06.25.15
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”
–Microsoft's chief evangelist
Summary: DockerCon gives room to Microsoft propagandists who want to divert the audience’s attention from secure GNU/Linux focus to proprietary Windows with back doors and surveillance
DOCKER rapidly grows in terms of adoption (and hype). It is Free/libre software and it is predominantly a GNU/Linux technology, like much of the whole container phenomenon. This is why Microsoft cannot just leave it alone (read: tolerate it).
Days ago we saw two misleading articles from Matt Weinberger about the Russinovich spiel, pretending that Microsoft and GNU/Linux can now sing Kumbaya. “Microsoft loves Linux” pins are now being distributed, according to a photo from this new article which says “Microsoft has doubled down on its support for Docker, further integrating the software container tech with Azure and Visual Studio Online and demoing the first-ever containerized application spanning both Windows and Linux systems.”
Proprietary software is the last thing Docker needs. Docker staff needs to learn to say “no”, having witnessed what happens to just about every company that liaises with Microsoft (even charities like OLPC). A lot of Microsoft proxies like ‘Open Tech’, CodePlex and others have virtually become non-existent, but the Trojan horse strategy has not completely failed yet. It just keeps evolving.
“To drive the point home,” wrote Neil McAllister, “there were plenty of free T-shirts available at the Microsoft booth on the subject of uniting Windows and Linux via Docker. There were even buttons with the catchphrase that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella coined in November, “Microsoft ♥ Linux.””
For those who actually believe that Microsoft has changed its colours, here are just some recent doings (of Nadella) which ought to remind us that Microsoft actually hates GNU/Linux:
What next after “Microsoft ♥ Linux” PR? “UEFI ♥ Linux”? “SCO ♥ Linux”? “Novell ♥ Red Hat”? The bigger the lie, the more confusing and provocative it becomes. Perhaps provocation really is the goal (see Microsoft’s quote at the top of this article). █
![Microsoft loves Linux](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/microsoft_loves_linux.jpg)
Photo credit: Neil McAllister
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06.24.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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“Linux has won in the data center — [it is] one of two in the data center. Think about that,” Cormier said to an applauding crowd.
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As the CEO of Docker, Ben Golub is at the forefront of the container revolution. In only two years, Docker has grown into a huge ecosystem that is starting to see widespread adoption across the enterprise market. The company has nearly quadrupled in size, and the statistics for applications are even more impressive.
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Docker has announced the availability of its commercial solutions and the Docker Trusted Registry, which is software that lets organizations securely store their container images. The Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) is a registry for Docker container images that provides an on-premise option for storing and sharing Docker images. It offers “a highly-available registry server that provides LDAP and Active Directory integration with existing authentication systems,” and “it also offers role-based access control (RBAC) and audit logs for authorization and compliance for authorization and compliance,” according to the company.
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Kernel Space
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The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) updates for Linux 4.2 are exciting for x86 Linux users.
The KVM x86 code in Linux 4.2 adds support for the System Management Mode, which is needed for supporting UEFI Secure Boot in guest VMs. As part of this comes KVM support for handling multiple address spaces.
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The latest subsystem update worth commenting on for the Linux 4.2 merge window are the crypto(graphy) updates with this new kernel version.
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Zefan Li had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release for the 3.4 kernel series, Linux kernel 3.4.108 LTS, a long-term support version that will receive updates for a few more years.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s another step forward today in NVIDIA’s open-source/Linux hardware support! NVIDIA will begin supplying hardware reference headers for the Nouveau DRM driver.
While NVIDIA right now is the primary choice for Linux gamers and those willing to use proprietary hardware drivers, the same cannot be said about those that are strict into using fully open-source code on their systems. The NVIDIA open-source support has lagged behind Intel and AMD on Linux with NVIDIA not officially supporting the community-based, mostly-reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. The only exception so far has been for the NVIDIA Tegra hardware where they actively have been working on the Tegra K1 (and newer) graphics driver support for the open-source driver.
Read more
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Applications
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openDCIM is an free and open source solution for Data Center Infrastructure Management. It is already used by a few organizations, and is quickly improving due to the efforts of its developers. The number one goal for openDCIM is to eliminate the excuse for anybody to ever track their data center inventory using a spreadsheet or word processing document again. We’ve all been there in the past, which is what drove us developers to create this project.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The new Humble Borderlands Bundle brings a lot of Linux titles, and it will be available for purchase for the next couple of weeks.
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Sword Coast Legends is a new RPG developed by n-Space and published by Digital Extremes on Steam. The developer confirmed the fact that it would be available for the Linux and SteamOS platforms as well.
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Galactic Civilizations III is a massive strategy game developed by Stardock Entertainment, and it was released on the Windows platform all the way back in May 2015. Now the developers are saying that there might be a chance to see the game on Linux, after Vulkan launches.
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Cossacks 3 is a new real time strategy from GSC Game World that is scheduled to be released by the end of 2015, and it will have Linux and SteamOS support.
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The underlying bones of Linux gaming just keep on getting stronger. Crytek’s CryEngine now supports Linux, and that means support for SteamOS, too.
This is just the latest big game engine to support Linux, following in the footsteps of Valve’s Source engine, Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, and Unity 5. It’s easier than ever for developers making games on top of these engines to add support for Linux and SteamO
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Alexander Larsson has formally announced xdg-app today as the desktop app sandboxing system for GNOME environments.
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Red Hat Family
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At the show, the chip designer will point to the growing momentum around the hardware and software ecosystem for 64-bit ARM systems.
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Richard Hughes announced today the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for hardware vendors to be able to upload their firmware files — thus making them redistributable to fwupd users (such as with Fedora 23+) assuming they comply with the AppStream specification.
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As some of you may know, I’ve spent the last couple of months talking with various Red Hat partners and other OpenHardware vendors that produce firmware updates. These include most of the laptop vendors that you know and love, along with a few more companies making very specialized hardware.
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Samsung is partnering with Red Hat to build mobile apps for business users in a deal that recalls Apple’s tie-up with IBM this time last year.
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Denise Dumas and Katrinka McCallum are open source leaders at technology giant Red Hat. Denise steers the engineering team that builds Red Hat’s flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Katrinka heads up the team responsible for the operational backbone of engineering and business units at Red Hat.
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The 2015 Red Hat Summit takes place this week in Boston, and with app performance and system optimization being a key concern in this new world of virtualized and container based systems, topping the list of desirable personalities to chat with is Jeremy Eder.
Eder, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, will deliver three sessions at the summit about topics such as virtualization, containerization, system optimization and the performance analysis and tuning of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
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Red Hat is convinced that the future, and clouds, belong to containers. In today’s release of its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, OpenShift Enterprise 3, Red Hat is basing it on Docker containers, Kubernetes orchestration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.
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Shippable, Inc. today announced that it has formed a new collaboration with Red Hat, Inc. to provide the only continuous integration/continuous delivery solution to run natively on Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise 3 platform. Coinciding with the announcement, Shippable also announced the release and beta availability of the product, Shippable CI/CD for Openshift Enterprise 3.
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Fedora
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Testing updates this way can apply to any of the packages within Atomic Host. Since Atomic Host has a small footprint the package you want to test might not be included, but if it is then this is a great way to test things out.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Even though the recently released Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition has pretty good specs, I think it’s safe to say that the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the first high end Ubuntu phone. The device looks top notch and feels high quality – at 144 x 75.2 x 8.9 mm, the phone is robust and the ergonomics are quite good.
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It’s been a long journey for Canonical, but the company finally has its Ubuntu system in the wild and in the hands of users. In fact, you can get three Ubuntu phones right now and here they are.
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Ford is trying to enter the world of autonomous vehicles, and the company is trying to play catchup with the rest of the crowd, and it looks like they are also using Ubuntu to make that happen.
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It would appear that there’s now a special, unofficial edition of the Ubuntu Linux operating system optimized for Chromebook and Chromebox computers that are powered by an Intel Haswell processor.
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Plex Media Server, a software that makes it easy for everyone to play movies and TV shows on the computer, has been upgraded to version 0.9.12.4 and is available for download.
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How many containers can you run on a server? At OpenStack Summit Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, showed that it could run 536 Linux containers on an Intel server with mere 16GBs of RAM. That’s great, but now how do you network them? Canonical thinks it has the answer: Fan Networking.
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Sierra Wireless has introduced its next-generation of AirPrime WP Series of smart wireless modules for the development of connected products and applications for the Internet of Things. The WP Series provides an integrated device-to-cloud architecture enabling IoT developers to build a Linux-based product using a single module that sends valuable user and product data to the cloud.
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InHand’s tiny “Fury-M6″ COM/SBC hybrid adds wireless, eMMC, battery support, and more to Freescale’s new, dime-sized, i.MX6 Dual based SCM-i.MX6D module.
The InHand Fury-M6, announced this week at the Freescale Technical Forum (FTF), appears to be the first board-level product to incorporate Freescale’s new dime-sized SCM-i.MX6D module. The Fury-M6 targets portable medical diagnostics, autonomous vehicle/UAV control, portable cameras with image analysis, and industrial sensors with data analytics, says InHand.
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Phones
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Android
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The Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the well-received original Motorola Moto X and the Moto X 2014 started rolling out Monday. Only last week, Motorola’s David Schuster updated his Google+ account to confirm the release of both the first- and second-generation Moto X models.
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Sony on Monday announced the availability of Android M Developer Preview images for select Xperia devices in the company’s Open Device programme, along with other tools. Users should note the builds are still in testing stages, and currently have key features missing.
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When news first broke that Lenovo was buying Motorola, plenty of people worried the company might push its heavy-handed approach to Android onto Motorola’s devices.
Well, surprise, surprise: Here we are, more than a year later — and it appears the exact opposite is happening.
Motorola execs have repeated emphatically that the company has no plans to change its “stock-plus” approach to Android software. And now, Lenovo is the one taking a cue from Moto and rethinking the way it handles the operating system.
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Two trains made of fiber, copper and code are on a collision course, as the widespread popularity of Android devices and the general move to IPv6 has put some businesses in a tough position, thanks to Android’s lack of support for a central component in the newer standard.
DHCPv6 is an outgrowth of the DHCP protocol used in the older IPv4 standard – it’s an acronym for “dynamic host configuration protocol,” and is a key building block of network management. Nevertheless, Google’s wildly popular Android devices – which accounted for 78% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of this year – don’t support DHCPv6 for address assignment.
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The Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update has pushed out to the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge and now the Galaxy S5. And while it brings bug fixes and enhancements, it brings some problems of its own. Today, we take a look at a few things you need to know about Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1.1 problems.
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Looking for a new Android Wear watch face? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Thanks to Google’s dedicated Google Play Store hub specifically for finding Android Wear watch faces, they are now easier than ever to find and download, with over 1,500 currently available to choose from.
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So you’ve grown tired of Apple’s walled garden of apps and the iron grip it maintains over the iOS platform. Well, the freedom of Android welcomes you with open arms, but don’t forget to bring your data along for the ride!
Apple doesn’t make it particularly easy to move your data from iOS to Android—it’s more interested in moving people in the other direction. Still, with just a few tools and some patience, you can be up and running on Android without missing a beat.
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Less than a couple of weeks after there were reports that BlackBerry is planning to launch an Android smartphone this fall, CEO John Chen has confirmed that the company would make such a move only if they can make the phone secure enough.
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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Android. As a result, I use and test a lot of different Android phones. I plan to start actually reviewing more of them.
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The use of open source software has become more and more commonplace as the technological world advances. It powers millions of devices many of which we depend on every single day. In fact this very web page you are reading this post on is powered by bits of open source code.
Software would be useless if there were not people there to use it and there are many different types of people who use open source software every day.
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The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform for accelerating the introduction of new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) products and services. We recently issued our first community-led software release, OPNFV Arno. This foundational release is intended for anyone exploring NFV deployments, developing Virtual Network Functions (VNF) applications, or interested in NFV performance and use case-based testing. With developers in mind, Arno provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of the ETSI NFV architecture.
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Facebook has begun opening up source code for its Nuclide IDE, which is designed to offer a unified experience for Web and native mobile development.
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Events
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This week sees Red Hat host its 11th annual ‘Summit’ conference, exhibition, symposium, developer hackfest, analyst & press outreach session and all round communications to partners and customers smorgasbord.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack platform is an open-source collaboration to develop a private cloud ecosystem, delivering IT services at web scale.
OpenStack is divided into a number of discrete projects, each with a code name with parallels to the purpose of the project itself.
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Education
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Usually, the higher-ed industry has a reputation as being one of the slowest adopters of new technology. But when it comes to open source software (OSS), campus IT departments are ahead of other industry and consumer tech adoption curves, says Scott Wilson, service manager of OSS Watch at the University of Oxford.
“On the face of it, higher education has been relatively quick to realize the benefits, notes Wilson. “Over 50 percent of higher education institutions use open source, both on the server and on the desktop. And one of the great open source success stories in higher education is the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).”
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Funding
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Simply put, Roundcube is the unsung work horse of web mail.
But a decade is an eternity in technology. When Roundcube started, mobile devices were large, clunky affairs used by the few. Today they are the most commonly used communication device. Roundcube Next is today’s answer to that radical change. Instead of once more embarking alone on that ten year journey, Roundcube Next is about building a strong, healthy and diverse Open Source community to achieve that task within 12 to 18 months.
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Manchester Storm are to reform and make a return to ice hockey’s Elite League next season.
The will replace Hull Stingrays in the league following their liquidation.
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Iceland has long been one of the more right-leaning Nordic countries. In contrast to Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all have a long tradition of electing Social Democratic governments, Iceland’s parliament has been dominated by right-of-center parties for all but four years since World War II. The only break in that streak came in 2009, when the left won for the first time ever—and elected the world’s first openly gay head of state. The unusual result came about because the global financial meltdown hit Iceland with particular ferocity, but tradition seemingly reasserted itself four years later when the right-leaning Independence and Progressive parties regained power in a landslide.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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British intelligence agency GCHQ is facing fresh calls to reveal the extent of its involvement in the US targeted killing programme after details of a fatal drone strike in Yemen were included in a top secret memo circulated to agency staff.
A leading barrister asked by the Guardian to review a number of classified GCHQ documents said they raised questions about British complicity in US strikes outside recognised war zones and demonstrated the need for the government to come clean about the UK’s role.
The documents, provided to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times, discuss how a joint US, UK and Australian programme codenamed Overhead supported the strike in Yemen in 2012.
The files also show GCHQ and Overhead developed their ability to track the location of individuals – essential for the targeted killing programme – in both Yemen and Pakistan. The legality of the US’s lethal operations in both countries has been questioned by international lawyers and human rights groups.
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Corporate media are demonstrably reluctant to use the word “terrorist” with regards to Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof–even though the massacre would seem to meet the legal definition of terrorism, as violent crimes that “appear to be intended…to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
Generally, news outlets don’t explain why they aren’t calling Roof a terrorist suspect; they just rarely use the word. But the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump gave it a shot in a piece headlined “Why We Shouldn’t Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist” (6/19/15), and his rationale is worth taking a look at.
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Yet there was at least one news item that ran the day after the shooting that was not afraid to refer to it as a terrorist attack: “US State Senator Killed by Terrorist With White Supremacist Sympathies, 8 Others Dead,” reads the headline of a news item that appeared on Sahara Reporters, a New York City-based news website that primarily covers government corruption in Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria.
The Sahara Reporters piece uses the word “terrorist” six times to describe Roof and his alleged action, including in the headline, the subhead and a photo caption. The words “mental illness,” “troubled” and “loner” do not appear — in fact, no speculation whatsoever is made regarding Roof’s mental state or stability. Instead, South Carolina’s “known hate groups” are mentioned to provide context for Roof’s alleged actions, and Roof’s white supremacist activities and the historic allusions made by the patches on his jacket are front and center in the piece. And the massacre is clearly contextualized as occurring at “a time where the persecution of black ethnic minorities in the United States has been making world headlines.”
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In theory, factchecking is one of the most important functions of journalism. In practice, systematic efforts by corporate media to “factcheck” political statements are often worse than useless.
Take PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Tribune, and its recent offering “Is Barack Obama Correct That Mass Killings Don’t Happen in Other Countries?”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In a landmark case that may set a very important precedent for other countries around the world, especially within Europe, the Dutch government has been ordered by the courts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent.
The ruling came from a class-action lawsuit that was brought before the Dutch courts by Urgenda in 2012. The case, rather magnificently, was based on human rights laws. Specifically, Urgenda asked the courts to “declare that global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius will lead to a violation of fundamental human rights worldwide,” and that the Dutch government is “acting unlawfully by not contributing its proportional share to preventing a global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius.”
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Four large bombs exploded underwater by the Royal Navy were to blame for a mass stranding which killed 19 pilot whales on the north coast of Scotland in 2011, government scientists have concluded.
A long-delayed report released on Wednesday by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs says that the noise from the explosions could have damaged the hearing and navigational abilities of the whales, causing them to beach and die.
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Finance
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As the EU-U.S. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement vote was postponed in the European Parliament on June 10th, the European Union is on the precipice of a major decision. Lurking in the background is another key decision about the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).
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While the threat of TPP draws ever closer, there are other trade agreements on the horizon that will prove equally malicious to user freedom. Today is the day we must fight back.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The single-minded groups are popping up on all manner of issues, including to lobby on rules regulating commercial drones that weigh less than 55 pounds, to rewrite the nation’s patent laws and to engage in the big legislative fight over the Export-Import Bank.
Coalitions offer lobbyists a big advantage by allowing firms to collect combined fees from a number of corporations and interest groups that may not otherwise engage on an issue. For instance, a company may not consider an issue pressing enough on which to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the idea of spending a few thousand dollars — that’s then combined with similarly smaller fees from other coalition members — is more enticing.
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In crafting the budget, Walker is taking his cues from the American Federation for Children (AFC), a major force for school privatization nationwide. It is funded and chaired by billionaire Betsy DeVos, and pushes its privatization agenda in the states with high-dollar lobbying and attack ads.
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Censorship
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In the documentary Mad Max: Fury Road, we learned how Australia is controlled by a psychotic strongman who believes in traditional gender roles, strict limits on immigration, and social control through imposed scarcity. This is why Tony Abbott, current Prime Minister of Australia, announced his new Internet censorship plan by warning Aussies, “Do not, my friends, become addicted to the Web.”
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Privacy
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Finally, no measures were agreed on on the anonymisation of data. Only the pseudonymisation is considered, which is totally insufficient to preserve the anonymity of a person. Pseudonymisation within the processing of personal data is not protection at all and is only another gift for private companies which will allow them to work, with complete impunity, on data whose the origin can be easily found. This gift is re-enforced by the will to authorise profiling person with their explicit agreement. Such an authorisation is necessary but insufficient if there is not a strict framework on the finalities of the profiling. The absence of a regulation of the issue of Safe Harbor in spite of the adoption of the Moraes 2014 report is making the breaches in the protection of personal data every time wider.
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It’s a sad day for freedom! French representatives just adopted the French Surveillance Law. As an ironic echo to the recent WikiLeaks revelations about NSA spying on French political authorities, this vote calls for a new type of resistance for citizens.
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The French president, François Hollande, is holding an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council after claims that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012. According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.
The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, Socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.
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The United States has eavesdropped on at least three French presidents and a whole raft of senior officials and politicians in France for at least six years, according to secret documents obtained by WikiLeaks and revealed here by Mediapart. The top secret reports from America’s National Security Agency (NSA) show that the phones of presidents François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac were all tapped. But they also show that the espionage carried out on a supposedly key ally of Washington’s went even further and deeper, and that senior diplomats, top civil servants and politicians also routinely had their phones tapped. The documents seen by Mediapart reveal proof of the spying on the French state that took place from 2006 to 2012 but there is no reason to suggest that this espionage did not start before 2006 and has not continued since. The revelations are certain to spark a major diplomatic row and highlight once again the uncontrolled and aggressive nature of American spying on friends and foes alike, as first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Mediapart’s Fabrice Arfi and Jérôme Hourdeaux and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks report.
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Today, 23 June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing “Espionnage Élysée”, a collection of TOP SECRET intelligence reports and technical documents from the US National Security Agency (NSA) concerning targeting and signals intelligence intercepts of the communications of high-level officials from successive French governments over the last ten years.
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Hollande said in a statement that the two spoke by telephone Wednesday after the release of WikiLeaks documents about NSA intercepts of conversations involving Hollande and his two predecessors between 2006 and 2012.
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Reports in France suggest the US spied on French presidents from a secret spy nest on the roof of its embassy in Paris, which stands just a stone’s throw from the Elysée palace.
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It’s hard to pretend to be surprised. Since Edward Snowden revealed, in June 2013, the planetary scope of the electronic surveillance and data collection programs carried out by American intelligence agencies, we have gone from surprise to surprise. We discovered, amongst other things, that this mass surveillance went as far as eavesdropping on the German chancellor’s phone conversations. It also enabled Airbus to be spied on by the German secret services on behalf of the American agencies. Nothing, therefore, should surprise us any more. Sooner or later, we were bound to have a confirmation that the French presidents and top-ranking officials were also spied on by the United States. We now have the proof, according to the WikiLeaks documents published, on June 23rd, by the French daily newspaper Libération and and the Mediapart investigative website
Knowing is one thing, accepting is another. Such practices are obviously unacceptable! Nevertheless, we must not be naive. Intelligence is a crucial tool in the struggle against terrorism. The French parliament has recently approved a far ranging bill to reinforce its interception capabilities. Some provisions of the text have been vividly criticised by civil liberties campaigners, who point out French intelligence services could use them to bypass the right to privacy of French citizens – and even more so, the right to privacy of foreign nationals. In this fight, intelligence services across Europe do need to cooperate with the US, and they have to be able to keep doing so… But only within the framework of the law.
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U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed in a phone call with his French counterpart Francois Hollande on Wednesday Washington’s commitment to end spying practices deemed “unacceptable” by its allies.
The presidents’ conversation, announced by Hollande’s office, came after transparency lobby group WikiLeaks revealed on Tuesday that U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on the last three French presidents.
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The directive was stern and uncompromising. In the depths of the Cold War, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to undertake a new mission: Identify every gay and suspected gay working for the federal government.
Only Hoover didn’t describe his targets as gays. He called them “sex deviates.”
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GCHQ’s covert surveillance of two international human rights groups was illegal, the judicial tribunal responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services has ruled.
The UK government monitoring agency retained emails for longer than it should have and violated its own internal procedures, according to a judgment by the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT). But it ruled that the initial interception was lawful in both cases.
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British spies have received government permission to intensively study software programs for ways to infiltrate and take control of computers. The GCHQ spy agency was vulnerable to legal action for the hacking efforts, known as “reverse engineering,” since such activity could have violated copyright law. But GCHQ sought and obtained a legally questionable warrant from the Foreign Secretary in an attempt to immunize itself from legal liability.
GCHQ’s reverse engineering targeted a wide range of popular software products for compromise, including online bulletin board systems, commercial encryption software and anti-virus programs. Reverse engineering “is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and prevent detection of our activities,” the electronic spy agency said in a warrant renewal application.
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The once-secretive, now-notorious Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group ran its online propaganda and manipulation operations at home as well as abroad.
JTRIG’s domestic operations used fake accounts to “deter,” “promote distrust” and “discredit” in political discussions on social media, uploaded fake book/magazine articles with “incorrect information,” hacked websites, set up ecommerce sites that were fraudulent operations designed to rip off their adversaries and so on. They relied on psychological research on inspiring “obedience” and “conformity” to inform their work.
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The spy unit responsible for some of the United Kingdom’s most controversial tactics of surveillance, online propaganda and deceit focuses extensively on traditional law enforcement and domestic activities — even though officials typically justify its activities by emphasizing foreign intelligence and counterterrorism operations.
Documents published today by The Intercept demonstrate how the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the signals intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is involved in efforts against political groups it considers “extremist,” Islamist activity in schools, the drug trade, online fraud and financial scams.
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Last Friday the folks at Reason confirmed what I suggested on Thursday — that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, after hitting Reason with a federal grand jury subpoena to unmask anonymous hyperbolic commenters, secured a gag order that prevented them from writing about it.
Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch describe how it all went down. Read it.
So, the truth is out — and it’s more outrageous than you thought, even more outrageous than it appears at first glance.
What, you might ask, could be more outrageous than the United States Department of Justice issuing a questionable subpoena targeting speech protected by the First Amendment, and then abusing the courts to prohibit journalists from writing about it?
The answer lies in the everyday arrogance of unchecked power.
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Civil Rights
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The Council of Europe, the self-proclaimed “democratic conscience of Greater Europe,” urged the United States on Tuesday to allow NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to return home and make the case that his actions had positive effects.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Net neutrality is the principle that Internet Service Providers should treat all data on the Internet equally. It’s about minimising the restrictions on which parts of the Internet you can access. And it’s about allowing startups to compete with big Internet firms and supporting innovation in the digital economy.
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Negotiations on Net Neutrality between the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union (trialogue) started on 11 March in order to settle an agreement on the final regulation. Political groups send few representatives to the trialogue but political groups do not necessarily adopt it and compromise with a text that does not respect main democratic values. Citizens shall urgently call all S&D and ALDE Members of European Parliament (MEPs), who are about to decide, in the next days, of their group positions, and urge them to resist against a text that would infringe fundamental rights and liberties of any European citizen. La Quadrature has sent MEPs the following letter.
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Posted in Site News at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Vladimir Putin loves puppies!
Summary: The ‘Microsoft loves Linux’ nonsense cannot be put to rest, as that tired old lie keeps resurfacing in the media
Linking to a rather poor article from Matt Weinberger (saying that “Microsoft is working with its most bitter enemies”), iophk, our reader, called it “entryism.”
“Also,” he wrote, “can any normal person or team even build one of the containers from source? I thought not. Between stuff like systemd and certain containers, we’re seeing a new kind of closed, proprietary software.”
“Between stuff like systemd and certain containers, we’re seeing a new kind of closed, proprietary software.”
–iophkWeinberger wrote another article a short moment ago. It’s the latest Microsoft puff piece with the “Microsoft loves Linux” mythology. After Russinovich glorification (the man who pretends there is a “new Microsoft” and also openwashes Windows) we inevitably see this rather bizarre new article in which Microsoft wants to sell us the illusion that it stopped attacking Linux, despite attacking it on many ways, e.g. UEFI ‘secure’ boot, patent lawsuits, bribes etc. As a reminder, see these posts (a series of six) from a few months ago:
Microsoft hates GNU/Linux. When it participates it’s in order to make Linux Windows-dependent (see Hyper-V for instance) or devour the platform in various other ways so as to make Microsoft’s non-Windows cash cows take over, in due course. This has nothing to do with Free/libre software as trying to make it proprietary software-dependent is not a contribution. It’s derailment. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 9:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
![Michael S. Rogers](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Admiral_Michael_S._Rogers_USN.jpg)
“I don’t want a back door. I want a front door.” — Director of the NSA (2015)
Summary: Microsoft decides to leave Windows with flaws in it, claiming that fixing the flaws would not be worth Microsoft’s resources
FOR A LONG period of time (3 months or more) Microsoft refused to fix a serious flaw in Windows. It only did something about it when it was too late because the public had found out. Microsoft blamed the messenger.
This is not the exception, it’s pretty much the norm. Some Windows flaws exist for as long as 15 years, but they have no "branding" like a name or a logo.
“People with access to the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons still use Windows XP.”“Dustin Childs says the company couldn’t get Microsoft to patch an IE exploit,” says this new report, pointing to HP’s Web site. “Since Microsoft feels these issues do not impact a default configuration of IE,” Childs wrote, “it is in their judgment not worth their resources and the potential regression risk” (a lot more damning information can be found in the HP Security Research Blog).
Given Microsoft’s cooperation with the NSA on back door access, this hardly surprises us. Even more sad than this is a new report about the US Navy wasting millions in taxpayers’ money to run an operating system initially released in 2001. People with access to the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons still use Windows XP. As IDG put it:
The U.S. Navy is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to keep up to 100,000 computers afloat because it has yet to transition away from Windows XP.
After the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) disaster (Windows involved), we oughtn’t be too shocked about some nuclear disaster happening because of dependence of ancient Windows. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 9:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft is hiding the price tag
Summary: More proof that Microsoft charges quite a lot for Vista 10 (at OEM level), despite the perpetual deception about costs
“NOT FREE” is the only way to describe Vista 10, despite repeated lies from Microsoft and its boosters [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Vista 10 not just nonfree (proprietary) but also not free (non-gratis) and exceedingly expensive. There is no other way to put it.
We gradually see (or start seeing) Vista 10 puff pieces that promise us everything and make this yet-unreleased piece of software sound like the best thing to ever reach planet Earth. We caution our readers and ask them to remember that Microsoft bribes bloggers, journalists, etc. who review the latest Windows before anyone else gains access to it. In addition, we saw Microsoft shamefully blacklist ‘unwanted’ voices, then ask the media to claim that reviews (bribed for at approximately $1000 a pop) are largely positive. It’s intended to shape consensus before the release. It’s trend-setting by gross manipulation.
Regarding the cost of Vista 10 (hidden in OEM contracts, under NDA), now we have a clue. According to the media in Taiwan, “Microsoft has been talking to notebook brand vendors about the licensing of Windows 10 recently and is planning to charge extra fees for notebook models with high-end hardware such as Core i7 processors or Full HD display.”
So Microsoft is quietly raising the price of Windows. There’s nothing “free” about it. “Expect GNU/Linux to have a really great year,” writes Robert Pogson. Microsoft hopes to bamboozle people into the false belief that Windows and GNU/Linux are the same price. It’s all about perception, even if by repeatedly lying. █
“There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”
–Steve Ballmer
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Endowing/bribing the media not a wise policy
Summary: Poll shows that the European Patent Office (EPO) comes under fire for its media strategy which involves wasting taxpayers’ money on fake/organic media coverage that glorifies the EPO
PROTESTS are said to have just taken place in Munich. EPO abuse was the cause. Although there are no reports (yet) about the gathering, not even about the scale or number of people in attendance, it is the principle that counts. Maybe the protesters too should ape their managers and hire ‘media partners’ such as Les Echos? Probably not. Only Benoît Battistelli would be desperate enough to do that.
We are meanwhile learning that patent lawyers in Europe, who are the target audience of this blog, don’t have a positive opinion of the EPO. As a recap:
A few weeks ago, the IPKat asked whether the EPO ought to be organising and funding the European Inventor of the Year award. His concerns were twofold: the resources that are devoted to this event, and the fundamental question of whether the EPO ought to be seen to be ranking different inventions in terms of their merits.
As it turns out, “43% (296 votes) were also unsupportive of the EPO involvement: “It lies outside the powers and duties of the EPO.””
As we explained before, this is misuse of public funds. The EPO wastes public money on paid placements ('articles') and 'media partners', hoping to bury or pro-actively suppress any potentially negative publicity (even when it is very much deserved).
“The IPKat wonders whether the EPO should now review its involvement with and funding of this event,” says the above blog post, “in the light of these concerns which appear to be shared by much of the IP community (or of this blog’s readership, at least)?” █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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Oracle technology chief Larry Ellison is embarking on a journey Microsoft couldn’t complete: beating Amazon’s cloud services on price.
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Oracle was once critical of the cloud computing trend but it’s now very clear that the company is hitching its cart to the cloud. As Reuters and many media outlets are covering, founder Larry Ellison has said that “we are prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price,” in announcing robust new cloud plans this week.
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Kernel Space
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I’m announcing the release of the 3.4.108 kernel.
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The x86 EFI changes for Linux 4.2 were mailed in this morning and indeed they offer the EFI System Resource Table support as necessary for supporting UEFI 2.5+ system firmware updates.
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In preparation for the rewrite of a bunch of kernel Assembly x86 code into C, the x86 core pull request has many Assembly code changes. As explained by Ingo Molnar, “Tons of cleanups and small speedups, micro-optimizations. This is in preparation to move a good chunk of the low level entry code from assembly to C code.”
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The new CPU port of the Linux kernel is to the Renesas H8/300 micro-controler. The H8 is a family of micro-controllers from Renesas Technology and the H8/300 uses an 32-bit CPU (though there’s also versions of 8 and 16-bit, but they appear unsupported by this new port) designed for real-time control applications. The H8/300 has been around for a while and one of the many products its found in is the LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Up to now the Linux support for the H8 300 has been maintained out-of-tree.
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With Linux 4.1 having been released this week and being mid-way through 2015, here’s some Git development statistics for the newest kernel code.
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The KDBUS in-fighting between upstream Linux kernel developers was once again reignited today after a kernel developer publicly asked Linus Torvalds on the prospects of merging KDBUS.
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Jiri Kosina of SUSE has sent in the HID driver updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel and with it comes new device support.
First up, the Logitech M560 mouse is now supported with Linux 4.2. The Logitech M560 is a ~$25 wireless mouse that has a “comfort design”, Windows 8 edge menu button, thumb buttons, a hyper fast scroll wheel, and a reported eighteen month battery life.
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A brand new version of the Linux Kernel — the heartbeat of the modern world (if we you want us to be poetic about it) — has been released.
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With today’s release of systemd 221 besides enabling KDBUS support being compiled in unconditionally, it also stabilizes the new SD-BUS.
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Docker and CoreOS on Monday announced the formation of a coalition of 21 industry leaders to create the Open Container Project, a nonprofit organization seeking minimal common standards for software containers for cloud storage.
The two companies made the announcement on the opening day of Dockercon, a two-day conference covering all aspects of the Docker ecosystem.
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The version of btrfs-tools in Debian/Jessie is incapable of creating a filesystem that can be mounted by the kernel in Debian/Wheezy. If you want to use a BTRFS filesystem on Jessie and Wheezy (which isn’t uncommon with removable devices) the only options are to use the Wheezy version of mkfs.btrfs or to use a Jessie kernel on Wheezy. I recently got bitten by this issue when I created a BTRFS filesystem on a removable device with a lot of important data (which is why I wanted metadata duplication and checksums) and had to read it on a server running Wheezy. Fortunately KVM in Wheezy works really well so I created a virtual machine to read the disk. Setting up a new KVM isn’t that difficult, but it’s not something I want to do while a client is anxiously waiting for their data.
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The Linux Foundation was among those today announcing a new project formed “to establish common standards for software containers.” Companies like Red Hat, Docker, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMware have joined together to create the Open Contain Project “to enable users and companies to continue to innovate and develop container-based solutions, with confidence that their pre-existing development efforts will be protected and without industry fragmentation.”
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To be clear though, the point of the OCP is not to standardize Docker, but rather to standardize the baseline for containers. Polvi explained that with an open standard, there can be multiple implementations of the standard. So for CoreOS, it means the company will continue to work on its Rocket container technology, while Docker will continue to work on the Docker container technology.
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The Core Infrastructure Initiative announced today that they will support two Debian Developers, Holger Levsen and Jérémy Bobbio, with $200,000 to advance their Debian work in reproducible builds and to collaborate more closely with other distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenWrt to benefit from this effort.
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Graphics Stack
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Nvidia has just released a new update for the Linux branch of the long-lived driver, and it brings support for new GPUs and a number of small bug fixes.
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Longtime open-source graphics developer Luc Verhaegen has written on the Linux-SunXI about further Allwinner misbehavior. Five days ago they updated their media codec framework with various new “proprietary” files that is then being built together with LGPL-licensed code and the binary is being dlopen’ed into the LGPL’ed code.
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David Airlie has been adding output master support to the xf86-video-modesetting generic DDX as well as reverse PRIME support and other changes to benefit USB display adapters.
The recent mode-setting driver work by Airlie allows for having USB devices attached, such as the DisplayLink USB adapters, while benefiting from GLAMOR acceleration on the host GPU using this X.Org DDX compatible with any DRM/KMS driver. The GLAMOR support is contingent upon OpenGL / OpenGL ES acceleration being available.
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Back in 2013 Timothy Arceri sought crowd-funding to work on another OpenGL extension for Mesa: GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays. While progress was made on this OpenGL 4.3 extension, the “AoA” support has yet to be merged to mainline but progress is being made.
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While it doesn’t have the backing of Intel Corp, the ILO Gallium3D driver continues to advance on its own for bringing HD/Iris Graphics to Gallium3D as an alternative open-source driver to the i965 Mesa DRI driver.
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Daniel Stone at Collabora has been working on atomic mode-setting support for Wayland’s Weston compositor.
One of the primary benefits of the DRM driver supporting atomic mode-setting is that it can allow a full mode-set operation to be tested prior to actually being committed to ensure it can be properly handled by the driver and display hardware. For end-users, this is meant to yield less problems and ideally avoid any display flickering. Atomic mode-setting support has been ongoing within the Linux kernel’s DRM drivers for a while now, though more patches still have yet to be mainlined. Daniel has been leading the charge to let Weston make use of the atomic mode-setting interfaces to the Linux kernel.
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Last year work started on making libweston and now that work is being picked back up on making the Weston code-base useful to other Wayland compositors.
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For those still living on the Mesa 10.5 release train rather than the latest Mesa 10.6 stable or even Git, there’s the 10.5.8 update out this weekend.
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Today is already a good day, you can now add CRYENGINE to the official list of game engines that support Linux, so here’s to hoping more games can come over.
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Applications
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“A picture is worth a thousand words”, a phrase which emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century, refers to the notion that a single still image can present as much information as a large amount of descriptive text. Essentially, pictures convey information more effectively and efficiently than words can.
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Today we present to you a great tool that will help you to good manage the IP address.
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Dedicated server monitoring tools have largely replaced the need to manually parse log files except for the most esoteric of issues. This however raises another issue — selecting one that has the right combination of features, usability and performance. Fortunately, many free options exist if you’re willing to learn their ins and outs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Good news folks, it seems Larian are planning to release Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition on Linux at the same time as Windows!
We’ve been waiting too long for Divinity, so hopefully the extra wait for Linux gamers will have been worth it.
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Last week the beta of the Dota 2 Reborn that’s powered by Valve’s Source 2 Engine began rolling out but was initially limited to Windows. The Dota 2 Reborn for Linux has now started rolling out today for those wanting to experience this big update to Dota 2 and Valve’s underlying game engine.
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0 A.D. is easily one of the most beautiful open source games around, but it has been plagued by poor performance. Hopefully this new and faster pathfinder is a step towards a rock solid game.
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Civilization V is already a pretty massive game, and now even more so thanks to the continued support from Aspyr Media. Civ V now supports mods thanks to Steam Workshop on Linux.
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Developer and publisher Nicalis, Inc. has made an improved version of the popular physics platformer available on Steam for Linux. NightSky was originally developed by the developer of the Knytt games, Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren, but has been ported to Nicalis’ own cross-platform engine.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V, the most successful game in the franchise released Firaxis Games and ported on Linux by Aspyr Media, just received support for the Steam Workshop.
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The Linux update was due on Friday, but sadly that release was missed due to lack of time for testing. The new update is going to be massive though, so it will be more than worth the wait that’s for sure.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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One of the things we all love about Linux (sorry I mean GNU/Linux) is the amount of choice that is available to us.
When it comes to choosing a desktop environment there is an abundance of choice and each one has its own unique way of providing a user experience which the developers hope will make us happy enough to use it over one of the other products on the market.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Earlier this month I wrote about Qt developers looking at making Qt 5.6 a long-term support release. Today that decision was firmed up by Lars Knoll and he’s also reinforced the plans for making Qt 5.7 release where the code-base will take advantage of C++11 language features.
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KDE developer Alexander Mezin was looking at the Qt Wayland compositor code and rather than building yet another Wayland compositor decided to build something similar for X11. Mezin ended up building “qmlcompmgr”, a compositing manager for X11 written in Qt Quick / QML.
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A pre-alpha is out of Kexi 3, the port of the visual database creator to KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.4.
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Two weeks before voting closes we’re at a response rate of 91.38%: 604 of 661 possible votes. If you’re eligible to vote and haven’t done so yet, you have until 10am CEST on July 6 to make the response rate even higher! Note that no-award backers who have pledged 15 euros or more can also vote, though they haven’t received a survey. If this is you, please send mail to irina@krita.org, either with your vote or to ask for the list.
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The release candidate to Qt 5.5 is now available with The Qt Company hoping to officially ship this tool-kit update soon.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME 3.17.3 desktop environment, a milestone towards GNOME 3.18, will be released in the coming days and will include major updates to some of the most essential core components, including the Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier.
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The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing the release of the third milestone towards the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.
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The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing the release of the GNOME 3.17.3 desktop environment, a milestone towards GNOME 3.18, which means that many of its core components received updates, including the Epiphany web browser.
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You can see that I am staying on the path of nice, simplistic and easy-to-use design features which re-build GTG into a modern feature of GNOME. Moreover, I will introduce some of the latest additions to the Gtk library: the popovers. Thanks to these, we are able to arrange efficiently all the buttons and options within the relatively small-sized editor window. This will be great once we merge this with the master since it will be a major unifying aspect between the browser and editor.
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This time, we were only four: Mario, Fabian, Briggette and me. Mario was trying to install jhbuild build gtk+ requieres packages like sysdeps, flex, anthy and many others.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 5 is a distribution that many people where waiting for. Initially scheduled for November 2014, it was finally released on the 19th of June 2015.
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Red Hat Family
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As an open source contributor, I began as a newbie and grew into a decent contributor thanks to working on many great projects. Today, I am mentoring new contributors on how to make their first contributions to open source. So, I think I can answer this question more elaborately.
Open source organizations have projects that need contributions from everyone, from all skills and levels of expertise. There are many non-coding ways too contribute as well, like: reporting issues, writing documentation, helping with design, trying previous versions, checking quality and translation, outreach for a product, and organizing events. Doing so helps you learn more about the open source project as well as to network with the community while adding positive contributions.
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What do you do when you’re king of the Linux server mountain and you want more? In Red Hat’s case, you develop a new mobile software stack, Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP), and you partner up with the world’s top Android smartphone vendor, Samsung.
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Last year Red Hat announced its first Women in Open Source Award, created to recognize the contributions that women are making in open source technologies and communities. I was honored to be on one of the committees that reviewed more than 100 nominations and narrowed the list down to 10 finalists divided into two categories: community and academic. Then the open source community voted, and I anxiously awaited the results. I wanted every woman on both lists to win, so I knew that no matter who ended up with most votes, I’d be happy.
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Shah, currently the director of Women Who Code in Gujarat, India, also mentored at Season Of KDE, Learn IT Girls! and Google Code-In, helping students from across the globe develop their first open source contributions. She was a recipient of the prestigious Google Anita Borg Memorial Asia-Pacific Scholarship, and Anita Borg Pass It On winner for teaching basic computer and smartphone technologies to middle-aged women, especially mothers in her province.
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Shilpa Nair has just graduated in the year 2015. She went to apply for Trainee position in a National News Television located in Noida, Delhi. When she was in the last year of graduation and searching for help on her assignments she came across Tecmint. Since then she has been visiting Tecmint regularly.
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Red Hat and Samsung jointly announced today from Red Hat Summit 2015 that kicked off in Boston that they’re forming a strategic alliance to work on next-generation mobile solutions for the enterprise.
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Liferay, maker of the enterprise, open source Liferay Portal, today entered a partnership with Red Hat to deliver an open source portal solution that brings together the Liferay Portal and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
This collaboration includes joint go-to-market initiatives and sales efforts around Liferay and Red Hat JBoss Middleware. The collaboration aims to offer organisations the advantages of an open source stack backed by portal and application server technologies.
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Today, we are making the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview 7.1 available to all current and future members of the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program as well as their end users as an unsupported development platform, providing a common standards-based operating system for existing 64-bit ARM hardware. Beyond this release, we plan to continue collaborating with our partner ISVs and OEMs, end users, and the broader open source community to enhance and refine the platform to ultimately work with the next generation of ARM-based designs.
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Whether on public or private clouds, businesses today are growing more willing to make their data more accessible to employees and customers. Aside from the convenience and improved service quality, using the cloud also helps businesses save time and money, which — in turn — helps boost their profits and their stock prices. Few companies have capitalized as well as Red Hat on servicing these needs.
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Red Hat, the open sources solutions provider, has released its financial results for the quarter ended May 31, 2015.
Total revenue for the quarter was $481 million, an increase of 14% from the year ago quarter.
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Red Hat reported its first quarter earning Thursday night which beat expectations on both the top and bottom line.
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Red Hat is taking over stewardship of the OpenJDK 7 project, at the moment a generation behind the current release of Java.
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Fedora
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There’s been no recent pushes for making Btrfs the default file-system of Fedora Linux while many releases/years ago there was once talk and hope of it becoming the first tier-one Linux distribution using it by default rather than EXT4/XFS. However, after years of development, Btrfs isn’t the default on Fedora — but those customizing their install can continue to setup a root Btrfs file-system. Other Linux distributions like openSUSE and Mageia have since defaulted to Btrfs, but Fedora apparently doesn’t feel ready yet to make this jump.
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We are sorry to inform all users of the Fedora 20 Linux operating system that today, June 23, was the last day when the distribution, dubbed “Heisenbug,” received security patches and software updates.
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The latest proposed feature for Fedora 23 is to have a standardized passphrase policy for providing greater consistency when it comes to inputting passwords/passphrases throughout the system.
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With Unicode 8.0 having been released last week, Fedora developers are planning on incorporating it into Fedora 23.
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Bottom line, Bolivia community now have 200 disk to raise interest about fedora and spread all the blue uber-force. There is already part of that material going to Cochabamba.
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As many of you may have noticed, we have had some issues the last few days in Fedora Infrastructure, in particular with metalinks (the files used by dnf/yum to pull down repository data).
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Debian Family
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You may have noticed that Jessie no longer includes the useful rescue flavour of live image, formerly included in Wheezy and earlier releases, and neither will Stretch unless you take action. This is my second public call for help this year to revive it. So if you care about rescue, here’s how you can help:
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Derivatives
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Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, the company behind the open-source server virtualization platform Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), a Linux kernel-based operating system derived from Debian GNU/Linux, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of Proxmox Virtual Environment 4.0 Beta 1.
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The developers of the Q4OS Linux distribution built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) and derived from the popular Debian GNU/Linux 8.1 (Jessie) operating system had the pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of Q4OS 1.2.5.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The MX4 packs in a 20.7MP camera and Sharp 5.36in Retina screen – but is it better than the first Ubuntu phone?
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The new Ubuntu based smartphone from Spanish Smartphone maker BQ which was released earlier this month, the BQ Aquarius E5 HD Ubuntu Edition was available for pre-order from 11 June and now is available for immediate buying when BQ began processing the orders on June 22. This phone is projected as the successor the Ubuntu OS based BQ Aquarius E4.5 released earlier by the company. The phone is currently available in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, will cost EUR 199.99 (Rs. 14,334).
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After taking more than two years to get Ubuntu into its first smartphone, Canonical is picking up the pace. The second Ubuntu handset was announced earlier this month, and tomorrow, a third is going on sale in Europe. The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition takes Meizu’s existing MX4 (a Chinese-only Android device released last September) and replaces Google’s operating system with Canonical’s home screen-focused OS. Canonical says it’s primarily focusing on attracting “enthusiasts” with the MX4, and the device’s mildly eccentric buying system certainly reflects this.
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Immediately after the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place on June 23, 2015, Joseph Salisbury announced the next plans for the main kernel packages of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.
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Ubuntu 15.04 is a next step in the development of Canonical’s flagship distribution. It definitely becomes more useful with each release, and you can see that since version 11.10 where Unity first appeared.
Of course, many argue that Ubuntu becomes more commercialized with all the adware and bloatware. But, as with other Open Source systems, there are ways to switch unnecessary components off, if you dislike them.
For me Ubuntu 15.04 is a nice distribution. I hope that next Long-term Support version 16.04 will not be worse.
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Canonical’s David Barth has sent his regular report to the Ubuntu Touch mailing list archive, informing us about the new features that have been implemented for Web Apps in the mobile operating system for Ubuntu phones.
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This past week the Ubuntu 15.10 desktop updated many of their GNOME packages to the GNOME 3.16.x series. There’s also been other improvements on the desktop front.
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Mark Shuttleworth this morning announced Fan: their solution to container-to-container networking.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu MATE project now has a hefty user base and that can only mean one thing; it’s time to get some t-shirts going, and developer Martin Wimpress has already presented the model.
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On Wednesday, Clement Lefebvre, the guy in charge of the Mint project announced the availability of Linux Mint 17.2, if you’ve been keeping up with Linux Mint you’ll realise these point upgrades aren’t so small after all.
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Freescale’s dime sized “SCM-i.MX6D” module runs Linux or Android on an 800MHz i.MX6 Dual SoC, includes a PMIC and up to 2GB of RAM, and targets IoT apps.
At the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Austin, Texas, where Freescale tipped a new Cortex-A7 line of i.MX7 system-on-chips, the company also revealed a tiny, 17 x 14 x 1.7mm SCM-i.MX6D computer-on-module that runs Linux or Android on a dual-core, Cortex-A9 i.MX6 Dual SoC. When it ships in August, Freescale claims the dime-sized COM will be “the world’s smallest single chip module (SCM) for the Internet of Things.”
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Wave announced two Linux-friendly, SODIMM-style COMs. One supports up to a quad-core i.MX6 SoC, while the other has the new i.MX6 UltraLite.
In conjunction with this week’s Freescale Technology Forum (FTF, iWave Systems unveiled two Linux-ready computer-on-modules that extend the Freescale i.MX6. The iW-RainboW-G18M-SODIMM i.MX6UL follows TechNexion’s similarly SODIMM form-factor EDM1-CF-IMX6UL, as well as its 36 x 25mm PICO-IMX6UL module in supporting the new i.MX6 UltraLite SoC. A similar new iW-RainboW-G15M-SODIMM i.MX6 supports all the earlier i.MX6 SoCs up to the iMX6 Quad.
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One of the Raspberry Pi’s engineers, and also a moderator of the official Raspberry Pi forum, announced recently that the default firmware branch of the world’s most known single-computer board (SBC) has been updated from the 3.18 kernel series to the more recent Linux kernel 4.0 branch.
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Freescale revealed two Linux-enabled QorIQ LS1 networking SoCs with four and eight 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 cores, and says it will offer a Cortex-A72 LS2 model.
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Freescale has been showing off its two Linux-ready, 28nm i.MX7 SoCs.
Based around the Cortex-A7 cores and Cortex-M4 MCUs, the pair have lower power consumption than the predecessor the i.MX6.
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Aaeon’s rugged, Linux-ready “Boxer” PC for vehicles offers a 4th Gen Core CPU, dual GbE and four 10/100 PoE LAN ports, mini-PCIe expansion, and a SIM slot.
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Phones
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Android
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Collaborating with co-workers used to be a real chore. Ever try to get everyone together in the same room at the right time? Or have to moderate a discussion to make sure everyone’s ideas were being acknowledged? These are just two of the many ways collaborating with with co-workers used to be painful.
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Although Ant builds have made Android development much easier, I’ve long been curious about the cross-platform phone development apps: you write a simple app in some common language, like HTML or Python, then run something that can turn it into apps on multiple mobile platforms, like Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows phone, UbuntoOS, FirefoxOS or Tizen.
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For IBM, its love of Docker is part of a larger philosophy: Docker’s main container technology is open source, meaning any developer anywhere can download the source code for free and put it to work however they want to.
Diaz is quick to remind people that IBM has a long history of boosting open source efforts, including leading the 1999 creation of the Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the development of a lot of high-profile open source projects, including Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.
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At Milpitas-based flash memory storage and software company SanDisk Corp., Nithya Ruff, director of the company’s open source strategy, is a huge driver behind science, technology, engineering and math initiatives to get more girls interested in the field. After growing up in Bangalore, India, Ruff learned to code at North Dakota State University, where she earned her computer science master’s degree.
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This message to tech companies was delivered Tuesday morning by Kronda Adair, founder of WordPress consultancy Karvel Digital, and the first keynote for this year’s Open Source Bridge Conference. The conference, organized by the group Stumptown Syndicate, is a three-day technical gathering for people in the Open Source community and those interested in the community.
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Events
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Taught by Dr. Jerry Cooperstein, The Linux Foundation’s Training Program Director who developed the Essentials of System Administration course, this workshop will provide the opportunity to dig into topics relevant to taking the exam and to get your questions answered live. Jerry is an amazing Linux talent and teacher so this is a wonderful chance to learn from the best at a very small price.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The GNOME developers are working on some really cool new features, and some this new stuff will be landing with the next release. In this case, it’s about the integration of LibreOffice with GNOME Documents.
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Our LibreOffice gtk2 vclplug inherits from our generic X11 vclplug and so in lots of places we just continued to use our historic X11 vclplug for various things, one big example being clipboard support.
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Getting an open source project into the storefront of Apple’s walled garden is tough. But LibreOffice has done it, thanks to hard work from community member Collabora
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CMS
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There are many translation plugins available for WordPress, and most of them deal with translations of articles. This might be of interest for others, but not for me. If you have a blog with visitors from various language background, because you are living abroad, or writing in several languages, you might feel tempted to provide visitors with a localized “environment”, meaning that as much as possible is translated into the native language of the visitor, without actually translating content – but allowing to.
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Education/documentation
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Last week 11 academics and two industry professionals spent three days in New York participating in something that would look like a doc sprint to open source contributors. Instead of working on project documentation, though, this sprint was focused on producing computer science- and open source-focused learning activities, which are similar to “experiments” for those familiar with chemistry or physics courses.
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Let’s say you’ve created a program or launched an open source project, and now you have people’s attention. They start to ask more and more questions, taking more and more of your precious developer time to answer. They fill your mailbox, sometimes even spam your IRC channel, often repeating the same questions. You know that you need to provide something in writing to help your users. But where should you start? What tools can you use? What output format do you choose? What subjects must you cover?
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Business
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Now Facebook is extending its practice of delivering tested open source tools through releasing Infer, a code verification tool. Facebook bills it as “a static program analyzer that Facebook uses to identify bugs before mobile code is shipped.” Static analyzers are automated tools that spot bugs in source code by scanning programs without running them.
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Semi-Open Source
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To be clear, open source is a key, long-term, strategic differentiator for us, with the knowledge that times are changing. Instead of the majority of the development work being done by the community (as was the case historically) the larger proportion of development will be done by the company, going forward. But we will continue to involve the community, encourage them to make checkins, and continue to make all the Kuali code available.
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Funding
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Throughout 2015, tools that demystify and function as useful front-ends and connectors for the open source Hadoop project are much in demand. Hadoop has been the driving technology behind much of the Big Data trend, and there are many administrators who can benefit from simplified dashboards and analytics tools that work with it. In fact, as we covered here, MapR’s CEO predicted toward the beginning of the year that “in 2015, IT will embrace self-service Big Data to allow developers, data scientists and data analysts to directly conduct data exploration.”
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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Better late than never… In 2010, Putin ordered Russia to convert to FLOSS by 2015. It took them until now just to figure out how to do that:
– Prefer locally generated software,
– Choose GNU/Linux and FLOSS as the platform, and
– Collaborate with other countries, particularly BRICS, to create specific applications.
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Openness/Sharing
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Of course, Higgins then goes on to pinpoint the exact position in Russia of the military convoy shown there, using not just the image’s co-ordinates (which anyway need to be verified) but tiny signs in the photo, including road markings, half-visible posts and cracks in the road that most of us would miss completely. It’s an amazing performance, and demonstrates well the incredible potential of this field. Whatever it’s called.
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Also in case you missed the news, ZeMarmot’s crowdfunding got extended by the platform so you are still encouraged to contribute if you wish to be part of an awesome 2D animation film under Creative Commons BY-SA/Free Art, made with Free Software and with a cool story (well I write it, of course it is cool :p)!
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The EU’s Open Data Portal is the single point of access for businesses and citizens to a growing range of data from European institutions. Data are free for reuse for commercial or non-commercial purposes. By providing easy and free access to data, the portal aims to promote their innovative use and unleash their economic potential. The EC adds that the portal aims to help foster transparency and accountability.
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Open Data
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This approval represents a key evolution in Open Data policy in Spain, as it transposes the new elements of the revised PSI Directive into Spanish law. The PSI Directive provides a framework for Member States to help them include a public data re-use model in their laws.
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DigitalGlobe has partnered with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to launch the Hootenanny open source project in an effort to offer developers software tools for crowdsourced mapping and geospatial big data analytics functions.
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Open Hardware
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A little more than a month ago, Katsu demonstrated the drone to the world by drawing on a billboard of Kendall Jenner. He captured the historic event on video and put it on YouTube, where it has racked up nearly 1.3 million views.
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Earlier this year, graffiti artist and feces portrait painter KATSU carried out what has been described as the first recorded act of drone graffiti. Using a modified quadcopter, KATSU sprayed a thin, red scribble over the face of Kendall Jenner on a gigantic advertising billboard in New York City. It wasn’t the most legible of tags, but it was there. Now, KATSU wants to make this power available to all, and earlier this month he launched ICARUS ONE: the “world’s first open-source paint drone.”
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Programming
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Quick summary: Cabal integration is very good (like haste, but unline fay), interfacing JavaScript is nice and easy (like fay, but unlike haste), and a quick check seems to indicate that it is faster than either of these two. I should note that I did not update the other two demos, so they represent the state of fay and haste back then, respectively.
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Health/Nutrition
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Could there be anything worse for the chicken industry than this month’s outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that hospitalized 42 percent of everyone who got it—almost 300 in 18 states?
Yes. The government also announced that China has been cleared to process chickens for the US dinner plate and that all but one of arsenic compounds no one even knew they were eating have been removed from US poultry production. Thanks for that. Also this month, some food researchers have revealed the true recipe for chicken “nuggets”…just in time for Halloween.
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Security
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Government officials have been vague in their testimony about the data breaches—there was apparently more than one—at the Office of Personnel Management. But on Thursday, officials from OPM, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of the Interior revealed new information that indicates at least two separate systems were compromised by attackers within OPM’s and Interior’s networks.
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Israel-based researchers said they’ve developed a cheaper and faster method to pull the encryption keys stored on a computer using an unlikely accomplice: pita bread.
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For those new to Linux/UNIX command line interfaces, there are lots of Internet sources that provide cheat sheets for the most common commands you’ll need to navigate and perform actions. Here’s another option we like because it’s particularly handy.
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The larger the site, the greater its functionality and visibility, and the more it uses third-party software, the more that the process of reducing inherent vulnerabilities in the site will be costly.
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The Internet allows for information to be readily available at your fingertips. However, it also allows for the same information to be accessed by malicious threat actors who are targeting your organization with cyberattacks. The recent explosion of social media has only increased the information available, and with it the risks to your corporate data, intellectual property, and brand. Some organizations call the awareness of this risk “threat intelligence,” but we have found that organizations need to focus on more than just current threats. Organizations can leverage an emerging intelligence-gathering capability to determine data leakage, employee misbehavior, or negative brand exposure at a higher level than threat intelligence using Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT.
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Finance
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Palace considers Queen and Duke of Edinburgh moving to Windsor Castle, their holiday home, while urgent repair work is carried out
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Profit motives offer little incentive to feed the hungry, treat the sick or provide any kind of retirement security
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Privacy
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The company behind the open-source blogging platform Ghost is moving its paid-for service out of the UK because of government plans to weaken protection for privacy and freedom of expression. Ghost’s founder, John O’Nolan, wrote in a blog post: “we’ve elected to move the default location for all customer data from the UK to DigitalOcean’s [Amsterdam] data centre. The Netherlands is ranked #2 in the world for Freedom of Press, and has a long history of liberal institutions, laws and funds designed to support and defend independent journalism.”
O’Nolan was particularly worried by the UK government’s plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which he said enshrines key rights such as “respect for your private and family life” and “freedom of expression.” The Netherlands, by contrast, has “some of the strongest privacy laws in the world, with real precedents of hosting companies successfully rejecting government requests for data without full and legal paperwork,” he writes.
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Civil Rights
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A 37-year-old New Jersey cop accused of exposing his genitalia to the young male motorists he pulled over has accepted a plea deal in which the officer loses his job in exchange for pleading guilty to tampering with his patrol car’s dashcam “to conceal unprofessional and inappropriate conduct.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Providers who defied TV company demands to switch off their VPN services have caved in following legal threats. CallPlus and Bypass Network Services faced action from media giants including Sky and TVNZ for allowing their customers to access geo-restricted content. Their ‘Global Mode’ services will be terminated by September 1.
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06.23.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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And look…this isn’t on Jonathan Nadeau, creator of the Sonar distro. Not at all. Jonathan is, in my eyes, one of the bravest people in the FOSS world. Being completely sightless, he’s put together a pretty good Linux distribution, not only for people with low or no sight, but which also includes software to help dyslexic people as well.Jonathan took the best available open source tools and built Sonar around them. It’s not a case of a distro being less than helpful due to difficult software; it’s a case of using the only open source software that is available. Unfortunately, much of that available software is not good enough.
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With the price and size of computer hardware steadily decreasing, it’s becoming more viable to use embedded Linux systems to control small robots and drones. There are plenty of projects for Raspberry Pi, but not everyone wants to build a drone from scratch. That’s why enthusiasts will be pleased to hear about the new drones from Parrot.
Last week, the French firm released a range of 13 mini-drones. They are available to buy right now in France, and they will be released in the UK and Europe in July. Like most drones, they are remote-controlled; you can use your phone or tablet to control them via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
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Server
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Linux system administrators are in high demand these days and many hiring managers say they’re having a hard time finding talent to fill their open positions. It’s critical, then, for companies seeking skilled admins to hone their recruiting process in order to stay competitive – and this starts with writing an effective job posting.
Unfortunately, many companies aren’t hitting the mark. Job postings for sysadmin positions are largely similar; they’re boring and generic, according to New York City-based recruiter Steve Levy.
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When it comes to managing containers, everyone including the competition agrees that Google is the leader, which was evident from the way Kubernetes was received by the community. Google is leaving no stone unturned to make its cloud the best platform for running the containerized workloads and microservices. From orchestration to cluster management to private registry, Google Cloud Platform has all it takes to run complex distributed containerized applications.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is taking on three new major open-source security projects and Linux security expert Emily Ratliff has been hired to oversee CII.
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Immediately after the release of the Linux kernel 4.1 by Linus Torvalds on June 22, Alexandre Oliva had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of GNU Linux-libre 4.1.
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It would appear that Greg Kroah-Hartman is on an airplain right now at approximately 30,000 feet and he just announced that the recently released Linux 4.1 kernel will be the next LTS (Long Term Support) release maintained for the next two years.
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Linus Torvalds this week announced the release of the Linux kernel version 4.1, which will also form the basis of the next long term stable (LTS) kernel release. Linux 4.1 was also the first kernel release to include contributions from more than 1,500 developers (1,539 to be exact) — with about 270 submitting their first ever patch, according to LWN Editor Jonathan Corbet. The previous record for the most developer participation on a release was set last June with Linux 3.15, which boasted 1,492 developers submitting patches. (See his full 4.1 release report.)
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Here, Clarkson tells us more about how he learned Linux and software development, his career path to becoming an expert on hypervisors, and his hobby as a stand-up comedian.
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Two scholarships will be available for each of the seven categories. In addition to Linux Newbies and Teens-in-Training, you can apply for the Whiz Kids (for high school or college grads), Women in Linux, SysAdmin Super Stars, Developer Do-Gooder, and Linux Kernel Guru scholarship categories.
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The 4.1 release of the Linux kernel has hit, after what Linus Torvalds says was a “very quiet week” since Release Candidate 8 dropped.
Torvalds’ brief announcement on the Linux Kernel mailing list also notes that “this obviously means that the merge window for 4.2 is open”.
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THE LINUX KERNEL has been committed again, this time to version 4.1. Linus Torvalds, or Mr Linux to you, announced the news on the mailing list as per.
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I am extraordinarily excited to be working with nearly every technology company on this project, which I think could be as important to the future of the Internet as intermodal containers have been to globalization. We expect to see a lot of the Open Container Project contributors at ContainerCon in August and look forward to the work ahead of us.
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Applications
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Mellanox
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LINBIT, a provider of Linux storage mirroring technology, Tuesday announced a new solution for data replication in collaboration with Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (MLNX), a supplier of high-performance cloud networking solutions.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dota 2 Reborn, the Dota 2 game remade with the Source 2 engine, has finally landed on the Linux platform, along with a ton of changes and improvements. It’s still a Beta release, but that doesn’t really matter.
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Total War: WARHAMMER is the upcoming strategy game from Creative Assembly, and as the name suggests, it’s based on the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It’s built by the same studio that got famous for the Total War franchise, Creative Assembly.
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Project Cars 2 is a new game announced by Slightly Mad Studios, and it’s being funded through the World of Mass Development portal. A SteamOS version has been promised, but it’s a weird announcement since the first games still don’t have a Linux version despite being promised as well.
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Even though Project Cars hasn’t been released on Linux, that hasn’t stopped the developers claiming the second one will too. Oh and yeah Project Cars 2 is a thing now.
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Space Colony: Steam Edition is revamp of Space Colony HD found on GOG, and previously the developers were only hopefully to do a Linux version. It seems like they are in progress right now!
The newer Steam version includes goodies like Steam Workshop support, so you can download community made campaigns.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I am happy to announce that Qt 5.5 Release Candidate is now available.
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So the fourth week is over and the mid term evaluations are upon us and I have to say, I didn’t even realize how quickly the last four weeks have gone by
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I am happy to say that Pre-Alpha edition of Kexi 3.0 runs nicely already after like 3 weeks of porting! Especially its tabular view work out of the box for me after fixing the last compilation error with zero fixes needed in the functionality.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Ever since GNOME 3 release, I was looking for good personal task managers. Specially now that I’m working on a big project a.k.a. Summer of Code, I feel a real need to stay organized.
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The development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment continues these days with the third milestone, dubbed 3.17.3, for which many of the GNOME’s core components have been updated, including the Evince document viewer software.
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New Releases
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Neophytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux project had the great pleasure of informing all Chakra users about the immediate availability of a new update for the rolling-release distribution.
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Papyros is getting closer to working release, and the developers are putting the final touches. We’ll soon be able to play with the new distro, even if it’s going to be just a development version.
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GParted Live, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, re-organizing, and deleting disk partitions has been upgraded to version 0.22.0-3 and is now available for download.
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Arch Family
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We are happy to announce our first update for Manjaro 0.8.13.
One week passed after we released Manjaro 0.8.13 to the public. We had already over 38.900 downloads so far. With almost 23.000 downloads just for or Xfce edition we see that we did a great job on our flagship edition. Still we had over 12.600 downloads for KDE5 so far. Regardless these stats Manjaro continues to get better each day. 0.8.13 was a good release, but still there are some bugs we try to fix now with regular updates.
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The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, had the great pleasure of announcing that the first update pack for the recently released Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 distribution is now live.
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Red Hat Family
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So with Fedora 22 well and truly out for both ARMv7 and aarch64 lets have a look at the release in general and also at the 4.0 kernel it ships.
Firstly I’d like to shout out to the AMAZING job done by the web team on the new sites for Spins, ARM and Labs. They really do look awesome!
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This week heralded the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview 7.1, the next milestone in Red Hat’s exploring the potential for ARM servers. There is a lot in a name, and this one is a mouthful.
The Linux kernel is famous – it is the namesake of the complete operating system, but it does not exist on its own. A complete OS runs on hardware, starts out in firmware, loads the kernel, which in turn loads a software and service initialization system, all of which require function libraries, all of which were built with compiler tools that do the magic conversion from human readable source code to machine readable binaries. When ARM designed the AArch64 architecture, they also had to provide ports and specifications for the firmware, the kernel, the libraries, the compiler, and so on. Hundreds of packages were affected. Not only did they need to provide ports, those ports needed to be designed, written correctly, in a style acceptable to each of the communities whose coding standards are frequently rigorous, distinct, and strictly enforced. To top it all off, this work needed to be done before the actual hardware existed, necessitating writing software simulators to check all the work and extensive documentation to empower community collaboration.
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Analyst Brian White expects the Red Hat story “to shine bright” at the Summit, with the company’s expanding portfolio opening up “new growth opportunities within the open source world.” With the rising importance of software versus hardware in next generation data centers as well as open innovation gaining momentum, Red Hat appears to be “an attractive play on the open source software movement.”
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A new partnership with open-source software giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) could propel TransCirrus – a small, 10-person Research Triangle Park-based startup, into the big leagues when it comes to cloud computing.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that leading global companies, including AMD, American Product Distributors, Avianca, Color Line, and Telegraph Media Group, have deployed Red Hat’s open source integration technology to become more agile and competitive in the fast-paced digital marketplace.
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Red Hat said Monday that Frank Calderoni, former chief financial officer of Cisco, will be its new chief financial officer.
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Fedora
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A new proposal has been submitted today, June 22, on the mailing list of the Fedora Linux project, which includes details about the implementation of the recently released Unicode 8.0 standard in the upcoming Fedora 23 distribution.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak is back at work after a short break at the end of last week, and he just informed us about the new features implemented in the development version of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu phones.
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The Ubuntu platform is moving towards its convergence goal, and the developers are getting closer to it. Applications like Ubuntu Notes show just how close the mobile and desktop platforms are, in terms of the underlying code and design.
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Details about GNU patch vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have now been published by Canonical in a security notification.
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Canonical is taking a shot at dealing with virtual machine address scaling problems, and reckons it can do so without resorting to software-defined network approaches.
The company reckons its scheme, The Fan, gives “any cloud user 250x the number of addresses they would normally have access to in a cloud environment”.
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A privilege-escalation vulnerability released earlier this week was found in a few versions of Ubuntu. The operating system fails to check permissions when users are creating files, resulting in the bug. When a file needs to be writable it is copied from the lower directory to the upper file system where is can be modified.
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Today, Canonical introduces the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu in test images for Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, delivering the fastest and most scalable address expansion mechanism in the container world. The Fan enables cloud users to grow the number of Docker and LXD containers they can address in a single cloud environment.
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On June 22, Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, and Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, had the great pleasure on introducing the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu Linux.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre and the great team of developers behind one of the most acclaimed, modern, and lightweight open-source desktop environments for GNU/Linux operating system published a new maintenance release for Cinnamon 2.6.
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For Raspberry Pi users out there, the default firmware branch has changed to using the Linux 4.0 kernel.
The source tree with Linux 4.0 has been available for a while now and is already used by some RPi Linux distributions while now the default firmware branch has made the move. Confirmation was posted to the Raspberry Pi forums.
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Phones
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Android
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These days there are hundreds and thousands of apps on the Google Play Store for Android smartphones and tablets, and it’s hard to sort through them all and find games worth downloading, playing, or paying for. For those who love to get headshots and get in the action, here are 10 or so of the best shooter games for Android.
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If you liked what you saw with the reveal of Fallout Shelter but don’t have an iOS device, never fear. Bethesda has confirmed that its surprise mobile hit will be released for Android. It just asks that you wait “a few months.”
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Google released a standalone clock in the Play Store this week. While Mountain View has been keen on serving up pieces of the Nexus experience (read: unskinned Android) for a while now, this latest release provides more evidence that the company is going all-in on a la carte apps. For users of devices other than a Nexus or Moto X — which also offers a nearly bloat-free OS — this means they can take advantage of the core pieces of Android and the larger Google ecosystem. In other words, you can customize a Samsung or HTC device how you see fit. It’s like Google is making what we commonly refer to as “stock” Android another skin, but in separate apps so that users can choose exactly what they want. Since last April, users have been able to install a standalone Camera app built by Google, while Gmail, Maps, Messenger and Calendar have their own individual software, too.
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Late last month Google announced the next version of Android and its successor to Lollipop, currently going by the name of Android M. And while the Android M update doesn’t look to be a significant software update, it is loaded with tweaks, performance improvements, and a few important new features. Here we’ll go over five features Android owners will love, and can look forward to.
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Mozilla’s Webmaker project has been running for three years. Its stated goal is to “help millions of people move from using the web to making the web.” It tries to do this by providing a few web-based tools to let non-programmers create web pages with images, audio, and video. This week, the project introduced a beta release of Webmaker for Android, which it describes as a “tool to help smartphone users of any skill level read, write and participate on the Web. The app makes creating original content in your local language simple — you can drag, drop and personalize photos, text and more to build unique projects like interactive scrapbooks, comic strips, games and memes.”
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Android’s market share globally is closely tied to the spending power of a particular market and it dominates in low-income countries, a survey of real-time usage has confirmed.
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Here’s some bad news for Android users. Security researchers have discovered 100+ more apps that fail to encrypt your login data properly, making it frightfully easy for hackers to steal your password. What’s worse: the vast majority of the app makers aren’t doing anything about it.
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Actually, yes: AT&T now carries a projector that’s also a tiny, LTE-equipped Android tablet. The movies are built in. That’s better—but I’m still not sure who this clever projector is for. Cinephiles on the go? Business men that need to be able to whip out a projected slideshow at a moment’s notice? I spent a week with it to try and find out.
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Android 5.1.1 for smartwatches has been out for a little while now, but Motorola took some extra time to make sure it was ready for the Motorola Moto 360. It’s finally rolling out now. This might be the biggest update Android Wear has seen to date. There are many new features and improvements that make the whole experience feel much more mature. Let’s take a look at some of the best new things.
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The company launched a preview edition of Fire OS 5.0 on Friday that is built upon Android 5.0 software, also known as Lollipop. To help developers prepare for the change, Amazon is offering $50 off up to two Fire HD 7 tablets to programmers.
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Where there’s smoke, there could be fire as well, that is why we asked you last week whether you would be interested to get a new BlackBerry handset if it ran Android. After all, the rumors are for flagship specs like a QHD display, and a Snapdragon 808 chipset, which might be one more thing to tip the scale for a switch. Surprisingly enough, more than two thirds of our respondents are willing to give BlackBerry the benefit of the doubt, with just a third categorically saying no to the premise.
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Some people claim that children shouldn’t get a phone when they are so young that it will just be a toy. That’s interesting given the dramatic increase in the amount of money spent on toys for children in recent times. It’s particularly interesting when parents buy game consoles for their children but refuse mobile phone “toys” (I know someone who did this). I think this is more of a social issue regarding what is a suitable toy than any real objection to phones used as toys. Obviously the educational potential of a mobile phone is much greater than that of a game console.
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Intel is giving Android users a free way to control their PCs from a smartphone or tablet.
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Android Wear is just a few days away from its first anniversary. Also, it now has a lot of apps under its belt. We decided to sift through the tons of apps out there for your smartwatch and present to you the apps that we think are a must have for your Android Wear device.
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Got a ton of tunes stashed in the cloud? DoubleTwist’s new Android app can play it all, with support for multiple storage services as well as your local media.
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The news about Android M coming out is legit. A new upgrade is expected to roll out this current year, but there are a lot of enthusiasts out there who are already giving it a go. Courtesy of Google’s developer preview, this can now be set up. But because this is destined for developers only, if you are curious to see how it works you will be setting it up on your own risk. Because it is not complete, some features might not be working properly or they might be missing completely. So, if you cannot control your enthusiasm and wish to set up Android M right at this very moment, we strongly advise you to use an older device and not something that you’re using on a daily basis. Just keep in mind that a Nexus device will be required to test out the Android M. But we’re betting that there are others out there who are already working on other types of devices for Android M to operate on.
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Spring has come and gone without any sign of Sony’s promised X900C and X910C TVs, but those super-thin 4K sets are finally on their way… well, almost. The slimmest of the bunch, the 0.19-inch thick X900C series, is now slated to arrive in July at hefty prices of $2,499 for a 55-inch model, and $3,999 for its 65-inch counterpart. Determined to go bigger? You’ll have to wait longer, and pay a pretty penny.
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The kids over at Addappt are back with a new build of their contact app for Android, so I snagged Mrinal Desai, a founder of the startup to dig into just what is new, why we might care, and where the company is headed.s
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At this year’s I/O, Google again made a developer preview of the upcoming version of Android available for download. Thing is, it only ran on Nexus phones and tablets. Today Sony has announced plans to release a test build of Android M for Xperia products in the Sony Open Device program as well. Here we see it running on an Xperia Z3 Compact.
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We’ve been living with the refreshed and refined Android Wear on the LG Watch Urbane for a while now. So it’s good news for Moto 360 owners that you can finally get in on the action – the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update is currently rolling out to all Motorola smartwatches.
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Top 10 Best Android Music Player Apps 2015: Music always plays an important role in our life while listening to our favorite music makes us happy and give us relief. These days smartphones and tablets are very common because they are very cheap and easy to use, that’s why everyone love to listen their their favorite songs on Android devices. With the rise of smartphones, new and free android applications have been added on play store and we carry our smartphones everywhere is also our primary media player. On android platform, a huge community of developers create apps that gives us better user experience with latest functions.
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Android Wear aficionados already have more than 1,500 watch faces to choose from, but Google’s thinking that you can never have too much of a good thing. That’s why it’s rolling out 17 more ways for you tell time on your fancy smartwatch, with watch faces that feature cartoon characters like Angry Birds and Hello Kitty to more refined designs from the likes of Bang & Olufsen and Muji. Check them all out here in the gallery below, or if you have your very own Android Wear watch, head over to Google Play to download your favorites.
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Sometimes an Android version comes along later. Other times not at all. It’s a serious drag, especially given Android’s dominant market share. It’s even more puzzling that this is still the habit of some large companies, as evidenced by Twitter’s slow rollout of Periscope and Spotify’s new feature set that’s still nowhere to be found on Android.
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Looking for an alternative to Nvidia’s Shield Portable? There aren’t a lot of options stateside, but fortunately Chinese OEMs are happily churning out new models all the time — models like the GPD XD, which looks an awful lot like Nintendo’s new 3DS XL.
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The main purposes of open source are overt in the name itself. The biggest differentiator of open source is its innate openness, or transparency. Not only is the source code available, but so too are the other aspects. This characteristic contrasts with the often clandestine processes of proprietary vendors. Open-source products are thus easier to evaluate to determine whether they are right for a specific enterprise.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Adobe has announced “Photoshop Design Space,” a new interface for Photoshop geared toward professional app and Web designers. The company calls the new interface “a companion experience” to the normal Photoshop UI, which is a streamlined interface consisting of the most-needed tools for app and Web design. The most interesting thing, though? Adobe designed this new interface in HTML5, and it’s open source.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hello free software supporters, my name is Adam Tobias Leibson. I’ve been an avid GNU/Linux user since my first year of high school. Around that time, I read Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother. That book challenged me to think more deeply about the effects of mass surveillance on society, and brought about my interests in privacy and cryptography.
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Public Services/Government
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The Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications has announced a plan to replace proprietary software with open source and locally produced software. The plan is one of the measures aimed at promoting sustainable economic development and social stability announced earlier this year.
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Openness/Sharing
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With Tesla’s opening of their automotive patents last year, the auto industry was turned upside down, with the effects increasingly being felt across the industry. Tesla opening their patents was seen by some in the automotive industry as inexplicable: Why would anyone give open access to people wanting to know how their cars were made? Wouldn’t this encourage theft of Tesla’s intellectual property?
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Open Data
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Security
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Censorship
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A controversial bill to allow websites to be censored has been passed by both houses of the Australian parliament. The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015 allows companies to go to a Federal Court judge to get overseas sites blocked if their “primary purpose” is facilitating copyright infringement.
Dr Matthew Rimmer, an associate professor at the Australian National University College of Law, points out that there is a lack of definitions within the bill: “What is ‘primary purpose’? There’s no definition. What is ‘facilitation’? Again, there’s no definition.” That’s dangerous, he believes, because it could lead to “collateral damage,” whereby sites that don’t intend to hosting infringing material are blocked because a court might rule they were covered anyway. Moreover, Rimmer told The Sydney Morning Herald that controversial material of the kind released by WikiLeaks is often under copyright, which means that the new law could be used to censor information that was embarrassing, but in the public interest.
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A few minutes ago Australia passed controversial new legislation which allows for overseas ‘pirate’ sites to be blocked at the ISP level. Despite opposition from the Greens, ISPs and consumer groups, the Senate passed the bill into law with a vote of 37 in favor and 13 against. Expect The Pirate Bay to be an early target.
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Why is it that many efforts made “for the children” are so stupid most tweens could point out the obvious flaws? Back during the discussion of the UK’s now-implemented ISP porn filtration system, Rhoda Grant of the Scottish Parliament wondered why the internet couldn’t be handled the same way as television, where all the naughty “programming” isn’t allowed to take to the airwaves until past the nationally-accepted bedtime.
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GOOGLE HAS STARTED accepting takedown requests for so-called revenge porn, following in the footsteps of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
Google announced that users can now request that sexually explicit images shared without their consent are removed from search results, despite the firm having generally resisted efforts to limit what is viewable in search.
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Privacy
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Documents from the National Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveal that the two agencies—and GCHQ in particular—targeted antivirus software developers in an attempt to subvert their tools to assure success in computer network exploitation attacks on intelligence targets. Chief among their targets was Kaspersky Labs, the Russian antivirus software company, according to a report by The Intercept’s Andrew Fishman and First Look Media Director of Security Morgan Marquis-Boire.
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When the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab disclosed recently that it had been hacked, it noted that the attackers, believed to be from Israel, had been in its network since sometime last year.
The company also said the attackers seemed intent on studying its antivirus software to find ways to subvert the software on customer machines and avoid detection.
Now newly published documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, were years ahead of Israel and had engaged in a systematic campaign to target not only Kaspersky software but the software of other antivirus and security firms as far back as 2008.
The documents, published today by The Intercept, don’t describe actual computer breaches against the security firms, but instead depict a systematic campaign to reverse-engineer their software in order to uncover vulnerabilities that could help the spy agencies subvert it. The British spy agency regarded the Kaspersky software in particular as a hindrance to its hacking operations and sought a way to neutralize it.
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The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the U.K., claims more than 270,000 corporate clients, and says it protects more than 400 million people with its products.
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Following on a ruling nearly two months ago, where the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal — for the very first time — found that GCHQ had broken the law with its surveillance of client/attorney communications, now the IPT has ruled against GCHQ again. The IPT says that GCHQ held emails of human rights activists for too long — but found that the initial collection of those emails was no problem at all.
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GCHQ’S SPYING on two international human rights groups was illegal, according to a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) which is responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services.
The court case was raised by a number of privacy groups and challenged how GCHQ surveys similar groups. It found that the government body operated in breach of its own rules.
The decision in the High Court on Monday followed concerns raised by groups including long-time snooping critics Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The IPT ruled that British spies had breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that GCHQ had retained emails for longer than it should and violated its own internal procedures.
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The Supreme Court gave a big boost to privacy Monday when it ruled that hotels and motels could refuse law enforcement demands to search their registries without a subpoena or warrant. The justices were reviewing a challenge to a Los Angeles ordinance requiring hotels to provide information to law enforcement—including guests’ credit card number, home address, driver’s license details, and vehicle license number—at a moment’s notice. Similar ordinances exist in about a hundred other cities stretching from Atlanta to Seattle.
Los Angeles claimed the ordinance (PDF) was needed to battle gambling, prostitution, and even terrorism, and that guests would be less likely to use hotels and motels for illegal purposes if they knew police could access their information at will.
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A smallish victory for Fourth Amendment protections comes today as the Supreme Court has struck down a Los Angeles ordinance that allowed police warrantless, on-demand access to hotel/motel guest records. This win is very limited, and the court’s discussion of the issue at hand pertains solely to the Los Angeles statute and doesn’t address the potential unconstitutionality of other, similar records sweeps granted by the Third Party Doctrine. Nor does it address the potential Fourth Amendment violations inherent to “pervasive regulation” of certain businesses — like the records legally required to be collected and handed over on demand to law enforcement by entities like pawn shops, junk yards and firearms dealers.
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Concerns over pervasive surveillance are often shrugged off with “ends justify the means” rationalizing. If it’s effective, it must be worth doing. But as more information on domestic surveillance programs surfaces, we’re finding out that not only are they intrusive, but they’re also mostly useless.
TrapWire — software produced by Stratfor and used by security and law enforcement agencies around the world — utilizes facial and pattern recognition technology to analyze CCTV footage for “pre-attack patterns,” meshing this information with other law enforcement databases, including online submissions from citizens reporting “suspicious behavior.”
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Civil Rights
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A 4-year-old child was struck by a bullet fired from a Columbus Police Officer’s gun, reports CBS affiliate WBNS.
According to the station, a patrol officer was answering a call Friday afternoon when a family in the area started screaming for help because of a medical emergency.
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A Florida postman who flew a gyrocopter through some of America’s most restricted airspace before landing at the US Capitol said he rejected a plea offer on Monday that would have involved several years in prison.
Douglas Hughes, 61, of Ruskin, Florida, said he rejected the offer because no one got hurt during his stunt.
Hughes was arrested on April 15 after he took off in his gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and landed on the Capitol’s West Lawn in his bare-bones aircraft.
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A Los Angeles Police Department officer shot a man in the head after he attempted to flag down officers for help with a towel in his hand.
Officers responded to the scene following an officer-needs-help call in the area, CBS Los Angeles reported.
The officers believed the man was holding a gun and, after ordering him to drop the alleged weapon, officers fired four shots. One of the rounds appeared to shoot the suspect in the head. A motorist posted graphic video of the scene online — which was widely shared on social media — showing the man rolled over and cuffed by police.
“The officers stopped to investigate and see what was needed,” LAPD spokesman John Jenal told NBC Los Angeles. “This person then extended their arm, which was wrapped in a towel.”
LAPD Commander Andrew Smith told the Los Angeles Times that the officers were following standard procedure for cuffing the man who seemingly had a gaping gunshot wound to the head with blood pouring from it.
Mr Smith said the man was standing on the side of the road asking for the officers’ help yelling: “Police, police.”
However, police said no weapons were found and only a towel was recovered from the scene.
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The unnamed pair were held by guards at the site, now a museum, on Monday and are in custody, police told AFP.
They took artefacts belonging to prisoners held there during World War Two, including buttons and pieces of glass, a museum spokesman told AFP.
The UK Foreign Office confirmed two British nationals had been arrested.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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An interesting and melancholy event is taking place not far away from me. An honest-to-goodness independent movie rental store is closing its doors with much fanfare and a going-out-of-business sale.
This is a small business that has been around almost since the advent of the VCR and rolled right through the dawn of the Internet and into the era of widespread streaming content — by renting videos. If you wanted to watch a movie, you drove down to the store, hoped there was a copy on the shelf, rented it on the contract you’d signed possibly decades ago, and returned it within a day or two.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In the previous instalment of the long-running saga involving alleged pirates of the Dallas Buyers Club film in Australia, the court agreed that Australian ISP iiNet should hand over information about its customers. But it added an important proviso: the letter and telephone script to be used to contact and negotiate with them had to be approved by the court first in an effort to prevent “speculative invoicing” of the kind all-too familiar elsewhere.
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So why did Apple think for one second that it could get away with not paying Taylor Swift?
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Libgen, the largest online repository of free books and academic articles, has pretty much vanished from the Internet. Earlier this month the site’s operators were sued by academic publishing company Elsevier, who asked a New York federal court for a preliminary injunction hoping to keep the site down for good.
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