08.27.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The European Patent Office has ceased even trying to pretend that it respects human rights, including the right to free speech
Staff suicides at the EPO are a frequent occurrence [1, 2, 3] as the last/latest one was just a week ago. This can reasonably well be blamed on a regime of terror, led by the arrogant, Napoleonic Battistelli. He rules with an iron fist and violates many rules, laws, regulations, etc. There’s no real protection from a thug like him who pretends to be above the law (impunity), so people are rightly afraid. It’s the same with armed policemen who destroy video evidence and do as they wish, basically acting like unaccountable goons.
Worst among all is probably Battistelli’s so-called Investigation Unit, which is basically just a bunch of goons, who even hire the ‘British Blackwater’ to go after staff and after journalists. Just for the uninitiated, who haven’t been following what we covered here before, here are some reminders:
“The Office continues to filter emails sent to EPO staff and containing the word SUEPO in the subject,” SUEPO wrote on the 26th of this month (an update titled “Filtering of SUEPO emails”). It’s not exactly surprising anymore. The EPO is nuts, so this is expected. “A SUEPO lawyer addresses Mr Battistelli,” wrote SUEPO, “by pointing out the legal implications and requests the end of the filtering. A copy of the letter can be found here.”
In a very crude, undemocratic fashion they do not just try to completely gag opposition, even if that opposition is the staff union, i.e. EPO staff rather than outsiders. For the record, here is the text of this complaint from SUEPO (it’s in German, so translations would be well received) █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The US patent system may be getting exported to Europe (a silent occupation), without even consulting European citizens on this matter
Summary: The EPO-backed Unitary Patent scheme threatens to bring software patents to Europe and along with them a lot of patent trolls from all around the world (especially the United States)
“The Unitary Patent might be able to open the floodgates for software patents in Europe,” says this new analysis, published earlier today in a lawyers’ site. It echoes many of the warnings from the likes of FFII, among other European groups that have repeatedly warned about the Unitary Patent (UPC).
“It echoes many of the warnings from the likes of FFII, among other European groups that have repeatedly warned about the Unitary Patent (UPC).”The long piece is titled “The Murky Waters Of Software Patents” and it’s not as positive as one might expect. Given the publication it comes from (pro-patents), it’s hardly surprising at all. “Software patents,” says the author, “have been the subject of much debate – not only in the US, but also in Europe. This has been a thorny issue for many years and the future of software patents still remains unknown. At the outset, a breakdown of the differences between patents and copyrights will highlight why the patent is the form of intellectual property which is proving to be the most problematic with regards to software.”
The author later alludes to Alice, which we may write a lot more about tomorrow. “In the US,” he says, “software patents have been in existence since the early 1970s, but courts have recently started to reject software patents. The courts have ruled that simply “doing something on a computer” does not enable one to obtain a software patent on the matter. After hundreds of thousands of patents being issued, it became clear that there needed to be more restriction and the courts have recently been invalidating patents that were already granted. In 2014, in the landmark Alice Corp judgment, the courts stated “the mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a patent ineligible abstract idea into a patent eligible invention.” Thus the US is now retreating from its original position of granting software patents somewhat liberally.”
Then the author writes about Europe, in particular about the effects of the UPC. “The Unitary Patent,” he explains, “is a very recent brainchild of the European Patent Office. Through one single request, one will be able to obtain patent protection in 25 member states (Spain, Italy and Croatia are not currently participating). This patent will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Unitary Patent Court, which will comprise of a court of first instance, a court of appeal and a registry.
“The rulings of this court will affect the Member States who have ratified the agreement. The EPO hopes that the establishment of the court will add to more predictability in proceedings and avoid parallel litigation. Since all unitary patents will thus have their own court, there is also an expectation of faster and more efficient procedures than if these were to be held in the relevant Member States. So far, seven Member States have ratified the agreement – and Malta was among the first to do so. It will come into force once it has been ratified by thirteen states, which is expected to be around 2016. Nevertheless, the position of software patents under this new patent system will remain to be seen. When it comes into force, it will lay the cornerstone for more debate on the subject – as being able to achieve a unitary software patent will mean that it will automatically be recognized in all the Member States.
“The Unitary Patent might be able to open the floodgates for software patents in Europe, since if it allows for software patents, they will become immediately applicable in all the EU Member States. The same might be said for the contrary – however, the fact that the EPO allows for a Unitary Patent court of appeal means that this discussion might go on for years to come.”
Another site of patent lawyers now informs us of “Progress on the Unitary Patent”. It says that “[o]n 10 July 2015, the Preparatory Committee (which handles all the subsidiary issues arising from the creation of the Unified Patent Court (“UPC”), such as HR or IT management) met to discuss the last (18th) draft of the Rules of Procedure for the UPC. They are expected to reach an agreement on a final set of Rules in October 2015.
“The draft Protocol on Provisional Application of parts of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court was also on the agenda as well as the salary package of the judges, the privileges and immunities of the UPC and the division of costs and responsibilities.”
According to this, Portugal too has caved in without even consulting or liaising with its citizens. What a coup!
“Confirmation of Portugal’s ratification of the UPC Agreement was published on 6 August 2015,” says a site about the UPC, “in the country’s Official Gazette of legislation. In the Diário da República Eletrónico, the Decree of the President of the Republic No. 90/2015 indicated that Aníbal Cavaco Silva had approved the UPC Agreement on 30 July 2015 following Parliament’s approval (No 108/2015) on 10 April 2015; a certified copy of the original UPC Agreement was also published in English and Portuguese. See here.”
Here in the UK as well, without even consulting citizens, the government is now preparing for the UPC. Nobody voted for it. This just serves to show how undemocratic the European Union has become, possibly even worse than the EPO alone.
What happens here is similar to what happens in New Zealand right now [1, 2, 3], with persistent efforts to thwart the law (a law banning software patents) through all-encompassing ‘trade’ deals, effectively ‘laundering’ the law at the behest of rich and powerful people who collude in secret. In New Zealand, the loopholes for software patenting have thus far been similar to Europe’s “as such”. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Vista 10, Vista 7, Vista 8, Windows at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bad Vista
Summary: Windows surveillance expands retroactively, making its way into platforms other than Windows and also expanding to predecessors of Vista 10
IN TERMS of sales and technical weaknesses, Vista 10 is a huge disaster, doing probably worse than its predecessor, which also did worse than the mythically ‘great’ Windows Vista. It really is a total disaster, but Microsoft employees won’t say this to the media for fear of personal retribution (firing).
“…Microsoft is putting Bing inside Cyanogen OS, not just from the company Cyanogen but also in OnePlus.”The unprecedented spyware problem is no longer limited to just Vista 10, so users of Windows on PCs are all affected. They should escape all of Windows as soon as possible because even older versions have spying features silently added to them. Well, this has actually been known for a while and we wrote about it several weeks ago. Now it appears as though more people become aware of it (the latest headline says “Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy On You Like Windows 10″). Based on [1-3], Microsoft is putting Bing inside Cyanogen OS, not just from the company Cyanogen but also in OnePlus. This company, OnePlus, should dump Cyanogen OS, for reasons we covered here before [1, 2].
Mind this new article titled “Windows 10 automatically sends parents detailed dossier of their children’s internet history and computer use”. To quote just the opening paragraphs: “Windows 10 sends a weekly “activity update” on childrens’ internet browsing and computer history to parents, by default and without telling anyone. The feature could be dangerous as well as embarrassing, users have pointed out, allowing parents to watch everything their children do on the computer.
“Microsoft has become just a surveillance company and Windows the surveillance platform.”“The operating system sends a weekly note that includes a list of websites children have visited, how many hours per day they have spent on the computer, and for how long they have used their favourite apps, according to reports.”
Microsoft has become just a surveillance company and Windows the surveillance platform.
Vista 10 lies (“marketing”) now grow in lieu with Munich propaganda (anti-GNU/Linux myth-making, in order to scare CIOs who are fed up with Windows). Beware Microsoft’s fake vista 10 figures. These are being pushed by Microsoft into its boosters and moles in the media right now. The company has a long history gaming numbers to lie about number of ‘sales’ or ‘useds’ [sic]. Here is one Microsoft booster disseminating what it essentially Microsoft marketing with a sloppily-made image that cement the Big Lie (carving it in stone, within an image that cannot be edited for correction). “The only question,” wrote to us iopkh, “is how they are fiddling the stats.”
These claims are pulled directly from Microsoft, or rather, they are being pushed by Microsoft onto gullible journalists or complicit ‘journalists’. The author is a known Microsoft booster with history. Microsoft’s own figures hysterically debunk some early claims that the media cited a lot (between 45 million and 55 million ‘upgrades’ after 3 days). We warned that these were baseless claims from the rumour mill and Microsoft’s trolls army.
This time too we cannot trust the figures since they come from Microsoft. Based on how it has always gamed the numbers (‘sales’ not meaning actual sales or even users), we know these are lies. Look at web statistics from some of the more respected sources. Maybe 5% market share (or less) is what Microsoft’s latest beast has got at the moment, which given the price and other exceptional factors, is truly (and quite frankly) pathetic. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet another EPO member of staff has just committed suicide, leading to the inevitable question: how many people need to die before Battistelli and his minions are out of the Office for good?
THE EPO‘s management has been so rogue that suicides have been happening, as we previously covered in [1, 2, 3]. Any outsider would agree that this may be a sign of terrible, incompetent management that over-stresses staff and rules by fear, reigning by terror.
Hearing from sources that 5 people at the EPO have committed suicide under the Battistelli regime is going to motivate more activism against the EPO, including staff demonstrations. Staff at the EPO needn’t be suicidal or depression-leaning. Many employees — and examiners in particular — are highly qualified, often with Ph.D.-level degrees and many years of technical experience. Money is not an issue and these people are a lot smarter than their ‘boss’, Battistelli, who merely comes from a prestigious (expensive) French school and has plenty of powerful connections other than his cabal inside the EPO’s management.
“Yet another EPO employee committed suicide last week,” wrote a person to us. This person managed to secure possession of a note that Ciaran McGinley published and disseminated among all EPO staff this week. We have deleted the name of the dead person in order to respect the wishes of his family.
“Just watch how negative the work atmosphere has become.”“The note of Ciaran McGinley looks poetic,” said our source, “but it is highly hypocritical and cynical. The term suicide has been carefully omitted. The suicide rate has now become extremely worrying. This is the fifth suicide in 39 months during the mandate of Mr Battistelli. And it is the third one in the principal directorate of Mr McGinley since his appointment. Mr McGinley systematically refuses any independent investigation whether the workplace could have played a role in these tragedies. And his lyrical note would be sufficient to make his staff forget that they are told that they are overpaid and will soon be replaced by machines. Their professional pride has been completely destroyed.”
The EPO scandals are far from over. We have some exclusive stories about the EPO’s other abuses. They are lined up for publication next month and we are eager to expose corruption with more tenacity than before as the regime of Battistelli is costing more than just money (not to mention the harm to European citizens). Some people prefer not to live under it.
When Battistelli doesn’t just eliminate people by illegally ‘suspending’ them (like a house ban) he just turns out to be ruling by intimidation. That’s never a healthy way to manage. If some staff are opting to eliminate themselves rather than eliminate corrupt elements in the institution that employs them, who wins?
Just watch how negative the work atmosphere has become. It now including censorship, self-censorship, suspicion that ill staff are just lying to get a day off, and so on. This must end.
Below is the text of the message from Ciaran McGinley [PDF]
. █
Our colleague ██████████ passed away
26.08.2015
A message of PD 2.1 Ciaran McGinley
Dear Colleagues,
By now, most of you will have been made aware of the unexpected passing away of our colleague ███████████. ██████, who was only 42 years old, leaves behind a wife and two young children. Our thoughts and deepest sympathy must, first and foremost, go to them. We have lost a colleague, a friend and a future leader. His family have lost something much more precious – a son, a husband and a father. I think I speak on behalf of everyone in PA when I express my shock and sadness about this tragic loss. His family have asked the EPO to be discreet and to respect what is a very private matter. We all therefore need to behave in a way that fully supports their wishes on this point. The best way to do this is to remember ██████ for how we at the EPO knew him – instantly likeable, open and always with a sincere, warm and caring smile.
Arrangements are currently being made for him to be flown home. The family has indicated that they prefer that the funeral takes place in a close, intimate circle. The family very much appreciate all the good wishes and expressions of sympathy, but they also want, and need, their privacy. The EPO social services have offered full support to the family as is usual in such tragic circumstances. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank ████ OHS for the support she has offered and given to colleagues in the past two days – it has been much appreciated and I know that it will continue to be necessary in the coming weeks as we all try to get to terms with what has happened.
Ciaran McGinley
PD Patent Administration
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Linux’s hardware support is better than ever, but you still can’t take it for granted. Not every laptop and desktop you see at your local computer store (or, more realistically, on Amazon) will work perfectly with Linux. Whether you’re buying a PC for Linux or just want to ensure you can dual-boot at some point in the future, thinking about this ahead of time will pay off.
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These days, I rarely give unsolicited technical advice. However, if people ask me how to explore and install Linux, I urge them to be systematic. To the average computer user, installing a Linux operating system is an unfamiliar procedure — to say nothing of an exercise in unprecedented diversity.
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Desktop
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I think it’s time to clarify the matter of “too many Linux distributions” once and for all. For a Linux veteran like myself, it is getting annoying to see all sorts of comments on the Internet from people complaining that there are way too many distributions of Linux.
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Just found these two (both from early 1996) and thought we could have a little fun. The member who posts a genuine picture of the oldest Linux installation CD they have in their possession by September 4th will be upgraded to a contributing member and will be able to pick one item out of the LQ Merchandise Store paid for by me.
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Server
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Intel Capital’s investment, its third in BlueData since 2012, is part of a $20 million funding round led by the chip maker’s strategic investment arm and announced today. Doug Fisher, senior vice president of Intel and general manager of its Software and Services Group, will also join BlueData’s board of directors.
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About 10 months since it first announced the managed version of Kubernetes, its open source Linux container management system, Google has launched the cloud service, called Google Container Engine, into production today, announcing the service is now production-ready.
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Cloud is not virtualization, nor is it a computer sitting in a remote data center; it is a wide range of disciplines that enable the third platform era, spanning from software-defined infrastructure to the API economy to new service acquisition models. Cloud even redefines relationships between those who use services and those who provide services—between, for example, lines of business and the IT organization, or between developers and system administrators—in what is commonly known as DevOps.
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Kernel Space
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“The badging system seems too rooted in video games and social media,” said Raytheon | Websense engineer Tom O’Connor. “Building secure software is not really a game, and I worry that a badge system reduces security to checklists. That said, I can certainly see value in having some sort of rudimentary assessments of open source projects to see that they meet some minimal standards.”
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The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a collaborative project run by the Linux Foundation, is aiming to develop a free security best practices program for open source software.
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It isn’t an overstatement to say that the modern world runs on Linux. If you look around you, almost everything is running on Linux — from your home router to stock exchanges. Thanks to Linux, open source has become a phenomenon that is fast becoming a norm in the enterprise and consumer segments. Fierce competitors like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, Red Hat, SUSE are all working together to make open source software even better.
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The twenty-fourth birthday of the Linux kernel was the top story today. Linux’ birthday is widely celebrated on August 25, the day of Linus’ original post, while others mark the birthdate as October 5, the day of the first public release. Lots of sites paid homage with several running through the time-line of its life. Elsewhere, a couple articles sang Open Source praises today and DarkDuck seemed confused by Knoppix.
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The gurus behind the popular and respected Linux kernel hardening service Grsecurity have decided to stop providing support for its stable offering.
Patches will be ceased in the next two weeks in response to an expensive and lengthy court case between the small outfit and a “multi-billion dollar” corporation which it says flagrantly infringed its trademark.
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It’s been two years since I last tested / reported on the Liquorix kernel, which advertises itself as “the better distro kernel” with optimizations for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads.
The Liquorix kernel has Zen interactive tuning, hard kernel preemption, utilizes Budget Fair Queue (BFQ), Vegas TCP congestion control, smaller TX net queues, AuFS support, etc.
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Linux is a very functional operating system. It “led to the collapse of the infrastructure decision debates of many IT shops,” said Guy Smith, chief strategist for Silicon Strategies Marketing. “Before Linux, long-term choices concerning the OS, database, development language, and more divided IT shops — and the resulting incompatibilities led to dysfunctional applications.”
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Overstreet further explains that Bcachefs is a modern Copy-on-Write (COW) file system “with checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching, and eventually snapshots and all kinds of other nifty features.”
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Graphics Stack
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At long last, libinput 1.0 has been released. Libinput is the input handling library commonly used by Wayland compositors and is optionally used in the X.Org world via the xf86-input-libinput driver and is starting to be used by the Ubuntu Mir display server.
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Applications
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The latest version available is RedNotebook 1.10.2, which has been released recently, coming with changes.
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Qmmp is a popular open-source, cross-platform multimedia player, similar to Winamp and written in Qt. It has support for popular multimedia file formats, including MPEG1 layer 2/3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, Native FLAC/Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WavePack, WMA, Midi.
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ownCloud, a software company known for developing and deploying the most popular self-hosting cloud server solution on the market, announced today, August 25, the immediate availability for download of ownCloud Desktop Client 2.0.
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Especially useful to broadcast news through a network of Twitter accounts, Retweet was improved to bump Python version to 3.4 and to improve pep8 compliance (work in progress).
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Penguin Subtitle Player is a simple open source Qt5 subtitle player which can be used to display SRT subtitles on top of online video streaming websites that don’t support subtitles or don’t allow using custom subtitles.
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Tomato App is a time management application based on the Pomodoro technique, specially developed for the Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and Elementary OS 0.2 Luna systems.
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The hard-working team of developers behind the powerful GStreamer open-source multimedia backend, used by numerous audio/video tools and deployed by default in dozens of GNU/Linux distribution published details about the new features coming to GStreamer 1.6, a major release of the acclaimed software.
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Proprietary
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VMware, a software company, known for some of the most acclaimed virtualization solutions on the market, announced the release of the VMware Workstation 12.0 and VMware Player 12.0 apps.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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If you’ve played Baldur’s Gate any time in the past decade, chances are you’ve also (whether you knew it or not) played through its 1999 expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast. The two have been packaged together for years now, and for good reason—there’s no reason not to play Tales of the Sword Coast. It’s thirty hours of side content, integrated so seamlessly into the base game it’s hard to tell where Baldur’s Gate ends and Sword Coast begins.
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The amazing Pillars of Eternity party-based RPG developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Paradox Interactive is now discounted on Steam for Linux with 33%.
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Feral Interactive are awesome, that’s not exactly news, but they did send out an interesting tweet earlier showing off some new kit.
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Teeworlds is a great little 2D battle game, and while it has been around for a while it’s now just become available on Steam.
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Ubuntu app developer and Open Source enthusiast Riccardo Padovani had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about his upcoming game for Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used on Ubuntu phone devices.
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The Steam for Linux platform is expanding, and it’s now home to more than 1,400 games and applications. The number of new titles, ported or released natively, has been increasing in the past year or so, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down.
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The Humble PC & Android Bundle 13 collection was released just a few days ago, and a few games have been added. Users who paid above the average price will get these new titles for free.
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Unity, the popular indie gaming engine, will arrive on Linux after being created for Mac OS X first and then ported to Windows in 2009.
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Unity Technologies announced a while back that they intend to launch the Unity game engine tools on Linux as well. Today we just received the first experimental build and it looks like developers are testing the waters.
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A little warning announcement for you, it seems the latest update for Dying Light has broken the game for Linux gamers.
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It’s not often I tell you to outright avoid a game, but Pump-Action Captain is a game you really need to just walk away from.
I really don’t like to put a downer on anything, but this is something that I feel needs highlighting.
I decided on a whim to pick up Pump-Action Captain with my own personal money to test it out, and to see if it’s worthy of covering at all. What I found was pretty shocking, and something that needed to be mentioned here. This is the first Leadwerks game that I’ve tried, and so far it’s not leaving a good impression.
The game doesn’t really work, at all. The executable is named incorrectly, so it won’t even load up. This is a simple case sensitivity issue, which could be forgiven. When I re-named the executable it worked, so that was okay. It wouldn’t be so bad if that was the only issue, but that alone tells you enough—it wasn’t even tested, not once.
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Hearthlands is a cute city-builder I haven’t really touched since December last year, so I decided to pick it up again today and the progress is amazing.
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The dungeon crawler rogue-like was released for Linux last week. It brings a few twists to the familiar formula that might interest fans of the genre. A free version is available for those curious to try the game out.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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First, we have a number of default namespaces which digiKam was using before. Default namespaces can’t be deleted or edited. They can only be disabled. These entries are essential for digiKam, so I decided that users might delete it by accident and then will be very hard to recover without a reset to default. Some namespaces hold special parameters designed for particular cases, so editing them is a bad idea, hence, the disabled edit.
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This September a bunch of KDE developers, me included, will gather for a week in Randa, Switzerland, to work on awesome new ideas for KDE. The theme of the sprint is around mobile apps, so KDE Connect will be one of the focus of attention.
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My work over the summer was to port the Amarok code-base to use Qt5/KF5 as much as possible because it was tough to port the entire base under the GSoC time-frame. I have ported a considerable portion of the code-base and now I will be continuing the project along with the community to see it to the end
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Even Free software needs to be funded. Apart from being nice to have, money is really useful: it can buy transportation so contributors can meet, accommodation so they can sleep, time so they can code, write documentation, create icons and other graphics, hardware to test and develop the software on.
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Kronometer 2.0, the next major version of Kronometer, is now publicly available. This is the result of the port to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, started one year ago.
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There is something interesting going on desktop computers — the UI is becoming heavily influenced by mobile operating systems. From Windows to Gnome you can see heavy influence of mobile OSes. KDE’s Plasma desktop, which I consider to be the most advanced desktop environment is, however, an exception. The KDE community just released Plasma 5.4, a major update to their desktop environment and it continues to shows the prowess of this ‘leaderless’ community.
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The difference surprised me. I think it gives a strong indication that Plasma 5 is being used more for work than as a hobby, with people more likely to encounter an area needing to improvement during the normal office week.
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ksuperkey is a small utility that allows you to use your Super key (sometimes called Meta or Windows key) to open your application menu, while keeping the functionality to use Super in keyboard shortcuts. In other words, ksuperkey won’t interfere with any of your existing shortcuts. It achieves this by letting Super act as a normal modifier key when pressed in combination with other keys, but generating a different keyboard combination (Alt+F1 by default) when the Super key is pressed and released on its own.
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Last year, I wrote a blog entry about the iminent release of Calligra 2.9 and the Calligra Gemini application which became a fully fletched member of the suite. In the latter half of that entry, I touched on what the future might potentially hold, and I mentioned the possibility of extending the concept from the application level to the complete system.
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This Free Software Office is well known in Spain for managing the biggest KDE deployment in Spain with 3k computers spread in several computer labs, laboratories and libraries, among other internal projects.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Video Arcade software, an open-source app that acts as a front-end to the well-known and cross-platform MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) emulator, has been updated to version 0.8.4.
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Boston Summit is GNOME’s annual event in North America. It is held every year on the Columbus Day weekend, and is an informal opportunity for contributors, enthusiasts and newcomers to get together. Previous summits have included planning meetings, tutorials for newcomers, hacking sessions, hardware testing, and more. There is also typically a social event in the evening.
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New Releases
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Barry Kauler, the creator of the Puppy Linux project, announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first point release of Quirky Linux, a sister project of the Puppy Linux operating system.
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The developers of the popular OpenELEC Linux kernel-based operating system for embedded devices have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the forth Beta build of the upcoming OpenELEC 6.0 OS.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The Linux AIO project has spent all summer creating new ISOs for various popular GNU/Linux distributions that have multiple editions, so they have had the great pleasure, as always, of informing us about some of them.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro developers have just released the tenth update for the Manjaro 0.8.13 version of the operating system and they have upgraded quite a few packages.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSE® today announced Teradata, the big data analytics and marketing applications company, has renewed and extended its commitment to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the strategic platform across Teradata’s entire product portfolio. The new agreement extends the two companies’ original seven-year partnership an additional seven years.
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Red Hat Family
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The Scientific Linux team, through Pat Riehecky, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the Scientific Linux 6.7 computer operating system.
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Looking to keep its options open when it comes to networking in virtualization environments, Red Hat has certified Midokura Enterprise MidoNet network virtualization software for use on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Version 7. The announcement comes before the kick-off of the OpenStack Silicon Valley event later this week.
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The Triangle’s biggest public companies, Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and Quintiles (NYSE: Q), performed the best. They actually surpassed their valuation from Friday, though in neither case touched a 52-week high. Although the other Triangle-area companies bounced back from Monday and Tuesday, they mostly finished below their market value set Friday, leaving investors to hope that the remainder of this week looks more like Wednesday and less like Monday.
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Raleigh open-source tech giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has landed on Forbes’ latest list of ” The World’s Most Innovative Companies.”
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Diversity has a new full-time ally. Marina Zhurakhinskaya (zhoo-ra-HEEN-ska-ya) recently won an O’Reilly award for her work in diversity for free and open source software (FOSS), and she just successfully created a new position for diversity at Red Hat. Oh, and, she’s a new mom.
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Fedora
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The alpha release for Fedora 23 was released two weeks ago while today it’s been released for the non-primary AArch64 (64-bit ARM) and POWER architectures.
Peter Robinson announced the Fedora 23 Alpha release today for AArch64 and POWER. Those wishing to learn more about these AArch64 and POWER builds can read the release announcement.
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The Fedora Project, through Peter Robinson, has announced the release of the Server edition of the Fedora 23 Alpha operating system for ARM 64-bit (AArch64) and POWER (PPC64 and PPC64le) hardware architectures.
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The slides are a little different from the slides at Fedora Flock, but they’re mainly the same…
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Debian Family
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Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get “reproducible builds” part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian.
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A natively hidden service is more secure than accessing a non-hidden service via Tor because there is no way for a third-party exit node to mess with your traffic
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Debian/sid is going through a big restructuring with the switch to a new gcc and libstc++. Furthermore, libcec3 is now the default. So I have updated my PHT builds for Debian/sid to build and install on the current status, both for amd64 and i386.
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Derivatives
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I faced no particular issue when working with Knoppix 7.4.2 in Live session. It was responsive, quick and more or less reliable.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has informed us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Kernel Team for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, during the meeting that took place earlier today, August 25, 2015.
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On August 25, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report informing all Ubuntu Phone owners about the progress made on the soon-to-be-released OTA-6 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
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Sable is a superb all-in-one PC from System76, and you can now purchase one at a $50 discount. It ships with the latest Ubuntu OS, and you can customize it to better fit your needs.
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A vulnerability that would allow users to crash GDK-PixBuf with specially crafted file has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
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As we reported the other day, the Ubuntu Touch developers were hard at work to release the OTA-6 software update for Ubuntu for phones today, Wednesday, August 26, 2015, for Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, Nexus 4, and Nexus 7 devices.
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As we reported the other day, the Ubuntu Touch developers were hard at work to release the OTA-6 software update for Ubuntu for phones today, Wednesday, August 26, 2015, for Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, Nexus 4, and Nexus 7 devices.
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Canonical, through April Wang, had the great pleasure of announcing the winners of the “And your Dream come true” innovation contest for its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system created in collaboration with China Mobile.
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Joel Leclerc, an independent Ubuntu developer, known for various apps, hacks, tweaks, tips, and tutorials for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has posted an interesting article on his blog about the proposal of a non-windowing display server.
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Immediately after announcing the release of the OTA-6 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the next major update for Ubuntu for phones, OTA-7.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint’s Clement Lefebvre has recently announced that Cinnamon 2.8 will bring better box pointers and information about the laptop’s model and manufacturer.
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A Raspberry Pi 2 is going to space, but for that it need to undergo some serious testing. It’s going to use the most awesome case you’ve ever seen, and it’s all happening very soon.
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Cloud Media has launched a dual-boot Linux and Android “Popcorn Hour A-500 Pro” media player with 3840 x 2160 video, high-quality analog audio, and XLR out.
Formerly known as Syabas, Cloud Media has been selling Linux-based Popcorn Hour and Popbox media players for years. Last year, Cloud Media found Kickstarter success with its Linux-based Stack Box home automation box. This week it achieved its $50K Kickstarter funding goal for the new top-of-the-line Popcorn Hour A-500 Pro media player and music system, which adds high fidelity stereo analog audio to its usual media player and home theater functions.
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When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they’ll do the rest.
At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups – eager for the respect of their peers – shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.
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Accelerated is excited to announce the availability of its Embedded Linux Distribution for the Internet of Things (IoT). With the unprecedented growth of the IoT and reliance on a new generation of connected devices pushing organizations to use even more data, businesses need to be prepared today for the connectivity and security challenges of tomorrow. Linux is in a prime position to be leveraged to overcome those challenges and shorten time to market.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Android
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Any sub-$200 smartphone worth its salt must come from a Chinese company, right? Former Apple CEO John Sculley is trying to change that perspective by co-founding Obi, a Silicon Valley-based company that has just announced a couple devices that will definitely turn heads and keep wallets healthy. These new handsets are the Obi Worldphone SF1 and SJ1.5.
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Samsung has been facing competition not just from Apple but also from Android manufacturers such as Motorola and Xiaomi, which offer good-enough features while keeping prices low. Consumers will have to decide whether the premium features in the latest Samsung devices will be worth the premium price tags.
The Galaxy S6 Edge Plus and Note 5 phones arrived last week, while the Galaxy Tab S2 tablets come out next Thursday.
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John Sculley — now there’s a name you may not have heard in a while.
The former Apple CEO is back, and is teaming with a top San Francisco design firm on a $199 Android smartphone designed to bring high-end features and looks to the low-end smartphones increasingly popular in much of the world.
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It’s been a dry year for high-end Android tablets, something Samsung aims to change with the new Galaxy Tab S2. Directly taking on the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 2 with both 9.7-inch and 8-inch screen sizes, each running at a crisp 2048 x 1536, the two slates come in WiFi-only and WiFi+LTE form.
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The Galaxy Note has been through five years of changes. Better screens, better processors, better software. And like any new smartphone, the Note 5 represents the very best of what’s come before. But despite being a fantastic phone—even foreseeing the big smartphone way of life—the Note 5 is mired in the overpriced premium past. You’ll definitely be shelling out for the very best.
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In short: Even as previous Android-heavy markets mature, new ones will continue to grow across the globe. As tens of millions of people in emerging markets start buying smartphones, the ongoing Android price war will make the platform more attractive than ever — securing Google’s lead for years to come.
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Back in 2002, Rubin launched the the Sidekick, one of the first devices to merge threaded messaging, e-mail and the full Web into a phone. Then, of course, he built a little startup called Android, which was bought in 2005 by Google and under Rubin’s continued leadership became the biggest smartphone operating system in the world.
With the smartphone now ubiquitous and mobile heading in new directions, we are thrilled to have Rubin joining us on stage at Code/Mobile. This year, we’ll be asking what comes next, now that we all have the smartphones he helped pioneer. For instance, we’ve noticed that technology that debuted in the smartphone is expanding into lots of places, including cars and wearables.
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Following in the footsteps of OnePlus, UK startup Wileyfox has released two low-cost, but decently specced, smartphones running on Cyanogen OS.
The more expensive of the two, Storm, will cost £199 and features a 5.5-inch full HD display, 20-megapixel auto-focus main camera from Sony and an eight-megapixel front shooter. The device runs on Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon 615 processor with integrated LTE, and offers 32GB onboard storage, 3GB RAM, as well as expandable memory up to 128GB.
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For those who still remember, it’s been well over a year since China’s Smartisan launched the T1, which turned out to be a surprisingly good effort from the teacher-turned-entrepreneur, Luo Yonghao. Today, the startup has finally launched its second Android device, the U1 aka JianGuo (which means “nuts” in Chinese), to cater to the younger audience with an 899 yuan (about $140) base price. That’s about the same as the Redmi Note 2, though some may find this to be a more fun design with what’s arguably a more intuitive interface, as we first saw back in April 2013.
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Sure, I could use my Android phone to keep an eye on Twitter for leads for a story, download images using Chrome, and write and publish my post in WordPress — but can you imagine switching between those apps to get it all done?
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Amazon just announced a new Android app with everything you can find in the normal Amazon app as well as a revamped store for Android apps and games. While the company already had the Amazon Appstore, Amazon Underground is a brand new app that can potentially replace both the Amazon app as well as the Appstore. In particular, the new app lets you download premium apps for free. Here’s how it works.
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Smartphones can be used to control computers remotely with the right apps installed on both devices, but there may be cases where you want to do the opposite – control a smartphone from a computer. One new app for Android allows users to do exactly that, manage the Android device from a computer. The app, however, is only available for Android devices, which means it can’t be used to operate an iPhone or any other iOS devices.
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Even with iPhone sales continuing to be strong, Apple is unlikely to make deeper inroads into Android’s global marketshare in the near future, according to projections from an IDC research report released on Tuesday.
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Vodafone UK wants to sell Android phones which are as close to stock (as Google intended) as possible, and the red company’s favourite device for this is the Moto G.
Writing on the Vodafone company blog, Motorola senior marketing director Marcus Frost unsurprisingly extoled the virtues of the new phone – but he’s not just trying to flog more smartphones.
The post points to two future directions, which can only be seen as an endorsement from both the handset company and the mobile network.
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Instead, Google expects that becoming more open — and releasing more open-source software — will create a path for the company to make inroads into the enterprise. “Google has recognized that open is a better way of building,” McLuckie also noted. “We’ve come to admire the ability of the open-source community to drive innovation.”
He argued that building out in the open not only allows it to build a better product for its customers, but also to enable faster integration cycles. In addition, having an open-source project that involves other companies also allows it to absorb the DNA of these companies into the product.
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Instead, we chose to partner with Harvard Business Review (HBR) Press. In many ways, HBR does for books what Red Hat does for open source software; it collaborates with creators and adds value to the products of these collaborations. Like any piece of open source software (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example), a book is far more than the content it contains. Like a software application, a book is a project with multiple stakeholders. It involves an agent that works to put the book on publishers’ radars. It involves an editorial team that reviews manuscripts and suggests improvements. And it involves a marketing team that decides how best to develop and target potential audiences.
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A few days ago, I aligned Republican presidential hopefuls with open source Linux-based operating systems. Now, it’s the Democrats’ turn: If Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders et al. ran Linux, which distribution would they use? Read on for some perspective.
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Organisations that can effectively harness people’s innate tendency to make their lives easier will be more likely to successfully develop software and applications that genuinely disrupt, or protect against disruption, as business needs dictate.
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The application development technology of the future must provide a framework for users to develop software quickly and get it to market fast.
That’s according to Red Hat, who says open source technology is the answer.
Red Hat says organisations that can effectively harness people’s innate tendency to make their lives easier will be more likely to successfully develop software and applications that genuinely disrupt, or protect against disruption, as business needs dictate.
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In the last few years, open source software platforms such as Android have established themselves as essential catalysts for technology advances.
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It was recently reported that the Colorado-based startup SlamData is working on creating an enterprise version of its open source analytics platform. Their solution allows users to see and understand NoSQL data and this will now enable larger businesses to visualize data more effectively. The platform will enable large businesses to visualize semi-structured NoSQL data by adding proprietary security and management features to the main open source platform.
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FCC Chairman Tim Wheeler addressed the biannual meeting of the Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDI) Conference in Baltimore on Thursday, with news of interest to anyone who works in assistive technologies.
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But scientists know they can manipulate those kinases to combat the disease. And chemical biologists at the University of North Carolina are leading an open source effort to unlock the secrets of kinase activity—secrets they say could pioneer a new generation of drug discovery.
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With open source technology already powering business like Facebook, Google and Booking.com – and 70% of new apps – will it be the backbone of the next wave of unicorns?
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Now we’re making Pinrepo open source on GitHub. There you can find all of the configuration stanzas and instructions to recreate it for yourself. It also includes a pypi release tool to release and maintain pypi packages. Check it out and let us know what you think! And, feel free to contribute back with your customizations and improvements.
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Currently, you’ll need a Windows machine to use ACAT. In the future, though, it would seem like this is exactly the kind of app that should be running on a smartphone, which is already bristling with cameras and sensors.
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When I ended my Doc Dish article about why you should use a rendered language for documentation, I told you that selecting a language was a matter for another day.
Well another day has finally arrived.
There’s no shortage of languages you can use for formatting and publishing your documentation, and your choice of language will depend on your project’s needs. In this article I’ll look at several different language options, ranging from the simplest to the most complex. It’s hardly an exhaustive list, so make the case for your favorite (or most hated) language in the comments.
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Many words have been written on community building, engagement, and retention. The discussion around community management is alive and kicking, with articles and blog posts everywhere about how to grow, support, and not mess up open source communities.
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Events
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Linux Plumbers 2015 finished up last Friday. Another great conference. The focus of Plumbers is supposed to be more problem solving/discussion and less talking/lecturing. To really get the most out of Plumbers, you need to be an active participant and asking questions or giving input. Plumbers was co-located with the group of conferences now run by the Linux Foundation. The fist day of Plumbers overlapped with the last day of Linux Con. This day was as bit more lecture focused like a regular conference. Even if Plumbers is typically a discussion conference, the talks I went to were all great.
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The Tizen Developer Conference 2015 has been moved this year from San Francisco to Shenzhen, China, from September 17 to 18. This is the annual event that brings together open source and app developers who are interested in contributing to the growth of the Tizen ecosystem worldwide.
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We are happy to announce the first round of systemd.conf 2015 sponsors!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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An anonymous person complaining about “social justice bullies” at Mozilla will be fired if the person is discovered to be an employee, the company’s CEO said today. Speaking at Mozilla’s weekly public meeting, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said Reddit user aioyama had “crossed the line” in a series of postings about women at the company, including recently departed community organizer Christie Koehler. In a series of tweets earlier this month, Koehler complained about Mozilla’s lack of diversity in the workplace and its failure to address accessibility issues.
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For the last two months, I’ve been interning at Mozilla Research, working on improving the state of SIMD parallelism in Rust: exposing more CPU instructions in the compiler, and an in-progress library that provides a mostly-safe but low-level interface to that core functionality.
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A new SIMD scheme is now available in the latest nightly versions of the Rust programming language.
Mozilla Research has been working on improving SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) parallelism in Rust that’s simple to use.
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SaaS/Big Data
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On the heels of its introduction as a hot new publlic company a few months ago, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, is expanding its reach. The company announced that it has acquired Onyara, a young startup whose staffers created Apache NiFi, which is open source software that has been used by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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Last month I wrote about Apache Ni-Fi, a project borne of (non-shady) work at the US National Security Agency, and now a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation. NiFi is all about building data flow orchestrations, and features a browser-based “boxes and lines” graphical user interface for getting the work done.
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Open source cloud infrastructure platforms like OpenStack offer many benefits to an enterprise — but first, IT must clear these five adoption hurdles.
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When dealing with open source cloud computing, there are many factors to consider, ranging from support to hidden costs. Make informed decisions with these five quick links.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Viewing LibreOffice documents inside GNOME Documents (the Evince Viewer) will soon yield a better experience thanks to work accomplished this year as part of Google’s Summer of Code.
Second-time GSoC student developer Pranav Kant focused this year on improving the LibreOffice support within GNOME Documents. His GSoC project summary explained, “Integrate gtktiledviewer into GNOME-Documents – Today, GNOME Documents spawns LibreOffice via a rather unreliable unoconv command-line that converts documents to PDF. It is not only unreliable but also the results are not good, for example, spreadsheet rendering results are quite bad. With this project, we would be improving the existing libreofficekit based gtk tiled renderer, which would, then, be a very good replacement of the unreliable unoconv command in gnome-documents.”
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We reported a couple of months ago that a group of Ubuntu Touch developers started developing a new core app for Canonical’s mobile operating system, a viewer for documents created with the open-source LibreOffice office suite.
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The Document Foundation has just released the second Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.1 branch and the developers have fixed quite a few issues that have been spotted by the community.
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Collabora, through Sam Tuke, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 office suite, a modified, commercial version of the open-source LibreOffice software.
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CMS
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Business
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Funding
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The Eclipse Foundation, best known for its Eclipse IDE, is moving into funding its open source projects via donations.
Previously, all Eclipse development was done by individuals and organizations contributing their time. “Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform,” Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said in a recent blog post.
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BSD
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I have been keeping an eye on NextBSD for some time, when it was initially just openlaunchd, an effort initially started by R. Tyler as a GSoC student in 2005 to, unsurprisingly, port the launchd system and service manager to FreeBSD. It was stalled for a long time until its revival in late 2013, but again moving very slowly.
Around November of 2014 at the MeetBSD conference, Jordan Hubbard delivered a talk entitled “FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years,” which outlined a general desire for a more “event-driven” and unified configuration approach to FreeBSD, strongly implying the use of launchd as system bootstrap and service daemon, as well as other parts of the OS X low-level userspace.
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The LLVM 3.7 release is imminent so here’s our usual look at the new features/improvements for this open-source compiler stack. Complete OpenMP 3 support is a big one but there’s also many other big ticket items to find in this major compiler update.
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The release of LLVM 3.7 is imminent.
Days after preparing the 3.7-RC3 release, Hans Wennborg of Google has announced the release of 3.7-RC3.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Some more shinny code and a lot of bug fixes are coming.
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GNU Press announces the release of Emacs Manual Version 24.5, which contains approximately 2.5 more years of Emacs documentation than version 24.2. Each manual comes with an Emacs Reference Card Version 24.5, which can also be purchased separately. Also, there are a few copies of Emacs Manual Version 24.2, which has now been reduced to $35.
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Public Services/Government
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The Academic Computer Club at the Umeå University in Sweden is a major supporter of open source projects. ACC UMU hosts one of the popular free software mirrors, and is one of the official sponsors of the Debian open source software distribution, maintaining a few of the project’s servers. The club supports two more well-known projects, the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) and Freenode. Both projects provide communication facilities that benefit free software communities.s
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One of the key lies out out in last years referendum was that we couldn’t exist securely without the British Security Services (the ones that brought you extraordinary rendition).
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Citizens and businesses should have to provide basic information only once, eGovernment services should be user-friendly and intuitive, and users should be digitally literate in order to use online (public) services. These are the most important digital rights for citizens and businesses when interacting with public agencies, as identified by panellists and the audience at the workshop ‘Promoting e-society’.
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Openness/Sharing
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The code was developed by Open Knowledge and the Swedish company Metasolutions on behalf of the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova for the Swedish open data portal. The graphical design of the portal was not overhauled in the latest update but it now automatically provides a consistent user interface for all visitors, independent of the device they are using.
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Intel has concentrated all its internal and externally acquired expertise in networking to create what it believes is a multi-generational interconnection fabric scalable to any sized data-center or supercomputer array. Called Omni-Path Architecture (OPA), the fabric, announced today (Aug. 26) at the IEEE’s Hot Interconnects Symposium 2015 (Santa Clara, Calif.), is an open-source architecture designed specifically for both high-performance computing (HPC) and servers.
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An open-source design for a flat-pack timber home that can be erected by four people in around two days with no more than a drill and a mallet will be prototyped on the Gold Coast later this year.
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Open Data
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Data is immensely powerful. The trick lies in organizing the stuff. The good news is that so many organizations are now offering tools that help with this—and so many of these tools are open source.
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As part of its global digital strategy, the government of La Rioja region in Spain has organised an open data contest, the goal of which is to promote the use and exploitation of data published on the regional open data portal.
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Open Hardware
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Over the past five years, 3D printers have gotten cheaper, hardware has gotten smaller, and tinkerer communities have boomed. All of that has spurred a renaissance of prosthetic design, bolstered by an open source ethos and crowdfunded budgets.
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Programming
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Hack is Facebook’s spinoff of the PHP language, working with the HHVM virtual machine. The library, meanwhile, generates code that is written into signed files to prevent undesired modifications. “The idea behind writing code that writes code is to raise the level of abstraction and reduce coupling,” Facebook said on its GitHub page for Hack Codegen.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Internet’s foundational documents are called “requests for comments” or “RFCs.” Published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization whose stated goal is “to make the Internet work better,” RFCs define and explain the operational standards by which our worldwide network of networks functions. In other words, they specify the rules everyone should follow when building and implementing new Internet technologies. Engineers working on the Internet discuss potential RFCs, debate their merits, then post their decisions online for anyone to read.
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For example, when saving ODF with LibreOffice, the unit that is used for storage depends on the user preferences. This can lead to inconveniences and rounding errors. If I specify a margin of 1.25cm and send it to someone who has the preferences set to use inches, the margin will be stored as 0.4925in. When that number is converted back to centimeters, the value is 1.25095cm which is 1‰ more than the original value.
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Finland’s Rovio, maker of mobile phone game Angry Birds, forecast its earnings would fall for a third consecutive year and said it planned to slash up to 39 percent of its workforce to try to improve its prospects.
Rovio has failed to create new hit games since the 2009 launch of Angry Birds, the top paid mobile app of all time, though it has tried to capitalise on its most successful brand by licensing its use on string of consumer products.
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On Friday afternoon, 151 warehouse and shipping workers for Google Express, the search engine’s delivery service, voted in favor of joining a union. Last month, workers at the Palo Alto, Calif., facility agreed to join Teamsters Local 853, which has unionized shuttle drivers for eBay, Apple, Yahoo and other companies.
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Science
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IT’S A SITUATION that will be familiar to most computer users. Your computer crashes, and when you manage to get it back up and running the disk has corrupted some data. Probably the bit that was vital and so new that it hadn’t been backed up yet.
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Health/Nutrition
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Is rejecting climate science, though, really like having believed that unchecked population growth would lead to food shortages? Contrary to Leonhardt’s glib “it hasn’t,” food shortages are a serious problem in the world right now. According to the UN World Food Programme, “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life…about one in nine people on Earth.” The WFP notes that about 3.1 million children die from malnutrition a year–and that one in four children on Earth are stunted by lack of food. That seems fairly widespread.
Unlike climate change denial, which if anything has exacerbated the problem of global warming, warnings about overpopulation may have had the intended effect of curbing population growth. China’s draconian one-child policy was directly inspired by the warnings of limits-to-growth advocates like the Club of Rome, along with numerous less coercive family planning initiatives. Partially as a result of these programs, the global population growth rate declined from above 2 percent in the 1960s and early ’70s to close to 1 percent and falling today. Without this reduction in growth, the population would be about 2 billion higher today than its current 7.3 billion.
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Security
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The Third Circuit US Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission does have the right to prosecute firms who mishandle their customers’ data.
Between 2008 and 2009, hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide – which runs hotels under the Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ramada, Super 8, and Travelodge brands – suffered three computer intrusions. The hackers stole the personal information and credit card numbers of over 619,000 customers, causing at least $10.6m in thefts.
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Yet, despite the frequent complaints about the unrealistic demands of security, today the problem is just as likely to be the insistence on convenience. With the rise of desktop Linux and the popularity of Android, the pressure to be as easy to use as Windows is almost irresistible. As a result, there is no question that the average distribution is less secure than those of a decade ago. That is the price we pay for automounting external devices and giving new users automatic access to printers and scanners — and will continue to pay.
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At the time, the code repository said the cyberattack involved “a wide combination of attack vectors,” as well as new techniques including the hijacking of unsuspecting user traffic to flood GitHub, killing the service.
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Virtualization is nothing new, and depending how fundamentalist you define “virtualized environment” one can point to the earliest of timesharing systems as the origin.
IBM’s mainframe hardware, the 360 machine series, introduced hardware virtualization, so that it was possible to run several of IBMs different and incompatible operating systems on the same computer at the same time.
It’s more than a little bit ironic that a platform which have lasted 50 years now, were beset by backwards-compatibility issues almost from the start, and even more so that IBMs patents on this area of technology prevented anybody else from repeating their mistake for that long.
Everybody else did software virtualization.
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During Positive Hack Days V, I made a fast track presentation about eCryptfs and password cracking. The idea came to me after using one feature of Ubuntu which consists in encrypting the home folder directory. This option can be selected during installation or activated later.
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While traveling through Dulles Airport last week, I noticed an Internet oddity. The nearby AT&T hotspot was fairly fast—that was a pleasant surprise.
But the web had sprouted ads. Lots of them, in places they didn’t belong.
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Ad networks have been hit with a string of compromises in recent months, and according to a new report, many of the infections are making it through to consumers. A study published today by Cyphort found that instances of malware served by ad networks more than tripled between June 2014 and February 2015, based on monthly samples taken during the period. Dubbed “malvertising,” the attacks typically sneaking malicious ads onto far-reaching ad networks. The networks deliver those malware-seeded ads to popular websites, which pass them along to a portion of the visitors to the site. The attacks typically infect computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash, typically triggered as soon as an ad is successfully loaded.
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The most important central concept is the memory address. Every individual byte of memory has a corresponding numeric address. When the processor loads and stores data from main memory (RAM), it uses the memory address of the location it wants to read and write from. System memory isn’t just used for data; it’s also used for the executable code that makes up our software. This means that every function of a running program also has an address.
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When hackers released password data for more than 36 million Ashley Madison accounts last week, big-league cracking expert Jeremi Gosney didn’t bother running them through one of his massive computer clusters built for the sole purpose of password cracking. The reason: the passwords were protected by bcrypt, a cryptographic hashing algorithm so strong Gosney estimated it would take years using a highly specialized computer cluster just to check the dump for the top 10,000 most commonly used passwords.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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With a staggering four in five Yemenis now in need of immediate humanitarian aid, 1.5 million people displaced and a death toll that has surpassed 4,000 in just five months, a United Nations official told the Security Council on August 19 that the scale of human suffering is “almost incomprehensible”.
Briefing the 15-member body upon his return from the embattled Arab nation on Aug. 19, Under-Secretary-General for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien stressed that the civilian population is bearing the brunt of the conflict and warned that unless warring parties came to the negotiating table there would soon be “nothing left to fight for”.
An August assessment report by Save the Children-Yemen on the humanitarian situation in the country of 26 million noted that over 21 million people, or 80 percent of the population, require urgent relief in the form of food, fuel, medicines, sanitation and shelter.
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There is no dearth of rumors about the Iran nuclear deal. In the latest scare, two allegations have filled the media: the first, that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran made “secret side deals”; the second, that the IAEA, in those negotiations, put the Iranian government in charge of investigating alleged nuclear research at its Parchin military base.
The latter supposed exposé comes from a now-debunked story by Associated Press (8/19/15). The piece, in its first draft, was full of errors and distortions (Vox, 8/20/15; War on the Rocks, 8/24/15). But its supposed revelations filled the airwaves.
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A war with Iran would be a catastrophe, yet by opposing diplomacy, hundreds of members of Congress may be blundering into just such a conflict. The Iran nuclear deal, as the complex diplomatic arrangement is popularly called, was agreed upon on July 14 by a consortium of key powerful countries, the European Union and Iran. The goal of the agreement is to limit Iran’s nuclear activities to peaceful purposes, and to block Iran’s ability to construct a nuclear bomb. Despite what its critics say, this agreement is not based on trust. It grants the International Atomic Energy Agency the power to conduct widespread, intrusive inspections to ensure that Iran keeps its many pledges. In return, many, but not all, of the sanctions on Iran, which have been crippling its economy, will be lifted.
The alternative to diplomacy is to pour gasoline on a region of the world already on fire with intense, complex military conflicts. Iran’s military has more than half a million soldiers, no doubt with many more who could be mobilized if threatened with invasion. Iran shares a vast border to its west with Iraq, and to its east with Afghanistan, two nations with ongoing military and humanitarian disasters that have consumed the U.S. military since 2001, costing trillions of dollars and untold lives.
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Tragedy struck Bedford County, Virginia this morning when two journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, were shot to death on live TV.
The people viewing the broadcast at home had no choice but to watch the horror unfold, and neither did many social media users. Video of the shooting autoplayed on Twitter, Facebook (despite a content warning feature reportedly implemented in January), and other sites that support autoplay video.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Mashable reports that the following note was left by a guest at Yellowstone and then posted on Reddit by a friend of someone who works at the park. The note was left upon checkout by someone who does not understand how wild bears work (they don’t fuck with you unless you’ve got a pool) but is nonetheless quite polite; it’s refreshing that they were so kind about their disappointment, unlike the woman who threatened to shit herself in anger at Town Hall when Disneyland didn’t have fireworks the last time I went.
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Apparently the president cares more about Big Oil than the environment, endangered animals, indigenous people — even his own climate legacy.
[...]
“This is a disaster,” said Kristin Brown, director of digital strategy at the League of Conservation Voters, in an email. “Shell has an awful safety track record — even the Interior Department says there’s a 75 percent risk of a large oil spill if these leases are developed, and in the unpredictable Arctic Ocean, cleanup would be next-to-impossible.”
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Water access is going to be one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. As climate change dries out the already dry areas and makes the wet ones wetter, we’re poised to see some radical civilizational shifts. For one, a number of densely populated areas will come under serious water stress—which analysts fear will lead to strife, thirst, and even violent conflict. With that in mind, the World Resource Institute has assembled a new report projecting which nations are most likely to be hardest hit by water stress in coming decades.
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Finance
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“If it was a car industry, our ministers would be out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts, boasting of the British jobs that would bring. And if the BBC were a weapons system, half the Cabinet would be on a plane to Saudi Arabia to tell them how brilliant it was,” he said.
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New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) disproves allegations promoted by Fox News that the 2015 increase in Seattle’s minimum wage has destroyed restaurant jobs.
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That’s because fewer people are invested in the stock market today than at any time in nearly the last two decades — the product of dogged wage stagnation and a dramatic loss of faith in markets.
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Prof. Wolff talks to The Big Picture’s Thom Hartmann about Monday’s historic lows in the financial markets. Prof. Wolff breaks down China’s economy and if the devaluation of the yuan is the root to this market meltdown. Then Prof. Wolff and Thom take a look at the U.S. economy and review wage growth, inequality, and pensions.
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We are seeing the usual hysteria over the sharp drop in the markets in Asia, Europe, and perhaps the US. (Wall Street seems to be rallying as I write.) There are a few items worth noting as we enjoy the panic.
First and most importantly, the stock market is not the economy. The stock market has fluctuations all the time that have nothing to do with the real economy. The most famous was the 1987 crash, which did not correspond to any real-world bad event that anyone could identify.
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On August 24, major stock markets in the United States opened their trading sessions with significant declines and sustained losses of 3 to 5 percent throughout much of the morning. Fox News used the event to advocate on behalf of numerous failed Republican policy demands, such as major tax cuts for the wealthy and a significant roll back of federal regulations.
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GUIDELINES on how to deal with suicidal benefits claimants have been handed out by the Department for Work and Pensions to Scots workers tasked with rolling out the UK Government’s controversial welfare reforms.
As part of a six-point plan for dealing with suicidal claimants who have been denied welfare payments, call-centre staff in Glasgow have been told to wave the guidance, printed on a laminated pink card, above their head.
The guidance is meant to help staff dealing with unsuccessful applicants for Universal Credit who are threatening to self-harm or take their own life.
A manager is then meant to rush over to listen in to the call and workers – who insist they have had no formal training in the procedure – must “make some assessment on the degree of risk” by asking a series of questions.
One section of the six-point plan, titled “gather information”, demands that staff allow claimants to talk about their intention to commit suicide.
The call-centre workers, who earn between £15,000 and £17,000 a year, must “find out specifically what is planned, when it is planned for, and whether the customer has the means-to-hand”, according to the guidance seen by the Sunday Herald.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The problem with Education Matters’ promise to create “independent journalism,” however, is that several of the organizations funding it have a direct stake in a very specific education reform agenda. Education reform, as a project, is far from value-neutral: Reformers promote specific policies, ranging from firing teachers based on their students’ test scores to replacing public schools with privately run charter schools. Their rhetoric often directly attacks teachers unions and even public education as an institution, in favor of “market-driven” “school choice” solutions. And the organizations funding the LA Times’ new project are no exception.
The Broad Foundation, in particular, has a prodigious record. According to its website, Broad currently invests in organizations that invest in charter-school expansion, including Aspire Public Schools (whose goal is to “expand its network of public charter schools in the Los Angeles area”), the California Charter School Association, the Charter School Growth Fund, charter loan provider Excellent Education Development, Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, Green Dot Public Schools (a charter network), the KIPP Foundation, New Schools Venture Fund, Pacific Charter School Development, Silicon Valley-based charter management organization Rocketship Education, Success Charter Network and Uncommon Schools. It funded the popular pro-charter documentary Waiting for Superman. It also invests in the US Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” grant program.
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Bear with me for a second, because this is going to sound like a #Slatepitch or a hot take at first, I know. But after catching up on the latest from U.S. senator and presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders, who “delighted” a crowd of roughly 3,000 South Carolinians at a campaign rally this weekend, according to the Associated Press, I feel compelled to register a mild criticism. And it’s probably one of the last you’d expect to be leveled against this longtime, unapologetic democratic socialist.
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I wish, although without much hope, that this theory would spread and become accepted. The reason is simple: it could help break the deadlock in Washington that has cursed us for the last four years. And from a more self-interested point of view, I’m not sure that my own genes can survive another election year like the last one.
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Censorship
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The Austrian branch of T-Mobile is refusing to block access to The Pirate Bay and several other popular torrent sites. T-Mobile was asked to do so by a local music rights group, who want the ISP to voluntarily follow a court order that was issued against rival Internet provider A1.
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In a remarkable case study of censorship, author and political cartoonist Ted Rall recounts how he was dropped from the Los Angeles Times, purportedly for giving an untrue account of a 2001 encounter with an LAPD officer, who cited Rall for jaywalking.
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Privacy
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As the Ashley Madison hack demonstrated, Web companies can’t guarantee privacy.
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When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.
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As someone said to me in one of the comments on my blog, trying to remove your data from the web is “like trying to remove pee from a swimming pool”. I added the DMCA comment in there as well because this has come up many times in the press. There’s a good piece on it in an article that emerged after news of the attack first broke last month (paradoxically, stating that DMCA is the reason the full data hadn’t been leaked), do read Parker Higgins’ comment about the “fraudulent” use of the act in terms of its’ use for removing data breaches. Regardless, a US law will in no way stop the mass distribution of this data, particularly via a decentralised mechanism like torrents.
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The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.
Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.
He added that he doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter, and said it was regrettable that vast numbers of people sign away their digital rights without thinking about it.
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Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Canadian cops need a warrant before they can get subscriber information from telecommunication companies—which is why police are now lobbying for a legal workaround so they can access that same information without court approval.
In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that subscriber information such as names and addresses carries with it a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that accessing such information without a warrant constitutes an unlawful search. The ruling has caused “substantial resource and workload challenges for law enforcement,” according to a resolution adopted by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) at its annual convention in August.
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According to a study from HP Security Research, 70 percent of the most widely used Internet of Things devices have notable security vulnerabilities.
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Facebook has promoted Stephen Scheeler to the role of managing director of its Australia and New Zealand region business.
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The default state of Internet privacy is a travesty. But if you’re willing to work hard, you can experience the next best thing to absolute Internet anonymity
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It’s official: using your cell phone during a family dinner is frowned upon by pretty much everybody.
A new survey by Pew Research Center found that 88% of respondents believe it’s “generally” not OK to use a cell phone during dinner. An even larger percentage, 94%, say cell phone use is inappropriate during meetings, while 95% say they shouldn’t be used at theaters and 96% say they shouldn’t be used during religious services.
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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday asked U.S. President Barack Obama to investigate alleged spying by the National Security Agency on the Japanese government and companies, Mr. Abe’s spokesman said.
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Tor is increasingly being used to scan organisations for vulnerabilities and to launch attacks
The Tor anonymisation network is increasingly used as the point of origin of attacks on public- and private-sector organisations, according to a new report by IBM, which recommends administrators ban access to the network.
The report also noted increases in SQL injection and distributed denial-of-service attacks and of “ransomware” incidents that encrypt data belonging to an individual or an organisation, and then charge a fee to decrypt it.
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UN PRIVACY RAPPORTEUR Joseph Cannataci has suggested – and he is not the first – that citizens need better data protection from technology companies, governments, the internet, heck the 21st century.
Cannataci, who assumed the position last month after a 29-person battle royal/interview process, has made it clear that, as a representative for privacy, he will represent privacy.
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After a breach of the site’s database, people combing through the information found that Ashley Madison, and other properties owned by parent company Avid Life Media (ALM), had retained quite a bit of information pertaining to users who purchased a “full delete” of their profile for £15, including GPS coordinates, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, among other details. Although e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and descriptions written by users who sought “full deletes” were eliminated by the time the hackers accessed the database, the incidental data that Ashley Madison kept on those users could still paint quite a picture. The Register has a table that nicely illustrates what information Ashley Madison kept on “deleted” users and what it actually deleted.
In addition, when Ars investigated the “full delete” option on Ashley Madison a year ago, we found that there was little difference between a “full delete” and the “hiding your profile” option, except that messages that a user sent to another user would be deleted if exiting users paid the fee.
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Civil Rights
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Generals, decorated war heroes, grieving families and politicians last night urged soldiers and members of the public to sign a petition to save Afghan interpreters from the Taliban.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, former head of the Army, led the calls as he pledged to sign a petition asking David Cameron to give all translators a safe haven in Britain.
He praised the Daily Mail for its Betrayal of the Brave series of articles highlighting the plight of frontline Afghans who risked their lives for UK troops in the battlefield.
He said: ‘We have a moral obligation to look after these people and if they feel once we have left that they cannot assume their normal lives because of fear having worked for us, then it is our obligation to have them in this country.
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On average, one person every two days was put to death in kingdom, says new report, with figures for 2015 already ahead of those for whole of last year [...] on average one person every two days [...] Saudi courts allow for people to be executed for adultery, apostasy and witchcraft.
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A former police captain recently signed an affidavit affirming that several formal reprimands are missing from the personnel file of the officer who killed a 19-year-old during a marijuana bust. Although the police chief claims that no disciplinary actions have been taken against the officer, his former supervisor lists multiple performance issues resulting from the officer’s negligence. In an attempt to improve public relations, city officials have hired a PR firm at the expense of taxpayers’ dollars instead of releasing the dash cam videos of the shooting.
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A woman reportedly downed a £120 bottle of cognac after airport security officials attempted to confiscate the liquid – only to be denied boarding as she was “too drunk to fly”.
The woman, who is being identified only by her surname of Zhao, was allegedly seen rolling about on the floor of Beijing Capitol International Airport, according to the Beijing Times.
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In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, five former New Orleans police officers were sentenced to six to 65 years in prison in connection to on-the-job deadly shootings of unarmed civilians. But recently, these five officers had their convictions set aside by a federal appeals court. Why? Federal prosecutors’ anonymous online comments posted underneath local news accounts of the officers’ ongoing 2011 trial “contributed to the mob mentality potentially inherent in instantaneous, unbridled, passionate online discourse,” the court said. In light of that, the appellate court found a fair trial wasn’t possible.
The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week (PDF) that the prosecutors’ behavior, unearthed by the same forensic expert who helped identify the Unabomber, created an “air of bullying” that federal prosecutors were “sworn to respect.”
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…apparently two BBC reporters who were covering the police pursuit of the apparent shooter (who then shot himself) were forced by police to delete their own camera footage. This is illegal. I don’t know how many times it needs to be repeated. Even the DOJ has somewhat forcefully reminded police that they have no right to stop anyone from photographing or videotaping things, so long as they’re not interfering with an investigation.
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Some 23% of Americans think it’s not OK to use your phone while walking down the street, but that’s nothing compared to how they feel about the cinema or church
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The very upscale New Yorker magazine marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a celebration of the benefits that supposedly accrued to the 100,000 mostly Black and poor people forced into exile from New Orleans. “Starting Over,” by magazine staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, a biracial Canadian who made his bones promoting the hyper-aggressive “broken windows” police strategy, concludes that involuntary displacement is a good thing for people who are stuck in “bad” neighborhoods or bad cities where poverty is high and chances for upward mobility are low. Since every heavily Black city in the country fits that description, the logic is that Black people should be dispersed to the four winds and prevented from forming concentrated populations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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While Google is still seen as (and proclaims to be) a net neutrality advocate, evidence continues to mount that this is simply no longer the case. Back in 2010 you might recall that Google helped co-write the FCC’s original, flimsy net neutrality rules with the help of folks like AT&T and Verizon — ensuring ample loopholes and making sure the rules didn’t cover wireless at all. When the FCC moved to finally enact notably-tougher neutrality rules for wired and wireless networks earlier this year, Google was publicly mute but privately active in making sure the FCC didn’t seriously address the problems with usage caps and zero-rated (cap exempt) content.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In 1987, Norberto Colón Lorenzana had what we can all agree is a pretty unremarkable idea. Colón, who had just started working at a fast food joint called Church’s Chicken in Puerto Rico, suggested to his employer that they try adding a basic fried chicken sandwich to a menu that was mostly chicken-by-the-piece.
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Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveals that City of London Police have targeted the ad revenue of 251 suspected pirate sites, replacing their banners with anti-piracy messaging. The police won’t reveal the domain names as that would raise their profiles, but the most prominent pirate sites are believed to be included.
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Megaupload’s legal team is asking the court to preserve essential evidence hosted on its seized servers. The data is at risk of being destroyed and Kim Dotcom’s lawyers argue that the authorities should buy the servers and transfer them to a safe facility where they can be preserved at the Government’s cost.
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John Deere would not talk on tape, but in an emailed statement the company said ownership does not include the right to modify computer code embedded in that equipment.
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We write frequently about those who abuse the DMCA either directly for the sake of censorship or, more commonly, because some are in such a rush to take down anything and everything that they don’t bother (or care) to check to see if what they’re taking down is actually infringing. The latter, while common, could potentially expose those issuing the takedowns to serious legal liability, though the courts are still figuring out to what extent.
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08.26.15
Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Data Center Operating System (DCOS) is a proprietary trap
“I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week.”
–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft
Summary: Hiding behind a misleading ‘open’ label while actually backed by Microsoft (and based on new rumours may join Microsoft), Mesosphere wishes to eradicate Free and back doors-free software in large datacentres hosting a lot of physical and virtual servers
WE have patiently been watching with great concern a company called Mesosphere. We have been watching it for quite some time, but have not yet properly covered it in Techrights (except incidentally). I personally complained about it many times in social media sites, not just because it’s backed by Silverberg (some Microsoft-centric publications call him “Mr. Windows” these days) but because it’s basically proprietary yet pretends to be ‘open’. It’s a big deception. Mesosphere is a parasite that has been often (and mostly) promoted by friends of Microsoft over the past year. Mesosphere is one of those companies that only people bribed by Microsoft (like Om Malik and his increasingly-defunct ‘news’ network) would actually openwash, excepting perhaps some gullible journalists who truly believe that there is genuine openness at Mesosphere or merely repeat what others are writing (the corrupting effect of manufactured hype).
Thankfully, Mesosphere is now showing its true colours, so we need not merely speculate or accuse Mesosphere with relatively weak evidence. Mesosphere has nothing to do with FOSS, except the fact that it wants to replace it with its own proprietary operating system. It can be viewed as a Microsoft Trojan horse with Microsoft veterans backing it — the same sorts of people who would distribute “Microsoft loves Linux” buttons (spreading a Big Lie) to help themselves devour the GNU/Linux market.
“Avoid Mesosphere, Mesos, and the Data Center Operating System (DCOS). Treat them as a creation of Microsoft, emanated silently to entrap the competition.”A Microsoft propaganda site (and by extension a network) recently showed Microsoft’s anti-Linux plan of entryism [1, 2], trying to make GNU/Linux just subservient to Windows, essentially demoting it. Other Microsoft propaganda sites did the same thing at the same time. Then we saw rumours that Microsoft was essentially ‘buying’ its own moles, just as it had done with Xamarin (now bankrolled by Microsoft veterans). All one has to do now is watch headlines from the financial press, for instance:
There are many more like the above, but we omit them for the sake of brevity.
I personally feel somewhat vindicated, having repeatedly accused Mesosphere of serving Microsoft’s agenda. I said the same about Mono about a decade ago, well before it officially became a sort of Microsoft adjunct in the form of Xamarin. These are more like moles. They serve as Microsoft’s bridge into the heart of the competition.
Mesosphere ought to be treated as a Trojan horse or a proprietary software company with Microsoft roots (intending to replace GNU/Linux at datacentres). It shows true colours with articles such as “Why Microsoft Could Reportedly Want To Buy Cloud Startup Mesosphere Even At $1 Billion”.
Watch what Microsoft boosters are writing right now [1, 2, 3]. Headlines such as “Windows Server Getting Open Source Mesos Container Technology for Scaled Operations” or “Mesosphere And Microsoft Bring Mesos To Windows Server” speak volumes.
Microsoft’s many attacks on GNU/Linux and Free software can only be as effective as GNU/Linux users can be dumb, gullible, defeatist, or lenient. Scott M. Fulton III, a Microsoft expert, wrote the other day that:
Developers outside of Microsoft will be able to experiment for the first time with new classes of applications that run partly on Windows, partly on Linux.
As one response to this framed the key message: “It’s hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to build an application that is part-Linux, part-Windows. Or, to go one step further, to intentionally engineer a server-based program that straddles two very, very different flavors of operating system.
“Why on Earth would anyone build or use an application that needs two operating systems to function?”
Why would anyone need a platform from Mesosphere to manage GNU/Linux? It’s not even Free software, so back doors are to be expected (voluntary or not), compromising the security of everything down the hierarchy/stack.
Avoid Mesosphere, Mesos, and the Data Center Operating System (DCOS). Treat them as a creation of Microsoft, emanated silently to entrap the competition. Time will tell what Mesosphere really is and where it’s heading. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 7:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at the recent assault on GNU/Linux in Munich and the likely cause for this assault (in such a timely fashion, too)
Over the past couple of days we have been writing about what Microsoft does in Munich, basically trying to stereotype/stigmatise this city’s GNU/Linux migration (also on the desktops) as a failure, doing so repeatedly, each time just quoting a person or two at most. There is now a good article on the subject, noting: “This “story” surfaces every several months and, for some reason I always fail to fathom, everybody starts parroting it. It goes thus: Munich is sick and tired of how inadequate Linux is for everyday use and is ready to ditch years of work and millions of euros to return to Windows.
“As usual, the facts say something different: all that has happened this time around is that two (count ’em: 2) councillors have sent a letter to the mayor requesting that some new devices that have had Limux (Munich’s tailored Linux flavour) installed on them, be equipped with Windows because the Linux distro comes with “no programs (text editing programs, Skype, Office, etc.)” that the councilors can use.”
This “story” has once again been amplified by Microsoft propaganda sites and then some blogs, perpetuating old myths and factual inaccuracies (some more gross than others). Microsoft AstroTurfing is quite possible here. As one person, Michael Matthew, put it this morning, “Microsoft Germany has their own dedicated team to wrest Munich away from Linux” (and Free software at large).
“They are trying to scare those who wish to move governments to GNU/Linux, especially in light of Vista 10′s serious failings.”It is not hard to see why Microsoft is nervous about Munich. The city’s success story with GNU/Linux can lead to the spread of a new trend, so McCarthyism (like witch-hunt against Communism) is what Microsoft now resorts to. Vista 10′s overt privacy violations combined or conjoined with NSA leaks that show Microsoft collusion in espionage can potentially destroy the Windows monopoly everywhere in the world, including parts of the US. There are “Lots of Reasons to Avoid Windows 10″, as the Goodbye Microsoft Web site put it earlier today, and “Meanwhile, Linux is getting easier to install and more capable every year. And it doesn’t snoop. Some applications issue crash reports that ask me if I want to send them to the developers; “no” is always presented as an option.”
Ken Starks, in the mean time, says it’s time to target (and boycott) Lenovo for spyware that it adds to Windows. Lenovo merely piggybacks Microsoft when it comes to surveillance, so it would make sense to target everything that runs Windows, not just Lenovo. It’s a tool of espionage. It is also not secure (by design), so even Five Eyes oughtn’t use it in governments. It’s a bait or a trap.
Microsoft is understandably nervous right now because Vista 10 is failing in a very big way, as we last showed last night.
The large army of Microsoft boosters at IDG (some are existing Microsoft employees, not just former ones) continues to belittle Vista 10 issues. Remember that IDG receives a lot of money from Microsoft in order to promote Vista 10 (advertisements in IDG sites), so IDG appointing many Microsoft people as “writers” simply makes business sense. Preston Gralla is the latest among the boosters of Vista 10, doing his usual Microsoft propaganda (he has been doing this for over a decade) which iophk calls “spin and lies” because it’s hardly hinged on facts at all. It’s jaw-dropping drivel which might only fool the most gullible among readers.
Having already made a beautiful Spanish word, “Vista”, get a bad connotation (Like Isis), Microsoft now does the same thing to a special decimal number, “10″. Attacking Munich’s story of successful migration to GNU/Linux is a priority at the moment. They are trying to scare those who wish to move governments to GNU/Linux, especially in light of Vista 10′s serious failings. In many countries and in many occupations the EULA of Vista 10 is not even compatible with the law. █
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08.25.15
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 4:03 pm 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: Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, helps Microsoft gain influence in the Foundation after payments are received
SEVERAL days ago LinuxCon ended. It was probably the biggest Linux-centric conference not only in the US but in the whole world. Microsoft, as usual, infiltrated and “injected Microsoft content into the conference,” to use the company’s own words. There’s a reason for this.
“This once again shows us an inherent weakness in the operations of the Linux Foundation. Microsoft moles or provocateurs managed to get in and change the agenda after they had paid.”We give some credit to Sean Kerner for writing about this as almost nobody else did. The first article from Kerner reminded us that the Linux Foundation is selling out again. It lets an anti-Linux company speak at Linuxcon because this company paid the Linux Foundation. Would the Linux Foundation also let SCO give some talks if SCO paid (hypothetical question as SCO is a defunct company now)? Remember that Intel (key funder of the Linux Foundation and OSDL before it) helped fund a SCO conference.
Kerner wrote repeatedly about this, noting that “Microsoft was a sponsor of the event and also had a booth in the vendor area [...] When Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, held up a Microsoft Tux penguin during a keynote session on Aug. 18, he was actually heckled.”
It is reported that these 'Microsoft loves Linux' buttons (see below) emerged at this event at well.
People who paid a lot of money to attend this event are reportedly upset, to use an understatement. And rightly so. See the quote at the top again. Microsoft succeeds at discrediting the event. Microsoft sure delivered its entryism first thing in the morning as “LinuxCon [was] infiltrated by Microsoft,” to quote one of our readers who sent us mail about it, as several other have done since then (many are furious as the Linux Foundation serves to legitimise Microsoft, in exchange for generous, self-serving payments).
This once again shows us an inherent weakness in the operations of the Linux Foundation. Microsoft moles or provocateurs managed to get in and change the agenda after they had paid. Microsoft entryism needs to be recognised as a potent threat and tackled accordingly. Such entryism and marketing not only reduces the popularity of GNU/Linux but also removes freedom because anything that Microsoft does around Linux merely promotes proprietary software like Hyper-V, Windows, and so on.
A third and final such article from Sean Kerner (not that it’s an issue, as he clearly helped raise awareness of what Microsoft had sneakily done again) got titled “LinuxCon Highlights: From Linus Torvalds to Microsoft”, demonstrating quite well that Microsoft interjected itself into the competition and it worked; it served to distract almost everybody and that’s how people may remember this event.
For those who believe that Microsoft actually likes GNU/Linux, recall the 6-part series below and see what Microsoft is distributing in FOSS conferences as though it is trying to deliberately provoke and upset attendees.
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![Microsoft loves Linux](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/microsoft_loves_linux.jpg)
Photo credit: Neil McAllister
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Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)