• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Is Everywhere – 12 Awesome Devices Powered By Linux

Besides well known devices like Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle etc, Linux is powering some of the most amazing devices around the globe and in the sky.

Google Demos Linux Running on Hacked Glass

Although Google is offering a limited set of developer tools for Glass — and more are on the way — the company doesn’t want to stop hackers from tinkering even further.

Google Glass rooted and hacked to run Ubuntu live at Google I/O

Google Glass Hacked To Run Ubuntu At Google I/O

New tablet boots Ubuntu Linux, Android, and Windows

We’ve seen several Linux tablets emerge over the past year or so, but examples with triple-boot capabilities are much less common.

Ekoore tablet can be used to run Android, Windows and Linux

This tablet boots Android, Windows 8 and Ubuntu

Server

• IBM collaborates with Red Hat and Suse to port Linux applications to Power architecture

  LONG TIME LINUX SUPPORTER IBM has opened an office in Beijing that will help developers port Linux applications to its Power architecture.

  IBM has been pushing its Power architecture for over 20 years, with its RISC chips intended for use in mission critical systems. Now the firm is working with Red Hat and Suse to help Linux developers port applications to the Power architecture by opening an office in Beijing.

• Scale Computing Scales Up With Linux KVM Servers

  Scale Computing is scaling up its server business with a new HC3x server.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 5 Episode 8

  In this episode: There’s a critical vulnerability in the kernel. But relax, it’s been fixed. The International Space Station is switching from Windows to Debian. But not Debian 7, which has just been released. The beginner’s programming environment, Scratch 2.0, is out and the Raspberry Pi gets a super-light camera module. As always, hear our discoveries, our reports on the challenge and your own opinions in the Open Ballot.

Kernel Space

• The Iron Penguin, Part 2

  Linus, has dived in to save the day. Where did the robot come from? What is it’s purpose? Can the Iron Penguin stand against it?

  Find out next time. Same penguin-time, same penguin-channel.

Applications

• ncp: Possibly the easiest yet

• 4 Open Source Alternatives To Adobe Photoshop

  Adobe Photoshop is not just a requirement for web designers, but it is a growing need of professional photographers as well. Not everyone who wants to use the Adobe photoshop can use it and the reason for it is not the lack of skills, as we all know there are plenty of tutorials available for almost every functionality of this image editing tool. The reason why so many people cannot use Adobe Photoshop or the reason why so many people are looking for open source alternatives to it is its price. The current version, which is the Adobe Photoshop CS6, costs $628.88 on Amazon.com. Now considering its price as high as it is, it is almost impossible for many people to afford it, which is why we have compiled the best 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, so you can fulfill your photoshop needs without having to spend a fortune over it.

• Useful Apps to Aid Parental Control in Linux

  So, you have a machine running Linux which is also used by kids. We all know how the Web may be dangerous, especially for youngest of Internet fans. But do you know how to shield your Linux system and control what your kids do online?

• Proprietary

  • SerNet builds complete Samba 4 packages

    Since the first free software implementation of the Active Directory Domain Controller (AD-DC) in Samba 4 became available, the large variety of potential scenarios for updating Samba 3 has made it difficult for Linux distributors to add the full set of features to their installation packages. Usually, they will choose one part or the other – the Samba 4 source code includes two daemons: samba for operating an AD-DC, and the Samba-3-compatible smbd for file server or domain member operation. However, the distribution packages usually only include one daemon.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Shell Script To Find Directories Which Consume Highest Space

  • The Beginner’s Guide to Inkscape

  • Can’t update Iceweasel from Experimental on Wheezy

  • Migrate from MySQL to MariaDB in FreeBSD

  • Short Tip: egrep – using grep with more than one expression

  • Add Alacarte Menu Editor to Fedora 18 Xfce

  • How to Change the Attributes of a File in Linux using chattr Command

  • Using Solr With TYPO3 On Debian Squeeze

• Games

  • More games will be heading our way!

    So as usual behind the scenes I have been doing digging contacting various developers to find out if they have Linux versions planned and here are a few that got back to me! Games including Edge of Space, Battlepaths and more, all of these are currently on Desura.

  • Valve Is Telling Linux Steam Users to Play More Left 4 Dead 2

    The Left 4 Dead 2 Beta for Linux has been released for a few days now, but it seems that players are not swarming it, as expected.

  • Akaneiro: Demon Hunters is now in Open Beta for Linux!

    Akaneiro: Demon Hunters the ARPG that draws from Little Red Riding Hood is now in Open Beta for Linux! Sadly it’s not going very smoothly and I am not impressed so far.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • The apps of KDE 4.10 Part V: Kopete

    What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.

  • Porting Krita to OpenGL 3.1/ES2.0

  • Amarok 2.7.1 Released!

    Hi there, while we’ve been working very hard on the next Amarok feature release, the 2.8, we also haven’t forgot the majority of our users using the stable versions.

  • Calligra 2.6.3 Released

    The Calligra team has released version 2.6.3, another bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a number of important bug fixes to 2.6.2 and we recommend everybody to update.

  • Return of the bird, Colibri 0.3.0

  • digiKam Software Collection 3.2.0 is out..

    digiKam team is proud to announce the 3.2.0 release of digiKam Software Collection. This version include a new album interface display mode named list-view. Icon view can be switched to a flat item list, where items can be sorted by properties columns as in a simple file manager. Columns can be customized to show file, image, metadata, or digiKam properties.

  • Qt 5.1 enters beta

    The Qt developers at Digia are moving at a pace – just over a month after releasing the Qt 5.1 alpha, they have announced the first beta of Qt 5.1. Mostly, the beta continues to deliver the features of the alpha – Qt Quick Controls, Qt Quick Layouts, a serial port module for hardware and virtual serial posts, an updated Qt Creator, support for static Qt builds, and official support for the Qt sensors module. The Android (Qt Quick 1 and 2) and iOS (Qt Quick 1 only) support has been refined in the beta release, though it is still at the level of a technology preview.

  • KWin running in Weston

    This week I decided to do some research for the Wayland porting of the KDE Plasma workspaces. One of the features we will need in future is a Wayland session compositor which runs nested on a Wayland system compositor. Of course one could think of setups without a system compositor, but overall I think that a nested compositor simplifies the setup and allows to have all the low level technologies in one place without duplication in all the various compositors. +1 for working together.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.8.2 Is the Last Release in This Branch, Download Now

    GNOME 3.8.2 has been officially launched and it features a lot of fixes, documentation and translation updates, not to mention a sleuth of new features.

Distributions

• Screenshots

  • Antergos 2013.05.12 Screenshots

• Red Hat Family

  • eCube Systems Announces NXTera 6.3 Distributed Middleware Support for Linux Redhat Enterprise 6

    New Version of NXTera 6.3 makes it possible for legacy Entera applications to run on Linux Redhat Enterprise 6 with support for SOA integrated JAVA, C, C#, FORTRAN, and COBOL applications.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Still Figuring Out How To Handle Hybrid Graphics

        While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.

      • Unity 7, Compiz To Be Polished For Ubuntu 13.10

        As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical’s next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.

        Discussed just now during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit were bug-fixes and enhancements for the desktop Unity version in Ubuntu 13.10. Unity 7 improvements being planned for the October release include presenting new Unity indicators, more Unity scopes, the in-dash payments method, and selected design bugs will be addressed.

      • Asus 1015E 10 inch notebook with Ubuntu coming soon for around $215

      • Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical to Close ‘Brainstorm’ Web Portal?

        A few days ago, Canonical reiterated its commitment to restoring the Ubuntu “community” Web portal to front-and-center of official Ubuntu websites. At almost the same moment, news hit that the Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Brainstorm site, another part of ubuntu.com that has served in the past as a vector between developers and community members. Bad timing or cognitive dissonance? Here’s a look at the details.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever

          Clement Lefebvre, Mint founder and lead, recently announced the public release of Linux Mint 15 Release Candidate. Mint 15 brings lots of fixes, two new tools, and several new features. In fact, Clem said, “Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”

        • Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” gets release candidate

          The Linux Mint developers have announced a release candidate for the upcoming version of their distribution, Linux Mint 15. The release, which is code-named “Olivia”, is being built on Ubuntu 13.04 and is billed by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre as “the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”

        • Tea and cookies for your new team members

          What does every development team want? New contributors!

Devices/Embedded

• Hackable SODIMM-style ARM9 COM has onboard display

  Crystalfontz America has announced availability of an SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) with an optional onboard 128 x 32-pixel OLED display. The tiny CFA10036x module is built around Freescale’s 454MHz ARM9-based i.MX28x SOC (system-on-chip), includes 128MB or 256MB of RAM, and houses its open-source embedded Linux OS in a microSD slot.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Studio opens its doors

      Few of the announcements at Google’s I/O conference have involved open source software, but one announcement did: Android Studio, a new IDE environment for Android application development. Although Android Studio is only an early preview at the moment, Google is looking at it to eventually become the default development environment for Android applications, replacing the current solution of the Eclipse IDE and ADT Plugin.

    • Why There Was No New Hardware At Google I/O

      The challenge with a conference like Google I/O, where the announcements arrive one after another, is to see both forest and trees. Analysis of individual announcements – such as Google’s new Pandora/Rdio/Spotify competitor All Access, or the granular pricing for its compute infrastructure – is relatively straightforward. What’s more important, however, is perceiving the larger pattern.

    • Google says it has 900 million Android activations

      The company also launches new APIs to improve Android apps

    • Making Linux and Android Get Along (It’s Not as Hard as It Sounds)

    • Sonic the Hedgehog Arrives on Android & iOS!

    • White Nexus 4 and Android 4.3 coming June 10th

      Rumors suggested that a white Nexus 4 might appear at Google IO, and they were right. We obtained the elusive white Nexus 4 and we can confirm it’s a carbon copy of the previous Nexus 4, just with a different color casing. That might not be the most exciting news, but we also learned the white Nexus 4 would hit the Google Play store on June 10th and it would be accompanied with Android 4.3.

    • Archos intros 3G-ready 80 Xenon tablet

      Archos has announced its latest Android tablet, the 80 Xenon, will be available in June with a $199 price tag. The 8-inch tablet is 3G-ready (SIM unlocked HSPA), runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and features the gull Google Play Store experience.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • XO Tablet Supposedly Becomes Available on June 1

    Three weeks ago I mentioned that OLPC Association has been remarkably quiet about the Android-based Walmart XO Tablet which it had introduced at CES 2013 in early January. Since then things have progressed a little bit with the Web site receiving a bit of a facelift.

Events

• Open Cloud Take Two: The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013

  The last year has been a whirlwind of activity for Apache CloudStack. Citrix proposed CloudStack for the Apache Incubator in April of 2012, and just over a year later we’re gearing up for a second collaboration conference – this time in Santa Clara, CA, from June 23-25.

Web Browsers

• Opera quietly settles lawsuit

• Opera and ex-employee settle £2.2m lawsuit

  NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE COMPANY Opera has settled the £2.2m lawsuit against ex-employee Trond Werner Hansen.

• Chrome

  • Google Touts Big Share for Chrome, and New Voice Search Plans

    At this week’s Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Chrome has reached the milestone of 750 million monthly users. This number is being misinterpreted by some to mean that 750 million people are using the Chrome browser on desktop computers.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox

    Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, “to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies.”

    The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

  • Ubuntu 13.10 may ditch Firefox for Chromium

    For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.

  • Ubuntu 13.10 may ditch Firefox for Chromium

    For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.

  • Mozilla Plans to Renumbers Open Source Firefox Security Updates

    Ok, I know… the ‘E’ in Firefox ESR does not stand for ‘Enterprise’, but it should. The ESR – Extended Support Release is an effort to help organizations stay with a secure version of Firefox for longer period of times than the current fast track six-week release cycle of Firefox.

    I rely on Firefox ESR and I recommend it to lots of people because it’s a much safer version of Firefox to use with custom apps that sometimes – break – with the fast release cycle of Firefox.

    The most recent Firefox mainline release is version 21, while the current Firefox ESR is 17. The next Firefox ESR is currently schedule to coincide with the Firefox 24 mainline release.

Business

• Colosa Announces ProcessMaker 2.5 Open Source BPM Software

  Back in April, during SugarCRM’s annual SugarCon Conference, the company announced it would integrate ProcessMaker into it’s suite of cloud-based services, allowing seamless use of business process management tools directly from the Salesforce interface. About the same time the company also announced the new SugarCRM mobile application powered by HTML5 and offering a fast, easy way to access SugarCRM’s powerful features on mobile devices.

• Open Source Workflow Platform ProcessMaker Unveils New Features

• VIDEO: ONF Chief on the Future of OpenFlow SDN

  The OpenFlow protocol stands at the center of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution, and at the center of OpenFlow stands the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). As the revolution progresses, however, vendors are attempting to look beyond OpenFlow. Where does that leave the ONF?

• Semi-Open Source

  • Talend 5.3 focused on Hadoop usability

    Talend’s data integration platform is being aimed at solving the complexity issues that surround deployment of Apache-Hadoop-based solutions. The developers have been focusing on creating Apache Pig developer tools and creating code in Pig Latin, which is said to remove the need to learn about MapReduce, the fundamental architectural element behind Hadoop. Users work with Talend’s Big Data graphical tools and that generates Pig Latin code which is then run on the Hadoop cluster; to optimise its running, a graphical mapper can be used to rework the data flow and mapping within the cluster.

Funding

• BonitaSoft Raises $13M Series C For Its Open Source Business Process Management Solution

• Vanedge Provides $3M Series A Funding to OpenGeo

  Canadian venture capital firm Vanedge Capital has made a US$3 million Series A investment in OpenGeo Inc., a New York-based provider of commercial open source geospatial software. At the same time, the company spun out from its incubator

• OpenGeo Completes $3 Million Series A Financing and Launches as Independent Open Source Software Company

  The OpenGeo Suite is widely used for managing and sharing spatial data. OpenGeo has led the industry shift toward flexible, interoperable geospatial software infrastructures and will use this Series A funding to further enhance its industry-leading product and training offerings and reach a broader array of customers.

Project Releases

• FreeIPMI 1.2.7 Released

Public Services/Government

• Fraunhofer FOKUS institute releases Fuzzino fuzzing library

  Researchers from FOKUS (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems) in Germany have released the Fuzzino data fuzzing library as open source software. The library allows existing test tools to be prepared for fuzzing and aims to make the development of new fuzzing tools unnecessary. Fuzzing is the process of testing a system for hidden weaknesses by presenting the system with random and sometimes erroneous input data.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • A directory for open data projects

    Open (government) data as it is understood nowadays can still be considered a new concept. It started to gain traction worldwide since the Obama memo in early 2009 and the launch of data.gov a few months later. Following successful leading examples of the US and UK governments we have seen open data flourishing all over the world over the last three years. About three hundred open data catalogues have been identified so far.

  • Location, location, location

    The rapid rise in the number of mobile devices has led to a concomitant rise in the amount of location data available. Proprietary services are emerging to take advantage of that data, but open source has a strong foothold in the form of OpenStreetMap.

Programming

• Google previews PHP on App Engine

  PHP is the latest addition to the range of languages supported on Google’s App Engine. The PaaS (Platform as a Service) already supports Python, Java and Go and, like the languages before it, PHP is being introduced first as a limited preview experimental feature.

Standards/Consortia

• Google pushing for quick adoption of their new open source VP9 video codec

  VP9 is an open source and royalty free video compression technology under active development by Google with which they hope to replace the popular H.264 standard. The development of VP9 begain in late 2011 with two goals in mind, to provide a 50% reduced bit rate compared to the older VP8 codec while maintaining the video quality, and also optimizing it to the point that it becomes superior to the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (H.264) standard as well. We have to keep in mind that H.264 is pretty old now and the same standard is getting an update to H.265 which as much as doubles the data compression rate compared to the older H.264 standard.

• Google’s open video proposal closes door on software freedom

  Google/MPEG-LA deal showed promise, but Google’s requirement for user licenses may bring a backlash

Health/Nutrition

• Organic Farmers on Alert Following Monsanto Ruling

  Farmers “concerned” for ruling’s implication on upcoming suits against the biotech giant

Security

• RIPE: Attacks on domain name systems are on the increase

  30 million open resolvers in the domain name system and a 200 per cent increase in the number of attacks in 2012 – these alarming figures were discussed by administrators at the 66th meeting of the RIPE IP address registry in Dublin this week. A panel discussion revolved around how to motivate the black sheep to implement long overdue security measures before large-scale attacks call the regulators to action.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Stephen Harper’s administration has increased spend from $9m to $16.5m in the last year

  Canadian government doubles advertising spend on tar sands

• Scientists Agree (Again): Climate Change Is Happening

  Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing — quite literally sometimes — with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale’s April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans’ conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding six months. The decline, the authors surmised, was most likely due to “the cold winter of 2012-13 and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted.”

Censorship

• Forcing domain names off the Internet does not help

  Around May Day, we received advance notice that the Swedish Prosecution Authority had filed a petition with the Stockholm District Court requesting the seizure of two domain names, thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se. Now, this comes as no surprise and our General Counsel, Elisabeth, has already blogged about this.

• Prosecutor Hints That Root Domain Registry Is Criminally Liable For Copyright Monopoly Infringements On The Pirate Bay

  Prosecutors in Sweden have sued the root domain registry of .SE domains to kill the domain name of The Pirate Bay. The root registry fights back heavily. This case is important to watch, as it can have thoroughly chilling results for the Internet’s domain name system if criminal secondary liability is established at the DNS level.

• Pirate Bay Domain Registrar Assists Copyright Infringement, Prosecutor Claims

Privacy

• Consumers not interested in privacy? Think again

• Shakespeare: on the mark for open data, misses on privacy and transparency

  The independent review on public data prepared by Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the Data Strategy Board, has just been published. Much of what Shakespeare recommends is very good stuff, and includes things that ORG has been proposing for some time. But we have some disagreements, particularly on the analyses and proposals around privacy.

Civil Rights

• America’s greatest threat: Unsafe work conditions

  If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11′s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?

• We made it! – Global Breakthrough as Retail Brands sign up to Bangladesh Factory Safety Deal

  Geneva 16 May 2013 – The world’s leading retail labels commit to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh before the midnight deadline. The Accord now covers more than 1000 Bangladeshi garment factories. Implementation starts now!

• CCC calls for action after another deadly collapse

  Clean Clothes Campaign is calling for immediate action from all international brands following today’s collapse of the Wing Star Shoes factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The collapse of the ceiling cost the lives of at least two people, and injured seven. The workers were stitching sneakers for sportsbrand Asics when the ceiling caved in on top of them.

• Lead the World on Internet Rights, Web Inventor urges Brazil

  Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, addressed a press conference on 16 May 2013 at the WWW Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Berners-Lee used his address to state his support for the Marco Civil da Internet, (Marco Civil) a landmark draft Bill in Brazil that many have called ‘a Constitution for the Internet’.

• Tipping law enforcement to possible terrorist activity is purpose of 13-county program

  Sheriffs in 13 Northeast Florida counties announced an online system Thursday for residents to report suspicious activity they think may be terrorism-related.

DRM

• One Step Closer to the Open eBook Tipping Point: O’Reilly Joins the EPUB 3.0 Ecosystem

  Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • IsoHunt Will Take DMCA Safe Harbor Fight to the Supreme Court

    In March, the Ninth Circuit declared that Canada-based BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is not entitled to protection under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA due to its conduct many years ago. IsoHunt filed a petition for a rehearing before a jury, but yesterday a Ninth Circuit panel unanimously rejected it. Isohunt lawyer Ira Rothken informs TorrentFreak that the right to a jury trial is protected by the constitution and isoHunt is now in the process of requesting a Supreme Court review.

  • Why are Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Backing the Fight *Against* the Blind?

    One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it’s more important to preserve copyright “inviolate” than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

    You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the “proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities” for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Measuring Linux By the VAR Metric

I don’t think the unnamed and unknown blogger who writes under the banner of The VAR Guy would argue with me if I were to say that over at his site it’s all about the money. That’s not a bad thing. The value added resellers, the VARs who are his readers, would expect nothing else.

These are guys and gals to whom hardware and software are all part of the same packet. This is the crowd who couldn’t care less about the usability of, say GNOME, for the average home user and who might even be tempted to look for loopholes in the GPL, because it would be easier to make money with free software if it wasn’t free. In other words, these are folks who’ve traditionally mainly stood firmly in the proprietary camp, where the rules for resellers have been more clearly defined. These are the dudes and dudettes who make RMS very wary whenever he sees them coming our way.

Linux vs Windows 2013: An Objective Comparison

Desktop

• Malaysia adopts Google Apps, Chromebooks for education

  Malaysia has adopted Google Apps and Chromebooks as part of the country’s plans to integrate Web usage in a bid to reform its education system.

  According to a blog post by the search giant on Wednesday, Malaysia adopted Google Apps for 10 million of its students, teachers and parents. In addition, primary and secondary schools will receive Chromebooks.

Server

• IBM Brings Power Linux Servers to China

  IBM is serious about expanding the footprint of the Linux operating system running on Power servers.

• Intel Hybrid Cloud Server: Dead or Alive?

  Rumors are swirling that Intel Hybrid Cloud (a small business server that has cloud and managed services capabilities) has been discontinued. If true, this is the latest setback for resellers that are seeking on-premises alternatives to Windows Small Business Server (SBS), which Microsoft killed in 2012. Still, there are cloud-based alternatives — including Microsoft’s increasingly popular Office 365.

• Google and NASA collaborate on AI research with new quantum supercomputer

  Google and NASA have teamed up to launch a new laboratory focused on advancing machine learning. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab — hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California — will contain a quantum supercomputer that will be used by researchers from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and all over the world to pioneer breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

Kernel Space

• Exploit for local Linux kernel bug in circulation – Update

  Back in April, the Linux kernel developers fixed an incorrectly declared pointer in the Linux kernel. However, it appears that they overlooked the potential security implications of such a bug – particularly the fact that it is possible to gain access to almost any memory area using a suitable event_id. The developers only got into gear and declared the bug as an official security hole (CVE-2013-2094) after an exploit was released that proves that normal, logged-in users can gain root access this way.

• Critical Linux vulnerability imperils users, even after “silent” fix

• Local root vulnerability in the kernel

• Linux x32 Is Made Easier With Ubuntu 13.04

  While there isn’t yet a release yet of Ubuntu in the Linux x32 ABI flavor, some packages now found in Ubuntu 13.04 make it easier to setup this binary interface that brings some 64-bit advantages to the 32-bit world.

• The Good & Bad Of Btrfs In A Production World

  A web hosting company has publicly shared their thoughts on the Btrfs file-system for Linux. While often discussed as the next-generation Linux file-system, Btrfs isn’t fully baked for use in a production world quite yet.

• The btrfs backup experiment

  Today we’re talking about our experience with btrfs, the next-gen Linux filesystem. btrfs has been maturing rapidly over the last few years and offers many compelling features for modern systems, so we’ve been putting it through its paces on some of our backup servers.

• More Linux Utilities Come For USB Logitech Devices

  It’s been a while since last reporting any improved to Logitech device support on Linux or any other USB gaming mice/keyboards for Linux. However, a Phoronix reader has written in with some news.

• The Staging Pull Goes In For The Linux 3.10 Kernel

  Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted his feature pull requests on Monday morning for the USB, staging, driver core, and TTY/serial areas of the Linux 3.10 kernel that’s just entered development following yesterday’s Linux 3.9 kernel release.

• Port of KVM to arm64

• Linux: The Gold Standard of Code

  “Is Linux code the ‘benchmark of quality’? Well, it is very good, no doubt about that,” said Google+ blogger Brett Legree. “The main take-away point from the study should be that open source software, including Linux, is on par with proprietary software from a quality perspective. So, Linux code could be considered a benchmark of quality — it is as good as anything else out there.”

• On the Job with a Linux Foundation Systems Administrator

  If you’ve ever dreamed of working directly with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ted T’so or any of the other Linux luminaries, you could work your way up through the ranks of kernel developers submitting patches and fixing bugs. Or you could work as a systems administrator on The Linux Foundation’s IT team, managing the servers that they use every day to build the largest collaborative software development project in the world.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge Gallium3D Driver Merged

    The modern Gallium3D graphics driver for supporting Intel Sandy Bridge “Gen6″ and Ivy Bridge “Gen7″ graphics has been merged into mainline Mesa!

  • Nouveau In Linux 3.10 Kernel Isn’t Too Exciting

  • Intel Linux Driver Gets Support For New Haswell IDs

• Benchmarks

  • GCC vs. LLVM/Clang On AMD’s FX-8350 Vishera

  • 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison

    Combining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.

  • Gallium3D LLVMpipe Compared To Nine Graphics Cards

    Yesterday after publishing the 15-way open-source vs. closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics comparison there were some requests by Phoronix readers to also show how the LLVMpipe software rasterizer performance is in reference. For this article to end out the month are the OpenGL performance results from nine lower-end AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running with their respective Mesa/Gallium3D drivers compared to the LLVMpipe software driver in two configurations.

Applications

• Free DJ Software `Mixxx` Sees New Release

  After more than a year of work, Mixxx 1.11.0 has been released recently, featuring a new beat detector, colored 3-band waveforms and many other new features as well as various bug fixes and performance improvements.

• Best Linux Tools for Enterprise Developers and Systems Administrators

• Proprietary

  • Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3

    IBM is shutting the doors on Lotus 1-2-3, the software program that made the IBM PC and Microsoft household names.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Short Tip: egrep – using grep with more than one expression

  • Configuring Gmail as a Sendmail email relay

  • Introduction to the Linux Command Line

  • Overriding the default SELinux policies

  • Using OpenDKIM to Sign Postfix Mails on Debian

  • Connect your android galaxy tablet to ubuntu via usb

  • Configuring Gmail as a Sendmail email relay

  • How to Run Fedora Linux on the MacBook Air Without Touching the SSD

  • Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 Code Name “Wheezy” Server Installation Guide

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.5.29 Brings Better JavaScript Performance

• Games

  • Humble Double Fine Bundle Mega-Review

    With only six days left to claim your copies, we go hands-on with every game to help you decide…

  • Anomaly 2 Released

  • X3: Albion Prelude Released For Linux Gamers

    One month after the release of X3: Terran Conflict for Linux, Egosoft has now released X3: Albion Prelude.

    Albion Prelude is the latest title in Egosoft’s X3 series. X3: Albion Prelude was originally released for Windows back in 2011 and has now been released for Linux with the whole Steam Linux gaming rush and having their own Linux talent in-house.

  • Life of Pixel dedicated to the brilliance of classic gaming machines

    It differs to the usual platform game by including game types from lots of different machines (and more to come too!) and emulates their graphical style so, it makes this actually quite an interesting one!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• OpenMW 0.23 Brings NPC Movement AI, Item Repairing

  OpenMW, the open-source engine re-implementation of Elderscrolls III: Morrowind, has a new version out. OpenMW 0.23 features the initial implementation of NPC movement AI, item repairing, enchanting, levelled items, texture animation, basic particles, and a lot more. This release comes just ahead of Morrowind’s eleventh birthday.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE 4.11 Beginning to Take Shape

    It’s been just a week since KDE 4.10.3 was announced, but 4.11 is already reaching its first milestone freeze. TSDgeos reminded developers today that the 4.11 Soft Feature Freeze happens in just one more week. What does that mean for users?

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 5th May 2013

  • KDevelop 4.5 IDE Offers More Integrated Unit Testing

    KDevelop, the integrated development environment for KDE that’s designed for C++ support and other programming languages, experienced a major release. Several new features are presented by KDevelop 4.5.

  • rekonq 2.3.0

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Cut Yourself a Tasty Slice of Gnome-Pie App Launcher

    Its interface design is the reason for its playful name, but Gnome-Pie won’t run you in circles when it comes to launching applications and getting into menus. It’s easy to set up your “pies” on the desktop so that you’ll have no problem finding your desired menu item for launch. Those weary of text-based app launchers will find Gnome-Pie to be a very productive alternative.

  • The Last GNOME 3.8 Point Release Has Been Made

    GNOME 3.8.2 was released this morning and it serves as the last bug-fix release in the GNOME 3.8 series. All work now is being focused on GNOME 3.10.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • GNU Automake 1.13.2 released

• Screenshots

  • Linux Screenshot Beauty Contest from DarkDuck (Part 3)

    I hope you have enjoyed the first and the second parts of the Linux Screenshot Beauty Contest.

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 13.04 KDE review: One of the most elegant distros in the Linux world

    Let me begin this way, I am a great admirer of Sabayon for quite sometime. This Italian distro is based on Gentoo Linux and provides an enviable ensemble of pre-installed applications which just works out of the box. Those who are scared of Gentoo, Sabayon can be a good starting point. Apart from being based on one of the most popular Linux operating systems, one of the greatest USPs of Sabayon is it’s aesthetics. It comes with a very professional dark blue theme with application interfaces tweaked to match it. I haven’t seen many Linux distros doing it, to be honest.

• Arch Family

  • Arch-based Manjaro Linux touts user-friendliness

    For those of you always looking for — or at least willing to try — the newest Linux distribution on the scene, a pretty fresh candidate is Manjaro Linux, which recently announced some updates that should be appealing to users who aren’t necessarily command-line junkies.

    Manjaro is based on Arch, rather than Ubuntu or Debian, which is a version of Linux known for being lightweight, fast, and minimalist in its approach. Arch has been aimed primarily at more intermediate and advanced Linux users in the past, but the Manjaro team has placed an emphasis on the user-friendly aspect of this distro.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat expanding in M’sia and Asean (update)

    Open source software solutions provider Red Hat Inc is strenghtening its presence in Asean region, especially Malaysia, through partnerships.

    Its general manager for Asean Damien Wong said Red Hat would invest in partner-specific marketing, sales and technical support to promote sustainability of the channel partner ecosytem.

  • Red Hat Expands Technical Account Management Services to Offer SAP® Solution-centric Support

  • Fedora

    • EasyUbuntu Equivalent For Fedora Linux: EasyLife

      As you may know, Ubuntu has the EasyUbuntu app that helps the Ubuntu beginners install additional drivers, with a nice graphical user interface.

    • The Fedora Project ARMs up

      The Fedora Project, an open source collaboration project supported by Red Hat and the developer community, rolled out their first Fedora-powered high-density ARM-based datacenter servers this week in a migration that was the first time they were able to use standard tools, such as Kickstart and PXE on ARM-based datacenter hardware.

• Debian Family

  • Review: CrunchBang (“#!”) Linux 11 “Waldorf”

    This is the last week of classes for me. I have turned in all my assignments and a handful of days until finals, so I can take today and tomorrow to write a couple of reviews at my leisure. The first will be #!.

    #! should be familiar to many readers here. It is a lightweight Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox. While it is not technically a rolling-release distribution because it is pinned to the stable release, there were tons of preview releases for this version. Now that Debian 7 “Wheezy” is finally stable, so is #! 11 “Waldorf”. Since version 10 “Statler”, the Xfce edition has been dropped, so #! is back to using Openbox exclusively.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical to maintain Linux 3.8 until August 2014

        The Ubuntu kernel developers plan to provide security fixes and minor improvements for version 3.8 of the Linux kernel until August 2014; version 3.8 was released in February. The announcement by Canonical employee Kamal Mostafa came just days after Greg Kroah-Hartman had discontinued the maintenance of Linux 3.8; Kroah-Hartman oversees the maintenance of the stable and long-term kernels and is currently maintaining stable kernel version 3.9 and long-term kernel versions 3.0 and 3.4.

      • On Brainstorm

        Recently the Technical Board made a decision to sunset Brainstorm, the site we have been using for some time to capture a list of what folks would like to see fixed and improved in Ubuntu. Although the site has been in operation for quite some time, it had fallen into something of a state of disrepair. Not only was it looking rather decrepit and old, but the ideas highlighted there were not curated and rendered into the Ubuntu development process. Some time ago the Technical Board took a work item to try to solve this problem by regularly curating the most popular items in brainstorm with a commentary around technical feasibility, but the members of the TB unfortunately didn’t have time to fulfill this. As such, brainstorm turned into a big list of random ideas, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and largely ignored by the Ubuntu development process.

      • Getting the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit to 1.0

        A while back I started a project called the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit. The goal is simple: create a single downloadable kit that provides all the information and materials you need to go out and help advocate Ubuntu and our flavors to others. The project lives here on Launchpad and is available in this daily PPA. If you want to see the kit in action just run:

      • The Problem of Sunsetting Ubuntu Brainstorm

        Yesterday, it has been suggested to sunset Ubuntu brainstorm. While the arguments on the surface make a lot of sense, a bigger problem seem to be not as much in the focus of the discussion as it maybe should be.

      • Ubuntu One Detailed Guide for 13.04

      • Ubuntu Website and the Community Link

        There has been much teeth gnashing about the removal of the ‘Community’ link from the top of the ubuntu.com site. As a member of the Ubuntu Community Council I have tried to gather my thoughts before blogging about this. Recently, I read an article that got me rather upset.

      • Mir Display Server Gets A Demo Shell, New Demos

        Canonical’s Mir Display Server now has a simple demo shell as well as a multi-window compositing demo.

        In continuing to monitor the public Bazaar development repository for Mir, there isn’t too much to report on this week. The only highlights were:

      • Unity 8, Mir To Be Experimental Choice In Ubuntu 13.10

        For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical’s next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October.

        The default desktop will be Unity 7 and it will be powered by an X.Org Server when running Ubuntu 13.10. However, the Qt5-based Unity 8 in conjunction with Mir will be readily packaged and available for those wishing to give it a go. Meanwhile, for the Ubuntu 13.10 state of the phone/tablet version, that is expected to be Mir-powered in time.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • 8 Reasons Why Ubuntu Users Should Try Out Linux Mint

          Ubuntu is moving in all directions lately. They are making sure that they find themselves on tablets, smartphones, and even on televisions. With the high amount of efforts being put in to make Ubuntu the best product in the FOSS community, there have been some polarizing decisions that have managed to alienate a few longtime Ubuntu users. Ever since the decision to switch to Unity was taken, there have been many Linux users who don’t find Ubuntu as user-friendly as they used to back then. There have been forum wars, IRC battles, and a bunch of irksome blog posts about usability–or lack thereof– of Ubuntu. However, as time progressed, Ubuntu has matured quite a lot and has managed to regain its top spot as one of the most user-friendly distributions in the FOSS world.

        • Kubuntu, KDE Has Little Hope For Ubuntu’s Mir

          Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE’s KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical’s Mir Display Server from the beginning. He’s now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor.

        • Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” RC released!

          Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools, “Software Sources” and “Driver Manager”, make their first appearance in Linux Mint.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi camera module now available

  In development since late last year, the Raspberry Pi camera module is finally available. The module can be purchased from RS Components or Element 14 and is based on an Omnivision 5647 5MPixel sensor which is configured to give a still picture resolution of 2592×1944 or deliver video with 1080p resolution at 30fps. It manages this in a 20x25x10mm package which connects to the Pi over a flat ribbon cable.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Nexus Android Jelly Bean

      We heard rumours that Samsung had plans to launch Galaxy S4 running stock Android, and it’s true! Google has just unveiled the Samsung flagship phone, Galaxy S4 powered by pure vanilla Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2.

  • Android

    • Quad-core Android phone keeps cool with water pipe

      NEC has announced an Android smartphone that uses a water-cooling system to keep its quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro system-on-chip (SOC) from overheating. The NEC Medias X 06E integrates a liquid cooling pipe near the SOC to cool off the 4.7-inch phone, which is being marketed at Japanese women.

    • New IntelliJ-based Android Studio IDE now available

      At Google I/O today, Google released an early access preview version of an Android integrated development environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA. To its IntelliJ foundation, Android Studio adds an enhanced drag-and-drop GUI layout editor, Gradle-based build system, Lint tools, Android-focused wizards, and the ability to preview how apps look on different screen sizes.

    • 25 Android Entertainment Apps to Fill Your Downtime

    • Android Studio: New Android Development Environment From Google

    • Android 4.3 pops up ahead of Google I/O

      A leak tips off security enhancements in the Android update expected to be unveiled at Google I/O.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • ASUS should license Ubuntu for Android for its Padfone

    At the moment, Canonical doesn’t allow users to download Ubuntu for Android (or perhaps it’s still not ready for prime time), and the company is rather looking for OEMs to license the software. I believe that the “perfect vendor” to take advantage of this software is ASUS, which should offer it pre-installed on its Padfone series. This way Padfone users would get an added benefit when they dock their smartphone to the tablet shell, with the ability to use real desktop apps.

  • HP Slatebook x2 : Android Powered Notebook Convertible

    HP has finally entered the Android hybrid market with HP SlateBook X2, the first Tegra 4 powered android convertible. The 10 inch tablet connects to the keyboard directly with a dock connector and also has a touch pad for mouse operations. The screen is a bright 1920 X 1200 full HD IPS display keeping things on screen very crisp and clear.

  • SlateBook x2: Tegra 4-powered Android hybrid

  • HP goes Android with x2 hybrid

Open-source community deploys ARM microserver cluster

Calxeda, maker of ARM server-on-chip (SoC) cards, announced that the Fedora Project, an open-source development community sponsored by Red Hat, has deployed servers with its EnergyCore SoCs inside. The cluster consists of Viridis mircoservers made by a UK company called Boston.

Migasfree developer journeys from graduation to open source career

When I first started to learn how to code and program, as a student and during the pre-internet era, it was common practice to share your source code as you were creating it. My classmates and I assumed that was the best way for us to learn—from each other.

Almost everyone shared, except for a few. I never fully understood why they didn’t, because they would learn from others but not share thier creations afterwards. As I got older and moved into the business world of making money, I began to understand as I was faced with the obscure system of intellectual rights, patents, trademarks, and copyright (and copyleft). Of course, I often think that without these obstacles, technology could go much further and become more ethically correct. But, it seems that the focus on “information is power” is still more important. Luckily, I found out that my feelings towards this are not so weird and actually are shared by many.

Events

• Gluster Workshop at LinuxCon Japan 2013

  Heading to LinuxCon Japan 2013? If you’ll be attending the conference or will be in Tokyo on May 31st, we’d like to welcome you at the Gluster Community Workshop.

Web Browsers

• Chrome vs. Firefox

  For a few years now, the great debate between Chrome and Firefox has raged on. Which browser is faster? Which is easier to install? In this article, I’ll tackle each of these subjects, in addition to providing some personal insights on each of these topics.

• Midori browser should now work on Wayland

• SlateKit Shell: A New Qt5/QML Web-Browser

  SlateKit Shell is a new QML-based web-browser sporting a “sliding drawer” user-interface. The WebKit-powered browser is written entirely in QML and JavaScript.

• Mozilla

  • We should keep Firefox as default browser in Ubuntu

    Why fix something if it’s not broken? If others prefer Chromium well then “sudo apt-get install chromium-browser” and I guess that’s just my two-cents on the topic.

  • Firefox 21 Arrives, Featuring Health Reports, More Social Features

    Version 21 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is out for Windows, the Mac, Linux and Android. You can download the standard browser here, and get Firefox for Android here. If you’re already a Firefox user, you should be automatically upgraded. There are quite a few enhancements in this version, including additional Do Not Track features, a Health report, social APIs and choices on the desktop and open source fonts for the Android version.

SaaS/Big Data

• Your Cloud Provider Is Toast. Now What?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• JavaTP
  Attackers Target Older Java Bugs

  It’s no secret that Java has moved to the top of the target list for many attackers. It has all the ingredients they love: ubiquity, cross-platform support and, best of all, lots of vulnerabilities. Malware targeting Java flaws has become a major problem, and new statistics show that this epidemic is following much the same pattern as malware exploiting Microsoft vulnerabilities has for years.

• A more colorful LibreOffice unveiled

• 50 million Apache OpenOffice downloads in a year

  Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the open source office suite. More than 80% of these downloads have come from Windows users, with the rest of the downloads spread between Mac OS X and Linux. Over time, the percentage of Windows users has slightly increased at the expense of Mac OS X, with Linux usage hovering steady under 5%.

Business

• Open source code and business models: More than just a license

  As an organization or even individual there always seem to be questions when considering whether or not to make your project or code snippet open source. Many times, it starts with trying to figure out which license to use. But there are many other things to consider. We derived a list for you the next time you ask yourself: Should I open source my code?

Project Releases

• GDB 7.6 Supports AArch64 Linux, New Features

  Version 7.6 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, has been released and with it comes support for new debugging targets and a whole lot more.

• OpenWrt 12.09 Brings Wireless Improvements

  The popular Linux distribution for routers and other wireless/network devices, OpenWrt, has been christened by a new version. OpenWrt 12.09 “Attitude Adjustment” brings with it many new features.

Public Services/Government

• Open Source Software Helped Obama Win the 2012 Election Campaign

  If you were to list all the reasons why Obama beat Romney in the 2012 presidential race, chances are DevOps, the cloud, and open-source software (OSS) wouldn’t be on your list. They should be. As Harper Reed, the CTO of Obama for America explained in his recent Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) speech, all these technologies played a major role in the campaign. Or, as the New York Times explained after the election: “Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.”

• Croatia’s President praises creative spirit of open source community

  President of Croatia Ivo Josipović appreciates the creative and innovative spirit of the open source community. “What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative”, he was quoted as saying, while opening the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 in the country’s capital Zagreb yesterday. “Most importantly, open source brings helps to strengthen democracy.”

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Mobile robot app competition offers $25,000 prize

    Kuka announced a 20,000 Euro Kuka Innovation in Mobile Manipulation Award for innovative mobile manipulation applications using its Kuka YouBot service robot. The open source Kuka YouBot is equipped with omnidirectional wheels and one or two 5-DOF manipulator arms, and runs Ubuntu Linux and ROS (Robot Operating System) on an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX board.

  • Blender dives into 3D printing industry

    Blender 2.67 was released last week with a 3D printing toolbox. LGW spoke to Dolf Veenvliet, Bart Veldhuizen (Shapeways, Blendernation), and Rich Borrett (Ponoko) about the new tools and the future of 3D printing.

Programming

• Point 13.04 Screenshots

Health/Nutrition

• How Private Consultancy Firms have brought the NHS to its knees.

  The NHS has spent billions of pounds on management consultants in recent years. It was profit-making private management consultancy firms (who shall remain nameless) that explored and reported on ways in which the NHS would make efficiency savings. The £20 billion pounds of ‘savings’ that were identified were built around the concept of what became known as QUIPP “Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention”.

  Central to the theories around QUIPP was the idea that much more of our patients should and indeed would be treated in the home. It was argued that the successful triaging of patients would relieve much of the pressure on our NHS. The logic on the face of it appeared reasonably sound. Many patients who arrive at A&E could indeed be treated elsewhere. If a way could be successfully found to divert patients to the most suitable care setting then it was argued that savings could be made in reducing A&E admissions, and that some wards could close as a result.

• Is Monsanto’s New Genetically Engineered Soy a Health Food?

  To eat these two types of fats in the right ratio, we can either eat more omega-3s or eat fewer omega-6s. Companies like DSM and Monsanto want us to do the former — so we buy their high omega-3 products (and pay top dollar for them, too!). But scientists recommend going by the other route, reducing our omega-6 consumption. One healthy way to do this is by using monounsaturated fats, like those found in olive oil.

  Author Susan Allport, who wrote The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them, agrees. “The best way to up the omega-3s in one’s tissues is simply to reduce one’s intake of omega-6s,” she says. “Monsanto will try to persuade us that we can get around this elephant in the room (the large amount of omega-6s in the food supply) with their new soybean but it certainly won’t be any more effective than the advice to eat more fish has been.”

  However, Monsanto does not want us to stop eating unhealthy levels of omega-6s, because their patented genes are in most of the soybeans grown in the U.S. And soybean oil is our number one source of omega-6s. (Soybean oil is often sold labeled simply as “vegetable oil.”)

  So instead of cutting into their sales by switching to a healthier fat, they’d prefer to keep making you unhealthy with soybean oil. But they are willing to offer you this “band aid” fix of a high omega-3 soybean that they anticipate will be grown on less than five percent of the nation’s soybean acres. Oh, and you’ll probably have to pay extra to get it, too.

Security

• Rygel 0.18.2 Fixes Numerous Bugs

  The developers behind the Rygel home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) for the GNOME desktop environment, announced the immediate availability for download of the second stable release for the 0.18.x branch.

  Rygel 0.18.2 is the second and last maintenance release for Rygel 0.18 and it incorporates numerous fixes, all in order to make Rygel a more stable and reliable release.

Finance

• Ambiguity in Tax Rules and Disintegration of Election Law May Have Led to IRS Tea Party Mess

  The controversy surrounding the IRS singling-out Tea Party-inspired groups seeking tax exempt status — while inexcusable — might be attributable, in part, to the agency’s failure to create clearer rules for political activity in the post-Citizens United electoral landscape, and it being inappropriately tasked with enforcing campaign finance law, tax law experts say.

  After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United opened the door for corporations — both for-profit and non-profit — to spend on elections, 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits became the vehicle of choice for wealthy donors seeking to keep their political spending secret.

• New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart

• Goldman ordered to pay investor $2.5 mln by arbitrators

  Goldman Sachs & Co must pay more than $2.5 million to an investor who alleged the firm recommended an unsuitable investment in a private equity fund, a securities arbitration panel has ruled.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Problem With Journalism? Scott Pelley Blames the Internet

  When big-time reporters decide to try their hands at media criticism, the results are usually disappointing–but they can also be quite revealing.

  So when a video of CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley started to making the rounds, the headlines associated with it piqued my interest. Over at the Weekly Standard, it was “CBS Anchor: ‘We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again.’”

• Matthews: Obama Needs to Break a Union Like Reagan

  Praise for a conservative president’s breaking the air traffic controllers’ union–that’s what you hear on the liberal cable channel. (The video is below.)

Censorship

• The Supreme Court Is an Ass

  From Free Press’s helpful explainer of the AP phone records scandal…

Privacy

• Strongbox: Aaron Swartz’s last gift to internet privacy

  Tragically, Aaron Swartz, hounded by an apparently over-zealous prosecutor, committed suicide in early 2013. His just-unveiled major open-source privacy project, DeadDrop, lives on in a citizen and press protection program, The New Yorker’s Strongbox.

  [...]

  The Strongbox servers themselves are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast in a physically and logically segregated area at a secure datacenter, but they otherwise have no elements in common with Condé Nast, The New Yorker’s publisher. As Amy Davidson, a New Yorker senior editor wrote, “Over the years, it has also become easier to trace [email] senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that. As it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”

  Aaron would have been proud.

• New Yorker unveils open source whistleblower system designed by activist Aaron Schwartz

• The New Yorker’s Strongbox Anonymity Application Has Some Notable Roots

Civil Rights

• On Paid Sick Days, Will Gov. Rick Scott Side With Moms or Mickey Mouse?

  Florida Governor Rick Scott is under pressure from Florida moms to veto a bill that would deliver a “kill-shot” to local efforts to guarantee paid sick days for workers. The legislation, which can be traced back the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is backed by major corporate players with questionable labor records, including Disney.

  In April, the Florida legislature passed a corporate-backed bill to preempt local paid sick day laws, largely in response to a small-d democratic effort in Orange County to have residents vote on the issue. More than 50,000 Orange County voters signed petitions to place a paid sick day measure on the ballot, which would be effectively blocked if Governor Scott signs the law.

• Syria crisis: number of refugees tops 1.5 million, says UN

  The scale and speed of the exodus of those fleeing the violence in Syria has been underlined by UN figures showing that the number of refugees has topped 1.5 million, just 10 weeks after the millionth refugee fled to safety.

• Israel to approve four unauthorised West Bank settler outposts

  Legalisation, which comes amid rise in attacks on Palestinians and their property, could frustrate US peace efforts

• Grief, Grind, and Glory of Work

  Last month the world heard the tragic news that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh, were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.

Intellectual Monopolies

• GMO Labeling Passes Vermont House as Activists Prepare to March Against Monsanto

  In an advance that makes history, Vermont’s House of Representatives passed a bill on May 10 requiring foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled. This is the furthest any such legislation has made it through the legislative process in the United States.

  Vermont’s legislative session was due to end already, but negotiations over a tax bill have kept lawmakers in the capitol this week. With the Senate’s attention focused fiscally rather than on food, however, H.112 to label GMOs will have to wait to be taken up by the Senate in January 2014.

• Trademarks

  • Open source hardware trademark application rejected

    On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was “merely descriptive.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

IBM to push Linux apps on Power iron in China, then elsewhere

IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM’s first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet that Big Blue is trying to light a fire under its Linux-on-Power efforts.

IBM Focuses on Linux in China, Partnered with Red Hat and SUSE

In Beijing this week, IBM has announced that it is further extending its reach into China with the opening of its first Linux innovation center for Power Systems there. The center will initially be focused on Power Systems clients and business partners, and will be located inside IBM’s China Systems Center. According to the company, the new center “will make it simpler for software developers to build and deploy new applications for big data, cloud, mobile and social business computing on open technology building blocks using Linux and the latest IBM POWER 7+ processor technology.”

Linux Top 3: Google Chooses Debian, Ubuntu Installer and GNOME’s Bugzilla

Munich’s Score Is 93%

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 310 – Glusterfuck

Kernel Space

• New Linux Foundation Members Help Advance Enterprise Linux

• Why Use Xen?

• Tux3 File-System Claims To Be Faster Than Tmpfs

  The experimental Tux3 file-system has already made claims of being faster than EXT4. The latest claims out of the open-source file-system is that it’s faster than Tmpfs, which is quite a feat given its very thin layer between VFS and SWAP.

  Daniel Phillips of the Tux3 file-system wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list this evening, “When something sounds to good to be true, it usually is. But not always. Today Hirofumi posted some nigh on unbelievable dbench results that show Tux3 beating tmpfs. To put this in perspective, we normally regard tmpfs as unbeatable because it is just a thin shim between the standard VFS mechanisms that every filesystem must use, and the swap device. Our usual definition of successful optimization is that we end up somewhere between Ext4 and Tmpfs, or in other words, faster than Ext4. This time we got an excellent surprise.”

• Linux 3.10 – The biggest Linux RC 1 Ever?

• VA-API Updated, Now Works With GStreamer 1.0

  The GStreamer VA-API plug-ins have been updated with support for the GStreamer 1.0.x API.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Radeon R600 GPU LLVM 3.3 Back-End Testing

    One of the exciting features of LLVM 3.3 that is due out next month is the final integration of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end. This LLVM back-end is needed for supporting Gallium3D OpenCL on AMD Radeon graphics hardware, “RadeonSI” HD 7000/8000 series support, and can optionally be used as the Radeon Gallium3D driver’s shader compiler. In this article are some benchmarks of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end from LLVM 3.3-rc1 when using several different AMD Radeon HD graphics cards and seeing how the LLVM compiler back-end affects the OpenGL graphics performance.

  • The Focus Of Wayland’s Weston Compositor

    Kristian Høgsberg has clarified the scope and goals of Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor. Now that Weston has become somewhat of its own desktop environment, Kristian has clarified its intentions to benefit future patches.

  • Intel’s Valley View Should Be In Shape For Linux 3.11

    While the merge window on the Linux 3.10 kernel is not even open yet let alone the Linux 3.9 kernel, Intel and mobile enthusiasts already have a reason to look forward to the Linux 3.11 kernel.

    It looks like the Linux 3.11 kernel — which is still several months away — will have support about finished up from the kernel-side for Valley View, the very attractive “Ivy Bridge” class graphics integrated into a low-power Intel Atom SoC. It’s also known as Bay Trail.

  • A Very Early Gallium3D TGSI Back-End For LLVM

  • Radeon Driver Gets Golden Registers In Linux 3.10

    A second Linux 3.10 Radeon DRM driver pull request was submitted by AMD’s Alex Deucher. The pull request sent to Red Hat’s David Airlie for the DRM sub-system mentions the “golden registers” addition as being the highlight of this batch of new open-source AMD Linux graphics code.

  • Gears On Gallium Still Grinding The Latest Mesa

    The latest release of Gears On Gallium happened earlier this week (2013.04.22) and is based upon openSUSE 12.3. This new release ships all of the latest Linux graphics code as of this week — including Mesa 9.2 Git, Linux 3.9-rc6, libdrm 2.4.44, X.Org Server 1.14.1, xf86-video-ati 7.99.99, xf86-video-intel 2.99.99, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.99, and LLVM 3.3 SVN.

  • First X.Org Server 1.15 Snapshot Released

    Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.14.99.1, the first X.Org Server 1.15 development snapshot ahead of the official release in the second half of 2013.

  • Plasma Worskpaces 2 On Wayland, A Converged Shell

    The future of the KDE desktop was planned earlier this month at a developer event held at the SUSE headquarters.

    Already we wrote about the results of KDE, Unity, GNOME, and Razor-Qt developers meeting up at SUSE’s Nürnberg offices. There were also clear statements about KDE support for Wayland. Now over on the KDE web-site is a nice summary of their Plasma planning.

  • AMD Releases Catalyst 13.4 For Linux

• Benchmarks

  • Intel i915 Gallium3D Performance Examined

  • Arch-Based Manjaro Linux Runs Against Ubuntu 13.04

    A larger comparison is in the works to pit Manjaro against Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and other popular Linux distributions. However, for the increasing curiosity about Manjaro, here’s the benchmarks that are complete at the moment: Manjaro 0.8.5 vs. Ubuntu 13.04.

  • ZFS vs. EXT4 On Linux Multi-Disk RAID Benchmarks

    When dealing with multi-disk configurations and RAID, the ZFS file-system on Linux can begin to outperform EXT4 at least in some configurations.

    Earlier this month I delivered some EXT4 vs. ZFS file-system benchmarks using the new ZFS On Linux release that is a native Linux kernel module implementing the Sun/Oracle file-system. Testing was done from a single disk configuration due to the available hardware within our labs and among Phoronix readers single disk configurations being most common.

Applications

• Simple Image Reducer – Pretty slick, Pretty easy, Pretty light & Pretty nice.

  Simple Image Reducer may be a somewhat unknown tool, of course I say that about every piece of software I just recently discovered. As if I know about every piece of software out there, go figure. In a relatively short time this excellent low resource tool to reduce and rotate images, has become a favorite go to application.

• GParted 0.16 Now Handles F2FS File-System

  Developers behind the GParted utility, the popular open-source program for managing Linux file-system partitions, released version 0.16.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux commands: Newusers adds new users … fast and furious!

  • How to Install Minecraft on Raspberry Pi

  • A Bash script to force Image Magick to use zero-indexing when it converts GIF to JPG

  • How to navigate in Vim

  • Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” Server Installation Guide

  • New to the commandline? Don’t lose heart

  • Top 10 Computer Tricks Every Geek Should Know

  • Get Weather Or System Info On Your Desktop With These 2 Conky Configurations

  • aspell: A spellchecker at the console

  • Fixing high CPU usage in Linux Mint 13 on ThinkPad X200s

  • Linux commands: Newusers adds new users … fast and furious!

  • How to Install Ubuntu on a Chromebook Pixel

  • How to install skype on debian wheezy with x86-64 / amd64 machine

  • How to install Linux on a vintage 68K Mac

  • CBT Nuggets Releases BackTrack and Kali Linux Training

    Introducing a new training series from CBT Nuggets, “BackTrack and Kali Linux.”

    In this 40-video series, trainer Keith Barker covers the best tools for penetration testing, information gathering and vulnerability assessment. Barker explains how to use these free Linux distributions to identify weaknesses in order to strengthen network security.

• Games

  • Brütal Legend Is Exciting To Linux Gamers

    With today’s debut of the Humble Double Fine Bundle, Linux gamers seem particularly excited by the debut of the Brütal Legend game for the penguin platform.

    Brütal Legend is a title developed by Double Fine and released for Windows in February, after the action-adventure real-time strategy game premiered for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in late 2009. The game was favorably reviewed and now with Linux gamers having a native client, it seems particularly exciting, and is another title now available on Steam for Linux.

  • Hairy Tales has been released for Linux

  • New Steam Linux Client Beta Released

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Qt 5.1 Beta 1 Released With Many Platform Features

    The first beta release of the Qt 5.1 tool-kit is now available. As the first major update to the Qt5 platform, this release comes with plenty of new features for developers and end-users.

  • presses ahead with DRM interface

  • Krita Lime PPA: always fresh versions for Ubuntu users!

  • Skrooge 1.7.1 released

    The Skrooge team is pleased to announce the release 1.7.1 of its popular personal finances management application.

  • Dolphin bugs fixed in April 2013

  • News in kdepim 4.11: Header theme (1/3)

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • MATE 1.6.1 Adds Support for More Applets

    The development team behind MATE, a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, released a few minutes ago, May 13, the first maintenance version of the stable MATE 1.6 desktop environment.

  • GNOME Control Center 3.8.2 Released with Minor Improvements

    GNOME Control Center, GNOME’s main interface for configuration of various aspects of your desktop, is now at version 3.8.2.

  • Numerous Improvements Heading Into GTK+ 3.10

    At a recent GTK+ “hackfest” in Cambridge, some features heading into the GTK+ 3.10 tool-kit were worked on by a handful of GNOME developers.

    Happening the past few days in Cambridge, Massachusetts was a GTK+ hackfest where a variety of improvements were tackled. Among the work is GTK+ 3.10 making the file chooser side-bar be a public widget (to already be used by Nautilus), proper composite containers support, baseline alignment work, and new widgets.

Distributions

• Cinnarch Linux Reborn as Antergos

  I like Arch and I like Cinnamon, so for me Cinnarch Linux was an obvious fit. Except for the fact that apparently Cinnamon doesn’t work so well with Arch.

• So Long, Cinnamon: Cinnarch Linux is reborn as Antergos

  Regular PCWorld readers may recall Cinnarch, a Linux distribution I covered last fall that combined Arch Linux with the relatively new and alternative Cinnamon desktop environment.

• Antergos Erases Cinnarch with Inaugural Release

• Zorin OS 6.3 Core is released

  The Zorin OS Team are pleased to announce the release of Zorin OS 6.3 Core, our operating system designed for Windows users. Zorin OS 6.3 builds on top of our popular previous release of Zorin OS 6.2 with newly updated software and a newer kernel out of the box. As Zorin OS 6.3 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 it is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, provided with software updates until April 2017.

• Screenshots

  • Manjaro: A Convenient Way To Play With Arch Linux

    After carrying out the easy Manjaro Linux installation and upgrading the system using Arch’s pacman, it was off to the races. While our ARM Linux benchmarks and 64-bit Arch Linux benchmark comparison in the past have revealed little performance advantage to Arch over other tier-one Linux distributions — contrary to popular belief that Arch and Gentoo are magically much faster on the very latest hardware — benchmarks of Manjaro 0.8.5 compared to other Linux distributions is being carried out right now. Stay tuned to the results on Phoronix in the coming days.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 18 Can we ever be totally free

    • Rawhide week of fun, 2013-05-14

• Debian Family

  • Debian 7.0 Wheezy: New Features You Need to Know About

    Debian was an early pioneering Linux distribution, and has been a pillar of the community for nearly two decades. Today, it is well-known for its comprehensive repositories of software, its careful approach to updates, its smooth package installation and upgrade process, and its commitment to software freedom. It is particularly popular as a base for customization, with notable derivatives including Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

  • Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy

    The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based release today. This is the release announcement:

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu and the Missing Community Link

        Sometimes, the symbolism of an act becomes more important than its actual consequences.

        A case in point is the repositioning of the link to the community page on the Ubuntu home page, which has reopened the divide between Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial face, and parts of the Ubuntu community. Not only has that divide reappeared, but a possible error in tactics may have cost the community sympathy that is needed for reform.

        At first, the change sounds unbelievably minor to have provoked the response it has. It is, after all, no more than a cosmetic change. Specifically, it is about the removal of the link to the Community page from the main menu on the Ubuntu home page and its repositioning in a sub-footer. The change leaves the main menu focused on product lines.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 316

        Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #316 for the week 6 – 13 May, 2013, and the full version is available here.

      • Ubuntu Set To Terminate Its Brainstorm Project

        Ubuntu Brainstorm served as a way for the Ubuntu community to nominate new ideas for the Linux operating system, comment on these ideas, and vote on the ideas should you find them interesting and worthwhile. However, now it looks like Ubuntu Brainstorm is going to be eliminated.

      • Important desktop and end-user topics this week at UDS

      • X.Org, Mir Plans Are Made Up For Ubuntu 13.10

        There’s a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place this week to begin drafting plans for Ubuntu 13.10. This morning the initial road-map for the X.Org / Mesa graphics and display stack were discussed for the next Ubuntu Linux release.

        Ubuntu 13.10 on the desktop will still be shipping an X.Org Server in configurations where Canonical’s own Mir Display Server isn’t primed. With Ubuntu 13.10 they will likely be shipping X.Org Server 1.14 or version X.Org Server 1.15 if the video driver ABI doesn’t break. While Canonical has talked about their next-generation Unity 8 interface, this apparently will be Mir-only. Those running a pure X.Org Server will be limited to the Unity 7.x world.

      • Video Demo of Unity 8 on Mir

        Recently the Mir and Unity Next teams got Unity 8 up and running on Mir. Now, this work is still very early in development and neither Mir nor Unity Next are finished yet, but I reached out to Michael Zanetti, who is on the team, and asked him to put together a short video demo to show the progress of this work. This demo shows the phone/tablet part of the Unity 8 codebase; the final desktop version will come later.

      • Unity 8 Running on Mir on a Galaxy Nexus

      • Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical Vows to Maintain Focus

        As Canonical works to “converge” Ubuntu, the massively popular open-source Linux operating system, across smarphones, tablets, PCs and cloud servers, it is also working to integrate the various parts of the Ubuntu Web ecosystem. So reports Canonical employee Alejandra Obregon in a recent update on the past, preset and future of Ubuntu.com and the role of the Ubuntu community within Canonical’s Web presence.

      • Canonical plans dogfood-capable phones by the end of May

        Canonical plans dogfood-capable phones by the end of May
        Canonical’s Vice President of Ubuntu, Rick Spencer, has set out a plan to make the Ubuntu phone images dog food – dogfooding is where a company’s employees use its own product for their day-to-day work and comes from the phrase “Eating your own dog food”. In his blog post, Spencer outlines the things that the images must be capable of before this plan can be put into action, namely make and receive phone calls and send and receive SMS messages, browse the web on 3G data and Wi-Fi and switch between either data mode, have the display dim when the phone is talked on, and be able to import contacts and then add or edit them. Spencer also says that when the phone is updated it should retain its user data, even if being flashed from the command line of a desktop system. All this work should be done, Spencer says, by the end of May.

      • Developer-user relationships

        Today when going through the list of Google+ communities I saw a message in a Linux G+ community that links to a blog post in Sprial Linear that talks about GNOME developers ignoring user requests. This is heartbreaking.

        The incident commenced when a user Eduard Valiauka reported this bug in GNOME’s bugzilla. A feature in GNOME 3.6′s GNOME Terminal (background configuration tab in Profile Preferences) is missing in GNOME 3.8. He described the problem with some detail and asked the GNOME Terminal developers to add back the feature in later GNOME releases.

      • Ubuntu 13.04-Based Touch Images Now Available

        Canonical has released new “Raring-based” Ubuntu Touch images for the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Galaxy Nexus devices.

      • Ubuntu 13.10 Is Codenamed “Saucy Salamander”

        Canonical will be sticking to a six-month release cycle for now with Ubuntu Linux and now that Ubuntu 13.04, the “Raring Ringtail”, has been released it’s time for 13.10. Mark Shuttleworth revealed this morning the Ubuntu 13.10 codename.

      • Ubuntu’s single platform SDK to be ship shape by October

        Canonical reveals more details of its roadmap for its Ubuntu SDK, which will allow developers to use the same code base to create apps for Ubuntu running on phones, tablets and desktops.

      • Ekoore Python S3 convertible tablet triple-boots Windows 8, Android, Ubuntu

        Can’t decide if you want a tablet or a notebook? No problem. There are plenty of hybrids that you can use either way.

      • Ekoore Python S3 Hybrid Tablet Boots Android, Windows 8 And Linux

Devices/Embedded

• TI DLP chipset targets 3D imaging devices, runs Linux

  Texas Instruments (TI) announced an evaluation kit for its next-generation digital-light-processing (DLP) chipset, offering much higher resolution and brightness than its predecessor. The DLP LightCrafter 4500 is aimed at 3D imaging applications such as machine vision, quality control, dental and retinal scanning, spectrometers, augmented reality devices, and 3D printers.

• Raspberry Pi gets photo and video capabilities with £20 camera module

  A tiny camera capable of taking five-megapixel photos and recording HD video has been launched for the Raspberry Pi.

• Nvidia Shield game console runs Android on Tegra 4

  Nvidia announced a new name and pricing for its quad-core Android game console, as well as the unique ability to play “Steam” games wirelessly streamed from a suitably-equipped Windows PC. The $349 “Nvidia Shield,” available for pre-ordering on May 20 and expected to ship in June, features a 1.9GHz Tegra 4 SOC with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of flash storage, gaming controls, and a 5-inch, 1280 x 720px retinal IPS display.

• Raspberry Pi Camera on sale now

• 11 Arduino Projects That Require Major Hacking Skills—or a Bit of Insanity

  Raspberry Pi has received the lion’s share of attention devoted to cheap, single-board computers in the past year. But long before the Pi was a gleam in its creators’ eyes, there was the Arduino.

• Ouya game device gets the teardown treatment

  The open-source game console, which rocked Kickstarter last year, earns a high repairability score from iFixit of 9 out of 10.

• Raspberry Pi in Easy Steps

• Security appliance taps 12-core QorIQ PowerPC SOC

  Nexcom announced a network security appliance with Unified Threat Management (UTM) services based on Freescale’s new 12-core, 1.8GHz QorIQ T4240 system-on-chip (SOC). The NSA 5640 is equipped with up to 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 2GB NAND flash, mini-PCI Express expansion, eight gigabit Ethernet ports, optional 4-port 10GbE connectivity, and PowerPC Linux support.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Android notebooks from Samsung to launch in 3-4 months as Google preps Apple TV competitor and smart watch?

      KGI Securities analyst Mingchi Kuo, who has been known to have accurate information regarding Apple product launches in the past, is out today with a new note that includes some surprisingly specific specs for upcoming products from Google. One of the products Kuo expects to see at Google I/O later this month is a new Nexus 7, but the note also included info on what he thinks Google has in store for the months after the event, including: an Android powered notebook, a new TV product, and even a Google smart watch.

    • Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Edition set to be announced at Google I/O

      At the Google I/O event, Samsung is set to make a pretty big announcement. A new version of their latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, will be announced – the Google version. Now, this doesn’t mean that Google will do that manufacturing, or any major overhaul like that. What it means is that Samsung understands that some people, while they may love the device, aren’t so big on the software (mainly TouchWiz). In response, we’ll e seeing a pure AOSP version of the Galaxy S4 being prepped to launch.

  • Android

    • Galaxy Note 3 Exynos 5 Octa-Core May Need Linux Kernel Update

      Samsung’s Exynos 5 eight-core processor may not actually function as an eight-core, but as a quad-core instead, according to an Android kernel developer. The eight-core processor, featured in select Samsung Galaxy S4 device is also expected to be featured in the Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

    • ‘Project’ no more: NVIDIA Shield preorders start May 20 for $349, ships in June

      NVIDIA promises to change mobile gaming with the Shield — a handheld console that’s pure Android and pure fun

    • White Google Nexus 4 caught on video

      Look what showed up at a conference in Dubai, the white Google Nexus 4 in all its glory. We’ve taken a video of it and made it available for your lusting. The device was a demo unit at the Qualcomm booth at The Mobile Show so don’t expect retail availability anytime soon – that is unless Google announces something else tomorrow at the Google I/O event. Back to the white Nexus 4, the device looks great on the back and may actually give the black Nexus 4 a run for its money. However the front is still black and takes the charm away from the device. The internals were pretty much the same and the device was running an older version of Android – 4.2 to be precise.

    • A sneak peek at Epson’s next-generation Moverio wearable Android glasses

    • Android tops Q1 2013 ‘smart mobile device’ shipments

      First-quarter 2013 shipments of “smart mobile devices,” including notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, swelled by 37.4 percent year-on-year to 308.7 million units, reports mobile market analyst Canalys. From the operating system perspective, Android grabbed a healthy majority of units shipped, at 59.5 percent.

    • Android Chief Discusses Open Source and Emerging Tech Markets

    • Native Android apps now possible with AIDE 2.0

      With software like AIDE, an Android IDE that runs on the Android platform, it is possible to develop for the mobile platform on the move, and with version 2.0 of AIDE that can now include writing C/C++ or using the IDE’s new design interface. The new version’s professional edition also features improved integration with the Git distributed version control system. AIDE runs on Android phones and tablets and offers traditional IDE features such as automatic code completion, error highlighting, refactoring and code navigation.

    • Android accounts for 74 percent of smartphones sold in Q1; Samsung reigns

    • Android gaming on a x86-powered PC with iConsole.tv

      The new computer should outmuscle Android consoles using mobile chips, and may be able to run the Linux version of Steambox.

    • Hands-on with the iConsole.tv, an Android-powered game system with the heart of a desktop PC

      Pry open any Android-powered game console on the market today, and you’ll likely find a mobile processor — an ARM-based chip originally designed for tablets, smartphones and maybe the odd specialty device. It seems to make sense — after all, isn’t Android a mobile OS? Christopher Price, CEO of Mobile Media Ventures, doesn’t seem to think so. “Android is the future of personal computing,” Price told Engadget. “Even on the desktop.” According to Price, developers just haven’t had a chance to play with a truly powerful Android gaming machine. So, naturally, he’s building one.

    • Android: Arcane Legends – World of Warcraft for Android?

      When talking about a multi-player on-line RPG, it’s hard not to draw comparison to World of Warcraft. WoW, the game and social experience is very much a benchmark for any other title of the same genre. WoW does have its critics and those that can be heard most loudly are those who write for the large mainstream outlets. There’s nothing better than a story about addiction and social exclusion in respect of a computer game. So Android has it’s own WoW? Will you be addicted? Will you give up your “real world” friends in order to play this game? Read on!

    • Blackberry Messenger (BBM) to run on Android

      Reports emanating from BlackBerry’s annual developer conference confirm that the firm is planning to offer the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service on other platforms.

    • Android 4.3 confirmed by Google developer website

    • HP announces Android SlateBook x2 just in time for next school year

Google to use open-source sensors to monitor I/O conference

Google is distributing hundreds of environmental sensors across the Moscone Centre in San Francisco to monitor everything from footsteps to air quality.

Startup CloudFounders builds open storage for VMs

Belgium-based newcomer CloudFounders is jumping on the software-defined storage bandwagon with an open storage platform that supports OpenStack, VMware and Amazon S3.

BonitaSoft Wins SIIA Software CODiE Award for Best Open Source Innovation

Supercomputers prefer open-source storage

Supercomputers are where the latest and greatest in information technology gets to shine. It is often where the bleeding-edge in engineering gets applied to solving and answering some of humanity’s biggest problems and questions: from origins of the universe to climage change and genetics.

At the time of its launch, a supercomputer is typically built of the best processor and server technology available then. When designing such a cluster of thousands of computing monsters strung together, engineering an adequate storage system is a big challenge.

Sauce Labs’ Jason Huggins: App Testing Is for the (Angry) Birds

“I wanted a tool that I could give to all of my developers and not have to worry about license fees. Open source means that I can very quickly and easily get it to all of my developers,” said Jason Huggins, cofounder and CTO of Sauce Labs. “It reduces the friction of getting contributions for people. If it is free to download and is free to use, that means you can skip the part where you talk to the sales guys.”

JQooBe platform helps communities manage communication

JQooBe is a platform that allows users to create simple blogs, websites, and advanced applications within a community. It is developed in PHP, Ajax, and MySQL.

Open source flight, from the Drone Lab to Twitter: Q&A with Dave Lester

I recently had the chance to catch up with Dave Lester, a soon-to-be graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a web developer who has been involved in a number of open source initiatives. Dave has been working on bringing technology together with the humanities and education through an un-conference he co-founded, and in his former role as assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. We talked about his drone hacking project, the importance of code integration, and his upcoming foray into open source at Twitter in an email interview.

XBMC used for in hotel system

Cool tool: One click installation of open source apps

Events

• Join Us For the KVM End User Technical Summit at the New York Stock Exchange

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla releases Firefox 21 for PC, Mac, Linux and Android

  • Is Mozilla Firefox 21 A ‘Healthy’ Browser?

    Mozilla is out with the Firefox 21 open source browser release today, fixing at least 8 security vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as being critical. The new release also provides new features that – depending on your viewpoint – could either improve or reduce user privacy.

    One of the new features in Firefox 21 is the Health Report. Mozilla first began talking about the health report in September of 2012 as a non-invasive reporting mechanism. The report is intended to deliver information to users about the ‘health’ of the browser and its components. The report also shares that data with Mozilla.

  • Firefox 21 arrives with social providers Cliqz, Mixi, MSN Now, open source fonts and HTML5 tweaks for Android

    Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 21 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Improvements include the addition of multiple social providers on the desktop as well as open source fonts on Android.

  • Firefox Gets a Health Report, New ‘Do Not Track’ Options, and More

    The lastest version of Firefox, Firefox 21, is available for download now. What will you find in this new release? A few major new features, including three “Do Not Track” options, a tune-up tool called Firefox Health Report, and performance-boosting startup suggestions.

  • Firefox 21: Mozilla Releases Browser Updates For Mac, Windows, Linux, Android

    Mozilla Firefox may not be the most popular web browser in the world — that achievement now belongs to Google Chrome — but fans of the free, open-source web browser are as excited about the browser as ever. Firefox 20, which was released in April 2013, was a huge step forward for the browser, introducing download messenger and per-window private browsing to the iconic web browser. Now, with the release of Firefox 21, the web brower comes packed with even more excellent features.

  • Stay Social with Firefox

    Social sites are a key part of online life and with Firefox we want to make it easier to use the Web the way you want. Mozilla developed the Social API to enable social providers to integrate directly into Firefox to make your browsing experience more social, customizable and personal. The Social API makes it easy for your favorite social providers to add a sidebar with your content to Firefox or notification buttons directly on the Firefox toolbar.

  • Feature light Firefox 21 lands

    Mozilla has begun shipping out Firefox 21, the latest rapid release of the organisation’s flagship web browser. Headlining the release notes is the expanded Social API support. The Social API launched last year with Facebook support allowing the company to create a more integrated sidebar for its services. Now, this is joined by support for Cliqz, Japanese social network Mixi and msnNOW.

    There are, though, a few features in this release that will raise issues around ongoing privacy debates. A new interface to Do Not Track (DNT) allows users to now set the DNT flag to “please track” when accessing web sites alongside the previous options of not setting the flag at all or setting it to say “do not track”. The default remains to say nothing about the users preferences.

  • Personalization with Respect

    Mozilla’s mission compels us to provide people with an Internet experience that puts them in control of their online lives and that treats them with respect. Respecting someone includes respecting their privacy. We aspire to a “no surprises” principle: the idea that when information is gathered about a person, it is done with their knowledge and is used in ways that benefit that person. People should be made aware of how information is collected and used. Each individual should also be able to decide whether the exchange of personal data for the services received in return feels fair. This can be challenging to achieve, especially when balanced against convenience and ease of use: people expect a fast, streamlined user experience without excessive prompts and confusing choices. But we are always striving toward this ideal.

SaaS/Big Data

• Q&A: ownCloud Provides Secure File Sharing for the Enterprise

  File storage and sharing using consumer-oriented cloud services can be a security problem for companies that want to avoid sensitive data leaks. ownCloud aims to solve the issue by offering commercial cloud services installed within a company’s own datacenter. Their open source software is built on Linux and most often deployed on Linux by enterprise customers, said Markus Rex, CTO of ownCloud, via email.

• Cisco Cloud CTO Updates OpenStack Progress [VIDEO]

  Where do open source cloud, SDN, and the Internet of Things intersect?

• OpenNebula 4.0 debuts new admin interface

  The OpenNebula project has announced the release of the latest major version of its open source cloud computing framework. OpenNebula 4.0, code-named “Eagle” after the M16 star cluster, introduces a redesigned Sunstone administration interface, a number of new virtual machine features, and improvements to several of the core components of the platform. The OpenNebula toolkit is used by, among others, the European Space Agency, Fermilab, CERN, and China Mobile and provides IaaS management capabilities for virtual infrastructure in data centres.

Databases

• The H Half Hour: 10Gen CTO Eliot Horowitz

  MongoDB is one of the most visible NoSQL databases out there and 10Gen’s CTO is apparently one of the most hands-on coding CTOs out there. So when he was in London recently, The H just had to have a chat with Eliot Horowitz about his technical philosophy of what MongoDB is, where its going and how being an active developer informs his decision-making process:

• PostgreSQL 9.3 begins beta cycle

  PostgreSQL 9.3 has begun its testing cycle with the release of its first beta. The new version brings writing support for foreign tables, including those on other PostgreSQL servers, updatable views and the ability to declare a materialised view, new JSON construction and extraction functions, indexed regular-expression-based searches, and new resilience features. Together, the changes place PostgreSQL in the position of being able to be the backbone of many enterprises’ data storage and integration systems.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• FOSS Force Poll: We Don’t Trust Oracle Or Java

  Back in March and April, when the Java browser plugin was getting hammered with security holes that were being exploited in the wild, we conducted a couple of unscientific polls here on FOSS Force to determine how our visitors were handling this security crisis.

  To call the problems that Java was experiencing at the time a “crisis” is not an exaggeration. If you’ll remember, the situation was considered so serious that here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security was urging everyone to disable the Java plugin.

• Java Release Numbering Gets Re-Numbered

• Toward a more colorful LibreOffice

• Potential new OpenOffice logos shortlisted

  As the development of Apache OpenOffice 4.0 progresses, the Apache OpenOffice project is looking for a new logo to visually represent the project and now – after 40 logo submissions and over five thousand entries in a community survey – the shortlist is available. A report on the survey shows that responses came from around the world.

CMS

• Crafter Open Source CMS Goes Solo

  New standalone organization created to support the open source Crafter content management system.

• Drupal Is a Framework: Why Everyone Needs to Understand This

  Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a “hook” is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.

  One of the greatest challenges that Drupal adopters face, whether they are new site owners or beginning developers, is figuring out what is easy and what is hard to do with Drupal. As a developer, solution architect, technical strategist and even as the friend who knows stuff about Web sites, 60% of my discussions revolve around three questions: how long will it take, how much will it cost, and can my site do [insert cool new thing]?

Education

• Stanford and edX unite to build stronger open education platform

  The open education landscape is set to grow a little more as Stanford University announces plans to team up with edX to build an online learning platform that universities and developers around the world can access for free.

  edX, a not-for-profit online education project founded in 2012 by MIT and Harvard University, develops online learning courses for students. The project encourages collaboration between teachers, students, and faculty to fit the needs of individual institutions.

Funding

• OpenGeo Completes $3 Million Series A Financing and Launches as Independent Open Source Company

  OpenGeo, the creators of the OpenGeo Suite, the world’s leading open source geospatial software platform, announced a $3 million Series A investment from Vanedge Capital of Vancouver, British Columbia. Simultaneous with the funding event, the company has spun out from its incubator parent, OpenPlans, and is boosting OpenGeo’s product and customer-support initiatives.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Hurd/ news/ 2012-q3-q4

  In November 2012, we finished the libthreads (cthreads) to libpthread (POSIX Threads) conversion. Converting the Hurd libraries to the pthread interfaces allows linking them together with other libraries that use this standard threading interface themselves. This project once was begun by Vicente Hernando Ara, and later continued by Barry deFreese, Thomas DiModica, Thomas Schwinge, Samuel Thibault, Pino Toscano, and now brought to completion by Richard Braun, who could not be scared by having to resolve the last remaining tricky issues before the transition could be completed.

• Guile 100 #7: Animated GIFs

  Challenge #7 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a function that creates an animated GIF from a datacube of 8-bit color indices and a 256 color palette. It is the third challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.

Project Releases

• Moodle 2.5 is now released!

• Video.js goes Apache with version 4.0

  The Video.js open source JavaScript library designed for working with web video has been updated to version 4.0 and, in the process, has changed its licence from LGPLv3 to Apache 2.0. The major update is the first since Brightcove, the video platform company, acquired Zencoder, where Video.js was developed as a side project. Video.js is designed to make it simple to embed video, whether the browser is modern and supports HTML5 or legacy and relies on Flash. Creator Steve Heffernan says that he was tasked by Brightcove to work full time on the project and that the Brightcove video team have become contributors too. That focus has paid off in version 4.0 of Video.js with improved performance, new skin designs, responsive layout, accessibility and retina display support among the new features.

• SpringSource fires up the asynchronous Reactor framework

• NGINX 1.4 Supports SPDY, Gunzip Filter

Public Services/Government

• Power, Responsibility, and Open Source Software

  I recently spoke to Dr SPT Krishnan, Chairman, Infocomm Technologies Advisory Panel, Singapore Red Cross Society. He and his team were responsible for Donorweb, a web platform for “disseminating critical information on blood requirements and reaching prospective blood donors during normal and emergency time periods.”

Licensing

• Open Source vs. Proprietary License: What You Need to Know About Software Licenses

  When it comes to using, developing and promoting software online, the numerous licenses that accompany them can be confusing for even the most adept computer user. Open source and proprietary license often go at each other head-to-head, with one promoting an accepted method of licensing whereas the latter leaves more room for interpretation. But can they work well together or are open source and proprietary license destined to drive developers and users even further apart?

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Open Data, Creative Destruction and Money

    Nearly three years ago, I wrote an article exploring why at that time there were no billion-dollar companies (since then, Red Hat has finally broken through this barrier). Here’s the key point:

    open source solutions save money for customers by doing away with the fat margins for existing computer companies – and thus shrink the overall market. Opponents of open source like to paint this as “value destruction” that takes money “out of the economy” – as if free software went around burning down offices and warehouses.

  • DIY cartography: Hands on with MapBox’s new open-source ‘iD’ editor in OpenStreetMap

    Maps are nothing new; humans have been recording the layout of the world around them for close to 8,000 years. What started out as cave paintings developed into hand-drawn maps on parchment, which eventually turned into machine-printed atlases, and, most recently, into GPS guidance. While mapmaking has been primarily the job of cartography experts and companies like Rand McNally and Garmin, technology has allowed for an awesome shift, giving the power to document one’s surroundings back to the people.

  • Default to open data: an Executive Order

    Last week, The White House published an Executive Order by which the default method for government data collection and dissemination must now be open and machine readable.

Programming

• Open Source Is Old School, Says The GitHub Generation

• LLVM’s Clang Compiler Is Now C++11 Feature Complete

• LLVM/Clang 3.3 Performing Against GCC For Old Intel CPU

• FLANG: Proposing An LLVM Fortran Compiler

• Linux 3.9 Kernel Delayed By One Week; 3.8-rc8 Released

  While it looked like the Linux 3.9 kernel would be released this weekend, a 3.9-rc8 release was warranted and is out this Sunday evening.

  Linus Torvalds explained that he was hoping to release Linux 3.9 final this weekend, but there ended up being a surplus of issues that led him to tagging another kernel release candidate. In the end, Torvalds decided, “another week won’t hurt.”

• LLVM/Clang Already Working On C++1y/C++14

  Phoronix was first to report on Friday that LLVM’s Clang compiler is now C++11 feature complete. The LLVM developers have today confirmed this information and talked about future C++ support too.

• Terra and Lua offer new high performance computing strategy

  Zach DeVito and a team at Stanford and Purdue University have published details of Terra, a new approach to generating code for high performance computing. Using Lua as a linguistic host for a new low-level language, the team have come up with a system which allows a developer to write high-level code in Lua and high-performance code in Terra, iterating code from high-level experimentation to high-performance optimised code over time. This is, though, just one of the use cases for Terra and Lua.

• LLVM 3.3 Release Candidate 1 Now Available

  Following yesterday’s branching of LLVM and the related components from trunk, LLVM 3.3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for those interested in testing the Apple-sponsored compiler.

• PyPy 2.0 alpha on ARM includes Pi support

  The developers of the JIT-compiling Python interpreter PyPy have released an alpha version of PyPy 2.0 for ARM processors. Part of the work was sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, so it’s not surprising to find the Raspberry Pi mini-computer listed as one of the supported platforms.

• Python 3.4 to get enums

  The planned feature list for Python 3.4 is starting to become more defined. One of the important additions that the developers have decided on is the inclusion of an enumeration type in the standard library in the next version of the language. Enumeration types, which are also known as enums, are data types that define each possible value as symbolic constants.

• Go 1.1 brings better performance and a race detector

  Google has released version 1.1 of the Go programming language, the first major revision of the language and its tools since it was introduced in 2012. Since then, there has been a lot of interest in the language as it offers a rich alternative to C and C++ as a basis for system and application development in modern highly connected environments. While much of the work in the update has focussed on improving performance, new features include a race detector for finding memory synchronisation problems and new functionality in the standard library of the language.

• Dart now compiling in-browser with Dart based Dart compiler

  The Google Dart developers are reviving the language’s try.dartlang.org site with a major upgrade of the site’s capabilities. Previously, the site would compile Dart into JavaScript by sending it to a server, but now, after having compiled the Dart2js compiler to JavaScript, it can run in the user’s browser. Dart was introduced in 2011 as a more structured form of JavaScript to replace the language in the browser. Dart can be run in two ways, either compiled to JavaScript or run in its virtual machine and, by exploiting the former, it has made it possible to work on or offline with the Dart2js compiler.

Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)

This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories

The Downside Of Long Quality Articles

Unix Architecture Showing it’s Age

Security

• Name.com domain registrar hacked

  US domain registrar and web hosting service Name.com has fallen victim to a hacker attack. In a recent email, the company informed its customers of an incident that potentially enabled unknown attackers to gain access to “email addresses, encrypted passwords and encrypted credit card details”. The registrar says that the private crypto keys that are required to decrypt the stolen credit card details are stored on a separate system that wasn’t compromised.

• CSRF hole in OpenVPN Access Server

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Bursting Benghazi’s Bubble–Only to Boost Bush

  But one of Cohen’s Post colleagues doesn’t think it’s a scandal either–just like Bush’s Iraq lies weren’t much of a scandal either.

  Come again?

• Russian agent claims Ryan Fogle is not the first CIA agent caught this year

  The spy in the blond wig, Ryan Fogle, was not the first CIA agent to be caught by Russian security services this year, according to an interview with an anonymous Russian agent aired on state television.

• US ‘spy’ Ryan Fogle expelled after CIA refused to stop recruiting, say Russians

  Federal Security Service says US embassy official was expelled because CIA persisted in trying to recruit Russians for espionage

• 
  ‘CIA Spy’ Row: Russia Summons US Ambassador

• Ryan Fogle: Russia to expel diplomat arrested trying to recruit for CIA

• Russia to expel ‘CIA agent’ in spy recruitment scandal

  Russia says it will expel a US diplomat briefly detained in Moscow for allegedly trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer as a spy.

• Russia Quizzes US Ambassador over ‘CIA Wig Spy’ in Cold War Row

  The Russian foreign ministry said Fogle has been labelled as persona non grata and is to be expelled from the country. Officially an US embassy employee, Fogle is protected by diplomatic immunity.

  [...]

  The Russian foreign ministry said Fogle has been labelled as persona non grata and is to be expelled from the country. Officially an US embassy employee,

• Russia to expel ‘CIA agent’ arrested in $1m spy sting

  THE US and Russia were locked in a Cold War-style spy scandal last night after an alleged CIA agent was seized and accused of offering millions to recruit a intelligence figure in Moscow.

• CIA ups stake in database-as-a-service firm

  The CIA has maintained its influence over Cloudant by upping its investment in the database-as-a-service firm.

  The $12m funding round sees Cloudant’s existing investors In-Q-Tel*, Avalon Ventures, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation up their shares in the company, and new investors Fidelity Investments, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital have piled in as well, the company announced on Tuesday.

• The CIA is Shaping the #Torture Debate

  Remember the Academy Award-winning film Zero Dark Thirty? Well, last week news broke that the CIA edited the film’s script to make sure that it didn’t portray the “enhanced interrogation” program in a way that would make the agency look bad.

• Targeted Killing: CIA’s fleet of 80+ UAVs unlikely to be transferred to military

  The Obama administration has floated the idea of putting the CIA’s controversial targeted killing operations under the control of the uniformed armed services. But sources familiar with the still-classified program, which uses unmanned aircraft to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen, say the shift would be difficult to implement and would make little difference.

• CIA’s role in the Benghazi mess

  And, despite its assertion that it warned the administration about the threat to Benghazi, it failed there, too, in not vetting properly the local militia and leaving what was essentially a CIA facility insufficiently protected.

• CIA Warned of ‘Jihadist’ Threat to Cairo Embassy

• Miller: Intel leak in AP probe “embarrassing, bad” for CIA

  Attorney General Eric Holder strongly defended the Justice Department’s seizure of two-months-worth of Associated Press phone records on Tuesday, saying the leak of secret information to the AP created a national security threat.

  The Justice Department obtained the phone records of the AP — from April and May in 2012 — in an effort to determine who leaked confidential information regarding a Saudi double agent who had infiltrated al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

• Email: Even The CIA Uses It. Time To Get Serious About Its Legal Protections

  Allegedly the U.S. diplomat told his would-be recruit to set up a Google Gmail account to respond if he wanted to pursue such a relationship.

• Boston Academic Taking CIA to Court Over “Paltry” Information Releases

  Prof. George Katsiaficas of Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston has launched a federal lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over documents he seeks relating to the assassination of a former Korean premier.

  [...]

  His FOIA requests have also been expanded to include the Defense Intelligence Agency, because he says, “it’s possible the DIA will release documents that the CIA doesn’t have, or doesn’t want to release.”

  Berman confirmed that the next step on his behalf is to serve the CIA and the Government before an appearance at the US District Court in Massachusetts will be scheduled.

• Secrecy, Drones, Prisons and Kill Lists

  On Monday, the Associated Press revealed that the Department of Justice used subpoenas to obtain phone records of its editors and reporters from April and May 2012. The records were obtained due to the investigation and supposed leak to the AP last year that the CIA had ”thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

Cablegate

• Protect your sources: Australia’s WikiLeaks Party calls for journalism shield law

  Julian Assange’s newly formed Australian WikiLeaks Party (WLP) announced that if elected, it will immediately introduce a national shield law to protect a reporter’s right not to reveal a source, as current state-based shield laws are “inadequate.”

• Polls positive for WikiLeaks, as party registers

  A national poll conducted by UMR Research found 26 per cent of voters said they were likely to vote for Mr Assange and his political party.

• UK expenses on Ecuadorian embassy surveillance ‘utterly absurd’ – Assange

  By spending $4.5 million on ensuring a whistleblower does not escape from an embassy, Britain has overstepped the bounds of common sense, according to Julian Assange, who does not believe the 2015 UK election will bring any change to his fate.

• The New Yorker takes a page from WikiLeaks

• New Yorker Launches ‘Strongbox’ for Anonymous Transmission of Files

• New Yorker launches new leak submission system, written by Aaron Swartz

• New cables ‘expose’ US govt lobbies worldwide for Monsanto, other GMO corps

• WikiLeaks reveals Labor backing for US wars, Iraq lies

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Zuckerberg Gets an Earful After Promoting Keystone XL

  Mark Zuckerberg’s complaint box is filling up.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Investors Should Oppose Pay Plan, Glass Lewis Says

  Goldman Sachs has been “deficient” in linking compensation to company performance, Glass Lewis said yesterday in a report, which also opposed the re-election of compensation committee Chairman James A. Johnson. ISS said in a May 8 report that shareholders should vote for Johnson at the New York-based bank’s May 23 annual meeting.

  [...]

  Goldman Sachs doesn’t have specific measures to help set annual pay for top executives, Glass Lewis said in the report, which gave the firm a “D” grade in linking pay to performance. ISS said the increase in executive pay for 2012 reflected stronger company performance.

• Former USAir General Counsel Speaks Out

  It’s not every day that a former corporate lawyer comes out in favor of stronger regulation of big business.

  And it’s not every day the former general counsel of a major American corporation comes out and urges the federal government to force major corporate wrongdoers to admit to their wrongdoing.

• Economist: Deficits nothing but a politically useful hammer to beat up Obama

  University of Massachusetts economist Richard Wolff on Tuesday explained that obsession over the federal deficit was based in politics, not economics.

  Wolff said on the David Pakman Show that the government could not improve a struggling economy by cutting its spending. As the single biggest consumer, the government only reduced demand for goods and services by cutting spending, leading to greater unemployment.

• Ghost in the Machine: Pete Peterson Haunts College Campuses

  No one in the room appeared to catch the fact that they all were participating in an elaborate public relations ruse, set up by well-known Wisconsin spinmeister (Graul) whose claim to fame is a racist attack ad on a sitting judge, and orchestrated by a Wall Street billionaire whose name was never mentioned in the two-hour “teach-in.”

• Everything is Rigged, Continued: European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe

  We’re going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.

  According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil.

• US Government Begins BitCoin Crackdown

  As we first noted here (regulation) and here (supervision), the US government has been gradually encroaching on the independence and freedom of the virtual currency. This week, as The Washington Post reports, the government escalated. The feds took action against Mt. Gox, the world’s leading Bitcoin exchange. Many people use Dwolla, a PayPal-like payment network, to send dollars to their Mt. Gox accounts. They then use those dollars to buy Bitcoins. On Tuesday, Dwolla announced that it had frozen Mt. Gox’s account at the request of federal investigators.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Dead Journalists and the Newseum Scandal

  On May 10, the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reported that the museum was being criticized by “conservative outlets and a pro-Israel think tank” over the inclusion in its Journalists Memorial of two reporters from Al-Aqsa TV, which is run by Hamas.

Censorship

• Republican Governor Deals Blow to “Constitutionally Suspect” Tennessee “Ag Gag” Bill

  Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has vetoed a controversial “ag gag” bill that would hamstring citizen investigations documenting patterns of abuse of animals and regulatory violations. These investigations have led in the past to regulatory action and demanded industry changes.

  As the reason for his decision, Governor Haslam cited the legal opinion of Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper, who last week called the bill’s provisions “constitutionally suspect” with regard to the First Amendment. (The First Amendment Center concurs and says that ag-gag bills “harm free speech.”)

• Flies, Maggots, Rats, and Lots of Poop: What Big Ag Doesn’t Want You To See

  What’s it like inside a factory farm? If the livestock and meat industries have their way, what little view we have inside the walls of these animal-reviewing facilities may soon be obscured. For the second year in a row, the industry is backing bills in various statehouses that would criminalize undercover investigations of livestock farms. The Humane Society of the US, one of the animal-welfare groups most adept at conducting such hidden-camera operations, counts active “ag gag” bills in no fewer than nine states. Many of them are based on a model conjured by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group that generates industry-friendly legislation language for state legislatures, Associated Press reports.

• National assembly approves controversial information bill

  An earlier version was already adopted at the end of 2011 but, in response to demands for changes from the opposition, the National Council of Provinces (the South African parliament’s upper house) made a number of minor amendments. These concessions still fall far short of what is needed.

• Chinese internet: ‘a new censorship campaign has commenced’

  These words are the reflection of my true feelings. Not long ago, scholar Zhang Xuezhong, Xiao Xuehui, Song Shinan and lawyer Si Weijiang all saw their Weibo accounts deleted. They each had large numbers of followers, who spread their words to an even wider audience. But all of a sudden their names have disappeared. Nobody knows why, or who ordered it, but we all know that a new round of a censorship campaign has commenced. As in 1957, 1966 and 1989, Chinese intellectuals are feeling more or less the same fear as one does before an approaching mountain storm: the scariest thing of all is not being silenced or being sent to prison; it is the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty about what comes next. There is no procedure, no standard, and not a single explanation. It’s as if you are walking into a minefield blindfolded. Not knowing where the mines are buried, you don’t know when you will be blasted to pieces.

• Critic Of Chinese Censorship Censored: Microblog With 1.1 Million Followers Deleted

  The Global Voices story quoted above goes on to describe the ways in which some of those 1.1 million followers have reacted, and how many feel that Sina Weibo is diminished by Murong’s absence. It also points out that all of his posts have been preserved and are available — but on the other side of the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Although only those with the requisite technical know-how to tunnel under the GFW using VPNs will be able to access the now-deleted messages, that doesn’t mean the Chinese authorities have really won here. After all, using censorship to silence a critic of censorship means that his 1.1 million (ex-)followers now have definitive proof of what he was warning them about.

Privacy

• Naked Citizens: Protect your Privacy!

  Imagine you opened your door tomorrow morning and found hundreds of naked people there waiting for you. Now what if they all started telling you what they thought about something you’d assumed not many people cared about. Naked people…talking about data protection? It’s safe to say it’d get your attention.

• Here’s a Good Reason to Encrypt Your Data

  There’s many reasons to password-protect — or encrypt — one’s digital data. Foremost among them is to protect it during a security breach.

• AP news agency spied on by US government

  News agency Associated Press (AP) has accused the US government of secretly and illegally obtaining phone records for 20 of the news agency’s phone lines. The agency has revealedPDF that its General Counsel Laura Malone was informed of the action by a letter from the US Department of Justice (DoJ). The data related to calls made over a two-month period in 2012 from AP phone lines in New York, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut and in the House of Representatives. The letter from the DoJ failed to provide a reason for its spying activities.

• The Law Behind the A.P. Phone-Record Scandal

• Gov’t obtains wide AP phone records in probe

• The New Yorker Launches Strongbox, an Open-Source Anonymous Tip Tool Built by Aaron Swartz

  Technology gives journalists unprecedented power to track down information. And technology gives lots of other people the ability to follow journalists’ footprints. Just ask the Associated Press.

  Now the New Yorker magazine says it can help journalists, and their sources, cover their tracks. It is rolling out an electronic tip box it says will give leakers and tipsters the ability to cloak their identity when they reach out to the magazine.

• New York terror suspect case could challenge NSA spying

  Feds refuse to confirm whether they cracked bomb plot with warrantless eavesdropping

• How a tiny Canadian company won security contracts with covert 3-letter agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI

  How does a small Canadian company get a contract to provide security software for top U.S. covert agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI?

  Actually, it’s not that difficult, according to mobile security company Fixmo’s CEO, Rick Segal.

  “Despite the Bush years of let’s go play in another war, there’s a very tight, close alliance between Canada and the USA,” Segal says.

• NSA Breaks Ground on Massive Computing Center

Civil Rights

• Indian law enforcement unaccountable in journalist attacks

  Anyone who has been to India or is familiar with the country knows how chaotic it can be: from the congestion on the streets of Delhi to the messy way in which democracy functions. And for journalists, covering the chaos of India can be risky business. This week alone, Indian law enforcement officials assaulted two journalists covering demonstrations in different corners of the country.

• Cornel West: ‘They say I’m un-American’

  The American academic and firebrand campaigner talks about Britain’s deep trouble, fighting white supremacy and where Obama is going wrong

• Heritage Immigration Scandal Proof That…Both Sides Do It?

  You may heard that the conservative Heritage Foundation released a dubious study about the effects of an immigration reform. The report alleged a cost of $6.3 trillion, and was quickly challenged and debunked by critics on the right and the left.

• Disappointing Unsealing Decision in Aaron Swartz Case

  The public lost another battle in the U.S. v. Aaron Swartz case, this one over transparency. On May 13, 2013, the U.S. District Court judge handling the prosecution sided with the government, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR and refused to make public any information in the case that any of these three entities wished to keep under seal. The ruling effectively grants the Department of Justice, MIT and JSTOR a veto over what the public gets to know about the investigation.

• Strongbox and Aaron Swartz

  Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous inbox. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.

• The Tough Life of a Dissident

  Ray’s excellent point is that we need more whistleblowers not less, so I should accentuate the positive and talk of how great I feel, how I can sleep at night, how I am recognized all round the world, etc. – all of which is true.

• Russian MP wants Nazi sympathizers to face criminal charges

  A senior United Russia official has demanded debate be resumed in the Duma over introducing criminal prosecution for the rehabilitation of Nazism. The move comes after Russian opposition activist statements during Victory day celebrations.

  Sergey Zheleznyak, deputy-speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, has declared he was insulted by some of the online statements made by members of the opposition movement on May 9, the day Russia marks victory over Nazi Germany.

Intellectual Monopolies

• US supreme court rules for Monsanto in Indiana farmer’s GM seeds case

  The US supreme court came down solidly on the side of the agricultural giant Monsanto on Monday, ruling unanimously that an Indiana farmer could not use patented genetically modified soybeans to create new seeds without paying the company.

• Copyrights

  • Canadian Anti-Piracy Outfit Pirates Photos for its Website

    Canadian anti-piracy company Canipre has been teaming up with film studios to hunt down and sue alleged BitTorrent pirates. They want to change people’s attitudes toward piracy and make a few bucks in the process. However, it appears that the attitude change should start closer to home, as their own website blatantly uses photos that have been ripped-off from independent photographers.