06.17.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Last week, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) announced its plan to build a revolutionary new type of computer called The Machine. And here’s what makes it truly revolutionary, in all senses of the word: The Machine will run an open source operating system developed in universities, as well as Linux and Android.
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Where Windows has utilities, Linux has tweak tools. And whether you’re a Linux pro or a recent refugee from Windows XP, they can help you makeA Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” (the latest and greatest offering from Linux distro pioneer Canonical) really start to feel like home.
Customizability has long been one of Linux’s most compelling features–particularly when compared with proprietary alternatives such as Windows and OS X–but the tweak tools out there today let you refine the OS even further. And if you’re making the migration to Linux on your workplace PCs, tweak tools can help ease the transition.
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Server
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SAP’s and IBM’s strategies around HANA emphasize how a unified in-memory platform can deliver the goods in both analytics and common line-of-business applications. That’s all good — but just as important will be the increasing competition that viable Power-based HANA solutions should inspire in the marketplace. Analytics and Big Data belong everywhere, not just in enterprise or BI ivory towers.
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In celebration of its 11th anniversary, cloud host Linode has slashed its prices. Users can now purchase hosting plans on Linux-powered servers with SSD storage starting at $10 per month.
The offering was made possible through a $45 million upgrade of Linode’s infrastructure back in April 2014, which brought SSD storage to the company’s servers, as well as Intel (INTC) Xeon E5 2680v2 Ivy Bridge processors, more RAM and higher network throughput.
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Kernel Space
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Following the exciting systemd 214 release that worked on new sandboxing features and other improvements toward a stateless Linux system, Lennart Poettering has blogged about the latest features and their plans going forward.
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With the recently released Linux 3.15 kernel is support for UAS. USB Attached SCSI will allow for significantly faster performance out of UAS-supported USB drive enclosures.
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At the end of 2013 I’ve spend 2 full months working on getting XHCI streams support and the UAS driver in the Linux kernel, which uses streams into shape. With the release of the 3.15 kernel this work now is available for end users to use.
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The latest addition to systemd’s networkd networking component is support for Virtual Extensible LANs.
With the latest networkd work, networkd can now create VXLANs. Virtual Extensible LANs are a network virtualization method designed for cloud computing needs.
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Developers have put out their latest batch of Allwinner patches that allow for basic upstream kernel support of Allwinner’s A23 SoC.
The Allwinner A23 SoC is a dual-core Cortex-A7 part that’s been out since last year. The A23 isn’t impressive by other tier-one ARM SoCs, but it’s low-cost and with the A23 System-on-a-Chip they switched from using PowerVR graphics to instead using ARM’s Mali with their new designs.
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Bill Traynor first got hooked on embedded Linux development when a friend who maintained Hitachi’s SH architecture helped him install Linux on his Sega Dreamcast. From there he developed a hobby of installing Linux on various gaming consoles, toys, and handheld devices. And when embedded development boards became more abundant, accessible and cheaper, Traynor moved on to more serious tinkering.
“For me, the availability of Linux on the many low-cost, ARM-based dev boards has been fun,” he said via email. “Small, powerful boards, like the BeagleBone Black have really made things fun again.”
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Graphics Stack
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With the Linux 3.16 kernel comes the ability to re-clock select NVIDIA GeForce GPUs when using the open-source, reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Here’s my first impressions with trying out this option to maximize the performance of NVIDIA graphics cards on open-source drivers.
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The “Motorcar Compositor” is an interesting Wayland-based compositor that supports using an Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra with support for 3D windows.
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Rich Geldreich, the former Valve OpenGL developer that left the company and has been publicly expressing the poor OpenGL driver landscape, has another new post out today.
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A few days ago I wrote about Codethink getting Wayland/Weston running on NVIDIA’s Jetson TK1 Tegra K1 development board using a fully open driver stack. Codethink’s work is now available in both code and image form.
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Attention grabbing headline? Check. It seems the ex-Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has noted a recent Phoronix benchmark using apitest on how badly AMD’s Catalyst driver performed.
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Benchmarks
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Last weekend I published 2D performance benchmarks comparing Nouveau to NVIDIA’s official driver. To no real surprise, the proprietary NVIDIA driver beat Nouveau in most micro-benchmarks when it comes to 2D (and separately, 3D) performance. With the open-source Radeon stack, however, it presents a much tougher fight against the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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Applications
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Shutter, a feature-rich screenshot program that allows users to capture nearly anything on their screen without losing control, is now at version 0.91.
The Shutter developers don’t release updates often for this great software and you would imagine that each new version carried a huge number of changes and improvements. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
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XWiki Enterprise 6.1 Milestone 2, a professional wiki that has powerful extensibility features such as scripting in pages, plugins, and a highly modular architecture, has been released and is ready for testing.
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DockBarX is a lightweight taskbar / panel replacement for Linux which works a stand-alone dock (called DockX), as an an Avant Window Navigator applet or as a Xfce4 panel applet.
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Conky Manager makes using/managing Conky a lot easier and while I like it for the most part, I’ve encountered two annoyances (nothing major though). One is that the application creates a “conky-manager” folder in the home directory – this will be fixed in a future release though.
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This is actually a GUI for Conky, which is a lightweight system monitor for the X server. Having to manage the files and to configure the application is pretty hard and time-consuming when you’re not using an interface.
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Telegram is a free messaging app that focuses on speed and security, at least that’s what its developers say. There are official Telegram applications available for iOS and Android as well as various unofficial clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Windows Phone.
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Proprietary
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What Linux needs most is games, said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza. However, “if you were trying to narrow it down to one app, it would probably still be Photoshop. For all the talk of how great GIMP has become, usability is still an abject nightmare, and in spite of the OSS community’s self-back-patting regarding documentation, there is no documentation for GIMP which is not pathetic.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Age of Wonders III, and turn based strategy game developed and published by Triumph Studios, is set to arrive on Steam for Linux soon.
Calling Age of Wonders III just a turn based strategy might be simplify the game too much. It’s a combination of Civilization and Heroes that managed to get good things from both worlds.
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A “Steamboy” handheld gaming console teased in a video appears to be the first portable Steam Machine to emerge for Valve’s Linux-based Steam OS platform.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V, the latest iteration of the famed Civilization series and one of the most addictive turn based strategy games, is finally coming to Linux and Steam OS. In a recent post on the Steam Community boards, Aspyr Media announced their first Linux and Steam OS title, Civilization V. The entire collection of the game, that is, the base game along with all the DLC and the two expansion packs, Brave New World and Gods & Kings are included in the Steam OS and Linux release.
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Valve is looking very seriously at Linux as a genuine replacement for Windows and the company has put a lot of effort into it. An interesting way of seeing just how much they care is to check the top ten most played games on Steam.
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Linux gaming has seen massive growth in the past two years, ever since Valve began openly supporting the open source operating system. That growth is nothing compared to what it will be after the launch of their Steam Machines, says Alienware’s product manager, Marc Diana.
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OpenXCom has taken its time. When we last posted about it—for its 0.9 release—it had been in the works for four years. That was over a year ago, meaning that this new v1.0 release has taken… well, you should be able to do the maths. It’s an open-source clone of the original XCOM: UFO Defense / UFO: Enemy Unknown, and lets you play Microprose’s original, brutal tactical strategy in an easier-to-use engine.
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War Thunder announced a little surprise for us in their E3 video! A Linux version that they have been showing off.
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Bravada is the new game from Ukraine developers Interbellum Team that features a cheery little story. This game differ from most of the others for it’s gameplay, in short it’s a mix of a vertical scroller with RPG and turn based strategic game.
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Advanced Micro Devices wants to bring console-quality gaming to Linux users by porting its Mantle gaming tools to the OS.
Mantle is a set of software development tools to make video games performance smoother and more realistic. It was introduced by AMD last year as the company’s answer to Microsoft’s DirectX. However, Mantle currently works only with x86 processors, the Windows OS and the company’s graphics cards.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment 0.19 features improved Wayland support, the tiling module rework has landed, support for the new X PRESENT extension for reducing compositing overhead in X.Org Server 1.15 and newer, the E16-style live pager has returned, and the new compositor code has landed.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The new KDE Plasma 5 Beta 2 that was released only a few days ago can be tested in Kubuntu 14.04 LTS with a just a minimum of effort.
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One of the great things about Linux, especially for web developers or server administrators, is that all of the basic tools you need to get set with your remote server and files tend to be included and well integrated into the system from the get go. You don’t necessarily need to install an FTP client, a code editor or a special terminal emulator.
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Now that I have your attention: the binary of KWin/5 just got renamed from “kwin” to “kwin_x11″. For you as a user nothing changes, the startup is adjusted to start kwin_x11 instead of kwin. Nothing else changed. The D-Bus interface is still org.kde.KWin, the config file is still “kwinrc”, etc. etc. Only if you start KWin manually remember to run “kwin_x11 –replace &” instead of “kwin –replace &”.
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During the move of KDE’s software projects from Subversion to Git most projects split their subprojects over multiple Git repositories. Calligra did not, but is keeping all code of all apps and extras in one single repository. That is all of the apps Author, Braindump, Flow, Karbon, Kexi, Krita, Plan, Sheets, Stage and Words as well as all of the extras like the file format converter, the Okular generators, file thumbnailers and other file manager integration.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Linux Lite 2.0 includes updated applications, Whisker Menu as the default menu, Linux Lite software repositories, sound control from the tray, descriptive title bars in terminal windows, and more than twenty popular applications that you can easily install from the terminal window. This release also offers a new system font called Droid Sans, tabs in the file manager, and dialog boxes for auto-login.
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When I saw the release announcement for KaOS 2014.06 on Distrowatch, it caught my eye for two reasons. First, because there have been a few times when I have thought I would really like to have a special KDE-focused distribution with rolling updates where I could find and test the latest in the KDE Software Collection and associated packages. And second, because I have recently been trying and writing about a totally “over-the-top” Linux distribution (Makulu) with absolutely everything thrown in, including the kitchen sink and whatever other appliances and paraphernalia were within reach, so the prospect of a smaller, carefully focused and selective distribution sounded quite interesting.
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Rescatux can fix GRUB and GRUB2, check and fix filesystems (Windows MBR included), change GNU/Linux passwords, regenerate sudoers files, and much more.
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In 2005, in version 5.0, The Pharmacy Server was mature and solid, running on a central server that supported over 300 drugstore chains in Brazil, and has been featured by Red Hat as a certification success story.
In 2010, after mergers and acquisitions, the company’s operation was terminated and Pharmacy Server was shut down. Its last version used Red Hat 5.4, Firebird 1.5.3, and a custom version of Webmin web admin interface.
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New Releases
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Cubicle OS is a rather new operating system and it shows, especially from the way it’s built. The developer chose to implement GNOME as the default desktop environment, but it looks like he didn’t bother to customize it too much.
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has advanced to version 4.0.5 and is now available for download.
The OpenELEC makers usually follow the XMBC releases, but from time to the time the devs make their own upgrades that are not taken from the other project. After all, XBMC is just a software and OpenELEC is in fact a Linux distribution, which means that there are a number of other components that need improvements and fixes.
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Screenshots
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 14.06 is based on Gentoo and that is not something that you see every day. In fact, there are very few Linux distros out there that are using Gentoo as a base and it’s good to see that developers take the time and the effort to utilize something else than Debian and Ubuntu.
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Red Hat Family
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Perhaps the biggest release on the Linux Planet in the past week came from the world’s largest Linux vendor (by revenue); Red Hat.
After what might have seemed like an eternity to some (though was only 3 and half years in reality), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) officially became generally available. RHEL 6 was first releasedin November of 2010.
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The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV 3.4) platform, released today, provides new features that make hypervisor-based virtualization easier to deploy and manage. The new RHEV release comes at a pivotal time for the virtualization industry as Docker container-based virtualization is now beginning to pick up momentum.
RHEV 3.4 is based on the upstream open-source oVirt project, which had its 3.4 release March 27. RHEV provides additional hardening and commercial enterprise support.
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In this latest RHEV release, Red Hat states that it brings new “enhancements for traditional virtualization infrastructure, guest support for the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, as well as advanced OpenStack [cloud] support across compute, storage and networking.”
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Red Hat is out with its new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform version 3.4, which arrives just after the new version of its Enterprise Linux offering. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.4 is being positioned as a bridge to the OpenStack cloud, among other things. The latest RHEV version offers new “guest support for [RHEL] as well as advanced OpenStack support across compute, storage and networking.”
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Goodtech develops and delivers projects, services and products creating business value for customers within a number of industries and sectors including manufacturing, energy, green technology and infrastructure. Among Goodtech’s customers in the Nordic region are industry leaders such as Astra Zeneca, LKAB, Vattenfall, Statoil and Norsk Hydro.
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Fedora
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A lot has been said on fedora-devel in the last few weeks about DNF and Yum. I thought it might be useful to contribute my own views, considering I’ve spent the last half-decade consuming the internal Yum API and the last couple of years helping to design the replacement with about half a dozen of the packaging team here at Red Hat. I’m also a person who unsuccessfully tried to replace Yum completely with Zif in fedora a few years ago, so I know quite a bit about packaging systems and metadata parsing.
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Following a lot of work by Hans de Goede at Red Hat, Fedora Rawhide now supports running the X.Org Server without root rights.
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The Bodhi2/Taskotron Fedora Activity Day happened earlier this month! A bunch of us gathered in Denver for a few days and worked on some of our critical releng & qa infrastructure. The hackfest was held in a conference room in my apartment building, which worked out quite nicely for the amount of people that we had. The hotel was right up the road, and we were able to walk to a lot of awesome spots, like the 1UP Barcade :).
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SouthEast LinuxFest is happening this upcoming weekend. I offered to host a PGP (I’ll substitute PGP for GPG, GnuPG, and other iterations) keysigning and CACert Assertion event and have been scheduled for 6:30 PM in the Red Hat Ballroom. Since there is a little bit of planning needed on the part of the participant I’m writing this to help the event run smoothly.
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Debian Family
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The Debian developers have announced a few of months back that they intend to make Debian 6 an LTS release. The period for this extended release period has now begun.
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Tails was built with two specific things in mind: sustainability and usability.
Sustainability refers to how this is a project that can be relied on by its users. The team goes on to explain the importance of usability: “We believe that the best security tool is of no use if people who really need it on the field cannot use it. Moreover, security tools must be hard to misuse, they should prevent you from doing critical mistakes, or ask you to make security decisions that you are not able to make.”
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Mate is a Gnome 2 fork, created by the Arch Linux developers as a an alternative to Gnome Classic (Gnome 2), when the Gnome developers decided to create Gnome 3. Mate became very popular in a short time and now is used on many Linux systems. The latest version available is Mate 1.8, which has been released a while ago.
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Debian developers have announced today that Debian 6 will be maintained as a long-term support (LTS) state until February of 2016.
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The Debian project is pleased to announce that the “Long Term Support (LTS)” infrastructure to provide security updates for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name “squeeze”) until February 2016 is now in place. Users of this version should follow the instructions from the LTS wiki page to ensure that they get the LTS security updates.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to the Ubuntu Wiki, this feature comes down to “the main purpose of a trusted prompt session (TPS) then is to tie together the [application requesting access to a resource via a trusted helper, the trusted helper, and a trust prompt provider] components mentioned before, both in terms of presenting the final prompt to the user and in terms of lifecycle/focus mgmt. (from a shell’s perspective). In this respect, a temporary, virtual app is introduced that spans across all three components.”
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Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu for phones operating system has been activated on 10,000 devices, marking an important milestone for the company.
Ubuntu for phones was announced at the beginning of 2013 and the development team has been working on it since then. It took them a while to get a functioning version and they’ve been improving it constantly.
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First off, Canonical emphasized to Ars multiple times that it is not getting into the hardware business. If you really want to buy one of these things, you can have Tranquil PC build one for you (for £7,575, or about $12,700), but Canonical won’t sell you an Orange Box for your lab—there are too many partner relationships it could jeopardize by wading into the hardware game. But what Canonical does want to do is let you fiddle with an Orange Box. It makes for an amazing demo platform—a cloud-in-a-box that Canonical can use to show off the fancy services and tools it offers.
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The stable Linux 3.15 is now available from the Ubuntu 14.10 development archive while the Linux 3.16 kernel isn’t landing quite yet in its early development form.
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Flavours and Variants
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As night follows the day, so too do Linux Mint launches follow Ubuntu releases. Linux Mint is a project which puts together a desktop-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu packages. The Linux Mint project tends to take a more practical and conservative approach to crafting a desktop operating system when compared to Ubuntu. While Ubuntu experiments with the Unity desktop, servers, cloud computing and mobile devices, the Mint team stays focused on producing a familiar, user-friendly, multimedia-enabled desktop solution. Starting with their most recent release, Linux Mint 17, the Mint team has announced they will be adjusting their release cycle, basing all Linux Mint releases on the most recent Ubuntu long term support release. This should make for a more stable platform and a more relaxed release cycle.
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In today’s open source roundup: Linux Mint 17 Xfce and KDE RC released. Plus: Deepin 2014 RC released, and a review of Linux Mint 17 MATE by DistroWatch
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The unofficial Tizen SDK Live DVD has now been updated to the latest version of lubuntu 14.04, and you can download the ISO image now.
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The IFC6410 Pico-ITX board is a tiny computer-on-a-board powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor as the Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One M7 smartphones. It sells for $149 and it’s aimed at developers, hobbyists, and others interested in testing their hardware or software designs… but thanks to a few recent developments, you can also use the IFC6410 as a small, inexpensive desktop computer.
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However, there is a need for more clarity on whether Google Fit will be integrated into the next version of Android, or offered as a standalone app that could be downloaded independently.
It added: “One source with knowledge of Google’s plans said Google Fit would allow a wearable device that measures data like steps or heart rate to interface with Google’s cloud-based services, and become part of the Google Fit ecosystem.”
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Makers, hobbyists and developers looking for a new Linux Fedora or Ubuntu development board for their projects might be interested to learn that the IFC6410 Pico-ITX board which is available to purchase for around $149.
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Phones
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The Russia Tizen App Challenge has been launched with the aim of bringing talented application and game developers to the new Tizen platform, for new challenges and above all new opportunities. The competition has started on the 9th June and is open to citizens of the Russia or Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan with permanent or temporary registration in the territory of Russia.
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If your phone can be connected to your computer with an USB cable you can do a lot more through this connection than just recharging it or transferring files to and from your phone’s storage. For example, you can make phone calls, read and send text messages, and see a bunch of other information from your phone, right on your PC. There is a number of Free Open Source software applications that allow you to do this, and you don’t even need to have a smartphone for this to work, just a phone that can connect to USB.
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Ballnux
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The document leaked to Android Geeks by an anonymous tipster indicates two versions of the S5 are due to receive the 4.4.3 update within the next couple of weeks. The leaked document was an email sent to Android Geeks titled “KTU84 Update Status Report”, containing a visible Samsung header and dated “June 10th”. The document suggests the Galaxy S5 (SM-G900F and SM-G900H) are both due to receive the update in June with both models having ‘completed testing’.
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Android
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Secure communications specialist Silent Circle recently set out to build the most secure Android phone in the world, and some have gone as far as to call the company’s Blackphone an “NSA-proof” smartphone. That statement can’t be confirmed, of course, since the NSA surely still has a few tricks up its sleeve that we don’t know about. What we can say, however, is that people concerned with keeping their mobile communications private will soon have a new option that is more secure than any publicly available Android phone currently on the market.
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Silent Circle in partnership with Geeksphone announced the Blackphone in January this year. The makers of the Blackphone claims that the handset is the world’s first smartphone that gives its user total control of privacy.
The upcoming smartphone is powered by a modified version of Android, PrivatOS, which is believed to be more security-oriented. The Blackphone will be carrier and vendor independent, which will ensure that individuals and businesses are able to make and receive secure phone calls, send texts, store files, browse the internet and more without compromising the privacy of the user.
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In Android Anti-forensics: Modifying CyanogenMod Karl-Johan Karlsson and William Bradley Glisson present a version of the Cyanogenmod alternate operating system for Android devices, modified so that it generates plausible false data to foil forensic analysis by law enforcement. The idea is to create a mobile phone that “lies” for you so that adversaries who coerce you into letting them take a copy of its data can’t find out where you’ve been, who you’ve been talking to, or what you’ve been talking about.
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In short, CyanogenMod (pronounced sigh-AN-oh-jen-mod) is an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets. CM is based on the android platform but contains a wealth of add-ons, third party extensions and customisations. Until now CM was pretty much an alternative operating system only used by those who were brave enough to self-install (aka ‘flashing’). However more recently CM is starting to hit the mainstream market in all new ways. At present CM can claim over 12 million installs which when considering was never released (until recently) as a direct-from-launch pre-installed product is quite impressive. In addition alternative phone manufacturers are starting to see the benefits of CM and jumping on board. The first device to officially utilize CM was the OPPO N1 which launched back in December 2013 with the ColorOS operating system. This was the first device ever to offer a pre-loaded CM firmware.
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It looks like the wait is over! OnePlus One has arguable created a lot of controversy over the last few months with the release of their new device. This first began with ‘OnePlus’ (the company) creating a real buzz around their open-source device ‘OnePlus One’ (the device – yes, it is confusing). However with increasingly delayed release dates and a purchase system relying on “invites”. OnePlus is starting to receive a backlash from the very people who were initially creating the buzz.
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Rooting your device and installing custom ROMs unleashes the true open nature of Android. Customising phone or tablet and having tight control over their functions is what hardcore Android users dream of. Once your device is rooted, it paves way for installing apps that can take advantage of the added permission and access to core software. Here are few of the best apps that will give you Super Powers that non-root users cannot wield.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve been diving into Android development using a semi-realistic project to force me to learn properly. I wrote a rough first version of a read-only Glom database UI for Android, called android-glom. So now there’s a version in gtkmm (C++), Qt (C++), GWT (Java) and Android (Java). It’s a good way to really try out a framework and I’ve really enjoyed doing that with no pressure.
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One of the most common complaints of smartphone ownership is battery life. Big displays and powerful processors conspire together to drain your phone of life before the day is through. You can get a portable battery charger to keep you going (and you probably should for emergencies and travel), but that’s one more device to carry.
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As one of the contributors to Black Duck’s eighth annual Future of Open Source Survey, the industry’s leading indicator of open source software (OSS) industry trends, JFrog was pleased to be able to help show the world the true impact of open source software. This was the first year that we decided to take part in the survey. We felt that it was a natural partnership, since our work revolves around regularly interacting with the OSS community to help create and distribute open source software.
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Ionic offers a free and open source library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building HTML5 apps. Ionic has recently announced ngCordova, an open-source collection of AngularJS services and extensions that allow the use of Cordova plugins and native features in hybrid apps.
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There are many useful open-source technologies out there. With all of this competition, it’s critical to make it clear why your particular open-source offering should be considered, and for which needs. That’s the reality any builder of an open-source community needs to adopt right from the start: While participation by developers in an active, viable open-source community will undoubtedly improve their projects, as well as your product’s evolution, getting a community up and running can be a challenge.
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Once again, we’re celebrating the arrival of summer with a list of some of the best open source games available. We’ve updated last year’s list with some new arrivals, as well as getting rid of some of the older games that are no longer under active development. You’ll find arcade, board, casual, puzzle, educational, first-person shooter, music, racing, role-playing, adventure, simulator and strategy games, as a well as a few apps that aren’t really games but are still a lot of fun.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Want to replace Chrome OS with another operating system or partition the storage so that you can create a dual-boot setup?
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has been making much noise about the Firefox OS mobile platform, and new $25 phones that it wants to bring to emerging markets. The company plans to deliver a $25 smartphone by the end of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Now, TIME is pronouncing the move “a brilliant game-changer,” but let’s remember that mobile phones are all about the apps, and even Mozilla officials have stopped short of calling Firefox OS phones “smartphones” in the sense that they run the robust apps that iOS and Android phones do.
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Once upon a time, it was simple. Mozilla, thanks to its open source web browser Firefox, was the feisty David to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Goliath.
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As a reminder, starting with Firefox 29, the classic interface has been replaced by Australis, a new UI with rounded buttons and a bunch of new features. If you don’t like the new Australis interface and want to switch the the classic one, see the instructions in this article.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Talend, which specializes in open source Big Data analytics and business intelligence, has announced that PC and smartphone maker Lenovo is deploying its enterprise software.
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The Hadoop Summit, sponsored by Yahoo and Hortonworks, went on recently in San Jose, California, and it showcased the fact that while enterprise adoption of the Hadoop Big Data crunching platform is moving briskly, there are needs for tools that work alongside Hadoop. For example, Microsoft officials delivered a keynote on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” which focused on the cloud as a complement for Hadoop, and Excel as a powerful front end for it.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the second Release Candidate for the 4.2.5 branch. It’s not as big as the previous version in the series and the final build should be just around the corner.
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CMS
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How has operating in the Portland area worked to your advantage? Portland is a hotbed of technical innovation, and open source in particular. It’s also fast becoming a hub for Drupal, the open source framework we use for many of our projects. Finally, Portland is a magnet for people who care about more than just a paycheck. Our team is made up of folks who care as much, if not more, about the nonprofits we’re helping as the technology we use and user experiences we craft.
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The XOOPS development team have announced the release of version 2.5.7.
XOOPS is an acronym of, “eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System”. It’s a free open source content management systems (CMS), written in PHP.
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BSD
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This will (hopefully) be our last RC before releasing 10.0.2 officially sometime on or around the 23rd. We have addressed or fixed most tickets related to the 10.0.2 release, so if you are still running into any issues, please report them using our Trac database.
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The third Beta version of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now out and ready for download.
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The first point release to the recent DragonFlyBSD 3.8 operating system update is now available.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On July 7th 2014 Peter Schaar (Head of the European Academy for Freedom of Information and Data Protection, former Bundesdatenschutzbeauftrager) will give a talk about technology, law and surveillance in German. The talk will be at the Garching campus of the TUM (U-Bahn stop: U6 Garching Forschungszentrum), in the FMI (Informatics/Mathematics) building, in Hörsaal 3 (lecture hall 3) starting at 16:00. Admission is of course free, registration is not required.
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I was watching an issue of CNN’s “Forensic Files” early this morning when I was surprised to see GIMP on TV. A murder had been committed and the local anthropologist lacked software to compare a skull with a portrait to verify the identity of the victim. A local computer guru was able to use GIMP to compare photographs of the skull with the portrait. That set the police on a course towards solving the crime. It turned out the truck driver did it. DNA from a tooth compared to some surgical evidence confirmed GIMP’s conclusions.
What was interesting is that Forensic Files mentioned that GIMP was available to anyone for a $free download. I liked that. The software licence, GPL, described in generic terms the public can understand got out there.
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Public Services/Government
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In 2012, the Dutch police force – which consists of over 63,000 workers – came to the realization that their disunity was directly impacting their role in Dutch society.
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Public administrations using open source software help make the country more competitive and lay a foundation for a creative economy. Consequently, the South Korean government wants its public administrations to consider free and open source software alternatives, according to its national open source competence centre, presented at a workshop in the capital Seoul, on 3 June.
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The German city of Leipzig is switching to using open source suites of office productivity tools: Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It expects that in the first five years the anticipated savings will be swallowed by the exit costs associated with the proprietary software used by the city. Starting in 2017, however, the city expects to lower its IT costs by some 100,000 euro, says Lars Greifzu, responsible for marketing and sales at Lecos, the city-owned IT service provider.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Source Seed Initiative is trying to preserve some of the world’s seeds from patents and licenses.
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Earth scientists, including remote sensing experts, climate modelers, practitioners, policy makers, and decision makers, have had a hand in furthering and monitoring the open source space. For example, the climate modeling community executes its daily operations of building, testing, and validating climate and Earth system models, many of which today are open source, released under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, and software packages that involve community contributions from very diverse participants. Similarly, the remote sensing community leverages open source packages, including Python and R, as well as non-open source, but community oriented packages, such as MATLAB, ENVI/IDL, and other software to share code, disseminate it amongst the community of experts, and also to process remote sensing data.
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Open Access/Content
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That’s one among countless opportunities a new digital platform could offer in coming years.
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The medical image community embraced open source as a standard practice back in 2000, with the adoption of the Insight Toolkit (ITK). ITK is sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine and was built as a C++ library. It is the equivalent to a usable encyclopedia of image processing algorithms.
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Open Hardware
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There’s been a ton of excitement around 3D printing over the last few years and it’s definitely justified. While the techniques of 3D printing have been around for many decades, recent cost reductions have thrust 3D printing into wide-spread use. In fact, I designed a custom engagement ring for my wife and had it 3d printed in silver; more on that below.
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Standards/Consortia
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Internet of Things (IoT) market is estimated to generate $ 7.1 trillion in sales by 2020, but its main issue is often considered to be the lack of interoperability between devices belonging to different systems.
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The Unicode 7.0 standard was announced yesterday and adds 2,834 characters.
Unicode 7.0 brings in new currency symbols, historic scripts, and a variety of other symbols — including plenty new emoji characters.
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Science
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Built by Replica Labs, the program uses only a single camera to render the object. As you can see from the video below, the front of the object was very nicely rendered, but because they didn’t spin around the back, the object is “connected” to the background. However, thanks to the printed sheet, they should be able to get a 360-degree view of the object and allow the system to assess bulges, creases and other aspects of 3D objects. Plus it looks cool.
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Health/Nutrition
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The island of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, has become Ground Zero in the intense political battle over genetically modified (GMO) crops in the United States. But the fight isn’t just about the concerns over GMO technology. It’s also about chemical pesticides.
The four transnational corporations that are experimenting with genetically engineered crops on Kaua’i have transformed part of the island into what could be one of the most toxic chemical environments in all of U.S. agriculture.
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Despite efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate polio worldwide, ten countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria, are on red alert as new cases have been detected and fears grow of the virus spreading to neighboring countries.
Yemen is not on the list, but fear over the polio virus has increased amid a regional breakout and concerns that Syrian refugees fleeing to Yemen could reintroduce the virus.
Yemen’s Health Ministry on April 3 launched a comprehensive national campaign to vaccinate children against polio in cooperation with the WHO. The move was to act against fears of polio spreading in Yemen.
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Security
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Hackers who claimed to have compromised the database server of Domino’s Pizza have demanded a ransom of €30,000 to prevent the public disclosure of customer’s data.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The CIA-linked rebel Retired General Khalifa Haftar is continuing his Operation Dignity ostensibly designed to rid Libya of jihadist militias but which also involved an attack on the Libyan parliament.
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In the early days of the Arab Spring, according to a Libyan diplomat, Tunisians would mock Libyans by admonishing their neighbours to the east to keep their heads down so that they, in Tunisia, could have an unobstructed view of the real revolutionaries in Egypt, who had risen up against the long autocracy of Hosni Mubarak.
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According to CNN, the state of Israel is the largest exporter of drones and drone technology in the world. Leading Israeli defense concern Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, counts as its customers the military forces of more than two-dozen nations around the world. These customers buy Israeli drones first and foremost because they’re easier to acquire than American models — where sales can be held up by government restrictions on drone exports. But customers also flock to buy Israeli drones because they work.
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A CYNIC might interrupt here: “Why should the army bother with a coup? It governs Israel anyhow!”
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Eleven years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is on the brink of collapse. We have only ourselves to blame
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It’s predictably pitiful that the Bush-era architects of our Iraq disaster have resurfaced to insist that the current sectarian bloodbath is all President Obama’s fault.
They have no shame. In the words of Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst, these dogs of war precipitated “one of the biggest and costliest mistakes in American history” – and yet here they are, indulged anew in the press, shirking accountability and shifting blame and presuming to offer advice. This spectacle would be hilarious if it were not so nauseating.
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I have written it before and I will write it again: Iraq has made fools of us all.
It made a fool of George W. Bush, who invaded the country to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, only to have American troops get there and discover Iraq had no WMDs.
It made a fool of CIA Director George Tenet, who infamously responded to Bush’s skepticism regarding the WMD reports by jumping up and shouting “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President!”
The war made a fool of most Americans like myself, who believed that the U.S. military needed to invade Iraq to keep their country safe.
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The London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has said that he thinks Tony Blair “should put a sock in it” rather than comment on the situation in Iraq.
Mr Johnson said that when looking at the current situation in Iraq it was important to consider the impact of previous foreign intervention in the country.
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Boris Johnson has described Tony Blair’s argument that the violent insurgency in Iraq has nothing to do with the 2003 invasion as “unhinged”.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the Mayor of London says the former prime minister is undermining the case for “serious and effective intervention”.
He described the invasion as a “tragic mistake” and a “misbegotten folly”.
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IF AUSTRALIA wants to assist the United States in Iraq with intelligence reports, that’s fine.
Just keep Prime Minister Tony Abbott away from the phone.
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The crisis in Iraq has brought war back to the US airwaves. But if you were expecting a more robust discussion about US military action this time around, think again. The rule seems to be that if you were wrong in 2003, you’re still an expert in 2014.
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Schultz: “They Should Not Be Treated As Experts, Because They Aren’t”
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The Iraq war was conceived in sin. It was based on the lies of the Bush administration, the most notorious of which were not about “weapons of mass destruction.” More dangerous were the fabricated projections they presented about how: the war would last only a few weeks and our presence would end in six months; it would only cost one to two billion dollars; American soldiers would be greeted as “liberators” with flowers at their feet; and Iraq’s new democracy would be “a beacon for the new Middle East.”
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No one has been held accountable for these actions, which indisputably constitute war crimes. Those responsible include not only George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others in the previous administration. Both major political parties, the media, the corporations and every American institution are responsible for the lies that have pervaded US policy—both foreign and domestic—for the past decade and a half. All of the criminal policies under Bush—aggressive war, torture—have been continued and deepened by the Obama administration. With its “pivot” to Asia and coup in Ukraine, it is preparing military confrontation with Russia and China and laying the groundwork for a nuclear Third World War.
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Despite the Obama administration’s vow not to put any troops on the ground, Mr. Paul, a libertarian icon, said members of the special forces or the CIA will be sent. He also warned against shipping arms to Iraq and said the Iraq military’s performance to date suggests that a lot of the money invested in it was “wasted or stolen.”
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If we are to solve our myriad domestic problems and revitalize our economy we need to be more selective about our involvement in foreign crises large and small. The president should embrace that truth in his remaining years in office. For starters, that means staying out of Iraq.
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The Iraq War hawks are back. And they have two knee-jerk ways of seeing the convulsions in Iraq where Sunni militants have seized cities from Syria to Baghdad’s doorstep, killing government workers and civilians, and grabbing weapons from a vanishing Iraqi Army.
First, it is always President Obama’s fault; and second, the U.S. must return to war, despite what has been one of the biggest debacles in American military history. Hawks are only happy when we are at war, fueling the military-industrial complex as U.S. soldiers die and platoons of maimed veterans return home to underfunded medical care.
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Walking TED talk and taxi-driver-chatter-upper Tom Friedman is obviously not a big fan of Iraq. Possibly because it doesn’t seem like a place where Apple would extend their global empire; building factories full of low-wage worker bees churning out iToothbrushes or whatever the hell they are going to iMake next in an effort to suck every last dollar out of every last wallet before Steve Jobs returns to Earth to take them all to iHeaven.
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Militants battled Iraqi security forces for control of a strategic northern town on Monday, prompting half the area’s population to flee, as Washington weighed drone strikes against fighters leading the charge.
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Then there’s this from Kristof: “The Democratic narrative is that President Bush started the cascade of dominoes. The problem with that logic is that Obama administration officials were boasting just a couple of years ago about how peaceful and successful Iraq had become because of their fine work.” Again: It’s just “the Democratic narrative,” not an objective fact, that Bush “started the cascade of dominoes.”
Just the latest Kristof embarrassment. And let’s not forget that he strongly urged Obama to bomb Syria last year—which would have aided the ISIS rebels.
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The US already has an aircraft carrier accompanied by two ships with guided-missile capabilities in the Gulf.
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The Obama Administration has been supplying Iraq with their foreign military sales program with a total of $15 Billion in supplying the country in chaos with F-16 jets, drones, tanks, arms, and Apache attack helicopters. Baghdad has been urging the US to deliver military weapons to stabilize its country, but the Iraqi military does not seem sufficiently trained to effectively use such complex military hardware.
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The U.S. military has the capability to conduct air strikes over Iraq within hours. The problem is they don’t know exactly who they are supposed to be targeting.
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Tony Blair came under fierce attack from former Labour cabinet members, some diplomats and the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Ashdown after he called for limited military intervention to drive the militant group Isis out of Iraq and restore order in Syria.
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CNN on Sunday night aired a “documentary” about former President George H.W. Bush on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
It was a glowing tribute to the nation’s 41st president filled with testimonials from notables, including President Obama, Bill Clinton and 39 other friends and family members. What was missing was a warning that what viewers were about to see was propaganda masquerading as journalism.
As noted by the always spot-on David Zurawik, the program — titled “41ON41” —was paid for by the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and one of its producers worked as a speechwriter for Bush in the White House.
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That is the way of the world. We have seen this before. In March of 1973, American troops withdrew from South Vietnam, leaving our local allies to take over that war. Two years later the North Vietnamese reached Saigon, as the ISIS has reached the suburbs of Baghdad. Do you think we should have gone back and resumed the war in Southeast Asia? That would have been nuts, and it is nuts to go back into Iraq.
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Nearly 300 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq to help secure U.S. assets as President Barack Obama nears a decision on an array of options for combating fast-moving Islamic insurgents, including airstrikes or a contingent of special forces.
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The U.S. was deploying extra troops to protect its embassy in Baghdad and mulling air strikes against militants who have seized key cities, amid warnings Tuesday that Iraq has polarized irrevocably.
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Now, our drone-happy President is under the illusion that he can find a “political solution” to overcome a 14-century-old animosity between the Sunnis and the Shiites and force them to compromise and reconcile. Good luck.
And John McCain, with his Napoleon complex proposes to bomb them, as he does in every other troubled corner of the world. Somehow, having spent the majority of his military service as a war prisoner qualifies him to be an expert on and a spokesman for everything military and foreign policy.
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A protest that began a week ago at Boeing Headquarters near Chicago, ended Saturday at the Air National Guard Base at Fort Custer.
The demonstrators want the U.S. to stop using remotely controlled aircraft to carry out military missions around the world.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Given its fragile and unusually rich ecology, the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i seems ill-suited as a site for agricultural experiments that use heavy amounts of toxic chemicals. But four transnational corporations — Syngenta, BASF Plant Science, DuPont Pioneer, and Dow AgroSciences — have been doing just those kinds of experiments here for about two decades, extensively spraying pesticides on their GMO test fields. As a result, the landscape on the southwest corner of the island has become one of the most toxic chemical environments in all of American agriculture.
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Lord Stern, the world’s most authoritative climate economist, has issued a stark warning that the financial damage caused by global warming will be considerably greater than current models predict.
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That’s what the U.S. Department of Transportation called shipments of crude oil by rail last month when it issued an emergency order requiring rail companies to notify emergency responders when dangerous shipments of explosive crude oil move through communities.
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An environmental campaigner is killed every week in Brazil.
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Finance
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Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month, paying for the increase with money originally devoted to executive bonuses.
The lowest-level employees at the hospital currently make $8.78 an hour, and the increase will give about 230 workers a raise. Those workers were already making more than Texas’s minimum wage, which is the same as the federal $7.25 an hour rate. The move also means that every worker employed by Dallas county, inside and outside the hospital, will make more than $10.25 an hour.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s meeting with Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff served to emphasize common interests. German-Brazilian relations increasingly shape world politics.
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Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans — especially young Americans— need to know the facts, and they need to know how they’re getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.
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Bitcoin is no longer decentralised and the cryptocurrency needs fixing if it’s to survive. That’s the warning some cryptocurrency researchers are giving since a single entity, a Bitcoin mining pool called GHash, managed to acquire 51 percent of total network mining power for 12 hours straight at the end of last week.
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Here we go again. For the umteenth time in recent memory, the sanctity of the bitcoin network is facing an existential threat from a large and overly secretive organization. It’s not an exchange or wallet service this time around that has the attention of crypto-currency watchers, but rather a large mining pool, specifically GHash.io, the self-described world’s “#1 Crypto & Bitcoin Mining Pool.”
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He’s known as Bitcoin Jesus in the world of cyber-currencies. Though he can’t promise you heaven, he is offering a haven: a condo in the Caribbean that comes with a new passport and almost zero taxes.
Meet Roger Ver, ex-U.S. citizen, ex-convict, millionaire investor, self-described libertarian and founder of Passports for Bitcoin.com.
The ever-expanding universe of what you can buy with bitcoins includes a hotel stay in Rome, a kimono in Tokyo, and cable TV in the U.S. Ver, a pioneer investor in bitcoin startups, now says he can add citizenship to the list.
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Analysis: Expect hedge fund copycats to begin to buy defaulted sovereign debt and break apart previous settlement packages while a well connected global enforcer group filled with Blackwater thugs collects in mafia fashion
[...]
Another fallout from the ruling could be a rise in additional hedge fund managers imitating Elliott Management and other “vulture funds,” buying debt claims for pennies on the dollar and then demanding payment in full and breaking previous negotiated settlements. What is needed for this hedge fund strategy to succeed is a global enforcer, a more sophisticated version of dog the bounty hunter, to physically repossess debtor assets as Elliott did when it seized an Argentine navel vessel sitting off the shore of Ghana. Or think about those separate holdout investors who attempted to reposes the President of Argentina’s personal jet as it sat refueling in a foriegn airport – with el Presidente inside. The enforcer group must be led by a high level operative familiar with maneuvering government assets to benefit large banks. Eric Holder might be a good person, with potential sponsorship from the large banks and their venture capital arm. This group could include ex CIA working with Blackwater type thugs to collect debt the old school way with a baseball bat. Whatever the future, it might not be kind to governments that grow massive debts – including, surprise, the USA.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and related projects, explained yesterday that it will establish new rules covering paid editing.
The heart of the change is that anyone who is paid to edit the site must “add your affiliation to your edit summary, user page, or talk page, to fairly disclose your perspective,” according to Wikimedia’s explanation of the change. The organization has also published an FAQ on paid editing.
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So why doesn’t Congress agree with the people they represent? Two reasons. The lobbyists have bribed them into protecting the future of cheap labor for their rich clients. The second reason is the fear of the Republican Party and Tea Party that Hispanics would vote for the Democratic Party in elections.
This is the future of the United States of America; protecting the interests of special-interest groups and ignoring the majority of our citizens. The Constitution has died an unacceptable death, and no amount of CPR (Congressional Posturing and Rationalization) can bring it back to life.
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Censorship
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Most businesses that accept advertising—from magazines and television networks to news websites and Facebook—accept ads for condoms. But earlier this year, Melissa White, the CEO of Lucky Bloke Condoms, learned that there’s one major exception: Twitter.
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Privacy
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One of the UK’s top spies has said that the country reckons spying on British folks’ Facebook posts and tweets is legal because they’re classed as “external communications” – though he wouldn’t confirm outright that it did so.
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Mass surveillance of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and even Google searches, is permissible because they are “external communications”, according to the government’s most senior security official.
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One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.
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One year ago, Glenn Greenwald began reporting on the leaked documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Together, Snowden and Greenwald have exposed vast government programs of domestic and international surveillance that threaten civil liberties here and around the world. As a result of these shocking revelations, Snowden has been stranded in Russia, facing espionage charges, and Greenwald has become the target of media hit jobs questioning whether he had the right to report on these spy programs and the erosion of our civil liberties.
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Along with Edward Snowden, the NSA, and wars, drones are the hottest topic in national security these days.
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State Hillary Clinton angered the entire nation of Germany by refusing to support a “no spy agreement” with one of the USA’s most supportive allies.
The Voice of Russia reports that, “Clinton, meanwhile, said she understood Germany’s anger at revelations that the US Natural Security Agency (NSA) had listened into Merkel’s mobile phone as part of its large scale surveillance of electronic communications in Germany, America’s close ally.”
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Moreover, Access My Info is based on an open platform. As a result, it can be reconfigured to send the same kinds of legal requests for information to all kinds of companies: credit card companies, banks, stores, or even car companies.
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One year ago this month, Americans learned that their government was engaged in secret dragnet surveillance, which contradicted years of assurances to the contrary from senior government officials and intelligence leaders.
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In a broad legal rationale for collecting information from Internet use by its citizens, the British government has reportedly asserted the right to intercept communications that go through services like Facebook, Google and Twitter that are based in the United States or other foreign nations, even if they are between people in Britain.
The British position is described in a draft summary of a report to be released Tuesday by Privacy International and other advocacy groups.
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A California federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to produce top secret documents requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation related to the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Americans’ call data so that the court can review if they are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
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Leopold asked the NSA about its variations on the phrase “collect it all” (a.k.a. former NSA head Keith Alexander’s personal motto), including “sniff it all,” “process it all,” “exploit it all,” “partner it all” and “know it all.” As is its particular idiom, the NSA Glomared all over the response letter.
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An appeals court has overruled a groundbreaking decision by a Chicago judge to let lawyers for an alleged terrorist see classified surveillance evidence.
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For those people who still do not believe we have crossed a terrible line into a Post-Constitutional state, here’s another chance to repent before we all go to hell.
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) in-house watchdog has demanded that the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) turn over all information it has collected related to abuses and mismanagement at VA medical facilities, according to a subpoena delivered to POGO May 30.
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When the Espionage Act passed in 1917, the Federal government left no proverbial stone unturned, using all communication channels available at their disposal to secretly monitor as many citizens of the United States proper as they could, given the technology of the time.
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Most of us don’t like the idea of intelligence agencies or law enforcement accessing our data stored in the cloud; that doesn’t mean your data is, by default, being accessed, but it’s likely a matter of principle. As NSA spying scandal revelations rolled out over the last year, many businesses and individuals decided they don’t want their data stored in the US. Countries want their cloud data to be stored locally in hopes of keeping it safe from US snooping. Whether you regard that as a privacy issue or a security issue, one security expert basically says, “Get over it.”
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Google’s response to “erosion of privacy” has been to “encrypt everything…to protect people’s interests.” A top Google executive recently spoke to DW and will join the Global Media Forum on June 30 via video link.
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“We believe in transparency here, you have a right to know what the police are up to in your country.” – Camden Police Chief Scott Tomson
On VICE News, Vikram Gandhi went to Camden, New Jersey to preview the latest technologies and strategies that are being employed to help local law enforcement in the long fought, and long failing, War on Drugs here in America.
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This policy decision is likely the result of a penalty imposed in 2011 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that requires the social media mammoth to submit to 20 years of privacy audits conducted by the agency. Another provision of the penalty mandates that any new features offered by Facebook must be “opt in.”
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While the company’s technology has already been available to international customers, Levy tells me he’s hearing growing concerns from companies who’d like their cloud infrastructure to be hosted more locally. You can thank Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks for that.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is making his ‘telepresence’ felt at events across the world with a telepresence robot that transmits a live feed from his computer to a roaming robot.
Just over a year since Snowden first revealed the extent to which the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on not just US citizens but people across the world, the man is now looking to end his exile in Russia through the means of telepresence.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago in June last year, it was just three weeks after he had begun reporting on the leaks provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the massive scope of government surveillance.
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Germany’s foreign intelligence agency officially lifted the lid on some of its worst-kept secrets Friday, acknowledging that half a dozen facilities around the country are in fact spy stations as anyone with Internet access could already figure out.
The Federal Intelligence Service, known by its German acronym BND, maintained the facade for decades that it had nothing to do with sites bearing cryptic names such as “Ionosphere Institute.” But amateur sleuths long suspected their true identities and posted them on websites such as Wikipedia.
The subterfuge wasn’t helped by the fact that some sites sport unmistakable signs of spy activity, like the giant golf ball-shaped radomes in Bad Aibling, near Munich until now, the “Telecommunications Traffic Office of the German Armed Forces.”
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Demeter considers himself a foe of both Democrats and Republicans.
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9. The Smoking Gun tape as the coup de grace. The release of the Smoking Gun tape, among 64 recordings that Nixon was forced to surrender by the Supreme Court, ended the Watergate drama. The tape showed Nixon ordering a cover-up of the break-in right after it happened in June 1972.
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Here’s a way to plant false evidence — call records, locations, etc — on your smart phone. I have no idea how good this will be. Presumably it will be an arms race between programs like this and programs that harvest data from your phone.
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Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over “all its metadata” on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service.
“Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment,” Stockman wrote on Friday.
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EFF recently kicked off our second Tor Challenge, an initiative to strengthen the Tor network for online anonymity and improve one of the best free privacy tools in existence. The campaign—which we’ve launched with partners at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Tor Project, and the Free Software Foundation—is already off to a great start. In just the first few days, we’ve seen over 600 new or expanded Tor nodes—more than during the entire first Tor Challenge.
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To mark the one-year anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the PEN Center has invited a number of journals to participate in a collaborative project on the theme of living in a surveillance society. For the American Reader’s contribution, AR editors Alyssa Loh, Uzoamaka Maduka, Jac F. Mullen, and Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon conducted a wide-ranging discussion on surveillance and its impact on narrative, free expression, and the creative arts. The edited transcript of this conversation, found below, also appears on the PEN Center website, along with the full suite of articles produced by the multi-journal collaboration.
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To many people, the design of email is fundamentally broken when it comes to security and privacy. That’s the impetus behind projects like the Dark Mail Technical Alliance, LEAP Encryption Access Project, and efforts to make PGP more accessible such as Mailpile, OpenPGP.js and Google’s recently announced Chrome extension, End-To-End. One issue is the contents of email headers. With all the recent talk about long-term technical solutions to enforce privacy by default, here is one thing that all mail server administrators and email providers should do to improve the security risks associated with communicating via email.
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Across the whole of America, you are continuously being monitored by local police forces using a secretive technology without any warrant, while you are completely oblivious to this and thinking that it’s just the NSA, according to media reports.
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Former CIA Director David Petraeus once stated that WiFi connected devices, such as appliances commonly found inside many homes, will “transform the art of spying.” Petraeus also said that spies will be capable of monitoring Americans without going inside the home or perhaps even acquiring a warrant. He went on to state that remote control radio frequency identification devices, “energy harvesters,” sensor networks, and small embedded severs all connected to an internet network will be all that is necessary for clandestine intelligence gathering.
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Civil Rights
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A few of us remember when a young man named James Risen joined The Journal Gazette fresh out of Northwestern’s journalism school and was a reporter here in 1978-79. He did some good reporting. In a yellowed clip file, there are photos of him using a drill and a welder for an article he did about working on the International Harvester Scout assembly line. And he got married at Trinity Lutheran Church while he was here, to his college sweetheart, Penny Blank, who was an editor at The News-Sentinel. They had their reception across the street at the Women’s Club.
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Ask five of your friends what “rendition” means and chances are you will not get a clear answer.
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A month ago, a federal court judge, Gladys Kessler, delivered a historic ruling on Guantánamo, ordering the government to stop force-feeding a hunger striking prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, and to release to his lawyers videos of his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions,” whose existence had only recently been discovered by one of his lawyers. She also ordered the government to release his medical records, and to “file a list of all current Standard Operating Procedures/Protocols directly addressing enteral feeding and/or the use of a restraint chair at Guantánamo Bay.”
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I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year.
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Senator Diane Feinstein, the head of the US Senate Intelligence Committee says she believes a secret report into the CIA’s extreme actions against terror suspects post 9 11 will be made public within weeks.
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To reconnect to the central question here of why protest is stumped in Pakistan, despite its critical economic and developmental challenges, it may be appropriate to end with the observation that it is this role of religion that used to be a subject of interest for an older generation that has now been sidelined and considered irrelevant by many post 9/11 scholar-activists.
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Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.
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As you approach the Aboriginal tent embassy on the Block in Redfern, inner city Sydney, you see the sacred fire burning within a large circle marked on the ground, serving to cleanse the area. Some ten metres up from the fire, at the edge of the Block, the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) has erected a sign that reads: “Warning. Private Property.”
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A federal judge demanded access to key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to domestic surveillance so she can decide whether they are fit for public release.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the case at hand under the Freedom of Information Act in 2011, seeking access to opinions in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found some of the National Security Agency’s surveillance unconstitutional.
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LORD Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent financed by his wealthy friends, the author of a new book claims.
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By day, we were an embassy family, raising our kids in foreign cultures and foreign languages. Our children’s lives were fairly normal: schools, parties, trips. But my night job was as a CIA operative — a second life my kids couldn’t know about until they were in their mid-teens. We needed to cut them in on the secret when they were old enough to handle the responsibility of keeping it to themselves but still young enough that they hadn’t stumbled across information that might disclose my true mission and then, unthinkingly, share it with their friends. Operatives try to find just the right age, when a kid’s judgment can be trusted not to compromise any operational cover, and by extension put their parents or their sources at risk.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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UNITED STATES SENATORS have introduced legislation to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from allowing internet fast lanes.
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That might seem perverse, since it means that Chilean mobile users must now pay to access those services, but it is nonetheless exactly what governments that have mandated net neutrality need to do. That’s because providing these services for free makes it much harder for newcomers — specifically new services from local startups — to compete with established ones that are provided free. Indeed, it’s striking how Facebook, for example, has kept its head down during the net neutrality debates — doubtless conscious that it has benefitted hugely from these schemes that run counter to net neutrality principles. As Vox wrote recently…
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Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor and author who coined the phrase “network neutrality,” is running for lieutenant governor in New York.
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DRM
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With the traditional family dinner and other pastimes on the verge of extinction thanks to an array of distracting hand-held devices, mobile applications are now available for parents to remotely bloc access to smartphones and tablets.
Are you tired of your child behaving like Pavlov’s salivating dog, mindlessly jumping for some smartphone or tablet every time it rings, sings or vibrates, crashing the solemn family dinner, or disrupting homework time?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The big news this week is an important leak detailing what the European Commission will offer the US in the fields of services and investment. It’s super fresh: the document is currently being circulated to the governments of the EU’s Member States, and comments remain open until 30 June, so we are gaining important insights into real-time discussions that have hitherto been completely hidden from us.
That makes this leak doubly important: not just for its content, but also for the fact that it took place at all. It shows that despite the European Commission’s attempt to keep key negotiating documents out of the public debate, the Brave New World of leaking whistleblowers means that we will get to see some of them anyway. The only difference is that the Commission looks arrogant and high-handed by refusing to release them officially.
The leak takes the form of three PDF files – unfortunately they are scans, not searchable documents. They were leaked to the European Federation of Public Service Unions, which apparently represents some 265 unions and 8 million public service workers.
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Copyrights
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YouTube will remove music videos by artists such as Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead, because the independent labels to which they belong have refused to agree terms with the site.
Google, which owns YouTube, has been renegotiating contracts as it prepares to launch a music subscription service.
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We’ve written a bunch about the City of London Police* and their extrajudicial campaign against “piracy” by trying to scare web hosting and domain registrar firms into taking down websites based on nothing more than the City of London Police’s say so. However, Adrian Leppard, the guy in charge of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (funded both by taxpayers and legacy entertainment companies) spoke at an IP Enforcement Summit in London and his comments, relayed by Torrentfreak, should raise questions about whether or not this is the right person to have anything to do with stopping “crime” on the internet…
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06.16.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Both Linux and the BSDs are free and open-source, Unix-like operating systems. They even use much of the same software — these operating systems have more things in common than they do differences. So why do they all exist?
There are more differences than we can cover here, especially philosophical differences about the way one should build an operating system and license it. This should help you understand the basics, though.
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Desktop
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Two years ago, Samsung made the first great Chromebook. It was thin, and light, and had good battery life, but most of all it was a different kind of computer. Chrome OS wasn’t like Windows, which can do absolutely everything on earth including a laundry list of things that only confuse and overwhelm most users. It was designed to be simple, functional, and focused. “It’s just a web browser” wasn’t a problem, it was progress.
As Samsung releases its successor, the Chromebook 2, things have changed. Cheap laptops can be even thinner, even faster, even more powerful, even longer-lasting; the Chromebook 2 is all four. The opportunity has grown, too: these 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch laptops enter a market in which most of what most people do all day lives inside a web browser anyway. We can do basic word processing and number-crunching with Google Docs or Office Online; we store all our files in Dropbox or OneDrive. Chrome OS feels more native than ever, but in a very real way we’ve caught up to Google’s vision more than it’s caught up to us.
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While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively.
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Server
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The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight project for promoting open source software-defined networking (SDN) continues to grow. Extreme Networks (EXTR), Flextronics and Oracle (ORCL) are now among the initiative’s members.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds will most likely be releasing the Linux 3.16-rc1 kernel today, now that the merge window has been open for two weeks and the feature pull requests are coming to an end. Here’s a concise look at the new features and improvements to be found with the Linux 3.16 kernel.
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Dr. Greg Wettstein and his dog Izzy have announced the release of the Hugepage Block Device Driver for the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest OpenGL 4 extension being enabled for the Nouveau “NVC0″ Gallium3D driver is GL_ARB_viewport_array.
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Version 1.3.2 of Intel’s VA-API driver for open-source video encode/decode using modern Intel HD Graphics GPUs has been released.
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Applications
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Unlike Google Drive and may other Windows and Mac friendly tools, Copy treats Linux well. Copy provides a native Linux UI to sync folders to its cloud storage.
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Synergy project was started way back in 2001. It is used in situations where several PCs are used together, with a monitor connected to each, but are to be controlled by one user. The user needs only one keyboard and mouse on the desk. Just a few weeks ago, Synergy version 1.5 (stable) was released. Though Synergy was Windows only earlier, it is now cross-platform and works seamlessly on Mac OSX and Linux as well.
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It is hard to keep up with the weather at times. If you are living in a place where the weather is unpredictable, knowing if it is going to rain or not makes a huge difference to you. That’s why you need to keep yourself updated about the weather from time to time.
If you are using Ubuntu or other Linux distro, this isn’t hard to do. Linux offers a plethora of options for users to keep an eye on the weather. Here is a selection of some of the best weather applications for your Linux desktop.
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One area on the Linux desktop that remains surprisingly conservative is email – email clients and webmail alike. While most if not all of the formats and protocols used are true open standards, you would think there could be a broad range of clients and webmails for Linux out there. Let me correct that: webmails are in a league of their own and I will not enter the webmail vs. email clients discussion. Many things are changing in that field, but one must differentiate between the actual email service, like GMail, your corporate mail, the webmail software (Roundcube, Horde, Citadel, Squirrel, etc.), the groupware platform (Kolab, Blue Mind, OBM, eGroupWare, and many others) and what lands and gets edited, if you’ve chosen so, in your email client, meaning the actual software program running distinctly from your web browser and handling anything from emails to calendars and contacts. Today I will focus on the email clients on the Linux desktop. I do not pretend that my list is exhaustive; it is but a personal selection; I have also excluded email client such as Mutt, mu4e, VM, RMail, Ner, Wanderlust, etc. as I will only be speaking of graphical email clients on Linux, at least the ones I’ve tried.
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I won’t spend too much time talking about trek. The game has been around since the practical dawn of the technology age, and if you haven’t played it yet, you’d do better to try it than listen to me yap about it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Copy is a cloud-based file storage, sync and sharing platform, similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, which has clients available for Linux (including Raspberry Pi), Windows, Mac OS X as well as iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.
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SysPeek is a system monitor AppIndicator that displays CPU, memory, swap and disk usage as well as network traffic.
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Games
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Aspyr Media have quite clearly proven themselves at porting to Linux with a port that works this well, but the bigger news is that they may have more to come.
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War Thunder contains aircraft, vehicles, and ships from the pre-World War 2 era to the Korean war and maps are largely based upon real battles in the past. War Thunder so far in its open beta period has been a highly praised online combat game and now it looks like it’s coming over to Linux, per the YouTube video embedded below.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Standard Linux circulations regularly default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these give clients an instinctive and attractive desktop, and also offering a verity of media inbuilt softwares, system programs, games, utilities, web development tools, programming tools and so on. These two desktops center all the more on giving clients a cutting edge computing environment with all the accessories emphasized in Windows OS, instead of minimizing the measure of system resources they require.
If you are using Ubuntu (or other) and exhausted of utilizing Unity desktop constantly? At that point, you ought to look at different choices accessible that can swap unity for you. I have gathered 7 desktop environments that are great and you beyond any doubt would need to utilize them once you are finished with this article.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Below is a pop-up for a new message – now granted not much of a change BUT the work is being done on the layout of the thing. Essentially the Icons size in comparison with the Header and the subheader.
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You may have heard that KDE Plasma Next won’t support anymore the old X11,Xembed-based systemtray icons.
(More information here)
Years ago, we developed a nicer, model/view based alternative in which is the shell that actually draws the systemtray icon, allowing better integration with the workspace, it’s a specification that is now shared between KDE and Ubuntu Unity.
All KDE applications use it already, Qt4/Qt5-only application will use it depending on a small patch (and soon Qt5 will do out of the box)
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Some features take time to implement, and it’s great to see them finally working. Bug fixes and incremental improvements, on the other hand, are quickier to do but less exciting when taken individually. It’s only the sum of many fixes and small improvements that can make a difference.
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I’m writing from a warm and sunny Berlin, having attended my first Qt Contributors Summit. It is always nice to meet the Qt developer team, and to get a chance to hang out with the Pelagicorians from our Munich office.
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Starting from today, there is a new category in kde-look.org explicitly for Plasma 5 QML2-based plasmoids.
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Kglobalaccel is a service which is supposed to get started through dbus. My installation prefix is “/opt/kf5″ and so the service file gets installed to “/opt/kf5/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.kglobalaccel.service” – that looks fine. After some investigation I figured out that dbus-daemon looks in $XDG_DATA_DIRS as a search path. Our startkde script adjusts $XDG_DATA_DIRS to include /opt/kf5/share before launching the dbus daemon. But when looking at the environment of the running dbus-daemon one could see the problem: it doesn’t use the set environment variable. The reason is obvious: dbus is nowadays started before the desktop environment gets started.
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During the first week of our Kickstarter campaign we collected more than 6500 eur, which is about 43% of the goal. That is quite a good result, so we decided to start implementing the features right now, even though the campaign is not finished yet 
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It was about a month when we last updated Krita Lime. And it is not because we had leisure time and did nothing here 
In reverse, we got so many features merged into master so it became a bit unstable for a short period of time. And now we fixed all the new problems so you can see a nice build of Krita with lots of shiny features!
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After the successful release of Krita 2.8, the advanced open source digital painting application, the we’re kicking off the work on the next release with a kickstarter campaign!
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Running a kickstarter campaign can be quite exhausting! But that doesn’t mean that coding stops — here is one new Krita 2.9 feature that we prepared earlier: painting with exposure and gamma on HDR images. HDR (high-dynamic-range) images have greater dynamic range of light than ordinary images. If you make one with your camera, you’ll combine a set of images made from the same subject at different exposures. If you want to create a HDR image from scratch, you can create one in Krita by selecting the 16 or 32 bit float RGB colorspace.
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We’re glad to announce that the contest has been a success with over 50 submitted wallpapers.
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At some point or other 23 of the 32 nations have had a Linux distribution. As you can see by the list I have had to name some discontinued distros and this is the nature of Linux.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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I have used a lot of rolling release distros in last 5 years, but, for production purpose, till recently, I mostly relied on only a few – Linux Mint, Debian and Ubuntu LTS. Primarily because the so-called “install it once only” promise hardly worked for most of the rolling release distros and they inevitably break or become unbootable after a couple of major upgrades. However, my experience with Manjaro Linux and Chakra Linux in the past 12 months have successfully changed that impression. These two Arch based distros survived 4 major upgrades and still running great, even with a whole lot of customization and niche packages that I installed.
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Red Hat Family
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Anyway. So yeah, the CentOS Project has been working feverishly AND they have been, unlike in the past, doing everything out in the open… transparency it is called. Yesterday they announced they had the packages building. Then someone on the centos-devel mailing list said they had a Docker CentOS 7 container image. I gave that a try. Then the centos-devs said they had the first build attempt completed although they have NOT gone through all of the packages yet and removed Red Hat’s branding… so it’s a very preliminary build. Then they announced they had a network install CD (~ 341MB). I gave that a try and it worked great.
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Governments should invest in open source cloud to avoid getting trapped with a vendor and their offerings when they need to meet policy requirements or the time comes to update to new technology, Red Hat says.
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At a time when Microsoft’s developer release cycle is markedly rapid (and arguably quite impressive), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 development is now strategically targeted to be a “consumable OS” full of simplicity.
“It’s the opposite of OpenStack, where new releases come to market every six months,” said Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat Inc., open-source OS developer. “Only hypercritical changes merit new version numbers. Otherwise, you’d drive IT guys crazy updating their deployments.”
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Fedora
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Never ever trust someone that will say that Rawhide works flawlessly (or the opposite!), and that’s because Fedora is a very famous OS for giving two kinds of experiences. From perfection to the totally catastrophe. A small bug is enough to get you there.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for June 10th, 2014:
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It’s been more than a year since I’ve had a successful build of Chromium that I was willing to share with anyone else, but last night I pushed out a Fedora 20 x86_64 build of the current stable Chromium. Here’s where you can go and get it:
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Debian Family
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For some tests the performance doesn’t deviate much between Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD given that both have a similar user-land. For our many source-based computational tests, the main factor to point out is that both GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD versions of 7.5 Wheezy have GCC 4.7 while the latest testing versions of these open-source operating systems are using the GCC 4.8 stable series.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A while back it was decided to create a separate Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn ISO running Unity8 on Mir, including the new core apps…
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
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This is just a quick note to say that for the next 7 days I will be releasing a number of Lubuntu based articles to celebrate the release of Lubuntu 14.04.
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Windows XP is dead. Some people may not be aware of this fact but I’m telling you now “That parrot is dead”.
Microsoft ended support for Windows XP on April 8th 2014 but what does end of support mean? Does it mean it doesn’t work anymore?
Actually, Windows XP will continue to work perfectly well for quite some time but the trouble is that any remaining security holes will remain unplugged and that leaves a huge opportunity for the cyber criminals to exploit any individual or organisation that remains on that platform.
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A start-up is working on a Raspberry Pi-based network attached storage device that can be used to set up a private cloud.
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DoodleBorg is] running off six motorcycle starter motors. It’s using mini all-terrain vehicle wheels and has a custom chassis made out of six-millimetre thick steel that has been laser cut. It has two motorcycle batteries, and six of our wonderful PicoBorg reverse control boards which are capable of five amps per channel, ten amps in total. We’ve got them connected up, one per motor so we can individually control each of the wheels. This means we can make alternate wheels go in all sorts of directions if we want them to. There are some big crazy switches on the front that serve emergency power-offs too.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Now Samsung’s announcing its newest tablet line, the Galaxy Tab S, available in 8.4-inch and 10.5-inch sizes. The Galaxy Tab S models are thinner, lighter, and faster than earlier efforts, and they have new Super AMOLED displays that Samsung says easily outperform their LCD-equipped counterparts. But one major thing remains the same: Samsung is very much still trying to beat the iPad.
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Tizen is being heralded as the “OS of Everything”, and you can really see it in action on the Samsung Gear 2, Smart camera’s, and Smart TV’s . We have previously mentioned the Tizen based Samsung WW9000 washing machine, but here are some more details regarding some of its features.
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At the Tizen Developer Conference, Onstar a General Motors subsidiary company, were showing off their car remote control solution, but with a little twist as it was working on a Samsung Gear 2, to control a lovely looking Chevrolet.
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Android
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KitKat made the best of Android accessible to more people than ever, but what will the next version do?
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Android/Linux is growing rapidly in Kenya while Series 40 is dropping fast.
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Mesosphere has closed new funding to expand the open-source Apache Mesos software for managing large compute clusters
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Perforce has released an open source version of P4CLI, its command-line interface to the company’s P4D versioning engine. In line with this release, the firm has also open sourced a version of P4Web, its web-based versioning client.
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Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Jim Thompson, CTO, TCIS, Unisys and L.N.V Samy, VP, Engineering, GTC, Unisys, about the firm’s operations in India.
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Open source is more than a type of software license. If you believe GitHub, it’s also a successful paradigm for collaborative software development. Will enterprise dev shops join the party?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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I just accidentally discovered a feature I didn’t even know existed. What feature? I’ll call it the Firefox Resolution Tester feature although I’m sure that is NOT the real name of it. I don’t know how long it has been a feature of Firefox… maybe for a long time… but like I said… I just found it in Firefox 30. How do you access it? Hit CONTROL-SHIFT-m. That’s it.
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Finally, Mozilla team officially released Firefox 30 for all major operating systems and the binary packages are now available for download. This release is not a major release, but still comes with few features, including support for Linux version of GStreamer 1.0.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Another scalable database platform for the OpenStack cloud has entered the open source fold. This week, Tesora made its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) software available to the open source community.
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One briefing highlighted an HP Labs project aimed at reinventing enterprise computer architecture. The other briefing highlighted how HP is going “all in” on OpenStack. The OpenStack press briefing was the more important one.
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Hewlett-Packard’s Atalla division rolled out new encryption offerings designed to make encryption easier and faster to deploy on-site and in the cloud.
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Does a day go past without a Hadoop update right now? — clearly not.
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CMS
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Healthcare
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The nation’s largest open source EHR system has received a substantial boost to its code base. The Indian Health Service (IHS), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services, has contributed its open source EHR technology, Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS), to the VistA code base hosted by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA).
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service (IHS) has contributed an open-source version of its Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) to the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) Technical Journal. This will complement the current open-source EHR capabilities of the VistA code base now hosted by OSEHRA.
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Funding
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In early June the open source search business arguably came of age when Elasticsearch closed on a $70M tranche of Series C investment funding. Elasticsearch is supported by both an open source search community and a commercial search business. In November 2012 the company received $10M in a Series A investment funding which was followed by a further $24M in a Series B funding in February 2013 — making the total of investment funding now $104M.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 4.9 was released at the end of April so this weekend I ran some fresh compiler benchmarks of the latest GCC 4.10 compiler snapshot to see if there’s been any performance improvements thus far in the 4.10 development cycle, although GCC 4.10 will not be released until 2015.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open science is one way today to deliver science to societies around the world. And, it can include open education, open research, open source, and open culture.
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Years ago, in a graduate computer science course, I was tasked with implementing an algorithm for “variational image segmentation by motion detection.” The algorithm was, as they say, a doozy. Tersely described over the course of half a dozen papers, it had dozens of subroutines, which when implemented grew to span thousands of lines of MATLAB code. But there was one subroutine, mysteriously called the “numerical upgrading” routine, whose description was mysteriously absent from the scientific record. Without this small but vital routine, the whole marvelous image segmenting machine just sputtered and ground to a halt. Crash! Panic! Woe.
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We live in an age where almost anything can be created – or replicated – for a fraction of the cost of a commercial product. For a couple of grad students wishing for some brain signal recording equipment back in 2011, their wish became a matter of original creation, eventually resulting in an open source community for neural technology and a device which is made at a fraction of the cost of its next least-expensive competitor.
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Health/Nutrition
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A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge.
German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land.
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Security
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“Could we – could I – make the gadgets that the agency uses to monitor and locate mobile phones, tap USB and Ethernet connections, maintain persistent malware on PCs, communicate with malware across air gaps, and more, by just using open source software and hardware?” he asked himself.
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Only 48 percent of respondents to a recent survey indicated that they test or validate third-party software to ensure it’s not vulnerable to SQL injection.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Western intervention has been the curse of the Middle East for over 100 years. The cure for the crisis in Iraq is not more intervention, says John Rees, but ending this disastrous history of meddling.
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Secret prisons, drone bases, surveillance stations, offices where extraordinary rendition is planned: Trevor Paglen takes pictures of the places that the American and British governments don’t want you to know even exist
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NBC and ABC’s Sunday news shows turned to discredited architects of the Iraq War to opine on the appropriate U.S. response to growing violence in Iraq, without acknowledging their history of deceit and faulty predictions.
This week a Sunni Iraqi militant group (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) seized control of several Iraqi cities and is focusing their sights on taking control of Baghdad and the rest of the country. The United States is still debating a response to the escalating violence, and has reportedly moved an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf.
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More than 750 cutouts of policemen have been bought by UK forces at a cost of more than $85,000. The 2D police constable cutouts are aimed at deterring shoplifters who would mistake them for real officers from afar…but no one knows if they really work.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The waters surrounding the Balearic party island are a world heritage site – and conservationists, politicians and tourist chiefs are adamant that plans to drill in the sea must be stopped
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Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes talks about her new book, which imagines that current inertia in the face of climate change will puzzle academics for centuries to come
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Finance
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In the sweltering mid-day Washington, DC heat yesterday, a small group of members of Congress and community leaders gathered outside of the capitol building.
Solemnly, as if at a funeral, they read a handful of stories written by a few of the more than 3 million Americans who are longterm unemployed (a category defined as being unemployed for six months or more and still looking for work). Since December 2013, when Congress let emergency unemployment compensation, or EUC, expire—a program that offers minimal financial support to the longterm unemployed—they have been without the help they need to get back on their feet.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Spouting off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.
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Civil Rights
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One man was crushed to death after getting caught between a conveyor system in December 2013 while sorting packages, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration said yesterday. OSHA cited five companies for violations at the Amazon facility in Avenel, New Jersey, including the contractor responsible for the sorting operation, and four staffing agencies that hired temporary employees to work at the warehouse. Amazon wasn’t cited by the government for the death.
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According to the mainstream Western version of events, thousands of Chinese university students began their sit-in protest demanding democracy and transparency from the Communist government in April and into May 1989 in the huge Tiananmen Square, directly across from the historic Forbidden City edifice in central Beijing. They defiantly faced off against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army. On May 20, 1989, the CCP imposed martial law and ordered truckloads of soldiers to Beijing to take back the square from protesters. The Western account has it that then, on June 3 into June 4, PLA soldiers opened fire and killed “up to 1000 student protesters.”
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A federal judge today ordered the Department of Justice to hand over key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the “FISA court”) so the judge can directly review whether information about mass surveillance was improperly withheld from the public.
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To be in Brazil for the World Cup should be every football fan’s dream, but as exhilarating as it is, it’s impossible for any sane supporter not to feel the competition has been tainted.
[...]
According to Samy, police are using a new law aimed at organised crime to hold and question individuals. “These activists are being accused of being part of a criminal organisation. The law passed last year created special procedures for crimes involving three or more people, and was aimed at organised crime, but it is now being used to criminalise, and eventually punish, protesters.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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WordPress has had it with copyright holders who abuse the DMCA takedown process to censor perfectly legal content. Through a lawsuit they demand $10,000 in compensation to cover the damage they, and one of their users suffered through a false DMCA takedown notice.
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If you’ve ever downloaded something via BitTorrent, odds are you’ve used (or seen) an app called Vuze. It’s one of the internet’s most prolific BitTorrent clients, and it’s used for downloading countless terabytes of copyright-protected material every day. The developers of Vuze have hit back at the online piracy epidemic, condemning copyright theft and promoting legal torrents.
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Send this to a friend
06.15.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you’ve not yet tried Linux Voice, you’re missing out on the most in-depth tutorials, features, reviews and interviews in the GNU/Linux and Free Software world. Every issue is packed with 115 pages of content from the most experienced writers in the business, and we donate 50% of our profits back to the community….
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My how the times have changed. At one point, HP and Microsoft were sharing friendship bracelets and having slumber parties. In fact, over the last decade, HP was a major player with Microsoft. Those days are gone. The juggernaut that was once Microsoft is slowly toppling and companies like HP are seeing the writing on the wall. That writing includes the likes of Android, Linux, iOS — platforms perfect for mobile and embedded systems.
To that end, Hewlett Packard has decided to kick Microsoft to the curb and develop their own operating system that will power all of their future devices. In particular, HP is working on a device they call “The Machine.” This new device will be made up of several new technologies — including a new type of memory — and will run a new operating system based on…
Wait for it…
Linux.
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A recurring Linux joke / horror story is running the command rm –rf /. Imagine if it actually happened? What would or could you do to recover?
Linux specialist Kyle Kelley recently decided to see what happened if he launched a new Linux server and ran rm –rf / as root.
This command is the remove (delete) command, with the flags –rf indicating to run recursively down all folders and subfolders, and to force deletion even if the file is ordinarily read-only. The / indicates the command is to run from the top-most root directory in Linux.
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Desktop
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That system is Wine, a software “go-between” that lets users run Windows applications without a copy of Microsoft Windows. Wine isn’t an operating system in its own right, just a layer that sits on top of free systems like Linux. It doesn’t run every Windows program but offers seamless compatibility on many of the most recent and popular applications. Used in conjunction with a free graphical operating system like Ubuntu, it’s an option that could save you up to £80 on Microsoft’s current asking price.
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Server
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Enterprises want to move into hybrid cloud services now and will probably spend the next several years making that move, according to Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. It won’t be an instant transition. He says that VMware, unlike Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, is in a good position to help them do so.
Lodge was on the road Thursday, visiting InformationWeek offices and other spots in his own “anti-cloud washing” campaign. He had a list of the requirements for a hybrid cloud and explained why some cloud services that talk about providing hybrid services probably can’t really do it. In case you’re wondering, he means Amazon Web Services, which struck a nerve inside VMware when it announced the AWS vCenter management portal, the connection between the VMware vCenter management console and Amazon’s EC2.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While EXT4 didn’t see any exciting changes for the Linux 3.16 merge window, the XFS and Btrfs file-systems are continuing to receive a great deal of upstream improvements.
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The 3.14.7, 3.10.43, and 3.4.93 stable kernel updates are available; each contains another long list of important fixes.
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Software engineer Thomas Gibbons remembers from an early age working with his father to set up mail servers in their home in Kidderminster, England. His dad, Christopher Gibbons, a BT (British Telecom) engineer, was always eager to teach him about things he expressed interested in, he said via phone this week.
“He got me into programming as well. I’m where I am today because of my father’s faith in me,” Gibbons said. “Whenever I wanted to learn something, he said ‘Great, we’ll learn it together.”
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Matthew Garrett sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Tuesday that are going into the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request is interesting for Dell Latitude laptop owners.
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For developers and debug-willing Linux enthusiasts, the Intel GPU Tools 1.7 open-source release is now available.
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Graphics Stack
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The first beta driver in NVIDIA’s forthcoming “Release 340″ driver series for blob-using Linux users is now available.
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Another OpenGL 4 extension has landed in Mesa by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center crew for the Mesa 10.3 release at the end of the summer.
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Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.1.
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Wayland 1.5 is released. It’s a pretty exciting release, with plenty of features, but the most exciting thing about it is that we can begin work on Wayland 1.6!
… No, I’m serious. Wayland 1.6′s release schedule matches up pretty well with GNOME’s. Wayland 1.6 will be released in the coming weeks before GNOME 3.14, the first version of GNOME with full Wayland support out of the box.
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The Linux graphics benchmarks we have to publish today at Phoronix are some tests of the Intel “ILO” Gallium3D driver that is independently developed by LunarG as an unofficial alternative to the classic Intel Mesa DRI driver that’s officially supported by the Intel Open-Source Technology Center.
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At Apple’s recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don’t yet know — or can’t admit — whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform.
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Benchmarks
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After last weekend delivering 30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA 2D Linux benchmarks this weekend I have some results comparing the GeForce GPU performance for 2D operations between the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine 1.7.20 was delayed an extra two weeks due to outside scheduling conflicts, but that new release is now available. While the release schedule was twice as long, the release isn’t too particularly exciting.
Found within Wine 1.7.20 is X11 drag and drop fixes, more C/C++ run-time functions have been implemented, fixes for more memory issues found by Valgrind, OLE storage fixes, and various other bug-fixes. This release has 88 bug-fixes found within this development version after the extended cycle.
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Games
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E3 and all of its shiny new game launches may be winding down, but the gaming goodness is just getting started. Friday morning, games site GOG.com launched its summer games sale, unloading a slew of games at dirt-cheap prices, with deals being swapped out day-by-day and even hour-by-hour.
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Linux is slowly becoming a gaming alternative, but it’s still a long way from consoles and Windows. How long will it take to see Linux represented at the E3 Expo in full effect, just like all the other platforms?
Making predictions is very hard, especially about the future. This simple statement from physicist Niels Bohr explains very well why it’s difficult to anticipate what will happen in the world of technology. Some things evolve faster than we can predict and others seem to stagnate…
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Ever since Valve released Steam for Linux, I had been hoping that Sid Meier’s Civilization V would come to the platform. In truth, I didn’t actually expect it to happen – not even after Beyond Earth was announced for Linux. As the game was announced for the OS earlier this week, though, this is one of those times I’m glad reality diverged from my beliefs.
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Team Fortress 2, the online multiplayer game developed by Valve, has been updated and a number of fixes have been implemented.
Team Fortress 2 has been available on the Linux platform for some time now and the developers have released lots of patches for the game already.
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2K and Firaxis Games announce that the Linux version of Civilization V has been released and the port has been made by Aspyr Media.
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When summer arrives, many games sites starts to sell out cheap games. We have found several games that works perfectly on Linux.
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Linux’s gaming potential is about more than SteamOS and blockbuster ports. Earlier this year, GOG.com announced plans to bring a bevy of classic games to Ubuntu and Mint Linux this fall, with more than 100 games expected to be available at launch. Expect them to work just fine with SteamOS when the operating system finally launches sometime in 2015, too.
Speaking of Steam, it’s not the big-name games but the indies that are driving Steam for Linux’s true growth. After launching with a mere 60 native games just over a year ago, Steam for Linux now stands at more than 300 games strong—tremendous growth in a very short time. More and more games—like Europa Universalis IV, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Dota 2, and Starbound—are starting to launch Linux versions alongside Windows counterparts.
It’s still not quite the year of Linux on the desktop, but one thing’s for certain: Linux’s gaming prospects are looking brighter than ever before.
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While LGP was once the leading source for providing Linux-native games, these days there isn’t much to say for them and their web-site remains offline one and a half months after trying to do a server upgrade.
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Crytek has been after hiring Linux programmers for years now and a Phoronix reader pointed out there’s a fresh job posting for working at Crytek in Frankfurt, Germany on the OS X and Linux versions of CryENGINE. The job posting is for an engine programmer working on Linux and Mac to maintain the support for CryENGINE, contribute to the development of CryENGINE’s OpenGL renderer, maintain and improve low-level engine subsystems, ensure the reliability of their UNIX-based build systems, provide training, and carry out other tasks.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V was announced today by Aspyr Media for Linux and SteamOS. The release targets SteamOS on current-gen hardware and is supporting Ubuntu 14.04. Future Civilization V Linux updates will expand the range of supported graphics cards.
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An updated version of the open-source OpenRA engine is out, the project with the goal of being a libre/free real-time strategy project recreating the original Command and Conquer titles.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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First I would like to say that this release would not have been possible without the excellent user community effort that arrived to help by lending their time and knowledge, after the very bumpy beta debut. Thanks to all of you.
Team members also deserve recognition for tolerating difficulties with the beta and internal frustrations that needed to be addressed. Kudos. Now on with the release notes.
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The latest addition to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries is Elua, a Lua-based Just-in-Time application runtime stack.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This is one of our first interviews with the excited attendees of the Randa meetings and today you shall get a glimpse into the mind, workings and makings of Cristian Oneț who has been with KDE since quite some time now and has been a prominent contributor.
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The KDE Project developers have revealed that the second Beta version of the next-generation Plasma workspace has been released.
Plasma Next has been built to eventually replace the current KDE Plasma, which seems to have run its course. This doesn’t means that the current Plasma used by the KDE project won’t be supported anymore, just that a change is coming in the near future.
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The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is just the development branch. It’s possible that some of the features integrated in this version of the browser will never make it to Beta and Stable.
Google Chrome Dev is the place where the developers implement new features and where the majority of fixes are added. There have been very few times when the Dev release wasn’t large, and this is not one of those times.
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Before you follow my instructions to install Plasma 5 on your system, keep in mind that Plasma 5 is under heavy development and the stable release has not been made. Since it’s in development stage, there are (as expected) issues. Some of the issue you should be aware of include the missing wallpaper, icons may stop working now and then and Plasma Network Manager is missing as well.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Sorry for a bit belated post. In the last month I attended GNOME.Asia, held in Beijing this year, in conjunction with FUDCon APAC. The conference was perfectly organized and I had a lot of fun with the enthusiastic people. Congratulations to the organizers on the successful event.
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One day while hanging around at the #gnome-design IRC channel, Allan Day made me aware of the fact that default avatars in GNOME could use a revamp. Sounded like a nice adventure, so I began following an exciting yet challenging path, aiming to find the treasure that is good avatar conceptual design.
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This may not be such a big deal on Linux, where distributions generally have ‘their’ theme, not to mention the many packaged and readily available themes. So, basically no Linux user ever sees the default GTK+ theme. The situation is very different on other platforms, where GTK+ is often bundled with applications, and it may not be easy to install themes, or get the bundled GTK+ to use them.
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The latest change abound for GNOME 3.14 is a new default theme for the GTK+ tool-kit.
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This article is a review of the latest edition of Antergos – Antergos 2014.05.26, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Like Manjaro, another Arch Linux-based desktop distribution, it is a relatively young distribution, and like its parent distribution, is a rolling release distribution.
A rolling release distribution is an install-once-update-forever distribution. That is, once a system is installed, there’s no need to reinstall when a new version is released.
The Antergos installer offers a choice of six desktop environments – Cinnamon, GNOME 3, KDE, MATE, Openbox and Xfce. This review features materials from test installations of the Cinnamon, GNOME 3, and KDE desktops.
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New Releases
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MythTV, a Digital Video Recorder and home media center hub featuring automatic commercial detection/skipping, intelligent schedule recording, parental control, remote administration, and many more other functions, is now at version 0.27.1.
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There were some nice items in the feeds on this unluckiest day of the month. Jack Germain says Pinguy OS is about as good GNOME as you can get. Andrew Powell asks Is Ubuntu’s Unity Really All That Bad Nowadays? And GamingOnLinux.com says Linux is “heating up” over at Steam. These stories and more on this Friday the 13th.
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Pinguy OS is easy to misjudge as being too basic for serious users. There is little to do but launch your applications and go about your computing tasks. It may not satisfy power users who like to control navigation with keyboard shortcuts and advanced system settings. However, if you are a normal computer user who just wants your system to work from the start, Pinguy OS has a lot going for it.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva SA is proud to announce the official Europe launch of the “out of the box” QNAP IT Management Station with its partner QNAP (Quality Network Appliance Provider) Systems, Inc., that aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability.
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Arch Family
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Few months ago I wrote about Xulrunner/AArch64 patches. Today I was able to make use result of them.
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The Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is out with its 0.8.10 update for its flagship Xfce version plus their editions for KDE, Openbox, and minimal “net” environment.
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Red Hat Family
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The same week as Red Hat announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, the CentOS community is now out with a public QA release for testing.
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After three and a half years in development, a major milestone update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform, debuts.
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Many of you probably noticed (or were gleefully anticipating) the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 today. Which means it’s a really super day to be a Red Hat employee — seeing the culmination of so much open source work come together as the next major version of our flagship product is pretty inspiring.
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Fedora
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Fedora 20 was released last December and the Fedora 21 schedule puts the next release as no earlier than mid-October, but there’s already a call for delaying this next version of Fedora Linux.
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Eariler this week, Mozilla released version 30 of their popular web browser, Firefox, and now Firefox 30 is available in the official Fedora Repositories for Fedora 20 (the Fedora 19 update is still in the testing phase).
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If you are missing a software in Fedora, it’s possible to ask for it and maybe someone will pick it up and make a rpm package for it.
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The feature proposal is moving forward for replacing the Yum package manager with the next-generation DNF solution for Fedora 22.
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Debian Family
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Getting MATE ready for Debian has been hard work for the MATE Packaging Team, but it looks like they’ve pulled it off.
“The MATE desktop environment is a fork of what was formerly known as the GNOME v2 desktop environment. The MATE upstream developers have performed a really good job in integrating the old GNOME code with latest technologies like DConf an GSettings.’
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The anonymous operating system that Edward Snowden used to evade the National Security Agency has more than doubled in popularity and use in the last year since the NSA whistleblower first made headlines.
The Amnesic Incognito Live System, known widely as Tails, was booted up 11,107 times per day in the last month, according to its developers. That number equates to a boot once every seven seconds or 344,328 boots over the entire month.
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Debian is a big system. At the time of writing, the unstable distribution has more than 20,000 source packages, building more then 40,000 binary packages on the amd64 architecture. The number of inter-dependencies between binary packages is mind-boggling: the entire dependency graph for the amd64 architecture contains a little more than 375,000 edges. If you want to expand the phrase “package A depends on package B”, there are more than 375,000 pairs of packages A and B that can be used.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth is hosting his keynote right now for the latest Ubuntu Online Developer Summit. Mark mostly talked about Ubuntu Phone, the forthcoming BQ phone hardware, Unity 8, OpenStack, LXC / Docker, and cloud computing in general… During the question and answer period, he was just asked about Mir driver support.
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The latest Internet-based Ubuntu Developer Summit ended yesterday. For those not up to speed on your Phoronix reading, here’s a recap of the most interesting topics.
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Ever since the Mir announcement made by Canonical last year, the community has met the decision with some resistance. The Ubuntu developers have explained on numerous occasions why they chose this path for their systems and it all has to do with control.
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After testing the developer’s build of Ubuntu Touch smartphone OS in 2013, the company behind Ubuntu Linux (Canonical) has finally confirmed that it will soon release its first batch of entry-level smartphones running the open-source operating system later this year. The company has teamed up with Meizu and Bq to be its initial Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). As compared to the open source Firefox OS released last year in consortium with Alacatel, the mobile edition of Ubuntu is not an HTML 5 or browser-based ecosystem. Similar to Android, it loads native Ubuntu applications (messaging, phone, and camera) flawlessly, even with the absence of wireless connectivity.
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Canonical has just released a new Ubuntu 14.10 image that only comes with the new Unity 8 as the default desktop environment, but don’t expect it to become one of the main releases in October.
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Now, don’t get me wrong – when it comes to choice of desktop interface it’s a very subjective matter and often a matter of taste and what you, as the user, finds most comfortable and/or productive. Still, browse through various forums, comment sections or blogs across the internet concerning Unity or even Linux desktops in general and you’ll still likely find plenty of negativity towards Canonical’s flagship desktop offering. However, I do believe some of the common criticisms leveled at Unity are based on some of the early incarnations of that desktop. Is it really so bad nowadays?
Of course, amongst all the perceived ‘hate’ and general negativity for Unity, there are also users with positive reactions who either are new to Unity and find it to be a good, stable and easy to use desktop or they are users who once disliked Unity based on it’s earlier versions but since trying out the Unity of today (say, Unity as it stands in Ubuntu 14.04) have had a change of heart.
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Besides figuring out SSD caching and other features for Ubuntu Server 14.10, developers at Canonical and other stakeholders are figuring out Ubuntu Server’s future with systemd in the long-term.
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Ubuntu developers are moving forward with their plans to support Click packages on the Ubuntu desktop.
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A question and answer session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for those interested in the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 desktop with its focus on convergence.
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Canonical developer Michael Hall says that there are over 10,000 unique users running Ubuntu phone OS on their devices. Where did this number come from? Did they tracked the number of download? No, that would be too vague to conclude how many users are actually using the mobile OS.
Ubuntu Phone users have to log into their Ubuntu One account (U1 file storage and music was discontinued this year), so that they can get updates or manage applications, just the way it works with Android, iOS or Windows 8. This gives Canonical the ability to know how many users used their U1 account to connect to the store and that’s where these numbers are coming from.
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Flavours and Variants
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Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 SoC, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.
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Samsung have delivered several Tizen powered Smart cameras and now according to a new leak, they are getting ready to deliver another Tizen based flagship model named the Samsung NX1. The expected announcement of this new Camera is thought to be at the Photokina event in September.
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Codethink demonstrated its Baserock Linux stack running the new Linux 3.15 kernel and an open source graphics driver stack on Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 SBC.
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Phones
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The UK Online electronics retailer MobileFun have listed the Tizen based Samsung Z (SM-Z910F) as a unlocked smartphone on their site, with a release date to be confirmed. We are expecting a Russian launch event soon and MobileFun have confirmed directly to Tizen Experts that they are looking at stocking the Samsung Z in the near future, and will also be looking at selling a range of accompanying accessories.
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Android
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Early reports are suggesting OnePlus One devices are finally ready to begin shipping to customers.
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A couple of years ago, I needed an oscilloscope for a fun electronics project I was working on: a 500W Tesla coil. I’d already spent quite a bit of money importing a kit of parts for the project from the United States, so the budget for the scope was pretty tight.
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If there is a “right way” to come in to open source, then surely this is it. So many people answered to say that their first brush with open source projects was that they spotted a problem somewhere in a tool they were using, and offered a fix. Open source is the combined effort of countless humans doing exactly this, and I was pleased and encouraged to find this as the biggest chunk of responders.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has pulled a “Chrome” by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.
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FireFox OS is the smartphone operating system from Mozilla. It is based on web technologies and FireFox OS apps are written in HTML5. Using WebGL FireFox apps can access the hardware elements of the smartphone and provide experience like a true native app. FireFox For Android 29 is bringing the Open Web Apps ecosystem to Android.
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Mozilla has today extended its Open Web App repackaging to Android.
Users of Firefox for Android are now able to install apps from the Firefox Marketplace, and have them install and behave like a regular Android app.
“As a developer, you can now build your Open Web App for Firefox OS devices and have that app reach millions of existing Firefox for Android users without having to change a single line of code,” said the announcement blog post.
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The Mozilla Foundation and chip maker Spreadtrum have partnered with two Indian vendors to launch ultra-low-cost smartphones in the next few months. Spreadtrum said the phones could cost just $25.
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Mozilla has officially released Firefox 30 for all supported operating systems. Firefox 30 is minor release as compared to 29 that came in with many new changes and complete user interface design. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the addition of new languages. Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 30.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The deal, which ownCloud, Inc. announced June 11, involves 18 research and applied science universities in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany. Together, the institutions—which are collaborating under the name Sync & Share NRW—serve up to 500,000 users who will take advantage of ownCloud’s file syncing technologies, the company reported.
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Databases
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As we’ve been covering recently, Icehouse, the next major release of the OpenStack cloud platform, is picking up steam. One notable thing about Icehouse is that it has introduced a new database-as-a-service feature, focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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Preparations are under way for the biggest change in the UK’s approach to computing education – but Raspberry Pi’s education expert Clive Beale reveals that the government is not putting enough money where its mouth is
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BSD
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The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.
The image checksums follow at the end of this email.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.7.4 has been released.
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I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ddrescue 1.18.1.
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Licensing
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I’ve had my disagreements with Joyent’s management of the Node.js project. In fact, I am generally auto-skeptical of any Open Source and/or Free Software project run by a for-profit company. However, I also like to give credit where credit is due.
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Developers won’t be required to sign contributor license agreements before contributing to the open source software platform, although Node.js will still be distributed under the MIT License.
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Openness/Sharing
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In late November 2012, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) team gained a new member who lived and worked almost 1700 kilometers away from the synthetic chemistry hub at the University of Sydney. Of course, collaboration across continents is not unusual for scientists, but until recently, recruitment in less than 140 characters certainly was.
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When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.
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As its base layer, DINAA adapts governmental heritage management datasets for broader open and public uses. DINAA is an exercise in open government data and community data sharing based on open source standards and ethics. DINAA (from construction, through rollout, and into future planning) is an example of how digital is simply the way we do archaeology now, and what that means for us as professionals and social scientists.
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Science
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F1000Research, a scientific journal with a strong focus on open access and life sciences, operates quite differently than even the average open access journal. The team there uses new approaches to publishing scientific research; a few of their most noteable characteristics are:
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References and citations are what make the scientific and academic worlds go round. Everyone has their own system for keeping track of their research, from dumping everything onto a desk, to dumping everything into a folder (I like to call this the Pensky Method), to dumping everything into folders on a computer.
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As scientists and researchers develop new and better methods for collecting data, from new sensor technology to advancements in data mining techniques, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed grows accordingly. For big data, you need big clusters, and OpenStack has proven to be an important tool for many scientific institutions seeking to manage and orchestrate their machines and workloads.
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Open Hardware
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Two MIT grad students offer up DIY brain-recording gear
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Programming
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In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results. The human mind is extremely good at spotting patterns and seeing trends in visual information. To this end, the standard Python module for this type of work is matplotlib. With matplotlib, you can create complex graphics of your data to help you discover relations.
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This May 22, 2013 file photo shows Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
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Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
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People in the UK should stop being “bashful” about being British, the prime minister has urged.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron said the country should be “far more muscular” in promoting its values and institutions.
He repeated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s call to promote “British values” in the classroom following the Trojan Horse claims in Birmingham schools.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Documents released under FoI reveal ‘enhanced collaboration’ plans, raising questions over independence of UK deterrent
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The removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil should be part of a post-independence constitution, according to Scotland’s deputy first minister.
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Tony Blair has urged western governments to recognise that they need to take an active role in the Middle East, saying the west should consider military options short of sending ground troops.
The former prime minister said there was a huge range of options available, including air strikes and drones as used in Libya.
Blair was speaking on UK morning TV shows after writing a lengthy essay setting out how to respond to the Iraq crisis, including his belief that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the cause of the country’s implosion.
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Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad
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All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a “failure” of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have “sprung” from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.
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Political convergence between Republicans and Democrats has successfully passed popular legislation.
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He affirmed that after the 9/11 attacks, the US has ordered its tools in the Persian Gulf to close windows of terrorism, but after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, it sent billions of Dollars through the Persian Gulf Arab states to the terrorist groups to kill the Syrians.
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Rahmat, meanwhile, hates and fears the drones, which deal death and destruction from above in a land where there’s already too much of both. Directly and indirectly, they cut him off from a better future, and even fuel support for the Taliban.
“For me the research was about figuring out what that world is like,” said Nacer. “There’s a great website, Living Under Drones, that’s exactly what it is, what life under drones is like. It’s terror, all the time, because drones are up there 24/7.”
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One party chooses to concentrate on the destruction of a State Department/CIA outpost in Africa…
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Bergdahl Critics Didn’t Howl When Bush Freed Prisoners
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These developments include the June 5 Islamabad High Court order to lodge a murder case against ex-CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, the June 6 Karachi Airport attack by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of the Govt-TTP talks, the rising terrorist activities of the Haqqani network across the border in Afghanistan and the May 31 release of a US soldier who was reportedly being kept in the Waziristan tribal belt by the Haqqanis.
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What happens if China or North Korea start to undertake the same actions as the United States is taking? Japan will also face a similar problem as its Self-Defense Forces plan to introduce three UAVs in five years starting this fiscal year.
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The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom
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Footage from the scene then showed protesters upturning several diplomatic cars parked in front of the embassy. The vehicles also had their number plates ripped off and were covered by graffiti. Someone drew several swastikas in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on one of the cars.
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The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.
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An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.
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Going to Iraq for the first time was like lighting a lighter and putting it under your hand. You get burnt badly, but the lighter company got to make money. You should have learned the lesson.
Now Republicans want us to do it again. They want us to put our hands on the lighter again, because they probably get paid for buying the lighters or that’s how they control the mindset of misinformed Americans.
Republican leaders are not idiots (they are smart and know a majority of Americans have below average IQ (thanks to glorification of not going to school, dropping out or making it to expensive to get any education) and they won’t be able to fully understand these issues so they hit where they know it will work. And they are doing it again with Iraq, making us all forget it it was a fraud and Bush should be serving life time sentence for murder of innocent men & women or US armed forces as well as innocent Irqis.
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According to your website you’ve got about six jobs, Google says you own seven or eight houses and you privately jet about the world a lot visiting media moguls, their wives, their ranches and their yachts.
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A new round of comments from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko has revealed Pentagon waste was even more staggering than previously imagined, with billions likely spent on war materiel that was not only never used, but never even sent to Afghanistan.
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The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.
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As Iraq faces a growing insurgency in the north that is threatening to pull the country apart, the country’s Ministry of Communications has blocked access to a number of social media sites on Friday.
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Wealthy Gulf neighbours and the West fear for the stability of Yemen, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.
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Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in anti-terrorist attacks gone wrong.
The illustrations add credibility to a legal challenge begun last month over a 2012 contract BT won to build the UK branch of the system – a fibre optic network line between RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and Camp Lemonnier, a US military base in Djibouti, North Africa.
British officials had been slow to finger the BT contract under human rights rules because they said there was no evidence to suggest the UK connection was associated with US drone strikes, let alone any that had gone wrong.
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Eventually, being in charge of this new kind of death-from-above exacts an emotional and even hallucinatory toll, building up to a crescendo with shattering consequences.
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Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s largest and most influential human rights organizations, is facing an unusual amount of public criticism. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, and a group of over 100 scholars have written an open letter criticizing what they describe as a revolving door with the U.S. government that impacts HRW’s work in certain countries, including Venezuela. The letter urges HRW to bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as staff, advisers or board members. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth has defended his organization’s independence, responding: “We are careful to ensure that prior affiliations do not affect the impartiality of Human Rights Watch’s work. … We routinely expose, document and denounce human rights violations by the US government, including torture, indefinite detention, illegal renditions, unchecked mass surveillance, abusive use of drones, harsh sentencing and racial disparity in criminal justice, and an unfair and ineffective immigration system.” We host a debate between HRW counsel Reed Brody and Keane Bhatt, a writer and activist who organized the open letter.
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Former US President George H W Bush celebrated his 90th birthday today by making a tandem parachute jump near his summer home in Maine, fulfilling a promise made five years ago despite having lost the use of his legs.
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Their reality is seen in bipartisan politicians creating a deficit of trillions of dollars to fund the unlawful wars of choice against Afghanistan and Iraq, and then failing to anticipate and provide adequate care for the large number of wounded veterans returning home. The long delays and cover-ups in treating veterans at the Phoenix VA medical center and elsewhere indicate that no soldiers are left behind—until they come home. Never mind that there would be no need for such extensive medical care for “wounded warriors” if former President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney– and their neocon advisors—had not launched these unnecessary, illegal pre-emptive wars.
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Queensland parents Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick are demanding federal authorities provide hard evidence to show the Islam convert and English language teacher had been “radicalised’’ and become a foot soldier in the Holy War.
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Apparently in a belated but calculated reaction, Pakistan strongly condemned Thursday the two incidents of drone strikes near Miranshah in North Waziristan which reportedly killed at least 16 foreign militants amid suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.
Reports earlier quoted two unnamed government officials as saying Islamabad had given the Americans ‘express approval’ for the strikes. Underlining Pakistan’s alarm over the brazen Taliban attack on the airport, just weeks after peace talks with the militants stalled, the top officials told Reuters a ‘joint Pakistan-US operation’ had been ordered to hit the insurgents.
Another official said Pakistan had asked the United States for help after the attack on the country’s busiest airport on Sunday, and would be intensifying air strikes on militant hideouts in coming days.
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The intriguing aspect of the revival of the drone strikes is whether they have been restarted with the ‘express approval’ of Pakistan.
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At a time when the American CIA’s targeted killing programme in the tribal areas of Pakistan was winding down, some recent developments seem to have made the US resume its deadly drone strikes after an unprecedented break of six months.
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After an unanticipated long break, the American CIA resumed its controversial drone programme in Pakistan’s restive North Waziristan tribal region raising concerns among its critics whether Islamabad has given a tacit go-ahead for fresh strikes.
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When CIA Director John Brennan — then the White House counterterrorism adviser — laid out the Obama administration’s new approach to fighting Islamist terrorism on June 29, 2011, he mocked conservatives who suggested that Islamist extremists were plotting to re-establish a caliphate across the Middle East.
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“Coming into my freshman year, I was very interested in the history of intelligence and espionage, which was something I didn’t know much about. I ended up working with two great professors – one of whom actually spent 30 years as an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War – and continued researching the CIA even after my career focus shifted to business and finance.”
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The CIA doesn’t need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds of silence and a black screen. People would be left scratching their heads, unsure about who would even pay for such a thing, let alone what the objective was. And that would be the whole idea.
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What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?
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Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer, in 2012, had accused the United States Government of funding environmental group Greenpeace via the CIA to undermine Australia’s coal mining sector. He was reportedly angry at Greenpeace’s plan to use lawyers to thwart future coal mining projects and claimed that funding is coming from an American environmental charity, the Rockefeller Foundation. He alleged it is funded by the CIA and is trying to harm Australia’s industry and help American interests.
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America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of misjudgments, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.
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The US has a disastrous record of involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts in Central America.
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Transparency Reporting
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Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson, also known as “Siggi Hacker”, will tomorrow arrive in Reykjanes District Court to face charges of embezzlement, fraud, and theft adding up to about 30 million ISK.
DV reports that Sigurður faces a total of 18 counts of the charges, ranging from funneling millions into a private bank account from Wikileaks to using the accounts of companies to which he did not belong to buy everything from laptops to fast food.
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The FTA granted greater rights to US investors. These included Colorado-based Newmont Mining, which had billions of dollars of interests in the area affected by protests.
Newmont, the world’s second-largest gold-mining company, holds a majority stake in Yanacocha, one of the world’s largest gold mines. Newmont is now developing the Conga mine, the biggest ever foreign investment in Peru.
Another cable, sent on June 5, provides an account of the outbreak of violence. Police sources cited by the ambassador said about 600 police moved on the blockade outside Bagua involving thousands of protesters.
Police started firing after a group of about 60 of their own became isolated and surrounded by the Amazonian protesters. Police sources claim that protesters triggered the violence by firing on a helicopter that was shooting tear gas into the crowd in support of the isolated police.
The police shot dead 10 protesters. Human rights groups later reported six indigenous men as missing, presumed dead.
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The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.
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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko handed to the US Embassy in Kiev inside information on the forging of a coalition government in 2006, according to Wikileaks data.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In the face of expanding energy regulations, stepped-up Democratic attacks and the ongoing fight over Obamacare, the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups—including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin, The Daily Beast has learned.
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Campaigners have managed to keep the Congo national park free from drilling just as protected sites elsewhere are being cravenly redrawn
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Finance
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Lord Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent after the murder of his children’s nanny.
The sensational claim is made in a new book which tells how spook James Gurney helped to mastermind the elaborate escape.
Gurney says he moved the fugitive from a country pub in Kent to a remote safe house in Wiltshire before they boarded a flight from Heathrow to Greece.
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The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.
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It’s no secret that the city of Detroit is not the thriving industrial city that it once was, but as things decay over time, it’s sometimes hard to notice just how drastic some of the changes have been. Redditor Scarbane has compiled a startling collection of images from Google Street View showing just how much things have deteriorated in just a few years. These pictures broke my heart a little bit…
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Every year taxpayers subsidize Walmart – the world’s wealthiest corporation 1 – to the tune of $7.8 BILLION!
HUH? Walmart, America’s largest private employer, raked in $17 billion in profit last year 2; its owners, the Walton family, have more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined 3. But every year, Walmart’s poverty wages and extensive tax dodging cost taxpayers $7.8 BILLION in subsidies.
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Mr. Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was the only person on board the aircraft, an airport official said.
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The auction of the 29,000 bitcoins is scheduled to take place on the 27th of June over 12 hours. Interested bidders need to register themselves by 12 p.m. EST of 23rd June. They are also required to make a deposit of $200,000 through wire from a bank within the US. In addition, the participants need to provide a government issued ID and prove that they are not affiliated or related in anyways to either Ulbricht or Silk Road. All the bitcoins will be broken up into 10 chunks with each bidder able to bid on multiple chunks.
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Looking to buy some Bitcoin? The US government has plenty to sell. It’s put up for auction the more than 29,000 bitcoins that it seized from the underground drug sales site Silk Road earlier this year, all of which are currently valued at close to $18 million. The auction will occur and close later this month, and bidders won’t be required to purchase the entire, expensive chunk. Instead, it’ll be broken up into 10 chunks, most of which are worth about $1.8 million, and interested parties can bid on as many chunks as they want.
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According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s $1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ABC-VEgasWhen a husband and wife allegedly murdered two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, the story received a lot of coverage. But it was coverage that mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said, “The revolution is beginning,” and a Revolutionary-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag closely associated with both the Patriot and Tea Party movements (Hatewatch, 6/9/14). The couple, both white, were also associated with far-right causes and had expressed extreme hostility toward authorities.
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When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed.
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Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013) is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.
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Censorship
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Twitter has suspended at least six accounts affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist group gaining ground in Iraq and Syria since fighting escalated this week.
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Egyptian security forces confiscated copies of a human rights group’s newsletter, saying the publication threatened the government, the head of the group said Sunday.
Gamal Eid, the head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said police seized 1,000 copies of the publication, entitled Wasla, or Link, from the print shop the night before, also arresting a worker at the press.
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A Tribe Called Red’s Ian “Deejay NDN” Campeau has become one of Canada’s most high-profile First Nations activists. As his Ottawa-based electronic music crew have surfed EDM’s wave to unprecedented heights — including a Juno Award for breakthrough group and Rolling Stone shoutout — Campeau has used his public profile to raise awareness about respecting Aboriginal culture.
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Steve Coogan has become a patron of Index on Censorship, the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
“We are delighted that Steve has agreed to be a patron of Index,” said its newly appointed chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.
“Comedians, writers and performers often bear the brunt of attempts to stifle free expression – in both authoritarian regimes and in democracies.”
Coogan said: “Creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished where it exists and fought for where it doesn’t. This is what Index on Censorship does. I am pleased to lend my support and patronage to such an important cause.”
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A new report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN) has strongly condemned “soft censorship” by governments and regulators as a “very serious threat to media independence and the very viability of media companies”. WAN, which is the umbrella organization of newspapers representing more than 18,000 publications and 15,000 online sites in 120 countries around the world, has urgently called for rapid action to stop this blatant repression of media and press freedom.
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Censorship in China affects many popular Internet services and websites, but there are ways to make do
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Privacy
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Surfing the Internet?? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is watching your every move on Web, and this time even more closure.
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Although privacy is now guaranteed under article 23 of the new constitution, an “NSA-like” agency – the Technical Agency for Telecommunications (ATT) – was also created back in November. Fears remain that Tunisia may not yet have turned the page on the Ben Ali surveillance era in spite of its new constitution.
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One year after Edward Snowden exposed the spying at the NSA, can the internet be re-set?
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The revelations drew international criticism, and led to the resignation of more than 33 DAS agents, more than a dozen of arrests and the eventual dismantling of the intelligence agency.
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So Secretary of State John Kerry thinks that Edward Snowden should “man up” and return to the United States. Well, fair enough, but should Kerry and other senior government officials “man up” and tell the public about the extent of spying on U.S. citizens as well as on our allies? Should they not reveal the civilian casualties of our drone strikes in allied countries such as Pakistan or Yemen?
Kerry also states that Snowden “should trust the American system of justice.” Tragically, the system is doing nothing to halt the illegal drone strike bombing in countries with whom we are not at war, nor the long-term imprisonment of individuals without bringing them to trial. It seems that the American system of justice has fallen far short of its ideals. The NSA and CIA are totally unaccountable to either Congress or the Courts.
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US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology
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Wyden made news last year when he caught Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in an obvious lie. Asked whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions of Americans,” Clapper said, “No, sir.” Wyden said he had written numerous letters to Clapper and NSA’s then-head Keith Alexander, seeking clarification on the agency’s programs.
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Rarely do you get a chance to ask a just-retired FBI director whether he had “any legal qualms” about what, in football, is called “illegal procedure,” but at the Justice Department is called “parallel construction.”
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Law and computer science both have their codes, but they’re disparate. Legal code is often fuzzy and qualitative. Computer code is precise and quantitative. Not surprisingly, law and computer science tend to attract different people. It’s not that the twain shall never meet; it’s just that they seldom do.
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No, the pro-Hillary activists aren’t tapping your phones, but they are just as humorless as the spy agency when mocked. In November, we reported that the NSA and Homeland Security Department were none too pleased about parody products sold online using an altered image of their logo, such as a T-shirt with: “Peeping while you’re sleeping” inside the NSA seal and under that, “The NSA, the only part of the government that actually listens.”
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Congressman Steve Stockman Friday asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.
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The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said no this week to tracking your movements using data from your cell phone without a warrant when it declared that this information is constitutionally protected.
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Yes, this is exactly what you think it means. The NSA can listen to your conversations and use your camera when you power off your phone. Sounds crazy, but it can happen.
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India’s new Bharatiya Janata Party government has come under pressure to scrap Aadhaar, the program which aims to enroll all of the country’s residents through biometrics.
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Last month, we wrote about how the USA Freedom Act was completely changed at the last minute in secret. This was even after the bill had been marked up and approved unanimously by two committees (Judiciary and Intelligence). Then the White House (read: NSA) came in and basically changed the bill around entirely, such that some say it’s even worse than before. Earlier this week, it even came out that the very author of the USA Freedom Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, was frozen out of the final negotiations on his own bill, such that the final product looked nothing like the original. While some in Congress tried to warn their colleagues that the bill they were voting on had been changed in secret, many Representatives didn’t fully comprehend what happened, and the bill passed.
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JOHN Kerry, the United States Secretary of State, has stepped in to oversee the investigation of reports that the National Security Agency is intercepting and recording all cell phone conversations in The Bahamas, with the ability to store them for up to 30 days.
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Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house, and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform
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In a 2013 Pew Internet poll, for instance, 86 percent of internet users reported “taking steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints.” This ranged from encrypting email to clearing cookies and masking internet protocol (IP) addresses to avoiding using their real name on virtual networks. The same poll found that 68 percent of users believe existing privacy protection laws are inadequate. The poll says nothing of mobile data privacy.
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A year on from Edward Snowden’s revelations around state sponsored mass surveillance programs, some of the major players in the online and technological world (including Google, Mozilla, Twitter and Reddit) have launched the Reset the Net campaign.
The program aims to increase people’s awareness and uptake of privacy and security tools so they can better resist surveillance, particularly that conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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I would like to give a brief history lesson to those who have either forgotten the past or wish to ignore it. In 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act in response to a terrorist attack. It gave Chancellor Adolf Hitler the power to enact laws without the involvement of the legislative body.
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Thousands of demonstrators might be camped outside GCHQ in Cheltenham for three days later this summer.
Activists who are angry at reports that GCHQ and its American sister agency NSA have developed large programmes of mass surveillance of phone and internet traffic are calling for a three-day protest outside the ‘doughnut’ in Hubble Road from August 29 to September 1.
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Google just bought Skybox Imaging for $500m to gain access to its capability to take real-time, high-resolution satellite images/videos of the whole world daily. Last week Google sources told the WSJ that Google was planning to spend $1-3 billion on “180 small, high capacity satellites at lower altitudes than traditional satellites” to enable two-way Internet access. In April, Google bought Titan Aerospace – which makes solar-powered, high-flying drones that Titan calls “atmospheric satellites” — for Internet access to remote areas and for disaster relief. And in March Google CEO Larry Page shared his ambitions that Project Loon “could build a world-wide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet.”
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The Times cited Fellwock’s claim that the United States had encircled the Communist world with at least 2,000 electronic listening posts on land or on naval vessels or aircraft. It discussed his description of CIA covert action in Thailand, the NSA’s role in finding Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, and the stationing of the electronic intelligence ship USS Liberty near the Israeli coast, where our the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) attacked it, killing 34 Americans. Throughout, the article treated Fellwock as a whistleblower, not a traitor.
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Nine states this year placed new legal limits on police cellphone surveillance after revelations that law enforcement agencies across the country are gathering cellphone data of thousands of people at once, often without warrants or without regard to whether they are criminal targets.
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On June 12, 2014 Senator Wyden asked for permission to address the U.S. Senate regarding the Intelligence authorization bill. There he spoke of the contributions of whistleblowers.
A whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization.
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Over 150,000 French people have supported a petition urging President Francois Hollande to grant NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in France after his refugee status expires in Russia in July.
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Oliver Stone may have purchased the film rights to Edward Snowden’s life story, but it seems as if the French are aiming for the rights to Snowden’s freedom by petitioning to grant him political asylum.
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Earlier this week, Simon Davies, the “Privacy Surgeon,” published a global analysis of the impact of the Edward Snowden revelations over the past year. The report, entitled A Crisis of Accountability demonstrates that, despite many strong and sweeping declarations, the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have failed to take meaningful action in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
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Civil Rights
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The US government used informants and spies to coax Osmakac into making “radical YouTube videos”. The FBI eventually got him to buy fake weapons, with money the FBI gave him, and then arrested him on felony charges. Osmakac’s trial is like many others in the US, where the government prosecutes Muslims and Arab-Americans for pre-emptive crimes–crimes the FBI sets up, but that are not actually committed. Osmakac’s defense said that the FBI entrapped a mentally ill man.
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The federal prosecutors are using recordings from two FBI informants who had been spying on Osmakac or months. However, he had been talking with and led on by FBI informants for much longer. Sami Osmakac’s brother Avni Osmakac, said he had “seen agents around his house every day since 2010.” Their house frequently had undercover police vehicles parked nearby. Back then Sami had worked as a grocery stocker for a local market. This is where they think he met the first government informant. From there he spent over a year being coaxed and pushed by agents into making “radical YouTube videos”. He was eventually guided into buying fake weapons with money given to him by the FBI. Government videos show FBI informants teaching and pushing Sami into committing acts of terrorism.
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Osmakac was using government money to buy government weapons, Tragos said. The FBI was on “both sides of this transaction.”
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Michael Hastings was one of our generation’s best, most driven, and fearless reporters. His work at Rolling Stone changed the course of the American war in Afghanistan. At BuzzFeed, he told the story of the 2012 election and was building a beat on the dark side of Hollywood when he was killed in a car crash at 33, one year ago.
Michael’s obsessive observation, his drive to figure it out, extended to his own profession. In his last years, he became obsessed with the internet, seeing, more so than most of his peers, that it would be a great home for big narratives. But Michael was ready for the change because he had seen the big changes shaking his business up close, watching the death throes of a great print institution as a young reporter for Newsweek from 2003 to 2008. It turns out that he observed that experience with the same obsessiveness and the same reflection.
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The notorious US private militia group Academi – previously known as Blackwater – trained Brazilian security forces in North Carolina in preparation for the current World Cup in Brazil, as reported by sportswriter Dave Zirin. Zirin pointed to the 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, which revealed that Washington viewed the expected World Cup-related crises as opportunities for US involvement. Zirin wrote that for Washington, “Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.”
Capitalism’s bullets follow the World Cup just as they do Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with the US. Five years ago this month, protests were raging in northern Peru where thousands of indigenous Awajun and Wambis men, women and children were blockading roads against oil, logging and gas exploitation on Amazonian land. The Peruvian government, having just signed an FTA with the US, was unsure how to deal with the protests – partly because the controversial concessions in the Amazon were granted to meet the FTA requirements. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, on June 1st, 2009 the US State Department sent a message to the US Embassy in Lima: “Should Congress and [Peruvian] President Garcia give in to the [protesters’] pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” Four days later, the Peruvian government responded to the protest with deadly violence, leading to a conflict which left 32 dead.
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The war against London’s “anti-homeless” spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action. In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.
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Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements
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U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.
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The story’s credibility is greatly enhanced by virtue of who wrote it. Duncan Campbell has an unmatched track record for covering the world of spies and surveillance, which includes being the first to reveal the existence of both GCHQ and Echelon, the precursor to today’s Five Eyes surveillance system.
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As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet – previously employed in CIA “rendition” flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible “black” imprisonment – flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.
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Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?
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While many Americans don’t seem to comprehend what’s happening all around them, the U.S government is implementing more methods of surveillance over this society and many of its agencies are acquiring more powerful weaponry. And now we are also seeing state and local law enforcement agencies following this government’s initiative of establishing greater and greater control over the American people. And that most certainly does not bode well for those who still value their privacy and rights under the Constitution.
It seems as if the U.S. government is waging two Wars on Terror; one in foreign lands against Al-Qaeda and one here within this country and society. So with that in mind let’s examine some of the distinct similarities that are present in the U.S. government’s foreign surveillance and methods of hunting down suspected terrorists around the world and those same strategies and tactics that it and various other law enforcement agencies are using here in America.
First let’s talk about surveillance. It’s no secret that, for many decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting comprehensive surveillance operations on various foreign governments and specific individuals in those countries. That’s been going on for so long that few Americans even give it a second thought.
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In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.
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Senior legislative counsel for the ACLU estimates that if the Senate has its way, 100 U.S. citizens could immediately find themselves in Guantánamo-like indefinite detention.
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After dropping Palermo off, Keys was pulled over by TLC investigators and accused of operating the black Town Car as an illegal cab, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court.
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The life of a taxi driver is hard. When cabbies start a shift, they owe about $100 to their company as payment just for the opportunity drive a taxi. They might not break even until halfway through their shift, or maybe not at all that day. In most American cities, they have to work very long hours to make a living.
During a shift, taxi drivers play a strange form of roulette when they pick up anonymous customers. The customer could be a pleasant family that tips them well, a drunk college kid that vomits in their car, or a violent criminal that robs and assaults them. After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.
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Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.
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The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist ‘extremists’ in the new ‘age of uncertainty’
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.
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This week, MPAA chief and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd praised pirate site blockades as an important anti-piracy measure. Speaking at the IP Summit in London, Dodd said that ISP blockades are one of the most effective tools available. Does this mean that Hollywood will try to get these blacklists in place on its home turf?
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Informing the masses about the activities of settlement-seeking copyright trolls is what FightCopyrightTrolls.com does best, so no surprise that its rivals are now hitting back. In a motion revealed this week, the world’s most prolific filer of lawsuits against BitTorrent users accuses the site of running an Internet hate group that is both “criminal and scary”.
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With the copyright lawsuit factory formerly known as Prenda Law now mired in sanctions, a California company called Malibu Media has become the most litigious copyright holder in the US.
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City of London Police and Hollywood’s Federation Against Copyright Theft are claiming big results in a new government IP crime report. PIPCU say they have suspended 2,359 UK domains and cut off payment to 19 sites, with FACT claiming the closure of 117 pirate sites and the arrest of seven release group members in the past 12 months.
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06.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’m not a big hardware guy. At all. Specs mean very little to me. However, Sean’s hardware is interesting, as it’s a Novena, something he developed himself. And of course, because he’s working with Linux, he’s able to get things to run pretty well. I have no idea what the future of the Novena is, but I love that people can make new devices that will be able to access familiar software and interfaces. Microsoft is making Windows cost-free for certain devices. It’s a smarter strategy than charging manufacturers, but until they let people get under the hood of the code, they’re going to have a hard time reaching new, experimental devices. Which is actually OK with me, since I’m happy to have Linux in as many places as possible.
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Desktop
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Last year, the Sioux Falls, South Dakota school district in the U.S. purchased a fleet of Chromebooks–portable computers runnng Google’s Chrome OS–for use by students, and now, a year later, school district officials are out with a review of the experience. Specifically, the Sioux Falls School District spent over $4.5 million on Chromebooks to arm students in third through twelfth grades with, and the School Board is heralding the program’s success.
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Retail giant Woolworths has announced a massive IT transformation program, confirming it will phase out its huge collection of Microsoft Windows desktops in favour of 8000 Google Chrome OS machines.
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The HP Chromebook 14, with its 14-inch screen, 1.4-GHz Intel Celeron 2955U processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB SSD, is a capable companion. It offers an inexpensive means of computing well in virtually any Wi-Fi environment. However, the Chrome OS isn’t for everyone. Costing $299, you can turn a Chromebook into an inexpensive PC running Linux.
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Looking around the BIOS let me set the Secure Boot to boot other OSes. It wouldn’t let me just disable it completely. I set the boot order to boot the DVD drive first and tried to run those Linux live disks. Mageia 4 wasn’t going to let me change the video driver from VESA no matter what. Cinnamon crashed once loading NVIDIA drivers in Mint 17. openSUSE behaved the best in giving me nice video support. I figured I’d install openSUSE and use it until Mint 17 came out in the KDE version.
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Server
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Should Intel Relevant Products/Services Xeon-based system manufacturers be worried? IBM just started shipping the next generation of Power Systems services with its Power8 processor Relevant Products/Services. The processor can be licensed and is open for development through the OpenPower Foundation — and Big Blue is making some big claims.
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This morning, Google also unveiled new tools that make it easier to merely run Docker containers on its cloud services, and other cloud companies–such as Amazon and Rackspace–have embraced Docker in similar fashion. Docker is one step towards a world where we can treat all cloud services like one giant computer, and a tool like Kubernetes is the next.
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Kernel Space
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The heart and soul of science is collecting data and finding patterns in it. The heart and soul of mathematics is manipulating symbols for the purposes of analyzing data and solving problems. The revised curricula in K-12 education in mathematics, science, and technology education all emphasize the ability to solve problems using IT, including some hardware and programming. See for example, Manitoba’s Grade 9 Mathematics Curriculum. Programming is like being able to read and to write and to do basic maths. I was overjoyed when the curriculum was revised in the late 1990s. Students who used to drop out of highschool over an inability to do “traditional” maths could finally excel at solving problems because they could edit and revise spreadsheets in seconds and get the spreadsheet itself to verify solutions. There was no longer an easy way to get the wrong answer. There was an easy way to get the right answer, like brute force/trying every reasonable value until the right one was found… Even weak students could understand the concept and some of them were better at that kind of maths than the “smart” kids.
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The developers have made quite a few changes to the software and, as usual, it’s difficult to list them all. Unlike a few of the previous releases, this is actually safe to use and users have been advised to upgrade to the new version, although it’s more likely that the distro makers will take care of that.
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Graphics Stack
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David Airlie of Red Hat sent in the DRM pull request for the 3.16 merge window with a plethora of changes this time around:
- The Nouveau driver has initial support for the GK20A Kepler graphics core found within the Tegra K1 ARM SoC.
- The other big Nouveau change is initial support for re-clocking on certain generations of NVIDIA chipsets. The support is limited to a few series where it should be working, is static, and can be rather buggy.
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Roy Spliet, an existing contributor to Nouveau, has managed to secure EVoC funding to reverse-engineer and implement NVA3/5/8 voltage and frequency scaling support within the open-source Nouveau driver. “For this project, I aim to tie these loose ends together for NVIDIAs NVA3/5/8 GPUs. His “REclock” proposal states, “I intend to fully reverse engineer several subcomponents related to voltage and frequency scaling, try to get a full understanding of the clock tree and use this gained knowledge to further improve the nouveau voltage and frequency scaling implementation for said GPUs.”
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A new African student developer from Cameroon, Nyah Check, has proposed working on Shatter with financing provided by the Endless Vacation of Code. Here’s the synopsis for what he hopes to accomplish, “This project seeks to support shatter rendering in a multi-head Xephyr by dividing rendering between multiple Xephyr GPUs screens by using the impedance layer to the X server. This will comprise of polishing the current implementation of the impedance layer and testing for shatter rendering on two Xephyr GPU screens. This would be the scope of this summer’s project which will eventually continue to completely add shatter and replace Xinerama by splitting the protocol objects from the driver objects modularizing the acceleration architectures and framebuffer layers under the driver rending layer and the damage, protocol decode layers under the protocol layer interface, communicating through the impedance layer interface. This removes duplicate protocol processing and storage of information lowering Xinerama multiplexing to the impedance layer boundary. This would enable multiplexing below the protocol screen.”
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Benchmarks
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After carrying out all of the PCI Express graphics cards at my disposal for last week’s open-source tests, I then immediately turned to testing all of the supported GPUs by the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers. Today’s comparison is still large (35 graphics cards) but smaller than the earlier comparison because the latest mainline drivers don’t support the diverse selection of Radeon and GeForce GPUs going back as many years as the open-source drivers. NVIDIA does maintain multiple legacy drivers that work well with updated Linux distributions, but for the Radeon HD 4000 series and older hardware, AMD doesn’t really maintain their legacy Catalyst Linux driver for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases. As a result, just the latest mainline AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA driver releases were testing, which gives us support for the GeForce 8 series and newer and on the AMD side is the Radeon HD 5000 series and newer.
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Applications
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Docker has spun off a key open source component of its Linux Containerization tech, making it possible for Google, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Parallels to collaborate on its development and make Linux Containerization the successor to traditional hypervisor-based virtualization.
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Docker, the open source container virtualization platform, released software version 1.0, signaling that it is officially ready for prime time. And the Docker team has launched an enterprise support program and a system integrator initiative to accompany it.
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Start up ttyload and you’ll see hints of things like tload, nload and even htop, in a way.
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trn claims to be an improvement upon the ancient rn newsreader, but I’m bewildered and discombobulated by this one. By all rights it should work, but it’s seriously playing hardball.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Kevin VanDine of Canonical has announced his work on Bacon2D… a 2D game engine designed in part to push gaming for Ubuntu Touch/Phone.
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Right now Linux gamers only have OpenGL renderers to exploit and recently OpenGL has come under a lot of scrutiny with one of the complaints being that it’s too high-level compared to Mantle, DirectX 12, or even Apple’s Metal. In terms of Mantle support on Linux, AMD has said in the past that it could come and they would like to see it come, but there are no active plans with no engineering resources being devoted to the process of actually porting it over to their Catalyst Linux driver but its feasibility is still being determined. This latest AMD Gaming blog post gives a bit more of a renewed hope that we could see Mantle on Linux given the reference and AMD’s continued investment into this proprietary graphics API.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V, that stalwart of the 4X genre, is now available on Linux, thanks to Aspyr Media. Designed to work with SteamOS, the Linux port has all of the same features and options available on the Windows and Mac versions, including Steam Play support, achievements, and support for the incoming Steam Controller.
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Several 1990′s era videogames created by the founders of Richardson, Texas-based id Software–John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack–have just been made available via open source, by the company that owns the rights to those games. The old, classic games–which include HOvertank3D, Catacomb, TheCatacomb, Catacomb3D, and other titles–were created by the founders of id Software at Softdisk, in Shreveport, Louisiana, before the three founded id Software. The games have all been open sourced under the Gnu Public License (GPL) by current owner Flat Rock Software.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I recently updated xfce4-power-manager to release 1.3.0 on my COPR repo. Here are screenshots from the latest releas, which has had a significant makeover. Smile
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Despite my involvement in KDE and free software operating systems, one of the features I’ve always loved from Qt is how we can use it to develop an application that can be used on any platform. Since I got my first /programmable/ phone, I’ve wanted to get my projects to work there, especially through all Nokia approaches to the issue, and I’ve managed to do so with relative success.
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Remember People behind KDE? It was an interview series with members of the community. I always enjoyed reading it because it showed, that KDE is software produced by dedicated and enthusiastic people and that it is possible to become one of them. So eventually I did.
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KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.
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Last summer, while looking for a new mail client, I stumbled upon Trojitá, a lightweight IMAP client based on Qt. The largest drawback from my point of view was the missing support for PGP and S/MIME. After looking at the code I figured I could try to implement the missing features.
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Also, I’ve finished up the KAuth support when adding/removing repos (already pushed to the master of Muon). Most importantly, I’ve started integrating apt-listbugs a most important component of Debian. What does this mean and how it will affect the end-user? Well, having apt-listbugs integrated means that the user will be warned when installing packages if the packages have some serious/grave/critical bugs!
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Five years ago, the Krita team decided raise funds to raise Krita to the level of a professional applications . That fundraiser was successful beyond all expectations and enabled us to release Krita 2.4, the first version of Krita ready for professional artists!
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Having a standard tool for mockups within KDE would have the benefit that everyone could learn to use it and mockups could be shared or collaboratively edited in its format.
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On our Plasma 5 build status page most of the packages are now a pleasing green colour. For the first time today I installed them all and logged in and… it worked! It took a bit of removing old caches and obsolete installs that’d I’d been making in the months previously and that nice temporary Next wallpaper everyone uses doesn’t really get shipped so I had to add that and the icons sometimes work and sometimes don’t and there’s no plasma-nm release yet so I had to grab a copy and build that before I could use the network. But with some fiddle and wee bit ay faff, it works!
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Recently, we ran a study on the reorganization of the KDE system settings (Re-sort KDE control modules and Results of Card Sorting the KDE System Settings). Both the number of participants as well as the discussion in the forum proved the huge interest in this topic.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Most of the work I’ve being doing since last report is improving the TVDB source in Grilo Plugins in order to have a cache for all data that you have once downloaded from thetvdb.com.
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New Releases
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GParted is a free partition manager that enables you to resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss. The latest stable release is GParted Live 0.19.0-1 announced on June 11, 2014.
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Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-19, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, has been released and is now available for download.
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Emmabuntüs, a distribution created for reconditioning old computers that relies on the robustness of Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, is now at version 3 Beta.
The Emmabuntüs 3 distribution is intended to be sleek, accessible, and equitable, and this latest version of the OS is just as light as the previous ones, despite the fact that it is using another base, which is more advanced.
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Michael Tremer, a developer for the ipfire.org team, has announced that IPFire 2.13 Core 78, a new stable build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, has been released to implement the latest OpenSSL fixes.
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KaOS is a very interesting operating system because the developers are choosing their own path. This is one of the few Linux distributions out there that are not based on another OS and everything is built from scratch.
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Gentoo Family
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Same as Arch Linux, Gentoo is an Open Source meta-distribution build from sources, based on Linux Kernel, embracing the same rolling release model, aimed for speed and complete customizable for different hardware architectures which compiles software sources locally for best performance using an advanced package management – Portage.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux has reached the version 0.8.10, bringing many new features, updated translations, lots of fixes and the latest software packages such as LibreOffice 4.2.4. According to the official announcement the followings are included in this release of this linux distribution that is becoming very popular:
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Manjaro KDE is the KDE edition of Manjaro Linux, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Manjaro 0.8.10 KDE is the latest edition, released at the same time as the Xfce and Openbox editions.
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Red Hat Family
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RHEL 7 “marks Red Hat’s embrace of cloud computing in a couple of ways, along with the operating system’s usual dedication to enterprise stability and predictability,” said Jay Lyman, a senior analyst at 451 Research. Red Hat seeks to do for enterprise applications “what we’ve seen with mostly Web and mobile applications thus far — that is, make them more lightweight, portable and standardized.”
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It basically boils down to the fact that in the open source world, the majority of work is done on open source UNIX-like operating systems such as GNU/Linux, *BSD, and somewhat recently in the IllumOS space. Each of these options are solid choices for server-side use, with varying preferences on which is the best. I think the server market share in recent years is evidence of this. However, the desktop has kind of been the peak of the mountaintop that we’ve yet reached. In the past few years there’s been an influx of people who I think have given up on the desktop, have put down their distro of choice, and picked up a Mac because it offers a UNIX-like work environment with a nice polished “out of box” experience. I don’t think this is inherently wrong or evil, but I do think that we all owe it to ourselves, and to our community, to sit back and ask: “What is this $thing lacking that makes me not want to use it?” (Though most often that $thing is GNOME3, Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, or some distro that ships with the desktop by default.)
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Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its open-source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, promoting it as the foundation of an “open hybrid cloud” that delivers emerging new capabilities like application containers.
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The big news while I was offline was the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 yesterday. Another topic grabbing lots of headlines is the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization V on Steam for Linux. Fedora 21 may be delayed and Linux 3.15 was released. And finally today, www.makeuseof.com takes a look at Gnome Flashback, another GNOME 2 clone.
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For some companies, the first question after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 was: “When will CentOS 7 be out?” The answer is soon.
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Enterprise Linux users, awake! Red Hat has finally released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and it looks like it’s going to run on everything, from the server in the back-room, to datacenters and the cloud.
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Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 for all customers and partners, marking the beginning of a new branch for one of the most used Linux operating systems in the world.
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Fedora
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This week in Fedora I wanted to go over some of the new badges that have come out and show how to get them. With the upcoming release of Fedora 21 there is a lot of chances to earn some pretty cool badges and show off your Fedora! As always, if you have an awesome idea for a badge you can submit your idea and if it gets approved then you can say “Yeah I thought of the idea for that badge” oh did I mention you get a badge for that!
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DNF was forked from Yum in January 2012 and available for experimenting…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In a blog post to Ubuntu One users, the organization said that its role as an open platform was to promote third-party services. However, the increasing amounts of free storage provided by top competitors such as Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox made it unfeasible for the organization to continue competing effectively.
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When booting up the Ubuntu 14.10 latest image with systemd 204, the system (to some surprise) booted fine and I encountered no immediate issues. The laptop has been running fine since today and was pleased it was a trouble-free experience. Coming up soon I’ll run some boot speed tests, etc. Still though it’s worth reiterating that it’s not yet clear when systemd will become the default on Ubuntu Linux, just sometime before the 16.04 LTS release.
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It’s interesting too seen how such an old video can still get people riled up and some users have even suggested that this was a report paid by Microsoft to smear a Linux distribution.
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Creating a base of user advocates from existing “fans” of Meizu and Ubuntu will be key to driving the early success of Ubuntu in the mobile market, Cristian Parrino, VP of mobile and online services for Canonical, told Mobile Asia Daily.
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We wrote a while back about this interesting collection of Ubuntu operating systems from the 14.04 LTS release and numerous users expressed their interest in downloading and trying Ubuntu AIO DVD.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi, a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu and that has really low requirements, has reached version 3.0.0 RC1.
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Canonical’s Unity interface in Ubuntu has fiercely polarized Linux users ever since it was released. Now some are calling for a MATE version of Ubuntu, which would provide a more traditional desktop interface that resembles what Ubuntu looked like before Unity. The VAR Guy thinks it might be good for Ubuntu and for the MATE project if such a release happened.
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Suddenly, consumer-oriented private cloud storage devices are everywhere, with many — if not most — running Linux. The market segment has blossomed thanks to growing concerns over government cyber-spying, notably in the case of the U.S. National Security Agency and the Chinese military. There is also growing unease about sharing of user data by mobile carriers, financial firms, and high-tech companies, as well as fears about cyber-criminals.
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Parrot is prepping two Linux-based mini-drones: a $160 “Jumping Sumo” wheeled robot and a $100 “Rolling Spider” quadrocopter that can fly, roll, or climb.
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THE RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION has announced hardware sales of three million and a casual visit with the Queen for a bit of show and tell.
The Raspberry Pi computer has been a solid mover since its release and its sales have grown from one million to two million, and now three million.
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Mikronaut launched a “RoboPi” robot controller for the Raspberry Pi, while Emlid tapped Indiegogo for its Pi-ready “Navio” shield for drone autopilots.
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Phones
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A “Console OS” Kickstarter project is building an Android 4.4 fork for Intel CPUs on everything from PCs to tablets, complete with a dual-boot option.
Intel is hoping to spur a new wave of dual-boot Android/Windows 2-and-1s and tablets with its Atom Z3000 and upcoming, newly announced Core M processors. So far, however, Android has yet to make much of dent in the PC market, either as a standalone or dual-boot OS.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is working diligently to offer $25 smartphones to customers in India this year, which likely would hasten the end of the feature phone. The open source Firefox mobile operating system will be featured, along with a list of modest entry-level specs. Key to the success of the endeavor will be attracting developers to create apps for devices that aren’t likely to generate much revenue.
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Mozilla said that Spreadtrum’s $25 Firefox OS phone will soon be carried by Intex and Spice in India, and it also signed up Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom.
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It seems Mozilla is targeting emerging markets and developing nations with $25 cell phones. This is tremendous news, and an admirable focus for Mozilla, but it is not without risk.
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The Science Lab was created to serve as a neutral broker and hub for the open science community—a means of bridging the gap between the early adopters and the many scientists who understand the value of open science, but who have not yet (for a number of reasons) mapped that understanding onto their day-to-day workflow. We strive to connect and support the activity of the open research community and its diverse stakeholders (researchers, coders, funders, publishers) to work towards the common goal of making research more like the web: open, collaborative and accessible.
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Mozilla has released Firefox 30.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 30.0 also imminent.
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SaaS/Big Data
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I’ve been following the Designate project, which provide OpenStack DesignateDNS-as-a-Service for OpenStack for some time. It’s a project that seems painfully obvious to me, enabling DNS features within an OpenStack cloud deployment.
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Databases
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Percona Server 5.6.17-66.0, an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL that will allow queries to run faster and more consistently and to consolidate servers on powerful hardware, is now available for download.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The University where I worked determined that it was in the best interests of the institution (and the students) to migrate to LibreOffice. This happened in 2011, but the process was slow.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is the announcement of a new bug-fix release of GNU gettext.
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Public Services/Government
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The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organisations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organisations have migrated to a customised version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.
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Licensing
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Unified collaboration software vendor Zimbra announced the release of a beta version of Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 to the open source community under the GNU Public License V2 license. Calling it a “commitment to community-powered open source innovation,” company officials say the move is part of an overall plan to distribute future versions of the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition under Open Source Initiative-approved licenses.
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Openness/Sharing
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Back in April, I noted that we had potentially a big win in the form of the opening up of drug safety data in the light of recent scandals that have seen big pharma companies hiding adverse effects of their products, often with fatal results. As I warned, we weren’t there yet, since the drug companies really don’t want their dirty washing for all to see, and they have been lobbying extremely hard to water down the provisions.
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One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman’s GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption — things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That’s what Ecuador’s FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. “FLOK” is derived from “free”, “libre” and “open knowledge”; here’s how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project:
The FLOK Society bills its mission as “designing a world for the commons.” The research project will focus on many interrelated themes, including open education; open innovation and science; “arts and meaning-making activities”; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining. The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualize the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.
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Bad things have been happening in some Birmingham schools: children have been taught things that are hard to reconcile with the broader culture and values of the country in which they live and which provides them with that education. That’s the consensus at Westminster, and Politicians will spend the day arguing about who is to blame, how this happened and how it can be stopped from happening again. Was it Michael Gove? Or Ofsted? Or Birmingham council? Or the governors? Or a whole political class that tacitly endorses a doctrine of multiculturalism, while turning a blind eye to its more troubling consequences? Everyone will have their preferred mixture of answers, so I don’t intend to offer you mine here. Instead, there’s one group that’s curiously absent from the conversation here: parents.
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Back in April, we wrote about the travesty of the very best reporters on everything Supreme Court related, SCOTUSblog, still not having a press pass to the Supreme Court. The issue is somewhat complicated, in part because of the seriously arcane credentialing process involved. Basically, the Supreme Court looks kindly on reporters who already are credentialed by the Senate. But the Senate credentialing process involves the “Standing Committee of Correspondents” who get to decide who else to let in. The committee, basically, are journalists who have already been let into the club deciding who else can join them. When you set up a guild that lets you exclude innovative and disruptive players, guess what happens?
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Issues seem to have begun this morning, as several users noted an inability to download the Skype app following its release. Some users attempting to download the app received a message indicating the app was no longer available for download.
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Science
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So, this weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time,” with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that’s what they do. First, here’s the press release from the University of Reading,
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Health/Nutrition
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This report, co-published by DPA and MAPS, illustrates a decades-long pattern of behavior that demonstrates the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) inability to exercise its responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner or to act in accord with the scientific evidence. The report’s case studies reveal a number of DEA practices that maintain the existing, scientifically unsupported drug scheduling system and obstruct research that might alter current drug schedules. In addition to marijuana, the report also examines the DEA’s speed in moving to ban MDMA, synthetic cannabinoids, and synthetic stimulants. In contrast to the DEA’s failure to act in a timely fashion when confronted with evidence for scheduling certain drugs less severely, the agency has shown repeatedly that it can move quickly when it wants to prohibit a substance. The report recommends that responsibility for determining drug classifications and other health determinations should be completely removed from the DEA and transferred to another agency, perhaps even a non-governmental entity such as the National Academy of Sciences. The report also recommends the DEA should be ordered to end the federal government’s unjustifiable monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana available for federally approved research. No other drug is available from only a single governmental source for research purposes.
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Hawai’i has become “ground zero” in the controversy over genetically modified (GMO) crops and pesticides. With the seed crop industry (including conventional as well as GMO crops) reaping $146.3 million a year in sales resulting from its activities in Hawai’i, the out-of-state pesticide and GMO firms Syngenta, Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Dow Chemical, BASF, and Bayer CropScience have brought substantial sums of corporate cash into the state’s relatively small political arena.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date.
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Sitting inside a medium-security federal prison in Kentucky, Jeremy Hammond looks defiant and frustrated.
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It is now extremely difficult for the media to pretend that everything is OK in Iraq, bar the odd car bomb. The AL-Maliki regime has been in the remarkable position of being both pro-Iranian and supported by the West with masses of military hardware – substantial quantities of which is now in the hands of ISIS. I don’t expect Al-Maliki to fall soon, but his area of control is decreasing by the hour. Whether the Al-Maliki regime has been any less vicious than that of Saddam Hussein is arguable. Certainly there has been a great deal less social freedom in Iraq.
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Raddatz went on to talk about ab out how more than 200 Americans had “given their lives to secure this city,” and that Mosul “is just the latest city to spiral out of control after the US pulled out”–which might suggest that Iraqi cities were in fine shape when they were occupied by US troops.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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BP Plc (BP/) must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in claims after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt disputed payments stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
In a one-sentence order issued today, the justices said they wouldn’t put a hold on lower court rulings that require the oil company to begin making the payments, part of a $9.2 billion accord.
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Last week we reported on a former Navy SEAL chief named David Cooper who was hired by the nonprofit group NextGen Climate to determine how vulnerable the controversial final leg of the Keystone pipeline network might be to terrorism. In a 14-page report, Cooper determined that it would be “easy to execute a catastrophic attack” on the fourth segment of the pipeline system, based on a mock attack he carried out on the completed Keystone I, or Gulf Coast Pipeline, which came online in January. He went on to describe multiple scenarios for spills ranging from 1.02 to 7.24 million gallons of diluted bitumen, the viscous, toxic, low quality oil derived from Alberta’s tar sands.
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Finance
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The moment to hoard cheap coffee beans has passed. The price of coffee futures peaked in April, and those higher commodity costs are now trickling down to grocery stores. J.M. Smucker (SJM) on Tuesday announced that it has increased the price of its packaged coffee, including the country’s best-selling brand, Folgers, as well as packaged Dunkin’ Donuts beans, by an average 9 percent.
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According to its filing with the SEC, the web-hosting company had revenues of more than $1.1bn in 2013
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Or consult the 2012 State of Working America report from the Economic Policy Institute, which features a number of distressing statistics on black unemployment (consistently about twice as high for blacks as for whites, though it would be hard to say that there are “plenty” of jobs for anyone, with overall unemployment at 6.9 percent) and racial disparities in median family income.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Guardian has just published its eighth article in three days pushing Gordon Brown’s views on independence. This one warns Scots they would not be able to watch the BBC after independence.
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The description of alleged “raids” of private homes in Wisconsin’s John Doe criminal dark money investigation has captured the imagination of Republicans across the country as supposed evidence of the investigation’s political motivations.
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Privacy
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A federal appeals court has for the first time said law enforcement can’t snoop on phone location records without a warrant
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Here is an interview I did on 5th June, the anniversary of the start of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the global surveillance infrastructure that is being built.
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The government and police regularly use location data pulled off of cell phone towers to put criminals at the scenes of crimes—often without a warrant. Well, an appeals court ruled today that the practice is unconstitutional, in one of the strongest judicial defenses of technology privacy rights we’ve seen in a while.
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US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology
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Marc Andrews wrote Hidden Persuasion to highlight the various methods advertisers use to lure us in. Here the World Wildlife Fund uses anthropomorphism to establish an emotional connection with users. The lion is experiencing secondary emotions (shame, disbelief), which are thought to be distinctly human. This make us feel closer to the animal, thus more likely to donate.
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You know, you’d think that the “intelligence community” would be a bit more intelligent. As we’ve discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of “harm” concerning Ed Snowden’s actions were based on the faulty assumption that he “took” (and revealed) every document he ever “touched” while at NSA — somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.
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Facebook Inc.’s photo-sharing application Instagram will add advertising in Canada, the U.K. and Australia later this year.
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Most of you have probably used Tor before, but I2P may be unfamiliar. Both are anonymization networks that allow people to obfuscate where their traffic is coming from, and also host services (web sites for example) without it being tied back to them. This talk will give an overview of both, but will focus on real world stories of how people were deanonymized. Example cases like Eldo Kim & the Harvard Bomb Threat, Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu)/Jeremy Hammond (sup_g) & LulzSec, Freedom Hosting & Eric Eoin Marques and finally Ross William Ulbricht/“Dread Pirate Roberts” of the SilkRoad, will be used to explain how people have been caught and how it could have been avoided.
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On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy.
This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online?
[...]
The experiment unfolded in two phases. In the first, we simply observed Henn’s normal Internet traffic. In the second, Henn, Porcello, and I stopped the broad surveillance of Henn and turned our tools on specific traffic created by leading Web applications and services. Here’s what we found.
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Civil Rights
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The Telegraph has obtained documents that raise questions on US treatment of John Stewart, a key campaigner against Heathrow’s third runway, who the US said had threatened Barak Obama
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Much of this is the kind of activity carried out in the form of attacks sponsored by governments outside the UK — or, as in the case of the NSA, directly by those governments. Despite the recent grandstanding by the US when it filed criminal charges against members of the Chinese military whom it accuses of espionage, there is little hope of ever persuading the main players to hand over their citizens for trial, so the new UK law will be largely ineffectual against the most serious threats.
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London mayor justifies the speed of the £218,000 purchase by saying the machines are needed in case of disorder this summer
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Up to 12,000 black-cab drivers expected to block traffic in central London with cabbies in Europe staging similar protests
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The streets of half a dozen European capitals will be jammed by strikes on Wednesday, as licensed cabbies in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan and Lisbon join their London colleagues in demonstrating against a technology that threatens their livelihood.
Uber is one of a wave of new apps, which also include Hailo and Kabbee, that allows users to see the nearest registered cars and hail them from their smartphone. The services are particularly popular with private-hire drivers, who now have an advantage over licensed drivers.
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This is a heartrending documentary from Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC. The terrible fate of the Palestinians at the hands of a world which has accepted the ludicrous claim to a religious Israeli right to their land is incomprehensible in a rational world. The brutality of Israeli soldiers, motivated by views of racial and religious superiority, towards children is sickening.
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There is just one problem with demanding an apology over this: The West Bank is currently under Israeli occupation. This was true whenever Clinton made her first visit. So the CNN host is demanding to know whether Clinton will apologize for saying something perfectly accurate.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Netflix will keep telling customers that ISPs are to blame for bad video.
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Last week, it transpired that the big cable companies were bankrolling fake consumer groups like Broadband for America and The American Consumer Institute. These “independent consumer advocacy groups” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, and instead represent the interests of its benefactors, in the fight against net neutrality. If that wasn’t bad enough, VICE is now reporting that several of the real community groups (oh, and an Ohio bed-and-breakfast) that were signed up as supporters of Broadband for America were either duped into joining, or were signed up to the cause without their consent or knowledge.
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Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The RIAA’s latest tax filings reveal that the anti-piracy group’s revenue has hit a record low as membership dues from record labels continue to decline. But despite the downward trend RIAA CEO Cary Sherman received nearly $500,000 in bonuses in addition to his million dollar salary.
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A United States District Court Judge has just granted Kim Dotcom’s request to put the MPAA and RIAA civil actions against him on hold . The reprieve, which will last seven weeks, expressly allows the entertainment companies the freedom to freeze Dotcom’s assets anywhere in the world if that is deemed necessary.
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His real “crime” as far as the Hollywood moguls are concerned is for doing something he hasn’t yet been convicted of any crime for – establishing Megaupload Ltd. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “Megaupload was a file hosting and sharing online service in which users could share links to files for viewing or editing….. The company was successful. However, millions of people from across the globe used Megaupload to store and access copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. Eventually it had over 150 employees, US$175 million revenues, and 50 million daily visitors. At its peak Megaupload was estimated to be the 13th most popular site on the internet and responsible for 4% of all internet traffic.”
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Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a major book scanning program. For those counting along at home, today’s decision marks another in a serious streak of judicial findings of fair use for mass book digitization, including Authors Guild v. Google, Cambridge University Press v. Becker, and the district court opinion in the HathiTrust case itself.
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An ISP that won a prolonged legal battle against a Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group has rejected plans to introduce three strikes and site blocking. Today, ISP iiNet is also urging citizens to pressure the government and fight back against the “foreign interests” attempting to dictate Australian policy.
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Growing copyright cop Rightscorp hopes to be a profitable alternative to “six strikes.”
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An announcement later this week will confirm Google as a member of a new coalition to cut off “pirate” sites from their ad revenue. Following similar initiatives in the U.S. and UK, a Memorandum of Understanding between the online advertising industry and the music and movie industries in Italy will signal a creation of a central body to tackle the piracy issue.
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The MPAA is concerned that innovation in the film industry will be ruined if consumers get the right to resell movies and other media purchased online. Responding to discussions in a congressional hearing this week, the MPAA warns that this move would limit consumer choices and kill innovation.
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Send this to a friend
06.12.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Nine out of ten (87 percent) of hiring managers in Europe have “hiring Linux talent” on their list of priorities and almost half (48 percent) say they are looking to hire people with Linux skills within the next six months.
But while they either need or want to hire more people with Linux skills, the data from the Linux Foundation suggests that this is easier said than done. Almost all — 93 percent — of the managers surveyed said they were having difficulty finding IT professionals with the Linux skills required and a quarter (25 percent) said they have “delayed projects as a result”.
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Desktop
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With Father’s Day right around the corner, some dads out there might be requesting a new Chromebook. Chromebooks, which run Google’s Chrome OS, have quietly become quite popular among notebook buyers. As of this writing, Chromebooks are among the top 20 most popular computers available on Amazon, and sales continue to grow steadily. Although the devices got off to a slow start, Google has found a way to attract customers. With that in mind it might be a good time to revisit Chromebooks’ operating system, Chrome OS, and talk about key features that make the Chromebook so attractive. While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively. This eWEEK slide show will cover the factors that made this platform appealing to notebook PC users.
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Server
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Cloud computing has really become the buzz term for any online service. Your web browser is a client connecting to a server or clusters of servers hosted anywhere in the world. The point is that you don’t care. You don’t need to know.
Generally speaking I have barely touched the surface. We all use the cloud everyday and most of us don’t even think about it.
How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user? It turns out quite a bit.
Is the cloud a good or bad thing? Neither. Each service has to be judged on it’s own merits.
The term “The Cloud” is just something marketing people and the technical press get excited about. Anyone remember when they kept using the term “Web 2.0″?
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Thanks to the advent of multicore processors, the average data center these days has access to a massive amount of compute capacity. Tapping into it efficiently, though, is another thing altogether.
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Kernel Space
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The official release announcement from Linus Torvalds has yet to come down the pipe, but today’s 3.15 final release was expected. For those not up to date on our Linux 3.15 kernel coverage, there’s been dozens of articles in recent weeks about this latest major kernel update. A summary of this new kernel’s top features can be found via the aptly named The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel article. There’s a lot of great stuff in this new kernel release for everyone!
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Linux kernel 3.14.6 is now the most advanced version of the kernel, at least for a few hours before the final version of the 3.15 branch is out (unless something weird happens and the launch is postponed).
The kernel developers have made quite an effort and this latest updates is one of the biggest so far. It’s still a young kernel and it’s not sure that it will reach the LTS status. There are already a number of long term support in existence already, but you can never know.
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The suspend and resume code impacts users who run Linux on laptop computers where there is a need to suspend disk and operating system operations when a device is closed and then start up again when the device is opened. Williams noted that his code contribution was inspired by an analysis and proposal from Intel developer Todd Brandt. Brandt’s proposal specifically dealt with a suspend/resume speed improvement, enabling a rapid wakeup from a device’s suspend state
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The MIPS architecture pull for the Linux 3.16 merge window pull is full of prominent changes for this next kernel version.
First up, with the MIPS changes comes initial support for the Octeon 3. The Octeon 3 is Cavium’s new multi-core processor line-up announced at the end of 2013. The OCTEON III is MIPS64-based and optimized for Wind River Linux and VxWorks. The Octeon III claims up to 120GHz of 64-bit processing and is aimed for high-performance computing environments.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels: 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92. As usual, each contains fixes all over the tree and users of those kernel series should upgrade.
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Samsung has sent in their F2FS pull request for the Linux 3.16 to provide a number of enhancements for the Flash Friendly File-System.
Improvements for the F2FS file-system with the Linux 3.16 kernel include enhanced wait_on_page_writeback, support for SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE, readahead flow enhancements, enhanced I/O flushes, support for fiemap, support for trace-maps, support for large volumes over two Terabytes, and a number of bug-fixes and clean-ups.
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Rackspace has lately been in the news for its stock market gains and a potential acquisition. But over the past 16 years the company has become well known, first as a web hosting provider built on Linux and open source, and later as a pioneer of the open source cloud and founder of the OpenStack cloud platform.
In May, Rackspace became a Xen Project member and was one of three companies to join the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with CoreOS and Cumulus Networks.
“Many of the applications and infrastructure that we need to run for internal use or for customers run best on Linux,” said Paul Voccio, Senior Director of Software Development at Rackspace, via email. “This includes all the popular language frameworks and open virtualization platforms such as Xen, LXC, KVM, Docker, etc.”
In this Q&A, Voccio discusses the role of Rackspace in the cloud, how the company uses Linux, why they joined the Linux Foundation, as well as current trends and future technologies in the data center.
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Graphics Stack
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According to the changelog, various improvements and corrections have been made to the information reported to GL applications via the KHR_debug and ARB_debug_output extensions, a bug that caused the GLX applications that simultaneously created drawables on multiple X servers to crash when swapping buffers has been fixed, and the nvidia-settings option has been updated to report all valid names for each target when querying target types, e.g. “nvidia-settings -q gpus.”
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Applications
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What makes this important, even vital, news to the larger world of system administrators, datacenter managers, and cloud architects, is that Google, Red Hat, and Parallels are now helping build the program. Indeed, they will work with Docker as core maintainers of the code. Canonical’s Ubuntu container engineers will also be working on it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The CD Projekt Red studio has announced that the upcoming The Witcher 3 action RPG is also arriving on SteamOS, which means that it will feature Linux support.
The interesting fact about this announcement is that the studio has yet to make a formal statement, and they chose a more indirect way to tell Linux users that they will be able to play the game. If you happened to open Steam today, you might have noticed that The Witcher 3 game also said that is coming to SteamOS.
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The Steam developers usually release quite few intermediary Steam versions, between major stable updates. This is one of the most interesting Beta updates so far in this cycle and the VR support that was just introduced will certainly make it into the next version.
It looks like virtual reality is the next-gen feature that will be pursued by all the major gaming companies. Oculus is already having an impact on the industry, Sony is working on their own version, and Valve will most likely present their own solution soon enough. With all these advancements made with VR, it’s good to see that Linux is on the forefront.
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Interstellar Marines, a tactical FPS developed and published by Zero Point Software, has just received Linux support with the latest patch.
Interstellar Marines is a very promising first-person shooter and its developers said that they took inspiration from Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The game has been built mainly as a multiplayer experience, but a limited single-player is also available.
The latest update for the Interstellar Marines also brought support for the Linux platform and it looks like this title aims to be one of the best-looking on the open source platform…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The third beta is out today ahead of the final release expected in July. This third beta brings many bug-fixes and other minor enhancements to ease in porting of software to this next-generation KDE stack.
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The latest monthly point release update to KDE 4.13 is now available.
KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.
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Hello, This is my second report for my GSoC. This week i was working on the Wallpapers and the Activities Configuration. While there was the support for changing the wallpapers the UI was more focused on a desktop rather than a touch device, which wasn’t exactly what we needed for Plasma Active. So the new UI looks like the old one (Plasma Active 1), and the only small change is that we don’t show the wallpaper name.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The player bar now uses all horizontal space available, which I based on new mockups for playback buffer by Jakub Steiner (except that it still has the repeat/shuffle menu). With this, the song title and album song has more space, and it will no longer just show an ellipsis when the window is small.
Updating of views is further refined, so it will not interfere when in selection mode. Tooltips were added to the buttons. Right-clicking songs inside albums in Albums view now starts selection mode. Albums list in Artists view are now insensitive when in selection mode.
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The Trevilla theme pack is made for people who like to have a flat desktop and it comes with clean headers and buttons that are very good for a minimalistic experience.
The Trevilla designers are not the only ones using this flat look for themes. In fact, more and more distros come with flat desktops and it looks like these types of decorations are not going anywhere…
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The GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee is happy to announce the preliminary results for this year’s Board of Directors elections:
Sriram Ramkrishna
Ekaterina Gerasimova
Karen Sandler
Tobias Mueller
Andrea Veri
Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Jeff Fortin
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Ubuntu GNOME is a popular spin of Ubuntu that uses the GNOME desktop instead of Unity. Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 has been updated to include GNOME 3.10, and GNOME Classic. This release also includes some gorgeous new backgrounds that will spruce up you Ubuntu GNOME desktop. And since it’s a long term support release you will be able to run it for the next few years with the maximum amount of stability and polish.
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The GParted Life project undergoes dormant periods and hardly are any updates released, but now it looks like two versions have arrived inside a week.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2014/Jun/09),” reads the official announcement.
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New Releases
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The OpenELEC makers are following the XBMC development cycle very closely and they have released a new version of their distribution, 4.0.4. It comes packed with all the goodies from XBMC 13.1 “Gotham” and the devs have made some changes of their own.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 (final) which contains a lot of fixes for issues found after the XBMC-13.0 release (some of them we already shipped with OpenELEC-4.0.0).
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The Linux platform is home to quite a few operating systems dedicated to sound, video, and graphics editing. Some are better than others, but they all try to do the same thing and get some free tools in the hand of the people who need them the most.
The advantage of Tango Studio is that you don’t need to configure almost anything in the operating system and most of the tools just work, without any extra input from the user. It’s a very helpful OS, especially for the people who just want to work and not tinker with a Linux distribution…
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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“We prepared mhwd to support newer proprietary drivers. MHWD 0.3.901 reflect these changes. Blueman got updatedto support the latest bluez 5.19. We kept Wayland 1.4.0, as any higher version breaks bluetooth support. We have to deal with that later. Beside some libreoffice language acks,python updates, a newer Cinnamon we pushed also regular upstream updates to this update-pack,” said the developers in the official announcement.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the business opportunity of a generation in what he calls a computing paradigm shift from client server to cloud architectures. “In those paradigm shifts, generally new winners emerge,” says Whitehurst and he intends to make sure Red Hat is one of those winners. His logic is sound and simple: disruptive technologies like the cloud that arise every couple decades level the playing field between large, established firms and smaller, innovative challengers since everyone, from corporate behemoth to a couple guys in a garage, starts from the same spot and must play by the same unfamiliar and changeable rules. With the cloud “there’s less of an installed based and an opportunity for new winners to be chosen,” Whitehurst adds. His mission is “to see that open source is the default choice for next generation architecture” and that Red Hat is the preferred choice, particularly for enterprise IT, of open source providers.
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Red Hat was just sending out press invites this afternoon for a virtual event tomorrow regarding “an exciting product” that will be announced.
Registration for the online event happening tomorrow (10 June) at 11AM EST can be found at RedHat.com. The site says it’s about, “redefining the enterprise OS.”
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Fedora
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If you’re a big-time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently. From the ‘Alternatives to Microsoft® Visio®’ department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser-known open source tool for converting Visio® stencils, these tips are for you…
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Debian Family
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Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has advanced to version 2.2.6 Beta and is available for download.
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Technologic is sampling a fast-booting “TS-4740″ COM that runs Debian on a 1GHz, ARM9 PXA168 SoC and offers a 25K-LUTs Spartan-5 FPGA and gigabit Ethernet.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A session happened this morning about the Unity8 Desktop Preview Image as a way for early adopters and developers to try out the Unity 8 and Mir stack ported to the desktop on the Ubuntu 14.10 base, while the official Ubuntu 14.10 release image will still be using Unity 7 with the X.Org Server. Those interested in learning more about this image and the plans can find the details via summit.ubuntu.com with the Google Hangout Video plus notes.
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The Core i7 4790K has an 88 Watt TDP over 84 Watts on the Core i7 4770K but aside from the higher clock frequencies and thermal/power improvements, the i7-4790K shares much in common with the i7-4770K when it comes to being a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, 22nm manufacturing, DDR3-1600MHz memory support, and sports HD Graphics 4600. Like the i7-4770K, the HD Graphics 4600 top out at 1.25GHz. Pricing on the Intel Core i7 4790K is currently about $340 USD from major Internet retailers.
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Making the switch to Ubuntu – or any popular Linux distribution – is more than the mere act of changing operating systems. You must also have apps that allow you to get work done.
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Flavours and Variants
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At Bodhi we work firmly on a “its ready when its ready schedule” as opposed to sticking to our set release goals and churning out something we are not happy with. Better late than never as the saying goes! Just ten days after the targeted release date I am happy to share our first Release Candidate for Bodhi Linux’s third major release…
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This was originally supposed to be a comparison test against Antergos, which is another distribution that ships GNOME 3/Shell and aims for new users to Linux. Unfortunately, Antergos refused to boot. Therefore, what is left is a typical review of Pinguy OS, albeit with some more critical remarks than usual about how well it really caters to newbies (left over from when this article was a comparison test). Follow the jump to see what it is like…
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This current version of Linux Mint 17 KDE “Qiana” comes with KDE 4.13.0, which is the latest version available right now. The rest of the packages are in place and, if you ever opened a KDE-powered distro, then you won’t be surprised by anything.
Just like the other flavors that have been released so far, this one is also based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will benefit from an extended support period, after it becomes stable, of course. The Linux mint developers announced a while ago that they intended to only base their distros on LTS versions of Ubuntu…
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If the end of XP demonstrated anything, it’s that disruption ensues when an OS reaches end of life. Linux users have long had LTS releases to stave off some of that, but the new Linux Mint 17 offers even more stability. Not only will it be supported until 2019, but it’s also built on a base that was made to last.
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WeIO is sampling a tiny open source board, running OpenWRT Linux on an Atheros/MIPS module, that enables IoT applications controlled entirely via HTML5 code.
Billed as “The Web of Things for Creators,” the fully open source, GPL3-licensed WeIO module is notable for its HTML5 programming interface and Python-based Tornado web server. Together, these let you connect and control objects from any device using only a web browser, says Paris-based WeIO. Designed for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, WeIO lets developers easily connect objects so they communicate with each other, or hook up to Internet services like social networks, says the company.
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Musaic is prepping an OpenWRT Linux and AllJoyn AllPlay-enabled wireless speaker and Internet radio that doubles as a home automation hub.
U.K.-based Musaic ended its Kickstarter round in April, surpassing its goal of raising 60,000 U.K. Pounds, and promising products by September starting at 160 Pounds (about $269). Recently, the Musaic system was selected along with four other finalists by the John Lewis JLAB technology incubator program, which starts today. Commercial sales will open in the fall.
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Phones
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Android
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OnePlus has managed to create a bit of a buzz around their latest smartphone. Called ‘One’ (but I’ll go with the OnePlus One for most of this review to avoid the confusion with HTC) this is a handset that goes out of its way to be attractive. The styling is simple but functional, the specs are close to the top of the range in the world of Android, and the price is stunning. It’s not a typo, it actually starts at £229 in the UK ($299 in the US) for the 16 GB model.
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When a buyer goes to purchase a new smartphone, he or she is often confronted with a tough choice. With so many flagship smartphones in the market today, which ones to choose from? There’s the Galaxy S5, which is a widely popular phone from Samsung and then there’s the iPhone 5s, which comes from the world’s most valuable tech company. And, as if that wasn’t confusing enough, Google offers its own flagship device known as Nexus 5.
While the three smartphones mentioned above are wildly popular, users have a tough time investing their hard-earned cash into. That’s why, we’ve written this article to help you buy the best phone amongst the big 3. So, without further ado, here’s a quick comparison between the Galaxy S5, Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s.
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Q: Where and why is SlimPort being implemented?
A: SlimPort was first implemented in the Google Nexus 4 back in 2012 and has continued to be used in a number of high-end tablets and smartphones from Fujitsu, Asustek, LG, and ZTE, as well as finding its way into Chromebooks from brands like Hewlett-Packard (HP), among others. The key is that the technology enables more features and can reduce costs. For example, users want to have the ability to take mobile audio and video and get it up on a big screen. Previously, the ability to get the video off of a tablet/smartphone was typically done by running it through a micro-HDMI port. Using SlimPort allowed the OEMs to drop the micro-HDMI port and simply run everything through the five-pin micro-USB port that is needed for charging. SlimPort simply takes control of the connector when a SlimPort dongle is plugged in, and while the devices are connected, SlimPort enables the display to also charge the mobile device. In 2013, support for Full HD was added but we really expect the technology to take off this year with SlimPort Pro.
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Release day is here again, with CM 11.0 M7 hitting the download servers. Last week’s post included the highlights from the changelog, but we’ll it again for those of you who prefer tl;dr.
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Most everyone, at least the tech-savvy who read this, are familiar with VLC Player — the Video LAN Client. It’s a jack-of-all trades media player, that is capable of handling pretty much any format you can throw at it, no matter how obscure it may be.
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Luis Gomez is Principal Software Test Engineer at Brocade and currently coordinates the Integration Group at OpenDaylight. Prior to this, Luis worked many years at Ericsson in end-to-end solution integration and verification for radio, fixed, core and transport functions…
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One problem is that the GitHub generation does not seem to care as much about code vetting as did coders in earlier years. In the time span from 2007 to 2010, open source became very popular. Enterprises tried to manage it, according to MongoDB’s Assay.
“My sense is that developers do not really look at licenses any more. They are not even looking at which license is applied and does it comply. I think these are issues that attorneys look at, though. I do not think the developers are thinking a lot about the licenses anymore,” he said.
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Secret-squirrel military tech bureau DARPA has designed a series of computer games which can help to verify open source software.
It is working on the games under the auspices of its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification programme.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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ADI technology analyst Tyler White speculated that two underlying market forces are boosting Google’s numbers. “First, device defaults matter,” White said. “Internet Explorer leverages its Windows OS dominance to gain share as the default Web browser for the majority of people online. Today mobile OS is more important, giving Google and Apple a leg up with default status on Android and iOS.”
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Mozilla
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The Firefox 30 release announcement is imminent with the source and binaries for the upcoming browser update now being available.
For those interested, Mozilla Firefox 30.0 can be obtained from the Mozilla FTP server while we’re still waiting for the official release announcement, which is likely coming in the day ahead.
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Education
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Ellis, who co-coordinated POSSE with Drexel professor Greg Hislop, told a crowd of nearly 20 faculty members from colleges and universities across the country that embedding their computer science students in open source communities could facilitate a kind of engagement traditional classroom experiences just can’t offer. But, she said, students and professors alike should be prepared for a bit of culture shock if they aren’t prepared to embrace the open source way.
So Ellis derived 16 maxims from free and open source culture—what she calls “FOSSisms”—to explain how open source values might transform computer science education.
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BSD
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DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.
DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.
“DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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RMS argues that “open source” misses the point, but a counter argument is that the name “Free Software” can sound like “free as in beer” – like malware-ridden Windows freeware. So we want to hear from you: which term do you use? Is it really important to you? Do you think RMS should have chosen a better word than “Free” originally, such as “Libre”?
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As anticipated, 3.15 was released upstream earlier today, and the scripts I updated yesterday have now done their job: 3.15-gnu sources are now available at http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ and shortly on mirrors too.
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Public Services/Government
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Tender documents issued this morning have confirmed that the Australian government will push ahead with seeking to build a whole-of-government content management system based on the open source Drupal platform.
The Department of Finance has made an approach to market seeking request for proposals for ‘GovCMS’, which the RFP states will be based on Drupal and delivered via a public cloud service.
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Although it’s good to see open standards in there, it’s disappointing that the Policy Exchange did not go further and call for open source, which is the most effective way of implementing those open standards. Simply mandating open standards allows lock-in through inertia – the argument being that the re-training costs etc. etc. make moving to new implementations of open standards too expensive. That’s a ridiculous way of looking at things, because it pretty much ensures that the status quo is maintained. What the Manifesto should have called for was a default use of open source software throughout government, unless there are compelling and clearly-articulable reasons not to take that route.
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Licensing
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For nearly a decade, a battle has raged between two distinct camps regarding something called Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs). In my personal capacity, I’ve written extensively on the issue. This article below is a summary on the basics of why CLA’s aren’t necessary, and on Conservancy’s typical recommendations to its projects regarding the issue.
In the most general sense, a CLA is a formal legal contract between a contributor to a FLOSS project and the “project” itself0. Ostensibly, this agreement seeks to assure the project, and/or its governing legal entity, has the appropriate permissions to incorporate contributed patches, changes, and/or improvements to the software and then distribute the resulting larger work.
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Health/Nutrition
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An immense scandal involving pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been unfolding in China over the last year. It centers on a massive bribery operation uncovered by Chinese police that included nearly every aspect of GSK’s business in China. Billions of yuan in bribes were channeled through an immense network to buy off doctors, hospitals, healthcare organizations, and even government officials to boost sales of GSK drugs.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Two drone strikes launched by the US military killed at least 16 suspected militants in Pakistan’s northwest tribal area bordering Afghanistan, local media reported on Thursday.
According to media reports, a US drone fired eight missiles in Dande Darpakhel area near North Waziristan tribal area which killed at least ten suspected militants and wounded four others in early hours of Thursday. The drones targeted four different compounds and a pick-up truck. At least five to ten drones were flying in the area near Miranshah tribal area when the strike took place, said the reports.
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People may wonder why we are protesting drones. The answer is simple: More than 2,400 men, women and children, more than 270 of them civilians, have died in drone attacks, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Investigate Journalism.
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KT MCFARLAND: We’ve seen in the past when Gitmo grads have been released, they have gone back to join the fight. If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to start releasing Gitmo prisoners, here’s what we ought to do. We have a lot of drones. I think we ought to put a drone 24/7, for the rest of their natural lives, hovering over each one of these Gitmo/Taliban grads. And the minute they join the fight, the minute they step out of line, waste ‘em.
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In Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, Hard Choices, the former secretary of state defends the administration’s use of drone strikes in the face of knotty ethical and legal questions.
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The White House has assumed all power over life and death — at home and abroad — and has created a brand-new category of individual — one who can be indiscriminately deprived of all rights altogether.
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The Government of Pakistan condemns the two incidents of US drone strikes that took place near Miranshah in North Waziristan on 11 and 12 June, the Foreign Office stated.
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Two hours after her official briefing, Foreign Office spokesperson Tasneem Aslam confirmed and condemned two pre-dawn US drone strikes that struck militant hideouts in North Waziristan in the past 24 hours.
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Islamabad (AFP) – Pakistan on Thursday condemned the first US drone strikes on its soil this year despite suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.
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Though the Pakistani government is back to the old strategy of labeling everyone slain “suspects,” none of the victims in either attack were actually named, and there was no indication the US even suspected they had a high-profile target in sight.
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Finance
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Privacy
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Deutsche Telekom, operating in 14 countries including the US, Spain and Poland, has already published data for Germany
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Edward Snowden has secured his highest endorsement yet in the US when former vice-president Al Gore described the leaking of top secret intelligence documents as “an important service”.
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Former vice president and global warming activist Al Gore forayed into the world of government surveillance on Tuesday, claiming that the National Security Agency’s constitutional violations are “way more serious” than any crime Edward Snowden committed in leaking secret documents.
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THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has defended its failure to comply with a request for evidence in a lawsuit by saying that its systems are “too complicated” to prevent data from being deleted.
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The National Security Agency is using a new argument for not retaining the data it gathers about users’ online activity: The NSA is just too complex.
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Making any adjustments to the way the National Security Agency collects intelligence —even court orders to ensure that evidence isn’t deleted by the NSA’s spying infrastructure — would bring great harm to the United States, officials say.
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The American fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden has claimed that the US National Security Agency (NSA), which works with the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), can eavesdrop through the mic inside an iPhone even when the device is switched off. The claim has been confirmed by several experts, reports Sina’s tech news web portal.
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Inspired by the NSA’s ANT Catalog of spyware and surveillance tools, The NSA Playset project invites hackers to reproduce easy, at-home versions of the NSA’s spy-tools arsenal — and NSA-style silly names are required.
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The NSA is particularly pleased with the security features in Apple’s iPhone which allows it to spy on people when they think it is switched off.
Edward Snowden said that the NSA can get into an iPhone, turn it on remotely if it’s off and can they turn on apps?
The Tame Apple Press dismissed the claim as “magical” – after all the iPhone was designed by Steve Jobs and is totally unhackable and completely secure. The fact that it usually takes experts less than a minute to break into one is neither here nor there.
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Observing corruption, waste and fraud drove NSA whistleblowers Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney to reveal government wrongdoing – June 11, 14
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The Silicon Valley tech giants want to reform government surveillance on the Internet? That’s what they say, anyway. In an open letter to U.S. Senators, technology titans such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer joined forces to urge Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act to “help restore the confidence of Internet users here and around the world, while keeping citizens safe.”
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According to some researchers, metadata could actually reveal a lot about you and your activities.
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Fuel to the fire of financial privacy with fiat currency has been added this week: details of transactions shared between banks and the NSA being made public.
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Thanks to hacker Michael Ossmann, you can now build gadgets like the National Security Agency uses to intercept communications from the comfort of your own home.
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International law firm Hogan Lovells has been tapped to represent the government of the Bahamas after a May report by The Intercept, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealed that the NSA had been recording all cell phone conversations made into, out of, and within the island country.
[...]
The NSA surveillance was being carried out, unbeknownst to Bahamian officials, using an advanced system known as SOMALGET, which enables the NSA to record and replay all cell phone calls for about a month, according to The Intercept report.
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A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.
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Civil Rights
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The Obama administration covers for Bush-era secrets.
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The new president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, welcomed a delegation of secret services from Atlanticist countries, headed by the CIA Director of the National Service of Covert Operations, Frank Archibald.
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The extreme right-wing organisation boasts it is ‘more radical than the BNP’ and is targeting students and universities in the UK to spread its message of hate
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The so-called “transparency journalism site” that helps people submit public information requests to US government agencies, decided to launch legal action because, it says, the CIA frustrates its work.
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MuckRock, a transparency journalism site that helps people submit public information requests to US government agencies, today revealed it is suing the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.
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British intelligence played a vital role in smuggling copies of Boris Pasternak’s banned novel Doctor Zhivago to Soviet readers, with MI6 secretly passing the Russian manuscript to the CIA, a new book reveals.
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As the agency strives to craft a cuddly new image, we mustn’t allow it to whitewash its history of torture and murder
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Radical transparency website Wikileaks has been a thorn in the side of the American intelligence community for long. And as the CIA joined Twitter this month, the Wikileaks account, which many believe to be controlled by founder Julian Assange, welcomed it in their own inimitable way.
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August and technophobic literary journal released a barrage of reminders of agency’s controversial interrogation techniques
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Afshin Rattansi goes underground on a story making big headlines across the Atlantic – net neutrality. But our own government seems suspiciously quiet on the subject, and leader of the Pirate Party UK Loz Kaye says it’s because politicians want to retain the power to control the internet. Amidst D-Day commemorations across the continent, historian and author of War Horse Michael Morpugo warns against glorifying war. Plus, the Chilcot inquiry is set to review some heavily-redacted evidence: we review who’s on the panel. A new report claims 4,000 of us are at risk of losing our homes per week – and the figure will only go up. Plus, what’s she done now? The Duchess of Cambridge gets it royally wrong as she attends a wedding at the Dorchester hotel.
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Send this to a friend
06.08.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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ZBOSS Linux 6.5 was released on Friday as a RHEL-based “enterprise” Linux distribution that ships with the ZFS file-system by default.
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In 1991, 22-year old Finnish computer programmer Linus Torvalds released his own operating system. Opening with the message “Hello everybody out there,” (a now-iconic phrase among Linux fans), he posted the source code online. People alternately contributed their abilities to improve it where they could or went off to build their own things with it.
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The latest Linux 3.16 kernel pull request worth covering on Phoronix are the latest LLVMLinux patches for being able to compile the kernel with Clang rather than GCC.
With Linux 3.15 came the patch-set to come close to being able to compile under Clang and now with Linux 3.16 it’s a bit closer. A set of five LLVMLinux patches are called for merging that affect ARM and Shash Crypto code.
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The Linux 3.15 kernel isn’t even expected for release until later today, but thanks to the Linux 3.16 merge window opening a week early to adjust to Linus Torvalds’ upcoming schedule, we already have a good idea for a portion of the changes for the next kernel cycle.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 10.1.5 was just released this Friday evening while we’re still waiting for the imminent release of the major Mesa 10.2 release unless it was delayed again.
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AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is a bit closer to supporting OpenGL 4.0 via the GLSL 4.00 specification requirements thanks to a new patch set published on Friday by Marek Olšák.
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The Linux graphics developers within Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center have already prepared a fresh batch of changes that will land with the Linux 3.17 kernel — even though the Linux 3.15 kernel hasn’t been released yet and the Linux 3.16 kernel merge window opened early.
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ARM has already submitted their results of their graphics driver for several Mali graphics processors for OpenGL ES 3.1 certification by the Khronos Group.
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Benchmarks
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The tested graphics processors for this article included the:
1: Intel HD 4600
2: NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT
3: NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT
4: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT
5: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
6: NVIDIA GeForce GT 220
7: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
8: NVIDIA GeForce GT 520
9: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
10: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
11: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
12: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
13: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
14: NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
15: AMD Radeon X1800XT
16: AMD Radeon HD 4550
17: AMD Radeon HD 4670
18: AMD Radeon HD 4770
19: AMD Radeon HD 4830
20: AMD Radeon HD 4850
21: AMD Radeon HD 4870
22: AMD Radeon HD 4890
23: AMD Radeon HD 5770
24: AMD Radeon HD 5830
25: AMD Radeon HD 6450
26: AMD Radeon HD 6570
27: AMD Radeon HD 6770
28: AMD Radeon HD 6870
29: AMD Radeon HD 6950
30: AMD Radeon HD 7850
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Applications
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The original traceroute application must be about a thousand years old by now. I can remember messing with something like it ~20 years ago on a Windows machine, and promptly tossing it aside for a graphical version that showed where the IP addresses were located on the globe. Far more interesting.
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XBMC 13.0 “Gotham” was probably the best release made by its developers and incorporated numerous features and some very cool options. The devs started working on an update for XBMC almost right away after the launch and, a Release Candidate later, the 13.1 version arrived.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The developers behind 7 Days To Die do like to tease us and then repeatedly go silent now don’t they? Here’s the latest on what’s going on and it’s not good as usual.
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Valve has funded work by LunarG on a project codenamed “Glassy Mesa” to deliver potential performance improvements on the open-source Mesa graphics driver stack.
Glassy Mesa is an experimental project using LunarGLASS for plugging LLVM into Mesa for shader compilation and run-time improvements. LunarGLASS originated back in 2010 as using LLVM IR as the base intermediate representation for the shader and kernel compiler stack. LunarGLASS has performance potential via taking advantage of LLVM’s many optimization passes.
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Besides Mesa 10.1.5 being released last night, Mesa 10.2 made it out late last night followed immediately by Mesa 10.2.1 to take care of a build failure that sneaked into the final release.
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The Witcher: Wild Hunt is the third installment in CD Projekt Red’s open-world action role-playing video game series, which is very popular among fans of western RPG titles. The game was announced as a next-gen title for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The developer also mentioned that it would bring the game to Linux if SteamOS, in future, provides constant Linux environment, which it did, and now it looks like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to SteamOS.
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For anyone firing up Steam today for some weekend gaming, you may notice there’s a large advertisement on Steam’s main page with a notice that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to SteamOS (Linux).
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FLASHOUT 2 is a fantastic looking fast paced futuristic racer that is now available on Linux. It looks a lot like the old Wipeout games that’s for sure.
They confirmed to us in the past that they were developing all versions next to each other, so to regular readers it should be no surprise that it has day 1 Linux support!
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The latest major update to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 was released this week and the Linux support has taken another step forward.
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This is the 10th PC and Android bundle, which contains 10 games, 9 of them also playable on our beloved Linux OS!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Before sometime I got in touch with KDE community and was overwhelmed by it. Then I became a member of this community and started exploring about open source environment. The most fascinating thing about KDE community members is how committed they are to open source technology. Through IRC I would be able to contact with genius coders all over the globe. It’s been quite a time that I am using open source software. It is very much important to aware people about open source. We can have access to all robust and efficient soft wares for free. After being a part of KDE it interested me to use open source systems and I am really enjoying this.
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The new pretty thing that is taking away my time is the activity switcher which got a rather big revamp for the next release of Plasma.
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As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.
Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories
So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.
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I am Anuj Pahuja(alasin), a Computer Science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, India. It is my first GSoC and I can’t thank KDE Community enough for accepting me as a student.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Most of the themes that can pull this Mac OS X transformation work on desktop environments like GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and so on, but not all of them work in Unity. The designer of this particular version made it compatible with GTK 3.10 and it works in Ubuntu as well.
“The goal is to keep it as close as possible to ambiance on the code base with the same look as the original cupertino. If that isn’t possible for an element I will prefer the look of cupertino,” said the designer on gnome-look.org.
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New Releases
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GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, has been released and is now available for download.
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Robolinux 7.5.3 is a fast and easy to use Linux distribution based on Debian, and its developer thinks that it can be the solution for people who look to protect their privacy.
If you remember from previous releases of Robolinux, the developer of this particular distribution came up with a working idea on how to move people from the Windows platform to Linux without them having to give up their favorite applications.
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SparkyLinux 3.4, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt desktops is now available for download.
The SparkyLinux 3.34 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie” and is not all that different from the previous versions in the series, at least not in this particular aspect.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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OpenMandriva Lx 2014 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux. It is one of the distributions that rose out of the ashes of Mandriva Linux; the other being Mageia, and, to some extent, ROSA Desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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Several weeks back, we reviewed Scientific Linux 6.5, a rather spartan incarnation of the legendary RHEL 6, which might be considered too boring and outdated for modern home use. Well, not so. Once long ago, I showed you how to transform CentOS into a home use beast.
Today, we will do it again, with the most comprehensive guide on Scientific Linux pimping ever made on Planet Earth. Here, you get a bit of everything, and then so. Best of all? This guide is also relevant for CentOS and even Fedora, so make sure you keep it close to your heart. Let’s go.
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Fedora
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Matthew Miller just announced that fortnightly public Fedora Board meetings are starting up again. The first meeting will be on Monday the 9th of June at 17:00 UTC time. (Matthew notes in the email to fedora-announce that the command date -d ’2014-06-09 17:00 UTC’ is an easy way to convert this into the timezone on your Fedora machine.)
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We previously posted about some of the logo design ideas that Máirín Duffy was working on for the 3 products of fedora.next (Cloud, Server, and Workstation). Since that post, Máirín has also posted a bunch of other iterations, and I also entered the fray with a few ideas of my own. Now, Máirín has done another round of design ideas. Check them out, and join the discussion over on her blog.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This week, Apple announced the new OS X Yosemite, and Linux users across the Linux-verse stood up and proclaimed “Oooo, I’d like to lay my hands on the lily-livered swab is writ that forgery!” Why so up in arms? Because Apple has done what Apple does — riff on features from other platforms and claim they’ve recreated a wheel that will make your life far easier. What did they do this time? Let’s chat.
One of the big features of OS X Yosemite is included in the Spotlight tool. For those who don’t know, Spotlight is the OS X search tool that, up until Yosemite, searched the local drive. As of Yosemite, anyone who has touched the Ubuntu Unity Dash will notice something very similar to Scopes.
[...]
When Ubuntu released Unity Scopes, a very large and very vocal group from the Linux community cried foul, that Scopes was an invasion of privacy, was insecure, and would probably steal their identity…
…maybe not that last bit. But there was plenty of backlash from the community (many of whom didn’t even use Ubuntu).
How will the Apple community react when they start using the Scopes-like feature in Yosemite? They’ll love it. They’ll realize how convenient it is to be able to, from one location, search their local drive, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and countless other sources.
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You would think that writing about the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 would be easy but it is hard to write about one of the biggest Linux distributions without repeating everyone else’s sentiments or covering the same ground that was covered with Ubuntu 13.10.
With that in mind please don’t be disappointed that much of what I will be writing here has been written before.
There is nothing revolutionary about Ubuntu 14.04, especially if you have already tried Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04. The improvements to Ubuntu have been slow and steady.
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Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2014) in Barcelona, Canonical has announced the first two phone manufacturers that will create Ubuntu Touch-based smartphones: Meizu and Bq.
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Flavours and Variants
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There’s been much talk in the past about creating a spin/derivative of Ubuntu Linux using the MATE Desktop Environment fork of GNOME2. While no spin materialized for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, talk of developing a new spin is again happening.
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Linux Mint 17 Qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.
Linux Mint usually comes with four desktop editions: Cinnamon Desktop Environment, MATE Desktop Environment, KDE and XFCE, although currently, only Cinnamon and MATE editions are available, XFCE and KDE edition should arrive shortly.
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Phones
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NSA-grade security is now coming to an Android device near you.
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The Samsung Z looks and feels very much like Samsung’s Android smartphones. There’s the tiles section at the top of the home screen, with some app icons at the botton, and there’s the pull-down notifications and settings tray at the very top. You also get the hardware Back and Menu buttons, in addition to the main Home button. The Settings app looks almost identical to Samsung’s Android version.
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LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for accessing directory services. It runs on a layer above the TCP/IP stack incorporating simplified encoding methods, and offers a convenient way to connect to, search, and modify Internet directories, specifically X.500-based directory services. It is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol. LDAP utilizes a client-server model.
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While it initially seemed revolutionary, open source software is actually rooted in traditional IT processes. Technology, after all, has always been about collaboration and continuous improvement. (In the early days of the ARPANET, for example, researchers established a “request for comments” procedure to improve the project.) Of course, there have been trepidations raised about open source. But the always-active open source communities are more than happy to address any concerns. As a result, more than one-half of the software acquired over the next several years will be open source, according to industry research.
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SaaS/Big Data
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SQL is the gateway drug to enterprise adoption says analysts at recent developer conference. Hadoop Summit, leading big data developer conference, saw the maturation of the Hadoop ecosystem. Hadoop is one of the necessary requirements in realizing the promise of Big Data’s application growth in the enterprise, and key players have emerged among those most influential in this development.
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Databases
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SQLite 3.8.5, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine, has been released with an impressive list of changes and improvements.
Most of the SQLite releases are maintenance ones, but from time to time the developers make some important changes. The current update features a few new options, so an update is recommended.
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BSD
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One week after FreeBSD 9.3 went into beta, the second beta update is now available.
FreeBSD 9.3 is the next major FreeBSD 9 update due out that brings down some features from FreeBSD 10.0 like the Radeon KMS/DRM driver support, Xen HVM support, Apple MacBook trackpad support, disables hardware random number generators by default, and has a ton of other changes.
FreeBSD enthusiasts can find out more about the forthcoming 9.3 update via the tentative release notes. FreeBSD 9.3 is expected to be officially released in mid-July.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I wanted to make this post to make it clear to the community regarding GNUstep’s position on the new Swift language. If the language is released as open source then GNUstep will fully support it. If it is, however, not released as open source then we will either take steps to create an implementation ourselves or provide any assistance needed to a group of people other than ourselves who are willing to take that on.
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Yesterday was a big day for defending our freedom and privacy on the Internet. The FSF and its supporters joined the ranks of thousands for Reset the Net, the biggest-ever day of action against bulk surveillance.
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Not only the pixmaps and colours can be changed, also the style of the interface. This include the menu style (vertical, in-window or Mac OS style), the scrollbar position (right or left), the behaviour of contextual menus, popup list and pulldown list (so these can have similar behaviour of the gtk components). The Silver theme include an style that let users run GNUstep’s apps on, for example, Gnome without problems.
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GNU remotecontrol relies on OS file access restrictions, Apache authentication, MySQL authentication, and SSL encryption to secure your data. Talk to us you want to find out how you can further strengthen the security of your system, or you have suggestions for improving the security of our current system architecture.
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The developers behind the Nettle project are out with a new major update to their dual-licensed GPLv2 and LGPLv3+ cryptographics library.
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Security
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Queen’s Speech: Hackers who risk lives by attacking food, energy and police computer networks face life in prison
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Several vulnerabilities have been patched in the Linux kernel that could have led to a denial of service or privilege escalation.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a 2010 speech, Robert Bergdahl claimed that the man who held Bowe “recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike.” The reports at the time appear to back him up.
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NEW YORK — The U.S. government, citing possible “exceptionally grave harm to national security,” told a federal appeals court it wants to give the public less information about its legal justification for using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas.
The Justice Department, Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency made the request in papers submitted late Thursday to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal.
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Washington, Jun 6 (Prensa Latina) The White House asked Friday a federal judge for authorization to publish the minor possible quantity of information about the ” legal arguments ” of the Government to kill American citizens by means of the use of drones.
Several government agencies, including the CIA, made an application to the appellate court in the city of New York, to avoid delivering texts to The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who had requested under the mandate of the Freedom of Information Act.
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In his drama Drones, filmmaker Rick Rosenthal poses complex security, political and ethical questions about drone attacks in the ongoing war against global terrorism.
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A young Queenslander killed in a US drone strike in Yemen told his family he was teaching English there and, while there may have been more to the story than that, his family say they have been denied a burial, a death certificate and closure.
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Now he’s got one thumb on the drones and the other on the Oval Office TV remote control watching “Plays of the Week” on ESPN.
Sounds like a boss to me.
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A silenced press has broader implications. For instance, journalists are kept out of North Waziristan, where the U.S. has been concentrating its drone strikes. Washington says these strikes are killing mostly militants, and are nearly always effective operations. Islamabad claims that large numbers of civilians – including children – are being killed. The two governments present very different numbers. Without journalists to investigate, who is to say where the truth lies?
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‘I have no faith left in a judiciary that refuses even to hear whether Abdulrahman, an American child, was wrongfully killed by his own government.’.
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Transparency Reporting
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For which, the whistleblower organisation Wikileaks replied: “@CIA we look forward to sharing great classified info about you,” along with links to CIA-related revelations in the Wikileaks website.
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Newly revealed chat logs may corroborate an imprisoned hacker’s story: An informant facilitated Anonymous’ attacks on Stratfor and hundreds of foreign websites.
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An Australian man killed in a US drone strike in Yemen moved to Christchurch to escape a troubled past, friends say.
Christopher Havard, 27, was killed in Yemen last November alongside dual Australian-New Zealand national Daryl Jones, who went by the name Muslim bin John.
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I have concluded that, regardless of any personal egos involved, Julian Assange (in his bold creation of Wikileaks), Edward Snowden (NSA whistleblower), and other individuals who have put their lives and careers on the line for all of us … are, to America and the world, HEROES. For that, I thank them.
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The Ecuadorean ambassador to London says that a £6 million policing bill after two years of stalemate over Julian Assange is “not our problem”.
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In the near future governments will control every aspect of human life, with even human DNA taken at birth and encoded right into your ID, says Julian Assange. A conference in New York discusses whether the internet might become a tool of suppression.
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Finance
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C. J. Polychroniou, for Truthout: It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivist bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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I despair sometimes that society as a whole has lost all sense of how a democracy ought to operate. State abuse has become the norm.
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Censorship
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Anti-coup protest organizer Sombat Boonngam-anong, captured Thursday, tracked using his IP address
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The Serbian government is facing increasingly frequent accusations of web censorship. The interventions by the OSCE and the European Commission, the reactions of prime minister Vučić
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The most recent – and perhaps unintended – turn of the screw came on May 12 when the Media Development Authority (MDA) released its proposed amendments to the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act for public consultation.
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The publishing industry’s inexplicable surrender to RSS worker Dinanath Batra’s recent barrage of demands to cleanse their books on Indian history of “anti-Hindu” content seems to have created a quick and easy censorship model that is likely to be a quite a hit with the religious fringe.
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14 cartoonists have left satirical magazine El Jueves over the past 24 hours and leading Spanish daily El Mundo has suspended two correspondents over censorship accusations on Twitter.
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Spain’s royal accession faced its first dispute last night over plans to grant the outgoing king legal privileges against prosecution for paternity scandals.
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Privacy
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Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.
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In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.
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On June the 5th last year, British newspaper the Guardian published the first leaks from US intelligence worker Edward Snowden. Exactly one year on – Mr. Snowden, who is wanted in America on espionage charges, remains in Russia on temporary asylum. CCTV UK correspondent Dan Whitehead takes a look at what effect the intelligence leaks have had on governments and security agencies worldwide.
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A private server startup has raised over $1 million in less than an hour and a half, breaking the crowdfunding record.
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A federal judge in California withdrew a temporary order requiring the National Security Agency to retain the data it collects under a controversial and little understood section of the FISA Amendments Act after the NSA argued that being forced to hold onto the data would both be illegal and overwhelm its computer systems, rendering the United States and its allies vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
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Encrypted Gmail. Transparency from mobile providers. Maybe even a legal ‘revolt’ against ‘Orwellian’ surveillance. But until we get real reform, NSA and Co may survive in the shadows
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More e-mail providers are using encryption, meaning messages can’t be intercepted and read by the NSA or hackers.
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One year ago Thursday, one of the most consequential leaks of classified U.S. government documents in history exploded onto the world scene: The first story based on documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was published. Americans finally knew the spy agency was sucking up virtually all of the data about who they called and when.
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The good news from Glenn Greenwald’s latest book is that we’ve arrived at the future that science fiction always promised. The bad news is that, rather than jetpacks, we’re getting a cyberpunk dystopia – less Isaac Asimov and more William Gibson, as it were.
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Reflecting on the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first revelations of rampant NSA surveillance program overreach, a whistleblower who preceded him sees both light and darkness on the horizon for the public’s rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association.
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Abby Martin features an exclusive interview with Top NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney, NSA Technical Director (1965 – 2001) & Kirk Wiebe, Senior NSA Analyst (1975 – 2001). The panel discusses the history behind the NSA’s illegal spying, both domestically and abroad, as well as their experience as witnesses to the agency’s transformation into an unconstitutional surveillance apparatus following the events of 9/11 and the FBI’s determination to crack down on their dissent.
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Influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is taking the Obama administration to task for its response to the international scandal over U.S. surveillance and the resulting harm to U.S. tech companies.
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“Now, Eric Schnowden has his time, he gets an hour on TV, he gets a hoorah from Brian Williams, but I think we ought to say to the national security staff that while we look at the constitutionality and other issues here that we do not demonize them,” she added.
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Thursday marks exactly one year since whistleblower Edward Snowden’s first revelations were published in the Guardian newspaper. But before the world knew about Snowden, two other National Security Agency (NSA) employees had already described the massive reach of the agency’s activities.
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Yesterday’s transparency report from Vodafone raised a very intriguing question: why did Vodafone feel obliged to redact aggregate surveillance statistics from their UK report?
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The performer Stephen Fry condemned the government’s failure to act over the Snowden revelations at the start of the Don’t Spy on Us Day of Action in London today.
In a pre-recorded video, Fry said that using the fear of terrorism, “is a duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country”.
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The self-created end of privacy in the United States was brought about as much by technology as desire. Those who claim there is little new here — the government read the mail of and wiretapped the calls and conversations of Americans under COINTELPROfrom 1956 to at least 1971 – do not understand the impact of technology.
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Everyone is writing and thinking about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose first revelations were published one year ago today. But it was also one year ago that Chelsea Manning’s trial began at Fort Meade in Maryland.
Manning provided the “Collateral Murder” video, hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. She was convicted of multiple offenses including five Espionage Act offenses in 2013 and was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
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Civil Rights
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The Gates Foundation is all about solutions that make the greatest impact on vulnerable populations. So why ignore the 68,000 women who die each year from unsafe abortions?
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A new study concluding that Americans tend to take hurricanes with female names less seriously than those with male names proves just how implicitly sexism is embedded in the culture of this nation. And a look at these photos of a Tennessee survivor of domestic violence should also perhaps elicit the question: “What is it about the culture of the U.S. that generates such misogyny?” – See more at: http://uprisingradio.org/home/2014/06/06/the-common-roots-of-misogynist-culture-in-pakistan-and-the-u-s/#sthash.GpiU1MKA.dpuf
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Freed US soldier Bowe Bergdahl developed a love for Afghan green tea, taught his captors badminton, and even celebrated Christmas and Easter with the hardline militants, a Pakistani militant commander told AFP Sunday.
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The Islamabad High Court’s recent ruling ordering the registration of an FIR against the CIA’s former boss in Islamabad is the latest in a series of embarrassing verdicts that have been handed down due to poor coordination between the federation’s counsels and government departments.
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Too often “the law” is nothing more than prejudice embedded in jargon.
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With a plot that sounds like a Jason Bourne move, on June 2 the Supreme Court declined to review Risen v. United States, a case raising an important question on First Amendment protections for the media but in a context that understandably left conservatives concerned over national security.
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The CIA is close to finishing its review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and hopes to have it ready by July 4, Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.
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One of the greatest Serbian writers, and surely the greatest witness of Serbian 20th century and a man who was directly involved in all the most crucial events of Serbia’s history from World War II until a few days ago when he passed away at age of 93, left his legacy to his friend and publisher Slobodan Gavrilovic.
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Top senators thought you wouldn’t notice. Behind closed doors, they wrote up new indefinite detention and Guantánamo provisions in the annual defense policy bill, and then waited 11 days to quietly file the bill.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Kim Dotcom is pulling out all the stops in his fight against the U.S. government and his adversaries in Hollywood. On the table now sits a $5 million bounty for anyone prepared to reveal behind-the-scenes wrongdoing and corruption. Dotcom told TorrentFreak how it will work.
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The domain of a large streaming TV show site was hijacked yesterday and began diverting to an imposter site. That’s the claim from WatchSeries-Online.ch, a site that in its previous form had been riding up towards the Alexa 1000. But is the real story as straightforward as that? Typically of these sites, absolutely not.
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Send this to a friend
06.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We all know that Linux has changed the world….in small ways and large One of the ways it’s changed the world is by changing the way work gets done in corporations, big and small, around the world. As with the computer itself, the effects of ever-advancing Linux seem evolutionary and “slow & steady” from day to day. But in the 20 years since its introduction, the impact Linux has made in macro is truly staggering!
Today everything from cars and jets to every supercomputer and most servers in datacenters have Linux somewhere…doing something important. Linux is, indeed everywhere! How’d that happen? And more importantly, what will happen next?
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And I think that’s why many people prefer OS-X over Windows or Ubuntu/Fedora. For everyday tasks as email, picture stuff, booking flights, doing taxes etc. OS-X definitely offers a good solution. And being UNIX-y enough to be used in a Linux delpoyment context, you get a good compromise.
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Desktop
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When Google launched Chrome OS, it touted it as a nearly entirely cloud-centric operating system. In fact, it wasn’t designed to store data or applications locally at all, or do anything local, really.
Since then, Google has wisely hedged that bet, and it is doing so in a big way as it finally gives Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies and TV offline. Google announced offline viewing last month and new Chromebooks are indeed pulling the feat off via a new app for Chrome OS.
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Server
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Oracle and Extreme Networks are the latest companies to join the vendor-driven OpenDaylight Project, which is developing an open-source platform for software-defined network and network-functions virtualization.
Also joining the group June 5 was supply-chain services firm Flextronics, bringing the total number of members in the consortium to 39. The numbers have more than doubled since April 2013, when Cisco Systems, IBM and 16 others announced the formation of OpenDaylight.
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There’s no doubt that Linux professionals are in high demand. But how much are they getting paid? I took a peek at the average Linux salaries page on SimplyHired and it was quite interesting to see how much various Linux jobs paid. See for yourself in the image below. You can also compare Linux salaries on that page, and you can search SimplyHired for Linux jobs in your area.
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Kernel Space
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The “ARM64″ pull request pertaining to EFI was sent on Thursday. This newest 64-bit ARM EFI patch-set enables EFI stub support similar to the x86 EFI stub support. The Linux EFI stub kernel support on (U)EFI systems to let the firmware function as the bootloader and to boot directly into the kernel without having to deal with a separate bootloader such as GRUB2 or Gummiboot.
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Most of the sound driver updates for Linux 3.16 revolve around ASOC (ALSA System-on-Chip) changes but there’s also a number of other noteworthy commits. HD Audio changes include Tegra HDMI support, a ThinkPad T440 dock fix, Realtek codec updates for several chips, Firewire audio support improvements, and various other changes.
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Rafael Wysocki has sent in his ACPI and power management pull that will target the next Linux kernel release cycle.
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For many months now Intel has been working on RAPL support within the Linux kernel as part of their power-capping framework as a power feature for Intel hardware on Linux.
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Graft is the SUSE-developed approach to live-patching the Linux kernel as another reboot-less option similar to Ksplice.
Besides kGraft and Ksplice, Red Hat coincidentally shortly after the release of Ksplice had announced Kpatch as their means of live patching a running kernel. Both Red Hat and SUSE have open-sourced their live patching mechanisms and both hope to have their solution mainlined, or some unified form of both. While no solution has been queued up for merging in the Linux 3.16 kernel, there still is a lot of interest by Linux developers in these solutions.
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The amount of changes and enhancements for this branch of the Linux kernel is rather large and the developers have added numerous drivers and other improvements. This is an LTS release and it’s likely that it will be updated for a long time.
“I’m announcing the release of the 3.10.41 kernel. All users of the 3.10 kernel series must upgrade.”
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Graphics Stack
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For those interested in DisplayPort MST support on Linux to support the specification’s multi-stream transport ability, there is now a revised patch-set providing this support.
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Applications
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FFmpeg 2.2.x is the latest major release and this current build is just a maintenance version. It comes with a lot of new features, such as HNM version 4 demuxer and video decoder, Live HDS muxer, a complete Voxware MetaSound decoder, WebP encoding via libwebp, VP8 in Ogg demuxing, libx265 encoder, and more.
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Proprietary
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Migrating to the Linux platform is not an either/or proposition. Linux as a computing platform is so flexible that it offers users a have-it-your-way menu of software options.
One option is the Linux desktop. Individual users in home computing, SOHO and SMB operations can choose from a variety of enterprise-class Linux distributions. The Linux desktop OS offers a no-cost or low-cost alternative to the frustrations of Microsoft Windows or the limitations of Apple’s Unix-based OS X platform for its relatively costly Mac hardware.
Another migration path is to forgo acclimating office staff to the Linux desktop. Instead, enterprises can opt to run their back-office and server operations on a Linux server. Linux servers have a rigorous giant footprint in the networking and cloud computing worlds. Linux servers are commonplace in many other enterprise settings.
A third migration choice is to run a full Linux shop. Standard office computing software is readily available in open source packages for office suites, Web browsing and graphic production tasks. Open source database applications connect famously with back-end software and servers. Plus, Linux does not need hardware-specific buy-in requirements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It just so happens on the tenth birthday of Phoronix that 500 games are now available for Linux via SteamOS.
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id Software has a long history of making games that stems back as far as 1991. Most gamers will only remember the hugely popular releases in the Doom and Quake series, but there were many more, and much older titles that were released before they hit the big time.
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LIMBO caused quite a stir when it was released for Linux being wrapped in a custom wine wrapper by Codeweavers, but that saga looks like it’s coming to and end.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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You might know that Okular has a plugin system, for adding support for more document formats. And you might know that Calligra since years also provides a plugin to Okular, which adds support to view slides from files in the OpenDocument Presentation (ODP) format. And not only for the ODP format: by simply using the Calligra import filters for PPT and PPTX you can also view the slides locked away in those formats.
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Just a little video showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.
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I am glad that I accomplished my first task to integrate political map with marble.
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A new development build of KDE Frameworks 5 is now out and the developers are making great progress. If things continue to evolve according to the plan KDE has laid out, we should see this new desktop environment pretty soon.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A year and a half after the previous release, the beautiful Faience GTK / GNOME Shell theme pack was finally updated and it now supports GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10.
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Over the past several GNOME releases, we have been aiming to stabilise GNOME Shell as much as possible. We have been largely successful in this: the last major UI change was in 3.10, when we introduced the combined system status area, and the main improvements in the recent 3.12 release were for performance and bug fixing. This is a good thing. At the same time, there is one area where a number of us still feel that bigger changes are needed. This is notifications, particularly the Message Tray.
In this post, I’m going to present a new set of designs for notifications and the Message Tray, which we’re hoping to implement for the next GNOME release. As ever, these aren’t set in stone and are in a state of evolution. The aim of publicising the designs is to get feedback so we can improve them.
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RoboLinux is a robust Linux desktop solution for a home office, as well as for SOHO and enterprise users looking for a well-protected migration path away from other operating systems. Its modified traditional desktop design and built-in virtual machine packages for running windows XP and Windows 7 from within the Linux desktop make it an easy and reliable option.
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In today’s Linux news, LinuxInsider has a review of RoboLinux saying it “smooths the Linux migration path.” Makulu Linux 6.1 is said to be “big, beautiful, and fun.” A new flaw has been patched and Shawn Powers discusses the new Linux professional.
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0.1. With this release we bring some much needed overhaul and advancements to our Linux desktop to make it the most stable, and easiest to use yet.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I’ve added to the Steam package repository for Fedora an alternative kernel module for xpad, the X-Box gamepad driver. This variant contains patches created by Valve to improve the driver and its behaviour.
The module is available in both akmod (RPMFusion) and dkms package formats.
This made my 3rd party X-Box controller work without any issue in Steam games and in the Big Picture Mode interface!
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This new design allows for a greater amount of detail when glancing at your notifications, rather than just an icon, and the number of unread notifications. The upstream developers seem to be targeting getting this new design implemented for GNOME 3.14, so hopefully we should see this in Fedora 21 Workstation.
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Debian Family
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With it having been since late last year when trying out the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD variant that pairs Debian’s GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel in place of Linux, I ran some fresh trials on one of our test-beds this week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to Alan Pope, one of the Ubuntu developers, The Calendar, Calculator and Music applications, part of the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps have received support for the Click Store, meaning that this apps can be easily kept up to date via the Click Store update manager, without needing a second developer to authorize the process.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn was temporary scheduled for release on the 16th of October 2014, but now the official date has been decided, Ubuntu 14.10 will be released on the 23rd of October, 2014.
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OpenProducts is prepping an Ubuntu-based private file and email server called OPI with LUKS-based microSD encryption, and optional USB or cloud backup.
Like Sher.ly’s recently announced Sherlybox, the OpenProducts OPI device runs Linux, and is intended to enable a private cloud controlled solely by the user. While the Sherlybox is more of a network attached storage (NAS) device with optional onboard storage, OPI is a multifaceted, secure server that offers NAS-like access to external storage. Unlike the Lima device, which depends on USB storage, OPI instead uses encrypted microSD storage.
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Taking place next week from 10 to 12 June is the next Ubuntu Developer Summit where plans about Ubuntu 14.10 with regard to Mir, Unity 8, Ubuntu Phone, and other topics will be discussed by developers.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu distribution features numerous flavors, like KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, but not all the major desktop environments are used. It looks like a new one is brewing, based on MATE.
Ever since the introduction of Unity, some of the Ubuntu users have been pining after GNOME 2, the desktop environment in use until Ubuntu 11.04 arrives. It looks like it had a lot of fans and a part of the Linux community is still hoping that the good days will return.
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Qnap unveiled a Linux-based, SOHO-focused “TS-X51 Turbo NAS” device with 2-8 HDD bays, plus private cloud sharing, video transcoding, and virtualization.
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The AllJoyn open source project is the core interoperability framework hosted by the AllSeen Alliance and works on Linux, Android, iOS and many other operating systems and platforms. This ability to discover, connect and interoperate regardless of the OS or manufacturer will enable a simple, seamless and universal experience for consumers and businesses.
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SoftBank and Aldeberan have teamed up on a Linux-based, $1,930 personal robot named Pepper that can read emotions and respond autonomously.
As we gradually approach the “singularity” when robots overtake human intelligence, we often comfort ourselves in believing robots will never duplicate our often troublesome capacity for emotion. Yet such James Kirkian sentiments may prove suspect as roboticists make robots more sensitive to emotions while using emotional expression to communicate.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung and Barnes & Noble announced on Thursday a co-branded device called the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, a 7-inch reading-focused tablet designed to compete with the Kindle Fire HDX and the Nexus 7. It’s the first sign of life in some time for the Nook brand, the lineup of ebook readers and tablets that have been consistently great but never popular enough to unseat Amazon as king of the reading device. Now, however, with the combined retail and marketing weight of Samsung and Barnes & Noble, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook may have the might to find a place once again. (And there’s only the slightest irony in the fact that Microsoft owns part of the Nook brand, meaning it now owns yet another Android device.)
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At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Samsung unveiled the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system. In this video, CNET reporter Jessica Dolcourt walks through the phone’s features and demonstrates its camera capabilities.
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Some time ago, I read Jos’ “meta” blog post. Jos argues that contributors to free software projects should blog more regularly. In my own “meta blog” post, I will confirm everything that Jos writes and share a few of my own thoughts on why blogging is important for everyone who is part of a free software community.
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Many individuals may want to contribute to Linux or some open-source software project. However, many people may not be sure where to start or how to help. Others may not know computer programming and feel that there is no way they can contribute. Well, guess what? There are many ways anyone can contribute to Linux directly or some open-source software (OSS).
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LinkedIn has overhauled its search engine infrastructure in favor of a new system dubbed Galene, a homegrown engine designed to improve search results and problems with maintenance, the company plans to announce Thursday.
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They’re routine activities for people, but this was a Willow Garage PR2 alpha robot. By navigating through eight doors and using nine outlets, it notched an important milestone—using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to accomplish its complex mission.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has just received another update for the 36 Beta branch of the software.
The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is not the stable branch, which means that you shouldn’t rush to replace your current one. There still are a number of stability problems, but the development is progressing quite nicely.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mirantis announced version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution. This version is based upon OpenStack Icehouse and is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments. I’ve spoken with company executives from time to time and have always come away impressed with their understanding of the market and OpenStack technology.
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The Hadoop Summit went on this week in San Jose, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, sponsored by Hortonworks and Yahoo. There were some interesting keynotes, including one from Microsoft on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” and Red Hat officials delved into “Enterprise Hadoop and the open hybrid Cloud.” At the Summit, it was clear that Hadoop has become a true open source success story. It’s also driving down enterprise storage costs.
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During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.
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During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.
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With Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of HP Helion, there are questions lingering about how the company can compete in the public cloud market, while using OpenStack as a way to get into the enterprise.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new build in the LibreOffice 4.3 Beta branch, bringing even more changes than the latest update in the series. It looks like 4.3 will be quite interesting, but it’s going to take a while until it’s released.
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Education
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Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.
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BSD
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According to the developers, the distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but it looks like that there is still room for improvements. The developers have made a few important changes and it’s recommended to update.
“In preparation for the next release we have been fine tuning some of the new features and making sure the loose ends are tied up. We were also able to close out a good amount of trac tickets this week and commit the fixes for 10.0.2,” reads the official announcement.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA’s massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA’s job a little harder. We’re releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex.
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Today we’re joining our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in kicking off the Tor Challenge, an effort to strengthen the global Tor network that protects Internet traffic from surveillance.
Tor is a publicly accessible, free software-based system for anonymizing Internet traffic. Tor relies on thousands of computers around the world called relays, which route traffic in tricky ways to dodge spying. The more relays, the stronger and faster the network.
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Public Services/Government
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How did Australia scale up to cope with all of its public research agencies at the same time? FutureGov spoke with Allan Williams, Associate Director, Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to find out how they did this.
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Long-time readers of this column may remember the great Digital Economy Bill saga back in 2010, which culminated in one of the most disgusting episodes in recent Parliamentary history, with the Bill being approved by a near-empty House of Commons in the dying hours of the last government, and with no substantive debate whatsoever. The result was an appalling piece of legislation, whose putrefying corpse is still polluting the UK’s digital landscape, acting as an ever-present reminder of just how badly the Labour treated the online world when it was in power.
Labour is now out of power, and trying to get back into power. I leave readers to decide for themselves whether it would be better or worse than the present incumbents. Instead, I want to concentrate on two initiatives that the Labour Party is taking to help it come up with some decent policies for the digital world.
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Openness/Sharing
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People from around the open source community will share with us, starting on Monday, how open source is being used to better and improve the world of science—in areas of academia, research, access, software, and more.
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Comics legend leading Electricomics project that aims to revolutionise comics on mobiles and tablets with new app
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Standards/Consortia
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The project is a free (Mozillla Public License v2) node-based compositor that relies on OpenColorIO for color management, OpenImageIO for file formats support, and Qt for user interface. It also works with 32bit float per channel precision and supports OFX plugins, both free and commercial.
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The adopter program lets potential adoptees run the OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance test for possible certification as their driver’s implementation being conformant to the official specification. The ES 3.1 test is obviously built atop the existing OpenGL ES 3.0 test.
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Hardware
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This is a quick unboxing video of the Intel NUC device that was given out to attendees of the Tizen Developer Conference 2014, and represents reference hardware that developers can use Tizen Common to test and develop their applications with.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The language is the language of intelligence service tasking memoranda, which Obama is consciously or unconsciously reproducing.
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Transparency Reporting
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I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.
Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Fox News hosts or guests cited a discredited report by the Chamber of Commerce seven times, even though it studied a scenario far stricter than the actual rule from the EPA. According to the executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries.”
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Finance
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The New York Times (6/4/14) took a look at one of the economic puzzles of the last few decades: If growth has been strong, why aren’t we seeing a greater reduction in poverty? Interestingly, the research the Times is relying on offers some explanations–ones the paper doesn’t see fit to mention.
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It’s not often that anti-corporate activists are heard from in the corporate media. Do they really need to be called “party poopers”?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The prisoner swap that freed US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has attracted an enormous amount of controversy. Much of it is silly partisanship; Republican Sen. John McCain–remember him, the media’s beloved “straight talker”–endorsed a prisoner swap with the Taliban until he was against it.
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A growing number of mainstream media outlets are holding Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) accountable for flip-flopping on his support of a deal to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Taliban capitivity.
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Censorship
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In other words, the Guardian, a UK newspaper, is admitting that it simply doesn’t feel safe locating its SecureDrop implementation inside the UK. For people who believe in press freedom in the UK, this is a pretty scary statement — just the latest in the past few years that have really called into question the UK’s support for a free and open press.
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Privacy
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A year ago I stumbled across a story about a worrying new surveillance programme developed by the NSA: Prism. While nobody was identified as the source of the disclosure, I was awestruck by the bravery of this unknown person.
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It’s a year since The Guardian published the first of many news stories about the scale of GCHQ and the NSA’s intrusion into our private lives. Based on the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the stories had global implications, exposing the insecurity of the Internet, straining relationships between the US and its allies and raising questions about who has control over the agencies that purport to protect our freedoms.
And as my conversation in Germany showed, surveillance has damaged global freedom of expression, affecting the way we think when we use the Internet. There have been other consequences to free speech in the UK as well. We have fallen five places in the Freedom House world ranking of countries’ press freedom. This was as a result of legal threats made by the Government against The Guardian, the destruction of hard drives in the newspaper’s offices and the detainment of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald – one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story.
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We get this a lot. There are a million answers (our favorite short one is “Nothing to hide? Really?”) but here’s something thoughtful and comprehensive to share with a friend the next time it comes up. The short version? None of the freedom and progress we’ve won over the past century would have been possible without the freedom to change things (starting with our own lives first) that privacy gives us.
Imagine a world where you were constantly being judged by everyone around you, suffering immediately, or years down the road, for anything you did or said that was unusual, unpopular, or against the rules. In that kind of world, social and economic progress grinds to a halt, because everyone’s afraid to rock the boat!
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The Free Software Foundation has released a guide to encrypting email to mark one year since the disclosures of NSA blanket surveillance by analyst Edward Snowden.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, carried the first story on the topic on June 6, which also happens to be the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Since then, there have been a slew of stories on the topic in newspapers all over the world.
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Vodafone, the world’s largest wireless operator outside China, says governments in some countries have installed permanent listening “pipes” into mobile networks, allowing authorities to monitor all communications and data without alerting or getting cooperation from network operators.
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Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.
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One of the important results of Snowden’s leaks over the last year is that the companies involved are not only becoming more open about how their services have been used by the NSA and GCHQ to spy on people,
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Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a ‘nightmare scenario’
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2) As if #1 wasn’t bad enough, Google has chosen to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Namely, the long-standing, mature, fully-debugged gpg2 open source OpenPGP standard codebase is being rejected out of hand, again because they want to do things ‘their’ way by creating a duplicate, immature, bug-laden codebase port of gpg2 as an incomplete subset into slow, interpretive Javascript. That’s right. Javascript. gpg2 is fully compiled C/C++ code.
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A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.
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Civil Rights
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A local New Hampshire police department agreed Thursday to pay a woman who was arrested and charged with wiretapping $57,000 to settle her civil rights lawsuit. The deal comes a week after a federal appeals court ruled that the public has a “First Amendment” right to film cops.
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New York Times reporter James Risen might be headed to jail soon for refusing to reveal the source of his critical reporting on the CIA.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.05.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There’s no such thing as “just a Linux sysadmin,” which is what makes Linux professionals so incredibly valuable. We’ve all been hearing that the demand for Linux professionals is “at its highest ever!!!” for years. In recent years, though, it hasn’t just been Linux nuts like me saying it. You may reference the 2014 Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and assume they’re biased, but a quick search over at Monster.com shows that the demand for Linux professionals is a real thing.
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Server
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Cavium is aiming be a force of nature in the ARM chips market with its new ThunderX lineup of system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs announced today. Alongside the ThunderX announcement, Cavium is also partnering with multiple Linux distributions, including Fedora and openSUSE.
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The devices support a variety of Linux distros, with KVM and Xen virtualisation support, Java and GCC development support.
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Kernel Space
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The HID/input pull request for the Linux 3.16 merge window has been sent in with some useful additions.
First up for the HID Linux 3.16 pull is an RMI driver, which is for supporting Synaptics RMI4 devices over USB or I2C. The RMI driver right now uses its own RMI4 implementation but will ultimately become a transport driver for the RMI4 library once it’s been merged upstream. This driver was developed by Synaptics along with Red Hat and other independent kernel contributors.
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After a period when Linux kernel updates were smaller than usual, the developers have started once again to send patches and fixes, even for slightly older kernels, like 3.12.x. This is the most advanced Long Term Support kernel version and it’s expected to see more changes than the rest of them.
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The KVM virtualization update for Linux 3.16 brings improvements mostly for less common CPU architectures. With the Linux 3.17 kernel should come more interesting work for x86 fans but KVM on IA64 is likely to get the boot.
Paolo Bonzini sent in the Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes this morning for the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request brings a lot of changes for IBM’s S390 architecture with regard to optimizations, support for migration, GDB support, and other improvements. Within the ARM space the only noteworthy change was support for the PSCI 0.2 hyper-call interface.
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There are so many Linux distributions out in the wild, but there is only one de facto thing that they have in common: the Linux kernel. But while it’s often talked about, a lot of people don’t really know exactly what it does.
Let’s take a look at what the Linux kernel really does and why it’s needed, with as few geeky terms as possible.
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This is a short and vague glimpse to the interfaces that the Linux kernel offers to user space for display and graphics management, from the history to what is hot and new, to what might perhaps be coming after. The topic came current for me when I started preparing Weston for global thermonuclear war.
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Graphics Stack
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The Nouveau DRM graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA support hasn’t seen any fundamental re-clocking support breakthroughs for the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel but the support can be easily enabled for select GeForce GPU models.
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In continuation of the Phoronix article from a few days ago about AMD Adds Gallium3D H.264 Profile Encoding Support, that work has now landed within Mesa’s Git code-base.
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X.Org Server 1.16 is expected to be officially released in early July. This major X.Org Server update clears over one thousand compiler warnings, lands in-server GLAMOR support and many GLAMOR-related improvements, works better without root privileges, improves Ultra HD 4K monitor support, and has many other changes.
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Besides being able to try out re-clocking with Linux 3.16, there’s also several other changes lined up for this next kernel release cycle when it comes to the Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA graphics support.
Here’s the key changes currently living within the Nouveau DRM repository that should be pulled into DRM-next and land within the Linux 3.16 merge window:
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Benchmarks
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To complement the initial results yesterday of trying 60+ graphics cards on the open-source Linux GPU drivers — with today being the ten year birthday of Phoronix — here’s the second round of our mass open-source graphics driver testing. While in Wednesday’s article were the raw OpenGL results for the wide-range of graphics processors on the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau articles, in today’s article are complementary results providing a brief look at the system power consumption, performance-per-Watt, CPU usage, and GPU thermal information when testing the hardware in the same configuration.
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Applications
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I suppose it’s not the fault of todo.txt that lifehacker.com left its greasy fingerprints on it. And perhaps I’m not being fair by immediately assuming that lifehacker.com is just glomming onto an otherwise useful script in hopes of pulling a little traffic its own way.
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Syncthing is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go. Similar to BitTorrent Sync, the tool can be used to synchronize files between computers however, unlike BitTorrent Sync, Syncthing is open source.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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That’s quite a big barrier to break-down, which means it should be easier than ever to use VOGL and that’s impressive work especially as it’s open source.
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Half-Life 2′s VR mode is now out of beta for Linux, so all of you with your fancy-pants head-gear can get swalled up by Half-Life 2′s visuals like you are really there! This update includes Lost Coast, Episode 1, Episode 2, and Half-Life: Source as well.
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A new technology is coming to open source that promises an integrated, high-quality and consistent streaming analytics application framework. The technology, codenamed “jetStream,” will allow original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, system integrators, service providers and developers to create Big Data analytics and streaming apps that address business use cases such as real-time analysis for spam filtering, network intrusion detection and analytics, location analytics, and social media market analysis.
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The UNIGINE Engine is built by Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time and the updates for the engine always bring numerous improvements.
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The Russian developers responsible for the Unigine Engine have begun to share details on the next iteration of their visually impressive, Linux-friendly game and visualization engine.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment 0.19 Alpha was just tagged as the very latest desktop / window manager work that includes improved Wayland support for E19.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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From January 18th to 25th, Kate, KDevelop and Skanlite developers met in Barcelona. The sprint was focused on the work of the upcoming few months, and covered a wide range of aspects of these projects.
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I am Bhaskar Kandiyal a student pursuing masters in Computer Applications and I have been accepted as a student to work for KDE as a part of GSoC this year! My mentors are Jonathan Marten and Kevin Krammer and I would like to thank them for giving me an opportunity to work on this project.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In the time off over Christmas and the New Year I decided to investigate & learn about the creation of GNOME Shell extensions. As an amateur astronomer, I have an interest in knowing what the “seeing conditions” will be like in the forthcoming nights. There are a number of different websites which provide forecasts, as well as apps for Android and iPhone. I use the Android AstroPanel application quite frequently, but most of the day I’m sitting in front of my laptop and would rather have the data presented there, alongside the regular weather forecast, rather than on my phone. So after finding that extensions are quite simple to create, I decided to create an extension for displaying an astronomical weather forecast for GNOME Shell.
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GNOME Classic is a GNOME 3 desktop designed to offer the look-and-feel of a GNOME 2/MATE desktop, that is, of a traditional or classic GNOME desktop.
It’s for people who are not fond of the default GNOME Shell. It comes with every installation of GNOME 3, offered as an option in the login screen’s Session menu.
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GNOME developers are making some very important changes that will come into effect with the release of the 3.14 branch, and it looks like the notification system will also get an overhaul.
The current notification system that is being used in GNOME is not all that bad, but it could be better. In fact, there are quite a few extensions that change the way notifications are handled in GNOME, so it stands to reason that the developers can make some improvements.
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The GNOME developers have finally decided that the time to upgrade the icon theme has arrived, and it looks like the 3.14 release will see some changes in this department.
One of the first things a user sees when starting a distribution powered by GNOME is the icon set used. You would imagine that developers paid more attention to something that is responsible with first impressions, but you would be wrong.
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Canonical provides a minimal Ubuntu install CD. It’s smaller than the regular installation ISO and it installs a minimal version of the distribution. At its most basic, it gives the user a command line, network connectivity and not much else. From this bare-bones beginning, it’s possible to selectively add components while leaving out most of the cruft that tends to come with a standard distribution.
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There are a lot of tools and applications available to security researchers to conduct penetration testing. Many of those tools run on the open-source Linux operating system, though not every distribution is properly configured to be a proper platform for security research. That’s where the Kali Linux distribution comes into play as an optimized Linux distribution built for security researchers. The Kali Linux 1.0.7 distribution was officially released on May 27, providing users with a number of new features. Kali Linux was originally known as Backtrack Linux, before being renamed and rebuilt in March 2013. One of the primary new features in Version 1.0.7 is the introduction of encrypted USB persistence for Live images. With that feature, Kali Linux can be installed onto a USB storage key, with user storage that can be updated and fully encrypted. One of the key benefits of Kali Linux is that it assembles in one place many tools that security researchers need. Tools for information gathering, vulnerability analysis, Web applications, password attacks, stress testing and even hardware hacking are all included. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features of the Kali Linux 1.0.7 release.
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New Releases
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The Clonezilla team released a new development version for their Linux distro with just a small update for the Debian base and a couple of changes.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of June 2, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
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We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.0.0, the first release in v3.0 stable series.
This is the first release with musl libc instead of uClibc and is not ABI compatible with earlier versions, so special care needs to be taken when upgrading. See http://alpinelinux.org/edge-musl on how to upgrade.
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This has been a rocky couple of weeks for the Makulu Linux distribution, but with the release this week of Makulu 6.1 Xfce, things are looking good again.
With the initial 6.0 Xfce release they switched to the LMDE installer, and that seemed to lead to a plethora of problems. The lead developer, Jacque Raymer, spent what must surely have been a week in Hell fixing the problems, improving the integration of the Mint Installer with the Makulu distributions, and rewriting the post-installation setup scripts. The result of that massive effort is the Makulu Linux Xfce 6.1 release.
The release announcement mentions some of the problems and explains some of the work that went into solving them. The release notes, which are actually the original 6.0 notes with some additional 6.1 information on the end, give a much more complete overview of the 6.x Xfce releases.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Lennart Poettering has added two new service sandboxing features to systemd.
For improving the security of Linux services, Lennart added ReadOnlySystem and ProtectedHome settings for services. ReadOnlySystem will mount /usr and /boot as read-only for the specific service. The ProtectedHome setting mounts /home and /run/user as read-only or replaces it with an empty, inaccessible directory.
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Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cerner Corporation, a global health care information technology company, has successfully leveraged Red Hat Enterprise Linux to enhance the stability and performance of its world-class application hosting services. Combined with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improved scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped Cerner meet the healthcare industry’s growing demand for IT solutions and services.
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Fedora
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Being a research student is really tough. I mean tough! The most difficult part is keeping up the self discipline, day after day, week after week. As a research student, you make your own schedule, you even make your own syllabus pretty much. I handle the syllabus part just fine, but I struggle with maintaining a disciplined schedule. It takes a while to get into a stable rhythm where you work according to plan and remain focussed on the task at hand, for however long it takes. On the other hand, it’s really easy to upset said rhythm: a late night coding spree, a night out with friends, an unexpected task that makes you diverge from your plan for the day etc. are often sufficient to make me sleep late and mess up the next day. Self discipline requires commitment, and a lot of hard work. Luckily, I’m not alone in this struggle. Here’s a helpful post on improving self discipline: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/self-discipline/. Since I spend most of my day at a computer, I went around and looked for tools that would help me keep focussed on my work; keep me away from distractions (yes, Facebook is a distraction); and help me work according to the plans I make.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mirantis and Canonical today announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu. The companies will also collaborate to offer an OpenStack solution that is fully supported.
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The development of Ubuntu 14.10 is underway for a couple of months already, but things are just starting to shape up for the operating systems from Canonical and it looks like the devs have decided what kernel version they will be pursuing.
It’s difficult to say what Linux kernel will be integrated in Ubuntu 14.10, but some estimates can be done. The Ubuntu developers are looking to settle with Linux kernel 3.16 as their target, but that is not set in stone and things ca still change until the launch.
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Canonical has finally settled on a release date for the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and the previous, temporary date announced has been changed by a week.
Shortly after the launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Canonical started to work on the next version of Ubuntu, 14.10. This is quite normal and the development cycle for Ubuntu is about six months. Also, the version number of Ubuntu says that it has to arrive in October.
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A touch-friendly version of Ubuntu Linux debuts on Dell tablets and laptop hybrid devices at Computex 2014 trade show in Taipei, Taiwan
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The development of Ubuntu Touch is separated on a number of branches, only one being stable. Also, the developers are considering building a separate branch of Ubuntu Touch that will get RTM (release-to-manufacturer) status and will be focused on bug-fixes and stability improvements. So, the developers may use the “derived distribution” feature of Launchpad, which branches the entire distribution or some parts only, into a new distribution.
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The Ubuntu Touch development has been powering on for the last year and a half, and Canonical has made great progress. The Ubuntu for phones operating system has been separated in a number of branches, and one of them is considered stable.
From time to time, the Ubuntu devs promote an image that passes all the internal tests to the stable branch but, for a mass release of the system, the OS will have to be much better.
That is the reason why the technical lead for the Foundations Team, Colin Watson, made a very interesting proposition regarding a new Ubuntu Touch version that will be designated RTM (release-to-manufacture).
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Flavours and Variants
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LINUX MINT 17 has been released, marking a significant milestone because it’s a long term support (LTS) release that will be updated for five years.
Distrowatch reported the news, quoting Clement Lefebvre, who said, “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.”
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Reviews of Linux Mint 17 dominated the news feeds today. Our round-up includes five reviews, video tour, and a screenshot slideshow. It’s probably not much of a surprise, but consensus is two thumbs up for Linux Mint 17.
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Linux Mint 17 qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.
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A $149 “Sherlybox” NAS debuted on Kickstarter today, based on a Raspberry Pi core, and offering a secure VPN that creates an invite-only cloud service.
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Over the past couple of years we’ve been able to bring our readers an amazing array of Raspberry Pi projects that we are genuinely proud of. From big projects such as building your own robot and quadcopters down to the little stuff like making melodies with Sonic Pi or making Pong.
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Arynga, Inc. , an innovator and leader in the delivery of intelligent vehicle software management solutions, announced its recent partnership with the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics® , a leader in Linux-based infotainment, automotive software and network design. The two companies publicized this partnership today at the 2014 Telematics Update Conference in Detroit, where Mentor debuted the integration of CarSync™ , Arynga’s software update management platform, with the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) .
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Enea (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA), a leading operating system solution vendor for telecom infrastructure equipment, today announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation concerning embedded Linux training courses. Enea is one of four announced training partners to date, and can thereby offer Linux professionals the full range of Linux Foundation courses, in addition to its own training curriculum.
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Embedded Linux development and commercial support for the AMD G-Series family is available through Mentor Embedded Linux and Sourcery CodeBench, as well as no-cost Mentor Embedded Linux Lite.
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The talks cover a wide range of challenges and issues associated with porting Linux or Android to new embedded hardware platforms and SoCs. Topics include overviews of Buildroot, Yocto, and the Device Tree; discussions of issues such as SMP support and boot-time reduction; and an example of supporting a new ARM-based SoC from Allwinner.
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If you’re anything like us – and dear Lord we hope you are not – you sometimes sit staring at your Raspberry Pi, willing it to do more. Unfortunately our mental prowess is not powerful enough to materialise extra features or tweak the performance of the ARM chip, so we instead turned to the internet and looked for ways to upgrade our Pi.
We came away with ten items that can help make your Raspberry Pi usage just that little bit better; from the simplest of USB cable switches to full-on touch screen LCD displays for the Pi. We then wrote a feature about it which you can read all about in the latest issue of Linux User & Developer.
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Phones
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In mobile we are losing the free world called the Web and the Net. How do we save it?
Already most of us spend more time on mobile devices than we do on desktops and laptops, put together. We also can do a lot more stuff, in a lot more places, on mobile devices than on computers. There were more than a million iOS apps on the shelves of Apple’s store in October 2013, and I’m guessing there are at least that many Android apps on Google’s shelves by now.
Meanwhile, app development on computers is slacking off—so is Web development, except as required to accessorize mobile apps. And on mobile devices, use of the Web is fading as well. According to Flurry Analytics, the Web’s share of mobile use dropped from 20% in 2013 to 14% in 2014. In “The Decline of the Mobile Web”, Chris Dixon writes.
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Android TV “certainly shows Google’s character as an organization,” said Brett Sappington, director of research for Parks Associates. “I don’t know of any other organization that would take three tries to get it right. Google embraces risk more than other organizations do.” The challenge is getting the mix of user interaction and ease of use right, he added.
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Ballnux
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The first smartphone running the Linux-based Tizen OS is here, even if it will likely be a long time before most of us can get our hands on it. But forget about phones – Tizen is also about cars, TVs, home automation, wearables, and more.
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Hey developers, do you want another good reason to join the Tizen Store and sell your applications? During the Tizen Developer Conference the Tizen store has launched a great revenue share promotion in which you receive 100% of the sales revenue for applications and In App Purchase sold during the promotion period. You get all the money for a full year. Check below for additional information
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Upstream is a new podcast featuring interviews and conversations with people who are moving open source forward. The podcast is produced by Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team. In their first episode, Joe Brockmeier talks with Leslie Hawthorn of Elasticsearch about her Sunday morning keynote at the Twelfth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 12x) in February this year. In Why Checking Your Privilege is Good For You, Leslie asks how we can use our level of privilege—whether in our field, in our community, or in our job—to help others, with lower levels of privilege in said field, community, or workplace, to get involved and succeed.
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Red Hat has announced the general availability of Software Collections 1.1, their update of common web development tools, dynamic languages, and open-source databases. Red Hat Software Collections provide newer versions of these key open-source packages than what is offered by default in RHEL while being backed by three years of Red Hat support.
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A common challenge to the security of open-source software is the ability of teams to focus on writing and testing the code. Counter this with organizations that dedicate entire teams solely to testing and improving the quality of the product.
As James pointed out in our discussion, the difference is often the passion. OSS projects appeal to the craft of solving a problem. It provides an opportunity to contribute, to collaborate, to improve.
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OSSEC is a cross-platform host intrusion detection system. Hence it’s also known as OSSEC HIDS. It is Free software released under the GNU General Public License, and features log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detection and real-time active responses. If you intend to run a server anywhere, this is one of the first applications you want to install on it.
OSSEC is a much better security application than Fail2ban, another popular host intrusion prevention application. OSSEC offers a centralized management server with support for agent and agentless monitoring. A complete description of its features are available here.
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Events
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Kaltura Connect is all about online video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities, and educational organizations will gather to join insightful sessions, workshops, round-tables, and parties about new products and a wide range of topics. Topics include OTT TV, video-based sales and marketing, video-powered learning and training, creating social and personalized experiences with video, the use of video by large cloud vendors, air droids and more.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome, the world’s most loved web browser has come a long way. Once touted as a faster alternative to Firefox has turned itself into a significant player in the OS marketplace. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google has ensured that pretty much everything you do on your desktop can be done in your web browser. Taking this vision further, the search behemoth turned the web browser into a full-fledged operating system. Running on top of Linux, Google Chrome OS has become a crowd favorite. Its ability to sync seamlessly across all devices has made the initial naysayers give Chrome OS a second chance.
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Mozilla
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Video game creators will be pleased to hear that the WebGL PlayCanvas Engine has been open-sourced. Mozilla announced the move today on its developer blog and you can access the entire engine sourcebase right now over on GitHub.
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I am a hipster Flash hater. I hated Flash before Steve Jobs told it was bad. I hate Flash before Adobe said there would be no Flash 7 for Linux. I don’t have Flash on my machine. I even coined “fc;dw”.
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Mozilla is starting a new research project targeted to usher in better security on the Internet. The Cyber Security Dephi initiative, announced in a blog post from advocacy director Dave Steer, will leverage resources from experts in academia and computer security companies to develop new online security strategies.
The announcement comes alongside Mozilla’s Reset the Net initiative, which calls for a day of action to improve security against widespread surveillance.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Open source Big Data vendor Talend has rolled out version 5.5 of its data integration platform. And speed is the headlining feature of this new release, which promises Hadoop performance increases of 45 percent.
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Earlier this week, Mirantis and Canonical announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu.
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CMS
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The founder of open-source Drupal content management system details how the 100-year evolution of photography can inform open-source development and the upcoming Drupal 8 release.
It took more than 100 years of evolution for the modern photography industry to reach its current state, and there are lessons from that century that apply to the modern world of cloud and Web development too. That’s the message delivered by Dries Buytaert, founder of the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS), during his keynote address at the Drupalcon conference June 3 in Austin, Texas.
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BSD
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FreeBSD developers haven’t forgotten about the 9.x branch of their operating system, even if they have already released 10.0. This is a strange and not very common situation, where a development branch is actually lower in version than the latest stable.
This only shows the commitment of the developers to the people who are still using 9.x and who want to continue employing it. This means that several updates are needed and 9.3 Beta 1 is quite a big release.
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Binary dports packages for 3.8 have been built; they are available for download. (link goes to release versions of the packages.
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As expected, DragonFlyBSD 3.8 has been released. This release brings several new features to the popular BSD operating system but the 3.8 series will be the last to support 32-bit releases.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The guide recommends free software tools like GnuPG and Enigmail to protect email communications from prying eyes.To accompany the guide, the FSF also released a shareable infographic.
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Public Services/Government
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Australia’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), John Sheridan, today clarified the government’s plans to release all code from its proposed new content management system (CMS) to the open source community.
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Open Enterprise has been charting the continuing rise of open source software for many years. In numerous areas, its dominance is evident, but there’s one – local government – where its success has been more limited. The most famous example of a city moving to open source is Munich, but even that has been a huge struggle to complete:
More than ten years ago the city of Munich took a decision that was bound to put its IT administrators in the spotlight. At that time it was clear that Microsoft would soon stop supporting Windows NT 4.0, the operating system that ran most of the more than 10,000 desktop machines in the Bavarian capital. The IT specialists and politicians in Munich had to decide: a migration was inevitable, but to where?
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Openness/Sharing
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Tesla held its annual shareholder meeting in northern California yesterday, and there were a few important messages for anyone interested in the entrepreneur’s vision for the future.
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Security
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A new study from Netskope and Ponemon Institute has revealed that IT and security professionals are expecting cloud services to increase the likelihood and economic impact of data breaches.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end.
EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler yesterday in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago. They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.
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One year ago day by day, a courageous young man named Edward Snowden sacrificed most of his life and his freedoms to show us the crude reality of the world we are living in. His ongoing revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore.
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It’s been almost a year since the June 5, 2013 revelation that the US government was collecting, in bulk, the telephone metadata of every telephone call to and from the United States. The National Security Agency leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden would eventually expose surveillance programs, including Prism, XKeyscore, Tempora, and Muscular.
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A year ago today, June 5 2013, The Guardian, a UK newspaper, published the first of its exclusives based on documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Leaving aside the incendiary debate over whether Mr Snowden is a traitor and enemy of the state or a brave citizen who liberated millions of people from illegal surveillance activities, there is no argument over just how significant his activities were in the context of data security. That the phrase “post-Snowden” has passed into common parlance among security professionals is evidence enough.
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OpenSSL 1.0.0m and OpenSSL 0.9.8za also contain a fix for CVE-2014-0076: Fix for the attack described in the paper “Recovering OpenSSL ECDSA Nonces Using the FLUSH+RELOAD Cache Side-channel Attack” Reported by Yuval Yarom and Naomi Benger. This issue was previously fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g.
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The good news is that these attacks need man-in-the-middle position against the victim and that non-OpenSSL clients (IE, Firefox, Chrome on Desktop and iOS, Safari etc) aren’t affected. None the less, all OpenSSL users should be updating.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Kiev’s Junta “anti-terrorist op” has aimed principally to retake administrative or symbolic buildings held occupied by disaffected people in the Donbass region, which strongly reject the idea of being ruled by a government instrumented by fascists and Nazis. These buildings are meant to be retaken by force, as the Ukraine government refuses talks with the political representatives of the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, etc, and which have established autonomous administrations after their respective referendums on sovereignty.
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Translation – ”Thanks for sending so many young Scots to die in Iraq and Afghanistan for us. Look forward to seeing them die in Syria or Iran soon. Keep the cannon fodder coming. Sorry have to nip off now to approve some teenagers on a drone kill list. Keep storing those nuclear warheads for us.”
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Israel launched air attacks against Egypt’s airfields at 7.45am on 5th June 1967. Within a couple of hours most of the Egyptian air forces was destroyed on the ground. At the same time, Israeli tanks scythed across the Sinai Desert heading for the Suez Canal and its troops initiated fighting on the borders with Syria and Jordan. False reports, meanwhile, claimed that Egypt had launched a major attack on Israel, which was fighting back in self-defence, a familiar refrain ever since. By mid-morning, Foreign Minister Abba Eban was telling the US ambassador in Tel Aviv “an ever larger curtain of lies” and claimed that Israel had “no intention of taking advantage of the situation to enlarge its territory.” Another lie.
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In a nice li’l tweet, King railed against the incredibly controversial swap of five Gitmo prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier kept prisoner-of-war by a Taliban-aligned group in Afghanistan for the past five years. Upon his return, details have emerged that seemingly indicate Bergdahl defected from his troop before his capture, while the official narrative has always been that he was “taken in battle.”
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The fact that finding yourself on a police watchlist can lead to a death penalty meted out on the other side of the world should worry our attorney-general. Why doesn’t it?
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The Prime Minister’s claim that Kiwis are being converted to radical Islam and joining al-Qaida lacks credibility…
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A Christchurch academic and lawyer has accused the Prime Minister of washing his hands of the killing of a New Zealander (Muslim bin John) and an Australian (Salma al Russi) in a US drone strike in Yemen.
Speaking at a public lecture in Christchurch, David Small said that the moment New Zealand intelligence agencies hand over information to a country with an active kill-first-ask-questions-later drone campaign, the New Zealand government has a responsibility to ensure that the subject of that intelligence is not subject to extra-judicial killing.
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The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has ordered the police to register a First Information Report (FIR) against former Central Investigation Agency’s (CIA) station chief Jonathan Banks for his involvement in 2009 drone strike that killed family members of a tribesman.
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Campaigners say court decision could open floodgates to more criminal cases against controversial strikes and call for international arrest warrant against American spy
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Islamabad’s High Court on Thursday ordered police to press charges against the CIA’s former station chief for murder, conspiracy and waging war against Pakistan.
Judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui issued the orders following a 2010 court petition by drone activist Kareem Khan, whose brother and teenage son were killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan tribal district.
The former top spy left Pakistan in December 2010 after his identity was disclosed through the court case, and there is little expectation Islamabad will seek his return to face charges.
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There is, in fact, an easy way for the Department of Defense to fulfill the president’s wishes. It could release redacted investigations of incidents in which civilians were killed during combat engagements involving the U.S. military. Although this is not well known, the DoD has conducted thousands of these investigations, generally in a thorough and professional manner. More important, most of them are already releasable by request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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The commander, identified as Jafaar al-Shabwani, was believed to be one of the four people killed in the strike, though the identities of the other three are completely unknown beyond being labeled “suspects.”
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Having lost faith in the ability of U.S. courts to provide justice and accountability for their relatives’ deaths, the family members of three U.S. citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 have decided not to appeal a court decision dismissing their lawsuit challenging the killings.
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The Taliban warned the U.S. during prisoner-exchange negotiations that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl that U.S. drone strikes had come close on several occasions to killing the soldier while he was in captivity, U.S. officials said.
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An attack by a suicide bomber on the home of the CIA-linked General Hifter who is leading a campaign against the government and Islamic militias called Operation Dignity killed three people.
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His two decades in exile in United States gave rise to accusations he was linked to the CIA first from the Gaddafi regime, and then from rival rebels.
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But he remains a figure of suspicion for many veterans of the uprising, with his U.S. exile leading some of them to accuse him of links to the CIA, something also claimed by Gadhafi regime.
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Al-Masry Al-Youm asked about his long period of exile in Virginia, where the CIA’s headquarters are located. He maintained a steady tone, confirming that [claims he collaborated with the Americans] were lies launched by his opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood. He explained that if he was going to spy for anyone, it would have been [former President] Moammar Gadhafi when he was at his peak.
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The 117 Irish soldiers based in Syria as part of the UN Disengagement Observer Force – the thin blue line separating Syrian and Israeli forces on the Golan Heights since 1974 – are coming under attack from Syrian rebels armed, trained and paid by the US, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Government needs to protest loudly to these countries to protect the lives of its soldiers and the aims of the UNDOF mission.
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The right-wing media is denouncing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as a “deserter” who wasn’t worth ransoming from the Taliban, but the real villains are the architects of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars who frivolously put the many Bergdahls in harm’s way, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
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Transparency Reporting
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What separates a democracy from a dictatorship? Government transparency, among other things. Here’s a new way to help get the important stories told.
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NSA whistleblowers William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe will speak at the news conference along with EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, a member of the ExposeFacts editorial board.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Palm oil is everywhere. This globally traded vegetable oil is found in thousands of products you buy off the shelf, like ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, toothpaste, soap, cosmetics. Palm oil is in hundreds of products we routinely buy yet, environmentally, it’s incredibly destructive. Although palm oil is relatively cheaper to produce, animals and indigenous communities suffer tremendously due to the cultivation. Studies have proven that while palm oil is a very successful ingredient it has proven to be detrimental to the well being of the orangutans, causing a decrease of at least 90% along with other species
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The Keystone XL oil pipeline would be vulnerable to attacks threatening water supplies for millions of homeowners and farmers, according to a report by NextGen Climate, a political group led by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.
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Censorship
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Obama’s first job after college in 1983 was with the CIA front company Business International Corp.
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We all know that China and their “Great Firewall” of censorship exist and we have a general idea of just how deep the censorship goes. We’re also aware of the justifications that the Chinese government use for this censorship, including the notions that they’re just protecting their innocent citizens from all the evil on the internet, as well as censorship committed by some of their antagonists (including the USA). But if you thought that this censorship was chiefly about pornography or current events, you’re quite mistaken.
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We should begin to expect more transparency as more information is revealed in the wake of the revelations that the NSA has been spying on citizens, by recording their telecommunications and digital transmissions.
At the moment, the ruling is directed at Europeans, and Google is reported to be receiving more than 10,000 daily requests. However, globally, other citizens can also expect the effect to be assimilated throughout the virtual ecosystem, as the discussion about online privacy is ignited.
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Shares in Russian internet search engine Yandex will begin trading in Moscow on Wednesday in a move that will please the Kremlin and could shield the Nasdaq-listed company from any tightening of Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.
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Privacy
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End-to-end encryption offers another layer of security by encrypting data leaving a user’s browser until it is decrypted by the recipient. The service has been available for some time via tools including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), but such tools have failed to become mainstream as they require a higher level of technological know-how.
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When you are on-line, act consciously, and think before you do. Guard your privacy and respect that of others. No, Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He sacrificed a lot in order to get the truth out there, and we should have respect for that, too.
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A federal judge raised privacy questions while dismissing a lawsuit filed by an Idaho woman against President Barack Obama regarding the collection of cellphone information by the National Security Agency.
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We’ve written plenty about the case Smith v. Maryland, which established the dangerous Supreme Court precedent that there is no 4th Amendment expectation of privacy to be found in any data or information you give to a third party. Judge Richard Leon, back in December, ruled that the NSA surveillance efforts were so different from the situation in Smith (involving police getting dialing information on a single person from the phone company) that it wasn’t an applicable precedent in the case in front of him, brought by Larry Klayman. That case is now being appealed.
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A run-of-the-mill public records request about cell phone surveillance submitted to a local police department in Florida has unearthed blatant violations of open government laws, including an incredible seizure of state records by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is part of the Justice Department. Today the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida filed an emergency motion in state court to preserve the public’s right of access to government records.
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In terms of collecting images, no one stated anything to the contrary. The collection is likely operating like many other NSA collections — on a large scale that increases the likelihood that incidental collection of American data and content will occur. The “appropriate legal steps” are the same ones that have been used as talking points over the last year.
Likewise, no one suggested in the article that the NSA targeted US citizens. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about the NSA’s programs is the fact that they’re clearly untargeted. The NSA doesn’t select a person and start the surveillance from that point. The surveillance is pervasive and ongoing and any selection tends to occur long after tons of data/communications have been collected. It’s the after-the-fact nature of the programs that makes them so dangerous. Further, the lack of solid minimization rules means tons of data from bulk collections sits around in NSA servers just waiting for someone to find a reason to look through it. So, while the NSA may not “unilaterally target American citizens,” it has the mechanisms in place to do so.
As for Roger’s last non-denial, it was clearly stated in the New York Times article that there was no indication that the NSA had access to US drivers license databases. Rogers’ last denial addresses “some people” (whoever they are) that have a clearly wrong interpretation of the leaked documents, but doesn’t address what was actually written. And it completely avoids the undeniable fact that, with as many “input” channels as the NSA has, collecting the sort of information a drivers license database holds would be simple enough, even without direct access.
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The volume of email cloaked in encryption technology is rapidly rising as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major Internet companies try to shield their users’ online communications from government spies and other snoops.
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Edward Snowden’s recent revelation that the NSA can bug cell phones even when they are turned off left some experts split on whether it is true or not. But a group of hackers claim that at least there is a way to protect your phone from spies’ ears.
Snowden, who exposed the American government’s secret mass surveillance program, has been making headlines in the media for almost a year with shocking details about the scale of snooping by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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It was last October that the Washington Post mentioned about leaked slides from the NSA’s top secret MUSCULAR data interception program, sharing details on how the NSA was able to step in and intercept data from Google’s cloud servers through an exploitation in an SSL gap. That particular slide has proven to raise a fair amount of controversy, especially so where Google employees are concerned. The comment read, “SSL added and removed here :)”, and did not go endear itself to Google employees. Of course, revenge is a dish best served cold, and Google has not forgotten about that, having hit back in a latest Easter Egg in their latest email encryption plug-in.
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US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday he was reconstituting a task force to coordinate the work of several Department of Justice agencies on thwarting homegrown terrorism within the US.
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Cheers and laughter could be heard late last night through the walls of a small Hamburg office as staff celebrated an unlikely win; their punt to build a NSA-subverting server that encrypts everything a small business might do in the office had made bank with a record-breaking $US1 million in crowdfunding sourced in 89 mins.
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Security technologist Bruce Schneier tells DW why he finds it curious that the German BND is getting a free pass on surveillance and why Europe should take the lead on protecting privacy in the digital age.
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Last week, leaked secret documents revealed that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German equivalent to the NSA, has asked the German Parliament for an additional 300 million Euros to extend its surveillance program in an effort to rival that of the U.S. and U.K.
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The government’s secret surveillance program becomes an issue in the Portland case
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The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.
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The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.
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A year has passed since Edward Snowden started telling us what really was going on in the world. Since that date, various holders of power have been struggling – without success – to reclaim the control of the narrative, the control of the news flow.
But in the age of the net, the power of narrative rests squarely with the many, rather than with the elite. People have become aware of mass surveillance, even if they haven’t become aware of its full consequences yet. But the story is out. The proverbial cat isn’t just out of the bag, but has left the entire city and is halfway across the continent. This hasn’t prevented an ivory tower establishment from playing “no see, no hear, no speak” monkey games, pretending Snowden does not exist and that people don’t already know what we know.
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It’s the day we began to learn just how incredibly intrusive government spying on average Americans had become in this technological age. June 5, 2013 – the day we began to understand what was at stake – our freedom, our privacy, our personal lives. The day the first of many news stories – courtesy of Edward Snowden – began to paint a picture of a shocking new world.
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US companies such as Yahoo Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc threaten the cyber-security of China and its Internet users, said the People’s Daily on its microblog, in comments echoed on the front page of the English-language China Daily.
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As you read this, the United States will be waking up to the one-year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first leaks on his country’s surveillance programs to the world’s newspapers.
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A year after Edward Snowden revealed the vast scope of the US data dragnet, America is still reeling from the fallout, which damaged ties abroad and triggered fears of “Big Brother” government.
In the latest twist since Snowden handed over thousands of US intelligence secrets last June, Germany has launched a criminal probe into snooping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
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The National Security Agency’s digital face book may or may not include images scraped from Facebook. An agency spokeswoman declined to divulge that information to The New York Times.
The agency has managed to intercept millions of images, “including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images,’” according to documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Those documents describe the trove of data as presenting “tremendous untapped potential,” the Times reported.
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Thomas Drake: Well it generated a worldwide discussion and debate about surveillance and what is at stake in terms of individual sovereignty and privacy and how far the US in particular in partnership with others, including other countries and other security services as well as major telecommunication concerns and internet service providers in gathering data, collecting data and finding out everything there is to know about us. And much of it has been conducted in secret, and he was able are able to bring out significant documentation, prime evidence to actually prove it.
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Reports began to surface in early April that the IBM’s sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo—which is based in Beijing, China—was getting close scrutiny from U.S. agencies around issues of national security. Government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the FBI, buy x86 servers from IBM, as do the largest telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-lenovo-server-deal-may-take-longer-than-expected.html#sthash.m6Wan9Dl.dpuf
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The opinion of Edward Snowden is wide ranging. Some call him a traitor, others call him a patriot. The truth sits firmly in the latter. Edward Snowden is a red, white and blue patriot whose act of civil disobedience came at a price everyone should revere.
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The NSA document leaker joins Google, Mozilla, Reddit, and many others in a campaign and day of action that aims to help Internet users “take back” their privacy.
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It was eight years ago that we first learned of a man named Mark Klein. He didn’t work for the government; he worked for the phone company. When he started asking questions about a secret room in the building where he worked, there was no turning back.
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Yesterday, advocates for government transparency argued for the release of more documents that could reveal how the Federal Intelligence Act Surveillance (FISA) Court has provided oversight of the US intelligence community and confirm which telecom companies cooperated with the government. It’s the latest step in an uphill battle that’s been waged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2011 for records they say may reveal disputes between the FISA court and the intelligence community, confirm the existence additional surveillance programs, and provide official acknowledgment of some essential details of known programs that have been already revealed in the media.
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Earth to Glenn Greenwald: If you write a book slamming the New York Times, it’s naïve to expect favorable treatment in the New York Times Book Review. Been there, done that. Twice as a matter of fact.
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Australia ”pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.
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Things seem to have gone downhill since then. One NSA slide details a program called BLARNEY by which the agency pressures such U.S. corporate vassals as AT&T into assisting with the illicit surveillance of their customers. Seeing this for the first time, I had a flash of inspiration. The reader may recall how the ACLU kept trying to sue the NSA for the bulk warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, including presumably those American citizens who work for the ACLU, but the courts wouldn’t grant them standing to launch the suit since all of that was classified and thus couldn’t be revealed in court. What the ACLU needs to do now is track down whoever it is whose homemade St. Patrick’s Day block party invitations the NSA ripped off to get this BLARNEY logo and have them sue for copyright infringement.
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Prof Kevin P.Clements calls for a New Zealand commission of inquiry to re-evaluate the value of the Five Eyes security arrangement.
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As reported earlier this week, the National Security Agency is now collecting photos from online to create a massive facial recognition database. Americans shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about that, says new National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, according to Washington Post article today headlined, “New NSA chief seeks to reassure public on surveillance.”
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The new head of the National Security Agency has distanced himself from previous government suggestions that whistleblower Edward Snowden is a foreign spy. Officials including former NSA director Keith Alexander have contended that Snowden may have worked with Russian or other foreign intelligence agencies. But at a public forum with Bloomberg News, new NSA chief Michael Rogers shot down that theory.
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The American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating nearly a year after journalist Glenn Greenwald initiated a deluge of reporting on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, including a cache of NSA documents stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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CCR President Emeritus Michael Ratner and NSA whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney examine the relationship between the NSA and U.S. global dominance, the stance of Democrats and Republicans towards surveillance, and mainstream media coverage of these issues
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A tool to target dissidents
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Google and other companies are using encryption on emails, but they are still not completely private. One thing that many people fail to realize is that the encryption is from the server side. It does not stop those at the email providers from reading the content of emails.
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A pledge for developers and site operators: Here are best-practices for people who make mobile apps, host sites, and write code to make the Internet more secure against mass surveillance. For example, mobile developers can use cert pinning and end-to-end encryption to keep their users safe and private. And websites can use SSL to protect their users’ privacy when they use the net.
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As June 5 approaches — and with it the one year anniversary of the first reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks — the privacy community is calling supporters to redouble efforts to improve the NSA “reform bill,” which I call the USA Freedumber Act, in the Senate.
I explained here why the Senate is unlikely to improve USA Freedumber in any meaningful way. The votes just aren’t there — not even in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Benjamin Franklin said it all: “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.”
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More than 12 years after 9/11, the United States continues to have a foreign policy mindset that demands zero tolerance on terrorism and treats even minor threats like existential challenges. In the pursuit of perfect security and in meeting the demands of a hugely expansive view of American power, the U.S. has failed to consider the ultimate consequences and potential political fallout — both at home and abroad — of what achieving that goal means. And that’s a challenge that goes far beyond the NSA.
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Recent revelations that the government can remotely turn on a phone and listen to conversations come without press examination if this historic spying capability is being misused
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Civil Rights
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Ashley Smith, a nineteen year old, mentally ill, inmate committed suicide while under suicide watch at a Correctional Institute in Canada. Ms. Smith was imprisoned at fifteen for throwing apples at a postal worker. During her imprisonment she suffered multiple cases of emotional and physical abuse. The first and mildest abuse she suffered was being denied sanitary products and adequate toilet paper during her menstrual cycle. The worst abuse she suffered was a combination of emotional and physical, and occurred when Ms. Smith was transferred between nine different institutions seventeen times. When she was transferred between institutes she was restrained by officers so she could be hooded and duct taped to her seat while she pleaded with them to stop hurting her.
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But in a groundbreaking ruling in January, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman granted Daoud’s attorney Thomas Durkin the right to examine secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act records, which Durkin hopes could provide grounds for having the case against Daoud thrown out.
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Daoud was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in September 2012 at the age of 18 after allegedly trying to detonate a device given to him by an undercover agent. He later pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and trying to damage or destroy a building with an explosive.
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Over the weekend the government of Qatar brokered a dramatic deal between the US and the Taliban to swap five Guantánamo prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier held as a prisoner of war for almost five years. Flexing his political clout, President Obama demonstrated his ability to navigate with ease through the Congressional obstacles in the way of releasing prisoners from Guantánamo. Some House Republicans accused the President of breaking the law to get his way. But the Obama administration made it clear that the President had added a “signing statement” to the bill restricting the transfer of Guantánamo detainees, saying that the restrictions violated his Constitutional prerogative.
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He’s Venezuela’s democratically elected president. It doesn’t matter. Washington’s dirty war continues.
It’s done so since Chavez’s December 1998 election. He became president in February 1999. He served until his March 5, 2013 death.
He survived Washington’s April 2002 coup attempt. A 64-day 2002 – 03 general strike and oil management lockout.
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President Harry Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.
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New Labour were the chief culprits in moving Britain away from a liberal democracy and into an authoritarian state.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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I am writing in response to NPRM 14-28 — your request for comments regarding the “Open Internet”.
I am a trained computer scientist and I work in the technology industry. (I’m a software developer and software freedom activist.) I have subscribed to home network services since 1989, starting with the Prodigy service, and switching to Internet service in 1991. Initially, I used a PSTN single-pair modem and eventually upgraded to DSL in 1999. I still have a DSL line, but it’s sadly not much faster than the one I had in 1999, and I explain below why.
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On June 6, during the next Council meeting, ministers will be invited to share their position regarding the proposal for a Regulation on Net Neutrality. After the rise of eurosceptical forces in the recent European elections, will the European governments be ready to support the European Parliament’s vote and defend our freedoms?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Three years ago, we wrote about how Disney applied for a trademark on “SEAL Team 6″ just two days after the Navy SEAL’s Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. While public outcry resulted in Disney dropping the trademark application a few weeks later, the situation apparently woke up some trademark lawyers at the Pentagon to get busy trademarking.
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Copyrights
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Things have been getting more interesting on the Malibu Media front lately. The company, which is responsible for 40% of all copyright cases, has certainly faced claims of abusive and seriously questionable practices. But some new information suggests it goes much further down the rabbit hole of questionableness. Like Righthaven and Prenda before it, new accusations are coming out about some highly questionable shell games to try to hide what’s really going on.
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