again with a new Internet piracy missive. The long-time friend of Barack Obama caused controversy by getting involved in the Game of Thrones download debate last month, but now believes that he hasn’t got involved enough. Quoting the earlier words of HBO, Bleich says that if online piracy is a compliment to Game of Thrones, then the same holds true for illegal immigration or someone hitting on your partner.
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04.24.13
Posted in Site News at 1:39 am by Guest Editorial Team
Silence or support for CISPA plays into Microsoft’s long standing smear campaign against Google.
For weeks, people have been claiming that Google supports CISPA. Ten days ago, a trade group spoke up for Google [2]. Five days later, right before getting the bill passed by Congress, co author Mike Rogers took time to represent Google and most of the Silicon Valley,
They’ve been helpful and supportive of trying to find the right language in the bill … I always said if I could get Palo Alto and New York City on the same bill, I got something. We found that sweet spot in this particular bill.
Even Wikipedia claims Google support for CISPA, “Google has not taken a public position on the bill [27] but has shown previous support for it, and now says they support the idea but believe the bill needs some work”
Voice jacking may be a downside of being the most loved company in tech and the world [2] but the Microsoft press is having a field day with it. Microsoft’s long slog against Google paints the company as, an evil monopoly, really EVIL, screwing partners and violating user privacy for commercial gain at every turn, basically everything Microsoft is or wants to be. Recent examples include much noise about harmless wifi data collection, Android developers and user data, a flap over privacy policies, really, an unending flap, flap, flap. A long list of older smear jobs can be found by searching Groklaw for the proper terms. Google support for CISPA really would be a reversal and betrayal.
Google’s long standing, official silence is baffling. Google was a hero in the fight against SOPA saying all the right things about censorship and privacy. Eric Schmidt has released an excellent excerpt from his soon to be published book about dangers to network freedom but it does not mention CISPA.
Informed opinion is overwhelmingly against CISPA, but they need help. Today, 34 prominent civil rights organizations issued a statement against the bill and most have been fighting it all along [2, 3]. The same groups also opposed SOPA but were unable to effectively reach the public without help from sites like Google and Wikipedia.
Continued silence allows the wrong people to control the narrative and demoralizes opponents. There have been several articles about how no one showed up for the first round of blackouts and how passage is inevitable without Google and Wikipedia support and how that’s not going to happen. They also say not to worry because Senate does not care and Obama will veto it. This is the usual narrative of the rich and powerful: You little people are weak and helpless, don’t struggle because it will only waste your time.
Techrights firmly opposes CISPA and has written against it several times [2] Users, companies, government and the internet itself don’t have a “cybersecurity” problem, they have a problem with second rate, non free software from companies like Microsoft. CISPA makes the problem worse by giving the usual suspects power to censor and harass [2] people trying to fix things.
Readers wanting to know the basics of CISPA are urged to read the EFF FAQ. Then join us in urging lawmakers to reject CISPA. We really can’t depend on Obama’s veto for this, he’s already signed an executive order almost as bad as CISPA and the house vote is sufficient to override a veto.
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04.21.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[Away for a sunny vacation (100 degrees Fahrenheit) until May]
Contents
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The recent emergence of the mini PC has opened up new horizons for the Linux user.
The form factor of the Mini PC is a square having approximately the same dimension as the long side of a DVD box and thin in profile. The mini PC is designed to be very power efficient, typically using a 65 Watt power supply. The CPU is a low-voltage power efficient type, there are no fans, and the power supply is often an external DC adaptor like that of a laptop. Because there are no fans, the computer runs silently.Fanless microserver aims Linux on Core-i7 at harsh environs
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Desktop
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I’ve been terribly curious about the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition since we first covered it back in November. This is a different beast from the flippy-touchscreen-equipped XPS 12—this Ultrabook contains zero touchscreens. However, it comes preloaded with Ubuntu Linux, and Dell has spent a substantial amount of time and effort in ensuring that it works—and works well.
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The Files app of Chrome OS is getting a brand new UI as well as status of a ‘full-fledged’ Chrome packages app status.
François Beaufort has also shared the instructions if you are interested in testing out the new UI of the file manager.
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Server
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Revenue dropped five percent over that period as the company missed expectations, with a 13 percent drop in hardware revenues leading a one percent drop in profits in Q1 2013. Year-over-year, System x revenues dropped nine percent compared to a seven percent increase for IBM’s System z mainframe business, which the company is not looking to sell. Lenovo told investors today in a clarification announcement that it “is in preliminary negotiations with a third party in connection with a potential acquisition,” but it has not confirmed talks with IBM specifically.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA’s graphics driver supports hybrid graphics now. As in other areas, NVIDIA took it easy, waiting until other people had done the dirty work building the necessary foundations.
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Kristian Høgsberg has clarified the scope and goals of Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor. Now that Weston has become somewhat of its own desktop environment, Kristian has clarified its intentions to benefit future patches.
In hopes of clarifying future development work that could be potentially accepted upstream, Kristian has written on the developer’s mailing list about clarifying the scope and goals for Weston.
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For many months there has been a “shader optimization” branch of Mesa/R600g that sought to rather noticeably boost the performance of the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver. While this work by Vadim Girlin didn’t look like it would be merged, after being revived and cleaned-up, it might reach mainline Mesa/Gallium3D as a new performance-boosting option.
Vadim Girlin had been working on shader optimizations for some time to more efficiently generate shader code and the back-end has evolved quite a bit in recent months. Diminishing prospects for this code has been that it doesn’t use the R600 LLVM GPU back-end, which will eventually become the default for AMD’s Gallium3D driver as it’s needed for OpenCL/GPGPU support. With this custom back-end not using LLVM, it looked like it wouldn’t be merged, but now the story is different.
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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Since I’m tired of trying to get work done with the Gimp development team constantly pissing on the very idea of “utility,” I’ve been investigating some Gimp alternatives. While it’s going to be painful doing without the Gimp, there’s other FOSS graphics applications that don’t get nearly the attention they deserve. If we gave them some exposure, perhaps they would get some support and introduce those few remaining crucial features that will put them over the bar as Gimp replacements.
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If you frequently write tutorials and manuals for helping other users, screen capture tools are something you can’t do without. Be it capturing a small section of your desktop or capturing a whole video for a tutorial, screen capture makes it easy for you to show your desktop to the world. These recorded tutorials can be posted on sites and even YouTube for helping other users out with their problems. Screenshots and screencasts can also be used for demonstrating a new software to users so that they get a good preview of what they’re going to download or buy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dystopia, a total conversion of the Source Engine that requires Half-Life 2, could arrive on Linux, in the coming months.
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What happens when you mix a child’s perspective and imagination, with the surreal nature of dreams? Quite a lot, I guess, but we think one of those things is an interesting premise for a horror adventure.
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Shoot and swing your way to victory across 40 intense platform/action and puzzle-solving levels in Gravi from Hashbang Games for OS X, Windows, and Linux.
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So rather than spamming everyone’s feeds here is a list of some recently released Linux games on Desura, three of which have a native version to buy and a further one comes with the source which you can use.
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Valve has launched yet another Beta version for its Steam for Linux client, this time with just a few minor fixes and improvements.
After a development version garners sufficient changes, Valve promotes that version to stable. The work for the next beta starts almost immediately.
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Among the Sleep, a horror game developed by Krillbite Studio, will arrive on multiple platforms including Linux, if their Kickstarter campaign will be successful.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The 2013 Libre Graphics Meeting is over and everyone has returned home and gone back to the drawing board or the keyboard. Krita has been very well represented at this LGM with three artists and a coder, giving three presentations and two awesome workshops!
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Praised, cursed, often misunderstood, what are KDE’s semantic desktop tools for anyway?
The idea of taking the myriad kinds of information stored on a computer, and trying to find the relationships between it so it’s more usable, has been around for a long time. “Semantics”, the dictionary tells us, “is the study of meaning”. The goal of a “semantic desktop” is to take all the bits and pieces of information we as users collect over time, and make it more meaningful, and ultimately more useful.
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Nepomuk is becoming a great tool, but it still has it’s drawbacks.
A hobby of mine that I’ve done for over twenty-five years now is genealogy. Over the course of that time I’ve acquired a lot of documents and scans of documents, not to mention photos, web snippets, text notes, pdf files and other such things.
As an ardent KDE user, the natural thing to do for keeping track of all these files – and being able to find them again – is by tagging for Nepomuk. With Dolphin I give them a tag or two, add a comment, and I should have no trouble finding the file in the future. While for many users that would hold true, for my usage (and I suspect many other users) there’s still a problem with relying solely on Nepomuk. It’s tags and comments don’t transfer to the cloud, or another computer. In other words, because Nepomuk’s stores all those tags and comments in it’s database and not in the file itself, the tags and comments don’t transfer elsewhere. With me, I sync all my research files in Dropbox, but when I access them with my laptop out in the field, none of those tags or comments are there. That’s a serious handicap to my research.
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KDE’s Martin Grasslin blogged today that despite what the rest of the industry/community does, KDE’s future will be on Wayland. He said he and his fellow developers decided to travel the road more annoying, if not by choice by process of elimination.
It’s been interesting to follow the various desktop camps as they discuss the future of their software in relation to desktop graphical servers. Xorg has been the recipient of some mighty harsh words as far back as when it was still XFree. GNOME already stated their interest in developing for Wayland and Grasslin thinks even the smaller projects will move away from X as well. Basically, Grasslin thinks Wayland is the future.
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Ok, I know, migrating to kmail2 is old news now. But only today I decided to try migrating to kmail2. Gentoo is going to remove kmail1 from their repository in a few months so I did not have much of a choice.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Ubuntu 13.04, which debuts next week, will have an official GNOME version. That news slipped under the radar for most folks, but it should please some Linux desktop users who don’t like Canonical’s Unity interface. And it could also impact Canonical’s big aspirations of “Ubuntu convergence” across all devices offered by channel partners.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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Another month has passed, so time to mention again what we have all been doing lately
Toolchain
Version 4.8 of GCC is available in the tree, but currently masked. The package contains a fix needed to build hardened-sources, and a fix for the asan (address sanitizer). asan support in GCC 4.8 might be seen as an improvement security-wise, but it is yet unclear if it is an integral part of GCC or could be disabled with a configure flag. Apparently, asan “makes building gcc 4.8 crazy”. Seeing that it comes from Google, and building Google Chromium is also crazy, I start seeing a pattern here.
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Slackware Family
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There are a lot of ways to support Slackware Linux Project. One of them is by subscribing to Slackware Linux CD/DVD releases or by using Slackware Store to purchase merchandises or even donate to the project.
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Red Hat Family
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Hortonworks, Red Hat and Mirantis have announced that they will be cooperating on Project Savanna which aims to make provisioning Hadoop clusters on OpenStack systems fast and easy. Savanna is being designed as an OpenStack component with a REST API and UI accessible through OpenStack’s Horizon Dashboard.
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Fedora
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Another week of rawhide rolling along and only one really interesting bug hit:
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So, the other day I wrote the Fedora Got Game story and have been continuing to make my transition from Fuduntu which as you may or may not be aware announced that it would close it doors.
Initially, I had selected the Fedora 18 KDE 64-bit spin but found that it put a bit of a strain on my Netbook. Then, I opted to simply install the Xfce Desktop group onto the KDE spin. The problem with doing that is that your menu winds up having the combined items from both KDE and Xfce and so I opted to reinstall with the Xfce spin.
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Debian Family
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McGovern said fixes are in the works for most of them. There was no mention of the new installer, but recent reports elsewhere state it is shaping up nicely as well with some new features. Ext4 is the new default filesystem, systemd is an option, and UEFI on 64-bit system is supported. Wheezy features Linux 3.2, GCC 4.7.2, Xorg 1.12.4, KDE 4.8.4, and GNOME 3.4.2.
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Derivatives
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It’s been ages since I last took a look at Elive. A development release has just come out so now is a good time to take a peek at it.
Elive is a desktop distro based on Debian, and it uses the Enlightenment window manager. Elive is geared toward providing you with a high quality desktop, with minimal hardware requirements.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Nicholas Skaggs, a Canonical software engineer and quality assurance community co-ordinator, wrote, “I’m happy to announce the Ubuntu touch images are now available for testing on the isotracker. And further, the images are now Raring based! [That is to say, they're based on the soon to be released Ubuntu 13.04 codebase] As such, the Ubuntu Touch team is asking for folks to try out the new images on their devices and ensure there are no regressions or other issues.”
Specifically, there are four officially supported devices and images for each of them: Nexus 7, grouper; Galaxy Nexus, maguro; Nexus 4, mako; and Nexus 10, manta. These are all early releases and I recommend that only power Ubuntu and smartphone/tablet users try them at this point.
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I’ve already decided that the next PC I build won’t include an internal optical drive. I just don’t need one often enough anymore to warrant the cost or installation. I can instead rely on a USB optical drive I already own. And I think that’s the case for a lot of PC owners now. They either use hardware that has already dumped the optical drive (e.g. Ultrabooks), or won’t consider it a great loss if their next system doesn’t include one.
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Ubuntu Touch, Canonical’s mobile aspirations, is getting ready for the market. If the developer preview was nothing more than demo-ware, with place holders, now there are images which you can test of your device with some ‘working’ and functional apps.
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Today I got in touch with Nathan Heafner, a community member who is actively participating, and wanted me to leave you with this message:
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Ubuntu Touch, the version of the Linux operating system for smartphones and tablets, is now available.
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But what can you expect to find in it? Unlike the last few releases Ubuntu 13.04 features few dramatic changes, instead bringing some much need polish and performance-boosts.
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A few days ago, I decided to give the Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ Beta version a test. I downloaded the Daily Build and installed it successfully. The first thing I have got to share with you all is there are many things to put in mind whenever you’re using any program/system in beta. Do not set too much expectation or you will be let down or frustrated. I was doing some work related word processing using the new LibreOffice Writer and my first experience was terrible
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Despite all the technical and commercial hurdles, Canonical is well on its way to transforming Ubuntu for mobile devices into the real deal. For proof, look no further than the rapidly maturing application stack for touch-enabled hardware that both Ubuntu engineers and independent developers are churning out.
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Flavours and Variants
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This year January, I reviewed the 2013.1 update from Fuduntu and was extremely impressed by it. Since then Fuduntu has been one of my favorite distros and I use it on my netbook, dual boot with Linux Mint 13 XFCE. Fuduntu, though the name has resemblance to Ubuntu in it, is more of Fedora with the advantage of rolling release. However, to me it is truly Fedora + Ubuntu, as it combines the simplicity and professionalism of Fedora with the fun of Ubuntu. It means that once you install it, you need not re-install it again – by just downloading the updates, your system has always the latest release.With the present release, Fuduntu also comes with a Fuduntu Lite version for advanced users and netbooks, which actually provides the basic shell without much pre-installed applications. For this review, I used the Fuduntu “heavy” version only – may be I’ll take Fuduntu Lite next time.
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CompuLab has introduced a rugged, fanless, microserver based on 3rd Generation Intel Core Processors, clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Linux-friendly “uSVR” runs from -20 to 60° C, accommodates up to four internal 2.5-inch drives, networks via WiFi and up to six GbE channels, and expands modularly.
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The payload will carry a model A Raspberry Pi, plus an Arduino Mini Pro, a UBlox GPS receiver, and 2 Radiometrix NTX2 transmitters. The latter will be on nearby frequencies primarily to avoid conflict with some other flights this weekend, but also to allow those with SDR (Software Defined Radio) receivers to listen to and decode the signals from both transmitters.
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Mentor Graphics has merged the Linux-based automotive infotainment technology it acquired in February from MontaVista Software into its own in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform. Additionally, the new Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) complies with Yocto Project 1.3 and GENIVI 3.0 requirements, says Mentor.
Mentor’s ATP and its Sourcery CodeBench and Sourcery Analyzer development tools are aimed at simplifying the process of tuning the Linux kernel and selecting suitable components for Linux-based IVI systems. In particular, ATP’s support for LLTng (LInux Trace Toolkit, Next Generation), helps developers “more easily visually analyze and debug complex interactions between the Linux OS and automotive application software with the Mentor Embedded Sourcery Analyzer,” states the company.
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The single-circuit-board Raspberry Pi computer, only as big as a credit card, makes it easy to gain experience with embedded Linux systems. We’ll show you some hands-on examples of how to use the Raspberry Pi in an everyday environment.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung Electronics plans to introduce its Galaxy S4 at the end of April in 50 countries and sources from the supply chain predict shipments in the first month will be close to 10 million units. There have been no rumors regarding component shortages.
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Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was revealed, all signs point to another hit smartphone and big growth for the Sammy. They keep expanding the Galaxy series as was expected and the juggernaut should continue to roll on. I found it funny that the Galaxy Camera only now arrived to American shores, we’ve had it here in Asia since last year. Samsung’s Q1 financial guidance said massive growth in smartphones, driving up their profits.. yeah, this ‘surprised’ some after the Christmas season, but not our readers, we know China’s gift-giving season is in January for Q1 and as Samsung is China’s top-selling smartphone nowadays (used to be Nokia) that means big good sales for the Samster…
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Android
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Google announced their latest quarterly earnings yesterday, and the company had another good three months in the black, earning a revenue of $14 billion, with $3.35 billion of that as cold, hard income. However, Google’s recently-acquired Motorola Mobility is struggling, losing $271 million, but Google CEO Larry Page seems to have big plans for the subsidiary, and teased some of the features we may see on upcoming devices.
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Google Inc’s core Internet business grew net revenue 23 percent in the first quarter, softening the effect of a sharp decline in its Motorola mobile phone division.
Shares of Google, which reached an all-time high of $844 (552.28 pounds) in March, were up 1.5 percent to $777.75 in after hours trading on Thursday.
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Android is moving in to fill the gap created by the failing Windows 8, according to reports. There is no doubt that Microsoft has failed to boost the sales of PC hardware and traditional PC vendors are now losing with Microsoft.
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Google released specs of its glasses, Project Glass, earlier this week. While it included information like the camera resolution, storage and everything else, one key piece of information was missing – the operating system.
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Airbnb today announced that it is open sourcing Rendr, its library for running Backbone.js apps seamlessly on both the client and the server. After launching its Chronos cron replacement a few weeks ago, this marks the company’s second major contribution to the open source ecosystem this year. Airbnb originally developed Rendr for its mobile site.
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A workshop to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Open Web Technology was organised successfully at S N Ghosh auditorium, of the J K Institute of Applied Physics and Technology of Allahabad University, on Saturday.
The workshop was conducted by Mozilla foundation, an open source non-profit organisation working in open web technology.
The workshop was inaugurated by head of the department of Electronics & Communication R R Tiwari who was also the chief guest of the workshop, aimed to benefit B Tech, MCA and BCA students of AU.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mitchell Baker has blogged that since Mozilla is celebrating its 15 year anniversary, it was time to tweak their Manifesto first published in 2007. Mozilla gathered input for a year and three new proposed changes are suggested.
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Want your website to load faster? Slim your images. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.
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Mozilla CEO says that the Firefox Mobile OS will be available this summer in Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain.
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We’ve already heard that another mobile operating system will soon be made available courtesy of Mozilla. This summer Firefox OS powered devices will be made available in 5 countries spread over Europe and South America.
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If you’ve wanted to be one of the first people to check out the new OS then Spanish e-retailer Geeksphone has you covered as they will be releasing two Firefox OS powered devices which they say “will be available for dispatch anywhere on earth.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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VMware has contributed plug-ins to the OpenStack Project that guarantees the project’s networking platform will recognize and work with virtual machines running under VMware’s vSphere management environment and VMware’s Nicira Network Virtualization Platform.
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The second Open Government Summit will take place on 25 April 2013 at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, London. This second event evolves from last year’s debate on open source and open standards, which the UK government adopted last November following a detailed consultation led by the Cabinet Office. This year’s event will examine how the open source model has driven a wave of Cloud computing innovation that government organisations can tap into to deliver major cost savings and avoid the political and fiscal dangers of vendor lock-in.
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Security is improving in the open source OpenStack cloud platform, but more work is needed and is still being done. That’s the message coming from the recently formed OpenStack Security Group (OSSG) at the OpenStack Summit in Portland this week.
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Databases
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The MariaDB Foundation has expanded its Board of Directors and has appointed Simon Phipps as its Secretary and interim Chief Executive Officer. Rasmus Johansson has been appointed Chair of the Board, which also includes Andrew Katz, Jeremy Zawodny, and Michael “Monty” Widenius as members. Speaking to The H, Phipps said: “The key change here is the Foundation is now officially under the direction of a diverse Board rather than just one director.” With this change, it is on track to be completely member-led in the second half of the year.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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A few days ago Guillermo Garron wrote a piece on his website after seeing you speak live. A link to that article was posted at Scot’s Newsletter Forums – Bruno’s All Things Linux, where a discussion ensued. During the course of that conversation, I thought that maybe it was about time that we started using a less bulky nomenclature for the GNU/Linux operating system. I posted a few suggestions, but I think I like GNix the best.
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The FSF contends that sometimes, proprietary software actually helps its fight for freedom but that Windows 8 is “so bad it’s almost funny” — the group claims that it is “full of spyware and security vulnerabilities” and that it is confusing for users.
The group sets out its stall as follows:
“As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.”
This infographic is linked here, but not shown here in full due its arguably somewhat reactionary nature.
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As an open source project gathers momentum and the possibility of corporate engagement beckons, developers can frequently be heard saying they need to start a foundation for their project.
But do they? Ask many of the people who have gone down that path, and they’re likely to advise against it. The bureaucracy is daunting, the skills needed to run such an organization are similar to those of any other business, and there’s a very real risk the IRS will refuse to grant tax-exempt status.
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Public Services/Government
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We take a first reading of the recent modification to the fundamental law that governs the digital aspects of the Public Administration in Italy. These modifications require Public Administrations to prefer internally made solutions and FOSS solutions over proprietary ones, mandate an increased degree of interoperability and strengthen the push for open data.
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As I was skimming through a solicitation document the FBI posted surveying vendors that might provide it with new video monitor technology, one word jumped out at me: open.
The FBI is looking for a system that will allow it to monitor video from all sorts of devices, including those it owns itself and those owned by other law enforcement agencies. It also wants to be able to plug tools into the system that help it identify faces and license plates.
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Openness/Sharing
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Endy is the co-director of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology — BIOFAB, for short — where he’s part of a team that’s developing a language that will use genetic data to actually program biological cells. That may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the project is already underway, and the team intends to open source the language, so that other scientists can use it and modify it and perfect it.
The effort is part of a sweeping movement to grab hold of our genetic data and directly improve the way our bodies behave — a process known as bioengineering. With the Supreme Court exploring whether genes can be patented, the bioengineering world is at crossroads, but scientists like Endy continue to push this technology forward.
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Open Data
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A patient facing search engine app MedWhat wants to achieve something its co-founder believes is lacking from similar tools — fast, comprehensive responses to patient questions no matter how simple or complex.
In an interview with MedCity News, entrepreneur and co-founder Arturo Devesa said he believes two ingredients are essential to achieving that: open source data from respected medical institutions and natural language processing — allowing people to ask questions in their own words. He envisions a platform that can transform mobile phones into virtual primary care physicians.
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Open Access/Content
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The Business, Innovation and Skills committee’s new inquiry into Open Access in academic publishing has revealed a familiar collision between the accepted practices of a sector unused to change, and the disruptive power of the internet, with its greater transparency, economy and reach.
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Open Hardware
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A modular, open-source workhorse to help rebuild civilization.
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Welcome to our 5 Engineers section, part of this blog and our Fun Friday newsletter, where we toss out a question and invite our audience to respond with their wittiest answers.
This week, on the cusp of DESIGN West and its many open-source hardware and software (OSHS) sessions, we’re thinking specifically about open-source hardware (OSH).
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Programming
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Rob Pike explains how Google designed Go to address major development issues they encounter while using other languages: long build times, poor dependency management, lack of robustness, etc.
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jQuery, arguably the most popular JavaScript library, is out with their much awaited major release v2.0. It comes with a 12% reduced size footprint, API compatibility with v1.9.x, and 45 bug fixes & feature improvements. But the most notable change is dropping of support for Internet Explorer (IE) versions 8 and less.
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Oracle has decided to delay the release of Java 8 into 2014 over their engineers tackling various security-related issues with the language as of late.
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Standards/Consortia
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The German Federal Ministry of Economics advocates an “unpatronising” internet, said Otto. The internet and social networks have become a powerful voice for freedom that mustn’t be jeopardised through control and regimentation, he added. However, Otto noted that citizens must also be able to defend themselves against online violations of their personal rights. The Liberal politician spoke out against giving governments more technical control over the global network through established bodies such as the IETF and the ICANN internet management authority. Otto also noted that genuine internet politics require an understanding of “how the underlying technologies work”.
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For years, we’ve discussed the problematic nature of “distracted driving” laws that seek to outlaw things like talking on your phone or texting while driving. It is not that we don’t think these behaviors are dangerous. It seems clear that those activities can take one’s attention away from driving and potentially increase the likelihood of an accident by a significant amount. However, the laws are often broad and inconsistent — and, worse, they can have serious unintended consequences. As we’ve noted there are lots and lots of things that can distract a driver which are still considered perfectly legal, such as changing the radio station, talking to passengers, eating, etc. Trying to ban each and every distraction one by one is a ridiculous and impossible task. In fact, studies have suggested that bad distracted drivers will often just find a different distraction to occupy their time. And, thanks to these laws, those drivers are often still texting while driving, but are simply holding their phones even lower, taking their eyes further off the road, so as to avoid detection… actually making the roads more dangerous. The real answer is to focus on stopping bad driving, not trying to call out specific activities.
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Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) director Jamie Love — formally James Packard Love — is the brain behind the “$1 a day” HIV drugs that have saved millions of lives in Africa and other poor parts of the world. Basically, he went around asking, “How much would it cost to make this HIV medication if the patent cost was removed?” At first, no one could answer. After a while, the answer came: Less than $1 a day. At that price, the Bush administration set up a massive program to deliver generic anti-HIV drugs to Africa. Jamie also works on copyright issues, boosts free software (he’s a Linux user/evangelist and had more than a little to do with the Microsoft antitrust suit), and generally tries to make the international knowledge ecology more accessible and more useful for everyone, especially those who aren’t rich. Or necessarily even prosperous. He’s a smart guy (read the Wikipedia entry linked above), but more than that he’s bullheaded. Jamie has worked on some of his initiatives for years, even decades. In many cases you can’t say, “He hasn’t succeeded,” without adding “yet” on the end. (You’ll understand that statement better after you watch the video, which we broke into two parts because it is far longer than our typical video interview.)
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Yahoo’s China arm will shut down its email service later this year, state media reported Friday, illustrating the brand’s diminishing profile in the country.
China Yahoo! announced it will close its email service by August 19, a move the China Daily said will leave it with just its web portal business.
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Digital technology makes documents easy to alter or copy, leading to multiple non-identical versions that can be used in unauthorized or illegitimate ways. Unfortunately, the ease of alteration has introduced doubt in users’ minds about the authenticity of many of the digital documents they encounter.
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Science
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Most people think computers are built by intelligent design. How on earth can you say their development follows Darwin’s mechanism of “survival of the fittest”? Yet an article at Science Daily announces, “‘Survival of the Fittest’ Now Applies to Computers: Surprising Similarities Found Between Genetic and Computer Codes.” (Emphasis added.) Certain similarities between Linux code and bacterial genomes may obtain, but one thing should be clear: they are not Darwinian.
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Security
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Since retinal scans still mainly are used in the movies to set the scene for gruesome eyeball-stealing, for the foreseeable future (pun intended), we’re stuck with passwords. In this article, I want to take some time to discuss best practices and give some thoughts on cool software designed to help you keep your private affairs private. Before getting into the how-to section, let me openly discuss the how-not-to.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The president of the humanitarian organisation International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) this week warned of the organisation’s concerns over drones being used in situations that are not official armed conflicts.
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Germany’s neo-Nazi NPD party is holding its national conference this weekend – on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Facing an attempt to have it banned, an expert believes financial strains, internal conflicts and dwindling support are already crippling the far-right extremists.
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Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is determined to curb American CIA operations in his country, his spokesman said.
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The CIA and the United States Government have had considerable success in toppling democracies around the world but they may have met their match in Presidente Nicolas Maduro, the legitimately elected leader of Venezuela.
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An Opa-lock building served as the CIA base for an operation that overthrew a leftist Guatemalan president in the 1950s.
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And it wasn’t just Afghanistan–Iraq’s “infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain…. Maybe then the people there will finally overthrow Saddam.” And if Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi did not leave his country, “we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mine the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand.”
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It is perfectly possible that this is not relevant at all, and the Tsarnaev brothers became radicalised in the United States by real, and non-Chechen related, terrorists, or simply auto-radicalised. But presuming the Tsarnaevs really did plant these bombs, just who was ultimately pulling the strings and why may be an extremely complex question – and one to which young Dzokhar Tsarnaev is most unlikely to know the real answer.
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Cablegate
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange met Google Chairman (and then CEO) Eric Schmidt in 2011, secretly in the UK. Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton and Lisa Shields of the Council for Foreign Relations were also present during this secret meeting. Shields was, according to the transcript, responsible for going through the transcript and to adjust it for accuracy and clarity. The interview was conducted to gather content for a book “The New Digital World” which is expected to be released on April 23, 2013. So this leaks is timed well to create some buzz around the upcoming book.
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Goa’s beaches were in the cross hairs of suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba terror suspect Nasir Raizuddin, being tried for the 2008 Bangalore serial blasts, Wikileaks has claimed citing a recently declassified US diplomatic cable.
The cable, dated February 2008, was drafted by David T. Hopper, then consul general at the US consulate in Chennai.
Hopper quotes top police officials about other areas identified by Riazuddin before his arrest in Karnataka.
According to Hopper, Raziuddin told the police that along with accomplices from the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he had identified sites across the country for a series of bomb blasts.
And “beaches in Goa frequented by foreigners” were one of those specifically identified as targets, according to the diplomatic communique.
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Manning follows in the footsteps of those patriots before him who willingly and knowingly broke the law on matters of conscience, and did so knowing the consequences. King broke the law to expose the savagery of apartheid to white America. Ellsberg broke the law to reveal the lies of the US government about its deepening involvement in Southeast Asia. All three — King, Ellsberg, and Manning — were branded as traitors. But all three remind us that following one’s conscience, even if it means breaking the law, is an act of courage and true patriotism.
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For anyone interested in open standards, privacy, encryption or just general advancements in digital technology, one of the jewels delivered online this week was Wikileaks’ release of a transcript for what is reportedly a five-hour “secret” meeting between Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. The transcript of the 2011 meeting is here, and it is well worth jumping around in it for surprises. Among them, Assange–who specializes in all things related to privacy and the lack of it online–says that he does not use email.
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Finance
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A paper used to justify austerity economics appears to contain an Excel error.
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Detroit is a city that has been in the national and world news once again. Since March, when Gov. Rick Snyder declared a so-called “financial emergency” in Detroit, therefore setting the stage for the appointment of an “Emergency Manager”, many press reports drew a direct connection between the recent corruption trial of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and businessman Bobby Ferguson. In fact just prior to Snyder’s declaration, Kilpatrick and Ferguson were found guilty of numerous corruption charges in the months-long federal trial.
Of course the corporate and government-controlled media has never focused on who are the real culprits in the underdevelopment and consequent destruction of Detroit and other majority African American municipalities in Michigan. These media entities fall back on the same notions that have prevailed inside the United States since the period of Reconstruction, i.e. that African American political leadership is inherently corrupt and inefficient rendering them incapable of managing the affairs of governments locally, statewide and nationally.
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What’s worrying investors the most appears to be the strange mixture of anemic customer trading revenue and institutional bravado when it comes to Goldman’s own money. Such high-risk/high-reward behavior was rather typical of institutions like Goldman Sachs (and indeed Goldman Sachs itself) prior to the crash, and it was largely seen as having created a toxic financial atmosphere.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Walton Family Foundation has an overriding interest in school pro privatization. They commit about $160 million each year for charters, vouchers, Teach for America, think tanks, and media. Everything they do has the singular goal of dismantling public education and opening the schools to untrained, uncertified teachers.
Here is news from the Chicago Teachers Union about the role of Walton in the proposed closing of 54 public schools.
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News Corp. COO Chase Carey said his conglomerate is considering moving programming from its Fox broadcast network, which viewers can receive over the air, for free, to its pay cable networks.
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Fair-trade officials in Taiwan are looking into reports that Samsung paid people to criticise rival HTC online.
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In a new report, entitled “P is for Payoff: Inside the Bradley Foundation’s Campaign to Privatize Education in Wisconsin,” the non-profit activist group One Wisconsin Now has detailed the Bradley Foundation’s funding of a coordinated campaign to promote school privatization in Wisconsin and across the nation.
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Censorship
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Now, he describes what happened after its wildly popular debut, and what it says about “doing business” in China.
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The latest twist in the Leveson saga is the Government’s proposed amendments to protect ‘small scale bloggers’.
We previously warned the drafting meant groups like Big Brother Watch could be covered, along with websites like ConHome and Mumsnet.
The amendment makes clear if you’re a multi-author blog with a turnover below £2m, you won’t be considered a ‘relevant publisher’ for the purposes of exemplary damages and cost protections. This is an important clarification. (Although the bill does still appear to lack a definition of ‘blog’, which could prove interesting – and expensive to argue in court.)
However, the drafting only protects either ‘incidental’ publishers of news-related material, or multi-author blogs. So someone who is not a blog, who publishes news-related material on a regular basis, remains in scope even if their turnover is £10,000.
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Copyfighter, journalist, sci-fi writer and Boing-Boing editor Cory Doctorow has fallen victim to the almighty content empire of Rupert Murdoch. In an attempt to remove access to infringing copies of the TV-show Homeland, Fox has ordered Google to take down links to Doctorow’s latest novel of the same title. Adding to the controversy, Doctorow’s own publisher has also sent DMCA notices for the Creative Commons licensed book.
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Privacy
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House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers, left, with the committee’s ranking Democrat, CA “Dutch” Ruppersberger. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
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Facebook debuted its Android app family Facebook Home today. This means those of you with compatible devices (sorry Windows Phone and iOS users) have a snazzy new product to try out if you’re looking for a tightly-Facebook integrated mobile experience.
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The group believes the tax collection agency has run afoul of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches.
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The Dangers of Surveillance, written by Neil M. Richards, Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, was recently published on the Social Science Research Network. In it, Richards proposed “four principles that should guide the future development of surveillance law.” Yet he said we must first recognize that: “Surveillance transcends the public-private divide;” that “secret surveillance is illegitimate;” that “total surveillance is illegitimate” and that “surveillance is harmful.” The courts may understand that surveillance could be potentially harmful, but “have struggled to clearly understand why.”
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All of those questions, messages, and stern commands that people have been whispering to Siri are stored on Apple servers for up to two years, Wired can now report.
Yesterday, we raised concerns about some fuzzy disclosures in Siri’s privacy policy. After our story ran, Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller called to explain Apple’s policy, something privacy advocates have asking for.
This is the first time that Apple has said how long it’s keeping Siri data, but according to Nicole Ozer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who first brought these Siri privacy questions to our attention, there’s still more that Apple could do.
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Plans for a data center in San Antonio were also announced by the agency in 2007. Although the exact size of the San Antonio facility is unknown, it took the place of a 470,000 square foot former Sony microchip plant, reported DataCenterKnowledge.
President Obama’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative calls for “upgraded infrastructure” and “increased bandwidth” as part of enhancing the nation’s cybersecurity capabilities. Yet, the San Antonio data center is only one part of the agency’s capacity.
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North Korean hackers and the Boston bombings might not appear to have much in common. But not according to some American lawmakers, who are using both to justify passing a controversial cybersecurity bill that civil liberties advocates claim “undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users.”
Yesterday, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote of 288 to 127. The law was first introduced in 2011 and approved last year by the House, though it died in the Senate after an outpouring of opposition from privacy and civil liberties groups. But it has been resurrected and is heading to the Senate for the second time. Predictably, the storm of criticism has also reappeared. Rights groups have consistently raised concerns over how CISPA would allow corporations to pass unanonymized user data to federal government agencies for vaguely defined “cybersecurity” purposes—and be covered by full legal indemnity when doing so.
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Civil Rights
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Over the past few months and weeks there’s been much greater attention paid to both the CFAA and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, and how both are in need of serious reform. The attention to anti-circumvention was galvanized around the fact that unlocking your mobile phone became illegal again, after the Library of Congress allowed an exemption to expire, making many people realize that the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, also known as section 1201, meant that they often don’t really own the products they thought they owned. The attention to CFAA reform came in response to Aaron’s Swartz’s untimely death, and the light it shed on the parts of the CFAA that he was charged under. Of course, many of us have been fighting back against both laws for years, but the public attention on both has been key over the past few months.
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To some, hacker Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer is a cause celebré. To others, he’s a famous douchebag. To many, he’s a polarizing figure in a debate that’s roiled Silicon Valley, pitting established tech companies against rogue innovators. When Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for collecting and publicizing the names of 114,000 AT&T iPad users, reporters grappled over the right words to characterize him. A headline in Venture Beat reflected their ambivalence: “Terrorist, hacker, freedom fighter: Andrew Auernheimer parties tonight in expectation of jail tomorrow.”
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In the last three months alone, the House has released three different cybersecurity bills and has held over seven hearings on the issue. In addition, the House Judiciary Committee floated changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the draconian anti-hacking statute that came to public prominence after the death of activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. Politicians tout this legislation as necessary to protect against foreign threats every single time they introduce a bill with “cyber” somewhere in the text. And it comes as no surprise that every hearing has opened up with a recap of computer security attacks faced by the US from China, Iran, and other foreign countries.
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Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process — the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what — is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today’s society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.
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Nearly 200 senior IBM executives are flying into Washington to press for the passage of a controversial cybersecurity bill that will come up for a vote in the House this week.
The IBM executives will pound the pavement on Capitol Hill Monday and Tuesday, holding nearly 300 meetings with lawmakers and staff. Over the course of those two days, their mission is to convince lawmakers to back a bill that’s intended to make it easier for industry and government to share information about cyber threats with each other in real time.
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Today, thirty-four civil liberties organizations sent a joint letter to Congressional Representatives urging them to continue to oppose the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA is a misguided “cybersecurity” bill that would provide a gaping new exception to privacy law. The House of Representatives is likely to vote on it on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. This means that there’s little time remaining to speak out against this bill.
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Mr. Brown came under the scrutiny of the authorities when he began poring over documents that had been released in the hack of two private security companies, HBGary Federal and Stratfor. Mr. Brown did not take part in the hacks, but he did become obsessed with the contents that emerged from them — in particular the extracted documents showed that private security contractors were being hired by the United States government to develop strategies for undermining protesters and journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon. Since the cache was enormous, Mr. Brown thought he might crowdsource the effort and copied and pasted the URL from an Anonymous chat server to a Web site called Project PM, which was under his control.
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The always patriotic U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham says the Boston bombing “is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield.” In an interview with the Washington Post:
“It’s a battlefield because the terrorists think it is.” Referring to Boston, he observed, “Here is what we’re up against,” and added, “It sure would be nice to have a drone up there [to track the suspect.]” He also slammed the president’s policy of “leading from behind and criminalizing war.”
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In 2009, defending the promise he made to close Guantánamo Bay, President Barack Obama insisted: “The existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.”
This weekend, the case for the closure of Guantánamo Bay, promised by Obama on his second day in office, has never been more compelling. A hunger strike by the camp’s inmates, half of whom had been cleared for release, has underlined the growing desperation of those 166 still detained. Of that number, some 86 had been approved for transfer (while the rest had been earmarked for trial) but have become stuck in a political and legal limbo that has seen such transfers almost completely halted in the last two-and-a-half years. A recent report by a bipartisan panel of experts has condemned both the conditions there and the use of abusive interrogation techniques.
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Local and state lawmakers opposing the tyranny of the NDAA and indefinite detention stand on very sound constitutional ground in their battle against federal overreaching. Any unconstitutional act of the federal government is prima facie void and must not be given the respect or force of law. In fact, such measures are not law at all.
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For many constitutional watchers, the Bill of Rights are in danger. That will be the message of speakers Debra Sweet and Michael Figura, who will be on a tour of Maine from April 19-21. After speaking in Bangor on April 19, Sweet and Figura will travel to Belfast to speak at the Belfast Free Library on Saturday, April 20 at 2:30 p.m. On April 21, they will wrap up their Maine tour in Portland.
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19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev is in custody. Assuming that Tsarnaev is indeed guilty of these crimes, a very real threat to public safety has been taken off the streets. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the Tsarnaev brothers have taken the last vestiges of a free society in America down with them.
The Bill of Rights was already on life support before this tragedy. Before the dust settled after 9/11, the 4th Amendment had been nullified by the Patriot Act. The 5th and 6th Amendments were similarly abolished with the Military Commission Act of 2006 and the 2012 NDAA resolution, which contained a clause allowing the president to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil without due process of law.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Google has formally submitted a package of concessions to European Union competition regulators in a strong signal that the world’s No. 1 search engine may be able to settle a two-year antitrust investigation without a fine.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Hitachi Ltd. (6501) lost a U.S. patent- infringement trial in which it sought as much as four years of royalty payments from TPV Technology Ltd. (903) on sales of high- definition televisions.
A federal jury in Marshall, Texas, last week said TPV, the world’s fourth-largest maker of LCD televisions, didn’t infringe four Hitachi patents and that two of them were invalid.
The dispute is over inventions related to an industrywide standard for a process to transmit digital audio and visual signals, as well as program data, over the airwaves. Hitachi claimed that televisions made by TPV and its units infringed the company’s patents.
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Trademarks
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In an Office action filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week, the attorney examining Apple’s “iPad mini” trademark withdrew their primary objections to the application, saying only a disclaimer clarifying the mark’s use of the term “mini” is needed in order to move forward.
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In a brief opinion issued today, Judge Richard Seeborg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California awarded Christopher Recouvreur more than $46,000 in attorney fees and expenses for having had to defend himself against a series of wild and baseless threats of suit for trademark infringement by Charles Carreon. After we were finally able to get service on Carreon and moved for an award of the costs of service, Carreon served a Rule 68 judgment granting the declaratory relief for which we had sued. We then sought to have fees awarded on the grounds that Carreon had bought threatened trademark claims that had no reasonable basis, thus forcing Recouvreur to seek a declaratory judgment to protect himself against damages claims; that Carreon ducked service and then refused to pay the costs of such service but rather forced us to move to collect those costs; particularly after Carreon demanded the opportunity to conduct discovery over the fee claims, we also argued that his litigation conduct made the case exceptional.
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Copyrights
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Hundreds of thousands of people have been sued for copyright infringement in the past three years using a controversial litigation strategy.
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Mendeley, an open collaboration platform for scientific research, has promised that it won’t become less open after being acquired by journal publisher Elsevier, but some prominent users aren’t waiting around.
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As Gary Fung is seeking a rehearing of the IsoHunt case in the 9th Circuit, two amicus briefs were filed yesterday. The first from the EFF and the second from Google. Neither brief suggests that Fung should get off as innocent, or that he did nothing wrong. Rather, both are worried about how the broad ruling by the court for the specific situation regarding Fung and IsoHunt will lead to further abuse by copyright holders and massive chilling effects on service providers. The EFF notes that while Fung/IsoHunt may have been bad actors, it appears that the court used this to go way overboard in creating new and dangerous standards for copyright
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In an epic clash between old and new media, Google Inc.’s video website YouTube has scored another huge victory in the long-running skirmish over copyright infringement brought by television giant Viacom Inc.
A federal judge in New York on Thursday ruled that YouTube had not violated Viacom’s copyright even though users of the popular online site were allowed to post unauthorized video clips from some of Viacom’s most popular shows, including Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
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Media giant Viacom just can’t win — at least when it comes to the company’s long-running, landmark copyright infringement lawsuit against Google‘s YouTube video service. A federal judge handed a major victory to YouTube on Thursday, one year after a federal appeals court breathed new life into Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit. Viacom had accused YouTube of illegally hosting videos that infringe on the company’s intellectual property, including popular content like MTV videos and TV shows like Comedy Central’s “South Park.”
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Posted in Patents at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Protectionism for all. What could possibly go awry?
Summary: Patents are being cheapened in pursuit of increased relevance and excessive dependence on the USPTO, the US-based monopolies office which lacks oversight
THE cult of patents branches off from the flawed hypothesis that without patents, whose original goal was publication, there would no longer be much innovation. It could not be further from the truth and it is arguably the very reversal of the truth.
Patents are these days being granted on designs, which are orthogonal to innovation. Isn’t copyright enough? Surely not for the maximalists, to whom protectionism is never quite enough. The new business for so-called ‘IP’ lawyers is in “Writing Software Patent Applications”. These are people to whom copyright rarely provides a job. Here is a new post about design patents being encouraged using a scholarship.
…the fundamental question of how (or if) we should protect designs using intellectual property law.
Copyrights already achieve this and they require no filing. Implementation is itself supporting evidence. No lawyers, no authoring of patents. But this is never sufficient for the maximalists, who wish to make patents more and more abstract, making it complex to find prior art and thus just granting almost everything for cash, causing litigation and spurring no real innovation, just devaluing patents as a concept (creating a bubble). Here is what some patent lawyers are saying about patentable subject matter while the USPTO encourages more and more patenting. It recently reported expansion in the business of selling monopolies to the Valley and patent lawyers who are more vocal are calling for volunteers to groom patents for the USPTO, noting that this corruptible office has a new programme for increasing the number of patents. This same office has been seeking to legtitimise software patents with biased debates and 'roundtables' (where all participants accept software patents) and here is another conference stuffed by lawyers, as well as a panel. They say they are open for comments, but only pro-software patents people get the stage. The ACLU is “Remembering the Real Purpose of Patents” when referring to this major case and the patent maximalists speak for blind expansion of patent counts, with little help from IBM again (IBM, a software patents proponent, lets Marc Ehrlich, Senior Patent Counsel, do his thing). Pamela Jones opposes this by stating: “The current patent system no doubt looks fine if you are the company with the most patents. But I dispute that patents encourage anything but greed. Microsoft didn’t build its business on patents. It is now, because it’s going down the drain. If Mr. Erlich’s theory was sound, it could not have built Microsoft. Yet it happened.
“Finally, while there may be, by his definition, three business models, when it comes to software — which is where most of the patent litigation is concentrated — there’s only two sides — proprietary and open. And there, both proprietary business models are teaming up to attack the newer open model, with the stated goal by one of them of destroying it. Tell me how that promotes innovation.”
Jones also found and now promotes this group called Application Developers Alliance — one we alluded to some days ago. In Los Angeles they are having their debate which seemingly has better speakers than the ones found in USPTO-leaning echo chambers. Rackspace will speak (Rackspace has become very active against patents), hopefully antagonising lots of lawyers and patent people (patent microcasm). We find the same in other debates on the subject. Patent lawyers and their institutions are ganging up against software engineers. █
“Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that’s good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.”
–Richard Stallman
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Posted in Patents at 9:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The scandalous policy of privatising genetics continues to come under extraordinary fire
The practice of patenting non-ideas such as nature has been under fire here for years, but now the SCOTUS has a chance to do something about it. Don’t hold your breath though, there might be a patent on this process. Seriously though, the Supreme Court has a habit of supreme systemic corruption which favours corporations over public interests and sanity. The infamous genetics patents will probably be no exception.
Timothy B. Lee asks, “Will the Supreme Court end human gene patents after three decades?”
“…Supreme Court has a habit of supreme systemic corruption which favours corporations over public interests and sanity.”Probably not. Here are the legal materials and SCOTUS Blog supporting the Court.
The 'legal community' (meaning people who exploit the law for profit) hijacked the discussion, with patent lawyers dominating in their responses and other patent sites controlling the flow of information. If you deviate from their consensus, you are ‘radical’. Speaking of patents on genetics, see this article about corruption, starting as follows: “As I reported a couple of weeks ago, a recent Senate bill came with a nice bonus for the genetically modified seed industry: a rider, wholly unrelated to the underlying bill, that compels the USDA to ignore federal court decisions that block the agency’s approvals of new GM crops. I explained in this post why such a provision, which the industry has been pushing for over a year, is so important to Monsanto and its few peers in the GMO seed industry.” The article names Sen. Roy Blunt as one whom Monsanto paid to pass policies relating to its patent monopolies (on crop genetics).
Jones says: “So, anti-software patents folks could just collect some money and hand it to a Senator and get patent reform? hat’s how it works?”
Yes, of course. Not just when it comes to patents. The system is rigged. █
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Posted in Patents at 9:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A lawyers’ (or politicians’) mindset
Summary: A lawyers-led debate neglects to target the core issue, which is patenting of software, instead resorting to attack on the symptom, which most often exploits software patents
Software patents have always been the #1 subject in this Web site. These patents — and by extension the patent system — are the #1 barrier to GNU/Linux domination in the post-Vista, post-Nokia/Symbian, post-x86 era.
Rather than discuss what’s “Fair” and “Reasonable” (to charge innovators) we should start tackling the source of the problem we all face because lawyers and their clients took over. Weak reformists do not advocate the end of software patents, they advance coexistence with them. FRAND is a common line for software patents apologists. As one site put it, “standard-essential patent owner is obligated to enter into binding baseball-style (or “final offer”) arbitration with any willing licensee to determine the royalty rate.”
“Rather than discuss what’s “Fair” and “Reasonable” (to charge innovators) we should start tackling the source of the problem we all face because lawyers and their clients took over.”Why discuss rates for something that might not be valid in the first place, such as the case in Europe? In the USPTO, where Apple is allowed just about any crazy monopoly it asks for (the institutional bias for large corporations), software patents might be acceptable and even enforceable internationally through the ITC (in the latest from the Apple versus Samsung case it likes to block Korean, i.e. non-US, companies). Watch this amazing bit of news, which is part of a bigger picture of Apple versus Android FRAND battles [1, 2]. Here is more on that from patent lawyers’ (hence biased) blogs.
Mark Lemley, an academic lawyer himself, proposes adjustments for FRAND rather than rejection. From his new paper:
Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) typically require their members to license any standard-essential patent on Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Unfortunately, numerous high-stakes disputes have recently broken out over just what these “FRAND commitments” mean and how and where to enforce them.
One lawyers’ site says that FRAND disputes start to expand outside the US, meaning that patents on software become enforceable in bulk where those patents, individually, are neither valid nor legal.
Aiming at trolls is another pattern of distraction, for instance with Obama nominating/appointing the problematic people while claiming to address the issue of trolls. Where is the protest? Where it the uproar? SOPA need not have a monopoly on outrage.
Here is some food for thought for Obama. As Pamela Jones notes: “Don’t miss this incredible article, everyone. It’s eye-opening. Mr. Ewing advises WIPO and is the attorney who first coined the phrase “patent privateering”, and this letter is his comment filed, along with many others which he makes available here — scroll down — in connection with a workshop that the FTC held on PAEs, or trolls, in December. The link doesn’t work any more, by the way, the one he includes in his letter regarding the workshop, but the cache is still available if you go to that page and then search for atr/public/workshops/pae in the search box.”
The EFF, not to its credit, left aside its old pitch of “against software patents” and now it is back too focusing on trolls and going after particular patents or players one by one (like the ineffective Patent Busting project). Here is a new example.
“Targeting trolls is not enough. All these reformists are going after the symptom rather than the disease.”Pamela Jones notes that the US government is studying trolls with special powers on its side, but it is not enough. Jones points out the article titled “Patent trolls launched majority of U.S. patent cases in 2012″ and then correctly points out: “That means that if you solve the patent troll problem, you still have nearly half of the problem unsolved.”
Nazer from the EFF is among those who focus not on the real solution to the mess and with phrases like “Crappy Software Patents” in the headline he helps imply that some software patents are “good”.
“Considering that algorithms are mathematics,” writes Jones, “and mathematics is non-patentable subject matter, I can’t see how this proposal will solve the fundamental problem.”
Rackspace, on the other hand, has gotten Jones’ support. With posts like these, the company shows that it wants the system itself fixed. In its blog it says: “When it comes to fighting this particular troll, we believe an IPR is our best option to have this patent abolished at its source – eliminate the root, destroy the weed.”
Watch the response from the troll’s site (it says “monetized to date” at the top). They call patent infringement theft. Here is a Patent Progress guest post from Rackspace, titled “STOP ABUSIVE PATENT LITIGATION, FOR THE SAKE OF OUR ECONOMY”
The site Patent Progress makes some suggestions for the ITC study and cheers for the FTC to shase down trolls as if it’s the only problem these days:
USING THE FULL POWERS OF THE FTC TO COMBAT PATENT TROLLS
A century ago there was a lively debate in Congress over the enforcement of the antitrust laws. Much of the 1912 presidential campaign had focused on the lack of effective antitrust enforcement by the Justice Department and the failure of the Sherman Act to stop growing anticompetitive conduct in the marketplace. In 1913, Congress focused on the urgent need for reform of the antitrust laws and stronger enforcement.
Targeting trolls is not enough. All these reformists are going after the symptom rather than the disease. That’s not to say that patent trolls are not an issue; they are. But if a huge number of people petition President Obama on the subject of software patents and receive a response about trolls, then someone is trolling and distracting them; the trolls will go away when large corporations, which are behind the government, decide that they must go away. Pursuing the end of trolls is leaving all the power in the hands of corporate cartels that use patents to harm everyone, including Android (a notable victim). █
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 8:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers.”
–The Economist, 1999
Summary: Yet another CFO receives a lot of money to keep his mouth shut about Microsoft’s accounting practices
A SUBJECT we covered a couple of times this morning (Microsoft's CFO leaving after cooking the books) merits an update as a separate post. A reader showed us a report titled “Microsoft to pay departing CFO Klein $2M for non-compete, secrecy promises”, which echoes what Microsoft did when its previous CEO (Mr. Liddell) left. Remember that Charles Pancerzewski, who had worked for Microsoft in accounting, was paid $4 million to keep quiet [1, 2]. He got this money after had revealed systematic financial corruption at Microsoft. The issue got buried thereafter. Here is what the latest report says:
Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Peter Klein, will receive $2 million in the year after he retires from the company, according to documents filed Thursday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Klein and Microsoft announced Thursday that he will leave the company after an 11-year stint. He will work through the end of the fiscal year, which for Microsoft wraps up June 30.
As part of his separation package, Klein will receive a $1 million payment on Jan. 15, 2014, and a second $1 million check on June 30, 2014, a Form 8-K filed by Microsoft said.
The payments are “compensation for his services during fiscal year 2013 and performance of his obligations under the Agreement,” the 8-K stated.
That agreement, also posted on the SEC website, bars Klein from working for any firm that competes with Microsoft for a period of one year and mandates that he keep confidential all information about Microsoft.
Microsoft needs to be raided again and properly investigated with no option of settlement (bribery) to stop the process. It sure seems like there is systematic bribery whose purpose is to cover up misconduct. Unless or until all those briberies stop we can — within reason — assume Microsoft to be guilty but too big to jail. “Big to jail” means that you are capable of paying people to subvert the course of justice, be it by ousting someone(s) or bribing someone(s). █
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