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01.07.13

Links 7/1/2013: Arch 2013.01.04, Fuduntu 2013.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • LWN’s 2013 Predictions

    The 3.12 kernel release will happen on November 20, 2013, or, at worse, by the beginning of December. The kernel development process has become a well-tuned machine with a highly predictable cycle; the longest cycle in 2012 (3.3) was only twelve days longer than the shortest (3.5). In the absence of significant externally imposed stress, it is hard to see anything changing that in 2013.

  • 3 Predictions on Linux World for 2013

    Bangalore: It’s 2013 and the entire tech world is anticipating something new for the year. The same holds for the Linux world that did great the past year and there’s no better time to look ahead. People are predicting so much about the tech and the Linux platform, such that they have realized the fact that Linux is the real deal. With that in mind, here are 5 predictions on the Linux platform for 2013, as reported by CIO.com.

  • Desktop

    • Tribal Desktop

      Things seem to have suddenly changed in terms of my available resources thanks to some generous supporters, and now I am thinking rather seriously for the first time of producing a more supportable and sustainable desktop distro image for general use based off debian wheezy gnu/linux, xfce4, some interesting tinkering, and some of my own odd aesthetics, which would work well anywhere from an arm chromebook or raspberrypi to a netbook, laptop, or desktop, whether very old or new. This should give an idea of what I have in mind…

    • Amazon’s top selling laptop doesn’t run Windows or Mac OS, it runs Linux

      We all know now that Windows 8 sales have been…. disappointing. You can blame the hardware. You can blame Windows 8′s mixed-up interfaces. You can blame the rise of tablets and smartphones. Whatever. The bottom line is Windows 8 PC and laptop sales have been slow. So, what, according to Amazon, in this winter of Windows 8 discontent has been the best selling laptop? It’s Samsung’s ARM-powered, Linux-based Chromebook.

    • Happy Sitting at the Kid’s Table?

      “Why does Google refuse to reference that Android or Chromebooks are Linux-based?”

      He took a pull on his Shiner Bock and did something I didn’t really expect.

      He answered me. And I’m not going to use quotes because I didn’t write it down but this is awful close:

      Because Linux Users can’t be trusted to behave if they are taken out into public.

      He went on to explain that the powers that be (of which he is not one but within that circle) simply don’t want anything getting in the way of Google’s march to their phone, tablet and computer market supremacy. Their Chromebook slayed the numbers this Christmas season and many within the marketing effort at Google believe NOT associating their brand with Linux may have helped tremendously.

      Is Linux mentioned anywhere in the Android Marketing?

      No.

      Is Linux mentioned anywhere in Chromebook Marketing?

      No.

  • Kernel Space

    • Major Network Performance Regressions In Linux

      Affecting the latest Linux kernel release, Linux 3.7, are “multiple apparently unrelated network performance issues.” The major network performance problems were reported by a well-known Linux kernel developer.

      Willy Tarreau, a Linux kernel developer and the one that was the maintainer of the Linux 2.4 kernel series, wrote a new mailing list thread to kernel developers on Saturday that was entitled “Major network performance regression in 3.7.” The problems also seem unresolved by the current Linux 3.8 kernel.

    • ARM CoreSight Support Published For Linux
    • Linux Kernel Still Picking Up AVX Optimizations

      Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) have been present in Intel and AMD hardware since last year with Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer processors, respectively, but their use isn’t too very widespread at this point. Fortunately, the Linux kernel has been receiving some AVX1/AVX2 optimizations.

    • Intel TurboStat Can Now Read CPU Temp, Wattage

      Intel’s TurboStat utility that’s part of the Linux kernel is now capable of reading the wattage and temperature for modern Intel processors.

      The Turbostat utility with the Linux 3.8 kernel will be able to read CPU temperatures for hardware that has either a Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS) or Package Thermal Monitor (PTM) hardware.

    • Linux Dynticks Being Extended For Performance Wins

      Dynticks, the Dynamic Tick Timer for allowing the Linux kernel to skip ticks while idling and resume to running at full HZ when encountering load, is in the process of being extended. Developers are working on making Dynticks work even under select workloads in order to enhance the performance of CPU-intensive tasks.

    • Balance NUMA Merged For Linux 3.8 Kernel

    • Graphics Stack

      • ARM 64-Bit Support For The X.Org Server (AArch64)

        Support for AArch64, the 64-bit ARM architecture, is being prepped for the X.Org Server.

        For the AArch64 Linux enablement, support was added to the Linux 3.7 kernel, has been merged for the next release of the GCC compiler, and other GNU/Linux components are beginning to see this ARMv8 support work.

      • A Software-Based Pixman Renderer For Wayland’s Weston

        There hasn’t been too many new Wayland/Weston developments to report on recently, but being published this weekend for review and comments is a new Pixman renderer for Weston. This Pixman renderer allows for pure software rendering with the Weston reference compositor and adds MIT-SHM support to the X11 back-end.

      • MSAA Anti-Aliasing Finally Comes To Radeon R300g

        While the AMD Radeon “R300g” Gallium3D driver has been effectively “done” for a while, only this weekend has multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support come to this open-source graphics driver that supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) GPUs and older hardware.

      • Radeon Kernel Driver Deprecates UMS Mode-Setting

        The open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack has been deprecating the user-space mode-setting (UMS) code for a while and is now finally making the kernel-space mode-setting (KMS) support the default Radeon interface for the Linux kernel.

      • TI OMAP5 Support Comes To Their DRM Driver
      • X.Org Server 1.14 Development Closed, RC1 Released
      • AMD Made OpenCL A Bit Faster This Year On Linux

        To be published on Thursday and Friday of this week is the annual “year in review” articles for the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. While those articles are looking at the OpenGL performance for all driver releases made in the past year, some OpenCL benchmarks were also conducted.

      • DRM Render Nodes Published, Better Graphics Security

        A complete but experimental implementation of “render nodes” for the open-source Linux graphics stack has been published. After being discussed in months prior for advancing the Linux graphics stack to take care of some security holes, this render node implementation is slowly but surely nearing a state for merging to mainline.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu mobile: too little, far too late

            Wise words those, from the bard of Avon. They come to mind as one ponders the situation that Canonical is in, after its announcement a few days ago of a concept for a mobile running Ubuntu.

            Briefly put, the company has missed the boat. The announcement is too little. And it is far too late. Any announcement of vapourware in the mobile space at this time is a waste of time and space.

          • Ubuntu’s Merry Mobile Machinations

            “The most interesting feature that Ubuntu Phone brings is the ability to plug it into a laptop dock or monitor and keyboard and run the full x86 PC version of Ubuntu,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “But how many people really want to run Ubuntu? Canonical has been offering this under its Ubuntu for Android project for nearly a year, and there seem to be no takers.”

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Voyager 12.10 Review: Xubuntu spiced up and overkilled!

              Make no mistake, I really like Xubuntu – for it’s simplicity and efficiency! But, the looks of default Xubuntu bore me a lot and most of the time I resort to making transparent panel, adding a nice conky, replacing the bottom panel with a docky, etc. to make it palatable. Functionally, though, I don’t have anything to fret about and Xubuntu works as good as any other Linux distro.

            • Fuduntu 2013.1 Released

              Well, December 21 came and went with little fanfare. When the dust settled, the world didn’t end and the Fuduntu Team was told that they did, in fact, have to finish the 2013.1 release. So, after realizing that they weren’t going to get out of work, the team put their collective noses to the grindstone and are now proud to present Fuduntu 2013.1, the first quarterly release of the new year!

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Limpag: Open source for the win

    ON Christmas Eve, I cobbled together a network-attached storage (NAS) at home to enable everyone in our house to have a shared directory for school, work and personal files. This shared directory is also accessible from outside the house – like a rudimentary personal “cloud” for our family.

  • 2012 was ace!

    Last year was awesome for Linux and free software. Android grew much stronger, more people than ever understood the ideas behind open source and the Raspberry Pi helped to erase any last vestige of ‘hacker-elite’ from preconceptions of Linux…

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.2.6 Carries Many Virtualization Fixes

      It’s been two months since the last update to Oracle’s cross-platform VirtualBox software but yesterday evening a new point release was made available that has a plethora of fixes and other minor improvements.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 Benchmarked Against Linux, Solaris, BSD

      While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 “Isotope” release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.

  • Project Releases

    • e(fx)clipse leaps to 0.8.0

      In its latest release, e(fx)clipse’s version number has been bumped from 0.1.1, as released in September 2012, to 0.8.0 to reflect the IDE for JavaFX’s maturity and stability. The system provides an Eclipse-based development environment, tools, and runtime for JavaFX 2.x and later as a framework for building rich client applications.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • 1 million OpenStreetMappers

        OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That’s a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world.

    • Open Hardware

      • MakerPlane: Open source takes flight in aviation

        I spoke with John Nicols at MakerPlane about their passionate team of contributors from all over the world who are designing and building a full-sized two seat Light Sport Aircraft. Their mission is to “create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them.”

  • Programming

    • You Can Now Run LLVM Assembly In Your Web-Browser

      Thanks to some experimental and innovative work done on LLVM, it’s now possible to parse and execute LLVM Assembly within your web-browser. This Assembly code from the LLVM compiler infrastructure is then translated to JavaScript using EmScripten.

Leftovers

  • If you tell others about this page, you owe me 1000 Dollars!

    Yes, you owe me 1000 Dollars. Please do follow and carefully read the links in the following paragraphs, otherwise it may be hard to believe that I am not making this up. It looks like some “National Newspapers of Ireland” is trying to get permission to force people who merely link to a page on a newspaper website to both get permission and pay that newspaper first, as if they had wanted to copy the actual text of that page.

  • Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing

    O’Reilly: Apple. They’re clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim that nobody else can make a device with multitouch. But they didn’t invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball forward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, “OK, we got value from someone else, but it stops now.” That attitude creates lockup in the industry. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo precisely because they try to own too much.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Food and Commerce

      Author Frederick Kaufman talked about the influence of the financial industry, large food corporations and federal policy upon how food is treated as a form of commerce.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CoalSwarm: A Clearinghouse for Shared Information on King Coal

      The article below was written by Ted Nace, who founded Coalswarm. Since 2008, the Center for Media and Democracy has been hosting the CoalSwarm wiki project on CMD’s SourceWatch.org website. SourceWatch is a sister site of this site, PRWatch.org, and other sites of CMD, which include ALECexposed.org and Foodrightsnetwork.org.

  • Finance

    • Secret and Lies of the Bailout

      The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

    • Inside the Hostess Bankery

      Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in 5 years if I took their offer.
      It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.
      That $3+ per hour they steal totaled $50 million last year that they never paid us. They sold $2.5 BILLION in product last year. If they can’t make this profitable without stealing my money then good riddance.

      I keep hearing how this strike forced them to liquidate. How we should just take it and be glad to have a job. What an unpatriotic view point. The reason these jobs provided me with a middle class opportunity is because people like my father in law and his father fought for my Union rights. I received that pay and those benefits because previous Union members fought for them. I won’t sell them, or my coworkers, out.

    • Portugal warns EU-IMF troika to back off on austerity demands

      President Anibal Cavaco Silva called for urgent action to halt the “recessionary spiral”, warning Europe’s leaders that the current course had become “socially unsustainable”.

  • Censorship

    • To Avoid Controversy, ‘Realtime’ Microblogging In China Now Delayed By 7 Days
    • Chinese journalists strike after propaganda department rewrites New Year editorial

      Protests have erupted in southern China after the Guangdong propaganda department rewrote a New Year editorial for the Southern Weekend newspaper.

      The government has an escalated situation on its hands now that the publication’s journalists have gone on strike and have received support from students and netizens.

    • Kuwait Twitter ‘insult’ brings 2-year prison sentence

      Authorities across the Western-allied Gulf Arab states have sharply increased crackdowns on perceived dissent among bloggers and others using social media. The sentence passed Sunday in Kuwait is not the harshest in region, but is likely to bring further denunciations from international rights groups.

    • Kuwaiti gets two years for insulting emir on Twitter
    • Kuwaiti gets 2 years for insulting emir on Twitter
    • Mounting costs for the default model of trust production in American newsrooms

      The outlines of the new system are now coming into view. Accuracy and verification, fairness and intellectual honesty–traditional virtues for sure–join up with transparency, “show your work,” the re-voicing of individual journalists, fact-checking, calling BS when needed and avoiding false balance.

      [...]

      Truth telling is more important that a ritualized demonstration of viewlessness…

    • When Reporters Get Personal

      BILL GRUESKIN remembers being an editor at The Wall Street Journal in 2004 when Farnaz Fassihi’s e-mail, meant for a few friends’ eyes only, began to circle the globe. Ms. Fassihi, an Iranian-American, was a reporter for The Journal, and the exposure of her views about the deteriorating situation in Iraq, provocative and incisive, was shocking. Published outside the normal bounds of painfully balanced journalism, her missive gave readers an unfiltered blast of reality.

      [...]

      Pushing back are editors like Philip B. Corbett, The Times’s associate managing editor for standards. “I flatly reject the notion that there is no such thing as impartial, objective journalism — that it’s some kind of pretense or charade, and we should just give it up, come clean and lay out our biases,” he said. “We expect professionals in all sorts of fields to put their personal opinions aside, or keep them to themselves, when they do their work — judges, police officers, scientists, teachers. Why would we expect less of journalists?”

      [...]

      ¶The idea that “transparency is the new objectivity,” as the author David Weinberger puts it, has merit. Journalists can let readers get to know their backgrounds, their personalities and how they do their jobs. The Times has embraced that move toward transparency, through social media, Web-based chats with journalists, and even its employment of a public editor who explains the paper to readers.

  • Privacy

    • Ministry unveils plan to spy on Internet users
    • Outrage at illegal SIM card penalties

      The Consumers Federation of Kenya (Cofek) has condemned a decision by the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) to fine subscribers KES300,000 (USD3,426) or jail them for three years for using unregistered SIM cards. CapitalFM.co.ke quotes Cofek secretary general Stephen Mutoro as suggesting that the only penalty customers should face for using unregistered SIM cards is disconnection from their service provider. Once disconnected, subscribers will have 90 days to recover their numbers, but Mutoro emphasised that the failure by providers to disconnect noncompliant customers should not be placed with the subscribers themselves.

    • There’s No Avoiding Google+

  • Civil Rights

    • The Big Chill

      The Obama administration is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know.

    • NDAA: The Civil Liberties We’re Giving Up For This Controversial Defense Bill

      President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on December 31, 2012, ushering in the New Year with a controversial law, which may impede civil liberties in its current form. As this New York Times article points out, President Obama signed this rather reluctantly, while being aware that the non-budgetary components were not entirely constitutional, and bordered on infringing on the president’s authority. I believe that that this is a pragmatic step taken by the president and while it binds his hands when it comes to closing down Guantanamo Bay (GITMO), it may have been a necessary evil to get work done. But we may be giving up more than what we had bargained for, considering the provisions of the Act in its current form.

    • New NDAA Keeps Indefinite Detention, Blocks Guantanamo Closure
    • Regulating the use of drones

      The debate will be interesting to listen to, for sure, whether or not the Legislature adopts new laws governing the use of drones. But there should be room for lawmakers to find proper balance between using drones when the technology would make police work safer and more effective and using them in an intrusive manner.

    • Drones killing our allies

      Militant commander Mullah Nazir was killed in a US drone strikes in South Waziristan, killing him is astonishing news as he was the only commander who was supporting our government’s efforts against militant groups, and he was considered the government’s biggest supporter in the area. Only weeks ago he survived a suicide attack from his rival Hakimullah Mehsud.

    • Stop the drones

      I am writing today because I am tremendously concerned about your use of remote controlled drones to kill people all over the world, depriving them of all their rights and violating every principle our great nation is founded on.
      It is hard to listen to you speak about the dead kids in Connecticut knowing you have killed lots of kids too. Kids who had no chance, no warning and no reason to be dead.
      Everybody deserves a trial and a chance to defend themselves against their accusers. It is the American way. Please stop setting such a monstrous bad example and stop the drone killings. Law enforcement follows your example and kills dangerous people rather than arresting them. You really do set the example for every chief executive in America.

    • The Booming Business of Drones
    • Emma Watson Stopped by Immigration

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Banana Republic Justice: Behind The Scenes Of The Pirate Bay Trial

        Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person that it’s hard to get a bird’s-eye view. This trial was characterized by first deciding that the operations were criminal, then finding somebody to punish, and finally trying to determine a criminal act they could be held accountable to. In any civilized country where process of law works, the exact reverse order is followed.

      • Tom Bell on copyright reform
      • The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain

        In 2003, many of those who rely on the public domain had their hopes dashed by Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case that upheld the 20-year extension to the copyright term. (The effects of repeated term extensions are explored in more detail below.) The Constitution declares that copyrights must only be “for limited times” and that Congress can only create exclusive rights to “promote the progress” of knowledge and creativity. Despite those limitations, in Eldred, the Supreme Court held that Congress could retrospectively lengthen copyright terms – something that seemed neither “limited” nor aimed at promoting progress. (It is hard to incentivize dead authors!) But 2012 was to hold in store an even more grievous blow to the public domain. In Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court held that Congress can remove works from the public domain without violating the Constitution. Yes, that is right – even if the public now enjoys unfettered access to a work, Congress is allowed to take that work out of the public domain and create a new legal monopoly over it. What’s more, the Court declared, Congress can do so even when it is clear that the new right “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work”!

      • Is The Copyright Industry Really Shooting Itself In The Foot?
      • ISP Walks Out of Piracy Talks: “We’re Not The Internet Police”

        A leading Australian Internet service provider has pulled out of negotiations to create a warning notice scheme aimed at reducing online piracy. iiNet, the ISP that was sued by Hollywood after refusing to help chase down alleged infringers, said that it can’t make any progress with righthsolders if they don’t make their content freely available at a reasonable price. The ISP adds that holding extra data on customers’ habits is inappropriate and not their responsibility.

      • 2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web

01.06.13

Links 6/1/2013: Steam Extending Games Sale, CIA Whistleblower Blown

Posted in News Roundup at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Miriam Ruiz, Debian Developer/Engineer

    Another Debian developer! Miriam has a low-drama setup. She simply uses Debian to do what she needs to do. I find it interesting that she desktop hops a bit (she’s now working with GNOME), but at the same time, it’s very cool that she’s open to trying new desktop environments. In general, her setup seems to be evolving over time, which is inspiring to those of us who are a bit entrenched in our own workflows.

  • Desktop

    • How Windows 8 has opened up a Window for Linux World Domination

      Earlier this year, Windows 8 was launched with great expectations. Microsoft banked on it to be a game-changer both for the tablet world as well as the desktop computer world. According to Redmond, the latest iteration of the most popular operating system in the world is a bridge between the tablet and the desktop. With a sleek, redesigned, and touch-friendly interface, Windows 8 was all set to become yet another milestone for Microsoft.

      However, Steve Ballmer’s expectations were crushed when the early reviews didn’t turn out to be that good. Windows 8, along with its contentious Metro interface, was criticized for its lack of usability and confusing design. Many users posted videos of their friends and family having a hard time figuring out how to use the software. In fact, the dramatic departure from the familiar Start-button oriented user interface has irked many users.

    • The Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Edition

      Over the last year or so I’ve managed to divest myself of most of my Apple products in a project I call #noapple. The last remaining piece of Apple equipment I used frequently was an 11-inch MacBook Air (MBA) that I would dual boot with OS X and Ubuntu.

      I was able to use it mainly booted to Ubuntu, but there were certain things that were a little bothersome. For example, the trackpad driver under Ubuntu wasn’t nearly as smooth as it was under OS X, and it was extremely sensitive, having little of what is called “palm detection”. Quite frequently, in the middle of typing something, the cursor would jump to some random part of the document when my palm barely brushed the trackpad.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Phone Spotted in a Bar, Supposedly

            Ubuntu on phones is a bold move from Canonical and they will need a lot of money for the marketing campaign. They can also start by forgetting or taking pictures of their phones in a bar, somewhere.

            This is a really old tactic and it’s not really effective anymore. Forgetting or spotting a phone in a bar might have been interesting a few years ago, but so many other companies did it that it’s no longer an effecting tool.

          • Android Central 121: CES preview, Ubuntu is back(ish)
          • Saturday’s Big Question: Is the Ubuntu phone for you?
          • Ubuntu Phone System Requirements

            Ubuntu Phone OS has been unveiled and it has received pretty stellar response so far. If you didn’t see it in action yet, check out the video below.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Netrunner 12.12 review – Starts low, ends high

              Netrunner 12.12 is not a perfect distro. But it is so much better than what its live session can give you. In fact, this is probably the most critical part, because people often judge distributions and decide whether to use them based on the few minutes of live CD testing. And considering what Netrunner can offer you, you might almost be tempted to give it a pass. But do not.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • The CuBox Pro Is An Open-Source Computer That Measures 2-inches Cubed

      If you’re a computer enthusiast and you’re not content with buying ready-to-use computers off the shelf and you don’t mind tinkering around the operating system, then open-source computer systems are probably the sort of device you’re after. Well if you are you might be interested to learn that SolidRun has taken the wraps off their latest offering, the CuBox Pro which is an upgrade over its predecessor and comes with 2GB of DDR3 RAM on board, which according to its creators makes it the world’s first ARM-based open source development platform to support 2GB of DDR3 RAM. The CuBox Pro will measure 2-inches cube and weighs 91grams and comes in either high polish or matte finish.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android Appalooza: Take note

          Now that the new year is here, you might be feeling a little crazy trying to organize all of those resolutions in your head. I’ve always found that jotting down those thoughts helps with the process of putting goals into action. Fortunately, there are plenty of apps available in the Google Play Store that offer this sort of thing: a place for Android users to put down their streams of consciousness, store photos that haven’t been archived, or leave a mental note.

Leftovers

01.05.13

Links 5/1/2013: Fedora 18 Delayed; Civil Rights Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Netflix makes cloud Janitor Monkey open source

    Netflix, the popular online video service that makes extensive use of public-cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has made code for one of the tools it developed to make its cloud-using life easier open source.

    Netflix developers built Janitor Monkey to automate clean-up of unused cloud resources, such as virtual-machine (VM) instances and cloud-storage volumes, or “Elastic Block Storage” (EBS) volumes in AWS parlance.

  • Another Satisfied Customer of FLOSS

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • A simulated FirefoxOS experience

        Your editor has frequently written that, while Android is a great system that has been highly beneficial to the cause of open mobile devices, it would be awfully nice to have a viable, free-software alternative. Every month that goes by makes it harder for any such alternative system to establish itself in the market, but that does not keep people from trying. One of the more interesting developments on the horizon has been FirefoxOS — formerly known as Boot2Gecko — a system under development at Mozilla. In the absence of any available hardware running this system, the recent 1.0 release of the FirefoxOS simulator seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for what the Mozilla folks are up to.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OPENNEBULA 2012: YEAR IN REVIE

      Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.
      As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

  • Licensing

    • Different Software Licenses

      There are times where one might be inclined to use a different license, e.g. the BSD license or even a license similar to the openmotif license. At least that’s the theory since what I really did was release source code with no license mentioned at all, kind of an ad hoc free/open software release. So I’m going to mellow a bit and say if someone wants to use a different but still open/free type license then I’ll accept that and not argue about it.

Leftovers

  • Why I Hate Microsoft

    It’s still not time to treat M$ as a normal business. They don’t yet work for a living, making $hundreds of thousands per employee per annum doing little more than shipping licensing agreements to OEMs. Certainly their OS is not worth what people are paying for it and M$ still attacks other businesses, most recently spreading FUD about Google at FTC, which dropped the matter after Google agreed to make a few changes. Google makes far more per employee per annum but they do work for it making huge server-farms do much of the work. That’s smart and does not harm competition. It’s time the rest of the world became smarter and dropped M$ as a “partner” in anything.

  • Journalism Is Not Narcissism

    Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation’s college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.

  • Italian authorities fine Apple another $264K over product warranties

    Apple’s changes to its product warranty policies in Italy have been enough to satisfy investigators, but not before the company was slapped with one final fine totaling $264,000.

  • Apple Must Pay Chinese Authors for Copyright Infringement
  • Google Muscles in on Microsoft’s Turf

    Google is muscling in on Microsoft ’s turf as it wins over more business customers with its cloud-based software.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell ship wreck debacle

      Shell has admitted that the Kulluks generators are wrecked. The weather forecast for today is strong winds and high seas.

  • Finance


    • Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness

      At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting.

    • What is behind the US fiscal cliff standoff?

      The phrase ‘fiscal cliff’ invokes images of an economy spiralling to the bottom.

      It was that image that was supposed to force politicians on Capitol Hill to work together to avoid the simultaneous expiration of tax cuts as well as the implementation of deep spending cuts.

    • Fiscal Cliff Follies: Political Theater Distracts From Key Problems With the Fix

      Extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income continue to enable the richest and largest individuals and enterprises to manipulate the economy and control the political parties. The result is an economic structure disinterested in a democratically focused way out of crisis and decline.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Perks of Being an American

      In the final days of the 112th Congress, President Obama signed two last minute bills. Both were extensions of highly controversial Bush-era policies. Both were scheduled to expire January 1, 2013. And both owe their passage largely to calamitous predictions that the sky would fall if they weren’t reauthorized in time.

    • Lawyers For The One Case Where There’s Proof Of Warrantless Wiretapping Decide Not To Appeal To Supreme Court

      Now, the lawyers representing Al-Haramain have decided that they will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, on the belief that the “current composition” of the court works against them. In other words, they believe that the current Justices on the court would side with the appeals court in rejecting their case, and then that would be precedent across the country (unless Congress changed the law, which it’s unlikely to do). The “hope” then is that somehow, down the road, someone else somehow gets evidence that they, too, were spied upon without a warrant, and it happens in a different district, and (hopefully) that circuit’s appeals court rules differently, setting up a circuit split. Oh, and that by the time that happens, the “composition” of the court shifts enough that the court actually respects the 4th Amendment. In other words: none of this is likely. Instead, the feds retain their ability to spy on people without warrants in direct violation of the 4th Amendment.

    • DHS TO PICK UP $6 BILLION TAB FOR CYBER SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS AT EVERY DEPARTMENT

      The Homeland Security Department is footing a potentially $6 billion bill to provide civilian agencies with the technology and expertise needed for near real-time threat detection, DHS officials said this week. The White House has demanded so-called continuous monitoring since 2010, but many agencies did not have the resources or know-how to initiate such surveillance.

    • Score one for the thicket

      WHILE everyone was watching the fiscal-cliff debacle, Congress and Barack Obama decided that they could still eavesdrop on Americans’ putatively private conversations without putting themselves to the trouble of obtaining a warrant.

    • The 2013 NDAA Signing Statement: No Better Than the 2012 Version
    • European Court orders damages for CIA torture victim

      In mid-December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg awarded damages of €60,000 to Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. The judges accepted that Macedonian security services had illegally seized El-Masri at the end of 2003, subjected him to abuse and finally handed him over to agents from the CIA.

    • Activist clear trash near NC CIA contractor’s base

      Stop Torture Now has committed to collect trash from the road outside the airport under the state’s “Adopt-a-Highway” program.

    • Obama may pick Pentagon, CIA heads next week

      President Barack Obama may round out his new national security leadership team next week, with a nomination for defense secretary expected and a pick to lead the CIA possible.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet”

      In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It’s a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.

    • REBUILDING THE WEB WE LOST

      We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It’s become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written and has inspired great responses.
      But the most important question we can ask is: How do we rebuild the positive aspects of the web we lost? There are a few starting points, building on conversations we’ve been having for years. Let’s look at the responsibilities we must accept if we’re going to return the web to the values that a generation of creators cared about.

    • China’s legislature adopts online info rules to protect privacy

      The decision bans service providers, as well as government agencies and their personnel, from leaking or damaging users’ digital information, as well as from selling or illegally providing this information to others.

    • China requires Internet users to register names
    • China closing Web loophole

      Michael Anti, a Beijing-based critic of Web censorship, believes the current pushback on the Web reflects paranoia over incoming President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on official corruption. Local officials could be pressuring propaganda departments to curb freedom of speech online, he said. “Officials hate the Internet,” Anti said. “They’re afraid of being victims of the anti-corruption campaign.

    • China’s New Internet Law Legalizes Deletion of “Illegal” Content, Bad News for Sina Weibo

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Tough Times for Trolls and their “Copyright Negligence” Scheme

        Despite at least five smackdowns by federal judges, copyright trolls are still accusing Internet subscribers of “negligently” allowing someone else to download porn films without paying. Last week, subpoena defense attorney Morgan Pietz fought back by asking the Northern California federal courts to put all of the open “negligence” cases filed by a prolific troll firm in front of a single judge – a judge who already ruled that the “negligence” theory is bogus.

01.04.13

Links 4/1/2013: Bodhi 2.2.0, Semplice Linux 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.03.13

Links 3/1/2013: Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled, Linux 3.8-rc2, KDE 4.9.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The year of open source in libraries

    If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was or if they had heard of Koha, I heard “no” a lot more than I do now. Now, people call me up and ask me to come to their libraries to speak about open source and help them find the right products for their library. Now, I hardly ever hear, “We can’t pick open source because it’s too immature.” Instead people contact me to ask what they have to do to get their hands on the latest and greatest release of Koha. It’s because of these changes that I’m seeing in the library professionals I meet that I proclaim 2012 the year of open source in libraries!

  • Happy New Year & Browser and OS stats for 2012

    I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year on behalf of the entire LQ team. 2012 has been another great year for LQ and we have quite a few exciting developments in store for 2013, including a major code update that we originally had planned for late 2012.

    Unfortunately, 2012 has been another quiet year from a blogging perspective, but I do regularly post to the LQ twitter account. Posting more lengthy commentary here is something I’ll try to be more cognizant of this year.

    [...]

    Operating Systems
    Windows 53.56%
    Linux 35.54%

  • The Web browser wars continue, and #1 is… well, that depends on whom you ask
  • TECH TALK: Open source is legal software alternative

    Despite the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.

  • January 2013 Project of the Month: DosBox
  • Open Source in 2013
  • NeuroDNet – an open source platform for constructing and analyzing neurodegenerative disease networks

    Genetic networks control cellular functions. Aberrations in normal cellular function arecaused by mutations in genes that disrupt the fine tuning of genetic networks and causedisease or disorder.

    However, the large number of signalling molecules, genes and proteinsthat constitute such networks, and the consequent complexity of interactions, has restrainedprogress in research elucidating disease mechanisms. Hence, carrying out a systematicanalysis of how diseases alter the character of these networks is important.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/armv6: what’s new and exciting?

      First of all we tried switching default cache type from write-through to write-back type. It should have increased performance but instead opened a can of worms. Memory corruption debugging led to L2 cache driver on Pandaboard, EHCI driver code and subsequently to busdma code. Whole process took quite a few days full of hair-pulling and nagging various people and ended up in committing USB fixes and Ian Lepore’s busdma patches. PL310 (L2 cache controller) driver is being tested at this very moment. Original issue (WB caches) still stands and postponed till next year.

    • FreeBSD Moves Along On ARM Support
    • NetBSD 6.0.1 Released, Brings Bug-Fixes

      For those of you currently on NetBSD 6.0 or are using NetBSD 5.x as your operating system but have been wanting a reason to upgrade, the first NetBSD 6.0.x point release has surfaced.

    • FreeBSD Jumps Quickly On LLVM/Clang 3.2

      While just released on Friday, FreeBSD has already pulled LLVM/Clang 3.2 into its “head” repository and will be pushing it into the FreeBSD 9/Stable series in the weeks ahead.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Cassandra 1.2 arrives as foretold

      Cassandra, the distributed, column-oriented NoSQL database, has been updated to version 1.2, says the Apache Software Foundation. Version 1.2 of Cassandra sees the official release of CQL3, which was introduced in beta in April 2012′s Cassandra 1.1 release. CQL is the modelling and query language for Cassandra that borrows, syntactically, from SQL to offer a more familiar database environment for developers. CQL3 allows for multi-column primary keys and many other changes, which are now established.

    • Apache Puts Out Cassandra 1.2 NoSQL Database

      The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Cassandra. Version 1.2 of the Cassandra big data “NoSQL” distributed database introduces several new features to the open-source project.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source

      A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

      The new IT strategy on Thursday evening got 36 votes in favour and 20 against, reports one of the city council members, Matthias Stürmer. He described the new approach as “ground breaking”. One year ago, the city council adopted a motion for Bern to develop an open source strategy. The council now takes a further step, asking for an IT strategy that increases the use of open source and that aims to achieve long-term cost savings.

  • Licensing

    • Unlicensed FOSS: Major Mistake for Developers

      One disturbing trend is the posting of FOSS modules without licenses. Simon Phipps focused on this problem in his recent blog, particularly on the problems raised by the terms of service at Github. James Governor, the founder of analyst Red Monk, is quoted by Simon as stating: “”younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github” http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046. Ironically, this approach will undercut the major desire of most FOSS developers: the broad use of their code. The lack of a license ensures that the software will be removed from any product meant to be used by corporations. Corporations are very sensitive about ensuring that all software that they use or which is incorporated in their products is properly licensed. I have worked on hundreds of FOSS analysis and the response to software without a clear license is almost always “rip it out”.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The men who would save Mali’s manuscripts

    Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed graves and shrines associated with Sufism this year. Ancient manuscripts are not directly threatened, but some fear they are next.

  • Why Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike is ethical

    Q: There has been much coverage of the hunger strike by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. I’m not interested in the politics — instead, I want to address the ethics of a hunger strike. Look at what it really is: a person slowly commits suicide to pressure others into giving what he or she wants. The most unethical part is that thousands of Canadians are encouraging Spence in her suicide by supporting her. It’s one thing for a child who didn’t get a toy to swear never to eat again, but we should expect more from a community leader.

  • iPhone ‘Do Not Disturb’ bug to self-destruct on Monday

    Users of Apple’s iPhone will have to wait until Monday for its latest bug to fix itself.

  • MorphOS Still Being Toyed With For PowerPC

    MorphOS, the Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system, is still being experimented with on PowerPC hardware. The latest effort out of the MorphOS camp is to make the operating system work on the IBM PowerPC G5.

  • Fox asks appeals court to stop Dish’s ad-skipping DVR, right now

    Fox Broadcasting, having lost a key court ruling last month, is more eager than ever to kick Dish Network’s new ad-skipping Hopper DVR off the market.
    Last month, a federal judge found that Dish’s DVRs probably don’t break copyright law, ruling that the Hoppers can stay on the market and operate normally while Fox proceeds with its lawsuit. Fox is arguing that it can’t wait, and it says that Dish’s product has the potential to do serious damage to various aspects of the ad-supported TV business. As promised, it appealed the lower court decision and has now filed its opening brief at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (PDF via Deadline.com).

  • Fujitsu Comes Up Empty in Koh’s Courtroom

    “They were very hardworking,” he said. “They dug down surprisingly deeply. They spent a lot of time going through documentary evidence.”

  • EU’s tougher Google deal derails FTC agreement

    European regulators appear headed toward a dramatically different conclusion to their antitrust probe of Google than their American counterparts — a binding agreement that could cost the search company dearly if violated.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Zanu PF leaders defy party WikiLeaks warning

      Zanu PF has warned its bigwigs to watch their mouths when meeting with American envoys amid revelations that party “stalwarts” last week clandestinely met United States ambassador Bruce Wharton.

    • A Tale of Two Diplomatic Asylums: Julian Assange and Chen Guangcheng
    • WikiLeaks:1988 Indian Payoff To LTTE Revealed – 520 Million Indian Rupees To Tigers

      “Major Sri Lankan Papers April 15 have head lined a report (First published in the April 3 London Observer) which quotes both Indian High Commissioner J.N. Dixit and an LTTE spokesman in Madras that Indian Prime Minister Gandhi agreed in late July to pay the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a monthly stipend to compensate for lost Tax revenues following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

    • What Is an Assange?

      This week, I was proud to join the board and help launch the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a new organization which plans on crowd-funding for a variety of independent journalism outlets whose prime mission is to seek transparency and accountability in government. You can read about the first group of four organizations — which includes the National Security Archive, MuckRock News, and The UpTake and WikiLeaks — here.

      Recently, I sat down with George Washington Law School professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and my close friend Kevin McCabe to discuss WikiLeaks’ impact on transparency, the government’s response, and the comparison to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (also a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation). (And see a previous conversation with Jonathan Turley here.)

      WikiLeaks was extralegally cut off from funding after two Congressmen successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard and PayPal into refusing to do business with the journalism organization in late 2010. We hope that the Freedom of the Press Foundation will become a bulwark against these types of unofficial censorship tactics in the future.

    • US spies on Assange in UK Ecuador Embassy

  • Finance

    • Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR

      Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

    • It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over: Wall Street Gears Up for Austerity Battles of 2013

      For better or worse, a bill passed Congress in the wee hours of 2013 averting the much-hyped “fiscal cliff” for now and raising taxes on couples making over $450,000 and extending a lifeline of unemployment benefits to 2 million Americans.

      But the vote is not so much an ending as a beginning to the austerity battles of 2013.

      As the economy continues to stagger, the search for a “grand bargain” on taxes and critical social programs is likely to roll from fiscal cliff to debt ceiling negotiations into the annual budget battles. While some feel that a “grand bargain” is less likely than “death by 1,000 cuts,” the ongoing debate will continue to pose serious risks for average Americans who will need to stay engaged.

    • Google India fined $13.8M for false accounting

      Search giant’s Indian arm accused of misleading tax authorities by underdeclaring revenue from AdWords and evading taxes through international transactions, but Google India denies the claim.

    • Paulson Named in ACA’s Revised Goldman Sachs CDO Suit

      Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund, was named as a defendant in a proposed revised lawsuit by ACA Financial Guaranty Corp. (MANF) against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) over a collateralized debt obligation called Abacus.

      Paulson and Goldman Sachs conspired to induce ACA to provide financial guaranty insurance for the Abacus deal, which was “doomed to fail,” the firm said in papers filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. ACA, which sued Goldman Sachs in 2011, is seeking court permission to file a revised complaint adding Paulson as a defendant.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Online gift shop blocked by mobile networks

      This is an online shop – meaning the block was affecting their ability to sell their products. The block was spotted and reported to Virgin Mobile in early December. The problem has not yet been fixed. So the block was in effect over Christmas, and will have affected the site’s ability to reach their market in one of the more important retail periods of the year.

    • State of Freedom of Speech in Tunisia in 2012

  • Privacy

    • Facebook rejects German demand to allow fake names
    • Microsoft Scrutinized by EU Privacy Watchdogs for Policy Changes

      Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s policy changes for its Internet products including Hotmail and Bing are being formally examined by European data protection regulators for potential privacy issues.
      Updates to Microsoft’s services agreement, which took effect Oct. 19, are being formally reviewed, EU privacy regulators wrote to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and the head of Microsoft Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s and France’s data protection commissions are leading the examination, according to the Dec. 17 letter, obtained by Bloomberg News.

    • EU Investigates Microsoft for Policy Changes in Hotmail, Bing

      Microsoft made the policy changes on October 19

      Microsoft just can’t catch a break from the European Commission.

      The EU now plans to investigate the tech giant’s recent policy changes and how they may affect the privacy of its users. The policy changes were in regards to Microsoft’s Internet services like Bing and Hotmail.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • After ACTA: Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement

      Not content with dedicated treaties developed under the aegis of WIPO, the copyright industries saw such general trade agreements as yet opportunity to impose their maximalist agendas. This led to chapters dealing with intellectual monopolies like copyright and patents not only being added to such agreements, but becoming the tail that wagged the dog. That can be seen from the fact that ACTA was killed in the European Parliament last year precisely because the chapter dealing with copyright and patents was regarded as so flawed that it vitiated the entire treaty, which had to be rejected despite other sections that were viewed very favourably by many MEPs.

      Moreover, in the current negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is a kind of ACTA for the Pacific rim, it is once more the disproportionate demands of the copyright and patent world that threaten to scupper the entire treaty as countries rebel at the onerous terms the US is trying to impose.

      That means the otherwise welcome trade agreement between EU and US is bound to have a similar chapter that attempts to push through many or most of the bad ideas that infected ACTA. There’s already a precedent for this in CETA, the Canada-European Union Trade Agreement that I wrote about back in October last year. As I noted, the criminal sanctions there were directly modelled on ACTA’s.

    • Copyrights

      • London ‘crime unit’ to target downloaders as part of UK copyright and patent initiatives

        Vince Cable, the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable outlined several different measures, including a sped-up patent processing service that can deliver patents in just three months — it currently can take years — as well as informational campaigns aimed at younger individuals that are more likely to engage in pirating copyrighted material. Cable also said that a special crime unit, aimed specifically at illegal downloaders, would be created in partnership with the City of London police.

01.01.13

Links 1/1/2013: digiKam 3.0.0, Android-Based Game Console Ships

Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Resolve to more open in 2013
  • Open Source Speech Recognition Tool, Simon, Gets An Update
  • Five Biggest Open Source Developments in 2012
  • Tech Jobs In 2013: Open Source All The Way Down
  • The H Year: 2012′s Wins, Fails and Mehs

    Welcome to The H’s look back at 2012. We’ve broken down the events of the year by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say “Meh”. From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source software to the worst mis-steps in the community.

  • Kolab Systems spearheads an open-source solution for the third pillar of productivity: groupware

    Why is the founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe currently leading a for-profit software company in the groupware space?

  • Egyptians decide Open Source is the Sphinx’s bollocks

    Open Sauce appears to be a major victor of the Arab Spring which led to a change of leadership in Egypt.

    It appears that the nation which worked out how to build the world’s largest public building with just copper tools, has decided that proprietary software is a bad thing.

    Egypt is apparently drawing up plans to cast out the Voles, Oracles, Apples and other followers of Apep, into the Lands of the West in favour of a decent open sauce plan for its public software projects.

  • Events

    • Google DocCamp 2012: Book sprints

      There are three new books about free software thanks to Google’s 2012 Summer of Code Documentation Camp. The week-long event started off with an unconference, but the main objective was for each participating project to produce a cohesive, book-length work of documentation. All three projects delivered, and thanks to the arrangement made by FLOSSManuals with a local printer, 30 copies of each book were in print late Friday evening. FLOSSManuals has the sprint process down to a science, which is good news for open projects of all stripes, but it is still feeling out how best to sustain the sprint’s energy after the participants part company.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS AppDays Hackathon Brings Mozilla’s Coveted OS Too India!

        No one needs an introduction to Mozilla. Yes, the makers of the Firefox internet browser. For years, Mozilla has been encouraging open web standards, trying to promote the web as a platform for all. And with the advent of HTML5 things have gotten much simpler with almost everything being able to be implemented in web. With HTML5, developers would no longer have to worry about creating applications intended for cross platform usage – if based on web-standards, it runs on any platform with a standard compliant browser! Building apps is quite easy as well.

      • Mozilla Firefox in 2012

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • 2012 Trends and 2013 Predictions for Open Source eCommerce

      I’ve been writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) shopping carts for a decade now, and many carts have risen and fallen in popularity during that time. For the past five years I’ve tracked the popularity of OSC carts every month by doing an exact Google search and recording the results. This doesn’t track the actual number of carts installed, and popularity can be positive or negative, but over time it becomes more and more valuable as the search results mirror the life cycle of a cart. Carts that are becoming more popular show rapid increases in the number of search results. It is possible to see exact the month a cart peaks in popularity. Year-to-year results are even more revealing.

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Simon 0.4.0 Speech Recognition System Released

      Version 0.4.0 of the Simon open-source speech recognition system has been released. This release, which represents years of development, brings many improvements.

      Simon 0.4.0 for speech recognition brings a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system, and much more. The main user-interface of Simon has also been reworked for improved usability.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • “Sit. Stay. Good lamp!”

        Shanshan Zhou had a longtime childhood fantasy: she dreamt her otherwise static belongings would suddenly begin to play with her—she used to pretend they were alive. So when it came time to do a project for her Physical Computing class at Victoria University-Wellington, she took the opportunity to turn an inanimate object into “living art.” Zhou gave character to an object which, despite its lack of human features, could now connect with people.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 is now stable and “feature complete”

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.

      Although this new stable version is not yet a W3C standard, it has been called “feature complete” a this stage.

Leftovers

  • William Baer Confirmed as Justice Department Antitrust Chief

    William J. Baer was confirmed by the Senate on Sunday as the government’s top antitrust lawyer, placing him in charge of the Justice Department division that reviews corporate mergers and prosecutes price-fixing cases.

    Amid the heated negotiations to reach an agreement to head off large tax increases and vast spending cuts in the new year, the Senate voted 64 to 26 in favor of Mr. Baer, a prominent antitrust lawyer at the law firm Arnold & Porter.

  • Haiku: BeOS for the 21st Century

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Report: $91 million spent on secret NSA tests probing domestic computer systems
    • Privacy group gets NSA files on utility research

      Files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and provided to CNET show that the National Security Agency (NSA) under its secret Perfect Citizen program is looking at the computerized systems that control large-scale utilities, checking for vulnerabilities including power grid and gas pipeline controllers. The U.S. government relies on commercial utilities for electricity, telecommunications, and other infrastructure requirements The program seeks to carry out “vulnerability exploration and research” against computerized controllers involved in these utilities.

    • NSA secret cyber security testing no longer secret
    • Pentagon Looks to Fix ‘Pervasive Vulnerability’ in Drones

      In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.

      Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.

      Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA Sued To Release NYPD Spying Report

      A non-profit government watchdog has sued the Central Intelligence Agency to uncover information about its controversial collaboration with the New York City Police Department’s counter-terrorism surveillance program. The suit, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Dec. 20, seeks to force the release of a report by the agency’s inspector general into whether it violated legal prohibitions against spying on American soil. In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the agency was deeply involved in training the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit, which spied on Muslims in New York even when there was no evidence they had committed any crimes.

    • Drone victim to appeal ruling over UK support for CIA strikes in Pakistan

      A Pakistani man whose father was killed by a US drone strike is to appeal a judgement in a case seeking to determine the legality of intelligence sharing in relation to GCHQ assistance in CIA drone strikes.

      Noor Khan – whose father was killed in a CIA strike on a peaceful meeting in March 2011 –issued legal proceedings in March of this year against the Foreign Secretary in order to clarify the British Government’s reported policy of supporting the CIA’s covert campaign of attacks on his home region of Waziristan, using remotely-controlled robotic aircraft.

      Supported by legal action charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day & Co, Mr Khan’s legal challenge asserts that this practice are illegal. British law makes it clear that in these circumstances UK intelligence staff and those who direct their actions could be committing various criminal offences, including conspiracy to murder.

    • Senate report: FBI, CIA, intelligence officials caused confusing Benghazi explanations
    • NDAA Threatens Americans’ Constitutional Rights and Should Be Vetoed By Obama
    • Crossover Drones

      The rapid advance of drone technology has sparked interest by police and sheriff offices in acquiring drones. This new eagerness of many nonfederal law enforcement agencies to acquire drones has been also closely nurtured by the federal government.

    • Drones: More Than Mechanized Warfare
    • Imran Khan | Ground the drones in 2013

      Although 2012 saw an accelerating drawdown of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) forces in Afghanistan, a grim aspect of that decade-long war—reliance on air strikes by unmanned drones—continued unabated. Indeed, those attacks were stepped up, with America’s use of drone warfare in Pakistan reaching an unprecedented height over the past year. With President Barack Obama re-elected and no longer facing the pressure of a campaign, it would be in America’s interest—and certainly in the interests of my country, Pakistan—to use the first year of his new term to de-escalate the violence.

    • Interesting revelations from the OWS FBI files
    • EGYPT PROSECUTORS INVESTIGATE POPULAR TV COMEDIAN

      Egyptian prosecutors launched an investigation on Tuesday against a popular television satirist for allegedly insulting the president in the latest case raised by Islamist lawyers against outspoken media personalities.

  • Cablegate

    • GREEN LEFT REPORT #11: Christine Assange, Carlo Sands + more

      The final Green Left Report for 2012 features Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange, on why the Australian government fears WikiLeaks, the problems of the corporate press, and the WikiLeaks releases that impacted the most on her.

    • Syrian rebels eulogise Aussie ‘martyr’

      The man’s name and date of birth correspond with that given for one person in a secret 2010 cable sent by the US embassy in Canberra, detailing people to be added to the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database. However, his family deny he was a member of any extremist group.

    • Ethiopian Review’s 2012 Person of the Year

      Because of Julian Assange’s effort, the world knows that heroic Ethiopians such as Andualem Aragie, Eskindir Nega, Reeyot Alemu, Woubshet Taye, and countless others are languishing in jail after being falsely accused of terrorism by a regime that is bankrolled by the U.S. Government and the European Union, and assisted by China.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • King Coal Gets a Boost through ALEC

      As Americans experienced epic droughts, freakish hurricanes, and other extreme weather over the past few years, many are eager to see our nation secure a sustainable energy supply for the future that won’t break our climate. But others – most notably the polluting fossil fuel industries – are eager to double down on the same old technologies that are responsible for the climate crisis in the first place.

    • The GOP House Is Dysfunctional By Design

      In short, John Boehner has committed himself to a set of principles for operating the House that makes the body fundamentally dysfunctional. A functional legislative body either needs a mechanism for the majority leader to get members of his caucus to toe the party line, or he needs the ability to “reach across the aisle” to get the votes he needs from the minority. John Boehner lacks the former, and by ruling out the latter he’s effectively painted himself into a corner where he might not be able to get any piece of “fiscal cliff” legislation passed by the full House of Representatives.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Make No Mistake, Corporate Ed Reform is Hurting Kids

      Corporate Education Reform hurts children. This truth needs to be said a million times over. No longer can we allow reformers to hide behind the rhetoric of reform and ignore the realities. Words like “poverty is not destiny” “high expectations” “quality school options” and “choice” all mask the very real impact of these reforms. There are consequences to the disruption of school closings, to purposeful disinvestment in neighborhood schools, to layoffs of experienced educators, to the haphazard expansion of largely low-quality charters.

      As most who read this blog know, I work in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Unlike many teachers out there who see only their small window of the reform world, I get to see the cross-section. Students cycle through my program so quickly (too quickly, thanks to massive cuts in mental health services) that I hear dozens of stories a week from all over the city and surrounding suburbs. And what’s happening out there is beyond heart-breaking, it is wrong. Kids have come in to the hospital with massive anxiety, depression, and aggression related, in part, to school policies. I have students who report fear of “getting jumped” on the way to schools across town after their neighborhood school was shut down. I’ve had kids with school refusal due to the very real fear of a dangerous bus route through rival neighborhoods. Young people are afraid of the increases in violence and gang activity as kids from all parts of the city are thrust together in schools whose only response to the rage is zero tolerance lockdown. There is no healing, just ignoring and punishing the problem, pushing the fights off of school grounds. Almost every child I work with from the neighborhoods targeted for the brunt of school reform has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They have difficulty sitting still, are quick to react to any perceived threat with violence or aggression, cannot concentrate on school work, and have come to hate the experience of school. And yet all they get from school leadership is school closures, fired teachers, and false choices.

    • We Need Your Help! Join Our Fight to Keep 3D Printing Open

      A few weeks ago, we asked for your help to identify patent applications that threaten to stifle innovation in the 3D printing community. Now more than ever, it’s critical to make sure the free and open source community and others who work in the space have freedom to operate and to continue to innovate.
      With your help, we have identified a lineup of top-priority patent applications that seem both overly-broad and dangerous to the free and open source community. Now it’s time to find proof that these patent applicants do not deserve the monopolies they are asking for: that what they are trying to patent was known or was obvious before the patent was filed.

    • Copyrights

      • New Zealand’s largest paper calls Kim Dotcom “good for this country”

        Kim Doctom could fill his own Year in Review list for 2012. The Megaupload mega-personality planned a cloud music service called Megabox. He unveiled a new domain, Me.ga, only to lose it in a preemptive strike by the African nation of Gabon. There were even rap songs and accusations against Joe Biden.

        But hanging over all that was Dotcom’s ongoing soap opera in New Zealand. On January 20, 2012, 76 police officers raided Dotcom’s mansion on behalf of the US and took him into custody for extradition to face charges of racketeering, money-laundering, and copyright infringement. Twelve months later, the legal woes aren’t over, and Megaupload remains down… but Dotcom is being invited to ceremonially turn on Christmas lights in the country.

      • The File Sharing Lawsuits Begin: Thousands Targeted at TekSavvy

        Given recent reports that a Montreal-based company has captured data on one million Canadians who it says have engaged in unauthorized file sharing, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before widespread file sharing lawsuits came to Canada. It now appears that those lawsuits are one step closer as TekSavvy, a leading independent ISP, has announced that it has received a motion seeking the names and contact information of thousands of customers (legal documents here). To TekSavvy’s credit, the company insists that it will not provide subscriber information without a court order and it has sent notices to affected customers.

      • Hollywood and Google Square Off Over Pirate Search Results

        The MPAA is still not happy with Google’s efforts to reduce online piracy and says that the search giant continues to facilitate a “staggering amount of copyright infringement.” For their part Google is warning policymakers of the damaging effects the recent surge of DMCA takedown requests is having on the flow of information online. Both Google and the MPAA agree that the current DMCA takedown procedures are not ideal, but the solutions both parties have in mind are quite different.

      • Copyright disappears books
      • Apple fined by China court for copyright violation

        A court in China has ordered Apple to pay compensation to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.

12.31.12

Links 31/12/2012: openmandriva.org Emerges, Many New Android Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

12.30.12

Links 30/12/2012: PulseAudio 3.0, GNOME Adds Privacy

Posted in News Roundup at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Limerick migrates to Zentyal’s open source email solution
  • Integreen Brings Open Source Traffic Monitoring To Italy

    The best way to fight an enemy is to start by learning everything you can about it, which is exactly what the team at Integreen are looking to do in the Italian city of Bolzano. By using the latest technology and banking on open source software, Integreen hopes to provide the city management with enough traffic and environmental data to help them more effectively implement environmentally conscience programs such as mass transit.

  • OpenGamma updates its open source financial analytics platform

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome to End Silent Extension Updates

        When it comes to their Internet browsers, users can get quite picky about how much automatic updating they want to take place. For example, in an OStatic post at the end of last year on how the Mozilla Firefox browser would begin silently updating itself (in keeping with Google Chrome) our readers disagreed widely on whether they wanted Firefox to do so.

  • SaaS

    • HPCC: An Open Source Big Data Competitor to Hadoop

      We’ve written before many times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and as the Big Data trend grows, Hadoop training and support solutions are proliferating.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.2.6 leads Oracle virtualisation update

      The developers of Oracle’s VirtualBox have announced a maintenance update to the lead version of their virtualisation platform. Version 4.2.6 is released along with maintenance releases of older branches of the software: 3.2.16., 4.0.18 and 4.1.24. The changes in 4.2.6 are focused on stability and on correcting a number of regressions – there are no new features. Fixes include ensuring that stale virtual machine events are not sent to resetting VMs, fixing the appearance of text in the GUI, corrections to the 3D support, fixing hangs with some storage and adding network rate and disk usage to the metrics.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Zurmo sets out to enchant the open source CRM space

        Being “fed up with the existing open source CRM applications”, the team at Zurmo have released their own open source customer relationship management (CRM) software – Zurmo 1.0. The CRM software, which has been in development for two years, includes deal tracking features, contact and activity management, and has scores and badges that can be managed through a built-in gamification system.

        Zurmo 1.0 has been translated into ten languages and features a RESTful API to further integration with other applications. Location data is provided by Google Maps and Geocode. The application’s permission system supports roles for individual users and groups, and allows administrators to create ad-hoc teams. The application is designed to be modern and easy to use and integrates social-network-like functionality at its centre, which functions to distribute tasks, solicit advice, and publish accomplishments.

  • Funding

    • Crowdfunding Piwik 2.0

      Piwik is a Free Software Web analytics application. If you run a website, it is what you use when you do not want to use Google Analytics or any other third party solution.

  • BSD

  • Project Releases

    • LLVM 3.2 released
    • LLVM 3.2 now available

      A few days after the intended release date, the LLVM developers have announced the availability of version 3.2 of the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The LLVM project encompasses a set of compiler tools such as the C/C++/Objective C compiler Clang, the runtime compiler library compiler-rt, the low-level debugger LLDB, a C++ standard library libc++ and the VMKit JVM which uses LLVM for static and JIT compilation.

    • MediaGoblin 0.3.2 “Goblinverse” Released

      After initial stages of fundraising campaign, the developers have published a new release of MediaGoblin, the only full “free as in freedom” media sharing software. This software is a part of the GNU project and aims to give users full freedom to share, upload and use all kind of media on their servers without using some expensive services out there or losing their privacy, freedom or control over their data.

    • TomEE 1.5.1 more than just a maintenance update

      In the latest update to the Java servlet container Tomcat, the TomEE development team has done a lot more than just fix a few bugs. TomEE 1.5.1 includes an option to improve classloader customisation and the ability to inject remote initial context into TomEE clients.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

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