09.25.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Security at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In the age of government lawlessness regarding privacy we recall Torvalds’ sarcastic remarks
LINUX is commonly being run with many blobs in it. Some are very large, especially graphics drivers. Recently, Linus Torvalds was dodging a question regarding a backdoor in Linux and this was covered by the British press.
“The lust for surveillance is a national thing and the bigger the nation is, the more capable it is of carrying out surveillance at a massive scale.”Now that “The UN High Commissioner Says Privacy Is a Human Right” [1] we should take this matter seriously knowing that cross-national bodies stand not for surveillance. The UN, reveal recent leaks, was itself a victim of US/NSA espionage. The lust for surveillance is a national thing and the bigger the nation is, the more capable it is of carrying out surveillance at a massive scale. It’s not just a US thing. The NSA is probably interested in putting back doors in Linux [2] and now that complicity turns out to be behind some NSA back doors [3] Free software leaves more hope for some who appreciate privacy [4], not those who use social networks in an irresponsible way [5-8] or those who trust the keepers of medical records [9,10] (here in the UK there is currently a push to share more such data, with opt-out being an option, for now). The Brazilian president says US surveillance a “breach of international law” [11] and there is some talk about building a new ‘Internet’ alternative [12] as backlash increases [13] over the Pentagon-built Internet. Irrespective of the location of an Internet company, surveillance is unstoppable [14] on the Internet. The UK is part of the problem [15] because it’s part of the empire. Concerns are being raised here [16] because our government is breaking European laws and cracks systems in ally nations [17], showing just how corrupt a government can be when given the power to carry out surveillance [18]. Don’t buy this whole ‘metadata’ excuse. It’s essentially what makes a concise profile of all of us. A lot can be derived from metadata, which BT’s Bruce Schneier (BT is a massive surveillance entity) says “Equals Surveillance” [19].
Some graphics drivers for Linux were previously found to be severely flawed (even enabling remote access through compromise). If one looks for a Linux back door, that’s a good place to start. What’s reassuring, however, is the news that NVIDIA will begin publishing open GPU documentation [20], much like ATI/AMD. If underlying code is being released, then it gets harder to conceal back doors. █
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When did the role of the National Security agency change from keeping USA safe to sabotaging the world’s IT? From the beginning…
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Indeed, the NSA has not cracked good crypto; what it has done is inserted backdoors and such in closed software,” Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien pointed out. “The key word here is ‘closed.’ That makes Linux even more important since anyone can view the code.
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If an employee makes a post on Facebook using a privacy setting that excludes the boss from seeing it, that post is off limits to the employer. Unless, that is, the poster has a turncoat friend who willingly supplies the post to the employer with no prodding to do so. That’s evidently the gist of a ruling handed down in August, as reported by PCWorld on Sunday.
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Emily Sheffield uploaded the image of her sister Alice smiling for the camera and holding a glass of champagne ahead of her wedding two weeks ago.
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On her wedding day, Alice Sheffield would have been entirely within her rights to expect to be the centre of attention.
But a family photo of the bride-to-be smiling with a glass of champagne just hours before the ceremony ended up going viral due to her brother-in-law being pictured in the background, taking a nap on a four-poster hotel bed.
While this may not sound to be too interesting in its own right, users of photo-sharing app Instagram who viewed the image were shocked to spot that the sleeping guest was none other than David Cameron. The British Prime Minister could clearly be seen dozing barefoot on the bed, curled up next to a red box of ministerial paperwork.
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The government has announced proposals that would provide thousands of unqualified NHS 111 workers access to our private medical records, posing a massive risk to patient privacy.
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Their concerns are entirely reasonable. Patients have had zero direct communication from the NHS about the program, patient information posters are wholly uninformative and have only been displayed in GP surgeries, rather than being sent to patients. If you don’t visit your GP every few weeks then it’s likely you wouldn’t see the poster before it was too late (and even if you did read the poster, it’s likely you’ll have no idea what it’s talking about.)
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Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.
President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.
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The International Day of Privacy was celebrated globally on 31 August, with the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden bringing extra energy and resonance to the subject.
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Some people are ao much in a panic about the NSA spying on them that they’re going to move their e-mail and cloud services out of the US entirely to “safer” foreign companies.
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Yahoo! has just added its own statistics to those of Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others. We blogged last week on Facebook’s new data and the questions that now urgently need answering about how powers to access data are being used and the oversight of surveillance powers.
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Sir Malcolm Rifkind defends UK intelligence agencies’ techniques but appears to concede laws may need review
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GCHQ is responsible for a cyber attack on Belgacom.
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It appears then that this message is only relevant to the countries that we seek, quite rightly, to condemn rather than to ourselves and our allies. The information leaked by Edward Snowden, and reported on by Der Spiegel, indicates that the goal of “Operation Socialist” was “to enable better exploitation of Belagcom” and to improve understanding of the provider’s infrastructure. It also appears that GCHQ used spying technology that had been developed by the NSA.
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The government is spying on essentially everything we do.
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Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people — including President Obama — discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata.
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This week at XDC2013 NVIDIA made one of the biggest surprise announcements… NVIDIA will begin publishing NDA-free GPU programming documentation. They already have released some documentation and more is on the way as they seek to assist the Nouveau graphics driver developers in writing a full open-source 3D Linux graphics driver for GeForce GPUs.
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Democracy requires accountability
Summary: As Free (as in freedom) software becomes the norm it is evident that proprietary software companies — not Free/Open Source software proponents — need to work hard to justify procurement through them
Desktop GNU/Linux is coming to more store shelves [1], even if it’s being branded “Chromebook” or whatever [2]. It is abundantly clear — and Intel agrees — that GNU/Linux is the future of the desktop, branding questions aside. Linux/Android already dominates mobile.
It has become harder to dismiss GNU/Linux or Free software as “hype” or “passing fad”. Governments are being pressured by voters to explore Free/libre options and in this process of public advocacy we see changes across Europe [3-5]. Ben Balter calls for “[o]pen standards, open formats, [and] open systems” [6] because only by freeing up data and code can the government earn trust.
There are many success stories for Free software this month. In a matter of days the movement of Free software will officially turn 30. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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I was reading a decent article about buying PCs with GNU/Linux installed. It all comes down to retail shelf-space and even in a country like Brazil where millions of GNU/Linux PCs are manufactured each year, it is difficult to find them on retail shelves.
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Back in late 2010, Google announced a “Chromebook”—a low-cost, entry-level netbook that would run Google’s own operating system, ChromeOS. Google’s vision of ChromeOS, although based on Linux, basically would be a giant Web browser, with all the apps on the machine running in the browser. ChromeOS would be a nearly stateless computer, with all the user’s apps based in Google’s cloud, running the Google Apps suite.
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A two-month tour by Friprog, Norway’s free and open source software resource centre group, visiting all municipal administrations, helped to raise the profile of this type of software solutions, says Morten Amundsen, the centre’s director. “We turned up several applications that the administrations want to share with others; and helped broker a deal with a proprietary software supplier to support a connection with an open source application.”
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Government CIOs have ample resources to do a great job for their communities and citizens. They have smart, well-intentioned people working for them and more low-hanging fruit than most private-sector CIOs dream of.
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Open. Barriers to the free-flow of information just add friction and more often than not, you just end up shooting yourself in the foot. Make open the default. Open standards, open formats, open systems. Expose process. Prefer social and cultural norms to technical constraints. Don’t lock it down unless you absolutely have to. Trust people.
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Posted in Courtroom at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Not just Russia…
Summary: How any effective protest (in its newer, online gown) is being banned and severely punished for in the West, with jail sentences far longer than Pussy Riot’s members have to endure
FREE SPEECH is dying and new forms of protest, which evolve to deal with an increasingly digital world, are being treated like crime worse than even rape and murder in some cases. Journalism that is favourable to protesters (or whistleblowers) is also being criminalised.
The control grid in the United States is expanding [1] with more and more biological footprints of more and more people. The NSA is basically taking digital footprints of just about anyone in the world who uses a phone, the Internet, a bank account, etc. Scary stuff.
Barrett Brown helped show that Anonymous, an amorphous group which thrives in anonymity while it protests online, is not just criminalised but even those who help explain what it does are being criminalised [2]. This is US law that’s being used against Barrett Brown, not something from a nation like North Korea.
Make no mistake. The US government can also harass, prosecute, and almost abduct anyone it doesn’t like right now [3]. Russia even warns about it openly [4]. Just look what’s being done to Julian Assange, which the US government is trying to sort of kidnap via Sweden (that ‘nuisance’ called International Law is the only thing allowing Ecuador to defend Assange from the US government’s allies in the UK). What this comes to show is that Sweden — like the UK — is like a branch of the US now. It helps the US spy on Russia (Snowden’s leaks show this clearly) and Obama has just gone to Stockholm to disrupt the city for a bit [5,6].
Don’t believe for a second that we in the West are so much morally superior. It’s the façade we are encourage to blindly accept if we habitually watch state and corporate media in our language. █
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A year from now, employees of two federal agencies will be searching for potential terrorists from a new 360,000-square-foot building on the FBI’s Clarksburg campus.
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Last year, I traveled to Canada to write a long profile of “homeless hacker” Christopher Doyon, who goes by the name “Commander X” and who is on the run from the US government. (Doyon brought down a California county’s website for 30 minutes, with the help of Anonymous, as part of his protest over an “anti-sleeping” law targeting homeless people; he is under indictment in the Northern District of California and is the only known Anon who has jumped bail to live “in exile.”) Doyon’s life has been by turns bizarre and dramatic, but last week the online drama surrounding Anonymous proved too much even for him—and he quit.
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“So I quit. I am closing down the PLF. I have replaced all those sites three times this summer. I can take no more. I am done. Trolls win.”
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Countries often issue travel advisories warning citizens of danger abroad: war, for instance, or a terrorist threat or an outbreak of disease. The Russian Foreign Ministry posted advice of a somewhat different nature on Monday, cautioning people wanted by the United States not to visit nations that have an extradition treaty with it.
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Posted in Deception, Europe at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The war on ideas. First they came for…
Summary: The Web and other types of Internet channels (e.g. BitTorrent as a medium) suffer from the politician’s attack on phantom menaces like “copyright infringement”, “child porn”, and “terrorism”
OVER here in the UK there is a big push to censor the Web [1,2] and prevent anonymous use of the Web. I personally fight this by running a censorship-free access point that’s free for all to use.
Entities are finding new excuses for censoring opposing opinions. Trolls and spam are the “child porn” and “terrorism” to some [3]; by this I mean that politicians use indefensible activities to impose on society a moral judgement of few plutocrats [4]. Facebook, a platform of censorship [5-6], is where a lot of this imposition can be seen (even certain political views are banned). Another excuse for censorship has become “copyright infringement” [7,8], which the copyright cartel views as superseding human rights.
Vietnam was recently seen taking further its crackdown of speech on the Web [9]. The Europe Union, where politicians like Neelie Kroes promote 'soft' censorship, keeps pretending to be against censorship [10] even while the UK and France, as shown above, clearly promote censorship. In the UK, ORG introduce the notion of “nudge censorship” to describe what the UK government is nudging for.
All in all, the world is descending into a more oppressive regime of censorship on the Web. Free speech is impeded rather than increased.
It should be noted that all sorts of storage, communication, etc. are being demonised and shut down one by one, until there is basically no choice left but to be “consumers” of DRM giants, communicate only through surveillance grids, give one’s identity to marketers and armies, and be subjected to heavy (but invisible/transparent) censorship of ideas. The Internet is being warped into a tool for controlling people rather than empowering and enabling them. █
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It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.
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‘Mini-Miss’ pageant organisers face fines and prison sentences as parliament addresses ‘hypersexualisation’ of under-16s
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My guess is that it’s the last item on the list, and that the article in Ars Technica didn’t help. As any long term user of Facebook knows, Zuckerberg and his friends like to have control of every aspect of the Facebook experience, and the fact that Social Fixer offers users a way to taylor their experience is probably very much a thorn in their side.
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The law also requires foreign internet companies to keep their local servers inside Vietnam.
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The text adopted on 10 September 2013 by the European Parliament “recommends the exchange of best practices between Member States on enforcement measures – such as on establishing white and black lists of illegal gambling websites”, but no longer mentions censorship measure. Although the choice of MEPs could be seen as inconsistent, it is still a victory for citizens and for freedom of expression.
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Back on 18 June, Maria Miller MP brought Internet companies to her office to talk about what can be done about various types of undesirable, offensive, adult or illegal online content.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 4:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Putting Linux in broader context, which also takes into account the origin of the platform we now know as GNU/Linux and many call “Linux”
WHEN Linux was born in 1991 its creator, Linus Torvalds, said that it “won’t be big and professional like gnu” (GNU had been born and created almost a decade earlier). These days, Torvalds’ employer is busy discrediting the role of GNU by altogether omitting it from history. All the attention goes to Linux. LinuxCon coverage was mostly managed or seeded by the well-funded Linux Foundation [1-11]. The Linux Foundation receives a lot more money than the FSF even though GNU is a bigger project than Linux. This is probably related to philosophy. It’s not as though Linux and its corporate backers don’t use GNU utilities; they do so all the time, but some workers call those utilities “Linux”. Misplacing credit is not as innocent as those who refuse to say “GNU/Linux” typically put it.
“It’s not as though Linux and its corporate backers don’t use GNU utilities; they do so all the time, but some workers call those utilities “Linux”.”The Linux Foundation habitually issues reports that are essentially marketing, or PR. This is a vital component of the Linux Foundation’s activities (whereas the FSF engages in advocacy). The Linux Foundation says that 10,000 developers contributed to Linux kernel since 2005 [12-18], but it is counting even those who only changed a few lines of code because it helps inflate the numbers and characterise Linux as a massive project worked on actively by thousands of people (full time).
Taking into account the origins of GNU and the large number of GNU packages, it is possible that a lot more — in terms of developers too — went into GNU than into Linux. We don’t know how many people have worked on GNU, but I recently asked Stallman and we will have some answers soon.
This isn’t bashing of Linux, of which there’s plenty to be fond and happy about. There are nice event videos and talks coverage to be seen [19-23], but let’s put it all in context and remember that not only Linux matters. Without GNU, Linux is just a kernel. █
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What it’s like at a LinuxCon? Join me in a virtual walk about the North America LinuxCon 2013 in New Orleans.
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Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Sarah Sharp and Tejun Heo cover what’s happening with the Linux kernel.
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This week the LinuxPlanet congregates at the LinuxCon conference in New Orleans and once again it looks to be a memorable event.
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Along with a great line up of keynote speakers and breakout sessions, LinuxCon and CloudOpen offer a dizzying array of workshops, mini-summits and work sessions this year. How will you make the most of your time in the Big Easy?
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The open-source Xen virtualization hypervisor has undergone a transformation in recent years, revitalizing its community and generating new interest. How did it do it?
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Although that rightly notes the incredible pace of development within the kernel, I’d like to highlight something else: the fact that this is taking place in a completely distributed fashion. That’s amazing testimony to the skills of the leaders of the Linux project, and to the power of the open source development methodology It’s further proof that this approach really is a great way of writing good code, and another reason we should be grateful to the Linux Foundation for producing these reports.
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Linux has made the operating system fight into a “two-horse race”, the head of the Linux Foundation told the opening of the annual LinuxCon conference.
It’s “the end of an era” for Microsoft’s Windows, Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation told the New Orleans gathering of developers and vendors this morning. Web-based and cloud computing is exploding and making the shift to open source operating systems and software easier.
“Linux is at a tipping point.”
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The Linux Foundation has just named its five scholarship winners for 2013, and they’re all over the board, diverse in gender, race, and geography.
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Linus Torvalds and Intel developer Sarah Sharp met face-to-face on Wednesday, their first public encounter since their mailing list contretemps over the blunt way Torvalds treats the software coders who work on Linux, the massively popular open source operating system he created and still oversees.
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Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel maintainers on stage today at LinuxCon and CloudOpen covered a range of topics, from personal hobbies to advice for getting patches upstream. But one consistent theme emerged in the discussion: Growing the size and diversity of the Linux kernel developer community — on the kernel side as well as in user space — will help push continued innovation even as technology changes.
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Getting involved in Linux kernel development is not that hard if you know where to look. That’s the message delivered by Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman at the Linuxcon conference in New Orleans this week.
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“Who Writes Linux” report surfaces new data on how fast the OS is being built, who is writing the code, and what companies are sponsoring the work
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“Who Writes Linux” report surfaces new data on how fast the OS is being built, who is writing the code, and what companies are sponsoring the work
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The Linux Foundation today released a report called “Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They Are Doing and Who is Sponsoring It.”
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The Linux Foundation held its LinuxCon North America conference in New Orleans this week. This post provides short summaries and links to videos from 12 keynote sessions videos featuring luminaries including Linus Torvalds, Google’s Chris DiBona, Valve’s Gabe Newell, Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton, and more.
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LinuxCon 2013 NA is this week. Here’s the keynote from Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin entitled, “The State of Linux”. Enjoy.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 3:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Not just cost but technical edge too seemingly help drive GNU/Linux as a choice for gamers and game makers
Gabe Newell from Valve believes that GNU/Linux is the future of gaming. He helped promote GNU/Linux as a platform for games in the very recent LinuxCon [1-4], almost stealing the thunder from the “Cloud Computing” hype [5] (surveillance computing).
What’s really noteworthy is that over the past week there have been quite a few announcements about games that are coming to GNU/Linux, not just via Valve (“SteamOS” is in the headlines right now [6,7], along with more Steam titles [8] that make headlines [9-13]). Performance under Ubuntu 13.04 is said to be much better than under Vista 8 [14]. The same goes for OpenGL versus DirectX [15].
Some GNU/Linux are not really news [16-18], but those that newly arrive at the platform [19-24] are, ‘big’ titles like Doom 3 [25] matter, and various other games [26-35] help show how GNU/Linux was transformed into more of a gaming platform, with even more devices being build around it [36]. Perhaps Newell was right and GNU/Linux is the future of gaming [37]. It took a whole to see this dream materialising. A new version of Wine has come [38,39] with further improvements [40], bridging the gap for some games whose developers have not used cross-platform APIs [41], so through Wine too — despite performance penalties — games continue to land on GNU/Linux even if they were never build for it. █
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Thanks to the Raspberry Pi and gamers, Linux is all set to come out on top, says Sean Michael Kerner
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“Linux is the future of Gaming” are the words loud and clear during the keynote by Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve Software, at Linux Foundation’s 2013 North American LinuxCon event.
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Technology has entered a new era in which software is no longer a differentiator, but the foundation that the “big winners” are building their services on, Jim Zemlin said today in his annual State of Linux speech at LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America in New Olreans.
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The Linux-based living room gaming announcements Valve co-founder Gabe Newell promised last week began today with the unveiling of SteamOS, a new Linux-based operating system focused on living room gaming.
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Valve – the company behind gaming distribution behemoth Steam – are to reveal more details on their up-coming ‘Steambox’ gaming console next week.
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Running With Scissors has revealed some but not all of the details of what will come with the Postal 2 (Steam, Desura) DLC!
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Fortix 2 is finally hitting the Linux platform! As of September 17, 2013, Fortix 2 will be available on Steam. Now all three platforms can enjoy the classic arcade gameplay of Fortix 2. It has been a long time coming for this event, and we would like to thank the Linux community for the patience on the matter.
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In a scary twist that reinforces Valve’s distaste for Windows 8, it turns out that the Source engine — the 3D engine that powers Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 — runs faster on Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL than Windows 7 and DirectX/Direct3D.
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Developed by Polypusher Studios for PC, Mac and Linux, Montague’s Mount is a first person psychological rollercoaster ride through isolation, desolation and one man’s tortured mind all set against the bleakness of an isolated Irish island. The player regains consciousness on a windswept beach, with no memory of the past.
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The Fall is a dark, action platformer based on the unison of atmosphere, adventure and exploration.
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Playing as an unidentifiable creature named Gomez, your goal is to find the missing pieces of a Hexahedron scattered across the world before it’s too late. Though the world looks 2D, FEZ has a trick up its sleeve that makes it far more unique than the platformer lets on at the start.
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Have you ever wanted to be president? or prime-minister? Convinced you could do a better job of running the country? Let’s face it, you could hardly do a worse job than our current political leaders.
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BlastEm has the goal of being an extremely accurate Genesis emulator while still running on relatively modest hardware by using advanced techniques. Currently, there’s a lot of work left to do on the accuracy front and there are a lot of optimizations I want to do, but BlastEm is still quite usable for certain purposes. Many commercial and homebrew 3 run well and the performance seems to be good on my relatively modest AMD E-350 powered laptop and Intel Atom based HTPC.
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Alien Arena is a is a free first-person shooter computer game similar to the Quake, Doom, and Unreal Tournament series. You can play Alien Arena online with other players or if you don’t feel skilled enough you can choose single-player matches and play against bots. The game’s content is proprietary, but its engine is open source (CRX engine). An internal server browser helps you to find other players online and there is also an IRC client for chat between players. Alien Arena is available Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X.
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Hopefully, you remember my escapade with Pandora, which was given to me by the company’s CEO for evaluation. In the first installment, we discussed mostly the look & feel and the amazing hardware of the test unit. In the second, we focused on the Xfce build and the modded Android port. So far so good, with some points for improvement.
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Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve declared that proprietary software and closed platforms are gaming’s past, its future is open and on Linux.
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The latest bi-weekly Wine development release, Wine 1.7.2, is now available.
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The Wine development release 1.7.2 is now available.
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An online car racing game that PC Gamer voted “Best racing game of all time” has hit Linux in the form of an alpha version that uses Wine.
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