04.30.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Google already provided the Chromebook Business Management Console to businesses, but now these businesses can work with familiar companies to use it in their business. In addition, with major manufacturers offering Chromebooks, including Dell, HP, Samsung, Acer, and Lenovo, businesses can stick with a preferred brand and have a wide variety of Chromebooks to manage.
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Major laptop makers are paying attention and are adding Chromebooks to their product lines. They require basically the same production methods as their Windows laptops, so it’s a low-cost effort to build them. The Chromebook doesn’t require big hardware, so the component inventory is not too heavy.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds is back in the news, but this time it’s good. Torvalds tops the news tonight for being the recipient of a prestigious award. LibreOffice 4.1.6 was released today with about 90 fixes and squeezably fresh Tails 1.0 is making headlines. And our final story tonight, The Register is reporting that upgrading Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 “may knacker your Linux PC.”
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When electrical engineer Manjinder Bains learned in January that his employer’s planned restructuring would put his job at risk, he wasn’t sure what to do. There aren’t a lot of companies in his home town of Sacramento, Calif., that employ embedded developers with his skill set, he said, so finding a new job would be tough.
He decided to broaden his knowledge and his job prospects and signed up to take Linux Kernel Internals and Debugging (LFD320), a training course that teaches how the Linux kernel is built, and the tools used for debugging and monitoring the kernel. It would be the third training course Bains had taken with the Linux Foundation in the past year, but the first one he had paid for on his own – his employer had sponsored the first two.
“Boosting my Linux skills will make me more employable,” he said via phone last month.
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The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.2, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking yet another update in the most recent stable release.
The updates and improvements that preceded the launch of the Linux kernel 3.14 branch indicated that this was going to be one of the most interesting releases in quite a while, but the updates for this version have been lagging a little behind.
In the past, the first updates to the fresh kernel were quite large and featured a multitude of fixes and changes. Either the new kernels are more stable and require less work, or the developers are focusing more on the upcoming 3.15 branch.
“I’m announcing the release of the 3.14.2 kernel. All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.”
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Two major backers — AMD and Mentor Graphics — have revamped their support for embedded Linux development. This week, the companies joined the advisory board of the Yocto Project, an open source initiative for creating custom Linux-based operating systems for embedded devices.
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The SystemTap team announces release 2.5, “boot loot”!
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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You can view more of these early Linux 3.13/3.14/3.15 kernel test results from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VDA via OpenBenchmarking.org, but overall, there isn’t too much to get excited about with the results. When comparing these three kernel series, there wasn’t much in the way of performance changes for disk, graphics, or the computational workloads. The power usage also didn’t appear to change much between these recent versions of the Linux kernel.
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Applications
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sl is also smart enough to lump directories according to their contents. So for example, my wallpaper directory shows up under the “images” heading, and not just as a folder.
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BitTorrent clients feel right at home on Linux, and this means that there are a ton of them, all doing mostly the same thing, with some differences in features and the interface. Interestingly enough, some of the clients on the Linux platform try really hard to copy the way uTorrent looks and works on Windows, which is rather strange for a software.
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Video (formerly Totem) 3.12.1, the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on Gstreamer that features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, as well as keyboard navigation, has been released and is now available for download.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Skulls of the Shogun, an arcade action game developed and published by 17-BIT on Steam, will also get a Linux version soon.
Skulls of the Shogun is a different action game that also uses a turn-based strategy gameplay, which makes this title a unique one.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Akademy is the KDE Community conference. It is where we meet, discuss plans for the future, get inspired, learn and get work done. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE, this is your chance to present your work and ideas at the Conference from September 6-12 in Brno, Czech Republic. The main days for talks are Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th of September. The rest of the week will be BoFs, unconference sessions and workshops.
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Jani Heikkinen of Digia has announced the RC candidate packages for Qt 5.3 via the Qt Project web server. These packages will become the official Qt 5.3 release candidates should no serious issues be uncovered in the next few days. It was shared that the goal is to put out this release candidate on Friday, 2 May.
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In order to organize these events, sooner or later you need a legal organization that provides financial support to these actions. You might not know that, in words of the founders, this was the main reason behind the foundation of KDE e.V. .
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With the introduction of webmail and mobile computing I am not sure how many people still have a need for a dedicated email client.
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My project is on implementing interactive tours in Marble. Tours are a set of related places in Marble with supporting media, visited in a defined timeline, which can be played back, and are useful for a range of tasks, like highlighting places of interest for sightseeing, or taking a trip of the highest skyscrapers of the world, or even showing historic events and political changes happening over decades.
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Last week I attended the KDE Frameworks Sprint, held in Blue Systems Barcelona office. Kevin put together the now traditional sticky note board and we started cranking through the tasks. I think we were quite productive, as this picture of the board at the end of the sprint can attest:
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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.9. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The guys behind the RAVEfinity project have released an updated Humanity Colors icon theme for Ubuntu 14.04 (and older), which work great with Ambiance and Radiance Colors GTK themes.
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As a general OS, Musix sounds a few sour notes. It has a meager collection of text editors, word processors and Web tools. You can do some real work with the software that is provided, but you might resort to manually installing some of the programs typically available in distro repositories but missing here. Musix also provides a poor user experience with its menus.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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With the Brazilian arm of Mandriva gaining activity, a new partner to on-board our partner ecosystem recently is Linux Solutions a leading consulting, services and solutions based company using Linux platform and offering a wide range of integrated programs and high technical quality since 15 years.Throughout its existence, Linux Solutions has handled more than 150 projects and assisted over 100 clients. More than 1000 students have also been trained. Linux Solutions specializes in clusters and various demands solutions in TCP / IP networks, such as file services, email, firewall, routing, proxy, among others
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Red Hat Family
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Linux operating system vendor Red Hat Inc said it will buy privately held storage systems provider Inktank Ceph Enterprise for $175 million to expand in the fast growing market for software-defined storage.
Inktank’s open-source Ceph software helps its customers replace legacy storage systems and increase the scale of their storage.
Red Hat said it expected the purchase to be completed in May this year. It also reaffirmed its 2015 outlook.
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Fedora
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The Wayland feature proposal for Fedora 21 is documented at length via the Fedora Project Wiki. X.Org Server support is expected to still stick-around for unsupported hardware/driver combinations and now that X.Org Server 1.16 has integrated XWayland support. Besides GNOME 3.14 and X.Org Server 1.16, on the software version side for Fedora 21 will also likely be Wayland 1.6.
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Debian Family
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Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, is now at version 6.0r0 and is ready for testing.
The developers’ ultimate goal is to offer users an easy-to-use OS based on Debian’s Wheezy branch, which makes use of the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment.
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Tails, a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps you use the Internet anonymously, has just reached version 1.0 after a long development period.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The idea was audacious: Combine Android, the most popular mobile version of Linux, with Ubuntu, the leading Linux desktop operating system, on a single smartphone that swapped between the two depending on whether the device was docked. Alas, Ubuntu for Android seems to have moved off the active roster as Canonical focuses on its own Ubuntu Touch project, and a new exchange on a Ubuntu project-tracking website seems to suggest Ubuntu for Android may be dead. (See update below.)
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Everyone knows that Ubuntu is not one of the most customizable operating systems, which is one of the problems that often come up in the Linux community. This is where the Ubuntu Tweak software will really help its users make head or tails of the Ubuntu Linux distro in a way that very few applications can.
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The Ubuntu developers have already started working on the next Ubuntu version, and the first development images have been produced. Don’t expect too much from the new Ubuntu build, at least not yet. It will be a couple of months until some major changes are visible
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An IoT survey targeting attendees of this week’s Embedded Linux Conference offers a MinnowBoard Max SBC giveaway, but anyone interested can participate.
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Via’s rugged, Linux-ready “AMOS-3003″ industrial computer for IoT builds on Via’s EPIA-P910 pico-ITX board, which features its 1.2GHz Nano E2 processor.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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We had anticipated that a special “camera” version of Samsung’s flagship device will be launched soon and here it is finally with the moniker ‘Galaxy K Zoom’. The device boasts of a 20.7-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor and 10X optical Zoom. This is not the first time Samsung has attempted to put zoom lenses on the back of a smartphone. Last year’s Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom featured similar 10x optical zoom, but it was a bulky mess, while Galaxy K Zoom has managed to keep a much slimmer profile at 0.8 inch thickness.
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Android
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The market for lightweight notebooks may get a lot messier in the coming weeks as Notebook Italia reports that HP is planning to release a 14-inch touchscreen laptop running Android, Google‘s mobile operating system for phones and tablets (and now wearables), rather than its Chrome OS operating system for lightweight notebooks. Notebook Italia claims to have found a demo video and promotional pictures tucked away on HP’s website. The videos have since been removed, but some screen grabs of the video are still up.
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Asus Fonepad 7 Dual SIM, the refreshed version of Fonepad 7 voice-calling tablet, is now available for purchase on Infibeam.com for INR 12,875. Powered by Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, the tablet supports dual-SIM functionality and voice-calling. The Fonepad 7 Dual SIM features a 7-inch screen with LED backlight and WXVGA screen IPS panel.
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The Android Silver project, which was rumored earlier this month, has today been corroborated by four fresh sources, all of whom point to a major shift in Google’s mobile strategy. The Information reports that the current scheme of offering Nexus-branded handsets with Google’s unadulterated vision of the best Android user experience will be scrapped, to be replaced by a set of high-end Silver phones that will closely adhere to it. The change is both expansive and expensive, as Google is said to be planning to spend heavily on promoting these devices in wireless carriers’ stores and through advertising, essentially subsidizing the development and marketing costs for its hardware partners.
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Noxel’s Android-based Xtream A700 signage player integrates Apple’s BLE-based iBeacon indoor positioning tech with Noxel’s cloud-based signage service.
Noxel claims its Xtream A700 is the most powerful Android signage computer around, and considering its quad-core system-on-chip and the relative novelty of Android signage, we imagine they are correct. Aside from the sheer performance, the device is notable for its use of Apple’s iBeacon indoor positioning technology, which can provide precise location information via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The device’s iBeacon support enables retailers and brand marketers to provide in-store navigation and location-specific push messaging to smartphones, says the company.
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“Taking into consideration the current stage of utilization of OSS in the Albanian public administration, the local ICT business experience and capacities and the current education system, it is strongly recommended to the Albanian government to start implementing initially the neutral approach combined with some enabling initiatives, thus recognizing, guaranteeing and ensuring fair and equal competition of OSS with other proprietary software.”
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Open source software (OSS) has had a huge impact on the development of technology today. From apps and web browsers to content management platforms and operating systems, there’s no doubt that open source projects have influenced the way that we create and access information.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Google Chrome 35 Beta, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, is now available for download and is ready for testing.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 29 has been released and it’s causing quite a wave of controversy among Firefox users. Firefox 29 comes with a new interface called Australis that features rounded tabs, along with a menu icon in the top right corner. As you might imagine, some users are having trouble adjusting to the new interface and are making their feelings very clear to the Firefox developers.
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Mozilla is launching its most important release of Firefox in a very long time today. After almost two years of working on its Australis redesign, the company is now finally ready to bring it to its stable release channel.
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Firefox 30 also has a new Box Model Highlighter, new CSS property support, ECMAScript 6.0 support improvements, and many other changes. While Firefox 30 is now in a beta state, it will be officially released in June.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The improved accessibility features included in today’s new version of Apache OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools, is good news for public administrations, expects Rob Weir, Project Management Committee Member at the Apache Software Foundation. Public administrations favour software solutions with strong accessibility support, he says. “By including Iaccesible2 support, we’ve removed a potential objection against the adoption of OpenOffice.”
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Oracle has put out the first public beta of the forthcoming Solaris 11.2 operating system release. The big focus of Solaris 11.2 is on embracing support for cloud computing.
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CMS
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Education
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The case in the article linked below describes some US colleges that were faced with $millions per annum of payments to a few corporations for permission to have computers the colleges owned compute stuff like finances and enrolments. One university spent $100million installing some software from Oracle and setting it up (Oracle charges ~$10 per employee per function per annum and ~$1000 per user per function per annum. It adds up to $millions per college per annum.). Now they are spending ~$1million per annum instead, contributing to a FLOSS project, Kuali, which will do what they want how they want it done. They share with a bunch of other colleges all with similar motivations. By sharing the load, each college gets what it needs for a lot less than paying some corporation multiple times what software costs to develop. The world does not owe big corporations a living. Make them earn it by competing on price/performance instead of lock-in.
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Healthcare
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The daily management and operation of a hospital requires enormous effort. These days, most hospitals utilize Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to centralize facility operations including inventory, budgets, invoicing, and employee management. Any hospital administrator will tell you that ERP software is essential to efficiently managing their hospital as the software lowers inventory costs and improves efficiencies and quality.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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The council of Poland’s capital will this year donate 400 PCs to schools in the city, to be refurbished with Ubuntu Linux and educational applications, in a joint-venture with the Foundation of the Free and Open Source Software (FWIOO). Announcing the project, Warsaw city’s department for education, praised the “beautiful idea of a common, selfless work for others” ingrained in free and open source. “It also brings huge economic and functional merit to schools and students.”
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Science
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In the course of a month, Peter Hodes plans to visit Poland, Israel, Germany and South Africa. Wherever he goes – even Australia – he always makes sure to get home in 42 hours or less. The reason? He’s a volunteer stem cell courier. Here he describes his unusual pastime.
Since March 2012, I’ve done 89 trips – of those, 51 have been abroad. I have 42 hours to carry stem cells in my little box because I’ve got two ice packs and that’s how long they last.
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Health/Nutrition
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Common infections and minor scratches could soon kill because antibiotics are becoming useless against new superbugs, World Health Organisation warns
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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And so many years later, his followers are still fighting. Even with the U.S. withdrawing the bulk of its troops this year, up to 10,000 Special Operations forces, CIA paramilitaries, and their proxies will likely stay behind to battle the Haqqanis, the Taliban, and similar outfits in a war that seemingly has no end. With such entrenched enemies, the conflict today has an air of inevitability — but it could all have gone so differently.
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Available in bright blues and hot pinks, rifles for kids sell in their thousands in America. They look like toys – but they’re lethal. An-Sofie Kesteleyn travelled to photograph this juvenile army
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In case you have been asleep for the past 61 years, the CIA overthrew Mossadegh in 1953. This kept the Shah in power for another 26 years until in 1979 the people mind you, and not Islam, overthrew him, and were then hijacked by Islam, which eventually became the IRHI or the Islamic Republic of Hijacked Iran.
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When President Obama decided sometime during his first term that he wanted to be able to use unmanned aerial drones in foreign lands to kill people — including Americans — he instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to find a way to make it legal — despite the absolute prohibition on governmental extra-judicial killing in federal and state laws and in the Constitution itself.
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US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib 10 years ago. But as he told DW, he is convinced that the US hasn’t learned any lessons from it.
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Earlier this month, CIA-operated drones killed as many as 55 people in Yemen in several separate strikes. Although it was claimed that those killed were “militants,” according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounded. That makes at least 92 U.S. drone attacks against Yemen during the Obama administration, which have killed nearly 1,000 people including many civilians.
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One week ago, multiple air strikes, including possible drone strikes, in Yemen were reported. An escalation in counterterrorism operations took place with many alleged “militants” being reported killed but the names of them were not announced. It is unclear if any senior al Qaeda leaders were killed but the governments have claimed success.
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So many years later, they seem to be repeating the process in Yemen. They are now escalating a “successful” drone and special operations war against a group in that impoverished land that calls itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The drones turn out to be pretty good at knocking off various figures in that movement, but they are in another sense like a godsend for it. In what are called “targeted killings,” but might better be termed (as Paul Woodward has) “speculative murders,” they repeatedly wipe out civilians, including women, children, and in one recent case, part of a wedding party. They are Washington’s calling card of death and as such they only ensure that more Yemenis will join or support AQAP.
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Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has definitely come up with some of the most shocking ways to kill people, from gasp-inducing beheadings to blood-spattered Red Weddings. But in an interview with Rolling Stone, Martin says the way we engage in modern warfare is far more brutal.
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Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin condemned drone attacks in a recent interview, claiming that the method of killing enemies is not personal enough.
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The Senate’s decision is particularly troubling in view of how reticent the administration itself continues to be about the drone program. To date, Obama has publicly admitted to the deaths of only four people in targeted killing operations. That came in May 2013, when, in conjunction with a speech at the National Defense University, and, in his words, “to facilitate transparency and debate on the issue,” President Obama acknowledged for the first time that the United States had killed four Americans in drone strikes. But according to credible accounts, Obama has overseen the killing of several thousand people in drone strikes since taking office. Why only admit to the four Americans’ deaths? Is the issue of targeted killings only appropriate for debate when we kill our own citizens? Don’t all human beings have a right to life?
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Feinstein’s relationship with drones is, of course, somewhat hypocritical. She feels there should be stricter regulations on commercial drone usage (partially prompted by a non-commercial drone appearing outside her house during a Code Pink anti-NSA protest) and seems generally opposed to drone surveillance. However, she does stand strongly behind the nation’s counterterrorism efforts and believes killing people with drones (rather than just watching them) is more acceptable.
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The U.S. Senate has dropped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Barack Obama’s administration to disclose the number of people killed or injured in drone attacks conducted by the U.S. in other countries.
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Hundreds crowded in to listen to Dr. Cornel West speak about the relationship between racism, poverty and drones in Syracuse.
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But after hearing civil rights activist Cornel West talk about the connections between racism, poverty and drones at Tucker Missionary Baptist Church, Jones said it “riled” her up and she decided to join hundreds of others protesting the United States’ use of drones in military actions.
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Canada is being urged to lead a new international effort to ban so-called “killer robots” — the new generation of deadly high-tech equipment that can select and fire on targets without human help.
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Somewhere deep in a lab in China, scientists are working toward building autonomous military machines that could some day end up on a battlefield.
It’s not just China. Russia and Israel are working on their own deadly hardware.
The U.K., U.S. and South Korea have even conducted tests on autonomous weapons in military scenarios.
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The killing of two Australian citizens is not end of the conversation, but the beginning. If these men were threats to national security, then the public deserves to know why
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Parliament voted to prohibit drone strikes in mid-December 2013. Votes from Yemen’s parliament can be struck down by the president and are non-binding.
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Australian military and intelligence personnel involved in controversial US drone targeting operations could face crimes against humanity charges, according to former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.
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The Almighty answers to no one in exercising the power of life and death over His creatures, and the president of the United States, despite the powerful weapons at his hand, can make no such claim. Barack Obama has some explaining to do for his drone killings of purported terrorists.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled last week that the Obama administration must allow the public to review the internal legal documents that justify the president’s drone killings of those, including American citizens, who are suspected of terrorism. The Justice Department had claimed that White House executive privilege shields its internal records from public scrutiny, but the court said by releasing selected portions of the documents, the administration waived its right to secrecy.
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Transparency Reporting
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It’s no secret that many in the US government would love to find a way to charge Wikileaks and Julian Assange with criminal activities for reporting on leaks. However, as many have pointed out, doing so would create a firestorm, because it’s difficult to see how what Wikileaks did is any different than what any news publication would do in publishing leaked documents. The attack on press freedom would be a major problem. Still, the Justice Department has spent years trying to come up with any way possible to charge Assange with a crime. They even tortured Chelsea Manning and then offered her a deal if she lied and claimed that she “conspired” with Assange to release the State Department cables. That didn’t work. Even as the DOJ couldn’t produce any evidence that Manning and Assange conspired, the Defense Department insisted it had to be true. Last year, however, there were finally reports that the DOJ was just about ready to admit that it had no legal case against Assange, with officials effectively admitting that it would be tantamount to suing a newspaper.
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Finance
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Perhaps this is our dystopian, Piketty-esque future: a small class of ultra-wealthy rentiers; a breakdown of public safety because the rich employ their own private security forces and don’t feel like funding anything further; a retainer class of managerial drones; and then everyone else—sullen and resentful, but kept in line by the hard men in dark glasses toting automatic weapons and driving armored limos.
Actually, probably not. Eventually robots will provide better security services than fragile human beings, so the security forces will be out of jobs too. By then, however, even the ultra-wealthy won’t care if robots produce enough to make life lovely for everyone. Sure, they’ll still want their share of the still-scarce status goods—coastal property, penthouse apartments, original Rembrandts—but beyond that why should they care if everyone lives like kings? They won’t, and we probably will. As long as we don’t all kill ourselves first.
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Prison governors have been ordered to cut the cost of holding inmates in England’s bulging jails by £149m a year, as part of a radical programme designed to slash the costs of incarceration by £2,200 a year per prison place.
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The Supreme Court heard arguments today over whether public employee who testify under subpoena at public corruption trials should be protected by the First Amendment. The position of President Barack Obama’s administration appears to be that they should not be protected.
The case is Lane v. Franks and it involves Edward Lane, who according to NPR was “hired in 2006 to head a program for juvenile offenders” at Central Alabama Community College that provided “counseling and education as an alternative to incarceration.” The program “received substantial federal funds.”
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Porn. It’s what the internet is for, as they say. Also, it’s very hard for some people to avoid. Entire governments, too. But what about the little people with big parts that make all this wonderfully ubiquitous smut possible? It’s easy to forget about the hard (ahem) working individuals that make these small businesses and big industry spurt out their wares like (insert grossest applicable analogy here). And now it’s apparently difficult for those mostly-young laborers to get paid, since some banks seem to have adopted a rather convenient moral code when it comes to who can open accounts with their institutions.
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Does income inequality matter to the richest Americans? Not very much. Here’s why. And it’s more than just greed-is-good– it’s because the rich will just get richer.
A study by economists at Washington University in St. Louis tells us stagnant income for the bottom 95 percent of wage earners makes it impossible for them to consume as they did in the years before the downturn. Consumer spending, some say, drives the U.S. economy, and is likely to continue to continue to dominate, as the decomposition of America’s industrial base dilutes old economy sales of appliances, cars, steel and the like. That should be bad news for the super-wealthy, us buying less stuff?
But that same study shows that while rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of beginning around 1980, the group’s consumption growth did not fall proportionally at first. Instead, lower savings and hyper-available credit (remember Countrywide mortgages and usurous re-fi’s?) put the middle and bottom portions of our society on an unsustainable financial path which increased spending until it triggered the Great Recession. So, without surprise, consumption fell sharply in the recession, consistent with tighter borrowing constraints. Meanwhile, America’s the top earners’ wealth grew. The recession represented the largest redistribution of wealth in this century.
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Privacy
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For the past nine months, Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she’s pregnant — and it wasn’t easy.
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Alexander was told that Lobban might ask about the safeguards in place to prevent any data that GCHQ shared with the NSA from being handed to others, such as Israel, who might use it in “lethal operations.”
Under the heading “key topic areas,” the document notes that gaining “unsupervised access” to data collected by the NSA under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “remains on GCHQ’s wish list and is something its leadership still desires.”
Section 702 of FISA grants the NSA wide latitude to collect the email and phone communications of “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” It authorizes PRISM and several other programs – with codenames such as BLARNEY and STORMBREW – that covertly mine communications directly from phone lines and internet cables.
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FOR the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world’s largest employers of mathematicians. These organisations stand accused of law-breaking on an industrial scale and are now the object of widespread outrage. How has the mathematics community responded? Largely by ignoring it.
Those employers – the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – have been systematically monitoring as much of our lives as they can, including our emails, texts, phone and Skype calls, web browsing, bank transactions and location data. They have tapped internet trunk cables, bugged charities and political leaders, conducted economic espionage, hacked cloud servers and disrupted lawful activist groups, all under the banner of national security. The goal, to quote former NSA director Keith Alexander, is to “collect all the signals, all the time”.
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Jail for Journalists Publishing Leaks, Immunity for Intelligence Personnel
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William Blum, the author of the book, “Rogue State,” said that while the object of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the post Cold War era has been relegated to history, many are not inclined to believe that subversion has lost its relevance. Rather, it has only been redirected at overthrowing governments that refuse to tow the line gleaned from the NED’s slogan of “Supporting Freedom Around the World.”
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is attempting to conceal unclassified information about the structure and function of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the leading role of the Central Intelligence Agency in collecting human intelligence.
Last month, ODNI issued a heavily redacted version of its Intelligence Community Directive 304 on “Human Intelligence.” The redacted document was produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Robert Sesek, and posted on ScribD.
The new redactions come as a surprise because most of the censored text had already been published by ODNI itself in an earlier iteration of the same unclassified Directive from 2008. That document has since been removed from the ODNI website but it is preserved on the FAS website here.
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Lawmakers in the House have killed a bill that would have banned drones from flying over areas deemed “critical infrastructure” in Louisiana.
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National Security Agency-leaker Edward Snowden called on one of the best-known Espionage Act lawyers last year when he entered into plea negotiations with the United States government.
According to a Tuesday article in the New York Times, Plato Cacheris, a prominent Washington, D.C. lawyer and name-partner at Trout Cacheris, has been working for nearly a year to get Snowden a deal from the United States government. According to the Times, Snowden hired Cacheris, who has previously represented convicted spies Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, and convicted leaker Lawrence Franklin, in the hopes of securing a plea bargain that would spare him significant jail time. Snowden, who fled to Moscow last year after being charged with multiple violations of the Espionage Act stemming from his decision to leak details of N.S.A. eavesdropping programs to The Guardian, is facing 30 years in prison.
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Angela Merkel should ask Barack Obama to destroy her NSA file when she meets the American president in Washington later this week, a leading German opposition politician has told the Guardian.
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THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has advised the American people that although it knows that telling them about security issues is in the public interest, it will not always do that.
Following the exposure of the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, the NSA explained its stance via the White House blog, sort of, and revealed that each security vulnerability that comes its way is assessed on a range of merits and will only be disclosed depending on its risk assessment.
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The agency has launched an initiative to strengthen contacts between tech-heavy U.S. American colleges and universities. The project will coordinate academic collaboration to best protect Internet infrastructure. Already, the NSA has awarded funds and resources to Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, and the University of North Carolina to set up so-called “lablets” on their campuses.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets US President Barack Obama this week with shared fears over the mounting Ukraine crisis helping to mend ties ruptured by the NSA eavesdropping scandal.
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Students and faculty are trying to raise awareness about surveillance in the United States.
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In a stirring editorial in the New Scientist, University of Edinburgh mathematician Tom Leinster calls on the world’s mathematicians to boycott working for the NSA, which describes itself as the “largest employer of mathematicians in the US” and which may the world’s number one employer of mathematicians.
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Several proposals have been put forward that would address the National Security Agency (NSA) spying abuses of privacy and human rights as documented in the Edward Snowden revelations. Four legislative pathways to curbing privacy abuses stand out, yet none comply fully with the 13 International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance. However, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the proposals is a worthy starting point, while another of the bills would make the situation worse than it already is.
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The Guardian has picked up three Webby awards for work including interactive coverage of the NSA files and a video report on the exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar.
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American law enforcement has long advocated for universal “kill switches” in cellphones to cut down on mobile device thefts. Now the Department of Justice argues that the same remote locking and data-wiping technology represents a threat to police investigations–one that means they should be free to search phones without a warrant.
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A false reading by a license-plate scanner mounted on a Prairie Village police car led officers to stop an innocent motorist on 75th Street Monday — an incident that has the PV-based attorney questioning the department’s protocol for officers unholstering their weapons.
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Civil Rights
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The vast majority of felony cases don’t end in decisions regarding guilt or innocence. Instead, 93 percent are subject to plea bargains. Of the remainder, most convictions aren’t reexamined carefully—appeals tend to focus on technicalities of the case rather than matters of guilt or innocence.
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In the latest example of a troubling trend in which companies play the role of law enforcement and moral police, Chase Bank has shut down the personal bank accounts of hundreds of adult entertainers.
We’ve written before about the dire consequences to online speech when service providers start acting like content police. These same consequences are applicable when financial services make decisions about to whom they provide services.
Just as ISPs and search engines can become weak links for digital speech, too often financial service providers are pressured by the government to shut down speech or punish speakers who would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. It’s unclear whether this is an example of government pressure, an internal corporate decision, or some combination.
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Parliamentary Ombudsman Petri Jääskeläinen says there is no evidence that Finnish officials had any knowledge of the alleged use of Finnish airspace or airports for prisoner rendition flights by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 2001 and 2006.
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The failure of an official investigation to uncover hard evidence of Finland’s alleged role in the US-led programmes of rendition and secret detention a decade ago is deeply disappointing, said Amnesty International today.
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Today, staffers on the Senate intelligence panel as well as CIA officers and perhaps contractors could be potential subjects of a preliminary DOJ criminal inquiry into the handling of the “Panetta Review,” a set of controversial classified documents that fell into the hands of Senate investigators working on the panel’s probe.
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How much should the American public be allowed to know about the use of torture and other forms of cruelty practiced by U.S. interrogators against captives of the war on terror? Everything.
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Despite all evidence to the contrary, many Americans continue to believe that brutality, torture and rank illegality is the road to national safety.
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Because of his reputation for brutality, Gulalai was someone both sides of the war wanted gone. The Taliban tried at least twice to kill him. Despite Gulalai’s ties to the CIA and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, United Nations officials and U.S. coalition partners sought to rein him in or have him removed.
Today, Gulalai lives in a pink two-story house in Southern California, on a street of stucco homes on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
How he managed to land in the United States remains murky. Afghan officials and former Gulalai colleagues said that his U.S. connections — and mounting concern about his safety — account for his extraordinary accommodation.
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An Army psychiatrist said the accused USS Cole bomber was given adequate access to treatment for his mental health problems, although he admitted he had no access the secret CIA files documenting the suspect’s extensive torture, the Miami Herald reports.
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The US government has always been the first to call out other nations with poor track records on human rights abuses. Invariably they are the two nations viewed most threatening to America’s global hegemony and power – rivals Russia and China.
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Oklahoma changed its execution protocols twice this year. State officials have five options for lethal injections, including a new three-drug mixture that was used for the first time Tuesday.
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We often hear about the police planting drugs or guns on people, but how about buildings? Something needed to be done to make marijuana dispensaries in California appear dangerous, and two officers of the law had an idea: “Why don’t we just plant some illegal stuff in there?
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Last week, an obscure but potentially internet-transforming document was leaked from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It revealed that government regulators are considering rules that would give big companies a chance to make their online services run faster than smaller ones.
The proposed rules were revealed in the New York Times, and they would overturn the principle of “network neutrality” on the internet. Put simply, network neutrality allows you to use services from rich companies like Google and small startups with equal speed through your ISP. You can read a blog hosted on somebody’s home server, and it loads just as quickly as a blog on Tumblr.
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Recently, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, came under fire for reportedly proposing exceedingly weak “open Internet rules.” If the reports are correct, the FCC will allow broadband providers like Comcast to make special deals that give some companies preferential treatment, as long as those deals are “commercially reasonable.”
In other words, rather then requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic more or less equally, the FCC will permit them to create an Internet “fast lane” and shake down content providers like Netflix, Google and Amazon for the right to travel in it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, pioneers of the BitTorrent copyright troll cases in the United States, have thrown in the towel. The law firm conceded defeat in a fraud and abuse case that was brought against them by an alleged pirate, and were ordered to pay nearly $40,000.
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Earlier this month the New Zealand High Court said that police could no longer hold onto property seized from Kim Dotcom during the 2012 raid on his mansion. Today and at the eleventh hour, the Crown indicated that it intends to fight by filing an appeal to keep control of Dotcom’s property.
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04.29.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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The percentage of women involved in free and open source software is very low. This is a well-known fact, yet the groups that should be open and welcoming are often those who, subtly and not-so-subtly, often send out messages that are far from welcoming.
A few days back, I came across the following pictures at the site of the Linux Professional Institute, an organisation that offers certification in Linux at various levels.
The subliminal message sent by the pictures is pretty strong. Take the plug for the lowest level certification, LPIC1. It has a picture of a woman (above) accompanying it.
The plug for LPIC2 has a picture of a black man.
But the plug for LPIC3, the highest level, has a white man as its face.
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Desktop
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The Linux distributions are all made from various software packages, each with a different set of maintainers, with a different set of values and agendas. While each group has given their software and their efforts to the open source community, each group is just a little bit different. It is in these differences that our love of minutia starts to show through. Some people don’t like the default Ubuntu desktop, so they clone Ubuntu and add a slightly different desktop and release it as a new derivative. This is good because it brings new ideas into the fold, and shows how things can be done just a little differently. However, each time this happens it also fragments the community just a little bit more. Is this good or bad? Depends on how you look at it.
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Server
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Google is eyeing IBM’s Power processors for the servers that power its services. Amazon is reportedly pondering custom ARM-based chips for its cloud servers. Add it up and the big cloud guns—the companies that will likely power most of the infrastructure that’ll be rented by the enterprise—are hedging their Intel bets.
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Kernel Space
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AMD has now revealed their newest APUs, codenamed “Beema” and “Mullins” while their Linux fate remains unclear.
The AMD “Beema” APUs are targeted for mobile products like notebook PCs while AMD Mullin APUs are low-power processors for ultra low-powered devices. The low-end Mullin APUs sport Radeon R2/R3 Graphics.
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Linus Torvalds, the principal force behind development of the Linux kernel and overseer of open source development for the Linux operating system, has been named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award.
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Linus Torvalds has just released the third Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch, which is now available for testing.
The Linux kernel development is going as planned, and it seems that the weekly development cycle has returned to normal. After a couple of crazy first releases, the third iteration of the kernel has calmed down and there are no more surprises.
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Graphics Stack
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The ABI break was attributed to a “temporary mistake of changing the function return type as a bug” so that existing drivers retail API compatibility with the new X.Org Server version, with the most important driver to Keith Packard as the X.Org Server maintainer being that of his employer — the xf86-video-intel driver. NVIDIA has already been working on X.Org Server 1.16 support for their proprietary driver but this event has thrown an issue into their handling of their new support.
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Cherryview is expected to be released before the end of the year and will feature an Airmont processor, which is the 14nm shrink of current-generation Silvermont processors in the mobile space. When it comes to the graphics, while Valley View / Bay Trail had “Ivy Bridge” class graphics, the Cherryview hardware is based around Broadwell — including its “Gen8″ graphics. Riding off Broadwell, most of the open-source hardware enablement for the Cherryview graphics under Linux is straight forward and not too invasive.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Ubuntu offers three ways to launch the operating system without hurting Windows. Two of these options require a bootable Ubuntu CD or flash drive, so I’ll first discuss how to set up those devices.
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Games
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Nuclear Throne is quickly becoming a favourite game of mine, I did a short video for you recently and it’s time I did another showing off the awesome music and sound effects included on this new release.
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The Last Tinker: City of Colors, Mimimi Productions’ upcoming platformer, will arrive on Steam May 12 for Linux, Mac and Windows PC, publisher Unity Games announced today.
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Don’t let the cartoon visuals fool you. Being a RGB Agent requires some good skills. A rather fun looking game now has a Linux version!
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For all the retro gamers out there, Rabbit Hole 3D: Steam Edition is a newly released game for Steam for Linux. The game is a minimalistic retro style puzzle, like the good old days of yore, complete with a catchy retro chiptune soundtrack that is sure to take you back to your childhood. The game’s interface is designed to give you the retro vibe. The game is basically a move up, down, left and right game like the classic Frogger but here you dodge words instead of traffic. You are represented by a single block, staying true to the retro formula.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I say Krita should be a number one tool considered to any digital painter, whether one is a beginner or an advanced professional. So now when I’m faced with a project where I need to paint something and know it will have to be printed, Krita is my number one choice. Especially when it is a real pleasure to paint in it. And that is how Bstudija came to use open source tools like Krita to accomplish some projects.
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In KDE Telepathy we provide several plasma widgets, which need to be ported in order to run on Plasma Next. In order to do this we first had to port our libraries to work on top of KDE Frameworks. By the end of the sprint we had the contact list and chat plasma widgets fully running and working on Plasma Next. We hope to release the widgets so that they are available for Plasma Next users
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As the name suggests, Moka Gnome Shell Theme is a pretty theme for Gnome Shell (and Unity).
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The status quo of Getting Things Gnome heavily depends on generic backend & local xml database for different third-party services. The class generic backend is inherited by backends for different services. This makes it quite difficult to add new services independent of generic backend, and maintain the core modules, including generic backend, independent of backend service sub classes.
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“The team has made a huge effort to make this one of our best releases yet. Since the OpenELEC 3.0 and 3.2.x releases, we have worked hard to improve OpenELEC in a number of areas. Some of these are visible changes, others are backend changes that aren’t as visible to every user but are certainly worth mentioning,” reads the official announcement.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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In today’s Linux news are several Ubuntu topics ranging from a review to a Shuttleworth interview. In other news, Red Hat is still struggling on Wall Street, but there’s cause for optimism. And finally, The Telegraph published a review of The Samaritan Paradox.
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When I’m not traveling, I take the kids to school. I’ve learned to use commute time as efficiently as possible. So, after dropping off the kids, I use my 30 minute commute to take/make calls (don’t worry, I use a hands-free set in my car). If you think about it, time spent commuting – whether driving to the office or waiting in lines at the airport – is often time wasted. I try diligently to preplan those times to make the most use of them. In fact, I spend time in the security lines at airports reading articles I’ve saved using Pocket – a great browser plug-in/app to save web content to read later.
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Fedora
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While the xorg-server and latest DDX now support not running with root rights, it’s still being done anyhow by default. Most display managers aren’t yet ready for supporting the X.Org Server running as a user. Hans shared the re-based X.Org for Fedora Rawhide via this mailing list announcement.
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Debian Family
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Debian has removed their SPARC CPU architecture support from Debian 8.0 “Jessie” testing and it might also be removed from Debian unstable as well.
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename wheezy). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old wheezy CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.
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The results of the General Resolution about the code of conduct is that the code of conduct is accepted and updates to it should be done via an other General Resolution.
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As of tonight, there is no more SPARC in testing. The main reasons were lack of porter commitments, problems with the toolchain and continued stability issues with our machines.
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Technologic announced a tiny, open spec SBC that runs Linux on Freescale’s i.MX286 SoC, supports industrial temperatures, and draws as little as 0.5W.
The “TS-7400-V2″ single-board computer is a lower-cost, faster, drop-in replacement for the first-generation TS-7400, says Technologic Systems. The single board computer maintains the earlier model’s 4.7 x 2.9 x 0.8-inch dimensions, general board layout, and Debian Linux OS support, says the company.
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Version 1.0 of the Tails (“the amnesic incognito live system”) distribution has been released. Tails is a Debian-based distribution intended for anonymous access to the net. The 1.0 release evidently brings few new features; the point, instead, is to indicate that Tails has reached a new level of stability.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As a reminder, the Debian developers have decided earlier this year to use systemd as the default init service manager on Debian Jessie and so, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will also replace Upstart with systemd, due to the fact that Ubuntu is a Debian derivative system.
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The Ubuntu developers have already started working on the next Ubuntu version, and the first development images have been produced. Don’t expect too much from the new Ubuntu build, at least not yet. It will be a couple of months until some major changes are visible.
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Canonical says it is working to fix a problem that’s crippling some Ubuntu PCs after they’ve been upgraded to the latest version of the Linux distro.
A spokesperson for the company told The Reg it is aware of a “small number” of “power users” are seeing their PCs crash following the move to 14.04.
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Ubuntu for Android sounds like a great idea. According to the official website, Ubuntu for Android provides a full desktop experience, including office software, web browsing, email and media applications, on Android phones docked to a screen and keyboard.
Canonical didn’t put too much effort in this project after it was officially announced and besides a vague late 2012 launch date, there is not much information about it. Users don’t even have access to a Beta and they can’t really test it.
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According to an entry in Launchpad by an interface designer for Canonical, Matthew Paul Thomas, the Ubuntu for Android is no longer in development.
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“Security Profile for Wind River Linux” is sort of a Yocto Linux complement to Wind River’s Wind River Solution Accelerators for Android, Security. It appears to build upon the company’s military-focused Wind River Linux Secure, but with a broader focus that is particularly aimed at Internet of Things security.
Like Wind River Linux Secure, the software is said to be certifiable to the Common Criteria General Purpose Operating System (GPOS) Protection Profile, but extends only to Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL 4) rather than the military version’s more rigorous EAL4+ standard. According to Intel subsidiary Wind River, which works closely with sister subsidiary McAfee on security technology, this is the first commercial embedded Linux platform featuring EAL4 certification via GP-OSPP
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Avnet released two new, Linux-ready MicroZed COMs, one of which supports industrial temperatures, as well as the first MicroZed SBC, all based on Zynq SoCs.
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The Linux Foundation will be announcing tomorrow that AMD and Mentor Graphics are partnering up with the embedded Yocto Linux project as advisory members.
I’ve been informed (and free to share now) that tomorrow the Linux Foundation will be announcing from the Embedded Linux Conference that AMD and Mentor Graphics have decided to join the Yocto Linux project in an advisory role.
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Banana Pi is a single-board computer (SBC) made in China. It can run Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian, Raspberry Pi and Cubieboard Image. Despite the name, Banana Pi is unrelated to the Raspberry Pi.
The Banana Pi is designed to be mechanically and electrically compatible with Raspberry Pi add-on modules with its 24-pin header layout. It comes with a dual-core, Cortex-A7-based Allwinner A20 SoC (system-on-chip) running at 1GHz. That’s much faster than the Raspberry Pi’s 700MHz, ARM11-based Broadcom BCM2835 processor. It also includes a more powerful Mali-400 GPU. The Banana Pi comes with 1GB of RAM and built-in Ethernet that can handle up to 1Gbps. That’s 10 times as fast as the Raspberry Pi. This brand-new SBC also includes a SATA port and a micro-USB port. It’s, at 92 x 60mm, a trifle larger than the 85 x 56mm Raspberry Pi.
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Phones
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Tizen already is fully developed as an operating system and deployed in numerous product lines. They typically have the word “smart” in their name — you know, things like smartTV, smartphone, smartwatch, smartcamera and yes, smart refrigerator. It can be found in in-vehicle infotainment systems as well.
“Tizen has been used in products for a long time before it was even formally announced,” Brian Warner, director of client services and operations at the Linux Foundation and manager of the Tizen Project, told LinuxInsider.
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Android
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If the word Wipeout sets your adrenaline high and your ears to cool electronic music, then this might be the news for you. Flashout 2, an anti-gravity, fast paced racer, is finally here for Android from Jujubee S.A. As you may already know, Wipeout is a highly acclaimed racing series that features some of the best fast paced racing in the gaming history. In the game, you ride your high speed anti-gravity ship that can be outfitted with various weapons to outrun and decimate your opponents.
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Aio one is more awesome than meets the eye. It is an Android device, desktop Linux computer and a real TV all in one. It is a crossover between a smart TV and All in one computer. With a clean and minimalist aesthetic our focus will be on all the details, even the smallest.
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Though you may know and follow basic security measures on your own when installing and managing your network and websites, you’ll never be able to keep up with and catch all the vulnerabilities by yourself.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released Firefox 29 (stable) today. The new version includes a new user interface known as Australis, along with many other changes.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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All the supported platforms have received this new update, but this is a maintenance build that’s mostly about bug fixes, which means that it fits perfectly in what has been made available so far, with no major surprises.
“LibreOffice 4.1.6 is the last release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, targeted to large deployments in enterprises and public administrations, which should always be supported by TDF certified developers. Today, we users can choose between LibreOffice 4.2.3 Fresh, targeted to early adopters and technology enthusiasts, and LibreOffice 4.1.6 Stable targeted to enterprise deployments and conservative users,” said Florian Effenberger, TDF executive director.
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Education
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“LET’S do it again,” calls a ten-year-old. Once more, pupils clasping printed numbers follow tangled lines marked with white tape on the floor of their school hall. When two meet, the one holding the higher number follows the line right; the other goes left. Afterwards they line up—and the numbers are in ascending order. “The idea is to show how a computer sorts data,” explains their teacher, Claire Lotriet.
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Funding
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For the first time, the Linux Foundation’s SPDX Workgroup is geared up to participate in the 2014 Google Summer of Code internship program. The goal was to engage students in open source projects, learn a bit about open source compliance, and meet open source community members. We had excellent responses in our first year, with a total of four projects accepted from three different universities.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Ada programming language that’s common to this day among embedded and real-time systems now has support for compiling to 64-bit ARM by the GNU Compiler Collection.
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Public Services/Government
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Albania’s Minister of Social Welfare and Youth is supporting the country’s first open source conference, taking place this weekend in the capital Tirana. Albania’s new government is strongly influenced by the free software and open data movement, explains Minister Erion Veliaj, who will inaugurate the conference on Saturday.
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Openness/Sharing
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Arfon Smith works at GitHub and is involved in a number of activities at the intersection of open science, open source, and online research. He has worked on several successful citizen science projects, like Zooniverse, a platform he co-founded where people can analyze real astronomical data and make significant contributions. Since his move to GitHub, Arfon has broadened his focus to how GitHub can help make academic collaborations behave more like open source ones.
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Open Hardware
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When Bunnie Huang firstannounced the Novena laptopback in December 2012 it was like an early Christmas present to hackers the world over. This was true even though there was only a suggestion that, given sufficient demand, a limited number maybe made available.
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If you like fun projects like these involving Linux, please read on and join in my birdy obsession!
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison.
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The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has warned in a closed-door meeting in Washington that Israel risks becoming an “apartheid state” if US-sponsored efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement fail.
In an apparent sign of Kerry’s deep frustration over the almost certain collapse of the current nine-month round of peace talks – due to conclude on Tuesday – he blamed both sides for the lack of progress and said failure could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens.
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Kharkiv mayor, who was key figure in ex-president Yanukovych’s party, shot in the back while on his way for morning swim
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The crisis in Ukraine and the steadily dropping temperature in relations between Moscow and Washington made many talk about a new Cold War; and many others are worried it may turn ‘hot’. But there’s another war going on right now: the information war. US Secretary of State Kerry has already attacked RT, calling it “Putin’s propaganda machine.” But Washington itself uses dubious evidence and fake facts. What is the information war? What methods is America using? Sophie talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran correspondent Chris Hedges.
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Since Ukraine is not (yet) a member of NATO, the U.S. government would not have the same formal obligation to intervene should a shooting war break out between Ukraine and Russia. But what if something happens between Russia and Poland or one of the Baltic states? Under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, an attack on one member is regarded as an attack on all. But it also says,
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Ranchers herd their stock away from dying grasslands as beef prices reach record highs and industry faces uncertain future
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Hundreds took part in a march to mark the anniversary of the formation of the Ukrainian SS division, which fought for the Nazi’s against the Soviet Union during World War II, in the city of Lvov in the western Ukraine.
Around five hundred neo-Nazi supporters took to the streets in the center of the city on Sunday to celebrate the creation of the 14th SS-Volunteer Division ‘Galician’ on April 28, 1943.
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For the US fracking industry – and for Vice-President Joe Biden – fracking is more than just a way to bring in vast amounts of cash, writes Steve Horn. It’s also a key weapon in the US’s long war with Russia, as Biden made clear this week in Kiev.
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A fuel buried under the deep ocean bed off Britain and Ireland could provide a plentiful supply of energy but will be difficult to exploit, an expert said.
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We’re products of an industrial project, a project linked to fossil fuels. But humans have changed before and can change again
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Finance
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So now you might have to buy your own crutches, but you’ll get your shotgun subsidised by the state. A few days after it was revealed that an NHS group is considering charging patients for the crutches, walking sticks and neck braces it issues, we discovered that David Cameron has intervened to keep the cost of gun licences frozen at £50: a price that hasn’t changed since 2001.
The police are furious: it costs them £196 to conduct the background checks required to ensure shotguns are issued only to the kind of dangerous lunatics who use them for mowing down pheasants, rather than to the common or garden variety. As a result they – sorry, we – lose £17m a year, by subsidising the pursuits of the exceedingly rich.
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Censorship
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Parents in Idaho called the cops last week on junior-high student Brady Kissel when she had the nerve to help distribute a book they’d succeeded in banning from the school curriculum.
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It appears as though Google run YouTube is targeting popular channels that promote freedom and liberty by deleting them and all their content off it´s servers.
[...]
In the past we have seen this happen to Russia Today a very popular english speaking news channel having their youtube channel cancelled twice and a Ron Paul promoting channel also deleted.
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Privacy
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A report from the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED delves into a wide-scale surveillance system being developed for police forces. How can the trade off between safety and privacy be negotiated as technology gets more and more sophisticated?
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Civil Rights
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Her cell was so dirty that a sock rotted into an open wound on her foot. For two and a half years, she didn’t have a bed. She slept on a mat on the floor. She bled on herself, because the jail denied her sanitary napkins.
Jan Green, a 51-year-old grandmother, never even stood trial. Because of the dramatic mood swings and psychosis associated with her bipolar disorder, Green was found unfit to stand trial – which meant that she should’ve been hospitalized to get the intensive mental health care she needed.
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In a similar but separate case, the same judge then upheld the death sentences of 37 of 529 men he notoriously ordered to hang last month, bringing the total number of death sentences to 720. The remaining 492 had their sentences commuted to 25-year jail terms. All cases are subject to further appeals.
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More than 90 percent of American adults own a mobile phone, and more than half of the devices are smartphones. But “smartphone” is a misnomer. They are personal computers that happen to include a phone function, and like any computer they can store or wirelessly retrieve enormous amounts of personal information: emails, photos and videos; document files; financial and medical records; and virtually everywhere a person has been.
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Send this to a friend
04.28.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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“Whether you’re aware of it or not, Linux is practically everywhere. It’s invisible, yet ubiquitous.”
And unlike today’s big software companies, no organisation can claim ownership of Linux because its development is mainly driven by a huge following of open and like-minded developer communities.
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“My opinion is that Linux is ready, and has been ready for some time, for the average person’s desktop computer,” Stone explained. “The only thing that stands in the way is availability of some software and its image as a geek toy. If the software was there and it came installed like Windows currently does, Windows would be a thing of the past.
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Linux is an amazing operating system, and it has much to offer any desktop user. But it’s also not perfect and it has its share of problems and issues. If you were the King (or Queen) of open source, what would you do to improve Linux? Foss Force asked its readers a similar question recently and shared some of their responses.
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Desktop
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When creating an ‘application’ from a web page Chrome attempts to create an icon for it using the favicon — the small icon you see in the corner of a tab next to the page title, or if the site specifies one, the ‘apple touch icon’.
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Server
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One of the earliest commercial ventures to emerge in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) space was Big Switch Networks, founded in 2010 by SDN pioneer Guido Appenzeller and Kyle Forster. In late 2013, Douglas Murray joined the company as its new CEO and has been helping to set direction and accelerate commercial adoption ever since.
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Part of the direction involves an effort known as Open Network Linux, which is a component of Switch Light and has now been donated to the Open Compute Platform (OCP) and its open networking effort.
“Open Network Linux takes a piece of what’s inside Switch Light, anything that you would normally need to leverage to bring up a switch,” Murray said.
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IBM positioned the move as a “sharp contrast [with] other chip and server manufacturers’ proprietary business models,” but with its hardware sales tumbling 23 percent in Q1 and its Power business falling 31 percent last year, the vendor badly needs a hearty seedling from which to build a stronger beanstalk.
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Kernel Space
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Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center sent in the first batch of drm-intel-next changes for landing into drm-next, David Airlie’s DRM tree as the subsystem maintainer for the work that will land in Linux 3.16. The changes already queued up for this next kernel cycle contain a lot of work on an Intel Gen7 command parser, continued Valley View / Bay Trail fixes, continued work on Intel Broadwell support, run-time power management support for Broadwell and Sandy Bridge, initial Cherryview support, and other code changes.
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Another week, another rc. So far, no big scares, and rc3 is appropriately smaller than rc2 was, so we’re following the right trajectory here.
The statistics look fairly normal too, with half drivers (input, usb, gpu, acpi, regulator..) and a third arch updates (much of it again arm dts files, but other arm and some um updates too). The rest is misc, but mainly concentrated in filesystem updates (btrfs and ext4).
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When a band releases their latest album in a Linux kernel module format, there should be little doubt that they’re probably a little geeky. But with netcat, the hints only begin there. Take for example their name: netcat is a popular Unix-based networking command-line tool. And then there’s the album name, Cycles Per Instruction. Oh – and their site is in plain text.
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Stratos Karafotis posted a patch for the Intel P-State code today that changes the calculation method for the next pstate. Stratos wrote on the mailing list, “Currently the driver calculates the next pstate proportional to core_busy factor and reverse proportional to current pstate. Change the above method and calculate the next pstate independently of current pstate.”
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Graphics Stack
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For those interested in the performance of GLAMOR 2D acceleration that’s accelerated via OpenGL, Keith Packard has written a new blog post on the topic.
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clpeak is a new tool in Fedora to measure the peak values of several OpenCL related aspects, i.e. IOPS, FLOPS, memory bandwidth and kernel latency.
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The generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver that’s designed to work universally across Linux KMS drivers now has support for sever-managed file-descriptors, which will help this driver work on non-root X Servers.
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With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS there is improved support for multi-GPU laptops (commonly what’s branded as NVIDIA Optimus configurations) where there is a discrete NVIDIA GPU used for high performance workloads to complement the low-power Intel integrated graphics. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS features better support for these Optimus / DRI PRIME configurations on both the open and closed-source graphics drivers. Here’s the Ubuntu 14.04 multi-GPU experience along with some OpenGL benchmarks and power consumption numbers between the different configurations.
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Benchmarks
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A common benchmark request at Phoronix lately has been to compare the Xen PV (para-virtualization) performance to Xen HVM (Hardware-assisted virtualization). Well, now that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released, here’s some benchmarks from within Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud when comparing Ubuntu 14.04 Server PV and HVM instances.
Xen has long supported para-virtualization (PV) as its means of virtualization support for best performance and stability while minimizing overhead between Dom0 and the hypervisor by the two operating system software stacks working more closely together. The “newer” option for Xen virtualization users is to act as a hardware-assisted virtual machine (HVM) whereby the host and guest kernels don’t need to be patched, Windows can run as a HVM guest, and there’s complete hardware isolation.
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Applications
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One of the most used audio players on the Linux platform, Audacious, has just received a major update and a ton of features, most of them being requested by the community. Audacious may be a very popular audio player, but the developers are not upgrading it as often as they should. This means that when a new version is promoted, the release tends to be stuffed with new features and improvements.
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CherryTree is a hierarchical note taking application that has many useful features such as syntax highlighting, password protection and image handling. This note taking app supports many languages; read the following list to find out the supported languages by CherryTree.
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It’s been a long time since the last major release of the Inkscape open-source vector graphics editor software, but the 0.91 release (formerly known as Inkscape 0.49) is still brewing and will be a very exciting release with a ton of new functionality.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you have an Nvidia graphics card on your system, then its recommended to install the official drivers released by Nvidia. The proprietory drivers would utilise the hardware properly delivering full performance.
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.17 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- More implementations for the Task Scheduler.
- C runtime made more compatible by sharing source files.
- Fixes in the Mac OS X joystick support.
- Various bug fixes.
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Games
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If you remember from our previous post, Epic had disclosed plans to support Linux with their game engine, the Unreal Engine. That promise is now a reality with their latest iteration of the engine. The new version, Unreal Engine 4.1 now adds support, according to the release notes, Linux and SteamOS.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This week we gathered around ten of the KDE Frameworks contributors for a sprint focusing on preparing the release. As usual I went the let’s have a board with sticky notes route. We dumped information from the wiki there and been working on tasks since then. By the look of that board this morning I would say we did a nice job.
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Ah, it’s that time of the year again, that time when the summer is rising up, the temperatures are warming, you are getting your gear around and planning to go to the beach to do a swim and suddenly you discover that there is a dive software for linux and you wanna try it doing a scuba diving on your nearest beach resort.
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I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted as student for this year’s Google Summer of Code! This summer, I’ll have the chance to improve the Clang integration in KDevelop, something we (the KDevelop developers) have been working on for some months already.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Gnome developers are currently working on Gnome 3.13 development version, which soon will turn into a stable release. The Gnome 3.14 version will be released this September after alot of testing and hacking on the current development version.
There are many features being discussed at the moment for the release of Gnome 3.14 such as Colour Tinting in GNOME Shell,Zimbra integration in Gnome and the ability to browse DLNA media servers in GNOME Photos.
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I have to admit that I’m a bit of an ebook junkie, I’m always reading something and when I’m done with one book then it’s on to the next. So I was very happy to see a report today that Marta Milakovic has proposed an open source ebook reading application for GNOME. Given the soaring popularity of ebooks, I think this is a fantastic idea. I’d like to see something similar in all Linux desktop environments.
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Welcome to a new “GNOME 3.12 is out blog post”, somewhat late because I wanted to focus on 3.12.1 instead of the usual 3.12.0, and because I was away for several days due to Easter holidays.
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Pinguy OS 14.04 Mini, an Ubuntu remaster that comes with a large number of tweaks by default, has been released today.
Pinguy OS Mini is a stripped down version of Pinguy OS which comes with all the tweaks and fixes available in the main Pinguy OS version, but without most of the applications installed in Pinguy OS. Like the main version, it uses GNOME Shell (3.10) as the default “shell”.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Over the years Linux users has been consistently growing due to un-parallel benefits like cost and critical load performance over its competitors like Microsoft Windows. Red Hat Software (RHT) is one such company that provides Linux operating system for desktop and web servers. Red Hat is a leading player in open-source Linux that crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and it has a solid plan to keep growing its business in the years ahead. Red Hat partners with enterprise vendors like IBM, HP, Intel, Cisco, Dell, and SAP this also provides a deeper penetration in the global market.
The company recently declared quarterly results and was firing all cylinders, it set records for new bookings and billings with strong renewals. It reported a record number of 30 deals that crossed $1 million, with 7 deals that crossed $5 million and 2 were over $10 million. Revenue of $400.4 million was recorded, up by 15.1% year over year also beating the management’s guided range of $397.0 million to $400.0 million.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Now that Mark Shuttleworth has announced Ubuntu 14.10 as the Utopic Unicorn, the next version of Ubuntu Linux is officially under development.
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According to the mailing lists, Canonical has officially start the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, scheduled for the 17th of October 2014.
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But if everything happens as announced at the previous UDS, Unity 8 (over X.org) will be implemented on Ubuntu 14.10, while Mir will be already usable by October 2014, despite the fact that it will get set by default on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, along with systemd, which will replace Canonical’s Upstart init system. A demo video of both Unity 8 (Mir) and Unity 7 (X11) running on Ubuntu 14.04 is available.
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That’s because there’s no way to boot a full Windows system from a USB stick to troubleshoot your PC—well, not without an Enterprise version of Windows and Windows To Go—but anyone can make a free Ubuntu USB drive, CD, or DVD. A Ubuntu live drive can be used as a digital Swiss army knife to troubleshoot all sorts of problems with any PC, whether you need to recover files from a failing computer, diagnose hardware problems, perform a deep virus scan from outside Windows, or even reset a forgotten Windows password.
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Hot on the heels of my previous annoucement of my systemd PPA for trusty, I’m now happy to announce that the latest systemd 204-10ubuntu1 just landed in Utopic, after sorting out enough of the current uninstallability in -proposed. The other fixes (bluez, resolvconf, lightdm, etc.) already landed a few days ago. Compared to the PPA these have a lot of other fixes and cleanups, due to the excellent hackfest that we held last weekend.
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Just days after Ubuntu 14.10 opened for development, a systemd package has landed within the “Utopic Unicorn” package archive that allows the Ubuntu desktop to be booted via systemd rather than Upstart.
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The indicator displays the total current network traffic on the panel and from its menu, you can check out the current download or upload speed as individual values.
Indicator Netspeed doesn’t detect the currently used network interface and by default it selects wlan0. So the first time you run it, select the network interface you’re using from the indicator menu!
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Flavours and Variants
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Xubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released in the wake of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so it’s time for a full review. Xubuntu 14.04 is a long term support release, so the focus is really on stability and finesse, not on adding tons of new features. Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of Unity, so it works very well as a lightweight alternative to regular Ubuntu. Xubuntu can be particularly useful if you have an older or otherwise underpowered computer.
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Its been two months since we had our alpha release and since then Ubuntu 14.04 has released as “stable”. That means the core for our upcoming Bodhi 3.0.0 release is finally stable enough for me to stamp a “beta” label onto it. For those that do not really care what I have to say and just want a download link, this beta release comes in the following three flavors:
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Without doubt, the Raspberry Pi has been a whopping success and introduced countless people to Linux. But the Model B hardware is looking a bit long in the tooth now, and faster alternatives with more RAM are starting to appear.
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The Raspberry Pi packs a lot of hardware into a sub-£30, credit-card sized package. From its ability to drive Full HD displays without a sweat to its on-board networking and GPIO capabilities, it’s a miniature marvel – but even its most ardent fans would admit that its audio subsystem leaves a little to be desired.
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Phones
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Raspberry Pi-using tinkerer David Hunt—who previously built a bark-activated door opener for dogs—is at it again with a real, working cell phone powered by the tiny computer and a few other items.
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The second update to Sailfish for the Nexus 4 was released in mid-April at version 1.0.5.16. This newest update fixes phone calls so audio now actually work, timers and alarms now work, HTMI5 video and audio work within the browser, and the update is based upon the latest Sailfish code. There is though still some known issues with securely powering off the device, phone call audio volume not changing with the volume buttons, and other bugs.
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Android
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Android is the mobile platform that lets you make what you want of it. It is customizable in almost every way and whatever you need to do there’s probably an app to make it so.
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HP is joining Lenovo in the strange world of Android laptops. The company hasn’t yet officially announced the SlateBook 14, but it briefly appeared on HP’s website — complete with a video outlining the device’s key features and specs. Most importantly, the SlateBook has full access to Google Play, so any apps you’ve already purchased and downloaded on a smartphone or tablet should work here. HP says the SlateBook 14 boosts Android’s productivity thanks to its 14-inch 1080p display and full-size keyboard. The laptop also includes Beats technology, which should help it pump out loud, powerful, and likely bass-heavy audio. HP has built in 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. But since this is Android and not a Chromebook, you may be left without the generous Google Drive cloud storage offers that come alongside many of those devices
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Lenovo’s Yoga series of mobile devices pushes the envelope ever-so-slightly (see here and here, for instance) in a world of cookie-cutter units, with its latest tablet serving as a great example of the approach.
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The Android-based “ALYT” home automation system supports numerous wireless protocols, and offers self-learning algorithms and advanced security functions.
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Open source software is a popular choice for libraries and librarians, not simply because recent austerity measures in many developed countries have tightened available budgets. The ability to customise the software for a library’s particular needs, the potential for interoperation with other software, and the lack of license restrictions makes open source software attractive.
Modern libraries need robust, scalable and flexible software to make their collections and services attractive, especially as digital libraries are radically transforming how information is disseminated. There are very few barriers to any library adopting an open source library system.
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Those challenges could become more important as the software spreads to other uses. Unlike applicators like Democracy OS or Liquid Feedback, Loomio isn’t really designed for large scale political decision making. But it’s already been used for at least one government initiative. Last year, the Wellington City Council used Loomio to gather ideas and feedback from the public for new alcohol policies. The ideas floated included closing bars at midnight — which was shot down — and limiting the hours of operation of 24 hour liquor stores.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Providing yet more evidence of how committed it is to its Firefox OS mobile platform, Mozilla has named Andreas Gal, an engineer who spearheaded and helped launch Firefox OS, as its new CTO. Gal, of course, will take the CTO spot that was left by Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, who subsequently stepped down from a CEO spot due to controversy over his contributions to support California’s Proposition 8.
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The open-source browser vendor offers a $10,000 bug bounty for flaws found in a new SSL certificate validation library.
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While we’re still waiting on the official release announcement, Mozilla Firefox 29.0 is now available for download.
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SaaS/Big Data
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An OpenStack training workshop was held as part of the recent, 4th Open Source Festival at the State University of New York at Albany. The workshop brought together over 40 participants for three hours to learn some of the fundamentals of OpenStack.
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Databases
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The OpenStack Icehouse release includes Trove for supporting Database as a Service. Tesora is stepping forward with its database virtualization engine to make deploying database applications easy.
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CMS
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The Dutch town of Vught is making available the source code for its website, a preconfigured version of Drupal, an open source content management system. The software is now being implemented by the municipality of Almelo, and, says Frank Schaap, ICT policy maker for the town of Vught, “there are three more that are seriously considering to do the same.”
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Education
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One of the distinctive elements of the open source software movement are open development projects. These are the projects where software is developed cooperatively (not collaboratively, necessarily) in public, often by people contributing from multiple organizations. All the processes that lead to the creation and release of software—design, development, testing, planning—happen using publicly visible tools. Projects also actively try to grow their contributor base.
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Healthcare
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‘Legitimate to ask’ whether number of staff is contributing to death of 300 babies a year, says Dr David Richmond
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I’m announcing availability of GNU Screen v.4.2.1
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Public Services/Government
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Of all the politicians newly elected in France’s municipal elections 143 have pledged their support for free software. The new councillors signed the Free Software Pact, a support campaign organised by April, an advocacy group. Signatories include the mayor of the city of Dijon, François Rebsamen, appointed Minister for Employment in France’s new government on 2 April.
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Openness/Sharing
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An OpenStack training workshop was held as part of the recent, 4th Open Source Festival at the State University of New York at Albany. The workshop brought together over 40 participants for three hours to learn some of the fundamentals of OpenStack.
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Their open-source-software project—or community-source, as they refer to it—was a complex undertaking, requiring technical and financial collaboration among multiple institutions. And it openly challenged the for-profit vendors, like Oracle’s PeopleSoft, that dominate the multibillion-dollar market for administrative systems. Known as enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems, they help college officials carry out crucial business functions. Commercial versions can cost tens of millions of dollars to license and maintain.
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On the MenuetOS download page, the 0.99.57 release notes just list, “Updates and improvements (httpc, ehci, picview, memcheck, menu, wallpaper, ohci, uhci, maps/streetview, icons, dhcp, freeform window, smp threads, smp init).”
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The entire Silicon Valley tech scene is filled with ludicrous buzz phrases that are often decried by the media. Terms like “engagement,” “disrupt,” and “innovation” are commonly thrown around by those who want to be part of the Valley subculture.
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Science
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A private company located in eastern China has printed ten full-size houses using a huge 3D printer in the space of a day. The process utilizes quick-drying cement, but the creators are being careful not to reveal the secrets of the technology.
China’s WinSun company, used a system of four 10 meter wide by 6.6 meter high printers with multi-directional sprays to create the houses. Cement and construction waste was used to build the walls layer-by-layer, state news agency Xinhua reported.
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Security
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The zero-day code-execution hole in IE versions 6 through 11 represents a significant threat to the Internet security because there is currently no fix for the underlying bug, which affects an estimated 26 percent of the total browser market. It’s also the first significant vulnerability to target Windows XP users since Microsoft withdrew support for that aging OS earlier this month. Users who have the option of using an alternate browser should avoid all use of IE for the time being. Those who remain dependent on the Microsoft browser should immediately install EMET, Microsoft’s freely available toolkit that greatly extends the security of Windows systems.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The U.S. and Philippine governments have agreed on a 10-year pact to open this southeast Asian country to more U.S. troops, warships, and fighter planes, flouting the people’s movements that booted the U.S. military from its permanent Philippine bases over twenty years ago.
“We have lost too much because of the U.S. military presence in our country,” Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S, told Common Dreams. “The Philippines has long history of protests against militarization. The protests now are only going to grow.”
The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement was announced Sunday by the White House and confirmed by two anonymous Philippine officials speaking to the Associated Press.
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Pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine were holding a group of European military observers in the city of Slavyansk on Friday night, claiming they had been travelling with a spy for the Kiev government.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Nearly 60% of China’s underground water is polluted, state media has reported, underscoring the severity of the country’s environmental woes.
The country’s land and resources ministry found that among 4,778 testing spots in 203 cities, 44% had “relatively poor” underground water quality; the groundwater in another 15.7% tested as “very poor”.
Water quality improved year-on-year at 647 spots, and worsened in 754 spots, the ministry said.
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Nearly 28 years after the worst nuclear accident in history, several bird species are doing the seemingly impossible: flourishing inside the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Due to lingering radiation from the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, humans aren’t allowed to live there—but the region has become an accidental ecological testing ground for scientists interested in studying the effects of radiation on wild animals. Ionizing radiation damages living cells by producing free radicals, leading to genetic damage and, eventually, death. An animal’s only hope is to neutralize those free radicals by upping its production of antioxidants. And that’s exactly what most birds in Chernobyl seem to be doing—with even better results than scientists expected. A team of ecologists used nets to capture 152 birds from 16 species inside and around the 2600-square-kilometer exclusion zone. After assessing the birds’ antioxidant levels, amount of DNA damage, and body condition, the researchers were surprised to find that most of the birds, like the hawfinch pictured above, seemed to benefit from the chronic exposure to radiation. Birds found in areas with higher radiation levels had more antioxidants and better overall body condition, the team reports online this week in Functional Ecology. This is the first known example of wild animals adapting to chronic radiation exposure, the researchers say. The only two bird species negatively affected by the radiation—the great tit (Parus major) and barn swallow (Hirundo rustica)—both produce large amounts of pinkish pheomelanin pigment in their feathers. Because pheomelanin production requires lots of antioxidants, the researchers suspect these birds may not have enough left over to fight off the free radicals. In Chernobyl, it seems that fancy feathers come at a high price.
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We’re in the middle of a sixth mass extinction, and this will be the first one—and possibly the last—we will witness as human beings.
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Mr D’Sa said he would not be prevented from standing up for the truth
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A warming Arctic and the clamor for more unconventional energy resources bring increased interest by fossil fuel giants in exploiting the fragile region’s potential vast resources.
Yet a new report warns that the the United States is inadequately prepared to deal with an oil spill in the Arctic.
The nearly 200-page report issued Wednesday by the National Research Council follows years of warnings from environmental groups that there is no way to safely drill for oil in the Arctic.
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Finance
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One of the big mysteries in politics is why so many right-wing people support Iain Duncan Smith’s Stalinist Workfare schemes, which are designed to force people (under threat of absolute destitution) to give away their labour for free, often to highly profitable foreign corporations.
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For years, the US enjoyed unrivalled prosperity – and its middle classes were the envy of the world. No longer. Last week, a study of decades of economic data concluded that the US had fallen behind other nations, apart, that is, from the super-rich
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Economists have begun seriously discussing the idea of banning banks. That seems ridiculous and far-fetched, but the idea might not be as crazy as it sounds.
But before we get to the idea, there’s something important that needs to be addressed, which is that people tend to have a gross misconception about what a bank does.
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Privacy
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The term “Dark Net” is shorthand to describe the hidden and encrypted part of the internet beyond the reach of normal browsers, accessible only using the anonymous browser Tor. It’s protected by a clever traffic encryption system which makes it very difficult to locate the servers which host sites – called Tor Hidden Services – and the IP addresses of the people the visit them. Tor used to stand for The Onion Router, and so some call this world “Onionland”. Anonymity and freedom rule Onionland, not censorship.
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If you are currently using the Reddit Unity Scope on Ubuntu, you should consider disabling it. The reason for this is that a Reddit admin pointed out that Ubuntu user dash searches were ending up in Reddit’s server logs.
This is happening because the Reddit Unity Scope uses a URL that does not have SSL configured so instead redirects those queries to HTTP plain text. The good news is a fix is already under way on a bug I filed and Reddit’s API documentation explains how to properly use SSL when making queries.
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A new, eerie web project called Digital Shadow combs through your Facebook profile and pulls together enough of your information to create a dossier creepy enough to make you want to quit social networking altogether.
Once you login and grant the site access to your Facebook profile, the system simulates a hacker attack and creates a list of “pawns” (friends who can betray you), “obsessions” (people you creep on the most) and “scapegoats” (people you would be willing to sacrifice), as well as photos of your favorite places and an analysis of your posting habits.
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Civil Rights
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On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard and a private militia employed by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I) opened fire on a tent camp of striking coal miners at Ludlow, Colo. At least 19 people died in the camp that day, mostly women and children.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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If you’re wondering what’s all the controversy over the FCC’s recent Net neutrality rules proposal, here’s the short version
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The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed new rules on Internet charging which will effectively mean the end of net neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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As Gottfrid Svartholm languishes in a Danish prison cell, unusual things are happening on the other side of the world. Speaking with TorrentFreak, a former work colleague of the Pirate Bay founder says that after receiving threats from an anonymous Swedish policeman, Danish police and the Copenhagen Deputy District Attorney turned up in Cambodia to ask him “ridiculous” questions.
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In one month, on May 25 at 20:00, the voting stations close for the European Elections. You’re never entitled to complain when media doesn’t cover you, but for some reason, the fifth-largest party out of Sweden’s eight – the Pirate Party – is consistently omitted from listings, events, debates, and coverage ahead of European Elections. For a challenger, this would be acceptable, but not for a defender of title: the pretend-does-not-exist attitude is reaching ridiculous levels.
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Send this to a friend
04.27.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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I’m inclined to agree with the conclusion of the article at Forbes. At this point it just doesn’t make sense to wait around to see if Microsoft will ever open source Windows XP. There are so many different Linux distributions available to replace it. Plus, it’s very doubtful that Microsoft would ever do such a thing anyway. It’s just not in their DNA to open source Windows, even an old and outdated version of it.
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Consider a school librarian wanting a cluster of PCs for customers. Typically, the concept would be raised in a staff meeting or annual plan and have to percolate upwards through the chain of command where no budget for the request exists. That means either fundraising or “next year” in the budget. What is lost by teachers and students traipsing around the community raising a few $thousand for PCs? What is lost by shifting limited funds from salaries or other supplies to PCs? It’s all a disruption from the desired goal of preparing students for the future.
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For those not in the know, let us first discuss what Linux is. It is not an application program; it is an operating system, in the same class as Windows or Apple’s Mac OS. An operating system is the piece of software that makes it possible to run any other application or user software on a computer. The operating system manages and provides the ability for programs to access the computer’s hardware, and it provides security mechanisms such as password-protected accounts that control user access. Operating systems have evolved into highly complex, multi-layered conglomerations that are essential to the operation of a computer.
Now then, your question essentially is whether Linux is a viable replacement for Windows. As usual, the answer is “that depends”. Specifically, it depends on what you want to do with the machine, and how much time you’re willing to put into learning about Linux. Where Windows is a vendor-built and supported operating system, Linux is open-source. That means the code base is public, and not supported by a company. Instead, it is supported by the community of users who contribute to its development. Since nobody “owns” Linux the way Microsoft owns Windows, it also means that multiple “flavors” of it exist – at least six or seven depending on how you count them.
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Desktop
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There is no customer-service to call with such questions or when something goes wrong, but there is the Internet, and Linux support groups are very easy to find. A secondary advantage is that it runs in a far smaller footprint, and far more efficiently than Windows. That means that it can indeed breathe new life into that old system you were going to toss.
So what won’t Linux do? Well, it will not run Windows software, for one thing. Outlook, Office, Internet Explorer, certain games, etc. are all designed to run under Windows. The upside is that there are Linux-specific versions of just about any application software you need, so you’ll have ready access to a choice of web browsers, Office Automation Suites, photo editing utilities, or whatever you normally run under Windows — you just have to find them online, and then learn and get used to a new version.
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Server
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Docker containers gain a major new deployment target with support across the Amazon cloud.
The open-source Docker container virtualization technology is getting a major boost that could serve as affirmation of its practical utility and may also help to accelerate adoption.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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At the start of this quarter we looked at how 2013′s graphics developments were more incremental than revolutionary, perhaps with the need for LTS stability in mind. Things are looking quite different this year, with several major changes quietly under way.
Last time, we identified XWayland’s upstream status as a potential barometer of Wayland’s desktop future. We’ll look at what has recently landed and what’s still to come.
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After yesterday’s testing of the GeForce 700 vs. Radeon Rx 200 Series With The Latest Linux Drivers test results were made available, the official Catalyst 14.4 Linux graphics driver was offered up to the public.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Unreal engine is one of the most prolific pieces of technology used in the gaming industry, and the fact that the developers from Epic have just added official support for SteamOS and Linux is actually one of the biggest leaps for the open source platform since the release of Steam.
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Clockwork Tales: of Glass and Ink, an adventure game developed and published by Artifex Mundi sp. z o.o., has just received a Linux version and is now available on Steam.
Clockwork Tales: of Glass and Ink was initially made available on the Windows platform more than a year ago, but it seems that the developers managed to port the game for the Linux players.
“A continuing string of strange earthquakes are causing the world’s cities to crumble to ruin. Dr. Ambrose Ink—one of the foremost minds of the technological revolution—hopes to expose the underlying cause of this supernatural phenomenon. It’s up to Dr. Ink’s longtime friend and confidante, Agent Evangeline Glass to save Dr. Ink and reveal what is causing the earthquakes,” reads the official Steam website.
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Infinity Runner is a game that tells everything about the gameplay just with its name. The mobile platforms are filled with games that feature perpetual running, but there are very few on the desktop, and even fewer on Linux.
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Valve just pushed another update for Steam, their digital distribution platform. The update contains a variety of bug fixes. In addition to that, this update now makes Steam for Linux officially compatible with the new distribution of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 14.04, which was a pretty fast move on the part of Valve. Apart from those, this update also improves and readies Steam to be fully compatible with Steam’s Virtual Reality. Instead of having to start it by the –vr command line option, the VR support is now integrated into Steam and it is capable of turning it on and off based on the hardware presence.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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After a stable version gets released the GNOME developers start the work on the next development version right away. In this case, the development release that we’re talking about is GNOME 3.13 that will be slowly turned into 3.14 in about six months.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Here’s a short video showing how Cockpit manages Docker containers. Cockpit is in RHEL branding here, but it’s basically the same thing as you get from cockpit-project.org
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“Lightworks for Linux Is Finally Here” says www.maketecheasier.com. The article states that after a 3-year beta cycle, a stable version was released in January. “It is completely free to use (the basic version, at least) and has a lot of features to offer to an amateur as well as a professional editor.” Their bottom line is, “If you’re looking for professional grade video editing software for Linux, look no further than Lightworks!” See the full article for all the details.
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Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has deployed open source Red Hat systems for mission-critical applications.
Last year, Cern said it was in the middle of expanding its IT infrastructure to accommodate the growing amount of data being produced by its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s been a week since Canonical released the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) version of its Linux distribution, Ubuntu. This version will be supported for the next 5 years, so it doesn’t introduce anything radical. Muktware reviewed the latest version, 14.04, when it first rolled out but after a week with the upgrade, here are some things that I’ve noticed that you may want to take note of.
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While Ubuntu 14.04 can be easily downloaded from the official site and installed via LiveUSB, there are some old fashioned geeks that prefer to have the actual DVD of the system.
According to the developers, Ubuntu 14.04 should work on systems with 768 MB of RAM memory and 5 GB of disk space, or better, of course.
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This is a guide to programs that are included by default in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. Here I overview the most important applications from each main category (like Firefox for web browsing or Nautilus for file management), and at the end I includes some more applications that I find useful to install from the Software Center. These are either useful utilities of configuration tools, as well as some open-source games installable from Ubuntu’s default repositories.
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That’s right. Business, with a capital B. It’s too late for me to
write anything coherent, so here’s a quick list of things we did
pre-opening to make your life more painful^Winteresting:
- ruby-defaults updated to 2.1
- boost-defaults updated to 1.55
- new binutils snapshot
- tiny unicorns in every package
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This release of Ubuntu Tweak contains a few small fixes.For example the nautilus scripts support for Ubuntu 13.10 and later has been fixed and the tool does not crash anymore when sources.list is not parsable.
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The maker community loves the Raspberry Pi Single Board Computer (SBC). But, the $35 Raspberry Pi, which was introduced in 2012, with its 700MHz ARM11 processor and 512MBs of RAM, is looking a little dowdy these days. So, Lemaker.org has introduced the faster Banana Pi.
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Picuntu is a custom version of Ubuntu Linux designed to run on devices with Rockchip processors. That effectively lets you turn a cheap Android TV box into a full-fledged PC capable of running desktop apps such as LibreOffice, GIMP and Firefox.
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Phones
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A LINUX ENGINEER has built the first smartphone based on a Raspberry Pi computer, and has cleverly named it the Piphone.
Liz Upton of the Raspberry Pi Foundation lauded the device in a blog post on Friday, largely due to the fact that it cost just $158 to build. What’s more, the Piphone is constructed entirely from off the shelf components, which means “there’s no soldering required, and no fiddly electronics work,” she said.
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Here’s my latest DIY project, a smartphone based on a Raspberry Pi. It’s called – wait for it – the PiPhone. It makes use an Adafruit touchscreen interface and a Sim900 GSM/GPRS module to make phone calls. It’s more of a proof of concept to see what could be done with a relatively small form factor with off-the-shelf (cheap) components. I don’t expect everyone to be rushing out to build this one, but I had great fun in doing it, as it builds quite nicely on my previous projects, especially the Lapse Pi, a touchscreen time-lapse controller, and uses most of the same hardware.
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Android
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Adobe Photoshop is considered to be the ultimate photo editor. Certainly it’s great, but it can be replaced. We all heard about GIMP and if you wonder “Can it compete with Photoshop?”, the answer is “Yes.” It may require some adjustments, you’ll need a separate converter for RAWs and some time to get used to its shortcuts, but ultimately you can switch to GIMP. No subscription required – it’s free, powerful and cross-platform.
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Events
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The trip was rather uneventful… except Gary decided to bypass Seattle and take a much more scenic router that goes through a quaint town named Leavenworth, Washington. What’s quaint about it? Well, Leavenworth is styled after a Bavarian village. How can you tell that? Well the buildings on the road through town all look like they are in the Alps or something. The lettering used on all of the business signs is in some kind of weird font that is obviously somehow mandated by the place… since even the big box stores and fast food chains have altered signage that uses the city font. Really… even Napa and McDonald’s don’t look quite right. It was definitely a pretty route with quite a bit of snow in the mountains with occational streams flowing down… (the road followed) a winding river much of the way… and apple orchards. The spead limit was 60 MPH but there was very little traffic and we hit the Seattle area just North of Everett I believe… so even when we got on the 6 lane highway, it wasn’t that crowded. It difinitely made for a much more pleasant trip. Gary took the same route home last year but this is the first time we took it on the way up.
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The OSI is thrilled to announce the launch of the International Competition in Free and Open Source Software Multimedia (ICOM). Organized by the Sena Primary School (SK Sena), Malaysia and Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) along with the state government of Perlis, Malaysia and the Ministry of Education Malaysia the video competition is open to students from around the world: from primary school children to those attending institutions of higher learning. The main objectives of ICOM are as follows:
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SaaS/Big Data
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It’s no secret that cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in all of technology. Microsoft’s upbeat earnings report this week was partly driven by success in the cloud, and companies like Red Hat are organizing their whole business strategies around open source cloud computing platforms like OpenStack. Forrester Research is out with a new report that puts some numbers on the hypergrowth being seen in the cloud arena. Among other forecasts, the report predicts that the global public cloud market will hit $191 billion by 2020. To put that in perspective, Forrester reported that the public cloud market was at $58 billion as of the end of last year.
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Databases
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Infor applications on a Red Hat and EnterpriseDB open technology stack provide a lower total cost of ownership alternative
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Healthcare
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There are reasons FLOSS works in health. There’s no lower-cost, no more reliable and no more flexible model for software in IT.
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Business
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Support for open source software is ‘unbundled’ from the software itself. That actually makes it much easier to get the right level of support at the right price.
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Semi-Open Source
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Public Services/Government
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Open source delivers safe, efficient and modern e-health services to Warsaw’s university hospital. Its integrated medical system is based completely on open source and, according to project leader and medical specialist Radosław Rzepka, is shaping the future of Poland’s medical databases.
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Spain’s largest hospital chain, Quirón, will be piloting a portal based on the Openstack open source cloud computing solution, to provide patients with access to their radiology data. The pilot is one part of a three-year research project called Coco Cloud, which in 2013 received a 2.8 million euro grant from the European Commission’s FP7 funding programme. Some of the requirements for the secure cloud-computing environment will be formulated by Italy’s governmental ICT resource centre, the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AGID).
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Openness/Sharing
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There’s a tomato called Rutgers, a variety that was favored by New Jersey’s canning industry in the 1930s, when Campbell Soup, Heinz, and Hunt were all sourcing fruit from the Garden State’s some 36,000 acres of vines. Today, the processing tomato varieties offered by Seminis, which was the largest seed company in the world before Monsanto acquired it, have nondescript names such as Apt 410, Hypeel 108, and PS 345.
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Science
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When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.
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Plans to open the world’s first mine in the deep ocean have moved significantly closer to becoming reality.
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Security
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Microsoft just published security advisory 2963983 which acknowleges limited exploits against a 0-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE). The vulnerability CVE-2014-1776 affects all versions of IE starting with version 6 and including version 11, but the currently active attacks are targeting IE9, IE10 and IE11. The attack vector is a malicious web page that the targeted user has to access with one of the affected browsers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Improbable it may seem, but doctrine and capabilities exist on both sides that could lead to nuclear use in a confrontation over Ukraine.
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According to a report by veteran journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, the US Military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence powered by the National Security Agency (NSA) for electronic surveillance and assassination of suspected militants in Pakistan’s northern areas.
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When President Obama decided sometime during his first term that he wanted to be able to use unmanned aerial drones in foreign lands to kill people — including Americans — he instructed Attorney General Eric H. Holder to find a way to make it legal, despite the absolute prohibition on governmental extrajudicial killing in federal and state laws and in the Constitution itself.
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The identification of the dead revealed that non-Yemeni Arab fighters were also among those killed.
The U.S. hasn’t commented on the strikes, but reports say that the U.S. carried out the drone offensive based on intelligence inputs from Saudi Arabia.
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Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone noted in a 2012 article that there is a much larger concern: transparency.
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On Friday, John Jacob Schmidt of Radio Free Redoubt said that according to Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, Attorney General Eric Holder has approved drone strikes against the Bundy ranch to take place some time in the next 48 hours. According to Schmidt, the information came from a source Oath Keepers has within the Department of Defense.
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Drones are like vigilantes or lynching parties — lawless and cowardly. They use brute power to kill the powerless. The powerful choose who is right and who is wrong; the powerless have no ability to defend themselves with arms or due process. Oh, sometimes the killers make mistakes, but their intentions are pure, aren’t they?
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The enormous increase in public attention to the drone war in the past year arguably began with the leak of a Justice Department “white paper” laying out the legal rationale for killing a US citizen who’d joined Al Qaeda. A few months later, President Obama gave a major speech in which described the government’s criteria for going after suspected terrorists beyond the war in Afghanistan. The administration also released the names of four US citizens who had been killed in drone strikes. Among them was Anwar Al Awlaki, the New Mexico-born cleric who died in Yemen in September 2011. – See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/foia_win_against_government_on.php#sthash.3j2nJQXo.dpuf
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After two years of legislative work, a bill that would restrict the use of commercial drones was effectively killed by the Senate Thursday.
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As with much of the past three days, it is unclear which U.S. agencies or departments took part in the raids.
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I think this message should be sent to our commanders who allow drones to fly over villages, terrorizing the people there, who never know if or when the next bomb is falling on their house, whom it is killing next. People who come home to find pieces of their loved ones in the ruin of their house, killed by a drone; people whose crime is to be living in the wrong place, it seems.
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“We own the finish line!” Our Vice President was saying that America owns the world. That “God” is on our side, marching in lockstep with our troops. That America is exceptional, and superior, and the envy of other nations. Like a “city set on a hill.” Biden embodies America’s delusionary—and destructive–“exceptional” reality.
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The propaganda effort to demonize anyone to the right of Josef Stalin continues, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy “insurgents,” Paul Joseph Watson said at Infowars Tuesday. Hayes and his guests spent about 15 minutes in what was clearly a propaganda effort designed to marginalize Bundy supporters and certain alternate media outlets as fringe kooks.
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National democratic activists, the bloc usually lumped by mainstream press as ‘the Left,’ have declared the entire week that US President Barack Obama is in Asia as “National Sovereignty and Patrimony Week” in the Philippines (22-30 April). They propose to discuss and challenge what they call as “heightening US intervention, increasing presence of US and allied foreign troops, intensifying foreign economic plunder and worsening puppetry of the Aquino regime to the US government.”
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But President Barack Obama appears to have taken the option of cyber attacks off the table. The reason: the United States is vulnerable to counterstrikes.
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Furthermore, the people of this country have the right to understand how the administration constitutionally justifies the killing of one of its citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki, in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.
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In a victory for transparency, opponents of the President’s veil of secrecy over drone killings has been partially lifted by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeal’s opinion filed on Monday in New York Times v. Departments of Justice (DOJ), Defense (DoD), and the CIA (Case Nos. 13-422 and 13-445).
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The United States is siphoning weapons and providing combat training to moderate Syria rebels via a secret Central Intelligence Agency programme in Jordan.
Growing US involvement has been propelled by continued strikes on rebel strongholds by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
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Among the terrorists groups directly and indirectly affiliated with the Syrian rebels, and possibly benefiting from US support include the following:
1) Al-Nusra Front (ANF), an Al-Qaeda associate operating in Syria.
ANF – has been described as “the most aggressive and successful arm of the rebel force”. This group has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the United Nations, the United States (see article: US blacklists Syrian rebel group al-Nusra http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/12/2012121117048117723.html) , Australia, and the United Kingdom.
Abu Mohammad al-Golani, the current leader of ANF, has confirmed the ANF’s allegiance to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. By May 2013, a faction of ANF declared its loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
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Physicians for Human Rights Calls for Public Reckoning on U.S. Violations of the Convention Against Torture
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Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.
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Inspected by US and Iraqi forces since late 2005, Site 4 is a detention facility operated by the Iraqi National Police, which according to the cable is overcrowded, with little running water, and sewage spills. In one inspection of the facility, prisoners told the inspectors cases of abuse, rape, and molestation. The gravest of the crimes was children, held illegally in the jail, informing investigators they were anally raped, beaten, and forced to perform oral sex on interrogators.
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The United States deployed 150 paratroopers to Lithuania today, part of efforts by Washington to reassure its eastern European allies, worried by events in Ukraine, that NATO would offer protection if they face Russian aggression.
A total of 600 US troops are to be deployed to Poland and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for infantry exercises. They are expected to remain in the region on rotation until the end of the year.
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The situation in Ukraine continues escalating. A military operation against pro-reform protesters in southeastern Ukraine, launched by Kiev, is tearing the country apart and forced Russia’s move to heighten security at its border. US Secretary of State, John Kerry, threatens that “the window to change course is closing” while additional troops are deployed to Lithuania. Using discredited “evidence” prompts some observers to doubt Kerry’s “wisdom”. Don’t, said a German analyst who reiterates that the US is systematically pushing Europe into a crisis for which the US has planned for decades.
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The US pivot to Asia, which is the raison d’etre for the entire visit, is, after all, not just about shifting its military weight closer to China. It also involves repairing and reinforcing its economic and political alliances in the region and creating more favorable conditions for furthering the neoliberal agenda to arrest its own deep crisis and overall decline.
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Ahmad Zia Durrani, a spokesman for the Kandahar police chief’s office, said the helicopter was on a “training flight” and that it was unclear why it crashed.
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Ecuador has ordered the U.S. Embassy’s military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month’s end, in a further indication of strained relations.
The group was ordered to halt operations in Ecuador in a letter dated April 7, the U.S. Embassy confirmed Friday.
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Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has ordered all US military officers to leave the country by the end of month and canceled a security cooperation program with the Pentagon, US officials said on Friday.
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Ecuador has ordered the U.S. Embassy’s military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month’s end, in a further indication of strained relations.
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Scotland Yard has run up a “ludicrous” bill of £6 million (Dh37 million) patrolling outside an embassy in London since Julian Assange sought refuge there two years ago.
Police are stationed day and night outside the Ecuadorian Embassy, racking up £1million in overtime alone, as they wait to arrest the WikiLeaks founder, who claimed asylum as he faced extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations.
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The WikiLeaks founder met with boxing champion Solomon Egberime, then had a sparring match with Father David Smith (a.k.a. ‘Fighting’ Father Dave), his team tells The Huffington Post. Smith describes himself on Twitter as a professional boxer, 6th degree black belt and social activist (as well as an Anglican parish priest).
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Transparency Reporting
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The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual “Free the Press” campaign today, which will purportedly highlight “journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting.” A noble mission for sure. But maybe they should kick off the campaign by criticizing their own Justice Department, which on the very same day, has asked the Supreme Court to help them force Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen into jail.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Thousands have been marching in Washington DC to protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Launched by Cowboy and Indian Alliance, the six-day event “Reject and Protect” is aimed at urging President Barack Obama to refuse the project.
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While Morales saw the wealth underground as a tool for liberation, Rojas saw the president as someone who was pressing forward with extractive industries – in mining, oil and gas operations – without concern for the environmental destruction and displacement of rural communities they left in their wake.
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An internal tracking document– obtained from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) by the Center for Media and Democracy/the Progressive Inc. under Texas public records law — reveals the scope of ALEC’s anti-environmental efforts in 2014.
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Finance
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But none of my interview was shown in the programme, nor was I mentioned. Instead a New Labour minister was interviewed and he was allowed to say, unchallenged, that the film was absolutely shocking and the British government had no prior idea this was happening; they would now look into it etc. Needless to say they still did nothing, nor has anything ever been done to have child slave cotton banned from the UK. Why do you think Primark is so cheap?
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Last month, we pointed out that Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel would almost certainly settle, rather than face an ongoing lawsuit concerning their collusive hiring practices, in which they promised not to poach employees from one another in an effort to keep employees longer and (more importantly for them) to keep salaries down. That has now come to pass, with the four companies agreeing to pay out $324 million to settle the charges. This is good. As we noted in our original story, the hiring collusion was shameful and, worse, antithetical to the kind of job shifting and idea sharing that helped make Silicon Valley into Silicon Valley.
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The relationship between advanced economies and their developing counterparts is complex. Human rights and working conditions in emerging nations, where many products consumed in developed countries are made, have been debated for many years. The contours of the Rana Plaza accident that killed 1,100 people, which I discussed yesterday*, the first anniversary of the tragedy, captured the key issues of that debate. But none of it is new. Its origins lie in the colonial past.
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On a routine drive to the beauty salon, Robin Johnson had one of those life-happens moments: Her 13-year-old Durango, with 200,000 miles on the odometer, overheated and started sputtering. Convinced that the car was on its last legs, Robin and Scott Johnson scrutinized their already-tight family budget, looking for a way to fit in car payments.
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At age 53, everything changed. Following my whistleblowing first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, I was run out of the good job I had held for more than 20 years with the U.S. Department of State. As one of its threats, State also took aim at the pension and benefits I’d earned, even as it forced me into retirement. Would my family and I lose everything I’d worked for as part of the retaliation campaign State was waging? I was worried. That pension was the thing I’d counted on to provide for us and it remained in jeopardy for many months. I was scared.
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Censorship
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Clearly those onerous conditions are designed to make any blogger think twice or three times before publishing anything at all controversial or embarrassing for the authorities. The article notes that the new law may be challenged before Russia’s Constitutional Court, and that there’s a huge loophole in the form of blogs located overseas, which are not covered by the legislation. The fear has to be that the Russian government will now move on to blocking them too.
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As we recently covered, Jim Ardis, the absurdly thin-skinned mayor of Peoria, IL, got the boys in blue to raid a house over a parody Twitter account that portrayed him as a.) a possible drug user, b.) a possible patron of the world’s oldest profession and c.) “trill as fuck.” Peoria’s Finest have never been finer, deploying seven plainclothes officers to nail a dangerous tweeter whose Ardis-mocking account had been shut down by Twitter weeks before. Bonus: drugs were discovered during the raid, which meant the cops could at least declare victory over marijuana use, if not the internet itself.
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Police shouldn’t be able to search people’s emails without a warrant, privacy and civil liberties backers said on Friday.
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Still, Big Brother concerns are creeping in. Some privacy advocates worry about possible security breaches and the reconnecting of personal identities to the data.
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THE NEW York Times recently offered a revealing look at how family members of a senior Chinese political figure had amassed a nine-figure fortune. It also struck a welcome blow against an aggressive effort by Chinese authorities to censor such information not just from domestic media but also from the U.S. press.
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You see, I was working from a hotel room last week in Istanbul, where the Turkish government has blocked access to YouTube. The government had earlier blocked Twitter, but the ban was lifted by court order. A court also ordered that YouTube access be restored, but according to Reuters, the government has decided to defy that order.
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Many people will be familiar with the name Carlos Slim as intermittently the richest person in the world, generally vying with Bill Gates for that title. Some will probably be aware that his huge fortune — currently listed as $69.67 billion in his Wikipedia entry — is derived from a business empire based on telecommunications.
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Mónica Mancero writing for the paper El Telégrafo [The Telegraph] gives a feminist-based opinion: “Debates generated by the subject of censorship should go beyond the strait-laced and reductionist view, which ends up victimizing a woman that supposedly needs to be defended and spoken for.”
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Privacy
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Microsoft’s remote storage disservice, OneDrive, has been caught inserting modifications into code in some of the files users store there.
Although this has not been reported about any other remote storage disservice, any of them could start doing this, which means you would be a fool to trust them with anything other than checksummed files.
All of these disservices spy on their users, and that is plenty of reason to reject them, for anything other than encrypted (and checksummed) files. In order for the encryption to be trustworthy, you need to do it on your own computer with free software.
Services provided by network servers can raise several different ethical issues, including nonfree client-side JavaScript (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html), surveillance (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html), and SaaSS (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html). Whether any of these problems applies depends on the facts.
The purpose of the marketing buzzword “cloud” is to encourage you to disregard the facts and not judge. Don’t let them “cloud” your mind: reject the term “cloud”.
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My previous two posts were about the angst of privileged middle classes. I wrote first about the middle class habit of moving into the catchment area for good schools. Then I excused our tendency to maintain a less-than ethical existence. Untrained eyes could be forgiven for mistaking my motives in writing these posts. Am I not simply trying to assuage my own guilt at doing precisely those things?
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Hillary Clinton didn’t have to directly deal with Edward Snowden’s leaks when she was secretary of state. Clinton had already stepped down from her post by the time the Guardian published its first revelations on the expansive scope of spying by the National Security Agency. But at an event at the University of Connecticut on Wednesday night, Clinton made it clear that she’s no fan of the NSA leaker, insinuating that Snowden had cooperated with countries hostile to the United States and unintentionally aided terrorist organizations. “I don’t understand why he couldn’t have been part of the debate at home,” she said.
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One of the phone companies participating in the US National Security Agency’s call data collection program challenged its legality before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court early this year. But according to newly declassified court filings, that challenge was rejected.
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Shahid Buttar, the Executive Director of The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance sit down with host Dennis Trainor, Jr. in this episode of Acronym TV to discuss, among other things…
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The NSA document is very clear about data collection or surveillance of U.S. citizens living in foreign country.
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“World leaders may be fretting over whether the NSA bugged their phones, but Canadian government officials aren’t particularly worried—they bought theirs directly from the agency. A survey of procurement records kept on public government websites reveals that Canada has spent over $50 million purchasing a bevy of secure communications equipment from the largest branch of the American intelligence community.”
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EFF has been on the road, traveling to cities and towns across the country to bring our message of digital rights and reform to community and student groups.
And while we had the tremendous opportunity to talk about our work and our two lawsuits against the NSA, the best part of the trip was learning about all of the inspiring and transformative activism happening everyday on the local level to combat government surveillance and defend our digital rights.
We met students and professors in Eugene, Oregon who held a campus-wide digital rights event at the University of Oregon. There, students had the opportunity to unpack their campus privacy policy, download and learn freedom-enhancing software, and explore their library’s open access initiative.
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The intricate surveillance equipment used by the federal government to track and store the cellphone data of millions of people and to monitor terrorism suspects is making its way to Main Street.
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Both Obama and now Clinton want the public to overlook the administration’s history of support for spying, as presented by The New York Times, prior to the disclosures. Obama aides anonymously told the Times that the president had been “surprised to learn after the leaks…just how far the surveillance had gone.” The administration fought groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the courts as they tried to convince judges to release documents that would at minimum confirm the secret legal interpretations of surveillance authorities under the law. So, it is fraudulent for Obama, Clinton or any other politician to claim to Americans that the White House was about to bring transparency and promote debate on government surveillance.
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An experimental ‘mesh network’ in Tunisia aims to curtail government spying. The project has a surprising backer – the U.S. State Department
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Civil Rights
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Indiana state lawmakers have taken steps to improve privacy protections for people by restricting police collection of cellphone data.
Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill into law prohibiting police from searching cellphones during routine traffic stops without a search warrant.
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Right-wing media have been rushing to distance themselves from the Nevada rancher they’ve spent weeks championing after Cliven Bundy revealed his racist worldview, but two of Bundy’s biggest cheerleaders — Sean Hannity and Fox News — have vested corporate, financial, and political interests in the promotion of Cliven Bundy’s anti-government land ownership agenda.
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Good news, Americans! The former “top watchdog” for the Department of Homeland Security, Charles K. Edwards, was an incredibly perverse blend of crooked and spineless and yet we still managed to avoid being terrorized to death during his run as Inspector General (2011-2013). That’s the resilience of the American public. Even while the agency was being bumblefucked into (even greater) uselessness, those who hate us for our way of life (which now includes drone strikes, neverending military ‘interventions’ and the constant watching of damn near everybody) were unable to find a way to maneuver around the “security” “provided” by the DHS.
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The Switzerland-Cuba association Geneva’s section condemned the secret program of the United States Agency for International Assistance (USAID), called Zunzuneo, which was targeted at boosting subversion and destabilization in the Caribbean country.
It is evident that the US government does not give up its effort to destroy the Cuban Revolution, if necessary by the flagrant violation of the national legislation, and the international regulations, noted the organization in a communique released today.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When Netflix opposed Comcast’s looming merger with Time Warner Cable on Monday, the streaming video company did so by raising net neutrality concerns. It argued that Comcast could use its newfound power to charge a toll for content that might compete with its own video offerings — a toll like the one that Netflix already found itself paying to improve the quality of streaming for Comcast customers. Comcast wasn’t too happy about that, of course, firing back that it was Netflix’s decision to cut out the middleman and work directly with Comcast to speed things up, and that the fee is standard practice for companies that offer “transit service” to quickly move data between networks.
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Dividing traffic on the Internet into fast and slow lanes is exactly what the Federal Communications Commission would do with its proposed …
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FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says new proposed rules will protect competition, while consumer advocates call them an “insult” to the open Internet.
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The problem is that ISP’s are more than capable of increasing speeds in the U.S., but choose not to so they can gouge consumers for more money. For those who are in areas that offer Google Fiber, have you noticed how prices have mysteriously dropped and services have improved on the part of the competition?
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The proposal would formalize pay-for-play arrangements in which streaming video companies and other types of Web services pay Internet service providers for a faster path to consumers over the “last mile” of the network.
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Ten years ago (!?!) we wrote about how Verizon conned Pennsylvania taxpayers out of billions of dollars. Verizon predecessor Bell Atlantic had cut a deal with the state to wire up every home in the state with symmetrical fiber. That didn’t happen. And while Verizon’s former CEO Ivan Seidenberg did, in fact, make a big bet on fiber with FiOS, Wall Street hated it and kept punishing the company for daring to do something so stupid as investing in the future. This is a quarter-to-quarter world, and spending on capital improvements that would bulk up the entire economy over the long haul is not a bet that Wall Street folks want to make, since it doesn’t pay off in a few months. So, it was no surprise that once Seidenberg was out of the picture, it basically dropped all plans to expand FiOS — and then started looking to push its DSL users to cable providers, so it could focus on the wireless business instead.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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President Obama recently wrapped up a meeting in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, where the leaders once again failed to make a breakthrough on their deadlock in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.
Obama and Abe have been in negotiations over Japan’s treatment of sensitive agricultural products, including rice, beef, pork, wheat, and dairy products, and over trade in automobiles — but a breakthrough is still out of reach. This lack of progress is just one of several indicators that the TPP is faltering, if not failing.
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Copyrights
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Via Silverscarcat we learn of an absolutely bizarre situation in which it appears that the ex-wife of a man who committed suicide late last year, is claiming copyright on his lengthy suicide letter in an attempt to get it taken offline entirely. It should be noted that all of the public information at this point is coming from websites that advocate for men’s rights in family courts (i.e., not quite a neutral third party), but it is true that original version of the letter has been removed from Scribd, and the reason stated is a copyright claim. The site A Voice for Men has refused to take the letter down, but provides the following explanation:
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Alex Tabarrock, one of the contributors to Marginal Revolution (and associate professor of Economics at George Mason University) has often dealt with the subject of intellectual property from an economist’s perspective. Recently, he changed things up and posted about his personal experiences with the frustrations inherent to intellectual property laws. Dealing with copyright in practice is much, much more aggravating and ridiculous than dealing with it in theory.
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The RIAA is not exactly known for its positive treatment of musicians. If you’re at all familiar with the art of RIAA accounting, you’d know about how they structure deals to totally screw over musicians, doing everything possible to make sure they never get paid a dime. Yes, many are given advances, but those advances are “loans” on terrible terms in which the labels add on every possible expense that needs to be “paid back” before you ever see another dime. Very few musicians ever “recoup” — even after the labels have made back many times what they actually gave the artists. For the most succinct example of how the labels make out like bandits, profiting mightily while still telling artists they haven’t recouped, here’s Tim Quirk, who a few years back explained how it worked with his band, Too Much Joy (TMJ):
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A few years ago, we wrote about an insanely aggressive anti-piracy campaign in South Africa, in which the local version of the RIAA (RISA) suggested people “shoot the pirate.” That hyperbolic and ultra-aggressive campaign resulted in some actual violence, when RISA sent a group of artists (armed with that slogan) onto the streets to “confront” counterfeit CD sellers. So, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to find out that a man in South Africa has been criminally convicted for posting a torrent for a local movie to the Pirate Bay, and given a suspended prison sentence.
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04.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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As the use of GNU/Linux grows and spreads, training has become more and more of a necessity if one wants to join the burgeoning ranks of administrators.
Given this, it is not surprising that the Linux Professional Institute has added a new course for the rank beginner, a course called Linux Essentials. The LPI already has courses for three levels of certification; the new course is aimed at the newcomer.
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Desktop
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Due to Google being the creator of both Android and Chrome OS, they have begun to experiment with these operating systems, combining them to create unique features, like how Apple does with their iOS devices and Mac OS X line of computers. Previously, Muktware mentioned Google working on alternative methods for unlocking Chromebooks, but the Android Police discovered one such development in the works on Chromebooks running the Dev channel. (The Dev channel is Google’s early release channel, through which Chromebook users can get new features earlier but are unstable, so sometimes cause problems).
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China is one of the countries that have suffered the most when Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Windows XP. The Chinese government is now looking towards Linux to fill that gap, and it intends to use its resources to make that happen.
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Server
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IBM has made some exciting announcements on POWER-8 based systems building on the Open Server Innovation Model at the just-concluded Open Innovation Summit in San Francisco.
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Kernel Space
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A Linux developer at Intel has proposed a new CPU load metric for power-efficient scheduling by the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s R600 Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards received a number of bug-fixes on Thursday.
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Using the Catalyst 14.4 release candidate and the NVIDIA 337.12 beta driver as the latest AMD/NVIDIA Linux proprietary graphics drivers available at the time of testing, I compared my complete assortment of AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards against all available NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards to see how these latest-generation GPUs compare on the newest graphics drivers as of this month.
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Benchmarks
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Building upon earlier Ubuntu 14.04 LTS benchmarks and tests of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, here’s a nine-way Linux distribution comparison done from the same hardware.
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Applications
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Kid3 is a powerful audio tag editor for KDE with support for formats like MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Speex, TrueAudio and WAV. Kid3 allows you to edit common tags over multiple files as well.
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Calibre is an ebook collection manager with support for many services, including Amazon, Android or Barnes & Noble. Calibre makes it easy to organize ebooks, as well as search various services for new ebooks. The latest version is 1.33 and brings several improvements, like a tool to check the spelling and a number of bug fixes.
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I like siege, even though it definitely falls into the bracket of “esoteric tools I will probably never have a use for.”
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The libappstream library got some new API to query component data in different ways, and I also brought back support for Vala (so if you missed the Vapi file: It’s back now, although you have to manually enable this feature).
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Earlier this month Canonical released a new, long term support, version of its popular operating system (OS), Ubuntu. Nicknamed Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 14.04 comes pre-installed with tons of great software, but even more is available through the handy Ubuntu Software Center which users will find in the applications launcher. Popular video game Minecraft is also available for install on Ubuntu 14.04. Users will need to launch the Terminal application to install the popular game, but a simple copy and paste can handle that.
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For you extreme Baseball fans (is baseball mostly American?) Out of the Park Baseball 15 has been released on Steam for Linux promising you the ability to manage your dream team.
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The Steam for Linux platform has received a few new games in the past week, and the top selling chart has somewhat changed, although some of the older games are still going strong.
Portal, the first game in the series, released way back in 2007 for the Windows platform along with Half-Life 2, has managed to slip into the tenth position, mostly because of its 75% discount.
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Jagged Alliance 1: Gold Edition, a collection of games developed by Madlab Software and published by bitComposer Games, has been released on Steam for Linux.
Jagged Alliance 1: Gold Edition includes Jagged Alliance and Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games, the original titles that sparked the entire Jagged Alliance franchise.
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Earlier this month we wrote about Epic Games “loving” Linux/SteamOS and that they’d be bringing the support to UE4 with their next update. That next update, Unreal Engine 4.1, is now available with preliminary native support for gaming on Linux and SteamOS.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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ETC2 is the lossy texture compression scheme developed by Ericsson that is royalty-free and is now mandated as part of the OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3 specifications. For those unfamiliar with this alternative to S3TC, read ETC2 Texture Compression Looks Good For OpenGL.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Till this point in time you should check your data on the KDE sprints page or register if you’ve not yet done so (or poke your team mates to register ;-). We need to fix a budget by then to start the fundraising campaign.
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Requests to unlock KWallet automatically on login (assuming the wallet password and user password are the same), like gnome-keyring can do, have been going on for years: in fact, bug reports requesting this feature are quite old. Recently, thanks to the efforts of Alex Fiestas, a PAM module, which interfaces KWallet to the system authentication methods, has been developed. In parallel, the necessary glue code has been also added to the various parts of the KDE workspace so that it could make use of it.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Also GNOME Maps, which has debuted on GNOME 3.10, will be receive a bunch of interesting improvements. Among others, GNOME Maps 3.14 will come with some GUI improvements, support for points of interests (like cinema, restaurants, hotels, etc) and enhanced support for zooming. Also, the points of interests will use both the Facebook and Foursquare APIs, for a better interaction with Gnome Shell, while the users will be able to edit the OpenStreetMaps maps directly from the GNOME app.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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The Red Hat Summit is different than most other vendor shows in the sense that, although it naturally centers on the company and its particular vision for technology, it also places a large emphasis on the ecosystem. And that doesn’t just encompass customers and partners, but the upstream community projects for its solutions and outside strategic industry initiatives as well. James Whitehurst, the president and CEO of the Linux distributor, made a point of that in the opening keynote of the recently concluded event, focusing on two points in particular: how a large organization should go about embracing the open source model and, beyond that, effectively consuming free software.
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Fedora
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With Red Hat’s public release of version 7 Release Candidate, some folks are putting it through its paces. Phoronix has some benchmarks and preliminary remarks. Also, Jay Lyman looks further into the recent Red Hat CentOS cooperation agreement. In other news, a new beginners Linux course has emerged, Shuttleworth named the next Ubuntu, and a review of Puppy Arcade 11 is highlighted.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Originally, Ubuntu was a great thing. Years ago I used a Unix like system for various things and got comfortable with what we now call the “command line.” Then I used DOS, and that was still a command line operating system (but with different commands) and that was pretty good for the late 20th century. Then Windows came out and I switched to that, and later used both Windows and Mac operating systems to do my work. Eventually, I wanted to get away from those proprietary operating systems and try out Linux, which by then was a Unix like system that had windowing capabilities but also a powerful command line interface.
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Ubuntu intends to throw off the shackles that come with supporting a Linux distribution release for five years, and conduct some spring cleaning in its next release due in October this year.
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So on Thursday 17 April when the patriotic amongst were preparing for independence day and the religious for the Good Friday mass-or Judgement night 2- the geek in me waited for official unveiling of the latest offering from Canonical. It came rather late in the night but it was worth the wait. After spending the entire Easter weekend dipping my connoisseur toes in Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) I can say to you my fellow countryman and those from beyond our borders- it is really time you chose Ubuntu. Now this is not one of those Year of the Linux Desktop brouhaha.
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The world’s most widely used Linux distro hit the ground running last week with the release of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr). This version looks to be the last LTS (Long Term Support) before the impending launches of Unity 8 and Mir. Unity 8′s hoping to unify the software between Ubuntu’s mobile interfaces with the desktop experience much the way Microsoft aimed to do with Windows 8 and recent iterations of Windows Phone. Mir, of course, is the new display server set to replace X in Ubuntu, much to the chagrin of the community and it’s Wayland proponents.
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If you’re new to Linux or the Ubuntu Unity interface, the overall performance and polish will be all that matters. If you’re still bothered by Unity’s look and feel, be sure to try one of the other Ubuntu desktops. The interface integration and the other desktop interfaces have a really smooth integration with Ubuntu’s execution. That will leave no doubt about why Ubuntu is a leading Linux distro.
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Flavours and Variants
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This is not an attack against the Mintcast podcast or the Luddites as I like listening to their podcasts and I listed both of them in my top 9 Linux podcasts article.
I did feel it necessary to respond to their critique though as I felt many of the points weren’t valid or needed qualifying.
As for the title of this post, that is definitely link bait. A title so vague that it draws people in.
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Cubuntu is the first third-party operating system based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS released so far and also one of the few OSes that kept Unity for users.
Most developers usually choose to remove the Unity desktop environment and focus on others, but the makers of Cubuntu left Unity in place and added a number of other desktop environments, like Cinnamon, GNOME Classic, LXDE, and OpenBox.
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Oregon-based APlus Mobile came up with the idea for the “MotherBone PiOne” while trying to add peripherals to the Linux-ready BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi Model B single board computers. Faced with the boards’ limitations relative to “real world expandability,” especially in regard to the BeagleBone Black’s power isolation issues, the company decided to develop a baseboard aimed at solving those problems for both hacker SBCs.
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Phones
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Android
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In 2013, Huawei Device shipped 52 million smartphones, up 62.5% on year, 24.4 million fixed-line Internet-access terminal devices, down 2.4%, 44.5 million mobile broadband Internet-access devices, down 11%, and had 80 million subscribers of its cloud services at the end of the year.
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The small size, low price, adequate performance and an abundance of software applications has allowed Android/Linux on ARM smartphones to blow away all my expectations.
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When I upgraded an Android device the other day, I found that tethering completely stopped working. The updated CyanogenMod had inherited a new bug from Android, informing the carrier that I was tethering. The carrier, Vodafone Italy, had decided to make my life miserable by blocking that traffic. I had a closer look and managed to find a workaround.
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Last week, I explored some of the important issues raised by the discovery of a major flaw in the widely-used open source program OpenSSL, and how that might be addressed. Since then, a couple of things have happened.
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Trying to generalize open-source is not an easy task – a lot of book writers, community leaders and presenters have different opinions on how the open-source community works, and whether it has any real benefit to newcomer programmers. I think it does, and here are some reasons for it:
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There are other open source recommendation engines. Overstock.com, for example, built its own system using a collection of open source algorithms from the Apache Mahout project. But it’s harder to get started with Mahout. Overstock.com has a team of about six engineers and a project manager working on its recommendation engine. As Ted Dunning — a contributor to the Mahout project who works for big data company MapR — told us in 2012: “It’s not a product. It’s not a package. It’s not a service. Batteries are not included.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For as long as I can remember, Brendan Eich was the CTO of Mozilla, then he got appointed CEO and well – things happened and now he’s left the building.
In the meantime, there wasn’t (AFAIK) a CTO at Mozilla, but that changes today.
Andreas Gal starts as Mozilla’s new CTO today.
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SaaS/Big Data
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CMS
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So you might forgive Tom Wentworth if he was a little wary of taking up the role of chief marketing officer at Acquia. But the CMO says that when he received a message from a recruiter asking if he was interested in the position, he jumped at the chance. “I couldn’t have dialled back the number faster when I saw him asking about Acquia,” Wentworth says.
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Education
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Business
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Mondrian is an open-source data analysis tool that can be used for analyzing data. You can use it to create reports, or to set up interactive systems that give business users the means to carry out their own analyses.
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Today, more domain experts with expertise in a particular industry or process are taking open source tools and building on top of them to sell their capabilities as a third-party service. “This is one piece of open source that is picking up interest and demand,” said Clay Richardson, principal industry analyst at Forrester Research.
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Semi-Open Source
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NGINX, the company focused on the widely used web server platform of the same name, announced this week that it now powers a whopping 146 million websites. That’s 52 percent more sites than the 96 million reported a year ago. It’s more evidence–along with the continuing success of Apache’s offerings–that open source projects have had an enormous impact on the web server arena, and the rise of the web itself.
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BSD
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Another story of unmaintained and possibly unused code that ends up in the attic. Any Kerberos users out there who want it back will need to step forward and contribute one way or the other. Some code is obviously worth cleaning up, other code is destined for retirement, it seems.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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So this happened. To say “we are floored with the success of the campaign and the community support we’ve received” would be a huge understatement. We made the call to arms to fight for federation and privacy features on the web, and you answered.
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Public Services/Government
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Transparency, participation, and collaboration are key components to open source but also to the open government movement. During the month of May, Opensource.com will feature stories where open source and government are transforming communities. From May 12 – 23, we’ll highlight some great people and projects in open government, open data, and civic hacking, and we’ll provide resources on how you can get involved yourself.
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The significant savings gained by using free and open source software in the school of the Swiss town of Villmergen are used to enhance the curriculum. Switching to free and open source has led to an increase in computers, motivating teachers to create their own courses. “Ubuntu Linux PCs are very easy to use and maintain, giving teachers more time to work with their students,” says Martin Lang, the school’s IT administrator.
The move to hassle-free software has created a virtuous circle, Lang says. Since most of the educational-applications created by the school are browser-based, teachers encourage students to bring their own computers. This again increases the number of PCs per classroom, making computer-aided teaching more attractive.
All teachers at the school can work with Ubuntu Linux, says Lang. “Changing their computer habits takes some effort, but they are motivated because of the increase in teaching possibilities.”
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Source Beehives project, currently raising funds via Indiegogo, is using smart tech and the power of the crowd to help tackle bees’ dwindling numbers.
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Open Access/Content
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FSU Associate Professor Oskar Vafek along with some of his graduate students created what they call a wiki physics textbook, that allows anyone to learn all about graduate-level quantum mechanics simply by going on the Internet and looking at the online textbook.
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Open Hardware
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The adapter is being offered open source as a free download for personal use worldwide under a Creative Commons License.
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Plug in the keyboard and mouse of your choice, and this laptop is ready to go; perfect for use in a labs or in you workspace. You get an open circuit board, inside a case that allows for many modifications with a Full HD IPS LCD.
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Hardware
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Intel announced a fanless mini-tower “NUC” mini-PC for thin clients, equipped with a 5-Watt Atom E3815 SoC and a new custom expansion interface.
The Linux-compatible Intel NUC Kit DE3815TYKHE is Intel’s first fanless member of its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) family of mini-PCs. The computer is also available as a single board computer (SBC) called the NUC Board DE3815TYBE.
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Security
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Coverity Scan’sTM main page states that it uses static analysis to “find and fix defects in your C/C++ or Java open source project for free.” Coverity, which was recently acquired by Synopsys, originally teamed up with theDepartment of Homeland Security to develop the Coverity ScanTM as part of the “Open Source Code Hardening Project.” Last year’s edition, the Coverity Scan: 2012 Open Source Report, found that “Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software–and both continue to surpass the accepted industry standard for good software quality.” The just-released 2013 Coverity ScanTM Open Source Reportreports a change this year, “Open source code quality surpasses proprietary code quality in C/C++ projects.”
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Google’s venture capital arm and Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins have invested in a start-up run by two former National Security Agency analysts, which promises to give large companies access to some of the world’s best cyber security researchers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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But even with all that, the appalling smug reaction of Netanyahu is sickening. Israel at no stage had the slightest intention of entering any meaningful peace process, stopping settlement building, or reducing the dispossession and discrimination suffered by Arabs of all sorts within Israel itself. The World’s most vicious and unrelenting theological and racist state continues to be just that. The United States was not in any sense genuinely involved in abetting a peace process; it was managing the process of genocide of the Palestinians, drawn out over decades, just conducted with enough disguise to allow the mainstream media to pretend it is not happening.
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Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has purchased a 1250 square meter holiday home in Crimea.
According to a report in the Sepastabol Times, Schroeder bought the beachfront property in Crimea’s Yalta district last Tuesday for €1.2 million in an all-cash deal. The posh mansion reportedly has 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, and an indoor olympic-sized swimming pool
Sources close to Schroeder say he intends to spend his summers in Yalta and is unconcerned about the international controversy surrounding Russia’s annexation of the territory from Ukraine last month.
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The overriding fact, however, is that drone warfare by the U.S. is achieving the opposite of what it was meant to do. Under the 2001 Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), the U.S. government can engage in targeted killings, including attacks on U.S. citizens (three of whom have been killed by drones), without further warrant; even the targets, namely “associated forces” of al-Qaeda, are loosely defined.
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Drones — known for their stealthiness and secret operations — are becoming exposed photo by photo by one artist.
James Bridle, 33, is using open-source satellite imagery to show the location of drones around the world to increase overall visibility. He consults news articles, Wikipedia pages, Google Maps, Google Earth and other publicly available satellite maps to locate the drones and snap photos.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The president came into office promising to make fighting climate change a priority. Now, he finally seems to be getting serious about it
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A Texas family claiming they were sickened because of pollution from hydraulic fracturing operations near their home should be awarded $2.95 million for their troubles, a jury ruled on Tuesday.
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Finance
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The hottest book everybody is talking about, that no one has read and no can get their hands on, is a giant, data-packed tome on income inequality covering three hundred years of history by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Is there a reason he’s getting the rock star treatment? Is it the symptoms that resonate (our drift into oligarchy), or is it the cure (a progressive tax on wealth)?
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Privacy
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A few days ago the President of the United States signed into public law bill S. 2195, now known as Pub.L. 113-100.
The law aims to “deny admission to the United States to any representative to the United Nations who has been found to have been engaged in espionage activities or a terrorist activity against the United States and poses a threat to United States national security interests.”
In other words, if the US government thinks that if you have been spying on the United States, then they won’t let you in the country.
Gee, let’s think for a moment– who has been engaging in espionage against the United States? Anyone?
Ah, right. The US government. Mr. Obama himself. The entire US intelligence network. They’ve all been engaging in espionage against the United States, especially its citizens.
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Pavel Durov, the founder of Russia’s top social network, fled the country on Tuesday, a day after being ousted from the company against his will. Durov announced on Monday that he was pushed out as the Vkontakte’s CEO after his refusal to share users’ personal data with Russian security services. Vkontakte was formed seven years ago, and the 29-year-old CEO first talked about his plans to leave the company on April 1 while mentioning his incapability to defend the network’s founding principles.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman is downplaying prospects of resolving tensions over U.S. surveillance when the German leader visits Washington next week — a trip during which Ukraine’s crisis and trans-Atlantic economic ties will be key issues.
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New York Congressman Hakeem Jeffries thinks reforming the NSA is one of the few things members of both parties can agree on – and perhaps that’s because they don’t want the intelligence agency spying on them.
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All too often bills are proposed and laws are passed in the United States that are in grave violation of the United States’ obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. And all too rarely does U.S. domestic policy get spoken about in terms of human rights laws. A case in point: the recent spate of bills responding to the unlawful mass surveillance conducted by the NSA revealed in the flood of disclosures from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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President Obama decided earlier this month that when the National Security Agency discovers Internet security issues such as the recent Heartbleed, it should make the flaws public. However, he left some wiggle room for “national security and law enforcement need.”
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Former General Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA, has a new gig writing for the conservative Washington Times. His column will be titled “Inside Intelligence,” ironically, as he no longer is.
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How many times have you done a double-take while in public conversation? Quickly checking that the roommate you’re complaining about isn’t walking behind you, or that your ex-boyfriend’s best friend isn’t at the next table.
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Google changes its security settings for Gmail last month. The extra encryption will mean that nobody can read emails that are sent over various networks, and was an answer to the controversy surrounding the National Security Agency (NSA).
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Brazil’s Congress passed comprehensive legislation on Internet privacy in what some have likened to a web-user’s bill of rights, after stunning revelations its own president was targeted by US cyber-snooping.
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As NSA creates potentially the most oppressive free speech dragnet in history, Obama expresses terror watching robots play soccer
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Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has been using a super-secure computer operating system called Tails that comes with encryption and privacy tools to make the user completely anonymous on the internet.
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From 2008 to 2010, as Edward Snowden has revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) collaborated with the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to intercept the webcam footage of 1.8 million Yahoo users.
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Civil Rights
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Dozens of pages of previously unreleased documents pertaining to the prosecution of hacktivist Jeremy Hammond have been released, further linking the United States government to a gamut of cyberattacks waged against foreign nations.
Hammond, 29, made waves last November when he defied a US federal judge’s order and told a packed New York City courtroom on the day of his sentencing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had relied on an undercover informant to direct members of the amorphous hacking collective Anonymous to target the websites of adversarial nations.
The latest releases now lend credence to Hammond’s claims that the FBI guided Anonymous into conducting cyberattacks at their behest, regardless of the sheer illegality involved. The documents — a previously unpublished statement purported to be authored by Hammond and never-before-seen court files —now corroborate the role of the feds in these proxy cyberwars of sorts.
Using the internet alias “Sabu,” the turncoat — Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York — supplied Hammond with lists of vulnerable targets that were then compromised, Hammond said in his courtroom testimony on Nov. 15. Data and details were pillaged and exploited, Hammond said, and then shared with the informant and, ergo, the FBI.
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Naveed Shinwari is one of four American Muslims who filed suit against the government this week for placing them on the U.S. “no-fly list” in order to coerce them into becoming FBI informants. The plaintiffs say the government refuses to explain why they were named on the no-fly list. They also believe that their names continue to be listed because they would not agree to become FBI informants and spy on their local communities. “It’s very frustrating, you feel helpless,” Shinwari says. “No one will tell you how you can get off of it, how you got on it. It has a profound impact on people’s lives.” We are also joined by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is seeking to remove the men from the no-fly list and establish a new legal mechanism to challenge placement on it.
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A Florida man and his family were returning home from a wedding and Christmas celebrations in New Jersey when they were allegedly pulled over, forced out of their vehicle and searched by several Maryland police – all because John Filippidis is licensed to carry a firearm.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Under the influence by governments and corporations, the final outcome document of the NETmundial forum became a weak, toothless and disappointing text. Despite the Brazilian president’s courageous speeches, NETmundial illustrates just how farcical and pointless efforts for a “global multistakeholder Internet Governance” are. If anything, the Net should be “governed” by citizens directly, independently of these circles and without waiting for the “global consensus”. Our shared communications infrastructure must be considered a common good, politically defined as such and defended.
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In February of 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated its final two /8 IPv4 address blocks of address space. That event marked the end of the so called “free pool” availability of IPv4 address space available to Regional Internet Registries (RIR), but it didn’t mean that IPv4 had become unavailable.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Obama Administration’s feverish cheerleading for genetically modified crops is being put to the test with growing evidence that the technology is unpopular with consumers, causing problems in the field and facing increasing rejection in the marketplace. – See more at: http://www.iatp.org/blog/201404/obama%E2%80%99s-gmo-problem#sthash.LwnO3OSr.dpuf
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The open source software development model has proven itself time and time again over the years. Now scientists at the Open Source Seed Initiative have actually taken that model and used it to create seeds for crops for the benefit of everyone. Yes, they have created the first open source seeds to be used in providing plants for food.
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Elevated language for mere germination, perhaps, but that’s how a new group of researchers is talking about plant breeding. Most of the seeds used to grow our collective garden of food aren’t free—they’re patented by institutions and large seed companies, who own them and require licenses for anyone who wants to use them.
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Copyrights
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The Chinese-based DVD ripping company DVDFab has asked a New York federal court to lift its domain seizures and payment processing restrictions so it can serve customers outside the United States. The company argues that the country’s DRM circumvention laws don’t apply internationally.
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Send this to a friend
04.24.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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The Chinese government is investigating security tools for its Windows XP systems, while it negotiates with Microsoft over upgrade pricing
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China will focus on the development of a new operating system (OS) based on Linux to cope with the shutdown of Windows XP, an official said on Wednesday.
Zhang Feng, chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said “the ministry will beef up support for the development of such an OS.”
Microsoft ended support for the 13-year-old Windows XP on April 8 and advised users to upgrade to Windows 8 or get a new PC if necessary. About 70 percent of Chinese personal computers, even in critical sectors like telecommunications, are still running Windows XP.
“The shutdown will bring risks directly to China’s basic telecommunication networks and threaten its overall security,” said Zhang.
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China is one of the countries that have suffered the most when Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Windows XP. The Chinese government is now looking towards Linux to fill that gap, and it intends to use its resources to make that happen.
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Desktop
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I’m very glad that the author admits to being a “Windows guy” at the beginning of the article. At least he’s being up front about it, and that’s rather refreshing. That said, I disagree with most of his conclusions. He’s clearly stuck in the mid 1990s or so in his mindset while the rest of the world has moved on from those days of complete Microsoft domination of the computing world. I give him props for noting that he has tried other operating systems and platforms, but he doesn’t seem to have gotten much out of them as the Windows-centric mindset still seems to dominate his thinking.
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Over the next year, support for Chromebooks will grow, and as a result the features and abilities of Chromebooks will increase. Thus, I believe that the best time to purchase a Chromebook is now, since we should expect them to rival PCs and tablets within the next year.
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Server
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Computing and services giant IBM did something very unlike IBM today. It has decided to open up its Power chip architecture to outside developers to improve upon it.
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Nine months after IBM opened up its Power architecture, it is launching a new line of servers based on the technology and showing off a server built by Tyan that uses the processor too.
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IBM today formally announced its Power8 silicon and server lineup in a bid to help improve Big Blue’s hardware fortunes. A key part of the Power8 launch is a renewed focus on Linux for data center workloads.
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The OpenPower Foundation , an open development community dedicated to accelerating data center innovation, has taken its first steps to deliver actual system designs based on IBM’s new Power8 processor. Formed by Google, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA, and Tyan, the Foundation makes Power hardware and software available for open development, as well as Power intellectual property licensable to other manufacturers. As Re/code notes, “the move allows anyone with the technical chops to design and manufacture their own Power-based chip and add their own enhancements to it.”
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Cloud server provider ElasticHosts, has announced the expansion of its white label cloud hosting option for the reseller market into its Elastic Containers. Using Linux Containers (LXC) an innovative way of selling cloud services based on consumption rather than capacity, with accompanying cost savings.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernel 3.13.11 with some important fixes. This is the last 3.13.y release. Please move to 3.14.y now.
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A Seattle-based band called netcat – not to be confused with the networking tool of the same name – has perked ears in the software community by releasing its debut album as a Linux kernel module (among other more typical formats.)
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The Linux Foundation today announced it has formed a new project to fund and support critical elements of the global information infrastructure. The Core Infrastructure Initiative enables technology companies to collaboratively identify and fund open source projects that are in need of assistance, while allowing the developers to continue their work under the community norms that have made open source so successful. Founding backers of the Initiative include Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Rackspace, VMware and The Linux Foundation.
The first project under consideration to receive funds from the Initiative will be OpenSSL, which could receive fellowship funding for key developers as well as other resources to assist the project in improving its security, enabling outside reviews, and improving responsiveness to patch requests.
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The last version of the stable Linux kernel 3.13.11 has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking the end of this particular branch.
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Graphics Stack
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While the Catalyst 14.4 OpenGL Linux graphics driver offers OpenGL 4.4 support, bug-fixes, and other improvements, it seems the performance improvements are limited — at least in terms of raw frame-rate performance and frame latency. Some Phoronix readers have been boasting about the Catalyst 14.4 Linux driver being better with some Steam Linux games, but from my tests of a few Source Engine games, there didn’t seem to be any major differences. The Catalyst 14.4 Linux driver only showed measurable performance boosts in a few benchmarks, where the biggest performance change for the four tested graphics cards was 6~9% faster.
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AMD has made its Catalyst 14.4 Windows and Linux drivers available for download. This Release Candidate (RC) driver is expected to arrive in its official WHQL form in a week or two but for those who like the look of the improvements and regularly install beta drivers it may well be appealing. The headline features of this driver include; support for the AMD Radeon R9 295X, enhancements and fixes for people running CrossFire configured systems and full support for OpenGL 4.4.
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Applications
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It’s always the simple things that reach out and grab me. Here’s shush, which I almost skipped over because ideally, it needs some sort of local e-mail subsystem to do its job correctly.
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Wireshark, one of the better network protocol analyzers offering users the means to capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network, is now at version 1.10.5.
The current version of Wireshark, 1.10.7, supersedes all previous releases, including all builds of Ethereal, and is now the latest stable build. It comes packed with numerous changes and features updates for various protocols.
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Setting it up is no big trick: Move the todo, todone and todone-archive files out of the git clone folder and somewhere in your $PATH. Copy sh-todo to $HOME/.sh-todo, edit it to give it a path for your lists (the default is a Dropbox folder), and from there it’s very quick to learn.
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Unfortunately, this is all I have to show for shell.fm, which allows a console interface to Last.fm.
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After extensively reviewing Bitwig Studio in the soon-to-be-released issue three of Linux Voice, our audio-geek-in-residence (Graham) has made a video showing how to get the best out of this music-making software. It’s also useful for people looking to get to know a bit more about Jack, the audio glue that holds some of Linux’s best sound software together.
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Clementine 1.2.3, a multiplatform music player inspired by Amarok 1.4, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music, has been released and is now available for download.
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Proprietary
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Last year Google unveiled the Google Web Designer as a program to put out clean, human-readable HTML5 code and this WYSIWYG editor can take advantage of the full realm of new HTML5 and JavaScript possibilities. That tool for web developers is now finally available to Linux users.
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Google Web Designer is a program for creating interactive HTML5 websites and ads for any device. Using it, you can create content using drawing tools, text, 3D objects, add animations and Google Fonts directly from the Google Web Designer interface and more. The tool “outputs clean human-readable HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript”.
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The fans of the Opera Internet browser have long given up the hope of seeing their favorite software get a Linux version. There are still a few stranglers that still hang on to the old version, but there is no indication that anything will happen on the Linux front.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Wasteland 2′s Linux build is no longer on the way; it’s just been added to inXile’s post-apocalyptic RPG beta, along with around 400 other changes and additions including a new area, a redesigned vendor screen, and new tutorials and music tracks. Listing everything would keep me occupied until the real apocalypse, so I’ll give you the highlights of this giant list after the break.
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The good news now is that I’ve heard from a Valve Linux developer that additions to the Steam API will finally allow us to at least record universally a build revision/number for each game… Up to now it’s been rather hard to tell if two separate copies of a Steam game being benchmarked were actually the same version (and thus comparable) or not since there wasn’t an expressed build number across the board of all Steam games. With the latest Steam API work, it looks like we finally have that ability to record a build number for Steam games to make sure the same version of a game is being benchmarked.
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Here’s another piece of news that shows the importance of the community for a developer. Due to a considerable amount of interest, the developers behind the Thinking With Time Machine mod for Portal 2 have finally decided to bring the mod over to Linux.
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Steam is one of the most popular options for gamers these days. But have you ever wondered about the numbers behind the games? Which games are really the most popular and how often do they get played? Ars Technica has dug into the data behind Steam and come up with some very interesting information about the games on Steam.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This schedule follows the same rhythm as 4.13 since it seems to have worked well. So in roughly 4 month you get some new KDE Application with some new features.
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I have some posts to write about Cantor but first I would like to request a help to KDE packagers of several Linux distros around the world.
I received some mails from users asking “how can I use python in Cantor?” or “where is python support in Cantor?”. Well, python2-backend is available in Cantor since KDE 4.12 release. If you is using KDE >= 4.12 but you can not to use python in Cantor, maybe the package was not build correctly.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In my last post, I described an experiment that I’m running for the GNOME 3.14 development cycle. The goal is to make it easier of people to contribute to GNOME, by making it easy to find tasks to work on and getting rapid and effective feedback.
Since I wrote that post, I’ve been working with a number of GNOME application maintainers to get their bugs in a state where it is easy for people to contribute. The result is three apps that have a clear set of bugs that contributors can get to work on today.
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4MLinux 8.2 Beta Multiboot Edition, a mini Linux distribution that is focused on the 4Ms of computing, Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g., playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (Linux games), has been released and is ready for testing.
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Today the Black Lab Linux team is pleased to announce the release of its Enterprise edition 5.0.1 to current and prospective customers. With this release we have fixed a myriad of problems experienced with release 4.2.5. The fastest growing alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux has just gotten better.
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Ikey Doherty is probably one of the most tech-smart people I know. Fact is, Ikey is much like that guy you hear about on the news, the guy that can hear a string of 4 digit numbers and tell you the sum of them in a couple of seconds. Now, I don’t know if Ikey is capable of that feat, but I do know what he can do.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 RC for all customers and partners just a few days ago, and now the company has even provided an image that anyone can download and test.
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For anyone wishing to try out the release candidate to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system release, the ISO is now publicly available.
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There was an era where, if you were playing a game of word association with me and you were to say, “Linux,” I would probably respond, “dependencies.” That era may officially end in 2014 as one of the more innovative mechanisms for packaging and distributing a server application becomes officially embraced by Red Hat and soon implemented in a special version of its Enterprise Linux server.
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Red Hat has proven many times that it can acquire and oversee open source projects without tainting them with commercial efforts or otherwise fouling them up. I expect most CentOS users, like the project itself, stand to gain from wearing Red Hat. As for Red Hat, joining with CentOS represents a net win in terms of growing community, ecosystem and paying customers.
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Red Hat Inc., the world’s largest open source software solutions provider, is expected to achieve a high double-digit revenue growth in its new financial year ending March 31, 2015 (FY15), up from US$1.53 billion (RM5 billion) a year before.
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Fedora
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As my post from earlier today explains, the focal point of changes in this release was groups and how to approach them sanely. Then there is some niceties like improved documentation, fixed resource leaks and one feature that hopefully many everyday users will find useful: the –refresh option that forces expiration of all repos, thus ensuring given operation runs with the latest & greatest metadata (just don’t come back complaining it takes time).
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The distributions included:
Oracle Linux 6.5 – Oracle’s spin of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 source tree.
Oracle Linux 7.0 Beta 1 – Oracle’s spin of the earlier RHEL 7.0 Beta 1 source code.
CentOS 6.5 – The community spin of RHEL 6.5 that is now collaborating with upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Fedora 20 – The out-of-the-box Fedora 20 for the latest experience of the Red Hat sponsored distribution
RHEL 7.0 RC1 – The just-released public ISO of the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 environment.
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Another Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting took place on Wednesday where another round of features were approved for the Fedora 21 Linux release.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The latest Steam client update bumps the Steam Runtime for compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04, fixes some potential hangs and game crashes, support for setting the voice input device via the Big Picture mode, many other fixes and improvements to the Big Picture mode, VR mode improvements, and other general improvements.
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A new stable version of the Steam Client for Linux has been released a while ago (after a few development versions), getting a lot of optimizations for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (and Linux Mint 17 Qiana) and some SteamOS improvements.
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That future Ubuntu developer wants to deliver app updates instantly to users everywhere; we can make that possible. They want to deploy distributed brilliance instantly on all the clouds and all the hardware. We’ll make that possible. They want PAAS and SAAS and an Internet of Things that Don’t Bite, let’s make that possible. If free software is to fulfil it’s true promise it needs to be useful for people putting precious parts into production, and we’ll stand by our commitment that Ubuntu be the most useful platform for free software developers who carry the responsibilities of Dev and Ops.
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Mark Shuttleworth has announced the codename for the upcoming Ubuntu release: Ubuntu 14.10 will be codenamed “Utopic Unicorn”.
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Canonical has released a new version of the Ubuntu Touch operating system, this time based on the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which was released on april 17, 2014.
This release of Ubuntu Touch features the followings:
overhauled home screen
scope experience
new web container featuring the V8 javascript engine and chromium rendering
Qt 5.2
enablement stack from the Android 4.4 branch
The new image has not the highest quality yet so you may experience some problems and bugs, but this release of Ubuntu Touch version is definitely a big step forward compared to the initial release done in October 2013. Ubuntu developers have been working for more than a year now, and are still working very hard with high velocity to give the user a very nice product.
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The Ubuntu Kernel Team is looking to extend stable support for the Linux 3.13 kernel until April of 2016, or another two years. The Ubuntu developers will be carrying out 3.13.y.z stable point releases over on their Ubuntu.com Git infrastructure. Their 3.13 kernel will be maintained the same as the upstream rules regarding stable kernel point releases. Their extended stable kernel plans are outlined via the Ubuntu Wiki.
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The Ubuntu developers have announced that they continue to provide support for the Linux kernel 3.13.x that has just reached end of life.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the 3.13.x branch of the Linux kernel, has revealed that this particular version has reached end of life and that users should upgrade as soon as possible.
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While a new kernel should mean better performance, Canonical’s UI troubles persist.
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Telegram is a free messaging app that focuses on speed and security. There are official Telegram applications available for iOS and Android as well as various unofficial clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Windows Phone.
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Flavours and Variants
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For years, proponents proclaimed the Linux operating system would someday be a viable competitor on desktop PCs to its rivals, Windows and Mac OSX.
When someone on an internet message board says they’re having trouble with a Mac or PC, someone will almost inevitably tell them to try Linux.
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If anyone has been waiting for the code repository for PiDoorbell, the Raspberry Pi project we presented at PyCon a couple of weeks ago, at least part of it (the parts I wrote) is also available in my GitHub scripts repo, in the rpi subdirectory. It’s licensed as GPLv2-or-later.
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This week the new BeagleBone Black Rev C development board has been unveiled offering a similar board to that offered by the Raspberry Pi mini PC and Arduino UNO.
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One of the most hyped examples of the Internet of Things is the Internet-connected refrigerator. But according to Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco CIO, the refrigerator will not likely be an Internet of Things use case that she deploys within Cisco itself.
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The 18.5 x 9.4 x 8.5-inch device runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi SBC, or for $110 more, on a quad-core, Freescale i.MX6 based Udoo Quad, which also runs Android. Each SBC furnishes Bluetooth and WiFi streaming, as well as I/O made available at the rear of the system.
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Ever since the Raspberry Pi burst onto the scene in 2012, open source hardware projects have been promoting their Linux-ready hacker boards as offering faster, more capable alternatives. Considering the Pi’s 700MHz ARM11 processor and relatively modest feature set, that’s not such a stretch, but matching the $35 price is another story. If you can’t match the price, what you really need to get the attention of Pi-lovers looking for a bit more oomph is to look and act like a Pi.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung users aren’t interested in the company’s branded messenger, voice-activated search, or app store Samsung Hub, according to a new report. Samsung users vastly prefer Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and the Google Play store to their Samsung counterparts. They spent an average of seven minutes a month using Samsung apps, according to the market research firm Strategy Analytics. That’s compared to 11 hours on Facebook alone.
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OnePlus, the startup founded by former Oppo VP Pete Lau, has unveiled its first smartphone, the OnePlus One. It’s a powerful effort, with a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 processor, a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 3GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel f/2 camera unit, and bottom-facing stereo speakers designed with assistance from JBL. It runs a minimalist custom UI atop CyanogenMod, the modified version of Android breaking out as an operating system in its own right.
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Efforts to boost the Gear 2 ecosystem include the Samsung Gear App Challenge, where developers could win cash prizes equating to $1.25 million.
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Android
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Already in 2014 it has won a major joint-tender contract from a consortium of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales’ Electoral Commissions, that will see the company provide 5100 tablets for vote counting purposes at each state’s forthcoming elections. All of these Acer branded devices will run Android, and deployment begins shortly.
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After a few new sleek and affordable Motorola phones leaked out under their cryptic model numbers recently, we now learn that at least one of them will arrive as the Moto E, an affordable device similar to the Moto G, but featuring a much thinner and more compact body.
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Following months of anticipation, OnePlus today revealed their flagship device, the OnePlus One. Embodying the OnePlus motto of ‘Never Settle’, the OnePlus One boasts industry leading design, superior build quality and top of the line specs at a disruptive price point.
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Alex Payne, formerly a developer at Twitter and Simple, has released an interesting set of scripts he’s calling “Sovereign” that help with building cloud services on your own server. I’ve been interested in running my own email, calendar, file sharing, and other services for a few years now, and since Alex did most of the heavy lifting already, I decided it was time to give it a shot. My experience so far has been good, but this is still rarefied air, and not for the inexperienced.
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Events
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You’d expect LinuxCon content to be centered around Linux — and of course the ten tracks we have between LinuxCon and CloudOpen will feature the latest in developer and SysAdmin/DevOps technical topics such as Linux kernel development, virtualization, containers and open cloud technologies. (Plus a keynote speaker you may have heard of: Linus Torvalds.) But it’s been inspiring to see the principles of Linux and open source — open collaboration, meritocracy, crowdsourcing — spread to other areas of society, from education to 3D printing to medical devices and cars.
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Docker container virtualization, massive open online courses, 3D printing and running open source software in your car are among the featured topics at the upcoming LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America event. Each of those subjects appears on the list of keynotes for the conference, which the Linux Foundation just announced.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Late last year, survey results began to appear left and right confirming that IT departments around the world were either planning to deploy the OpenStack cloud computing platform or considering deploying it. An OpenStack Foundation survey found that cost savings and the flexibility of an open cloud platform were key drivers behind these trends.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Open source software, hardware, and methods are gaining popularity and access to them couldn’t be more prolific. If you’re thinking about starting a new open source project, there are five common pitfalls you should be aware of before you begin.
Don’t despair if you’ve already started your project and are just now reading this! These pointers can be helpful at any stage if things are still running smoothly.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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NGINX 1.6 features improvements to its SSL support, SPDY 3.1 protocol support, cache revalidation with conditional requests, an auth request module, and many other changes and bug-fixes.
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BSD
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Right now Lumina is considered in an early alpha state but is now found within PC-BSD’s ports/package repositories. Lumina aims to be lightweight, stable, and fast-running. Most of the Lumina work is being done by PC-BSD’s Ken Moore.
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FreeNAS, a free implementation of a minimal FreeBSD distribution, has finally reached version 9.2.1.5, and the developer implemented a large number of improvements.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation’s GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), featuring front ends for such languages as C, C++, Objective-C, and Java, has been upgraded with improvements for devirtualization and fixes to bottlenecks.
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GIMP: The cross-platform, open-source GNU image manipulation programme may not win any awards for design, but it is arguably the most complete Photoshop replacement that you don’t need money to buy. The interface is very different, so Photoshop users will have some learning curve to negotiate, but a variety of add-ons allow GIMP plenty of flexibility. Get it at Gimp.org for your PC, Mac or Linux computer.
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If you’ve used an operating system with a command line interface, you’ve had Emacs available to you. It’s been around for decades (since Richard Stallman and Guy Steele wrote it in 1976), and its the other major text editor to stand behind in the Holy Text Editor Grail Wars. It’s not the easiest tool, but it’s definitely one of the most powerful. It has a steep learning curve, but it’s always there, ready for use. It’s had a long and storied history, but the version that most people wind up using is GNU Emacs, linked above. It’s richly featured, too—Emacs can handle almost any type of text that you throw at it, handle simple documents or complex code, or be customized with startup scripts that add features or tweak the interface and shortcuts to match your project or preference. Similarly, Emacs supports macro recording, tons of shortcuts (that you’ll have to learn to get really familiar with it), and has a ton of modules created by third parties to leverage the app for completely non-programming purposes, like project planning, calendaring, news reading, and word processing. When we say it’s powerful, we’re not kidding. In large part, its power comes from the fact that anyone can play with it and mold it into something new and useful for everyone.
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Public Services/Government
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I had a chance to catch up with David A. Wheeler, a long-time leader in advising and working with the US government on issues related to open source software. As early as the late 1990s, David was demonstrating why open source software was integral to the US goverment IT architecture, and his personal webpage is a frequently cited source on open standards, open source software, and computer security.
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Open source is propelling the United Kingdom’s PatientView, a web-based solution written in Java that displays laboratory results, medicine information, correspondence and explanations of test results, diagnoses and treatment. PatientView is already implemented by 60 of the UK’s 70 renal clinics and is used by more than 20,000 of their patients. The solution is increasingly used by other health care disciplines, says Jenny Ure, a researcher at the Centre for Inflammation Research at the University of Edinburgh.
“PatientView is not only providing patients with access to their records”, Dr Ure says. “It is a very useful communication tool for multidisciplinary teams, working in different hospitals and health clinics”, she said at the Medetel conference, in Luxembourg on 10 April.
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Programming
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Kivy is a highly cross-platform graphical framework for Python, designed for the creation of innovative user interfaces like multitouch apps. Its applications can run not only on the traditional desktop platforms of Linux, OS X and Windows, but also Android and iOS, plus devices like the Raspberry Pi.
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The 2014 Google Summer of Code program will involve 1,307 college students this year, who were selected from a pool of 4,420 applicants.
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Science
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The world’s longest-running laboratory experiment has finally delivered a result – eight months after the man who patiently watched over it unrewarded for five decades died.
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Hardware
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Although ARM reported a drop in royalty payments for its embedded chip designs, the company reported an increase in licensing revenues and a healthy boost in the chips it sells into smartphones, including the first 64-bit sales.
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Health/Nutrition
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The World Health Organization hit back on Wednesday against vaccine deniers who claim that immunisation is pointless, risky and that the body is better off fighting disease unaided.
“The impact of vaccines on people’s lives is truly one of the best things that one could see out there,” said Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, head of the UN health agency’s immunisation and vaccines division.
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McDonald‘s just announced it will be the first fast food restaurant in the United States to add lab-grown meat to its menu. Following the success of Sergey Brin’s lab-grown burger experiment in London last year, McDonald’s says they will ‘grow’ their own chicken McNuggets in special laboratories across New Jersey.
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At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.
The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.
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Security
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To that end, EFF is evaluating the feasibility of offering a prize for the first usable, secure, and private end-to-end encrypted communication tool. We believe a prize based on objective usability metrics (such as the percentage of users who were able to install and start using the tool within a few minutes, and the percentage who survived simulated impersonation or man-in-the-middle attacks) might be an effective way to determine which project or projects are best delivering communication security to vulnerable user communities; to promote and energize those tools; and to encourage interaction between developers, interaction designers and academics interested in this space.
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At the beginning of this year, secret backdoor ‘TCP 32764’ was discovered in several routers including Linksys, Netgear, and Cisco. But even after releasing the new security patch, the backdoor binary continues to be present in the new firmware version, and the backdoor on port 32764 can be opened again by sending a specific network packet to the router.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The greatest boost ever received by Islamic fundamentalism was the invasion of Iraq. Closely followed by extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and drones, and Israeli bombings of Gaza. All of those things lead some Muslims to believe a violent response by terrorism is required to defend themselves. So for Tony Blair, who has promoted huge hatred and caused unnumbered deaths through a career of deceit and self-enrichment, to warn about the dangers of Islamic terrorism is something nobody but a few Guardian and Murdoch acolytes wish to hear.
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The Dutch defense department says several NATO member countries scrambled jets Wednesday afternoon after a pair of Russian bomber planes approached their airspace over the North Sea.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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As Brazil prepares to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, a topic that plagues the country is the impact hosting these games will have on the local environment and various ecosystems. Despite efforts by soccer’s ruling body, FIFA, to “greenwash” the games—by holding “green events” during the World Cup, putting out press releases about infrastructure construction with recycled materials and speaking rhapsodically about the ways in which the stadiums are designed to capture and recycle rainwater—the truth is not nearly so rank with patchouli oil.
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A 32-year study of subarctic forest moths in Finnish Lapland suggests that scientists may be underestimating the impacts of climate change on animals and plants because much of the harm is hidden from view.
The study analyzed populations of 80 moth species and found that 90 percent of them were either stable or increasing throughout the study period, from 1978 to 2009. During that time, average annual temperatures at the study site rose 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and winter precipitation increased as well.
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Finance
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In this clip, Krugman tells Bill that America is on the road to becoming a society controlled not by self-made men or women, but by their offspring.
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Updates on how inequality persists across generations; the nonsense of “taxes are job killers”; governor uses tax revenues to prevent unionization in a private enterprise. Major discussion of state and local taxes in the US; the economics of paying executives very high incomes; and the privatization of public services. Response to listener’s question on recent Medicare report on oversize payouts to doctors.
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Censorship
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The Russian Lower House has approved a bill that provides up to five years in prison for denying the facts set out in the Nuremberg Trial, rehabilitation of Nazism and distributing false information about the actions of Russia and its allies during WWII.
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1) Do you agree it is a reasonable practice for authors to persuade friends and family to post favorable reviews on Amazon? Do you agree with Mr Aaronovitch’s implication that Amazon’s policy forces authors to do this?
2) A wayback archive search shows that in fact a number of poor reviews of Voodoo Histories were deleted by Amazon. Did Mr Aaronovitch contact Amazon to initiate these deletions?
3) In fact, the poor reviews deleted were not, with a single exception, posted any earlier than similar quantities of five star reviews. Why was it decided to delete several one star reviews and no five star reviews? Who took this decision? Was it in any way motivated by Amazon’s own political sympathies? Was it motivated by a desire to boost sales?
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Privacy
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For years, I felt the same way about email. When I send a message to a specific email address, I figure that it’ll be opened by the person who owns that email address, and even if anyone else did stumble across that message, it’s unlikely that they’d be interested in the contents. I knew about methods of email encryption such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard), because I occasionally saw the email signatures of people who cared deeply about such things; they’d include a public key that you could use to send them encrypted messages. But rather like the lemon juice, dealing with the various keys and additional processes all seemed too much like hard work. I reckoned that the people who emphasised its importance were at best excessively geeky and at worst ridiculously paranoid.
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Still responding to the National Security Agency surveillance revelations, Google is reportedly preparing to help users beef up Gmail security with end-to-end encryption. The search giant is working on a way to make Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption easier to use for Gmail fans, according to a report by Venture Beat.
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The 27th European Media Art Festival began this evening in Osnabrueck, Germany. In the wake of all the global intelligence whistleblowing that has gone on over the last few years, the theme for the artists of 2014 is “We, the Enemy”.
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Why Microsoft is altering files on OneDrive for Business, is not documented anywhere by the company, but the revelation has again raised doubts about the integrity with Microsoft.
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Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte (VK)—the largest social network in Russia—said on Tuesday that he fled the country one day after being forced out of the company, claiming that he felt threatened by Kremlin officials.
In a post on his profile page on Monday, Durov explained that he was fired from his position as CEO of VK and that the so-called “Russian Facebook” is now “under the complete control” of two oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin.
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Law enforcement peak body wants to make it easier to decrypt communications
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Law enforcement agencies represented at today’s Senate committee hearing, including the Australian Crime Commission (ACC), South Australia Police, Queensland Police, the Australian Federal Police, the ATO and ASIC, all backed a data retention regime that would impose requirements on service providers in terms of the storage and release to law enforcement of metadata.
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President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called the Internet a CIA project and made comments about Russia’s biggest search engine Yandex, sending the company’s shares plummeting.
The Kremlin has been anxious to exert greater control over the Internet, which opposition activists — barred from national television — have used to promote their ideas and organize protests.
Russia’s parliament this week passed a law requiring social media websites to keep their servers in Russia and save all information about their users for at least half a year. Also, businessmen close to Putin now control Russia’s leading social media network, VKontakte.
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Civil Rights
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Dr Rahinah Ibrahim is not a national security threat.
The federal government even said so.
It took a lawsuit that has stretched for eight years for the feds to yield that admission. It is one answer in a case that opened up many more questions.
Namely: How did an innocent Malaysian architectural scholar remain on a terrorism no fly-list – effectively branded a terrorist – for years after a FBI paperwork screw up put her there? The answer to that question – to paraphrase a particularly hawkish former Secretary of Defense – may be unknowable.
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Twitter is a cool website where you can type any old thing into a box and send it out into the ether for the entire internet to read. Some people use it to joke around, some people use it to be like, “HEY INJUSTICE IS HAPPENING, WHOA #GETINVOLVED,” and some people use it to roleplay as characters from Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you like heated arguments with total strangers.
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Brown only pleaded to three counts: transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, accessory after the fact to unauthorized access to a protected computer, and interfering with the execution of a search warrant. Statutorily, he faces a maximum sentence of 102 months imprisonment (8.5 years) but will likely serve considerably less.
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This insight into how police think the public should interact with them is certainly enlightening. (via this tweet and Amy Alkon’s Advice Goddess blog)
The backstory is this: a woman was walking down the street when a motorcycle cop approached her, asked her if she lived in the area and if she would talk to him. She says his approach made her feel uncomfortable, so she refused and continued on her way.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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This blog post is my extended remarks to the opening session of Netmundial 2014. I can only say about 80% of it live because of time limits.
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The “404-No-More” project is backed by a formidable coalition including members from organizations like the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Old Dominion University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Part of the Knight News Challenge, which seeks to strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation through a variety of initiatives, 404-No-More recently reached the semifinal stage.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After amassing 106,000 signatures a petition aimed at improving the prison conditions of Gottfrid Svartholm has been delivered to the Danish government. In the hope that it may even prompt the total release of the Pirate Bay founder, yesterday the Danish Pirate Party handed the petition to Karen Hækkerup, Denmark’s Minister of Justice .
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Defending free culture doesn’t come cheap. Nor does running elections. We don’t get the money we need to campaign from fat cats and big backers. We are funded by people like you, through your donations and your membership payments, we couldn’t do it without you.
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04.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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LinuxCareer.com: How do you see the future development of Linux professionals recruitment sector?
Brent Marinaccio: Well, Linux is not going away. It just continues to grow. Thus, it bodes well for the individuals in this space. Throughout our time recruiting in the open source arena, the demand has always outstripped the supply for Linux professionals. Even in the two recessions we have been through. Therefore, I see no indication this is going to change in the near to mid term. All in all, it is a good time to be involved with open source software.
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Desktop
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Chromebooks have been able to show system performance through the Task Manager in the Chrome browser, however a future update is showing a new way to view a Chromebook’s system performance. Currently, on the stable build for Chromebooks, going to the chrome://power page allows users to view battery performance over time in the form of a chart. However, the Beta channel shows not only battery performance on this page, but CPU performance over time, too. This view gives Chromebook users a better idea of Chromebook CPU usage. (The Beta channel is one of Google‘s early release channels, where users can receive future updates early, though they can be unstable.)
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Server
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The OpenPOWER Foundation is going to reveal new innovations around Big Data technology in the next Open Innovation Summit on April 23, 2014. The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration of technology companies on Power Architecture products initiated by IBM. It is building an ecosystem around IBM POWER hardware and software and making it available for open development for the first time. Canonical has also added support for PowerSystems in the recently released Ubuntu Linux 14.04.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Announced yesterday were a bunch of Mesa/X/Wayland student projects to be worked on this summer by students attending university and participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code. There’s a ton of great open-source work Google is sponsoring that will hopefully be successful in the months ahead.
While the GSoC work is great and the X.Org Foundation has been involved most years, separate from that is the X.Org Endless Vacation of Code. The X.Org EVoC is the X.Org Foundation’s own GSoC equivalent that they fund out of their own foundation money — generated from corporate donors, etc. This is a very rarely advertised campaign put on by this foundation that also stewards Wayland, Mesa, etc.
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Applications
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Nuclear Dawn, the Source Engine game now with full Linux support after a major game update was rolled out on Steam this week, seems to be running fine on AMD Linux hardware.
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Puppy Linux is a lightweight distribution built to run in memory and therefore the overall footprint is very small.
Puppy is designed to run from a USB drive and not for installation on a hard drive.
There are a number of Puppy derivatives available including MacPup and Simplicity.
Puppy Arcade is designed for fun. It includes emulators for every games console imaginable as well as ROM loading software and joystick calibration.
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Tabletop Simulator, the very uncommon physics sandbox game that deals with the accurate simulation of a table top, is now available on Steam Early Access. The game has been creating quite a few ripples ever since its announcement. The game started its journey on Kickstarter which it quite successfully completed and is now headed for a full release on Steam.
The game is basically a sandbox with the sole purpose of simulating all kinds of possible table top physics. Now the interesting part of the game is that it is kind of a blank table top over which users can put up any game that they fancy. Once set, the game can be played just like in the real world moving around the pieces as if on a real world. But the interesting part is that, just like in the real world, should you decide, you can rage flip the table, throw the pieces at your opponent or just push the table over!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The icons in Nitrux OS are infinitely scalable, which is one of the most interesting features of this icon pack. This is also one of the biggest collections for the Linux platform, which means that it will be hard to find an application that is not supported.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE community has announced a major update to its desktop application set. KDE Software Compilation 4.13 includes bug fixes and many new features. KDE developers have focused on building a new infrastructure for semantic search, and the Kontact personal information manager includes several improvements.
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For those not keeping up closely with the Qt 5.3 development over the past half-year, fortunately at Phoronix we have you covered. Here’s some of the features that interest me most about the imminent Qt 5.3 tool-kit release
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KDE developers are still discussing whether KDE 4.14 will end up being the last Qt4-based KDE release or if there will be a KDE 4.15 release. Whatever release ends up being the last Qt4-based release will be preserved in a long-term support form. KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 2, and the other next-generation KDE components are set to be released later in the year, hence the shift in focus to the newer platform.
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Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, received the most attention in this version and that usually garners the most changes. For example, resetting the slider spin box when double clicking on it has been fixed, the tablet press/release events that did not produce any sane buttons are now ignored, support for “evdev” tablets has been added, and line smoothing options are now saved between runs of Krita.
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There’s only 1 tool to deal with an unsupported Windows XP…
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce that 39 participants have been accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program For Women (OPW) internships to work with the GNOME Project this summer.
The work will cover a wide range of tasks including improving Shell animations, annotation support in Evince, DLNA capabilities in Photos, and documentation updates. Information about all accepted participants and their projects is available in the e-mail welcoming the interns, which was sent to the Foundation mailing list.
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GNOME Maps is a simple maps application being developed in javascript, using the Gjs bindings. The map data for Maps comes from OpenStreetMap which is a collaborative project to create a free and editable map of the world.
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Tweet
GNOME Maps began development during the GNOME 3.10 cycle and going ahead for GNOME 3.14 and beyond are some ambitious plans to make this open-source OpenStreetMap-powered JavaScript application more like Google Maps in its abilities.
Right now GNOME Maps is written in JavaScript with Gjs bindings, loads up data from OpenStreetMap, and attempts to auto-find your position using the Geoclue D-Bus service. There’s also basic search support.
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“It comes with a security fix for the strongswan package which is responsible for IPsec VPN connections. The vulnerability has got the number CVE-2014-2338. It was possible to bypass the authentication and therefore to overtake a VPN connection whilst the original peers are rekeying. IKEv1 connections are not vulnerable, but IKEv2,” reads the official announcement.
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The Linux kernel for this latest testing version has been upgraded to version 3.13.10-1, which is one of the newest stable releases available, and the drbl package has been updated to version 2.8.16-drbl1. It’s likely that future versions will switch to Linux kernel 3.14 soon.
Clonezilla Live is a Linux distribution that does only one thing: bare metal backup and recovery. It’s very similar to other older cloning software, such as True Image or Norton Ghost.
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DEFT stands for Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit and is based on Lubuntu. It’s a set of tools used by law enforcement agencies during computer forensic investigations.
“Computer Forensics software must be able to ensure the integrity of file structures and metadata on the system being investigated in order to provide an accurate analysis. It also needs to reliably analyze the system being investigated without altering, deleting, overwriting or otherwise changing data,” reads the official website.
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The rest of the changes in this latest version are not all that exciting and consist of mostly updated packages. For example, Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.4, glibc has been updated to version 2.18, GCC has been updated to version 4.7, perl has been updated to version 5.14, Squid has been updated to version 3.3, httpd has been updated to version 2.2.26, iptables has been updated to version 1.4.14, and openswan is now at version 2.6.4.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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For anyone wishing to try out the release candidate to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system release, the ISO is now publicly available.
Last week Red Hat released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Release Candidate and initially it was just made available to Red Hat’s partners, OEMs, ISVs, etc. However, as planned, this week they have opened up the release candidate to everyone.
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Fedora in general tends to have a more liberal update policy than Ubuntu and others when it comes to stable releases of software; new versions of the Linux kernel are shipped down to stable releases of Fedora, etc. With Fedora 21 not arriving until late in 2014, exceptions have been given to also ship new Mesa updates for Fedora 20 users to provide a more modern and updated hardware experience. For those curious how Fedora 20′s performance compares to when it made its debut in December to how it performs now with all official stable updates, here’s some benchmarks.
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Cern, “the European Organization for Nuclear Research” and probably best known for the Large Hadron Collider, has chosen Red Hat for its mission critical systems according to a report on ComputerWorlduk.com. Elsewhere, folks are still all worked up over Heartbleed, but some say its beyond the little guy – so relax. Finally today, Chris Clay at ZDNet.com has deployed CentOS on his desktop. How’d that work out?
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Having this platform with the long-term support (10 years) for me is a step in a positive direction for desktop Linux. Not only is the base operating system good for the 10-year period, but I’m also able to find updated applications that keep in line with some of the latest Fedora versions, without having to upgrade the entire operating system at one time. Plus, the recent adoption of CentOS by Red Hat will only make this GNU/Linux distribution even stronger.
The upgrade process with Fedora is fine for some and is an easy way to refresh the entire system at once, but for remote computers that I support it just makes sense to go with an operating system with long-term support so that the base will stay static for many years to come and packages on that base can be updated remotely. I’ll definitely be doing more work with CentOS 6, while we wait for the release of CentOS 7 later this year.
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Fedora
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for April 22nd, 2014.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For this new Long-Term Support release, major changes have been implemented, not only in Ubuntu, but in its derivatives as well. Trusty will be supported for five years for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Kylin, while the other flavors using a different desktop environment will be supported as well, if only for three years. These include Xubuntu and Lubuntu.
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Ubuntu 14.04 adds back an option to have window level menus. There are two caveats, though. First, the defaults have not changed. If you want the new menus you’ll need to head to the system settings and enable them yourself. Once you’ve done that you’ll find that Canonical’s decision on where to put the menus is a tad unusual: instead of adding the menu as a line of options below the window title bar the way you might expect, Ubuntu 14.04 packs them into the title bar itself to save space.
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Testing Ubuntu for phones is now even simpler with an application that is capable of installing the new operating system from Canonical without having to delete Android. Getting a dual boot system in place will perhaps turn the attention of even more users towards the new open source platform for mobiles and tablets.
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When LG acquired the WebOS project from HP early last year, it was a stripped down Linux-based mobile operating system hardly fit to run on any hardware. Then in January, less than a year later, LG debuted its new WebOS smart TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And until the first WebOS TVs hit retail shelves earlier this month the team was working around the clock for the release.
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For years now, pundits have predicted that the age of connected TVs is upon us, and televisions have become much smarter, but LG Electronics is one of a growing number of companies betting that an open source development model can really drive the trend forward. The company recently made Connect SDK, an open source software development kit, available to Android and iOS developers for the creation of apps that could reach tens of millions of big TV screens around the world.
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Shenzhen China based Lemaker.org has launched its Banana Pi single board computer for $49 plus shipping at Ali Express. The Banana Pi is aimed at Raspberry Pi users who want a more powerful processor without abandoning the comfort and convenience of a familiar board design. First noticed by CNXSoft, the board has dimensions, port positions, and 24-pin header layout similar to the Raspberry Pi, and supports the same add-on modules, says Lemaker.org.
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The “BB.Suit,” a wearable wireless router garment prototype created by Dutch design house By Borre, runs OpenWRT Linux on a TP-Link router board.
Last month at South-by-Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, Dutch fashion designer Borre Akkersdijk unveiled his wearable computer called the BB.Suit. While most wearables are eye- or wrist-wear, the BB.Suit is an actual onesie garment with electronic circuitry woven in, including Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and a WiFi access point.
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Phones
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Android
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Review While most Chinese smartphone OEMs started life making cheap tat and then slowly began moving upmarket, Oppo has taken a slightly different tack. Its devices have been fairly high-end from the get-go and the N1, initially released running Android 4.2 back in September 2013, made quite a splash.
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CyanogenMod is now officially supporting the Kindle Fire HD 7 and Kindle Fire HD 8.9. CyanogenMod 11 comes with a relatively clean version of KitKat, plus a number of enhancements that make CyanogenMod the single most popular custom ROM on the planet.
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Google’s Project Tango is a platform for Android phones and tablets designed to track the full 3-dimensional motion of the device as you hold it, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment around it. The devices track themselves with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and collect 3D points with a built-in depth-sensing camera. Project Tango is progressing at a fast pace thanks to many open source tools that facilitate the use of the 3D data.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Pricing for white-box tablet products in China are likely to drop during 2014 as demand is expected to decrease while competition intensifies, according to China-based supply chain sources.
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“Even though the IT industry and geek culture can be innovative and progressive, the reality is it is often antiquated and backward,” said 451 Research analyst Jay Lyman. “This is particularly so when it comes to workplace discrimination and harassment based on gender, sexual orientation, race, age or other factors. You would expect more from good software developers and IT professionals.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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When it comes to software, the best way to learn something new, or even just figure out if it’s the right tool for you, is to dig your hands in, get dirty, and try it out. For the OpenStack universe, this is where TryStack comes in.
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Education
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Every generation since the beginning of human existence has passed its value system, principles, methodologies, and skillsets on to the next generation. This passing on of information within cultures has been followed by the development of a systematic approach to learning techniques. Formal structures were created throughout the world to learn and apply these skillsets.
During the middle ages, the monasteries of the church became the nucleus of education and literacy. Ireland, during those times, was known as a country of saints and scholars. During the Islamic Golden age in Baghdad, the House of Wisdom was established and became the intellectual hub. Similar institutions of great nature and vision were established in other parts of the globe as well.
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Funding
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Google has published today their list of accepted student proposals for various open-source organizations to work on this summer… The X.Org Foundation work, which includes work to Mesa and Wayland, has seven projects to be tackled.
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BSD
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OpenSSL is the dominant SSL/TLS library on the Internet, but has suffered significant reputation damage in recent days for the Heartbleed bug. The incident has revived criticism of OpenSSL as a poorly-run project with source code that is impenetrable and documented, where it is at all documented, badly and inaccurately.
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LibreSSL is a fork of the SSL/TLS protocol code from OpenSSL and aims to rewrite code as well as remove a lot of functionality that is only of limited use or has been deprecated and destined for removal. Developers will still worry about portability and they will work on multi-OS support once LibreSSL has an established baseline. For now, OpenBSD is the only supported platform of LibreSSL and there’s already plans to ship it as part of OpenBSD 5.6.
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OpenBSD developers “removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Jakub Jelinek on behalf of all the GNU Compiler Collection developers associated with the Free Software Foundation, has announced the official release of the GCC 4.9 compiler.
Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat wrote in the release announcement, “One year and one month passed from the time when the last major version of the GNU Compiler Collection has been announced, so it is the time again to announce a new major GCC release, 4.9.0. GCC 4.9.0 is a major release containing substantial new functionality not available in GCC 4.8.x or previous GCC releases.”
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I’ve fixed a couple of bugs affecting the network interactions which crept in a couple of releases ago. Sorry about that!
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Public Services/Government
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The education sector in the Basque Region is increasingly switching to free and open source, reports ESLE, an industry trade group representing free software IT service providers in the autonomous region in Spain. This type of software is helping schools in computing, mobile learning, open data and 3D printing, ESLE writes in a first strategic review, published in December.
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Health/Nutrition
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No, it’s not clear why anyone would ever connect a phone to a medical device.
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Sixty percent of underground water in China which is officially monitored is too polluted to drink directly, state media have reported, underlining the country’s grave environmental problems.
Water quality measured in 203 cities across the country last year rated “very poor” or “relatively poor” in an annual survey released by the Ministry of Land and Resources, the official Xinhua news agency said late Tuesday.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Twitter users swamp New York Police Department’s online campaign with police brutality photos.
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In response to a string of recent break-ins, the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has given a local Pennsylvania chapter the go-ahead to form a neighborhood watch group.
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Amherst and Leverett are holding town meetings to consider resolutions to regulate drones, and to end government use of the aircraft for assassinations.
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The peace walkers arrived sweaty and gross, feet blistered and knees creaking, and Phil was waiting for them. Phil had his signs up, his American flags out, his star-spangled cap on. He extended a tight-fisted thumbs up toward the cars exiting Creech Air Force Base. A couple hundred yards away, every couple of minutes, a drone glided earthward with a baleful elegance.
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A federal appeals court ordered the US Department of Justice on Monday to turn over key portions of a memorandum justifying the government’s targeted use of drones to kill terror suspects, including Americans.
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In the latest wave of attacks, 55 “militants” are said to have been killed.
It would probably be much more accurate to report that approximately 55 people were killed, few if any of their names are known and they are suspected to have been members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
Rather than calling these targeted killings, they should probably be seen as speculative murders — the act of terminating someone’s life when the U.S. government has the suspicion that person might pose an unspecified threat in the future.
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The Senate’s forthcoming report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques could add to the legal complications facing the long-delayed U.S. military tribunals of terrorist suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
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The man widely considered to be an architect of the CIA’s controversial enhanced interrogation techniques program is a retired Air Force psychologist living in Land O’ Lakes who likens the use of waterboarding and other methods now considered torture to “good cop/bad cop” interrogation efforts employed by law enforcement.
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Imagine you are chained with your hands between your legs, crouching. You’re isolated in a small, dark room with earphones you can’t take off. Queen’s “We Are the Champions” has been playing on repeat for 30 hours now at full volume, and you’ve lost your ability to think. It could go on for months.
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The limits put on John Kiriakou’s freedom of speech is telling of how the United States treats its political prisoners.
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In the midst of a thirty-month prison sentence at the federal correctional institution of Loretto Pennsylvania, former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou has written a letter where he reports that his children were told they had to leave the visitors room because it was “overcrowded.” Kiriakou immediately saw this as an act of retaliation for writing letters from prison.
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An Australian has been killed overseas. But the federal government is strangely incurious about it, and has nothing to say about it. Its ideology is getting in the way.
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Prime Minister John Key is refusing to comment on the possibility that more Kiwis have been killed by drone strikes in Yemen.
He last week confirmed that one New Zealander, known as Muslim bin John, had been killed alongside three others, one of them an Australian.
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Nonetheless, the reporting on shadowy military strikes that are part of a program that US government does not officially speak about is bound to rely on mostly unnamed government officials, either here in the US or in Yemen.
Just look at today’s New York Times story (4/22/14), with the headline “US Drones and Yemeni Forces Kill Qaeda-Linked Fighters, Officials Say.” The paper explains that those targeted were “militants who were planning to attack civilian and military facilities, government officials said in a statement.”
[...]
While it’s possible that the strikes are indeed targeting and killing terrorists on the verge of launching attacks, history suggests that initial claims can be flat-out wrong.
When a US drone struck a wedding convoy in Yemen last December, for example, the Times offered a sketchy account that backed the official line–”Most of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being militants linked to Al-Qaeda,” the paper explained (FAIR Blog, 12/13/13)
A 2009 US attack that included cluster bombs was initially reported by the Times as an attack on an Al-Qaeda camp. On-the-ground reporting (Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 3/29/12) later disclosed that the attack had killed 41 civilians, including 22 children and five pregnant women.
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US frigate USS Taylor (FFG 50) has entered the Black Sea, according to the US Navy, as the Pentagon announces plans to dispatch some 600 troops to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia for military exercises.
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Biden’s visit is not the first time Western representatives have traveled to Kiev in direct support of the “Euromaidan” protests and the subsequent unelected regime that violently seized power. US Senator John McCain would literally take the stage with the ultra-right, Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party leaders as well as meet with “Fatherland Party” member and future “prime minister,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
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Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, said on Monday that he had been fired and that the site was now “under the complete control” of two close allies of President Vladimir Putin.
Announcing his firing on his VKontakte page, Durov said: “Today, VKontakte goes under the complete control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov.” Usmanov is a metals tycoon who expanded into tech via his company Mail.ru, which has steadily upped its stake in the Russian social network. Until recently, Usmanov owned a 10% stake in Facebook. Sechin is the leader of the hardline silovik faction that backs Putin, is CEO of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, and is believed to be one of the Russian president’s closest advisors.
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George W Bush and five of his co-conspirators in the illegal war against Iraq are being taken to court for their violation of international law.
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Exclusive: The mainstream U.S. news media is flooding the American people with one-sided propaganda on Ukraine, rewriting the narrative to leave out the key role of neo-Nazis and insisting on a “group think” that exceeds even the misguided consensus on Iraq’s WMD, reports Robert Parry.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A newly published study has uncovered alarming indications of biological loss and ecological collapse in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that exploded in Ukraine on April 26, 1986.
Nuclear boosters have long claimed that the superficial appearance of teeming wildlife in the approximately 1,000 square mile Chernobyl exclusion zone indicates an Eden-like outcome. But the study observed a frightening halt to organic decay and the disappearance of important microbes that indicate the steady advance of a potential “silent spring.”
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One of the most divisive issues in Kitimat, B.C., in a generation came to a head Saturday night as residents voted ‘no’ against Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project.
The ballot count from Saturday’s vote was 1,793 opposed versus 1,278 who supported the multi-billion dollar project — a margin of 58.4 per cent to 41.6 per cent.
“The people have spoken. That’s what we wanted — it’s a democratic process,” said Mayor Joanne Monaghan in a statement on Sunday. “We’ll be talking about this Monday night at Council, and then we’ll go from there with whatever Council decides.”
More than 900 residents voted in advance polls on a question that has split the community.
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The Harper government is downgrading the protection of the North Pacific humpback whale despite objections from a clear majority of groups that were consulted.
Critics say the whales could face greater danger if two major oilsands pipeline projects get the go-ahead, since both would result in a sharp increase in movement of large vessels on the West Coast that occasionally collide with, and kill, whales like the humpback.
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Scientists are studying cases of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are missing—us. Homo sapiens. We too are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
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We can, and must, create common ground between the labor and climate movements.
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Finance
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Food banks were almost unheard of just a few years ago – now they are being opened in the UK at the rate of one every four days.
For Kenny and Leanne Jones, spiralling debts caused by rising utility bills and high rents led them to the St Andrew’s Community Centre in north Liverpool.
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Study finds clear link between spending cuts and rise in number of men who killed themselves between 2009 and 2010
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To understand a crucial reason for the European financial crisis that nearly caused a global financial collapse and threatened to undo a six-decade push toward a united Europe, you could look at a bunch of charts of bond markets and current account deficits and fiscal imbalances.
Or, you could take a look at new data compiled by LIS, a group that maintains the Luxembourg Income Study Database, that shows how income is distributed in countries around the world. It offers a surprising insight about why Europe came to the financial brink.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Guardian will still do anything to oblige the war criminals who invaded Iraq.
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New court filings in a federal challenge to Wisconsin’s John Doe campaign finance probe into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker undermine claims from Wisconsin Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal that the investigation is a “partisan witch-hunt” and a case of biased selective prosecution on the part of Milwaukee’s Democratic District Attorney.
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La guerre is what you supported so enthusiastically in Iraq, and involves the blasting to pieces of young children, the rape of countless women, the end of hundreds of thousands of lives and the wrecking of millions more. It involves the destruction of the infrastructure of countries and the loss of decades of economic development, and a ruinous expense to our own economy. It involves the bombing of densely packed urban areas in Gaza, for which you are an enthusiast, and from which the terror and suffering is something you will never understand. For you just sit here in the highly paid heart of the warmongering Murdoch establishment, and indulge in lies and cheats to further your income and your grubby little career.
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Censorship
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Because there is nothing of merit going on in this election-year Legislature, beyond the sort of sad lobbyist ass-patting and electoral base-touching of a state run by actual fools – fools who love guns and God and glory – our Legislature made a bit of national news last week when the Florida Senate actually passed a bill that would allow the censorship of school textbooks by individual counties. Home rule, right?
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The Chinese government has set forth its rules for the censorship of foreign video games – and it looks like a fair number of titles may be affected.
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NEWS WEBSITE Reddit has downgraded the /r/ technology stream following reports of censorship.
A statement from Reddit administrators said that some users have been overzealous, and have exerted too much control over the thread and its content and broken it as a news source.
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Here’s the situation: President Obama himself is in secretive meetings with key political figures and lobbyists in Asia to lock the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Internet censorship plan into place.
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We’ve covered the ridiculousness of the UK’s “voluntary” web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping “pornography” (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.
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Privacy
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A global conference in Brazil on the future of the Internet in the wake of U.S. spying revelations might be much less anti-American than first thought after Washington said it was willing to loosen its control over the Web.
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China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s No.2 telecoms equipment maker, on Wednesday shrugged off analysts’ concerns that its growth will suffer from media reports alleging the United States accessed servers at its Shenzhen headquarters.
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It’s been over ten months since the Guardian published the first disclosure of secret documents confirming the true depths of NSA surveillance, and Congress has still not touched the shoddy legal architecture of NSA spying.
There have been myriad NSA bills presented in Congress since last June. None of them are comprehensive proposals that fix all the problems. Many of them seem to be dead in the water, languishing in committee.
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The NSA has finally decided to tell the world how the Internet surveillance program PRISM works, though it’s been almost a year since its existence was revealed by one of the very first Edward Snowden leaks.
On Tuesday, the spy agency released a report on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the legal justification for PRISM. The document explains how the NSA collects Internet data but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it reveals almost nothing new.
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The number of Britons approving of the publications of NSA secret files by The Guardian and The Washington Post is twice the number of those who are against, according to a poll by the YouGov analytical agency. According to the survey, 46 percent of Britons polled believe that British society stood to gain by the publications of files provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_04_23/Most-Britons-approve-of-publication-of-NSA-secret-files-revealed-by-Snowden-survey-2574/
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Back in December, it was revealed that the NSA had given RSA $10 million to push weakened crypto. Specifically, RSA took $10 million to make Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, better known as Dual_EC_DRBG, as the default random number generator in its BSAFE offering. The random number generator is a key part of crypto, because true randomness is nearly impossible, so you need to be as random as possible. If it’s not truly random, you’ve basically made incredibly weak crypto that is easy to break. And that’s clearly what happened here. There were other stories, released earlier, about how the NSA spent hundreds of millions of dollars to effectively take over security standards surreptitiously, including at least one standard from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). People quickly realized they were talking about Dual_EC_DRBG, meaning that the algorithm was suspect from at least September of last year (though there were indications many suspected it much earlier).
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Following revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) deliberately weakened cryptographic standards put out by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NIST recently proposed a series of principles to guide cryptography standards-setting going forward. Access, together with a coalition of eleven other digital rights, technology, privacy, and open government groups, submitted a letter today calling on NIST to strengthen cryptography principles, noting in particular that the principles must be “modified and amended to provide greater transparency and access.”
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Recently, news of a bug called Heartbleed spread, and with it came news of the National Security Agency possibly abusing the bug to gather information on U.S. citizens. If this information is true, it would be yet another strike against the NSA.
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Intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has been installed as rector at Glasgow University.
The former US National Security Agency contractor fled from his homeland last May after revealing extensive details of internet and phone surveillance.
The 30-year-old is currently staying in Russia, where he has temporary asylum.
Speaking via a satellite link from Russia, Mr Snowden said he was honoured to take up the post but could not attend as he was not allowed in the UK.
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Civil Rights
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Just yesterday, I wrote a post about how a South Carolina construction worker was fined $525 and lost his job for not paying $0.89 for a drink refill while working at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in downtown Charleston. The point was to emphasize how the law comes down with a devastating vengeance when an average citizen commits a minor crime, yet allows the super rich to loot and pillage with zero repercussions. There is now a systemic two-tier justice system operating in these United States, and the result will unquestionably be tyranny if the trend continues unabated.
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No doubt inspired in part by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who called supporters of the Bundy ranch “domestic terrorists,” a number of liberals on Twitter expressed their desire to see the ranch and its supporters killed by drone strikes, Paul Joseph Watson reported at Infowars Monday. Such a raid would, of course, kill innocent children as well as men and women, but it seems that didn’t matter to those demanding the deadly raid.
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Christian Legal Centre calls on David Cameron to intervene in alleged religious discrimination case
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Netflix has continued to criticise US Internet Service Providers (ISPs) over the issue of net neutrality, warning that if the proposed Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger is approved, the new company will be able to use its market dominance to demand greater fees from streaming services.
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AT&T plans to possibly bring speeds of up to a gigabit to 21 new cities. But before these cities get too excited it’s time to call Ma Bell out for its gigawashing.
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For almost 15 years, “Internet Governance” meetings1 have been drawing attention and driving our imaginaries towards believing that consensual rules for the Internet could emerge from global “multi-stakeholder” discussions. A few days ahead of the “NETmundial” Forum in Sao Paulo it has become obvious that “Internet Governance” is a farcical way of keeping us busy and hiding a sad reality: Nothing concrete in these 15 years, not a single action, ever emerged from “multi-stakeholder” meetings, while at the same time, technology as a whole has been turned against its users, as a tool for surveillance, control and oppression.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Jane Kelsey (58), professor of law at the University of Auckland in New Zealand said that the United States would mention the 2014 report on trade barriers and raise an issue with South Korea to get what they want in exchange for approving South Korea’s membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
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Copyrights
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Responding to a consultation of the EU Commission, various music industry groups are warning against a right for consumers to sell their MP3s. IFPI notes that people should be barred from selling their digital purchases because it’s too convenient, while the quality of digital copies remains top-notch. Interestingly, the UK Government opposes this stance with a rather progressive view.
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04.22.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Chromebooks–portable computers that run Google’s Chrome OS platform–are seeing rapid adoption in many niche markets, including the education market, but the holy grail for Google is to get them in the hands of enterprise users. To achieve that goal, there needs to be a solution that bridges the world of Windows applications with Chrome OS. And, Google and others are working on exactly that challenge.
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As for the partner relations, PC brand vendors are gradually accepting Google’s Chrome OS and even trying to provide dual-OS solutions. Microsoft’s Surface tablets also created a conflict of interest with its tablet vendor partners. With Windows-based smartphones continuing to fall behind Android-based models, most smartphone vendors have placed less attention on Windows Phone and started dropping support after the software giant’s acquisition of Nokia.
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Kernel Space
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“It’s been a week, so here’s another rc. And while -rc1 was one of the biggest rc’s in memory, rc2 looks fairly normal. We had a few niggling issues fixed, but it really wasn’t anything horribly worse than usual. It might be a *bit* bigger than most -rc2′s, but let’s wait to see after rc3 whether things are actually busier than usual. Quite often rc2 is calmer than rc3, with it taking a week for some issues to show up,” Linus Torvalds said in the announcement.
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Graphics Stack
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The R9 295X graphics card was announced earlier this month and consists of two R9 “Hawaii” GPUs and 8GB of video memory. However, given the rather poor and not too useful CrossFire support under Linux, the R9 295X will likely not be too beneficial. The R9 295X also costs $1500 USD, so it’s out of the hands of most Linux gamers.
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Benchmarks
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Since last week’s release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we have been busy benchmarking Ubuntu 14.04 in a variety of configurations. Already some of the Ubuntu “Trusty Tahr” benchmarks we have done recently include 12.04.4 vs. 13.10 vs. 14.04 benchmarks, a 20-way graphics card comparison, server benchmarks, and results in many other articles. We are in the process of doing a larger, server/enterprise-oriented Linux distribution. More distributions are still being tested, but to get a new week of benchmarking started at Phoronix, here are some results of Ubuntu Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, and openSUSE.
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For this benchmarking we used the stock compilers available through the Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” archive, which provided GCC 4.8.2 and LLVM Clang 3.4 — the current stable versions of each compiler. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set were “-O3 -march=native” to optimize the generated code performance for this particular hardware. GCC 4.8 introduced AMD Jaguar support while LLVM Clang 3.4 followed with the support. GCC 4.9 will already land AMD Excavator (bdver4) support.
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Applications
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The issue of Adobe possibly releasing its products for Linux is not a new one. It seems to pop up every once in a while in various articles and discussion threads here and there. There was even a petition to encourage Adobe to release its software for Linux. But is it a good idea? Should Adobe finally begin releasing its products for Linux? I think it would be a smart move on Adobe’s part and I’ll tell you why in this column.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The most powerful tool at your disposal is the command line. With tools like the gdb and strace commands, you have everything you need to help figure out what is causing that application to die. For those unwilling to learn the command line, your tools are a bit less powerful, but still quite helpful. Although the GUI tools won’t give you the raw data needed to send to developers, they will help you troubleshoot the issue at hand. These tools will also give you a deep peek into your system…and who doesn’t want that?
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As a reminder, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 Trusty Tahr, powered by a version of Kernel 3.13.9 optimized by Canonical, is using GNOME 3.10 as the default desktop environment.
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Games
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Valve’s effort in pushing Steam OS and Linux gaming seems to be paying off. Developers and publishers who thought Linux to be a non-viable option now are porting their games to that platform. And so is GameConnect, the developer behind the RTS and FPS hybrid Nuclear Dawn. After a very long silence, they have just announced that their game is ready for Linux. Back in February, the GameConnect confirmed in an email that no one was working on the Linux version, so it was at a standstill while both the Windows and Mac version were well on their way and working 100%.
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Nuclear Dawn, the post-apocalyptic first-person RTS hybrid video game powered by Valve’s Source Engine, is now out of beta on Linux — two years after the game was formally released for Windows gamers.
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To be fair, there already are some publishers that have shown their support for the game, and 2K is probably the biggest one of them. The newly-announced Civilization Beyond Earth will be arriving on Linux, although the port is being handled Aspyr Media, which is not exactly ideal.
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Star Citizen is a game you cannot help but get excited over. A new video has surfaced from PAX where parts of the game where shown off and it doesn’t disappoint. Move over Eve Online!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Taking place earlier this month in Nürnberg at the SUSE office was the 2014 FreeDesktop Summit where members of GNOME, KDE, Unity, and LXDE-Qt desktops collaborated over joint topics important to the success of the Linux desktop in a cross-desktop world.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Nice to see that our work on Kate is awarded.
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Here’s a short video he shot (the colors is of course the phone – we’re not going for a sepia theme just yet… or are we?). Just look it! Look I tell you what – you go to a design office and go “hey you know what a group of dedicated individuals working together in cooperation can do faster and better than you?” and then show them the widget theme and the activity the cooperation and just the wonder of it.
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Hello planet! Okay, that’s not even a word, GSOCer..! but I am selected in Google Summer of Code 2014 with KDE. My project is Integrating Plasma mediacenter with Plasma Next and porting it to KF5 and Qt5. My mentors are Sinny Kumari and Shantanu Tushar Jha.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The libinput library that’s a generic means of handling Linux input devices so the support can be standardized and shared amongst other Wayland compositors and other possible “clients”, now has patches for tablet support.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat and Ubuntu are Linux rivals and they disagree on many technical details, but they do agree on one thing: Docker, a container technology is going to be a major virtualization technology in the years to come.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 14.04 was released recently and as usual the other flavors of Ubuntu have also been updated to 14.04 including Ubuntu GNOME. Ubuntu GNOME tends to get overlooked a bit, given all the attention that goes to the main Ubuntu release. However, that’s a shame since it has quite a lot to offer anyone who prefers the GNOME interface to that of Unity.
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Taiwan-based Korenex, owned by Beijer Electronics Group, has been spinning its Linux-based, JetBox industrial controller and router computers since at least 2007, with more recent models including the circa-2011 Jetbox 9345-w. The new JetBox model 5300-w is one of its lower-end boxes, run by a 185MHz Atmel AT91RM9200 processor, and supported here with just 64MB of RAM.
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Phones
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Android
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Cloudproject and Elam Kitchen have launched a line of Android-based home furnishings and appliances that feature transparent multitouch displays.
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Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first Google smartphone to be sent up to the ISS and strapped to SPHERES: in 2011, a Nexus S was sent up too, also with the intention of augmenting NASA’s SPHERES with more sensors.
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Mixed news this week for Android users as Google changes its approach in protecting Android devices against malicious apps code.
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The offering makes the source code of 38 UI widgets in the Kendo UI Core publicly available for use by both commercial and non-commercial developers. In addition, developers have access to related tools for mobile app development, such as templates and input validation. The resources are available from both Telerik’s website and a GitHub repository.
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I’ve been using Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS), for the websites I manage for over four years now. Though there may be some quirks in working with an open source product, I cannot imagine doing it any other way.
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“Work on stuff that matters” is a famous call to action from founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly. But, how about working on stuff that matters while getting paid for it? There are an abundance of open source-related jobs out there if you’ve got the right skills.
Mark Atwood, Director of Open Source Engagement at HP gave a talk on How to Get One of These Awesome Open Source Jobs at the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta, Georgia this year (April 2 – 3). His talk was originally targeted to students, but he later removed the “Advice for Students” part because the seven tips below really apply to anyone looking to score their open source dream job.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for its LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America event, which takes place August 20-22 at the Sheraton Chicago. It looks like it will be a good event, and the CloudOpen schedule looks particularly compelling. LinuxCon has actually sold out every year since its debut, and the CloudOpen part of the conference has been increasing in scope.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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“Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times,” reads an announcement by The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) which oversees more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives. ASF, a non-profit corporation, provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of over 170 open source software projects. Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.
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Education
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Funding
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Google just announced their list of accepted student projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code. After going through all of the projects on the list for the different upstream open-source projects involved, there’s a ton of improvements to be worked on by students this summer and financed by Google. This is perhaps the most exciting Google Summer of Code ever.
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Public Services/Government
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The German city of Munich is complimenting the free and open source software development community for providing fast and easy assistance. On the blog of the city’s IT department, Peter Onderscheka, business unit manager for IT stategy and IT security, writes how the developers’ quick responses helped the city implement new services. Examples include sending alerts about new job openings, a solution based on Phplist, and an online order form for coupons, using Pdfsam.
“Users of open source products can easily get in touch with the developers, pose questions, propose features and even help fix bugs”, Onderscheka writes. “The developers usually respond immediately.”
“These informal and direct contacts provide straightforward and free access to the core developers of open source software”, he adds.
Onderscheka thanks two developers in particular, Michiel Dethmers, from the Netherlands, who is involved in the Phplist project, and Italian Andrea Vacondio, helping the the city tweak Pdfsam.
Choosing the Phplist newsletter solution allowed Munich to rely on the feedback from the community “which answered in detail our questions about security.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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She has a passion for technology and design. Moving from Italy to Berlin has taken Beatrice to the heart of technology in Europe. But, it was a trip to Stockholm, Sweden that led her to join Open Knowledge.
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Programming
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Computer programming is an art and is essential to the way we live. Computing provides the bricks and mortar of our lives, it’s an important component in the way our world is built and shouldn’t be tucked away under sufferance in a dry and dusty science classroom as an adjunct to something else. Programming is fun and practical and useful, and makes things happen. Just by grasping a few concepts, anyone can be a programmer and turn a game on its head, make something work – and this is a world that the Raspberry Pi was made for, a tool such as Meccano and Lego that is useful and fun for both teachers and pupils alike, and is as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
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Science
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The most amazing thing about Fox’s new Cosmos series is that it exists at all. A program that is, at its core, educational, airing at 9 p.m. on Sunday and competing with shows like Game of Thrones…in what universe does that happen?
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Health/Nutrition
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The tragedy of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster took place almost three years ago. Since then, radiation has forced thousands out of their homes and led to the deaths of many. It took great effort to prevent the ultimate meltdown of the plant – but are the after effects completely gone? Tokyo says yes; it also claims the government is doing everything it can for those who suffered in the disaster. However, disturbing facts sometimes rise to the surface. To shed a bit of light on the mystery of the Fukushima aftermath, Sophie Shevardnadze talks to the former mayor of one of the disaster-struck cities. Katsutaka Idogawa is on SophieCo today.
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The importation ban, issued with the consent of the Russian parliament, was initiated in late February. As the orders trickle down, a widespread monitoring effort will be placed over the Russian agricultural sector. Imports will be heavily inspected to assure that GMOs aren’t entering the country. This new all-out ban strengthens very restrictive policies already put in place. Current Russian law requires producers to label any product containing GMOs in excess of 0.9 percent of the product.
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Security
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The news is rife with screeching reports about the Heartbleed vulnerability, with some news outlets questioning the security model of open source. If you aren’t familiar with it, Heartbleed is “…a security bug in the open-source OpenSSL cryptography library, widely used to implement the Internet’s Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol” according to Wikipedia. While it certainly is a bad thing, it’s also not the armageddon of the Internet that some in the media have been proclaiming it to be, and it’s not a harbinger of doom for open source software development either.
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First, DSL router owners got an unwelcome Christmas present. Now, the same gift is back as an Easter egg. The same security researcher who originally discovered a backdoor in 24 models of wireless DSL routers has found that a patch intended to fix that problem doesn’t actually get rid of the backdoor—it just conceals it. And the nature of the “fix” suggests that the backdoor, which is part of the firmware for wireless DSL routers based on technology from the Taiwanese manufacturer Sercomm, was an intentional feature to begin with.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Syrian rebels have been sighted wielding anti-aircraft weapons in various combat sectors including the Damascus region in the last few days. Just as on April 6, debkafile was the first publication to disclose the arming of Syrian opposition forces with their first US weapons, BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles, our military sources now reveal that they have also acquired – and are using – Russian-made 9K310 Igla-1 aka SA-16 anti-tank rockets, which have an operational range of 5.2 km.
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Federal court rules in favour of ACLU and New York Times to force release of papers describing legal justification for strike
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The Obama administration must disclose the legal basis for targeting Americans with drones, a federal appeals court ruled Monday in overturning a lower court decision likened to “Alice in Wonderland.”
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In the years-long conversation about President Barack Obama’s incredible drone wars, we’ve heard opaque, albeit scintillating, references to threat matrices and kill lists. But there’s one thing we’ve never heard: What is the president’s legal rationale for extrajudicial killing of Americans with drones?
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At least 55 al-Qaida militants have been killed in Yemen, the country’s interior ministry claimed after an intensive weekend air offensive in which US drones are believed to have been involved.
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Different though Ukraine is from Iraq and Afghanistan there are some ominous similarities in the Western involvement in all three countries, says Patrick Cockburn
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Stormfront founder Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, criticized Miller for giving users of his site a bad reputation. “We have enough of a problem with how we are portrayed without some homicidal whack job coming along and reinforcing that,” Black told the Daily Beast. After he was banned from Stormfront, the SLPC said Miller posted more than 12,000 times on a similar forum, Vanguard News Network, whose slogan is “No Jews, Just Right.”
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In truth, if colonial conquest and force majeure are legitimate grounds of sovereignty, and if extermination of a population can wipe out the legal right to self-determination, then in international law Britain has the right to Diego Garcia and to give it as tribute to their US overlords. But if international law has any relationship of any kind to principles of justice, then Britain should not be permitted to reap the dubious benefit of genocide. What international law actually is in the neo-conservative era is the real question before the UN tribunal now looking at the Diego Garcia question.
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American drone missile attacks and air strikes killed more than three dozen people in southern Yemen over the weekend. The carnage coincided with press reports that the Obama administration is moving to ship advanced weapons to “rebel” groups fighting the Assad government in Syria.
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Turkey was behind the horrific Aug. 21, 2013, sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of innocents in a Damascus suburb “to push [President] Obama over the red line” and strike Syria, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh claims in the London Review of Books.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Britain’s nuclear dump is virtually certain to be eroded by rising sea levels and to contaminate the Cumbrian coast with large amounts of radioactive waste, according to an internal document released by the Environment Agency (EA).
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James Dyson invented the best vacuum cleaners. Now, with the M.V. Recyclone barge, he’s applying the same ideas to sucking up plastic pollution from the world’s rivers. We talked to him about his plans.
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In the week ahead, a coalition of tribal communities, ranchers, farmers and allies calling itself the ‘Cowboy Indian Alliance’ plans to lead a series of protests, ceremonies, and direct actions in the heart of Washington, DC in order to drive home their united opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and the destructive expansion of tar sands mining and fossil fuel dependence it represents.
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Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration’s conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.
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Finance
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They call him the Robin Hood of the banks, a man who took out dozens of loans worth almost half a million euros with no intention of ever paying them back. Instead, Enric Duran farmed the money out to projects that created and promoted alternatives to capitalism.
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Censorship
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Twitter executives have admitted that the company has blocked two Turkish social media accounts which were used to leak secret government documents and accuse authorities of widespread corruption.
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Privacy
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Snowden’s puzzling single-question Q&A with Russian president Vladimir Putin on the topic of domestic surveillance prompted many to believe this was an indication that he was, at the very least, under control of Russian intelligence, if not actually acting in concert with it. Putin took the apparent softball and lined it right down the middle, responding with a series of statements and denials that made Russia appear to be the antithesis of the US government: tightly controlled intelligence built on respect for its citizens’ privacy.
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A sergeant in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department compared the experiment to Big Brother, even though he went ahead with it willingly. Is your city next?
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When sheriff’s deputies here noticed a burst of necklace snatchings from women walking through town, they turned to an unlikely source to help solve the crimes: a retired Air Force veteran named Ross McNutt.
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Civil Rights
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Covered by the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois this week, seven members of the Peoria Police Department executed a search warrant yesterday in order to discover the identity of someone operating a fake Twitter account that parodied Peoria mayor Jim Ardis (pictured above). The police seized multiple mobile phones in addition to computers stored at the residence. Three people at the home were brought into the police department for questioning and two members of the household that were working at the time were picked up by police from their place of employment and taken to the station.
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Sweden, like most European countries, has a number of governmentally-run state lotteries that are an efficient extra tax on the people who can’t math properly. Because of the jackpot sizes (nine-figure euro or dollar amounts), they are still hugely popular. From June 1, the Swedish state lottery requires people who want to buy a simple lottery ticket to identify and register.
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A popular Los Angeles high school science teacher has been suspended after students turned in projects that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom.
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DRM etc.
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Which left dealing with the installed software. The BDT-230 is based on a Mediatek chipset, and like most (all?) Mediatek systems runs a large binary called “bdpprog” that spawns about eleventy billion threads and does pretty much everything. Runnings strings over that showed, well, rather a lot, but most promisingly included a reference to “/mnt/sda1/vudu/vudu.sh”. Other references to /mnt/sda1 made it pretty clear that it was the mount point for USB mass storage. There were a couple of other constraints that had to be satisfied, but soon attempting to run Vudu was actually setting a blank root password and launching telnetd.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?
Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.
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Copyrights
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The Pirate Bay reached a dubious milestone today, as copyright holders have now asked Google to remove two million of the site’s URLs from its search results. According to Google this means that between one and five percent of all Pirate Bay links are no longer discoverable in its search engine.
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