• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Best Terminal Emulators for Linux

If you’re a fan of Linux, you know the exact reason why it’s awesome – the command line. Though many outsiders view it as only a “hacker tool,” it’s actually one of the best tools available for any operating system. The Linux shell has the ability to install software, manage your operating system and basically everything else.

To interact with the command line, you’ll need a terminal emulator. There are many terminal emulators available – perhaps too many. There are a lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones out there. It is because of this reason we’ve decided to create a list of five great terminal emulators available on Linux.

Why I rarely file bug reports

“Any chance of a bug report?” a developer asked when I mentioned a problem with an application on social media. As a free software supporter, I felt an obligation to oblige, but in practice, the chance was slim. For those of us who don’t regularly file bugs, the process is usually too demanding, and too dependent on bureaucratic whim to seem worth the effort.

HP’s Big Slap-In-The-Face To Microsoft Will Show Up Next Year

The operating system is called Linux++, and is part of HP’s ambitious project to reinvent the computer, reports MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite.

Ultimately, HP hopes to replace Linux++ with something even more radical and homegrown, an operating system called Carbon, though it hasn’t talked about a timeline for that yet.

Has The Russian Government Moved To GNU/Linux As Planned?

There is another plan which almost certainly will involve replacing Wintel PCs with GNU/Linux PCs gradually, by a million units per annum, the move to Baikal processors, a derivative of ARM. Recently, in response to sanctions over Ukraine, Russia will officially prefer home-grown “solutions” for IT. There are signs of a digital “cold” war emerging and the world’s IT is dependent on several components originating in Russia. Such pressures will surely accelerate migration to GNU/Linux in Russia. It’s a short cut to independence.

Linux Continues to Grow in the Cloud Computing and Implementation of Enterprise Applications

The operating system of most famous open source is gaining ground in business particularly in cloud computing, according to a report from the Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group.

The Linux Foundation has published a study called “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report” that shows the steady growth of Linux in the market for large companies, especially in recent years driven by factors such as the growth of cloud computing, in addition to its known qualities in terms of safety, capacity deployment, costs or virtualization.

Desktop

• Must-have Linux desktop apps (Six Clicks)

  There’s nothing I can’t do on my Linux PCs that requires Windows. It’s really that simple.

  On my Linux Mint 17.1 desktop, I can run Windows games, thanks to Crossover, and run thousands of native games including many Steam-powered games. In addition, I don’t need to worry about anti-virus software since, despite all the FUD, there still hasn’t been a successful desktop Linux virus.

  Let’s get down to business: Here are the six applications I use every day to get my work done and keep in touch with my friends. Unless you have some particular program that’s Windows only, I think you’ll find these six programs may answer for all your daily needs as well.

Server

• Containers, microservices, and orchestrating the whole symphony

  The microservices architecture is far from a new trend; it’s generally accepted as a better way to build apps these days. The common way to build apps was, until a few years ago, the monolithic approach—which was, if you look at it from a functional perspective, basically one deployment unit that does everything. Monolithic apps are good for small scale teams and projects, but when you need something that has a larger scale and involves many teams, it starts to become problematic. It’s much harder to make changes, as the code base becomes bigger and more people make changes to it.

Kernel Space

• Linux leader: Dependency on a platform is good for the platform

  Zemlin’s statement preceded the announcement Tuesday that the Cloud Foundry Foundation, representing the financial backing for open source projects, has been successfully spun off into an agency unto itself. It will remain intertwined with the Linux Foundation, however, in that Linux will become a contracting service provider to Cloud Foundry.

• diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

  Containers are very tricky to implement. Trying to isolate sets of resources from each other completely, so that they resemble a discrete system, and doing it in a secure way, has to be addressed on a feature-by-feature basis, with many caveats and uncertainties. Over time, this makes the core kernel code more secure and robust, but each individual feature may have surprising issues.

  The whole namespace idea—corralling subsets of system resources like user IDs and group IDs, and performing on-the-fly translations between the resource names within the container and the corresponding names in the outer system—is tough to manage.

  Recently, Marian Marinov noticed that process counters in the outer system counted processes as being owned by the same user if his or her UIDs (user IDs) were the same inside two separate containers. The same was true for GIDs (group IDs). He didn’t like this, because the two containers represented two logically isolated systems, and in that context, the same UIDs could refer to different users entirely. They shouldn’t be counted together.

• Linux 3.19 To Have Full Multi-Touch For More Logitech Devices

  Jiri Kosina has lined up his HID subsystem changes for the Linux 3.19 kernel that include more multi-touch device work and other input improvements.

• XFS Has Improvements To Look Forward To With Linux 3.19

  One of the latest pull requests for the Linux 3.19 kernel is the XFS file-system changes.

• Benchmarks

  • 12-Way AMD Catalyst 14.12 vs. NVIDIA 346 Series Linux GPU Comparison

    This article is comparing twelve recent NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards when using these latest binary drivers on Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit. All tests were done on an Intel Core i7 5960X system.

Applications

• qrq: How little I really know

  I found qrq by way of a brute search through the Debian archives for anything text-related, and even though I haven’t a clue what to do with qrq, I’ll show it here out of fairness.

• xrestop: The irony is palpable

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Install Nuvola Player 2.5 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kodi 14.0 RC3 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kingsoft WPS Office Alpha 16 Patch 3 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How to block unwanted IP addresses on Linux efficiently

  • Install and Configure PureFTPd with MySQL on an OpenSUSE Linux VPS

  • Install KVM (Kernel Based Virtual Machine) On Ubuntu Server 14.04 / 14.10

  • Install sysstat on Fedora 21

  • How to Sync Android with the Linux Desktop

    Once that is installed, open up Lightning and right-click a blank space in the Calendar listing, select New Calendar, select On the Network, select Google Calendar, and walk through the remainder of the wizard. Even if you have two-step verification, this process will work without a hitch. In the end, you can select all of the calendars you want to sync (Figure 3) and start working with your Google Calendar ─ which will then sync with your Android device.

• Games

  • CS:GO Lowers Its Memory Usage On Linux

    The latest update out to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive this week aims to lower the system memory usage for OS X and Linux systems.

  • Metro Redux Games Launch For Linux

    The Metro Redux Bundle is now available for Steam on Linux gamers. We’ve been looking forward to the Linux versions of these games for several months and now they’ve finally arrived. The “redux” version offers various updates to the original versions of the game while Metro 2033 Redux should be particularly interesting for Linux gamers as it’s the first time the 2033 version is coming to Linux — the non-redux Metro: Last Light meanwhile came out for Linux last year.

  • Civilization: Beyond Earth Coming Soon To Linux, Intel/AMD Support Restored

    For Linux gamers that are fans of Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, the Linux port of the game could arrive as soon as next week.

  • Total War Series finally appears on Linux

    The British video games company The Creative Assembly has finally begun releasing successful strategy games of the Total War series for Linux. The first title that was published recently is Empire: Total War.

  • Civilization: Beyond Earth Mac Version Receives First Big Patch; Linux Version Will Release Soon, Patch Included

    Mac and Linux developer Aspyr announced the news of the two patches in its most recent Dev Update post. Civ players on Mac should be able to download the update now and start enjoying the freshly retooled game. Linux users are still waiting for their version of the game to come out, but the good news is that they won’t have to wait to get the patch, too. According to Aspyr, the patch is already built into the Linux version and will be ready to go on launch.

  • Android, Linux, iPhone users can download Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition next week

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Frameworks 5.5.0 Released

  • Release of KDE Frameworks 5.5.0

    This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

  • Calligra 2.8.7 is Out

    Packages for the release of KDE’s document suite Calligra 2.8.7 are available for Kubuntu 14.10. You can get it from the Kubuntu Updates PPA. They are also in our development version Vivid.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • 4MLinux Is So Lightweight It’s Anemic

    I worked with the all-in-one version of 4MLinux for several days, and I had a very frustrating experience trying to deal with the little distro that could not. The separate mini distros had a few usability issues too. I was disappointed by the minimalistic software inventory. Unless you install them to the hard drive, very few of the included apps actually run.

• Screenshots

  • Porteus 3.1 Screenshot Tour

  • SparkyLinux 3.6 MATE Screenshot Tour

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: November 2014

    The Gentoo Council addressed a few miscellaneous matters this month.

    The first concerned tinderbox reports to bugs. There was a bit of a back-and-forth in bugzilla with a dispute over whether bugs generated from tinderbox runs that contained logs attached as URLs instead of as files could be closed as INVALID. Normally the use of URLs is discouraged to improve the long-term usability of the bugs. Since efforts were already underway to try to automatically convert linked logs into attached logs it was felt that closing bugs as INVALID was counterproductive.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta is here

    Time, and operating system developments wait on no one. Only a few months ago Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 and now the RHEL 7.1 beta has landed on our doorsteps.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 Raves & DRM Happiness

      But the real reason behind Fedora 21’s success? It’s an odd-numbered release. Historically, the odd-numbered releases have always been better than the even-numbered ones. Don’t ask me why. There’s no documentation or detailed research to prove why it happens this way. It’s just a physical law of the universe.

    • Red Hat 7.1 Beta, Malware History, and Bug Reports

      In the Linux feeds this evening was the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta. In other news, Jon Gold takes us down Linux malware memory lane and Derrik Diener looks at some terminal emulators – one that was new to me. Elsewhere Bruce Byfield discusses why he don’t file bug reports and Jack Germain says 4MLinux is so lightweight it’s anemic.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Launches a Stripped Down Version of Ubuntu for Cloud

        Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution on the cloud launched a lightweight cloud-optimised version of the OS called Snappy Ubuntu Core.

      • Canonical Refreshes With ‘Snappy’ Ubuntu Core And Easy Updates

        Canonical has unveiled a new version of Ubuntu designed for the cloud, which aims to update cloud instances with the same certainty and precision as a mobile phone.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google releases Cardboard VR viewer specs and SDKs

      The Android SDK enables applications with features including lens distortion correction, head tracking, 3D calibration, and side-by-side rendering. Other features include stereo geometry configuration and user input event handling.

    • Sharing with Qt on Android

      We just release a new version of GiraffPanic – a logic mobile game written with Qt and QML. In the new version we give the users the possibility to share unlock codes with each other to unlock new levels. So we wanted to have a nice way to share the code between devices without any need to copy paste them (codes) into another application. After trying a lot of different approaches (that did not work), we found it is possible to invoke the native Android share menu from within our application. Using this method keeps our own code quite tidy and supports all the ways of sharing provided by the host device.

    • Game of Thrones adventure released for Android

      I’m a huge fan of the and . I’ve read through the books a number of times, and watched the show even more. There’s always some little angle or juicy tidbit to find in the books, you just can’t read them once to take it all in. No matter how attentive a reader you are, you’ll definitely miss things as George R.R. Martin puts little hints and foreshadowings all over the place.

    • BlueZ 5.26 Taks Aim At Bluetooth 4.2 & Android 5.0

      BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack, boasts more features with today’s release of version 5.26.

      BlueZ 5.26 most notably adds support for Android 5.0 Bluetooth features and support for Bluetooth 4.2 commands and events. BlueZ 5.26 also supports the Low-Energy Secure Connections feature of Bluetooth, HID over GATT get and set report handling, and version 1.2 of the Phonebook Access Profile. BlueZ 5.26 also packs various fixes.

HubSpot Is Now Aiming to Solve DevOps with New Tool

The company, traditionally focused on marketing software, is to eventually aiming to make the new product open source.

Cisco Announces Plan to Reinvent Snort 3 IPS

The user friendliness is being enabled in part by way of a new command line shell that leverages the open-source Lua language.

There is also a plan to have a simpler language for Snort rules. Roesch explained that the new rules language will be more streamlined than the existing language. The goal for the new rules language is for both humans and machines to be able to more easily read and write Snort policies.

The most current stable open-source Snort release is version 2.9.7.0, but that doesn’t imply that the new Snort 3.0 release will be coming within the next three regular Snort release update cycles. Roesch said he doesn’t mind having a Snort 2.10.0 or an even higher number, emphasizing that the development of Snort 3 will take its due and proper course.

Events

• How many LibrePlanet scholarships will we give?

  We’re excited to announce our first keynote speaker for LibrePlanet 2015: Karen Sandler, executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast. Ms. Sandler’s closing keynotes have been a highlight at LibrePlanet, and we’re so excited to have her back. In other words, LibrePlanet 2015 is shaping up to be a really great event.

• AnDevCon Highlights Embedded, Open-Source

  Application performance management tools, speakers, and giant green Android mascots abounded at the Android Developer Conference San Francisco Bay Area, held November 18 through 21 in Burlingame, Calif. The event, in its eighth year, was sponsored by Intel, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Twitter, Sony, Epson, and Amazon, among others.

• Call for Papers is open for the Embedded Linux Conference 2015

  Are you involved in Embedded Linux? Well there is a Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) taking place in San Jose, CA, March 23 – 25, 2015. This is the “premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products”.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla to Support Certificate Transparency in Firefox

    Mozilla is planning to add support for Certificate Transparency checks in Firefox in the near future, but the company says that the feature won’t be turned on by default at first.

SaaS/Big Data

• Dell Adds Midokura Open Network Virtualization Option for OpenStack

  Dell Computer is deepening its focus on the open cloud and OpenStack in particular. The company announced an expansion of its Open Networking initiative to include Midokura, a company focused on network virtualization, to complement Dell’s networking and server infrastructure. Their agreement includes a joint go-to-market program, validated reference architecture and global reseller agreement.

• How to Easily Get Very In-Demand OpenStack Cloud Skills

  How in demand are cloud computing skills in the job market? Consider these notes from Forbes, based on a report from WANTED Analytics: “There are 3.9 million jobs in the U.S. affiliated with cloud computing today with 384,478 in IT alone. The median salary for IT professionals with cloud computing experience is $90,950 and the median salary for positions that pay over $100,000 a year is $116,950.”

• OpenStack Is Huge In The Open-Source Cloud—But Maybe Not Huge Enough

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • IT should listen to users not just managers, says SugarCRM CEO

    Deliver the software users want and need (not just what management thinks is required), look for deployment flexibility, and beware of API charges. They are the messages from SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin.

    The proliferation of BYOA – bring your own applications – is putting pressure on IT departments to provide better tools, and to regard users as “constituents” rather than simply listening to management.

Public Services/Government

• European Commission updates its open source policy

  The European Commission (EC) wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). “We use a lot of open source components that we adapt and integrate, and it is time that we contribute back.”

Openness/Sharing

• Google embraces open doc formats, U.S. Marines choose Linux, and more

Programming

• Ruby Programming Lang Creator Working on New Language: Streem

• Ruby Compiled With Clang Is Noticeably Faster Than GCC

  While in our benchmark runs the performance of generated binaries between GCC and LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compilers are generally quite close, there are exceptions. When it comes to real-world usage of Clang, most companies tend to just utilize Clang for now when producing debug builds due to its faster compile times and better diagnostics than GCC, but GCC still ends up getting used for producing release/production builds.

• Rust 1.0 Is Coming Next Year

  The Rust Programming Language Blog has shared their plans for scheduling the Rust 1.0 release to happen next year.

Science

• Researchers ‘Averaged’ The Faces Of 400 CEOs — And The Results Say A Lot About Race In Business

  What happens when you combine the faces of 400 CEOs?

  A startling picture of just how similar, and pale, our modern leaders are.

  Fractl, the viral marketing company, used the face-manipulation software Psychomorph to “average” the faces of 400 execs in 10 different industries, from nonprofits to entertainment to transportation. They also averaged the age and income of CEOs in each industry.

Security

• A brief history of Linux malware

• The Password? You Changed It, Right?

  As my Twitter followers may be aware, I spent the first part of this week at the Passwords14 conference in Trondheim, Norway. More about that later, suffice for now to say that the conference was an excellent one, and my own refreshed Hail Mary Cloud plus more recent history talk was fairly well received.

  [...]

  By this afternoon (2014-12-11), it seems that all told a little more than 700 machines have come looking for mostly what looks like various manufacturers’ names and a few other usual suspects. The data can be found here, with roughly the same file names as in earlier episodes. Full list of attempts on both hosts here, with the rather tedious root only sequences removed here, hosts sorted by number of attempts here, users sorted by number of attempts here, a CSV file with hosts by number of attempts with first seen and last seen dates and times, and finally hosts by number of attempts with listing of each host’s attempts. Expect updates to all of these at quasi-random intervals.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• ‘Excited Delirium’ and the Suspicious Death of Kenwin Garcia

  Kenwin Garcia was a 25-year-old African American man from Newark who died in 2008 on the side of a highway, after an altercation with state police. Christopher Baxter from NJ Advanced Media states that his death was claimed to be a result of “excited delirium.” The term is used to describe a lethal overdose of adrenaline that leads to heart or respiratory failure. But there is little medical evidence to support this official judgment in Garcia’s case, and there is wider controversy surrounding the interpretation of the symptoms that constitute the syndrome. In Garcia’s case specifically, an autopsy found he suffered severe internal injuries, including a broken breastbone and ribs, a torn kidney and extensive bleeding.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The New York Times Downplays The Influence Of Money In Politics

  The New York Times downplayed the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and dismissed the influence of money in politics by ignoring record-breaking spending of outside groups, the role of large donor political contributions, and dark money in the 2014 midterm election.

Censorship

• Face-sitting pornography protest Q&A: How, where, and seriously – why?

  The ban on certain acts in pornography has been called sexist because it outlaws practices that put the woman firmly in control

Privacy

• Solidarity against online harassment

  One of our colleagues has been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months. We have decided to publish this statement to publicly declare our support for her, for every member of our organization, and for every member of our community who experiences this harassment. She is not alone and her experience has catalyzed us to action. This statement is a start.

• GOP rep attempted late bid to kill spy bill

  One of the biggest thorns in the side of the country’s intelligence agencies attempted to mount an eleventh hour bid to kill the spy agencies’ funding bill on Wednesday.

  Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) wrote on Facebook that the intelligence authorization bill that easily passed through the House contained “one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative.”

  “It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American,” explained Amash, who has a record of skepticism toward the National Security Agency and other agencies. Last year, he nearly succeeded in an attempt to end the NSA’s controversial phone records program.

• Police can search cellphones in arrests without warrant, Supreme Court rules

  In a crime ruling that earned it rare praise from the federal government, the Supreme Court of Canada said police may search cellphones without a warrant when they make an arrest.

  Cellphones are the bread and butter of the drug trade, the majority said in a 4-3 ruling. It said police have been given the “extraordinary power” to do warrantless searches during an arrest, under common-law rules developed by judges over centuries, because of the importance of prompt police investigations. Until now, those searches typically included purses and briefcases. Civil liberties groups had urged the court to exempt cellphones.

• European Commissioner For Human Rights And Key EU Privacy Committee Strongly Condemn Mass Surveillance And Bulk Data Retention

  As we wrote recently, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that GCHQ surveillance doesn’t violate human rights. That’s hardly surprising, given IPT’s track record in approving pretty much everything that GCHQ does. But the global reach of the spying carried out by GCHQ and the NSA means that there are plenty of other bodies that are prepared to condemn what they have been doing. Here, for example, is an important report from the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, entitled “The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World”. It’s an extremely thorough exploration of this complex area, touching on key issues that have often been discussed here on Techdirt: privatized law enforcement, suspicionless mass data retention, cross-border exchange of data by law enforcement agencies, and global surveillance by national security agencies.

• the long tail of MD5

  Everybody knows that MD5 is as terribly useless as ROT13 and you should have switched to SHA3-512 like twenty years ago. But lots of usage sticks around, and will continue to stick around for a long time to come, leading to the long tail of MD5. Why not simply convert to a better hash function? Maybe it’s not so simple.

• Edward Snowden’s lawyer calls on Europeans to prosecute US torture architects

  A leading German human rights lawyer has called on prosecutors across Europe to “get active” and prepare to seize any CIA agents and US officials involved in torture who enter their territories.

Civil Rights

• Stephen Colbert Mocks Fox News’ Raucous Support Of Torture

• Mark Udall Wants To Release CIA Internal Review Of Torture Program

  Outgoing Senator Mark Udall has been a key player in trying to hold the intelligence community’s feet to the fire concerning their unconstitutional and illegal activities — and that includes both the NSA and CIA. He was a key player in making sure that the CIA torture report was actually released — and there was pressure on him, if the report wasn’t released, to read it into the record to force it out. Even with the release on Tuesday, some were asking for Udall to at least release an unredacted version or even more sections from the full ~7,000 page report, rather than just the 500 page exec summary. In fact, in Udall’s final floor speech on Wednesday (link to a video that is about 50 minutes), the Senator instead chose to reveal more information related to the so-called “Panetta Review” on the CIA’s torture program.

  [...]

  The CIA has done everything it can to try to bury the Panetta Report. But Udall actually discussed it in depth. A big chunk of his speech is actually discussing some of the details in the Panetta Review, going beyond the CIA torture report. Following his speech, Senator Richard Burr — who is a known buddy of the intelligence community, and soon to take over the Senate Intelligence Committee — ridiculously claimed that Udall disclosed a bunch of “very classified” material. What it actually shows, however is that the CIA’s response to the torture report is simply more lies from the CIA. As Udall noted in his speech, since the Panetta Review was supposed to be internal, it was a lot more open and honest, and it agreed with the Senate staffers. He first points out that the official CIA response to the terror report, from current Director John Brennan, shows the CIA’s “flippant” attitude towards oversight and the fact that it knows the Obama administration will let the CIA get away with anything. However, the Panetta Review shows the true story.

• Stun Guns Used by Police 13 Times Causes Death

  The policy states that officers should not stun any handcuffed suspect.

• How The CIA Got Conservative Author Ronald Kessler To Spin For Them On Torture

  The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture reveals that conservative author Ronald Kessler was “blessed” by the CIA, receiving background information from the agency which he used to push false claims about the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and publishing classified information without triggering a leak investigation.

• Scalia: Constitution silent on torture

  Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is joining the debate over the Senate’s torture report by saying it’s hard to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened.

  Scalia told a Swiss broadcast network that American and European liberals who say such tactics may never be used are being self-righteous.

• Metaphysics

  Listening to the BBC and Sky, and reading The Guardian, all on the subject of whether the UK establishment knew about CIA torture or not, the realisation dawned on me that I had imagined my entire life story and in fact I had never actually existed. For a little while it was like being in a particularly scary Japanese film.

• Rectal feeding is rape – but don’t expect the CIA to admit it

  Of all the revelations made about the “enhanced interrogation methods” used by the CIA on detainees in the aftermath of 9/11, the use of waterboarding and rectal feeding have garnered the most attention. In the case of the latter in particular, this was the first time many people had even heard of such a thing.

  Initially used in response to prisoner hunger strikes, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found this allegedly “necessary” and “legitimate” medical practice – also referred to as a “nutrient enema” – was also used by the CIA as a form of torture and control.

• Guess Who Else Tortured People Like the CIA Did — Soviets and Nazis

  The Soviet Union was good at torture.

  But the Soviets excelled at torture because they understood its usefulness. “Our task is not only to destroy you physically,” a Stalinist interrogator explained to a prisoner in 1948. “But also to smash you morally before the eyes of the society.”

  History’s great agents of pain knew what the CIA pretends not to.

• These American World War II Re-Enacters Dress Up Like Nazis for Fun

  That’s part of what drew her, as well as her friend and fellow photographer Marisha Camp, to photograph American re-enactors of Germans in World War II for her series “Targets Unknown.” Half out of necessity—those who attend the re-enactments are required to dress for the occasion—and half out of a desire to test the boundaries between subject and artist, Kranitz became an active member in the events she photographed.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • IsoHunt unofficially resurrects The Pirate Bay

    Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content.

    Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.

  • What chance a piracy consensus?

    The Government says rights holders and ISPs must develop an anti-piracy regimen themselves, or have one imposed on them. Early signs show this approach is working.

    The Government’s ultimatum to ISPs and content owners and distributors that they have three months to come up with a system for identifying and taking action against copyright infringers already appears to be bearing fruit.

  • MPAA Prepares to Bring Pirate Site Blocking to the U.S.

    The MPAA is in discussions with the major movie studios over ways to introduce site blocking to the United States. TorrentFreak has learned that the studios will try to achieve website blockades using principles available under existing law. Avoiding another SOPA-style backlash is high on the agenda.

  • Thanks To All Heroes Of Freedom Who Have Kept The Pirate Bay Running

    The file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is down following a raid by Swedish Police. The organization Rights Alliance, previously named the Anti-Pirate Bureau and representing the giant movie and record corporations, is behind the raid. It’s a dark day for freedoms online.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How Linux Works Is an OS Mechanic’s Mainstay

Linux Ruled 2014, Codenames, and Steam Linux Sales

There were lots of interesting tidbits in today’s Linux feeds. Silviu Stahie wonders if Linux’s advancements in 2014 were enough to finally declare it the “year of Linux.” Elsewhere, Larry Cafiero laments Fedora’s decision to forgo codenames and Kevin Fenzi explains what happened to Fedora servers yesterday after release. Jack M. Germain reviews How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know and GOL explains how Steam computes Linux sales.

Joyent Offers Linux Branded Zones, Extends Docker Engine as Container Service

Joyent, Inc., which has billed itself in several different ways over the years is now billing itself as “the container infrastructure company.” The company is actually making a lot of smart moves. In November I reported on how Joyent has announced that it is open sourcing its core technology. Joyent’s platform can compete with OpenStack and other cloud offerings, and facilitates efficienet use of container technologies like Docker.

About Linux Weekly News – 8th December 2014

Users Want Windows 10 Features That Are Already Available in Linux Systems

Windows 10 brought some new features for its fans, but it’s still under development. Its users already have a list of features they would like implemented, but it’s funny to see how most of those features are already present in Linux installations.

Desktop

• Was 2014 “The Year of Linux Desktop”?

  Linux has seen a lot of changes during 2014 and many users are saying that this was finally the year that really showed some real progress, but has it been enough to call it “the year of Linux desktop”?

• Linux Mint 17.1 and the question of the “best” Linux desktop

• Is Linux Mint 17.1 really the best desktop of 2014?

  Wow, that’s some high praise there for Linux Mint 17.1. I agree that the Linux Mint developers did a great job on it, but I’m not sure I’d call it the best available desktop today for the simple reason that no matter how good a distribution or desktop is, there are bound to be people out there who need something different. Linux Mint is a fine choice for many or even most desktop Linux users, but it’s not right for everybody.

  I’m not even sure there is a “best desktop” since the whole notion is so extremely subjective. I suppose you could say that there’s a “most popular” desktop if there is a huge majority of people using it that dwarfs all other desktops. But “best” implies that it is better than everything else and, as much as I like Linux Mint, I cannot say that it’s better than every other distribution or that Cinnamon or MATE beat out every other desktop environment.

  I suppose it’s the old “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” thing. If Linux Mint 17.1 meets all of your needs, and you can use Cinnamon or MATE then it may very well be the best desktop distribution for you. But there are far too many different Linux users to generalize and give it the crown of best desktop of 2014, particularly given all the other choices out there.

• My Favorite Linux Applications and Desktops

  My main desktop remains KDE, although Cinammon, GNOME, Mate, and LXDE are also ready to run. However, my main environment remains KDE because of the work tools it provides, such as a multi-item clipboard, and the ability to group the applications I’m working with into a single tabbed window.

Server

• Trusty Old Router

  In the past years, the device has been running OpenWRT, which is a really nice and very powerful little Linux distribution specifically for this kind of routers.

• Parallels adopts Docker in next Cloud Server release

  Long, long before Docker made containers the cool server application virtualization tool, Parallels was making container technology work for enterprises with the commercial Virtiozzo and the open-source OpenVZ project. Now Parallels will be adding native support for Docker as well to the next version of its Parallels Cloud Server.

Kernel Space

• OpenDaylight Member Spotlight: Intel

  Intel was a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project and recently increased its membership to Platinum, the highest tier. We had a conversation with Uri Elzur, Intel’s director of SDN architecture, to understand what drove the company’s decision and what we can expect to see from them in 2015 and beyond.

• VirtIO & Xen Changes For Linux 3.19 Kernel

  The VirtIO changes for Linux 3.19 include infrastructure changes for providing VirtIO 1.0 support. There’s also bug-fixes and other improvements with the VirtIO code for Linux 3.19. The VirtIO changes for Linux 3.19 can be found via this pull request.

• EXT4 In Linux 3.19 Brings Lots Of Bug Fixes

  Ted Ts’o has sent in the EXT4 file-system changes for the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window.

  EXT4 changes for Linux 3.19 include “lots of bug fixes”, including changes that should improve CPU utilization and potential soft lock-ups when under heavy memory pressure. There’s also a random assortment of other changes with just around 500 lines of EXT4 file-system code being touched by 26 changes for this merge window.

• Linux Foundation IoT standardisation effort AllSeen Alliance grows to more than 100 companies

  For those wo are not following IoT news all the time: you may have lost the foundation of this interesting alliance project that aims at fostering interoperability of IoT.

  This project is led and started by Linux Foundation and this is a great guarantee of openness and real community driven innovation. We all look forward to see where AllSeen will lead!

• Many Sound Updates Queued For Linux 3.19 Kernel

  Takashi Iwai classifies the sound updates for Linux 3.19 as a fairly large pull request. There’s ASoC improvements, new USB audio support improvements, a new OXFW Firewire audio driver for the FW970/971 chipset, support for new Intel x86 SoCs, and various other changes. The new Intel SoC support work is for some Cherry Trail and Braswell hardware.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver Brings Mixed Results For Linux Users

    There are some significant performance improvements to find with this week’s Linux version of the AMD Catalyst 14.12 “Omega” driver, but there’s also some Linux OpenGL performance regressions to note too. Feedback from the Linux community as well to this new driver has been mixed.

  • NVIDIA Launches a New Stable Driver for Linux Users, Latest Kernels Supported

    A new set of NVIDIA Linux drivers has been released and this time they are for the long-lived branch, which makes them perfect candidates to be added in the official repositories.

Applications

• citadel: So many things to explore

• bpm-tools: Music and … stuff

• speedpad: The advanced typing tutor

  Some typing tutors I’ve seen were oriented toward specific letter combinations, or as touch-typing coaches with the ability to swap out dictionary sets. Quasi-gamelike programs such as banihstypos aside, software like gtypist or typespeed primarily work on a word-by-word basis, ostensibly as a way of building fundamental proficiency.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install and run Stringer on a Fedora Linux VPS

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 7.0

  • How To Install Kernel 3.18 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivatives

  • How To Install Kernel 3.17.6 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install NVIDIA 343.36 Driver For Linux On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install NVIDIA 343.36 Driver On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • How To Install FreeCiv 2.4.4 On OpenSUSE 13.2, OpenSUSE 13.1 And OpenSUSE 12.3 Systems

  • How To Install Darktable 1.6 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Properly Install Cinnamon 2.4 Stable On Ubuntu 14.04

  • tagfs, xtagfs, dhtfs and more: Tag, you’re it

  • How to dual-boot Windows 8 and Fedora 21 on a PC with UEFI firmware

  • How to test-drive Ubuntu Core on Fedora 21 Workstation

  • How to Setup Logstash on Linux with ElasticSearch, Redis, Nginx

  • Infrastructure FAD Report — MirrorManager2/Ansible

• Games

  • Trine Enchanted Edition For Linux Released

    It’s been a while, but Trine Enchanted Edition has been officially released for Linux. Be sure to give you love to Frozenbyte for delivering on their promise.

  • The 7DFPS Challenge 2014: A Linux Perspective

    Last month, hundreds of developers from around the world came together to challenge themselves to make first person games in seven days for the 7DFPS game jam.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Interview with Sylvia Ritter

    A friend mentioned Krita in 2010, claiming that it was the best open source alternative to Photoshop. Had to try it and never stopped working with it. On a sidenode I’ve never worked with commercial art software before, but I’m not eager to either.

  • GCompris Joins the KDE incubator and Launches a Fundraiser

    GCompris has joined the KDE incubator. GCompris is the high quality educational software suite comprising numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10, and well known by parents and teachers all over the world.

    GCompris was started in 2000 by Bruno Coudoin as a Free Software project. Originally written in GTK+, the project developers decided in early 2014 to make a radical change and rewrite it in Qt Quick. The main motivation is the ability of the Qt platform to address the desktop and the tablet market from a single code base.

  • digiKam: Season of KDE Update

    To put it briefly, the gradient of the image patch gives us the differences in pixels. We then decompose the covariance matrix to get eigen values whose values represent the strength of the image patch. Specifically, the larger the maximum eigen value, the richer the texture is, in the dominant direction.

    I came across an OpenCV function which handles all of this and returns the eigen values (and vectors).

Distributions

• Create a live system ISO for your Ubuntu-based Linux machines using Systemback

  You have that Linux desktop or server precisely how you want it and are interested in either creating a spot-on backup or a live ISO that you can then install on other (similar) hardware. How do you do it? You could go through the process of learning a number of commands to take care of the process, or you could install and use a handy tool called Systemback.

• Reviews

  • An Everyday Linux User Review Of Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0 CE

    Puppy Linux continues to be a tremendous distribution. The performance is incredible and the amount of quality applications that are provided in such a small download is breathtaking.

    The default applications won’t appeal to everyone and they are built for functionality over style but the Quickpet application makes it possible to install old favourites like LibreOffice and GIMP.

    It would be good if Puppy could get around booting on UEFI based machines but modern machines probably aren’t the target market at the moment.

    I would definitely recommend Puppy Linux for netbooks, older laptops and for computers that have no hard drives. It proves once and for all that you can teach an old dog (of a computer) new tricks.

• New Releases

  • Alpine Linux 3.1.0 Is Built for Users Who Love the Terminal

    Alpine Linux, a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox, which make up the terminal, has just been upgraded to version 3.1.0 and it comes with a large number of updated packages.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo mailing lists down

    This public service announcement has been brought to you by non-infra Andreas.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro 0.8.11 Gets Its First Upgrade Pack, Manjaro 0.9.0 Already Being Worked On

    The Manjaro 0.8.11 Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, which is also 100% compatible with the repositories of the base system, has received its first updated pack and it looks like it’s a big one.

• Slackware Family

  • New chromium and chromium-dev packages

    For the curious among you, I have additionally refreshed my chromium-dev packages. Chromium-dev is the development release of the browser (there’s also a “beta” channel but I don’t care about that too much). By play-testing the development release from time to time, I am prepared and do not get nasty surprises when the stable channel jumps to a higher major release (the jump from 38 to 39 was quite intrusive in terms of SlackBuild script).

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat secure, open source solutions

  • Red Hat secure, open source solutions overview

    For agencies and programs across government, open source solutions from Red Hat are delivering security as good as or better than proprietary solutions.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta Now Available

    In June, we announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, effectively raising the bar for enterprise IT infrastructure and pushing the operating system into the role of being a critical infrastructure platform for the enterprise. Featuring a broad spectrum of significant new features and enhancements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to not only meet the demands of today’s modern datacenter but to tackle the next-generation IT requirements of tomorrow. From accelerating application delivery through containerization – to laying a stable foundation for the open hybrid cloud – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues to redefine the enterprise operating system.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Now In Beta

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Enters Public Beta

    RHEL 7.1 is now available in beta. Improved security is a key focus in the new beta of Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.1 Beta available now!

    Fans of Linux-based operating systems have been experiencing a deluge of quality releases in the last quarter of 2014 — Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora to name a few. While I still think there are too many distros nowadays, the lesser-quality releases can be tuned-out as noise.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Infrastructure release day retrospective

      Here’s what happened: For the last few weeks we had been seeing sporadic slowdowns in the bodhi application, but had been unable to isolate what was causing them. This last week was the Fedora Infrastructure Mirrormanager 2 / Ansible FAD, and there we added some more debugging in, but still couldn’t see where the problem was. It wasn’t in bodhi itself, but somewhere in it’s integration with the authentication system and getting to that via proxy01 (our main datacenter proxy). Proxy01 seemed busier than usual, but it gets a lot of traffic anyhow. We bumped memory up on it to make sure it could better cope with release day.

    • ​Say hi to Linux’s future: Fedora 21 is here

      I’ve only started playing with Fedora so I don’t have a firm opinion about it yet. I will say that while the Desktop, with its default GNOME 3.15.2 interface, works well, I still don’t care for GNOME. Fortunately, Fedora comes with a wide variety of “spins,” so you can run with KDE, Xfce, LXDE, or, my own favorite of the official Fedora variations, MATE.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • The truth about the thick skin of a community manager

        What drove the creation of that book was partially inspired from my experience in the Ubuntu community. There is no doubt about that. The reason why I wrote that book is because I have seen people contribute things of value to the world, and then they get frustrated because they see this negative input and feedback, and it is awful because these are good people trying to do good things and are treated like shit.

      • Ubuntu Core Linux Gets ‘Snappy’ for Docker Container Security

        A new approach for enabling a highly secured and optimized host for container deployment enters public beta.
        Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is building new tools to make updating cloud container applications “snappier.”

      • Canonical Unveils ‘Snappy’ Ubuntu Core

      • Canonical makes Ubuntu more snappy with Docker

      • Ubuntu 15.04 Is Now Using Kernel 3.18. The First Alpha Version Will Be Released Next Week.

        Recently, Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 15.04 has switched to Kernel 3.18, which is the newest stable Kernel available.

      • Ubuntu Core slimmed down for cloud, frameworks sold separately

        Canonical has launched Ubunto Core, a slimmed-down, re-architected version of the Ubuntu operating system the company claims will bring some pretty significant benefits to cloud users of the popular Linux OS.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Xubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn – Quite brilliant

          Time to try another Ubuntu derivative. Xubuntu has been kind of a second league player for many years, but then it suddenly got awesome, and it grew on me like fungus only in a good way, and it’s been getting better and better and slicker all the time. For real.

          Trusty was truly excellent. But now we need to make sure there’s no regression, the kind of like what happened with Unicorn in its official flavor. Remember, Xfce has become a beautiful and highly viable alternative to most other desktops out there. So let’s commence the testing, shall we.

Devices/Embedded

• Hackable Roomba integrates Raspberry Pi

  iRobot’s hackable $200 “Create 2″ version of its Roomba robot for STEM education can be programmed with a laptop, or via an onboard Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

  iRobot’s Roomba was the first — and still one of the few — major successes in consumer robots. Unlike more advanced iRobot designs, such as the Linux-based Ava 500 telepresence robot, the modest, vacuuming Roomba runs on a simple Motorola HC12 microcontroller. Now, iRobot has released a $200, non-vacuuming hacker version of the Roomba 600 called the Create 2 designed for K12 and college-level STEM education.

• Phones

  • Our approach to software and ongoing support for the first Fairphones

    Fairphone was started by a group of passionate thinkers, designers and makers who want to change the phone industry. As our campaign grew into a social enterprise making our own phone, we started with a road map outlining our ambitions to raise awareness and create change in the sectors of mining, manufacturing, design, life cycle, and social entrepreneurship.

  • Tizen

    • New Tizen Development Tools Version 14.03.1 Released

  • Android

    • UT One Ubuntu Tablet Delayed; Rooted Android Device May Come Instead

      Ubuntu Linux fans won’t be enjoying an open source tablet this holiday season after all. The Demski Group has announced that the UT One, the Ubuntu-based mobile device it had been shooting to release as early as this month, has been delayed—although the company may be putting out a hacker-friendly Android tablet in its stead.

Why your organisation will thank you for going open source

With all the information available on the internet and on websites like FutureGov, it’s no longer difficult to know the merits of open source and how other government agencies have been benefiting from it. The bigger challenge would be how to convince your finance department to believe in these merits enough that they would reallocate their budget to back it.

VMware is nuts for clusters (and containers)

VMware has announced a batch of integrations with a number of technology entities as it strives to create a common platform for building and operating applications at scale.

TYPO3 Updates Open Source Web CMS Neos

Open source web content management (WCM) provider TYPO3 released a new version of Neos that officials there say improves the user experience for digital marketers in a “smoother” and more “time-saving” way.

Five open source PaaS options you should know

An open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows developers and users to contribute and share source code and extensions. The PaaS is either vendor-driven or standard-based.

A vendor-driven open source PaaS locks the developers and users to a vendor. The developers have limited controls over transferring applications from a vendor-driven open source platform to another one.

The standard-based open platform is vendor-agnostic and is more flexible; it aims to standardize the orchestration of automatic processes of life cycle management. Developers can transfer applications across the cloud.

UPDATE: XRDPConfigurator Is Now Open Source!

I have just released XRDPConfigurator – a GUI application to configure your Xrdp server – as Open Source, under the Apache License version 2.0.

I had originally intended for it to be a commercial product whereby a user would have to purchase a license in order to use it.

SOS Open Source is Now Open Source!

We are glad to inform you that the European funded initiative PROSE eventually enhanced the SOS Open Source methodology, re-engineering the tools and making them available to the general public as open source. Now everyone can run an educated open source software procurement process by using SOS Open Source tools and methodology.

ARTIST Open Source Software Release

If you belong to an open source community or are a passionate developer check out our ARTIST OS package to test it now! Our source code is available for modification or enhancement by anyone.

Intel and SwiftKey Update, Will Open Source, Stephen Hawking’s Speech Program

OPNFV Adds New Members to Open Source SDN/NFV Project

The Linux Foundation has announced that four new industry partners—Array Networks, Midokura, Ooredoo and Sonus Networks—are backing OPNFV, the open source software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) platform.

Events

• Open Hardware Summit 2014 – Rome #OSHW

• Web Engines Hackfest 2014

  During the last days I attended the Web Engines Hackfest 2014 in A Coruña, which was kindly hosted by Igalia in their office. This gave me some time to work again on WebKit, and especially improve and clean up its GStreamer media backend, and even more important of course an opportunity to meet again all the great people working on it.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 35 Set to Be More Responsive and Conversational

    For end-users, the Firefox Hello WebRTC system is set to get a chat room type conversations model, which looks interesting.

  • Why Mozilla Had to Swap its Google Deal for One with Yahoo

    Indeed, going forward, Mozilla may be able to keep its browser more open and flexible without ties to Google. Furthermore, Android has become a huge force for Google, and Mozilla is positioning its entire company around its Firefox OS mobile platform, which is already competing with Android.

  • Firefox 35 Set to Be More Responsive and Conversational

SaaS/Big Data

• What OpenStack women are saying about the community

  It’s a problem that the tech industry struggles with in general, and OpenStack is no different: How do we create an environment that is open, inviting, and friendly to women, and how do we get more women involved?

• Landing In The Cloud – The Open Source Arena

  Open source by its very nature is more free-flowing and open to others, making it that much more affordable, especially when it’s free. Since open source software usually isn’t a product made by a large corporation or eager upstart, the cost to use it is usually quite low. That means a low barrier of entry for businesses to adopt it for their operations. The low monetary barrier makes it so small businesses with limited budgets that might have shied away from more expensive cloud solutions before can actually use the technology and embrace the benefits that come with it.

• OpenStack Leverages Its Higher Profile To Lead Open Source Cloud Survey

  There’s a strange situation within the open source cloud sector. CloudStack, the initiative that is now supported from within Citrix has a far longer history, and more early customer success than OpenStack. However OpenStack, with its huge following by large vendors (including Rackspace, HP, IBM and Oracle ) has taken the lion’s share of attention.

• Big Data Source Code: Getting Better All The Time

Databases

• MongoDB gets its first native analytics tool

  Most companies realize they need to become more data driven in order to make better decisions and identify new opportunities. Many also recognize the need for new tools to analyze their data, much of it stored in operational systems.

  At the same time, for their operational systems, a growing number of companies have adopted NoSQL databases, the most popular of which is the document database MongoDB. Unfortunately, document databases are nobody’s first choice for analytics, so people end up using ETL to move data from MongoDB to an RDBMS or Hadoop for analysis. ETL processing adds latency, however — perhaps too much latency if you want your business to be “data driven.”

• How do you solve a web-scale deployment problem with MariaDB?

  MariaDB Corporation (the artist formerly known as SkySQL) is polishing up its open source database products this month.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Second Beta for LibreOffice 4.4 Is Now Ready for Testing

  The Document Foundation has released the second Beta for the new LibreOffice 4.4 branch and users should now be able to download and test the new version of the office suite.

Business

• Zimbra releases new report highlighting greater trust in open source among IT professionals than proprietary software

  The report findings confirm a changing perception of open source, to a platform for the development of quality software that enhances privacy and security. Findings from the survey, which was conducted in 18 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as the United States, show that 66% of EMEA respondents agreed that commercial backing and code transparency reduces applications’ privacy risks, and 67% agree these improve application security.

• 6 of the Best Open Source Holiday Gifts for SMBs

  ‘Tis the season to look beyond the usual humdrum small business gear and give your favorite small business owner something new and unusual. In this roundup we’ll look at a little flying and rolling camera drone, a mobile library and Webserver, a new-generation 3D printer, a clever customizable key organizer that you can print with the 3D printer, a cutting-edge programmable LED flashlight, and an Android smartwatch.

  Some of these picks should be useful for your small business, and they all make superior gifts for employees and customers. Forget the Christmas hams—give cool gadgets instead.

Funding

• Hachicorp Raises $10M to Advance Open Source DevOps Vision

  HashiCorp today announced that it has secured a $10 million Series A round of funding. The company will use the money to continue to evolve its application development and deployment technology, including the development of a new commercial service known as Atlas.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FreeIPMI 1.4.7

Openness/Sharing

• Build and Share Your Own 3D Printer with Open-Sourced ‘Bolt’ by Edu3d.Org

  It’s often the case that we set out to inspire our kids, teach them, and encourage them to do things in the world, but when we give them the tools to work independently, they end up turning the tables and inspiring the older generations with new ideas that can be very surprising, and even startling with innovation and relevance. Kids’ brains are still new, much more open, and not yet quite so worried about what an academic or peer set will think of a ‘crazy new idea’ for something that just might work — or change the world altogether.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Source Hardware Companies Blend Altruism With Bottom Line

    It’s very easy for open source users around the world to collaboratively share data and files to modify software. Everyday examples include products like Mozilla Firefox and Chromium which allow users to modify, study, deconstruct and even distribute the programs in a collaborative way with no worry of patent or warranty infringement.

Programming

• Go 1.4 is released

  Today we announce Go 1.4, the fifth major stable release of Go, arriving six months after our previous major release Go 1.3. It contains a small language change, support for more operating systems and processor architectures, and improvements to the tool chain and libraries. As always, Go 1.4 keeps the promise of compatibility, and almost everything will continue to compile and run without change when moved to 1.4. For the full details, see the Go 1.4 release notes.

• Google’s Go 1.4 Officially Released

Standards/Consortia

• Cabinet office Plugfest builds momentum for ODF

  On Monday and Tuesday, 8th-9th December, a group of technologists, SMEs, corporations, individuals, and representatives of Governments gathered in Bloomsbury, London over two days to collectively improve the implementation of Open Document Format (ODF).

Security

• Linux Turla Malware Infection? Not Going to Happen.

  This code simply isn’t in any Linux repository.

  That means one must intentionally deviate and go outside of the keyring-protected repo of applications ‘into the wild’ to obtain this rogue software.

  By definition, a trojan, requires one to install the application and then explicitly run it to have its ‘payload’ execute.

• Multiple X.Org Vulnerabilities Found, One Is from 1987

  One of the most important features of the open source development community is its ability to self-correct, even if it takes a very long time. A number of issues in X servers have been corrected recently, and some of them were actually very old. The record holder is a bug introduced back in 1987.

• Security updates for Thursday

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Another Perspective on the US, China, and Containment

  Writing on the occasion of President Obama’s November 2014 trip to Beijing for the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, John V. Walsh asks whether China might contain the United States. Walsh inverts the conventional question—Can the U.S. contain China?—and observes that, as far as East Asia is concerned, “History tells us that the West with its missionaries and soldiers, Obama’s predecessors, bathed the region in suffering and bloodshed.” In that expanded context, Walsh considers whether China might “restrain the U.S. from doing more damage in East Asia” and elsewhere in the developing world. Due to its economic and military powers, Walsh writes, “China should be able to provide to the world alternatives to the diktats of the West.”

• U.S. Troops Out, Private Contractors Stay in Afghanistan

  In May 2014, President Obama announced a plan to keep at least 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2016. He neglected to inform the country about the massive army of private contractors that will also remain deployed in Afghanistan. A PowerPoint document obtained by Salon from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), one of the country’s biggest military and intelligence contractors, spells out the contractor’s ongoing role in Afghanistan, which dates back to 2009. The document also shows the company’s $400 million contract with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, which is on a five-year plan.

• Top Gun Violence Researchers Criticize Pew’s “Outlier” Gun Rights Survey Result

  Media outlets are heavily touting a poll from Pew Research Center supposedly showing “growing public support for gun rights,” but Pew’s polling question is flawed because it presents a false choice between regulating gun ownership and protecting gun rights. In response to the Pew poll, a prominent gun violence researcher said, “I could not think of a worse way to ask questions about public opinions about gun policies.”

  [...]

  According to experts, the question is flawed because respondents have to pick between support for gun regulation or gun rights, as if those premises were mutually exclusive.

• US drone strikes kill 13 alleged militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan

  A suspected US drone strike on a Pakistani Taliban compound in North Waziristan tribal region killed at least four alleged militants on Sunday, officials said.

• US drones kill 13 ‘militants’

  A suspected US drone strike on a Pakistani Taliban compound in North Waziristan tribal region killed at least four alleged militants on Sunday, reports The Guardian quoting officials.

  [...]

  The officials said Pakistani Taliban linked to commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur used the compound, but it wasn’t immediately known whether Bahadur was there at the time of the strike.

• Scarborough: I Can’t Wait for the Report on Obama’s Drone Strikes

  Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough diverted a discussion about the CIA torture report with drones on Tuesday, took a day off, then reprised his act Thursday, simultaneously dismissing the Senate Intelligence Report on the CIA’s terror funplex enhanced interrogation techniques while salivating for the details of some future report on President Barack Obama’s drone program.

• Torture “Architect” Mistaken in Claim Nobody’s Punished for Drone Murders

  A psychologist who played a key role in a U.S. torture program said on a video yesterday that torture was excusable because blowing up families with a drone is worse (and nobody’s punished for that). Well, of course the existence of something worse is no excuse for torture. And he’s wrong that no one is punished for drone murders. The protesters are. Latest example:

• Drone operator made long-distance war from close to home

• LETTER: People that are retired still contribute to society in Derbyshire

  I object to my taxes being used to buy bombs and drones to kill Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian children, and for adventures in Afghanistan and Libya and subsidising bankers who’ve robbed us but still get their bonuses, and life long silver spoons for royal offspring, but as a taxpaying pensioner I don’t get the chance to opt out.

• Planet Politics: America’s Bloody Conscience

  America can be a brutal superpower, especially when — as rarely happens — it is attacked. Yet it likes to think of itself as a country with more lofty rules of combat and behavior than the run of imperia that have come before it.

• America Trades Torture for Drones

  The release Tuesday of the executive summary of a report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which reviews the CIA’s detention and interrogation practices between 2001 and 2009, was for all its gruesome detail greeted in some official quarters as a kind of catharsis. “This,” said Secretary of State John Kerry in a statement, “marks a coda to a chapter in our history”—a chapter, he went on, that is now “more than five years behind us,” since President Obama ended the CIA’s detention program during his first week in office. Obama, for his part, acknowledged that “some of the actions that were taken were contrary to our values” but expressed hope that “today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong—in the past.”

• Question use of lethal drones

  The age of innocence is long gone. We’re far beyond the nonthreatening play of remote-controlled model planes, or even Cold War spying. By beginning this conversation in the religious community, we hope to take a long and hard look at the use of lethal drones and then make policy recommendations to the U.S. government. We will seek to determine what the religious community can do about lethal drones at every level: congregations, regional bodies, ecumenical and interfaith bodies, and nationwide coalitions.

• Editorial: U.S. must defend itself, but torture is not the way

  The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report released Tuesday details the depths to which the Central Intelligence Agency reached in its efforts to coerce terror suspects to reveal secrets and potential plots against the United States in the wake of the 911 attacks.

  And Obama is correct: That’s not what America is.

  Indeed, the shocking report discloses what will certainly go down as a dark and hidden period in U.S. history. It gives the U.S. a black eye in the world community and our enemies ammunition for retaliation – not that they ever seem to need any reasons.

  Interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and tight confinement were authorized by the Justice Department in 2002. But, the report says, CIA tactics went beyond what was approved by former President George W. Bush. It says the CIA misled top U.S. officials and Congress about the full extent of its treatment of detainees and the effectiveness of the program. The CIA did not brief Bush with details until 2006, the report says.

  Some Republicans and current and former CIA directors say the tactics did help stop attacks here and abroad, capture terrorists and save American lives.

  But that raises the troubling question posed by the debate: Does success derived from immoral acts make those acts moral? The answer is no, which is why Americans should find them revolting. Which is why they are not who we are. Or at least not who we aspire to be.

• For We Know Not What We Do

  While we’re on the subject of knowledge gaps, Micah Zenko of the Council of Foreign Relations notes that the CIA never measured the effectiveness of their covert programs. Take interrogation. A memorandum by the CIA dated June 27, 2013 — but only released today — responds to “the SSCI’s conclusion that the ‘CIA never conducted its own comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques’”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Evo Morales Slams Richest Countries over Global Warming

Finance

• Congress to Reinstate Taxpayer Subsidies for Reckless Derivatives Trading

  The New York Times called it “a textbook Washington play: use a must-pass bill, on the eve of the holidays, as a vehicle for changing unrelated policies.”

  The liberal Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, called it “the worst of government for the rich and powerful.”

  The conservative Senator from Lousiana, Dave Vitter, called it “a Christmas presents to the megabanks and Wall Street.”

  Firebrand Florida Representative Alan Grayson told the Huffington Post’s Zach Cater who broke the story, that it was “a good example of capitalism’s death wish.”

• Democrats Revolt Against ‘Wall Street Giveaway’ In Deal To Prevent Government Shutdown

  Democrats on Wednesday raged against a government funding bill that would provide taxpayer subsidies to risky Wall Street derivatives trading.

  “The House of Representatives is about to show us the worst of government for the rich and powerful,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the Senate floor. She urged her colleagues not to support a “deal negotiated behind closed doors that slips in a provision that would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.”

  News of the deal, first reported by HuffPost on Monday, has prompted a bitter bicameral feud. The dispute highlights a major divide among Democrats leading up to the 2016 elections over Wall Street’s role in the party platform.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Investigative Reporting = Working With Ad Partners to Monetize the Audience

• As US media awake to a ‘nightmare’ Israel, NYT brings Blumenthal in from the cold

  We’re in the midst of a sea change in the American mainstream’s treatment of the conflict. US media are beginning to reflect the awareness that the two-state solution is over and that violence around Jerusalem and the West Bank is caused by occupation and fostered by rightwing intolerance inside Israeli political culture– the “nightmare” of greater Israel. There are countless examples of the shift. Last night on MSNBC Richard Engel said many people are angry at the US because of torture and drones, but also “because of Israel/Palestine, and Gaza.” When Israeli finance minister Naftali Bennett was confronted by Khaled Elgindy at the Brookings Institution last Saturday to explain why Palestinians are “the only group of humans in the world that do not have the right to self-determination,” the Beltway audience was evidently on Elgindy’s side. Leon (AIPAC) Wieseltier is gone from the New Republic. The New York Times is publishing Max Blumenthal. And the New Yorker‘s David Remnick is staying in East Jerusalem.

  [...]

  The Times gave Max Blumenthal a platform to explain that Israel has always been rightwing…

Censorship

• IFC Center Rejects MPAA’s ‘R’ Rating On Snowden Documentary, Says It Should Be ‘Essential Viewing’

  Many people still have no idea that the MPAA “rating system” for movies is a totally voluntary system. Any official system like that would be unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment (which is why a legal attempt to rate video games got killed by the Supreme Court). It’s pretty rare for theaters to ignore MPAA ratings — though it does very rarely happen. Back in 2012, we noted that AMC theaters defied the MPAA by letting students see the documentary Bully, even though the MPAA wanted to rate it as “R” (which restricts anyone 17 and under from seeing the film without an adult).

• GCHQ to help tackle ‘dark net’ child abuse images

  Intelligence experts and organised crime specialists will join forces to tackle child abuse images on the “dark net”, David Cameron has said.

• Web Index: 4.3B People Offline Globally, 1.8B Face Internet Privacy Challenges

  Later today, Tim Berners-Lee will be making an appearance in London to talk about how well the world is doing at making the Internet accessible to everyone and a place safe from commercial and political interference, themes that have been strong for the inventor of the World Wide Web. Ahead of that, the World Wide Web Foundation — an organisation started by Berners-Lee — has released its Web Index annual report, a global pulse check on these issues over the past year.

Privacy

• Open Rights Group and Privacy International’s DRIPA intervention

  Open Rights Group (ORG) and Privacy International (PI) have intervened in a judicial review of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA). The case has been brought by Tom Watson MP and David Davis MP, represented by Liberty. The Claimants have been granted permission to proceed to a substantive hearing and ORG and PI have been given permission to make a further written intervention.

• [Old] Alabama school district paid an ex-FBI agent $157K to monitor students on social media

• Alabama school district paid ex-FBI agent to monitor students on social media

  On October 30, Huntsville City Schools provided records showing that 78 percent of the 305 expulsions last year involved black students, in a district where just 40 percent of students are black. Expulsions related to social media investigations through the SAFe program were a small part of that total.

• Telecommunications Data Retention: EU Commission is working on new Data Retention Directive (Update)

  The new EU Commission plans to re-introduce Telecommunications Data Retention, as we learned in Brussels yesterday. A spokesperson of the Commissioner for Home Affairs confirms that it is no longer a question “if” there will be a directive, only “how”. But the European Court of Justice ruled: suspicionless mass surveillance is disproportionate and violates fundamental rights.

• State sanctions phone and email tapping

  Companies that object to order could be brought before private ‘in camera’ court

• Normalization Of Mass Surveillance Continues: Ireland And Georgia Join The Snoopers Club

  One of the consequences of the Snowden leaks of mass surveillance around the world is that a number of governments have been bringing in new laws in order to provide a legal framework for the snooping they have previously been carrying out illegally, when they obviously thought that no one would ever find out.

Civil Rights

• President George W Bush ‘knew everything’ about CIA interrogation

  Former US President George W Bush was “fully informed” about CIA interrogation techniques condemned in a Senate report, his vice-president says.

• Cheney on torture report: ‘Full of crap’

  “The report’s full of crap, excuse me,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox News after calling the report a “terrible piece of work” and “deeply flawed.”

• ABC Makes US the Victim in CIA Torture Report Story

  There’s an unfortunate impulse, when you or someone you’re close to does something wrong, to turn the situation around so that you can seem like the victim. That ugly human defense mechanism was on display on ABC’s nightly newscast for two days running as the network previewed the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program.

• Are Rush Limbaugh And Fox News Still Laughing About Torture?

  Last spring, Palin appeared before an NRA convention crowd and laughed about how liberals supposedly coddle America’s mortal adversaries. “Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen,” said Palin. “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists,” The NRA audience roared with approval, but even some conservative commentators who saw the tape of Palin’s wisecrack took offense, upset that she had linked bodily torture with a Christian sacrament. (“It’s disgusting.”)

  [...]

  “If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh,” Rush Limbaugh once announced, and claimed “if somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn’t torture.” At the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Limbaugh routinely mocked the claims of prisoner abuse, which were confirmed by horrific photographs: “Here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever.” Limbaugh dismissed the prison torture as a “fraternity prank,” suggesting “Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured.”

• Right-Wing Media Evokes Controversial Rolling Stone Story To Discredit Senate Torture Report

• Creative writing teacher resigns after student writes about Jesus, pot

  The assignment was to take a fairy tale or legend and rewrite it in modern times. One student changed the biblical story about Jesus handing out bread and fish to the poor to Jesus handing out marijuana to the sick.

• C.I.A. First Planned Jails Abiding by U.S. Standards

  Just six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush signed a secret order that gave the Central Intelligence Agency the power to capture and imprison terrorists with Al Qaeda. But the order said nothing about where they should be held or how the agency should go about the business of questioning them.

  For the next few weeks, as the rubble at ground zero smoldered and the United States launched a military operation in Afghanistan, C.I.A. officials scrambled to fill in the blanks left by the president’s order. Initially, agency officials considered a path very different from the one they ultimately followed, according to the newly released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s harsh interrogation program.

• Dick Cheney Says CIA Torture Report Is ‘Full Of Crap’ — Then Admits He Hasn’t Read It

  It’s no secret that those most closely responsible for the CIA’s torture program are pulling out all the stops to attack the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the program, trying out a variety of defenses from “it actually saved lives” to “it’s just a partisan hack job.” So it should come as no surprise that former Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the cable TV news appearances to help attack the report. After all, many have argued that the real person behind the torture program was Cheney and his staff — and to date, Cheney has insisted that everything that was done was perfectly reasonable and he’d do it again. Thus there’s no surprise when Cheney appears on Fox News (because, of course), to claim that the report is “a bunch of hooey” and “full of crap” and “deeply flawed” only to then admit ” I haven’t read the report.”

• Architects of brutal methods had little experience

  When the CIA set out to design a program to elicit intelligence from captured terrorists, it turned to two former Air Force psychologists with no practical interrogation experience and no specialized knowledge of al-Qaida, according to a Senate investigation released this week.

• Pay and Suffering: Psychologists Made $80M From CIA Interrogation Program

  The two psychologists contracted by the CIA to design the enhanced interrogation techniques used against al Qaeda suspects were paid more than $80 million, even though they were never themselves interrogators, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report,” released today — a report that one of the psychologists told ABC News was “bulls**t.”

• The Architect

  The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a blistering, 500-page report on the CIA’s controversial detention and interrogation program, a document that committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said represents the most significant oversight effort in the history of the US Senate.

• Mormon church appointee aided CIA on terror

  A Spokane psychologist who helped develop controversial interrogation methods, which some human rights groups say amount to torture, became the new spiritual leader of a Mormon congregation on the South Hill this week.

  Bruce Jessen was proposed by Spokane Stake President James Lee, or “called” in the terminology of the Mormon faith, to be the bishop of Spokane’s 6th Ward, approved by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hierarchy in Salt Lake City and presented to the congregation on Sunday. He was unanimously accepted by some 200 in attendance, Lee said.

• CIA torture report: The doctors who were the unlikely architects of the CIA’s programme

  They are the most unlikely architects of the CIA’s programme of torture. Two psychologists who swore to heal not harm.

  Now it has been revealed that two doctors, identified by the pseudonyms Dr Grayson Swigert and Dr Hammond Dunbar, were paid $81 million by the CIA to help develop and implement a seven-year programme that included “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, placing detainees in stress positions and sleep deprivation.

  Until now, little was known about the pair, who the New York Times has named as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

  According to the declassifed documents, they created the programme in 2002 when the CIA took custody of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi arrested in Pakistan and suspected of being an al-Qaeda lieutenant.

• Meet the Psychologists Who Helped the CIA Torture

  So how did these two men come to play such an outsized role in developing and enacting the CIA’s torture program? Much of the story is captured in a 2009 Times article by Scott Shane. Shane writes that Mitchell, who after retirement “had started a training company called Knowledge Works” to supplement his income, realized that the post-9/11 military would provide business opportunities for those with his kind of experience and started networking with his contacts to seek them out.

• The American Mengeles: Drs. Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell

  We like to think of evildoers as easily recognizable cartoon characters. We want them to be different from us to reassure ourselves they aren’t anything like us. But when you consider the man pictured here, and the truly bestial things he did, you have to accept the fact the face of evil is a lot like our own. If that makes you uncomfortable, don’t worry. It should bother you. If it didn’t, there would be something wrong with you.

  The man in the old photo is tidy, professional, and clearly in control. Even without a stethoscope slung around his neck, you know the man in the white coat is a cultured, educated, intellectual man of science.

  You may not recognize him, but you certainly know his name. He’s (in)famous for his experiments. In fact, he’s so extraordinary I think he deserves a medal. I don’t mean he should get one; he should get one named after him. I think Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell deserve to be the first to get this medal.

• Psychologist defends harsh CIA tactics he designed

  But Mitchell declined to detail his experience, other than to point out he spent 30 years with the Air Force and other government organizations.

• Battle Rages Over Senate Report on CIA Interrogation Techniques

  One day after a Senate panel’s report on interrogation tactics employed by American spies, a furor erupted at home and abroad as top Central Intelligence Agency officials prepared a detailed public response.

  Democratic senators issued fresh denunciations from the chamber floor Wednesday, Poland’s former president said the CIA misled him, and Afghanistan’s new leader demanded accountability for any mistreatment of detainees there.

  Meanwhile, a group of former CIA officials and GOP senators on the panel fiercely defended the agency against what they called a one-sided report, saying the interrogation program was legal and effective.

• Spokane psychologists helped craft CIA’s harsh interrogation tactics

  From their office in Spokane, two psychologists who once worked with an Air Force survival school there launched an extraordinary covert business that, after the 2001 terror attacks, offered one-stop shopping for a CIA wanting to use harsh interrogation tactics.

• Senate Report Put Obama at Odds With Brennan, Longtime Security Adviser

  Tuesday’s release of the report criticizing the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-Sept. 11 detention and interrogation program puts an unusual public strain on the close relationship between the president and his CIA director.

• The CIA chained him to the floor and froze him to death. But who was Gul Ruhman?

  It wasn’t that bad, we’ve been told, over and over again, for more than a decade. “We only waterboarded three people” goes the line American officials have been force-feeding the world for years.

  “We tortured some folks,” Barack Obama admitted recently, still downplaying war crimes committed in America’s name. But we now know those statements do not even begin to do justice to the horrific activities carried out by the CIA for years – atrocities that now have been exposed by the US Senate’s historic report on the CIA’s torture program, finally released on Tuesday after years of delay.

  There are stories in the CIA torture report of “rectal rehydration as a means of behavior control”, threats to murder and “threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee” – or cut a mother’s throat. There are details about detainees with broken bones forced to stand for days on end, detainees blindfolded, dragged down hallways while they were beaten. There were even torture sessions that ended in death. The list goes on and on, and on and on.

• The 10 most harrowing excerpts from the CIA interrogation report

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Piracy is a crime – really!

    The Australian government has today confirmed that it will not tolerate online content piracy – site blocking and a graduated response scheme backed by legal action is soon to be legislated.

  • Develop anti-piracy scheme or we’ll do it for you

    The Government has issued an ultimatum to ISPs to work with content owners and distributors to develop a code that will enable digital pirates to be prosecuted.

    Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Attorney General George Brandis have written to ISPs, telcos, copyright owners and content distributors telling them to develop an anti-piracy code or have one forced upon them.

    The letter is published here. It tells all parties they have until 8 April 2015 to develop a code that will enable the enforcement of sanctions against people who infringe copyright by downloading content from illegal sources.

  • Google Pulls Out The Nuclear Option: Shuts Down Google News In Spain Over Ridiculous Copyright Law

    Back in October, we noted that Spain had passed a ridiculously bad Google News tax, in which it required any news aggregator to pay for snippets and actually went so far as to make it an “inalienable right” to be paid for snippets — meaning that no one could choose to let any aggregator post snippets for free. Publishers have to charge any aggregator. This is ridiculous and dangerous on many levels. As we noted, it would be deathly for digital commons projects or any sort of open access project, which thrive on making content reusable and encouraging the widespread sharing of such content.