Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

06.18.14

Links 18/6/2014: Red Hat to acquire eNovance

Posted in News Roundup at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • 7 Improvements The Linux Desktop Needs

      In the last fifteen years, the Linux desktop has gone from a collection of marginally adequate solutions to an unparalleled source of innovation and choice. Many of its standard features are either unavailable in Windows, or else available only as a proprietary extension. As a result, using Linux is increasingly not only a matter of principle, but of preference as well.

      Yet, despite this progress, gaps remain. Some are missing features, others missing features, and still others pie-in-the sky extras that could be easily implemented to extend the desktop metaphor without straining users’ tolerance of change.

    • Kerala and Leipzig Move to Free Software on the Desktop

      The government of the Indian state of Kerala has ordered all of its public sector agencies using Windows XP to migrate to free and open source (FOSS) operating systems by 30 June.

      Nor is Kerala alone in doing so in India:

      Since March this year, there have been moves across the Indian public sector to open source. The central government’s IT arm has encouraged agencies to switch to open source operating systems. Another state, Tamil Nadu, has told its departments to install open source operating systems.

  • Server

    • Opening A Window To Linux Virtual Server Hosting

      Manufacturers are getting on board with Linux virtual server hosting in part because oflower set-up and maintenance costs, and the ability to modify the OS according to their needs. Because of its flexibility, scalability, high availability and open-source nature, Linux virtual server hosting is becoming an increasingly attraction option for small and midsize manufacturing concerns.

  • Kernel Space

    • ALSA 1.0.28 Released

      ALSA 1.0.28 features various small updates to the alsa-oss and alsa-tools components, adds new sound firmware files for the Cirrus Logic CS46xx, boasts small changes to alsa-plugins, and as usual most of the work happened within the alsa-lib and alsa-utils components. Within the ALSA library for 1.0.28 are many API updates while within the ALSA utilities area are many updates to ALSA Control and Speaker Test.

    • Welcoming #MesosCon to CloudOpen

      A few years ago we put together the CloudOpen conference to unite the open source projects and products companies are using to create cloud or elastic computing infrastructures inside their companies: OpenStack and CloudStack, containers technology like Docker, data clustering platforms like Hadoop, storage platforms like Gluster and Ceph, and automation tools like Puppet, to name just a few. The defining characteristic of all of these projects (besides being open source) is that they are delivering on the promise of distributed and elastic computing to enable scalable and responsive infrastructures.

    • SCSI Multi-Queue Performance Appears Great For Linux 3.17

      Building upon the major blk-mq work for the multi-queue block layer, the SCSI multi-queue code is now in good shape according to its developers, is delivering very promising performance results, and should be merged into the Linux 3.17 kernel cycle.

    • Ext2Fsd: EXT3/EXT4 Support Now Works On Windows 8

      The Ext2Fsd project that provides an EXT3/EXT4 file-system driver for Microsoft Windows operating systems was recently updated with Windows 8 support and other changes.

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD Reportedly Plans To Bring Mantle To Linux, Calls Mantle An Open-Source API

        There’s been a bit of flip-flopping from various AMD sources and reports about whether their Mantle API will come to Linux in the near-term, which is AMD’s high-performance graphics API designed to complement OpenGL and Direct3D for the gaming space by offering faster frame-rates. Mantle for now remains Windows-only and bound to just the Catalyst driver with the more recent “GCN” graphics cards.

      • Radeon VCE, OpenMAX Improvements Land In Mesa

        A number of commits have landed within mainline Mesa today for improving the open-source Radeon driver’s video encoding support via the recently exposed VCE video encoding engines and the recently introduced OpenMAX state tracker to Gallium3D.

      • Gallium3D “Mega Drivers” Might Be Ready For Merging In The Next Month

        Work on a Gallium3D approach to Mesa “mega drivers” is still progressing. The final reported patch series is now out there and the developer hopes to have the support merged over the next month.

      • Broadcom VC4 Work Well Underway On DRM, Gallium3D Support Planned

        Beginning this week, Eric Anholt is now working for Broadcom after working for Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center the past several years on the Intel Linux graphics driver stack. While Eric just started there, he’s already made some headway on a Broadcom DRM driver and expects to begin developing a Gallium3D driver soon.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Randa Meetings Interview: Sanjiban Bairagya

        Here we are in conversation with Sanjiban Bairagya, a current Google Summer of Code 2014 intern who is working on Marble for KDE and is one of the younger, fresher, newer lots at KDE and has quite a bit to offer in terms of enthusiasm and brilliant ideas as well as zeal!

      • Sponsors required for KDE code sprint in Randa

        KDE is organizing a “coding sprint” in Randa, Switzerland. KDE Developer Sprints are focused gatherings of KDE developers to work on a specific part of KDE. Sprints are an opportunity to plan, design, and hack (think 20% socialization and 80% perspiration). Though sprints are supported by KDE e.V. financially and organizationally, we are having more enthusiastic people than funds allotted to us by KDE e.V. We need your support in helping us to fill this gap.

      • Starving Developers

        Phonon, a pillar of our multimedia solutions, was revived in Randa. Kdenlive, our video editor, became 302% more awesome in Randa. The KDE Frameworks 5 movement seeking to make our awesome libraries more useful to all the world started in Randa. Amarok 2 was planned in Randa. Approximately a godzillion bugs were fixed in Randa.

      • after convergence

        Two years later I gave a presentation summarizing these thoughts at Akademy in Dublin. A desktop layer that was stackable like a normal window (“dashboard” in today’s jargon), scripted components instead of compiled applets, dataengines, network services, dynamically loading different layouts for different user activities, using threads to keep the UI fluid, easy animation systems, configure/manipulate-in-place, a window manager that did more than just put title bars around things, etc. It was finally time to get to turning scribbles in notebooks into code. (I was still maintaining various parts of KDE’s 3.x desktop at the time, in particular kicker, as well as working on a variety of other bits of KDE software. This, along with a semi-crazy travel schedule kept me busy with productive things while these ideas were crystallizing.)

      • QML module versions and automatic imports
      • Five Musings on Frameworks Quality

        KDE Frameworks 5 will be released in 2 weeks from now. This fifth revision of what is currently known as the “KDE Development Platform” (or, technically “kdelibs”) is the result of 3 years of effort to modularize the individual libraries (and “bits and pieces”) we shipped as kdelibs and kde-runtime modules as part of KDE SC 4.x. KDE Frameworks contains about 60 individual modules, libraries, plugins, toolchain, and scripting (QtQuick, for example) extensions.

      • Geogebra file support in Kig ( GSoC Report )

        KIG currently has filters for various formats ( Cabri, Dr-Geo, KGeo, KSeg ). I have been working on implementing the Geogebra-filter for KIG. Here’s some introduction about the Geogebra-filter that we are trying to implement :

      • First Report

        As the title (Lyrics Support improvements) of my Google Summer of code project suggests, I am improving the way lyrics are fetched and displayed in Amarok. Personally, I like to follow the lyrics of the song that is playing; so I added this is idea to the Idea Page for GSoC 2014. And now here I am, working on it. I goal of my project is to highlight the particular line from the entire lyrics text that is being played.

      • Last week in Krita — week 23 & 24

        In the last two weeks, besides the coding work on the git repositories, Boudewijn has made available a hefty number of testing builds for the windows community. This builds brings up the latest novelties and features developed in the master branch. Note, however, not all feature sets are finished and it is not recommended for production use. Get the bleeding edge build

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME: A notifications update

        Previously, I described a work-in-progress design that we have been pursuing in GNOME design. Since that post, the process has diversified, and we are exploring several variations on the original design. These different options are in a state of evolution, and we are developing and evaluating them in parallel. To help with this, Jasper has created a couple of rough prototypes that we’ve been testing.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • BeagleBone SBC goes OEM, COM version coming

      CircuitCo debuted an HDMI- and flash-free OEM version of the BeagleBone Black called the “BlueSteel-Basic,” to be followed by industrial and COM versions.

    • In-Rack Linux Development Module fosters custom code writing.
    • The IFC6410 Pico-ITX Is A Developer ARM Single-Board Computer Capable Of Running Ubuntu 14.04 And Fedora 20

      As you may know, the IFC6410 Pico-ITX is a single-board computer powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 CPU, having 2 GB of RAM memory, 4 GB internal storage, 2 USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, Wifi, Bluetooth, a SATA connector and other pins and conectors, capable of running Ubuntu 14.04 and Fedora 20 systems, with open source graphics drivers from the Freedeno project.

    • MIPS Takes on ARM in the Internet of Things

      Already, MIPS is widely used in smartwatches, such as the new Android-ready SpeedUp Smartwatch-S, and it supports Google’s upcoming Android Wear platform, claims Imagination.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Oppo R1 Android Smartphone

          Oppo is a relative newcomer out of China offering high-end phones that are gaining popularity in developed and emerging markets. Its new offering the R1 combines processing power, design and feel. Powered by the MediaTek MT6582 with 4 cores humming along at 1.3GHz with Mali-400 graphics unit the phone has a 1GB RAM and 16GB of storage. The R1 runs Android 4.2.2. The 5-inch (1280×720) high-definition screen is crisp and clear. Both front and back are a mirror-like glass. The buttons on the front have very faint markings but do light up a little when the screen is on. This device certainly has a quality feel and look.The cameras are 8MP rear and 5MP rear. Travel a lot? Duel sims give you carrier flexibility. Oppo is clearly a new kind of Chinese manufacturer and this is a solid phone for the business traveler.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is Open Source the New De Facto Standard?

    Marc Cohn, senior director of market development at Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN) and chair of the ONF market education committee, kicked off the discussion and highlighted the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Network Functions Virtualization ISG’s decision to start its own open source project, called Open Platform for NFV, or OPN, with the Linux Foundation , which already runs OpenDaylight .

    The idea, Cohn said after the panel, is to develop a framework for an open NFV platform in a similar way that OpenDaylight has created an open source approach to an SDN controller. Participation in the OPN requires a financial buy-in for both network operators and industry hardware and software vendors, and if it follows the Open Daylight model, would also require the contribution of code.

  • GCHQ Plans to Open Source Bits of Its Spy Technology

    By open sourcing that technology, the global security community can probe it for weaknesses and make it even stronger, said Professor Alan Woodward, security expert from the computing department at the University of Surrey. It should also inspire confidence that there are no backdoors or purposeful weaknesses, as the security community would be keen to probe the code, he added.

  • NICTA to release drone OS as open source
  • Auto-Summarization Tool TextTeaser Relaunches As Open Source Code

    TextTeaser, the text-summarization API that TechCrunch first profiled back in October 2013, is now open source and available on GitHub. Creator Jolo Balbin says that he decided to make the code available after “stumbling upon some scalability issues, especially in the API.”

    So he took down the API and recoded TextTeaser to make its auto-summarization process faster. Developers can chose from two plans, including one that costs $12 for every 1,000 articles summarized. The second is an enterprise plan that costs $250 per month and comes with a dedicated server that can store the article source. That means each time someone uses the tool to summarize an article, TextTeaser will learn the keywords in the text and use it to improve its results.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome/Google

      • Google Open Sources PDF Software Library

        The PDF code in Google Chrome has been made open source and available for use in apps for viewing, printing and form filling PDF files.

      • Opinion: Why CIOs should cheer Google’s latest open source move

        Virtualization is changing the IT landscape, and two news items last week drove home its impact. The first was Google’s release of Kubernetes under an open-source license. Kubernetes is basically a public version of Borg, the software that the company has used internally to harness computing power from across its data centers into a massive virtual machine.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • MemSQL, GoGrid Partner on High-Performance Big Data Cloud Analytics

      MemSQL, which provides Big Data analytics based on an in-memory database, and GoGrid have partnered to simplify deployment of the analytics solution within the cloud.

    • What is the best Linux filesystem for MariaDB?

      How do you choose the best Linux filesystem for your MariaDB server? The primary factors to look at are data integrity, performance, and ease of administration. Data integrity tops the list because fixing a corrupted database is even less fun than it sounds, and filesystems play a key role in data integrity. Performance is important because faster is better and time is money, and ease of administration matters for the same reasons as performance.

      [...]

      Trying to figure out which filesystem gives the best performance may be fun, but the filesystem won’t make a large difference in the performance of your MariaDB server. Your hardware is the most crucial factor in eking out the most speed. Fast hard drives, discrete drive controllers, lots of fast RAM, a multi-core processor, and a fast network have a larger impact on performance than the filesystem. You can also tailor your MariaDB configuration options for best performance for your workloads.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A free photo editor worth trying: Getting started with GIMP

      When most of us are looking for a photo-editing tool, we immediately think of Photoshop. Adobe’s program is powerful and popular, but it’s pricey at $100—and that’s for the “light” version called Photoshop Elements.

      Meanwhile, $20 per month is the standard charge for individual one-app subscriptions to Photoshop Creative Cloud. Adobe offers a free in-browser version called Photoshop Express Editor, but it’s very limited and only allows you to edit JPEG files.

      A better free alternative is to turn to the open-source world and a popular program called GIMP. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is the standard photo-editing tool included or available to most Linux distributions. GIMP is also available for Windows (XP and up) and Mac.

    • Register now for the GNU Hackers’ Meeting 2014

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Parliament to weigh open source pilots

      Next Monday, the European Parliament’s budget committee will consider a proposal from the Green/EFA group to pilot the use of open source encryption software, to be used by parliament members and their staff. The Green/EFA group is also asking to trial the use of open standards and open source to make available the EP’s data available in machine-readable format.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • EZTV Users Help to Fund Horror Movie, and Open Source Another

      EZTV users may download many TV-shows for free, but they are by no means cheapskates. A team of filmmakers from Laos recently noticed that nearly all traffic to their Indiegogo campaign came from the torrent site. As a token of their appreciation they have now offered to open source their first horror film, if their funding goal is reached.

    • A web platform for streamlining scientific workflows

      If you haven’t heard, science has been experiencing some issues. Though most scientists believe in the ideals of openness, transparency, and reproducibility, the reality is that the incentive structure of academic research encourages exactly the opposite. So, scientists have a stronger professional incentive to get results published than to get them right. To make things worse, many scientists are stuck with outdated and closed source tools that aren’t up to the task of managing their increasingly complicated workflows.

    • Can we make research more like the web?

      Kaitlin Thaney is the Director of Mozilla’s Science Lab and an open science advocate. Her work in this space began with John Wilbanks building the science wing of Creative Commons (formerly known as “Science Commons”). Their focus was on crafting the infrastructure, policy and advocacy for Open Access and sharing data on the web. She moved to Digital Science, where the focus was on tools and science software, but there was still a gap.

  • Programming

    • The New asyncio Module in Python 3.4: Event Loops

      Python 3.4 added a new asynchronous I/O module named asyncio (formerly known as Tulip). The asyncio module provides a new infrastructure with a plugabble event loop, transport and protocol abstractions, a Future class (adapted for use within the event loop), coroutines, tasks, threadpool management, and synchronization primitives to simplify coding concurrent code. In this overview of asyncio, I provide a brief introduction to the main components of the module and a few simple sample applications that work with some of the event loop functions.

    • Enroll now in free, online open source programming classes

      When Kushal Das helped found the Durgapur, India, Linux users group in 2004, he was struggling to find a teacher who could show him the open source ropes.

      “During that time,” Das said in a recent presentation at PyCon 2014, “there was almost no one to tell us what exactly to do with this thing called Linux, other than clicking randomly.”

    • Real life experiences thanks to Google Summer of Code projects

      While the open source community is filled with some of the most talented minds in the world, fresh perspectives from the next generation of developers is essential to the continued pioneering spirit of open source projects. Such an injection of youthful enthusiasm lends new creative blood to the open source community, allowing projects to stay cutting edge and in keeping with current trends.

    • Inspired by Lego, fuelled by creativity: Linux-based Kano kit wants to get kids hacking again

      Both OS X and Windows 8 are fairly closed operating systems, merely allowing coders to run commands and pulling a veil over the internals of the software powering the machine. The same goes for hardware: all-in-ones, laptops, and tablets alike aren’t easy for curious types to take apart and see what’s inside.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • I stopped a ten million dollar robbery

    “For various reasons, including my wife Claudia is slightly worried I could get killed, I am changing all of the names. All of the other details are intact.” A true story by James Altucher

  • What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse

    I grew up in Los Angeles, the city by the freeway by the sea. And if there’s one thing I’ve known ever since I could sit up in my car seat, it’s that you should expect to run into traffic at any point of the day. Yes, commute hours are the worst, but I’ve run into dead-stop bumper-to-bumper cars on the 405 at 2 a.m.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Feeding Hawai’i

      The early Hawaiian settlers, who arrived in the uninhabited islands around A.D. 300 from Polynesia, developed a unique system of resource management to support their growing population. Recognizing the connection between the mountains and the oceans and the key role of freshwater in linking the two, they divided the islands into self-sustaining units called ahupua’a. The ahupua’a were usually wedge-shaped sections of land that ran from the mountains to the sea (extending into coastal fishing grounds) and contained a freshwater source such as a stream, spring, or river. Each ahupua’a contained within it all the resources needed for a community to sustain itself independently.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Finance

    • Dear Marc Andreessen

      I appreciate that smart, ambitious people like you are thinking about a future of universal prosperity. You borrow terminology from finance in saying that you’re “way long human creativity”. While I’m creeped out by the commodification of our species’s ingenuity, I appreciate the sentiment. If our industry stops painting anyone who questions our business models as Luddites and finds creative ways to build products and services that sustainably address real needs, maybe we can hold on to the receding myth of triumphal disruption. Hopefully we can agree that there are many more meaningful quality of life improvements technology has yet to deliver on before we can start brainstorming the “luxury goods markets” of the future.

      Meanwhile, we don’t need to wait until a hypercapitalist techno-utopia emerges to do right by our struggling neighbors. We could make the choice to pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow. Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution.

      [...]

      The factory owner gets rich. The line worker, not so much.

    • Private Wealth, Public Squalor: America’s Dilemma

      In the first six months of this year, Senate Republicans used the filibuster to block the Senate majority from increasing the minimum wage, providing paycheck fairness to women, and enabling those with student debt to refinance at lower rates, paid for by insuring millionaires pay a minimum tax.

      Senate Republicans joined Democrats to pass extension of unemployment insurance and comprehensive immigration reform. But Republican House Speaker John Boehner has refused to allow either measure a vote in the House, despite likely majority support for both.

      Profits are at record heights and wages near record lows as a portion of the economy. CEO pay soars to new heights. The wealthiest 1 percent pockets nearly all of the nation’s income growth, while typical household income continues to decline. We are five years into the official “recovery” that has yet to reach most Americans.

  • Censorship

    • Flying the coup: Circumventing censorship in Thailand

      On 22 May 2014, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Commander of the Royal Thai Army, launched a coup d’état, replacing the Kingdom’s beleaguered civilian political institutions with a military-led National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO). The move came after months of street protests, the most recent in Thailand’s ongoing political unrest. While Thailand is no stranger to military coups, this time the military junta is focusing unprecedented efforts towards restricting online speech and the digital rights of users in Thailand.

      [...]

      The most popular way to secure email communications is using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), popularly available through its open source implementation, Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG). While PGP leaves metadata traces unencrypted (such as the email subject line and the sender’s and recipient’s email addresses), it encrypts the content and attachments of your email to ensure that only the intended recipients can read the message (all recipients must have GPG for this to work). For help installing GPG, follow Security in a Box’s walkthrough, which covers Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux operating systems. GPG is also available for Android devices with K-9 Mail and APG.

  • Privacy

    • Pentagon working on anonymity tools to dodge NSA?

      So you already know about the NSA’s massive information-collection system to spy on U.S. citizens (courtesy Edward Snowden) which, perhaps, sends shivers down your spine? But did you also know that there is a network called Tor which you can use while surfing the Internet to dodge the NSA?

    • Mikko Hypponen says John Kerry should ‘shut the f*** up’ about Snowden

      Mikko Hypponen has slammed US Secretary of State John Kerry for branding Edward Snowden a “coward” and a “traitor,” and saying that the US National Security Agency (NSA) document leaker should “man up” and return to the United States from Russia to “make his case”.

      In not so many words, Hypponen said that Kerry should pipe down and have respect for Snowden after he blew the whistle on the world’s largest intelligence agency, the NSA.

    • Ex-NSA Guys’ Startup To Protect You From NSA

      It’s like hiring Darth Vader to build planetary defense systems to thwart the Death Star.

      Except the analogy doesn’t quite work. Vader switched to the light side because of his love for his son. These guys are just doing it for the money.

  • Civil Rights

    • 70 Years Later, Still Playing Politics With Freedom of the Press

      Today we’re in year four of the third spy investigation of a publisher in U.S. history. Since 2010 the Justice Department has investigated WikiLeaks, confirmed by court filings this April. Obama called the organization “deplorable” and continues to sponsor confining the organization’s editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, to the Embassy of Ecuador in London. June 19th marks the two-year anniversary of Assange’s entry into the Embassy. Public officials accused WikiLeaks of treason, called for Assange’s assassination, and asked private companies to cut ties to the organization. Ecuador granted Assange political asylum owing to the credible risk of torture, inhumane treatment, and unfair trial he would face here.

    • When Aaron Swartz Spoofed His MAC Address, It Proved He Was A Criminal; When Apple Does It, It’s Good For Everyone

      Whenever we write about Aaron Swartz and the criminal prosecution against him, some of our (and Aaron’s) critics scream that it was “obvious” that he knew he was up to no good, because he chose to spoof his MAC address on the machine he used to download JSTOR articles. Of course, as many people explained, spoofing a MAC address isn’t some crazy nefarious thing to do, and often makes a lot of sense. In fact, Apple recently announced that iOS 8 will have randomized MAC addresses to better protect people’s privacy. Simply speaking: Apple is making “MAC spoofing” standard. And, as the folks over at EFF are noting, this is a very good thing for your privacy.

    • GM Recalls: How General Motors Silenced a Whistle-Blower

      It was close to 3 a.m. on June 6 when Courtland Kelley burst into his bedroom, startling his wife awake. General Motors (GM), Kelley’s employer for more than 30 years, had just released the results of an investigation into how a flawed ignition switch in the Chevrolet Cobalt could easily slip into the “off” position—cutting power, stalling the engine, and disabling airbags just when they’re needed most. The part has been linked to at least 13 deaths and 54 crashes. GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra, summoned before Congress in April to answer for the crisis, repeatedly declined to answer lawmakers’ questions before she had the company’s inquest in hand. Now it was out, and Kelley had stayed up to read all 325 pages on a laptop on the back porch of his rural home about 90 miles northwest of Detroit.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Court Hands Google a Worldwide Site Blocking Injunction

        In what is being viewed as an over-broad action with serious implications, a Canadian court has ordered Google to completely block a group of websites from its worldwide search results. The ruling was handed down despite Google’s protestations that the court has no jurisdiction over Google locally or in the United States.

      • Advocate General Says EU Libraries May Digitize Books In Their Collection Without Permission

        As that indicates, this is a fairly specific result, rather than a broad general right as in the US digitization case. However, what is encouraging is that it is the latest in a string of good decisions handed down by the European Union’s Court of Justice that are starting to introduce a modicum of common sense to Europe’s outdated copyright laws.

      • Torrent Domain Suspensions Damage Credibility, Registrar Says

        When the police coerce registrars to suspend domain names there are a series of damaging knock-on effects, Iceland’s top domain registry says. ISNIC says that it’s difficult to repair the kind of damage suspensions cause to the credibility of top-level domains, something that could be avoided through better understanding of Internet functionality.

06.17.14

Links 17/6/2014: More Games, Plasma 5 Demos

Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • HP’s The Machine Open Source OS: Truly Revolutionary

    Last week, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) announced its plan to build a revolutionary new type of computer called The Machine. And here’s what makes it truly revolutionary, in all senses of the word: The Machine will run an open source operating system developed in universities, as well as Linux and Android.

  • Linux professionals use tweak tools to customize their OS, and so can you

    Where Windows has utilities, Linux has tweak tools. And whether you’re a Linux pro or a recent refugee from Windows XP, they can help you makeA Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” (the latest and greatest offering from Linux distro pioneer Canonical) really start to feel like home.

    Customizability has long been one of Linux’s most compelling features–particularly when compared with proprietary alternatives such as Windows and OS X–but the tweak tools out there today let you refine the OS even further. And if you’re making the migration to Linux on your workplace PCs, tweak tools can help ease the transition.

  • Server

    • IBM’s Empowerment of SAP HANA

      SAP’s and IBM’s strategies around HANA emphasize how a unified in-memory platform can deliver the goods in both analytics and common line-of-business applications. That’s all good — but just as important will be the increasing competition that viable Power-based HANA solutions should inspire in the marketplace. Analytics and Big Data belong everywhere, not just in enterprise or BI ivory towers.

    • Linode Unveils $10/Month Linux Cloud Hosting Plan with SSD Storage

      In celebration of its 11th anniversary, cloud host Linode has slashed its prices. Users can now purchase hosting plans on Linux-powered servers with SSD storage starting at $10 per month.

      The offering was made possible through a $45 million upgrade of Linode’s infrastructure back in April 2014, which brought SSD storage to the company’s servers, as well as Intel (INTC) Xeon E5 2680v2 Ivy Bridge processors, more RAM and higher network throughput.

  • Kernel Space

    • Systemd’s Plan For Stateless Systems, Factory Resets

      Following the exciting systemd 214 release that worked on new sandboxing features and other improvements toward a stateless Linux system, Lennart Poettering has blogged about the latest features and their plans going forward.

    • USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Is Now Working Under Linux

      With the recently released Linux 3.15 kernel is support for UAS. USB Attached SCSI will allow for significantly faster performance out of UAS-supported USB drive enclosures.

    • UAS: USB Attached SCSI now available in the 3.15 kernel, qemu USB-3.0 compatibility coming up

      At the end of 2013 I’ve spend 2 full months working on getting XHCI streams support and the UAS driver in the Linux kernel, which uses streams into shape. With the release of the 3.15 kernel this work now is available for end users to use.

    • VXLAN Support Added To Systemd’s Networkd

      The latest addition to systemd’s networkd networking component is support for Virtual Extensible LANs.

      With the latest networkd work, networkd can now create VXLANs. Virtual Extensible LANs are a network virtualization method designed for cloud computing needs.

    • Allwinner A23 “Sun8i” Support Gets Cleaned Up For The Linux Kernel

      Developers have put out their latest batch of Allwinner patches that allow for basic upstream kernel support of Allwinner’s A23 SoC.

      The Allwinner A23 SoC is a dual-core Cortex-A7 part that’s been out since last year. The A23 isn’t impressive by other tier-one ARM SoCs, but it’s low-cost and with the A23 System-on-a-Chip they switched from using PowerVR graphics to instead using ARM’s Mali with their new designs.

    • The People Who Support Linux: Embedded Linux Hobbyist Maintains eLinux Wiki

      Bill Traynor first got hooked on embedded Linux development when a friend who maintained Hitachi’s SH architecture helped him install Linux on his Sega Dreamcast. From there he developed a hobby of installing Linux on various gaming consoles, toys, and handheld devices. And when embedded development boards became more abundant, accessible and cheaper, Traynor moved on to more serious tinkering.

      “For me, the availability of Linux on the many low-cost, ARM-based dev boards has been fun,” he said via email. “Small, powerful boards, like the BeagleBone Black have really made things fun again.”

    • Linus Torvalds Releases First RC for Linux Kernel 3.16

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • Open-Source Radeon Takes On AMD Catalyst In 2D Performance

        Last weekend I published 2D performance benchmarks comparing Nouveau to NVIDIA’s official driver. To no real surprise, the proprietary NVIDIA driver beat Nouveau in most micro-benchmarks when it comes to 2D (and separately, 3D) performance. With the open-source Radeon stack, however, it presents a much tougher fight against the proprietary Catalyst driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment E19 Is Moving Closer To Release

      Enlightenment 0.19 features improved Wayland support, the tiling module rework has landed, support for the new X PRESENT extension for reducing compositing overhead in X.Org Server 1.15 and newer, the E16-style live pager has returned, and the new compositor code has landed.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Context-sensitive CMake documentation in QtCreator
      • Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Users Can Test the Beautiful Plasma 5 Beta 2 Desktop

        The new KDE Plasma 5 Beta 2 that was released only a few days ago can be tested in Kubuntu 14.04 LTS with a just a minimum of effort.

      • Easily Manage Remote Files on Linux with Konqueror and Kate

        One of the great things about Linux, especially for web developers or server administrators, is that all of the basic tools you need to get set with your remote server and files tend to be included and well integrated into the system from the get go. You don’t necessarily need to install an FTP client, a code editor or a special terminal emulator.

      • KWin is no more

        Now that I have your attention: the binary of KWin/5 just got renamed from “kwin” to “kwin_x11″. For you as a user nothing changes, the startup is adjusted to start kwin_x11 instead of kwin. Nothing else changed. The D-Bus interface is still org.kde.KWin, the config file is still “kwinrc”, etc. etc. Only if you start KWin manually remember to run “kwin_x11 –replace &” instead of “kwin –replace &”.

      • Managing internal dependencies in a build of Calligra

        During the move of KDE’s software projects from Subversion to Git most projects split their subprojects over multiple Git repositories. Calligra did not, but is keeping all code of all apps and extras in one single repository. That is all of the apps Author, Braindump, Flow, Karbon, Kexi, Krita, Plan, Sheets, Stage and Words as well as all of the extras like the file format converter, the Okular generators, file thumbnailers and other file manager integration.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Quick Look: Linux Lite 2.0

      Linux Lite 2.0 includes updated applications, Whisker Menu as the default menu, Linux Lite software repositories, sound control from the tray, descriptive title bars in terminal windows, and more than twenty popular applications that you can easily install from the terminal window. This release also offers a new system font called Droid Sans, tabs in the file manager, and dialog boxes for auto-login.

    • KaOS Linux: Hands-on with this solid and focused distribution

      When I saw the release announcement for KaOS 2014.06 on Distrowatch, it caught my eye for two reasons. First, because there have been a few times when I have thought I would really like to have a special KDE-focused distribution with rolling updates where I could find and test the latest in the KDE Software Collection and associated packages. And second, because I have recently been trying and writing about a totally “over-the-top” Linux distribution (Makulu) with absolutely everything thrown in, including the kitchen sink and whatever other appliances and paraphernalia were within reach, so the prospect of a smaller, carefully focused and selective distribution sounded quite interesting.

    • Rescatux 0.32 Beta 1 OS Can Help Users Fix Windows Systems and Linux Distributions

      Rescatux can fix GRUB and GRUB2, check and fix filesystems (Windows MBR included), change GNU/Linux passwords, regenerate sudoers files, and much more.

    • Migration to open source tool inspires new Linux distribution

      In 2005, in version 5.0, The Pharmacy Server was mature and solid, running on a central server that supported over 300 drugstore chains in Brazil, and has been featured by Red Hat as a certification success story.

      In 2010, after mergers and acquisitions, the company’s operation was terminated and Pharmacy Server was shut down. Its last version used Red Hat 5.4, Firebird 1.5.3, and a custom version of Webmin web admin interface.

    • New Releases

      • Meet Cubicle OS 2.3, a Failed Attempt at Building a Proper Linux Distribution

        Cubicle OS is a rather new operating system and it shows, especially from the way it’s built. The developer chose to implement GNOME as the default desktop environment, but it looks like he didn’t bother to customize it too much.

      • OpenELEC 4.0.5 Integrates Latest OpenSSL Fixes

        OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has advanced to version 4.0.5 and is now available for download.

        The OpenELEC makers usually follow the XMBC releases, but from time to the time the devs make their own upgrades that are not taken from the other project. After all, XBMC is just a software and OpenELEC is in fact a Linux distribution, which means that there are a number of other components that need improvements and fixes.

    • Screenshots

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Linux 14.06 Can Be Turned into a Gentoo-Based Steam Machine

        Sabayon 14.06 is based on Gentoo and that is not something that you see every day. In fact, there are very few Linux distros out there that are using Gentoo as a base and it’s good to see that developers take the time and the effort to utilize something else than Debian and Ubuntu.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Core Linux Business Should Drive Q1 Earnings RHT
      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Finally Hits the Big Time

        Perhaps the biggest release on the Linux Planet in the past week came from the world’s largest Linux vendor (by revenue); Red Hat.

        After what might have seemed like an eternity to some (though was only 3 and half years in reality), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) officially became generally available. RHEL 6 was first releasedin November of 2010.

      • Red Hat Advances Enterprise Virtualization Platform With RHEV 3.4

        The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV 3.4) platform, released today, provides new features that make hypervisor-based virtualization easier to deploy and manage. The new RHEV release comes at a pivotal time for the virtualization industry as Docker container-based virtualization is now beginning to pick up momentum.

        RHEV 3.4 is based on the upstream open-source oVirt project, which had its 3.4 release March 27. RHEV provides additional hardening and commercial enterprise support.

      • Red Hat looks to the OpenStack cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4

        In this latest RHEV release, Red Hat states that it brings new “enhancements for traditional virtualization infrastructure, guest support for the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, as well as advanced OpenStack [cloud] support across compute, storage and networking.”

      • Red Hat unveils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
      • Red Hat Announces Updated Training for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
      • Red Hat Positions its Enterprise Virtualization Platform as an OpenStack Bridge

        Red Hat is out with its new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform version 3.4, which arrives just after the new version of its Enterprise Linux offering. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.4 is being positioned as a bridge to the OpenStack cloud, among other things. The latest RHEV version offers new “guest support for [RHEL] as well as advanced OpenStack support across compute, storage and networking.”

      • Goodtech Energizes its IT Infrastructure with Red Hat

        Goodtech develops and delivers projects, services and products creating business value for customers within a number of industries and sectors including manufacturing, energy, green technology and infrastructure. Among Goodtech’s customers in the Nordic region are industry leaders such as Astra Zeneca, LKAB, Vattenfall, Statoil and Norsk Hydro.

      • Fedora

        • DNF v.s. Yum

          A lot has been said on fedora-devel in the last few weeks about DNF and Yum. I thought it might be useful to contribute my own views, considering I’ve spent the last half-decade consuming the internal Yum API and the last couple of years helping to design the replacement with about half a dozen of the packaging team here at Red Hat. I’m also a person who unsuccessfully tried to replace Yum completely with Zif in fedora a few years ago, so I know quite a bit about packaging systems and metadata parsing.

        • Xorg without root rights now available in Fedora
        • Fedora Rawhide Can Now Run The X.Org Server Without Root Rights

          Following a lot of work by Hans de Goede at Red Hat, Fedora Rawhide now supports running the X.Org Server without root rights.

        • Bodhi2 Fedora Activity Day

          The Bodhi2/Taskotron Fedora Activity Day happened earlier this month! A bunch of us gathered in Denver for a few days and worked on some of our critical releng & qa infrastructure. The hackfest was held in a conference room in my apartment building, which worked out quite nicely for the amount of people that we had. The hotel was right up the road, and we were able to walk to a lot of awesome spots, like the 1UP Barcade :).

        • Compare files with these graphical diff tools in Fedora
        • PGP Keysigning Event and CACert Assertion at SELF2014

          SouthEast LinuxFest is happening this upcoming weekend. I offered to host a PGP (I’ll substitute PGP for GPG, GnuPG, and other iterations) keysigning and CACert Assertion event and have been scheduled for 6:30 PM in the Red Hat Ballroom. Since there is a little bit of planning needed on the part of the participant I’m writing this to help the event run smoothly.

        • YUM Will Be Replaced By DNF On Fedora 22 And Later Versions

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6 Gets LTS Support That Will End in February 2016

        The Debian developers have announced a few of months back that they intend to make Debian 6 an LTS release. The period for this extended release period has now begun.

      • Tails interview

        Tails was built with two specific things in mind: sustainability and usability.
        Sustainability refers to how this is a project that can be relied on by its users. The team goes on to explain the importance of usability: “We believe that the best security tool is of no use if people who really need it on the field cannot use it. Moreover, security tools must be hard to misuse, they should prevent you from doing critical mistakes, or ask you to make security decisions that you are not able to make.”

      • MATE 1.8 Has Been Added To Debian’s Default Repositories

        Mate is a Gnome 2 fork, created by the Arch Linux developers as a an alternative to Gnome Classic (Gnome 2), when the Gnome developers decided to create Gnome 3. Mate became very popular in a short time and now is used on many Linux systems. The latest version available is Mate 1.8, which has been released a while ago.

      • Debian 6 Will Be Maintained Under An LTS Flag

        Debian developers have announced today that Debian 6 will be maintained as a long-term support (LTS) state until February of 2016.

      • Debian 6 debuts its long term support period

        The Debian project is pleased to announce that the “Long Term Support (LTS)” infrastructure to provide security updates for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name “squeeze”) until February 2016 is now in place. Users of this version should follow the instructions from the LTS wiki page to ensure that they get the LTS security updates.

      • Mate 1.8 Is Now Available In Debian

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Mir Gains Support For “Trusted Prompt Sessions”

            According to the Ubuntu Wiki, this feature comes down to “the main purpose of a trusted prompt session (TPS) then is to tie together the [application requesting access to a resource via a trusted helper, the trusted helper, and a trust prompt provider] components mentioned before, both in terms of presenting the final prompt to the user and in terms of lifecycle/focus mgmt. (from a shell’s perspective). In this respect, a temporary, virtual app is introduced that spans across all three components.”

          • Ubuntu for Phones Activated on 10,000 Devices

            Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu for phones operating system has been activated on 10,000 devices, marking an important milestone for the company.

            Ubuntu for phones was announced at the beginning of 2013 and the development team has been working on it since then. It took them a while to get a functioning version and they’ve been improving it constantly.

          • Hands-on with Canonical’s Orange Box and a peek into cloud nirvana

            First off, Canonical emphasized to Ars multiple times that it is not getting into the hardware business. If you really want to buy one of these things, you can have Tranquil PC build one for you (for £7,575, or about $12,700), but Canonical won’t sell you an Orange Box for your lab—there are too many partner relationships it could jeopardize by wading into the hardware game. But what Canonical does want to do is let you fiddle with an Orange Box. It makes for an amazing demo platform—a cloud-in-a-box that Canonical can use to show off the fancy services and tools it offers.

          • Linux 3.16 Won’t Land On Ubuntu 14.10 Quite Yet

            The stable Linux 3.15 is now available from the Ubuntu 14.10 development archive while the Linux 3.16 kernel isn’t landing quite yet in its early development form.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • More on Mint, Email Clients, and Weather Apps
            • Initial thoughts on Linux Mint 17

              As night follows the day, so too do Linux Mint launches follow Ubuntu releases. Linux Mint is a project which puts together a desktop-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu packages. The Linux Mint project tends to take a more practical and conservative approach to crafting a desktop operating system when compared to Ubuntu. While Ubuntu experiments with the Unity desktop, servers, cloud computing and mobile devices, the Mint team stays focused on producing a familiar, user-friendly, multimedia-enabled desktop solution. Starting with their most recent release, Linux Mint 17, the Mint team has announced they will be adjusting their release cycle, basing all Linux Mint releases on the most recent Ubuntu long term support release. This should make for a more stable platform and a more relaxed release cycle.

            • Download Linux Mint 17 Xfce and KDE release candidates

              In today’s open source roundup: Linux Mint 17 Xfce and KDE RC released. Plus: Deepin 2014 RC released, and a review of Linux Mint 17 MATE by DistroWatch

            • Tizen SDK Live DVD updated to Lubuntu 14.04

              The unofficial Tizen SDK Live DVD has now been updated to the latest version of lubuntu 14.04, and you can download the ISO image now.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • IFC6410 Snapdragon 600 dev board now supports Fedora, Ubuntu

      The IFC6410 Pico-ITX board is a tiny computer-on-a-board powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor as the Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One M7 smartphones. It sells for $149 and it’s aimed at developers, hobbyists, and others interested in testing their hardware or software designs… but thanks to a few recent developments, you can also use the IFC6410 as a small, inexpensive desktop computer.

    • Google Fit: Google’s new health service to challenge Apple’s HealthKit

      However, there is a need for more clarity on whether Google Fit will be integrated into the next version of Android, or offered as a standalone app that could be downloaded independently.

      It added: “One source with knowledge of Google’s plans said Google Fit would allow a wearable device that measures data like steps or heart rate to interface with Google’s cloud-based services, and become part of the Google Fit ecosystem.”

    • IFC6410 Pico-ITX Development Board Now Supports Fedora And Ubuntu

      Makers, hobbyists and developers looking for a new Linux Fedora or Ubuntu development board for their projects might be interested to learn that the IFC6410 Pico-ITX board which is available to purchase for around $149.

    • Phones

      • Call for Papers – Tizen Developer Summit Shanghai 2014
      • Russia Tizen App Challenge, Total of 7,000,000 Rubel in Prize money on offer

        The Russia Tizen App Challenge has been launched with the aim of bringing talented application and game developers to the new Tizen platform, for new challenges and above all new opportunities. The competition has started on the 9th June and is open to citizens of the Russia or Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan with permanent or temporary registration in the territory of Russia.

      • Control Your Phone with These Open Source Linux Apps

        If your phone can be connected to your computer with an USB cable you can do a lot more through this connection than just recharging it or transferring files to and from your phone’s storage. For example, you can make phone calls, read and send text messages, and see a bunch of other information from your phone, right on your PC. There is a number of Free Open Source software applications that allow you to do this, and you don’t even need to have a smartphone for this to work, just a phone that can connect to USB.

      • Ballnux

        • Leak reveals Galaxy S5 and S4 KitKat update coming this month

          The document leaked to Android Geeks by an anonymous tipster indicates two versions of the S5 are due to receive the 4.4.3 update within the next couple of weeks. The leaked document was an email sent to Android Geeks titled “KTU84 Update Status Report”, containing a visible Samsung header and dated “June 10th”. The document suggests the Galaxy S5 (SM-G900F and SM-G900H) are both due to receive the update in June with both models having ‘completed testing’.

      • Android

        • World’s most secure Android phone finally starts shipping next month

          Secure communications specialist Silent Circle recently set out to build the most secure Android phone in the world, and some have gone as far as to call the company’s Blackphone an “NSA-proof” smartphone. That statement can’t be confirmed, of course, since the NSA surely still has a few tricks up its sleeve that we don’t know about. What we can say, however, is that people concerned with keeping their mobile communications private will soon have a new option that is more secure than any publicly available Android phone currently on the market.

        • Silent Circle’s Blackphone will ship out in three weeks

          Silent Circle in partnership with Geeksphone announced the Blackphone in January this year. The makers of the Blackphone claims that the handset is the world’s first smartphone that gives its user total control of privacy.

          The upcoming smartphone is powered by a modified version of Android, PrivatOS, which is believed to be more security-oriented. The Blackphone will be carrier and vendor independent, which will ensure that individuals and businesses are able to make and receive secure phone calls, send texts, store files, browse the internet and more without compromising the privacy of the user.

        • Blackphone is about to sidle stealthily into the mainstream
        • NSA-Proof? Super-Secure Blackphone Shipping by July
        • Super-Secure Blackphone Shipping by July
        • Anti-forensic mobile OS gets your phone to lie for you

          In Android Anti-forensics: Modifying CyanogenMod Karl-Johan Karlsson and William Bradley Glisson present a version of the Cyanogenmod alternate operating system for Android devices, modified so that it generates plausible false data to foil forensic analysis by law enforcement. The idea is to create a mobile phone that “lies” for you so that adversaries who coerce you into letting them take a copy of its data can’t find out where you’ve been, who you’ve been talking to, or what you’ve been talking about.

        • OnePlus makes official announcement defending anger against ‘Invite’ System
        • A warm welcome to CyanogenMod

          In short, CyanogenMod (pronounced sigh-AN-oh-jen-mod) is an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets. CM is based on the android platform but contains a wealth of add-ons, third party extensions and customisations. Until now CM was pretty much an alternative operating system only used by those who were brave enough to self-install (aka ‘flashing’). However more recently CM is starting to hit the mainstream market in all new ways. At present CM can claim over 12 million installs which when considering was never released (until recently) as a direct-from-launch pre-installed product is quite impressive. In addition alternative phone manufacturers are starting to see the benefits of CM and jumping on board. The first device to officially utilize CM was the OPPO N1 which launched back in December 2013 with the ColorOS operating system. This was the first device ever to offer a pre-loaded CM firmware.

        • The wait is over! OnePlus One available to buy without invite

          It looks like the wait is over! OnePlus One has arguable created a lot of controversy over the last few months with the release of their new device. This first began with ‘OnePlus’ (the company) creating a real buzz around their open-source device ‘OnePlus One’ (the device – yes, it is confusing). However with increasingly delayed release dates and a purchase system relying on “invites”. OnePlus is starting to receive a backlash from the very people who were initially creating the buzz.

        • Must have apps for rooted Android devices

          Rooting your device and installing custom ROMs unleashes the true open nature of Android. Customising phone or tablet and having tight control over their functions is what hardcore Android users dream of. Once your device is rooted, it paves way for installing apps that can take advantage of the added permission and access to core software. Here are few of the best apps that will give you Super Powers that non-root users cannot wield.

        • Android Glom Experiments

          Over the past few weeks I’ve been diving into Android development using a semi-realistic project to force me to learn properly. I wrote a rough first version of a read-only Glom database UI for Android, called android-glom. So now there’s a version in gtkmm (C++), Qt (C++), GWT (Java) and Android (Java). It’s a good way to really try out a framework and I’ve really enjoyed doing that with no pressure.

        • 6 Android Phones with Great Battery Life

          One of the most common complaints of smartphone ownership is battery life. Big displays and powerful processors conspire together to drain your phone of life before the day is through. You can get a portable battery charger to keep you going (and you probably should for emergencies and travel), but that’s one more device to carry.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The future of open source: speeding technology innovation

    As one of the contributors to Black Duck’s eighth annual Future of Open Source Survey, the industry’s leading indicator of open source software (OSS) industry trends, JFrog was pleased to be able to help show the world the true impact of open source software. This was the first year that we decided to take part in the survey. We felt that it was a natural partnership, since our work revolves around regularly interacting with the OSS community to help create and distribute open source software.

  • Ionic ngCordova Open-source AngularJS Services and Extensions for HTML5 Apps

    Ionic offers a free and open source library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building HTML5 apps. Ionic has recently announced ngCordova, an open-source collection of AngularJS services and extensions that allow the use of Cordova plugins and native features in hybrid apps.

  • Building and Maintaining an Open-Source Community: How to Get Developer Attention

    There are many useful open-source technologies out there. With all of this competition, it’s critical to make it clear why your particular open-source offering should be considered, and for which needs. That’s the reality any builder of an open-source community needs to adopt right from the start: While participation by developers in an active, viable open-source community will undoubtedly improve their projects, as well as your product’s evolution, getting a community up and running can be a challenge.

  • 110 Fun Open Source Games and Apps

    Once again, we’re celebrating the arrival of summer with a list of some of the best open source games available. We’ve updated last year’s list with some new arrivals, as well as getting rid of some of the older games that are no longer under active development. You’ll find arcade, board, casual, puzzle, educational, first-person shooter, music, racing, role-playing, adventure, simulator and strategy games, as a well as a few apps that aren’t really games but are still a lot of fun.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • PBJ100: No. 9 ThinkShout leans on the open source movement for growth

      How has operating in the Portland area worked to your advantage? Portland is a hotbed of technical innovation, and open source in particular. It’s also fast becoming a hub for Drupal, the open source framework we use for many of our projects. Finally, Portland is a magnet for people who care about more than just a paycheck. Our team is made up of folks who care as much, if not more, about the nonprofits we’re helping as the technology we use and user experiences we craft.

    • XOOPS 2.5.7 Final Goes Live

      The XOOPS development team have announced the release of version 2.5.7.

      XOOPS is an acronym of, “eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System”. It’s a free open source content management systems (CMS), written in PHP.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Peter Schaar on “Technik, Recht und Überwachung”

      On July 7th 2014 Peter Schaar (Head of the European Academy for Freedom of Information and Data Protection, former Bundesdatenschutzbeauftrager) will give a talk about technology, law and surveillance in German. The talk will be at the Garching campus of the TUM (U-Bahn stop: U6 Garching Forschungszentrum), in the FMI (Informatics/Mathematics) building, in Hörsaal 3 (lecture hall 3) starting at 16:00. Admission is of course free, registration is not required.

    • GIMP On TV

      I was watching an issue of CNN’s “Forensic Files” early this morning when I was surprised to see GIMP on TV. A murder had been committed and the local anthropologist lacked software to compare a skull with a portrait to verify the identity of the victim. A local computer guru was able to use GIMP to compare photographs of the skull with the portrait. That set the police on a course towards solving the crime. It turned out the truck driver did it. DNA from a tooth compared to some surgical evidence confirmed GIMP’s conclusions.

      What was interesting is that Forensic Files mentioned that GIMP was available to anyone for a $free download. I liked that. The software licence, GPL, described in generic terms the public can understand got out there.

  • Public Services/Government

    • How Open Source Software Transformed a Nation’s Police Force

      In 2012, the Dutch police force – which consists of over 63,000 workers – came to the realization that their disunity was directly impacting their role in Dutch society.

    • ‘Open source crucial for cutting edge industry’ – South Korea ICT ministry

      Public administrations using open source software help make the country more competitive and lay a foundation for a creative economy. Consequently, the South Korean government wants its public administrations to consider free and open source software alternatives, according to its national open source competence centre, presented at a workshop in the capital Seoul, on 3 June.

    • Leipzig is switching to open source office suites

      The German city of Leipzig is switching to using open source suites of office productivity tools: Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It expects that in the first five years the anticipated savings will be swallowed by the exit costs associated with the proprietary software used by the city. Starting in 2017, however, the city expects to lower its IT costs by some 100,000 euro, says Lars Greifzu, responsible for marketing and sales at Lecos, the city-owned IT service provider.

    • M$ Drives Away Another Big Customer

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-Source Agriculture: The Sprouting Of A New Food Movement?

      The Open Source Seed Initiative is trying to preserve some of the world’s seeds from patents and licenses.

    • What’s open source got to do with Earth science? NASA explains

      Earth scientists, including remote sensing experts, climate modelers, practitioners, policy makers, and decision makers, have had a hand in furthering and monitoring the open source space. For example, the climate modeling community executes its daily operations of building, testing, and validating climate and Earth system models, many of which today are open source, released under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, and software packages that involve community contributions from very diverse participants. Similarly, the remote sensing community leverages open source packages, including Python and R, as well as non-open source, but community oriented packages, such as MATLAB, ENVI/IDL, and other software to share code, disseminate it amongst the community of experts, and also to process remote sensing data.

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • 3D Printing goes open source

        There’s been a ton of excitement around 3D printing over the last few years and it’s definitely justified. While the techniques of 3D printing have been around for many decades, recent cost reductions have thrust 3D printing into wide-spread use. In fact, I designed a custom engagement ring for my wife and had it 3d printed in silver; more on that below.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Internet of Things – proprietary vs open source systems

      Internet of Things (IoT) market is estimated to generate $ 7.1 trillion in sales by 2020, but its main issue is often considered to be the lack of interoperability between devices belonging to different systems.

    • Unicode 7.0 Adds A Lot Of New Characters

      The Unicode 7.0 standard was announced yesterday and adds 2,834 characters.

      Unicode 7.0 brings in new currency symbols, historic scripts, and a variety of other symbols — including plenty new emoji characters.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Rendor Turns Your Single-Camera Smartphone Into A Real 3D Scanner

      Built by Replica Labs, the program uses only a single camera to render the object. As you can see from the video below, the front of the object was very nicely rendered, but because they didn’t spin around the back, the object is “connected” to the background. However, thanks to the printed sheet, they should be able to get a 360-degree view of the object and allow the system to assess bulges, creases and other aspects of 3D objects. Plus it looks cool.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Kaua’i Cocktail: Why Hawaiians Are Outraged by GMO Farming on Kaua’i

      The island of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, has become Ground Zero in the intense political battle over genetically modified (GMO) crops in the United States. But the fight isn’t just about the concerns over GMO technology. It’s also about chemical pesticides.

      The four transnational corporations that are experimenting with genetically engineered crops on Kaua’i have transformed part of the island into what could be one of the most toxic chemical environments in all of U.S. agriculture.

    • Polio vaccine campaigns face difficulty amid spying revelations

      Despite efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate polio worldwide, ten countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria, are on red alert as new cases have been detected and fears grow of the virus spreading to neighboring countries.

      Yemen is not on the list, but fear over the polio virus has increased amid a regional breakout and concerns that Syrian refugees fleeing to Yemen could reintroduce the virus.

      Yemen’s Health Ministry on April 3 launched a comprehensive national campaign to vaccinate children against polio in cooperation with the WHO. The move was to act against fears of polio spreading in Yemen.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • General Haftar launches new attacks on Islamist militias in Libya

      The CIA-linked rebel Retired General Khalifa Haftar is continuing his Operation Dignity ostensibly designed to rid Libya of jihadist militias but which also involved an attack on the Libyan parliament.

    • Libya is on the brink of civil war, again

      In the early days of the Arab Spring, according to a Libyan diplomat, Tunisians would mock Libyans by admonishing their neighbours to the east to keep their heads down so that they, in Tunisia, could have an unobstructed view of the real revolutionaries in Egypt, who had risen up against the long autocracy of Hosni Mubarak.

    • Is Israel Building an All-Drone Army?

      According to CNN, the state of Israel is the largest exporter of drones and drone technology in the world. Leading Israeli defense concern Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, counts as its customers the military forces of more than two-dozen nations around the world. These customers buy Israeli drones first and foremost because they’re easier to acquire than American models — where sales can be held up by government restrictions on drone exports. But customers also flock to buy Israeli drones because they work.

    • A Coup? Nonsense!

      A CYNIC might interrupt here: “Why should the army bother with a coup? It governs Israel anyhow!”

    • Three Troubling Lessons from the Latest U.S. Drone Strikes
    • How the U.S. helped turn Iraq into an al-Qaida haven in just 53 steps

      Eleven years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is on the brink of collapse. We have only ourselves to blame

    • Iraq redux: The dogs of war are barking again

      It’s predictably pitiful that the Bush-era architects of our Iraq disaster have resurfaced to insist that the current sectarian bloodbath is all President Obama’s fault.

      They have no shame. In the words of Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst, these dogs of war precipitated “one of the biggest and costliest mistakes in American history” – and yet here they are, indulged anew in the press, shirking accountability and shifting blame and presuming to offer advice. This spectacle would be hilarious if it were not so nauseating.

    • OPINION: Violence in Iraq Result of Wreckage of US Policy Since 9/11
    • Iraq: Fools rush in, fools rush out

      I have written it before and I will write it again: Iraq has made fools of us all.

      It made a fool of George W. Bush, who invaded the country to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, only to have American troops get there and discover Iraq had no WMDs.

      It made a fool of CIA Director George Tenet, who infamously responded to Bush’s skepticism regarding the WMD reports by jumping up and shouting “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President!”

      The war made a fool of most Americans like myself, who believed that the U.S. military needed to invade Iraq to keep their country safe.

    • Boris Johnson: Blair should ‘put a sock in it’ over Iraq

      The London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has said that he thinks Tony Blair “should put a sock in it” rather than comment on the situation in Iraq.

      Mr Johnson said that when looking at the current situation in Iraq it was important to consider the impact of previous foreign intervention in the country.

    • Boris Johnson: Tony Blair’s Iraq comments ‘unhinged’

      Boris Johnson has described Tony Blair’s argument that the violent insurgency in Iraq has nothing to do with the 2003 invasion as “unhinged”.

      Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the Mayor of London says the former prime minister is undermining the case for “serious and effective intervention”.

      He described the invasion as a “tragic mistake” and a “misbegotten folly”.

    • Letters: Fighting ISIS monsters in Iraq is not Australia’s duty

      IF AUSTRALIA wants to assist the United States in Iraq with intelligence reports, that’s fine.

      Just keep Prime Minister Tony Abbott away from the phone.

    • Debating Iraq in 2014: Wrong All Over Again

      The crisis in Iraq has brought war back to the US airwaves. But if you were expecting a more robust discussion about US military action this time around, think again. The rule seems to be that if you were wrong in 2003, you’re still an expert in 2014.

    • MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Calls Out Media For Giving Discredited Iraq War Architects A Platform

      Schultz: “They Should Not Be Treated As Experts, Because They Aren’t”

    • Who lost Iraq? What we can do about it?

      The Iraq war was conceived in sin. It was based on the lies of the Bush administration, the most notorious of which were not about “weapons of mass destruction.” More dangerous were the fabricated projections they presented about how: the war would last only a few weeks and our presence would end in six months; it would only cost one to two billion dollars; American soldiers would be greeted as “liberators” with flowers at their feet; and Iraq’s new democracy would be “a beacon for the new Middle East.”

    • The fall of Mosul and the crimes of imperialism

      No one has been held accountable for these actions, which indisputably constitute war crimes. Those responsible include not only George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others in the previous administration. Both major political parties, the media, the corporations and every American institution are responsible for the lies that have pervaded US policy—both foreign and domestic—for the past decade and a half. All of the criminal policies under Bush—aggressive war, torture—have been continued and deepened by the Obama administration. With its “pivot” to Asia and coup in Ukraine, it is preparing military confrontation with Russia and China and laying the groundwork for a nuclear Third World War.

    • Ron Paul: Haven’t We Already Done Enough Damage In Iraq?
    • Former Rep. Ron Paul warns about getting more involved in Iraq

      Despite the Obama administration’s vow not to put any troops on the ground, Mr. Paul, a libertarian icon, said members of the special forces or the CIA will be sent. He also warned against shipping arms to Iraq and said the Iraq military’s performance to date suggests that a lot of the money invested in it was “wasted or stolen.”

    • Obama Should Resist Military Intervention, in Iraq and Beyond

      If we are to solve our myriad domestic problems and revitalize our economy we need to be more selective about our involvement in foreign crises large and small. The president should embrace that truth in his remaining years in office. For starters, that means staying out of Iraq.

    • The War in Iraq Cost $4 Trillion and Enormous Loss of Life: 8 Warmongers Who Would Take Us Back

      The Iraq War hawks are back. And they have two knee-jerk ways of seeing the convulsions in Iraq where Sunni militants have seized cities from Syria to Baghdad’s doorstep, killing government workers and civilians, and grabbing weapons from a vanishing Iraqi Army.

      First, it is always President Obama’s fault; and second, the U.S. must return to war, despite what has been one of the biggest debacles in American military history. Hawks are only happy when we are at war, fueling the military-industrial complex as U.S. soldiers die and platoons of maimed veterans return home to underfunded medical care.

    • As Obama Considers Drone Strikes in Iraq, Could U.S. Military Action Worsen Sectarian Conflict?
    • Tom Friedman will never ever get tired of telling Iraqis to ‘suck on this’

      Walking TED talk and taxi-driver-chatter-upper Tom Friedman is obviously not a big fan of Iraq. Possibly because it doesn’t seem like a place where Apple would extend their global empire; building factories full of low-wage worker bees churning out iToothbrushes or whatever the hell they are going to iMake next in an effort to suck every last dollar out of every last wallet before Steve Jobs returns to Earth to take them all to iHeaven.

    • Militants battle Iraq forces as US weighs drone strikes

      Militants battled Iraqi security forces for control of a strategic northern town on Monday, prompting half the area’s population to flee, as Washington weighed drone strikes against fighters leading the charge.

    • A Wild Weekend With Kristof, Snowden and Manning

      Then there’s this from Kristof: “The Democratic narrative is that President Bush started the cascade of dominoes. The problem with that logic is that Obama administration officials were boasting just a couple of years ago about how peaceful and successful Iraq had become because of their fine work.” Again: It’s just “the Democratic narrative,” not an objective fact, that Bush “started the cascade of dominoes.”

      Just the latest Kristof embarrassment. And let’s not forget that he strongly urged Obama to bomb Syria last year—which would have aided the ISIS rebels.

    • Obama considers military options in Iraq

      The US already has an aircraft carrier accompanied by two ships with guided-missile capabilities in the Gulf.

    • There’s No Such Thing as ‘Other Military Options’ in Iraq

      The Obama Administration has been supplying Iraq with their foreign military sales program with a total of $15 Billion in supplying the country in chaos with F-16 jets, drones, tanks, arms, and Apache attack helicopters. Baghdad has been urging the US to deliver military weapons to stabilize its country, but the Iraqi military does not seem sufficiently trained to effectively use such complex military hardware.

    • U.S. Doesn’t Know Who to Hit in Iraq

      The U.S. military has the capability to conduct air strikes over Iraq within hours. The problem is they don’t know exactly who they are supposed to be targeting.

    • Tony Blair’s call for anti-Isis drive criticised

      Tony Blair came under fierce attack from former Labour cabinet members, some diplomats and the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Ashdown after he called for limited military intervention to drive the militant group Isis out of Iraq and restore order in Syria.

    • Blair: Bombing Iraq Better – Again
    • Anderson Cooper shilling for Bush

      CNN on Sunday night aired a “documentary” about former President George H.W. Bush on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

      It was a glowing tribute to the nation’s 41st president filled with testimonials from notables, including President Obama, Bill Clinton and 39 other friends and family members. What was missing was a warning that what viewers were about to see was propaganda masquerading as journalism.

      As noted by the always spot-on David Zurawik, the program — titled “41ON41” —was paid for by the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and one of its producers worked as a speechwriter for Bush in the White House.

    • What Can We Do in Iraq? Nothing!

      That is the way of the world. We have seen this before. In March of 1973, American troops withdrew from South Vietnam, leaving our local allies to take over that war. Two years later the North Vietnamese reached Saigon, as the ISIS has reached the suburbs of Baghdad. Do you think we should have gone back and resumed the war in Southeast Asia? That would have been nuts, and it is nuts to go back into Iraq.

    • Obama Announces About 275 Troops Deploying To Iraq

      Nearly 300 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq to help secure U.S. assets as President Barack Obama nears a decision on an array of options for combating fast-moving Islamic insurgents, including airstrikes or a contingent of special forces.

    • US Deploys Extra Troops to Iraq, Mulls Air Strikes
    • U.S. adds troops, mulls air strikes in Iraq

      The U.S. was deploying extra troops to protect its embassy in Baghdad and mulling air strikes against militants who have seized key cities, amid warnings Tuesday that Iraq has polarized irrevocably.

    • Letter: Not another U.S. life or dollar for Iraq

      Now, our drone-happy President is under the illusion that he can find a “political solution” to overcome a 14-century-old animosity between the Sunnis and the Shiites and force them to compromise and reconcile. Good luck.

      And John McCain, with his Napoleon complex proposes to bomb them, as he does in every other troubled corner of the world. Somehow, having spent the majority of his military service as a war prisoner qualifies him to be an expert on and a spokesman for everything military and foreign policy.

    • ‘America can’t be part of any solution to stop the ISIS violence’
    • Anti-war groups demonstrate against drones in Battle Creek.

      A protest that began a week ago at Boeing Headquarters near Chicago, ended Saturday at the Air National Guard Base at Fort Custer.

      The demonstrators want the U.S. to stop using remotely controlled aircraft to carry out military missions around the world.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Contamination of Natural Kaua’i: Rare Plants and Wildlife at Risk

      Given its fragile and unusually rich ecology, the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i seems ill-suited as a site for agricultural experiments that use heavy amounts of toxic chemicals. But four transnational corporations — Syngenta, BASF Plant Science, DuPont Pioneer, and Dow AgroSciences — have been doing just those kinds of experiments here for about two decades, extensively spraying pesticides on their GMO test fields. As a result, the landscape on the southwest corner of the island has become one of the most toxic chemical environments in all of American agriculture.

    • Climate change will ‘cost world far more than estimated’

      Lord Stern, the world’s most authoritative climate economist, has issued a stark warning that the financial damage caused by global warming will be considerably greater than current models predict.

    • Demand the right to know about dangerous oil train threats

      That’s what the U.S. Department of Transportation called shipments of crude oil by rail last month when it issued an emergency order requiring rail companies to notify emergency responders when dangerous shipments of explosive crude oil move through communities.

    • Dying to save the Amazonian rainforest

      An environmental campaigner is killed every week in Brazil.

  • Finance

    • Hospital Uses Executive Bonus Money To Give Its Workers A Raise

      Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month, paying for the increase with money originally devoted to executive bonuses.

      The lowest-level employees at the hospital currently make $8.78 an hour, and the increase will give about 230 workers a raise. Those workers were already making more than Texas’s minimum wage, which is the same as the federal $7.25 an hour rate. The move also means that every worker employed by Dallas county, inside and outside the hospital, will make more than $10.25 an hour.

    • Rousseff and Merkel Meet Ahead of German Debut in World Cup
    • Rousseff, Merkel seek progress toward EU-Mercosur free trade deal
    • Berlin and Brasilia vow to strengthen ties

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s meeting with Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff served to emphasize common interests. German-Brazilian relations increasingly shape world politics.

    • Ralph Nader on Dave Brat: ‘A Clear Populist Challenge by Main Street Against Wall Street’
    • Fomenting a Revolution: Extreme Acts of Greed Against the American People

      Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans — especially young Americans— need to know the facts, and they need to know how they’re getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.

    • We Can No Longer Ignore Bitcoin’s Fatal Flaw

      Bitcoin is no longer decentralised and the cryptocurrency needs fixing if it’s to survive. That’s the warning some cryptocurrency researchers are giving since a single entity, a Bitcoin mining pool called GHash, managed to acquire 51 percent of total network mining power for 12 hours straight at the end of last week.

    • Crypto-”armageddon:” Researchers claim mining concentration threatens to destroy bitcoin

      Here we go again. For the umteenth time in recent memory, the sanctity of the bitcoin network is facing an existential threat from a large and overly secretive organization. It’s not an exchange or wallet service this time around that has the attention of crypto-currency watchers, but rather a large mining pool, specifically GHash.io, the self-described world’s “#1 Crypto & Bitcoin Mining Pool.”

    • Bitcoin security guarantee shattered by anonymous miner with 51% network power
    • ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Calls Rich to Tax-Free Tropical Paradise

      He’s known as Bitcoin Jesus in the world of cyber-currencies. Though he can’t promise you heaven, he is offering a haven: a condo in the Caribbean that comes with a new passport and almost zero taxes.

      Meet Roger Ver, ex-U.S. citizen, ex-convict, millionaire investor, self-described libertarian and founder of Passports for Bitcoin.com.

      The ever-expanding universe of what you can buy with bitcoins includes a hotel stay in Rome, a kimono in Tokyo, and cable TV in the U.S. Ver, a pioneer investor in bitcoin startups, now says he can add citizenship to the list.

    • Supreme Court Ruling Against Argentina: Global Consequences

      Analysis: Expect hedge fund copycats to begin to buy defaulted sovereign debt and break apart previous settlement packages while a well connected global enforcer group filled with Blackwater thugs collects in mafia fashion

      [...]

      Another fallout from the ruling could be a rise in additional hedge fund managers imitating Elliott Management and other “vulture funds,” buying debt claims for pennies on the dollar and then demanding payment in full and breaking previous negotiated settlements. What is needed for this hedge fund strategy to succeed is a global enforcer, a more sophisticated version of dog the bounty hunter, to physically repossess debtor assets as Elliott did when it seized an Argentine navel vessel sitting off the shore of Ghana. Or think about those separate holdout investors who attempted to reposes the President of Argentina’s personal jet as it sat refueling in a foriegn airport – with el Presidente inside. The enforcer group must be led by a high level operative familiar with maneuvering government assets to benefit large banks. Eric Holder might be a good person, with potential sponsorship from the large banks and their venture capital arm. This group could include ex CIA working with Blackwater type thugs to collect debt the old school way with a baseball bat. Whatever the future, it might not be kind to governments that grow massive debts – including, surprise, the USA.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Wikipedia creates new rules, forcing editors to disclose if they’re paid

      The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and related projects, explained yesterday that it will establish new rules covering paid editing.

      The heart of the change is that anyone who is paid to edit the site must “add your affiliation to your edit summary, user page, or talk page, to fairly disclose your perspective,” according to Wikimedia’s explanation of the change. The organization has also published an FAQ on paid editing.

    • Hero vs. Villain

      So why doesn’t Congress agree with the people they represent? Two reasons. The lobbyists have bribed them into protecting the future of cheap labor for their rich clients. The second reason is the fear of the Republican Party and Tea Party that Hispanics would vote for the Democratic Party in elections.

      This is the future of the United States of America; protecting the interests of special-interest groups and ignoring the majority of our citizens. The Constitution has died an unacceptable death, and no amount of CPR (Congressional Posturing and Rationalization) can bring it back to life.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Missiles-on-rooftops Brit spy Farr: Yes, UK.gov slurps your Facebook, Twitter… What of it?

      One of the UK’s top spies has said that the country reckons spying on British folks’ Facebook posts and tweets is legal because they’re classed as “external communications” – though he wouldn’t confirm outright that it did so.

    • Mass surveillance of social media is permitted by law, says top UK official

      Mass surveillance of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and even Google searches, is permissible because they are “external communications”, according to the government’s most senior security official.

    • How to Anonymize Everything You Do Online

      One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.

    • Unmasking Big Brother

      One year ago, Glenn Greenwald began reporting on the leaked documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Together, Snowden and Greenwald have exposed vast government programs of domestic and international surveillance that threaten civil liberties here and around the world. As a result of these shocking revelations, Snowden has been stranded in Russia, facing espionage charges, and Greenwald has become the target of media hit jobs questioning whether he had the right to report on these spy programs and the erosion of our civil liberties.

    • Forget national security: Drones are the latest scandal at the World Cup

      Along with Edward Snowden, the NSA, and wars, drones are the hottest topic in national security these days.

    • Hillary Clinton Refuses ‘No Spy Agreement’ with Germany

      State Hillary Clinton angered the entire nation of Germany by refusing to support a “no spy agreement” with one of the USA’s most supportive allies.

      The Voice of Russia reports that, “Clinton, meanwhile, said she understood Germany’s anger at revelations that the US Natural Security Agency (NSA) had listened into Merkel’s mobile phone as part of its large scale surveillance of electronic communications in Germany, America’s close ally.”

    • ‘Access My Info’ Tool Lets Telecom Subscribers Know If They’ve Been Spied On
    • This App Helps Reveal What Personal Data Is Stored by Canadian ISPs

      Moreover, Access My Info is based on an open platform. As a result, it can be reconfigured to send the same kinds of legal requests for information to all kinds of companies: credit card companies, banks, stores, or even car companies.

    • Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Rand Paul: How to end the NSA dragnet

      One year ago this month, Americans learned that their government was engaged in secret dragnet surveillance, which contradicted years of assurances to the contrary from senior government officials and intelligence leaders.

    • British Spy Agencies Are Said to Assert Power to Intercept Web Traffic

      In a broad legal rationale for collecting information from Internet use by its citizens, the British government has reportedly asserted the right to intercept communications that go through services like Facebook, Google and Twitter that are based in the United States or other foreign nations, even if they are between people in Britain.

      The British position is described in a draft summary of a report to be released Tuesday by Privacy International and other advocacy groups.

    • Calif. Court To Review Secret NSA Phone Surveillance Docs

      A California federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to produce top secret documents requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation related to the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Americans’ call data so that the court can review if they are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

    • NSA Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny It Uses The Phrases It Used On A Leaked Slide

      Leopold asked the NSA about its variations on the phrase “collect it all” (a.k.a. former NSA head Keith Alexander’s personal motto), including “sniff it all,” “process it all,” “exploit it all,” “partner it all” and “know it all.” As is its particular idiom, the NSA Glomared all over the response letter.

    • Appeals court reverses decision in Chicago terrorism case

      An appeals court has overruled a groundbreaking decision by a Chicago judge to let lawyers for an alleged terrorist see classified surveillance evidence.

    • Government Demands Whistleblower Organization’s Encrypted Files

      For those people who still do not believe we have crossed a terrible line into a Post-Constitutional state, here’s another chance to repent before we all go to hell.

      The Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) in-house watchdog has demanded that the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) turn over all information it has collected related to abuses and mismanagement at VA medical facilities, according to a subpoena delivered to POGO May 30.

    • A year after Snowden, DEF CON and government agencies are friends again
    • The History of Domestic Surveillance in WWI America

      When the Espionage Act passed in 1917, the Federal government left no proverbial stone unturned, using all communication channels available at their disposal to secretly monitor as many citizens of the United States proper as they could, given the technology of the time.

    • The Pentagon is trying to make the internet more anonymous
    • No cloud privacy or security: If NSA wants your cloud data ‘be big boys about it’

      Most of us don’t like the idea of intelligence agencies or law enforcement accessing our data stored in the cloud; that doesn’t mean your data is, by default, being accessed, but it’s likely a matter of principle. As NSA spying scandal revelations rolled out over the last year, many businesses and individuals decided they don’t want their data stored in the US. Countries want their cloud data to be stored locally in hopes of keeping it safe from US snooping. Whether you regard that as a privacy issue or a security issue, one security expert basically says, “Get over it.”

    • Vint Cerf: “It’s not Google that will be tracking you. It will be the cameras.”

      Google’s response to “erosion of privacy” has been to “encrypt everything…to protect people’s interests.” A top Google executive recently spoke to DW and will join the Global Media Forum on June 30 via video link.

    • Surveillance at the Local Level: the Militarization of America’s Police State

      “We believe in transparency here, you have a right to know what the police are up to in your country.” – Camden Police Chief Scott Tomson

      On VICE News, Vikram Gandhi went to Camden, New Jersey to preview the latest technologies and strategies that are being employed to help local law enforcement in the long fought, and long failing, War on Drugs here in America.

    • Facebook App Adds Yet Another Powerful Tracking Feature

      This policy decision is likely the result of a penalty imposed in 2011 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that requires the social media mammoth to submit to 20 years of privacy audits conducted by the agency. Another provision of the penalty mandates that any new features offered by Facebook must be “opt in.”

    • Mobile app monitoring startup Crittercism expands to London

      While the company’s technology has already been available to international customers, Levy tells me he’s hearing growing concerns from companies who’d like their cloud infrastructure to be hosted more locally. You can thank Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks for that.

    • Edward Snowden using telepresence robot to attend events internationally

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is making his ‘telepresence’ felt at events across the world with a telepresence robot that transmits a live feed from his computer to a roaming robot.

      Just over a year since Snowden first revealed the extent to which the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on not just US citizens but people across the world, the man is now looking to end his exile in Russia through the means of telepresence.

    • Greenwald, Snowden take on Big Brother state

      When journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago in June last year, it was just three weeks after he had begun reporting on the leaks provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the massive scope of government surveillance.

    • Report: CIA Rendition Jet was waiting in Europe to Snatch Snowden
    • N977GA was waiting to render Snowden back to the U.S.
    • U.S. officials tried really, really hard to catch Edward Snowden but still couldn’t do it
    • Edward Snowden Proves A Difficult Catch For US Authorities
    • Catch me a spy: Secret Snowden rendition plot revealed?
    • NSA’S SECRET SPY CENTER IN BERLIN

      Germany’s foreign intelligence agency officially lifted the lid on some of its worst-kept secrets Friday, acknowledging that half a dozen facilities around the country are in fact spy stations as anyone with Internet access could already figure out.

      The Federal Intelligence Service, known by its German acronym BND, maintained the facade for decades that it had nothing to do with sites bearing cryptic names such as “Ionosphere Institute.” But amateur sleuths long suspected their true identities and posted them on websites such as Wikipedia.

      The subterfuge wasn’t helped by the fact that some sites sport unmistakable signs of spy activity, like the giant golf ball-shaped radomes in Bad Aibling, near Munich until now, the “Telecommunications Traffic Office of the German Armed Forces.”

    • NSA spying ruled unconstitutional by US court
    • The Teenager Who Tripped Up Pelosi Has Words for Obama…And Glenn Beck

      Demeter considers himself a foe of both Democrats and Republicans.

    • 10 fascinating facts about Watergate 42 years later

      9. The Smoking Gun tape as the coup de grace. The release of the Smoking Gun tape, among 64 recordings that Nixon was forced to surrender by the Supreme Court, ended the Watergate drama. The tape showed Nixon ordering a cover-up of the break-in right after it happened in June 1972.

    • Falsifying Evidence on a Smart Phone

      Here’s a way to plant false evidence — call records, locations, etc — on your smart phone. I have no idea how good this will be. Presumably it will be an arms race between programs like this and programs that harvest data from your phone.

    • Congressman asks NSA to provide metadata for “lost” IRS e-mails

      Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over “all its metadata” on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service.

      “Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment,” Stockman wrote on Friday.

    • Tor Is For Everyone: Why You Should Use Tor

      EFF recently kicked off our second Tor Challenge, an initiative to strengthen the Tor network for online anonymity and improve one of the best free privacy tools in existence. The campaign—which we’ve launched with partners at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Tor Project, and the Free Software Foundation—is already off to a great start. In just the first few days, we’ve seen over 600 new or expanded Tor nodes—more than during the entire first Tor Challenge.

    • On Surveillance: A Conversation

      To mark the one-year anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the PEN Center has invited a number of journals to participate in a collaborative project on the theme of living in a surveillance society. For the American Reader’s contribution, AR editors Alyssa Loh, Uzoamaka Maduka, Jac F. Mullen, and Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon conducted a wide-ranging discussion on surveillance and its impact on narrative, free expression, and the creative arts. The edited transcript of this conversation, found below, also appears on the PEN Center website, along with the full suite of articles produced by the multi-journal collaboration.

    • Stop Including Sender IPs in Email Headers

      To many people, the design of email is fundamentally broken when it comes to security and privacy. That’s the impetus behind projects like the Dark Mail Technical Alliance, LEAP Encryption Access Project, and efforts to make PGP more accessible such as Mailpile, OpenPGP.js and Google’s recently announced Chrome extension, End-To-End. One issue is the contents of email headers. With all the recent talk about long-term technical solutions to enforce privacy by default, here is one thing that all mail server administrators and email providers should do to improve the security risks associated with communicating via email.

    • Not Just the NSA, Even the Local Cops Are Tracking You

      Across the whole of America, you are continuously being monitored by local police forces using a secretive technology without any warrant, while you are completely oblivious to this and thinking that it’s just the NSA, according to media reports.

    • Smart Meters: Are They Spying On You?

      Former CIA Director David Petraeus once stated that WiFi connected devices, such as appliances commonly found inside many homes, will “transform the art of spying.” Petraeus also said that spies will be capable of monitoring Americans without going inside the home or perhaps even acquiring a warrant. He went on to state that remote control radio frequency identification devices, “energy harvesters,” sensor networks, and small embedded severs all connected to an internet network will be all that is necessary for clandestine intelligence gathering.

  • Civil Rights

    • Journalist wrongly facing jail time

      A few of us remember when a young man named James Risen joined The Journal Gazette fresh out of Northwestern’s journalism school and was a reporter here in 1978-79. He did some good reporting. In a yellowed clip file, there are photos of him using a drill and a welder for an article he did about working on the International Harvester Scout assembly line. And he got married at Trinity Lutheran Church while he was here, to his college sweetheart, Penny Blank, who was an editor at The News-Sentinel. They had their reception across the street at the Women’s Club.

    • The Secret Statex

      Ask five of your friends what “rendition” means and chances are you will not get a clear answer.

    • The Latest News On Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videotapes, And Prisoners’ Ongoing Legal Challenges – OpEd

      A month ago, a federal court judge, Gladys Kessler, delivered a historic ruling on Guantánamo, ordering the government to stop force-feeding a hunger striking prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, and to release to his lawyers videos of his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions,” whose existence had only recently been discovered by one of his lawyers. She also ordered the government to release his medical records, and to “file a list of all current Standard Operating Procedures/Protocols directly addressing enteral feeding and/or the use of a restraint chair at Guantánamo Bay.”

    • In America, It’s Always Torture Approval Month

      I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year.

    • Report on CIA to be released within weeks

      Senator Diane Feinstein, the head of the US Senate Intelligence Committee says she believes a secret report into the CIA’s extreme actions against terror suspects post 9 11 will be made public within weeks.

    • The limits of protest

      To reconnect to the central question here of why protest is stumped in Pakistan, despite its critical economic and developmental challenges, it may be appropriate to end with the observation that it is this role of religion that used to be a subject of interest for an older generation that has now been sidelined and considered irrelevant by many post 9/11 scholar-activists.

    • Chris Hedges: American Socrates

      Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.

    • Aboriginal Tent Embassy is Reclaiming the Black Heart of Sydney

      As you approach the Aboriginal tent embassy on the Block in Redfern, inner city Sydney, you see the sacred fire burning within a large circle marked on the ground, serving to cleanse the area. Some ten metres up from the fire, at the edge of the Block, the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) has erected a sign that reads: “Warning. Private Property.”

    • Secret Legal Opinions Face Judge’s Scrutiny

      A federal judge demanded access to key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to domestic surveillance so she can decide whether they are fit for public release.

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the case at hand under the Freedom of Information Act in 2011, seeking access to opinions in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found some of the National Security Agency’s surveillance unconstitutional.

    • Lord Lucan fled to Greece with ex-MI5 agent’s help

      LORD Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent financed by his wealthy friends, the author of a new book claims.

    • Dear kids: Daddy’s a spy

      By day, we were an embassy family, raising our kids in foreign cultures and foreign languages. Our children’s lives were fairly normal: schools, parties, trips. But my night job was as a CIA operative — a second life my kids couldn’t know about until they were in their mid-teens. We needed to cut them in on the secret when they were old enough to handle the responsibility of keeping it to themselves but still young enough that they hadn’t stumbled across information that might disclose my true mission and then, unthinkingly, share it with their friends. Operatives try to find just the right age, when a kid’s judgment can be trusted not to compromise any operational cover, and by extension put their parents or their sources at risk.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • New ‘parent control’ app remotely turns-off your kid’s smartphone

      With the traditional family dinner and other pastimes on the verge of extinction thanks to an array of distracting hand-held devices, mobile applications are now available for parents to remotely bloc access to smartphones and tablets.

      Are you tired of your child behaving like Pavlov’s salivating dog, mindlessly jumping for some smartphone or tablet every time it rings, sings or vibrates, crashing the solemn family dinner, or disrupting homework time?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XXVIII

      The big news this week is an important leak detailing what the European Commission will offer the US in the fields of services and investment. It’s super fresh: the document is currently being circulated to the governments of the EU’s Member States, and comments remain open until 30 June, so we are gaining important insights into real-time discussions that have hitherto been completely hidden from us.

      That makes this leak doubly important: not just for its content, but also for the fact that it took place at all. It shows that despite the European Commission’s attempt to keep key negotiating documents out of the public debate, the Brave New World of leaking whistleblowers means that we will get to see some of them anyway. The only difference is that the Commission looks arrogant and high-handed by refusing to release them officially.

      The leak takes the form of three PDF files – unfortunately they are scans, not searchable documents. They were leaked to the European Federation of Public Service Unions, which apparently represents some 265 unions and 8 million public service workers.

    • Copyrights

      • YouTube to block indie labels as subscription service launches

        YouTube will remove music videos by artists such as Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead, because the independent labels to which they belong have refused to agree terms with the site.

        Google, which owns YouTube, has been renegotiating contracts as it prepares to launch a music subscription service.

      • City Of London Police Claim That ‘The Tor’ Is 90% Of The Internet, And Is A Risk To Society

        We’ve written a bunch about the City of London Police* and their extrajudicial campaign against “piracy” by trying to scare web hosting and domain registrar firms into taking down websites based on nothing more than the City of London Police’s say so. However, Adrian Leppard, the guy in charge of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (funded both by taxpayers and legacy entertainment companies) spoke at an IP Enforcement Summit in London and his comments, relayed by Torrentfreak, should raise questions about whether or not this is the right person to have anything to do with stopping “crime” on the internet…

06.16.14

Links 16/6/2014: First RC of Next Linux, Tizen Spreading

Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • ‘Syngenta methods of silencing GMO opposition are unbelievable’

      A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge.

      German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Lawmakers fume over lost emails in IRS probe
    • Witness Wednesday Protests Launched In Washington To Highlight Tragedy of Longterm Unemployed

      In the sweltering mid-day Washington, DC heat yesterday, a small group of members of Congress and community leaders gathered outside of the capitol building.

      Solemnly, as if at a funeral, they read a handful of stories written by a few of the more than 3 million Americans who are longterm unemployed (a category defined as being unemployed for six months or more and still looking for work). Since December 2013, when Congress let emergency unemployment compensation, or EUC, expire—a program that offers minimal financial support to the longterm unemployed—they have been without the help they need to get back on their feet.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Why Does the Right Embrace Ignorance as a Virtue?

      Spouting off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.

  • Civil Rights

    • Activists Pour Concrete Over Spikes Meant to Deter Street Sleeping
    • Amazon Worker Deaths Examined by U.S. Labor Department

      One man was crushed to death after getting caught between a conveyor system in December 2013 while sorting packages, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration said yesterday. OSHA cited five companies for violations at the Amazon facility in Avenel, New Jersey, including the contractor responsible for the sorting operation, and four staffing agencies that hired temporary employees to work at the warehouse. Amazon wasn’t cited by the government for the death.

    • ​Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989: What really happened?

      According to the mainstream Western version of events, thousands of Chinese university students began their sit-in protest demanding democracy and transparency from the Communist government in April and into May 1989 in the huge Tiananmen Square, directly across from the historic Forbidden City edifice in central Beijing. They defiantly faced off against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army. On May 20, 1989, the CCP imposed martial law and ordered truckloads of soldiers to Beijing to take back the square from protesters. The Western account has it that then, on June 3 into June 4, PLA soldiers opened fire and killed “up to 1000 student protesters.”

    • Citing “Intense Public Interest and Concern” Over Mass Surveillance, Judge Orders DOJ to Turn Over Secret Legal Opinions for Court to Review

      A federal judge today ordered the Department of Justice to hand over key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the “FISA court”) so the judge can directly review whether information about mass surveillance was improperly withheld from the public.

    • Brazil: Arrests and crackdowns but anti-World Cup activists get their message across

      To be in Brazil for the World Cup should be every football fan’s dream, but as exhilarating as it is, it’s impossible for any sane supporter not to feel the competition has been tainted.

      [...]

      According to Samy, police are using a new law aimed at organised crime to hold and question individuals. “These activists are being accused of being part of a criminal organisation. The law passed last year created special procedures for crimes involving three or more people, and was aimed at organised crime, but it is now being used to criminalise, and eventually punish, protesters.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • WordPress Demands $10,000 For DMCA Takedown Censorship

        WordPress has had it with copyright holders who abuse the DMCA takedown process to censor perfectly legal content. Through a lawsuit they demand $10,000 in compensation to cover the damage they, and one of their users suffered through a false DMCA takedown notice.

      • ‘We Will Never Support Illegal BitTorrent Downloads’: Vuze

        If you’ve ever downloaded something via BitTorrent, odds are you’ve used (or seen) an app called Vuze. It’s one of the internet’s most prolific BitTorrent clients, and it’s used for downloading countless terabytes of copyright-protected material every day. The developers of Vuze have hit back at the online piracy epidemic, condemning copyright theft and promoting legal torrents.

06.15.14

Links 15/6/2014: News Catchup, Build-up for Another Iraq Invasion

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • p2p Video Chat
  • Open source electronics project: Oscilloscope

    A couple of years ago, I needed an oscilloscope for a fun electronics project I was working on: a 500W Tesla coil. I’d already spent quite a bit of money importing a kit of parts for the project from the United States, so the budget for the scope was pretty tight.

  • What Got You Involved in Open Source?

    If there is a “right way” to come in to open source, then surely this is it. So many people answered to say that their first brush with open source projects was that they spotted a problem somewhere in a tool they were using, and offered a fix. Open source is the combined effort of countless humans doing exactly this, and I was pleased and encouraged to find this as the biggest chunk of responders.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox risks user backlash by adding search box to new tab page

        Mozilla has pulled a “Chrome” by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.

      • Firefox OS Apps run on Android
      • You can run Firefox OS Apps on Android

        FireFox OS is the smartphone operating system from Mozilla. It is based on web technologies and FireFox OS apps are written in HTML5. Using WebGL FireFox apps can access the hardware elements of the smartphone and provide experience like a true native app. FireFox For Android 29 is bringing the Open Web Apps ecosystem to Android.

      • Mozilla begins repackaging Firefox OS apps for Android

        Mozilla has today extended its Open Web App repackaging to Android.

        Users of Firefox for Android are now able to install apps from the Firefox Marketplace, and have them install and behave like a regular Android app.

        “As a developer, you can now build your Open Web App for Firefox OS devices and have that app reach millions of existing Firefox for Android users without having to change a single line of code,” said the announcement blog post.

      • Mozilla and Spreadtrum get closer to $25 Firefox OS smartphone

        The Mozilla Foundation and chip maker Spreadtrum have partnered with two Indian vendors to launch ultra-low-cost smartphones in the next few months. Spreadtrum said the phones could cost just $25.

      • Firefox 30 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Firefox 30 Officially Released

        Mozilla has officially released Firefox 30 for all supported operating systems. Firefox 30 is minor release as compared to 29 that came in with many new changes and complete user interface design. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the addition of new languages. Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 30.

      • Firefox Runs On 64-bit ARM (AArch64)

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Is the government doing enough for computing?

      Preparations are under way for the biggest change in the UK’s approach to computing education – but Raspberry Pi’s education expert Clive Beale reveals that the government is not putting enough money where its mouth is

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 Now Available

      The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

      This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

      The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • International team of scientists open sources search for malaria cure

      In late November 2012, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) team gained a new member who lived and worked almost 1700 kilometers away from the synthetic chemistry hub at the University of Sydney. Of course, collaboration across continents is not unusual for scientists, but until recently, recruitment in less than 140 characters certainly was.

    • 4 ways to make open science easier

      When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.

    • Digital archaeology and open source

      As its base layer, DINAA adapts governmental heritage management datasets for broader open and public uses. DINAA is an exercise in open government data and community data sharing based on open source standards and ethics. DINAA (from construction, through rollout, and into future planning) is an example of how digital is simply the way we do archaeology now, and what that means for us as professionals and social scientists.

    • Science

      • What makes this journal the most open?

        F1000Research, a scientific journal with a strong focus on open access and life sciences, operates quite differently than even the average open access journal. The team there uses new approaches to publishing scientific research; a few of their most noteable characteristics are:

      • Respected journal makes transition to open science
      • Scientists manage research with open source Zotero

        References and citations are what make the scientific and academic worlds go round. Everyone has their own system for keeping track of their research, from dumping everything onto a desk, to dumping everything into a folder (I like to call this the Pensky Method), to dumping everything into folders on a computer.

      • Using OpenStack for scientific research

        As scientists and researchers develop new and better methods for collecting data, from new sensor technology to advancements in data mining techniques, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed grows accordingly. For big data, you need big clusters, and OpenStack has proven to be an important tool for many scientific institutions seeking to manage and orchestrate their machines and workloads.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2014
    • Scientific Graphing in Python

      In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results. The human mind is extremely good at spotting patterns and seeing trends in visual information. To this end, the standard Python module for this type of work is matplotlib. With matplotlib, you can create complex graphics of your data to help you discover relations.

    • CMake 3.0 Released

Leftovers

  • IRS tells Congress it has lost trove of emails by central figure in tea party investigation

    This May 22, 2013 file photo shows Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

  • Masters of Love

    Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

  • Cameron: ‘Stop being bashful about Britishness’

    People in the UK should stop being “bashful” about being British, the prime minister has urged.

    Writing in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron said the country should be “far more muscular” in promoting its values and institutions.

    He repeated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s call to promote “British values” in the classroom following the Trojan Horse claims in Birmingham schools.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Exclusive: UK to step up collaboration with US over nuclear warheads

      Documents released under FoI reveal ‘enhanced collaboration’ plans, raising questions over independence of UK deterrent

    • Scottish independence: nuclear free promise for constitution

      The removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil should be part of a post-independence constitution, according to Scotland’s deputy first minister.

    • Tony Blair: west must intervene in Iraq

      Tony Blair has urged western governments to recognise that they need to take an active role in the Middle East, saying the west should consider military options short of sending ground troops.

      The former prime minister said there was a huge range of options available, including air strikes and drones as used in Libya.

      Blair was speaking on UK morning TV shows after writing a lengthy essay setting out how to respond to the Iraq crisis, including his belief that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the cause of the country’s implosion.

    • Tony Blair: ‘We didn’t cause Iraq crisis’
    • Iran sends troops into Iraq to aid fight against Isis militants

      Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad

    • Convicted Soldier Warns Of ‘Lies’ About Iraq
    • Chelsea Manning says U.S. public lied to about Iraq from the start
    • Manning says U.S. public lied to about Iraq from the start
    • Manning says US lied about Iraq
    • Analysts: Misguided US invasion spawned crisis in Iraq
    • NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion

      All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a “failure” of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have “sprung” from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.

    • US sends aircraft carrier to Persian Gulf as Obama considers air strikes in Iraq
    • The new left-right alliance in the US

      Political convergence between Republicans and Democrats has successfully passed popular legislation.

    • Mikdad: West’s Policies Uncovered During Crisis in Syria

      He affirmed that after the 9/11 attacks, the US has ordered its tools in the Persian Gulf to close windows of terrorism, but after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, it sent billions of Dollars through the Persian Gulf Arab states to the terrorist groups to kill the Syrians.

    • ‘Pattern of Life,’ a tale of modern warfare

      Rahmat, meanwhile, hates and fears the drones, which deal death and destruction from above in a land where there’s already too much of both. Directly and indirectly, they cut him off from a better future, and even fuel support for the Taliban.

      “For me the research was about figuring out what that world is like,” said Nacer. “There’s a great website, Living Under Drones, that’s exactly what it is, what life under drones is like. It’s terror, all the time, because drones are up there 24/7.”

    • U.S. drone attacks shrouded in secrecy, possible illegalities
    • Choice between parties is already quite clear

      One party chooses to concentrate on the destruction of a State Department/CIA outpost in Africa…

    • The Milk Carton GuyThe Milk Carton Guy

      Bergdahl Critics Didn’t Howl When Bush Freed Prisoners

    • US does more harm than good with military intervention on foreign soil
    • What made CIA resume drone attacks?

      These developments include the June 5 Islamabad High Court order to lodge a murder case against ex-CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, the June 6 Karachi Airport attack by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of the Govt-TTP talks, the rising terrorist activities of the Haqqani network across the border in Afghanistan and the May 31 release of a US soldier who was reportedly being kept in the Waziristan tribal belt by the Haqqanis.

    • U.S. drone attacks shrouded in secrecy, possible illegalities

      What happens if China or North Korea start to undertake the same actions as the United States is taking? Japan will also face a similar problem as its Self-Defense Forces plan to introduce three UAVs in five years starting this fiscal year.

    • The Fog Machine of War

      The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom

    • Protesters throw stones, firecrackers, Molotov cocktail at Russian embassy in Kiev

      Footage from the scene then showed protesters upturning several diplomatic cars parked in front of the embassy. The vehicles also had their number plates ripped off and were covered by graffiti. Someone drew several swastikas in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on one of the cars.

    • Two Occupations Ending in Hopeless Disasters

      The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.

    • The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth

      An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.

    • US should stay out of Iraq, that war was a lie and repeating it would be a crime

      Going to Iraq for the first time was like lighting a lighter and putting it under your hand. You get burnt badly, but the lighter company got to make money. You should have learned the lesson.

      Now Republicans want us to do it again. They want us to put our hands on the lighter again, because they probably get paid for buying the lighters or that’s how they control the mindset of misinformed Americans.

      Republican leaders are not idiots (they are smart and know a majority of Americans have below average IQ (thanks to glorification of not going to school, dropping out or making it to expensive to get any education) and they won’t be able to fully understand these issues so they hit where they know it will work. And they are doing it again with Iraq, making us all forget it it was a fraud and Bush should be serving life time sentence for murder of innocent men & women or US armed forces as well as innocent Irqis.

    • THE IRAQ MESS: PLACE BLAME WHERE IT IS DESERVED
    • Dear Tony Blair, thanks for everything, hope you enjoy the oil, Love – Iraq

      According to your website you’ve got about six jobs, Google says you own seven or eight houses and you privately jet about the world a lot visiting media moguls, their wives, their ranches and their yachts.

    • Inspector General Reveals Staggering Waste in Afghan War

      A new round of comments from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko has revealed Pentagon waste was even more staggering than previously imagined, with billions likely spent on war materiel that was not only never used, but never even sent to Afghanistan.

    • Deadly Fiasco

      The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.

    • Facebook, YouTube, Twitter Blocked in Iraq Amid Crisis

      As Iraq faces a growing insurgency in the north that is threatening to pull the country apart, the country’s Ministry of Communications has blocked access to a number of social media sites on Friday.

    • Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube blocked in Iraq
    • Drone strikes kill three suspected militants in Yemen

      Wealthy Gulf neighbours and the West fear for the stability of Yemen, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.

    • Drone kill communications net illustrated

      Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in anti-terrorist attacks gone wrong.

      The illustrations add credibility to a legal challenge begun last month over a 2012 contract BT won to build the UK branch of the system – a fibre optic network line between RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and Camp Lemonnier, a US military base in Djibouti, North Africa.

      British officials had been slow to finger the BT contract under human rights rules because they said there was no evidence to suggest the UK connection was associated with US drone strikes, let alone any that had gone wrong.

    • Issues of drone warfare get a female pilot’s human face

      Eventually, being in charge of this new kind of death-from-above exacts an emotional and even hallucinatory toll, building up to a crescendo with shattering consequences.

    • Debate: Is Human Rights Watch Too Close to US Government to Criticize Its Foreign Policy?

      Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s largest and most influential human rights organizations, is facing an unusual amount of public criticism. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, and a group of over 100 scholars have written an open letter criticizing what they describe as a revolving door with the U.S. government that impacts HRW’s work in certain countries, including Venezuela. The letter urges HRW to bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as staff, advisers or board members. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth has defended his organization’s independence, responding: “We are careful to ensure that prior affiliations do not affect the impartiality of Human Rights Watch’s work. … We routinely expose, document and denounce human rights violations by the US government, including torture, indefinite detention, illegal renditions, unchecked mass surveillance, abusive use of drones, harsh sentencing and racial disparity in criminal justice, and an unfair and ineffective immigration system.” We host a debate between HRW counsel Reed Brody and Keane Bhatt, a writer and activist who organized the open letter.

    • Bush makes birthday parachute jump

      Former US President George H W Bush celebrated his 90th birthday today by making a tandem parachute jump near his summer home in Maine, fulfilling a promise made five years ago despite having lost the use of his legs.

    • When Johnny Comes Marching Home

      Their reality is seen in bipartisan politicians creating a deficit of trillions of dollars to fund the unlawful wars of choice against Afghanistan and Iraq, and then failing to anticipate and provide adequate care for the large number of wounded veterans returning home. The long delays and cover-ups in treating veterans at the Phoenix VA medical center and elsewhere indicate that no soldiers are left behind—until they come home. Never mind that there would be no need for such extensive medical care for “wounded warriors” if former President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney– and their neocon advisors—had not launched these unnecessary, illegal pre-emptive wars.

    • Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick want evidence their son Chris Harvard had become a jihadist in Yemen

      Queensland parents Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick are demanding federal authorities provide hard evidence to show the Islam convert and English language teacher had been “radicalised’’ and become a foot soldier in the Holy War.

    • Pakistan denies ‘express approval’ for drone hits

      Apparently in a belated but calculated reaction, Pakistan strongly condemned Thursday the two incidents of drone strikes near Miranshah in North Waziristan which reportedly killed at least 16 foreign militants amid suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.

      Reports earlier quoted two unnamed government officials as saying Islamabad had given the Americans ‘express approval’ for the strikes. Underlining Pakistan’s alarm over the brazen Taliban attack on the airport, just weeks after peace talks with the militants stalled, the top officials told Reuters a ‘joint Pakistan-US operation’ had been ordered to hit the insurgents.

      Another official said Pakistan had asked the United States for help after the attack on the country’s busiest airport on Sunday, and would be intensifying air strikes on militant hideouts in coming days.

    • Drone strikes revival

      The intriguing aspect of the revival of the drone strikes is whether they have been restarted with the ‘express approval’ of Pakistan.

    • What made CIA resume drone attacks?

      At a time when the American CIA’s targeted killing programme in the tribal areas of Pakistan was winding down, some recent developments seem to have made the US resume its deadly drone strikes after an unprecedented break of six months.

    • Resumption of drone strikes raises questions

      After an unanticipated long break, the American CIA resumed its controversial drone programme in Pakistan’s restive North Waziristan tribal region raising concerns among its critics whether Islamabad has given a tacit go-ahead for fresh strikes.

    • Anonymous Pakistani Government Officials Suggest Drone Strikes to Intensify in Coming Days
    • Back to Iraq? No Troops, But Obama Ponders ‘Other Options’
    • Lack of intelligence: What CIA chief said is ‘never going to happen’ is happening in Iraq and Syria

      When CIA Director John Brennan — then the White House counterterrorism adviser — laid out the Obama administration’s new approach to fighting Islamist terrorism on June 29, 2011, he mocked conservatives who suggested that Islamist extremists were plotting to re-establish a caliphate across the Middle East.

    • Wilson explores CIA and Ukraine

      “Coming into my freshman year, I was very interested in the history of intelligence and espionage, which was something I didn’t know much about. I ended up working with two great professors – one of whom actually spent 30 years as an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War – and continued researching the CIA even after my career focus shifted to business and finance.”

    • Why the CIA presence on Twitter is a really bad idea

      The CIA doesn’t need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds of silence and a black screen. People would be left scratching their heads, unsure about who would even pay for such a thing, let alone what the objective was. And that would be the whole idea.

    • Wikileaks Had A Great Response To The CIA Joining Twitter
    • Dr. Zhivago’s CIA Connection and the Pope

      What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?

    • Why foreign-funded NGOs need to be monitored

      Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer, in 2012, had accused the United States Government of funding environmental group Greenpeace via the CIA to undermine Australia’s coal mining sector. He was reportedly angry at Greenpeace’s plan to use lawyers to thwart future coal mining projects and claimed that funding is coming from an American environmental charity, the Rockefeller Foundation. He alleged it is funded by the CIA and is trying to harm Australia’s industry and help American interests.

    • Neocons Double-Down on Iraq/Syria

      America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of misjudgments, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

    • US counter-terrorism abroad: Fighting terrorism or encouraging it?

      The US has a disastrous record of involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts in Central America.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • “Siggi Hacker” Charged With Multiple Fraud And Theft Counts

      Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson, also known as “Siggi Hacker”, will tomorrow arrive in Reykjanes District Court to face charges of embezzlement, fraud, and theft adding up to about 30 million ISK.

      DV reports that Sigurður faces a total of 18 counts of the charges, ranging from funneling millions into a private bank account from Wikileaks to using the accounts of companies to which he did not belong to buy everything from laptops to fast food.

    • Peru: WikiLeaks cables shed light on US massacre role

      The FTA granted greater rights to US investors. These included Colorado-based Newmont Mining, which had billions of dollars of interests in the area affected by protests.

      Newmont, the world’s second-largest gold-mining company, holds a majority stake in Yanacocha, one of the world’s largest gold mines. Newmont is now developing the Conga mine, the biggest ever foreign investment in Peru.

      Another cable, sent on June 5, provides an account of the outbreak of violence. Police sources cited by the ambassador said about 600 police moved on the blockade outside Bagua involving thousands of protesters.

      Police started firing after a group of about 60 of their own became isolated and surrounded by the Amazonian protesters. Police sources claim that protesters triggered the violence by firing on a helicopter that was shooting tear gas into the crowd in support of the isolated police.

      The police shot dead 10 protesters. Human rights groups later reported six indigenous men as missing, presumed dead.

    • “Getting Away with Murder”: Immunity of US Intelligence from Criminal Prosecution

      The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.

    • Wikileaks Says Ukraine’s Poroshenko ‘Was US Informant’

      Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko handed to the US Embassy in Kiev inside information on the forging of a coalition government in 2006, according to Wikileaks data.

    • Wikileaks exposes dark sides of Ukraine’s Poroshenko, Tymoshenko

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Koch Brothers Unveil New Strategy at Big Donor Retreat

      In the face of expanding energy regulations, stepped-up Democratic attacks and the ongoing fight over Obamacare, the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups—including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin, The Daily Beast has learned.

    • Virunga is saved but Africa’s wildlife is being encircled sliver by sliver

      Campaigners have managed to keep the Congo national park free from drilling just as protected sites elsewhere are being cravenly redrawn

  • Finance

    • Lord Lucan was ‘smuggled out of Britain by ex-MI5 agent and hidden in Greek monastery’

      Lord Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent after the murder of his children’s nanny.

      The sensational claim is made in a new book which tells how spook James Gurney helped to mastermind the elaborate escape.

      Gurney says he moved the fugitive from a country pub in Kent to a remote safe house in Wiltshire before they boarded a flight from Heathrow to Greece.

    • The emergence of the neoliberal containment state in Canada | Part I

      The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.

    • Detroit’s Sad Decline Is Shown In These Shocking Transformation Photos

      It’s no secret that the city of Detroit is not the thriving industrial city that it once was, but as things decay over time, it’s sometimes hard to notice just how drastic some of the changes have been. Redditor Scarbane has compiled a startling collection of images from Google Street View showing just how much things have deteriorated in just a few years. These pictures broke my heart a little bit…

    • Yo Walmart, Go Subsidize Yourself

      Every year taxpayers subsidize Walmart – the world’s wealthiest corporation 1 – to the tune of $7.8 BILLION!

      HUH? Walmart, America’s largest private employer, raked in $17 billion in profit last year 2; its owners, the Walton family, have more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined 3. But every year, Walmart’s poverty wages and extensive tax dodging cost taxpayers $7.8 BILLION in subsidies.

    • Richard Rockefeller Dies in Plane Crash

      Mr. Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was the only person on board the aircraft, an airport official said.

    • About $18 million worth of Bitcoins going up for auction later in June

      The auction of the 29,000 bitcoins is scheduled to take place on the 27th of June over 12 hours. Interested bidders need to register themselves by 12 p.m. EST of 23rd June. They are also required to make a deposit of $200,000 through wire from a bank within the US. In addition, the participants need to provide a government issued ID and prove that they are not affiliated or related in anyways to either Ulbricht or Silk Road. All the bitcoins will be broken up into 10 chunks with each bidder able to bid on multiple chunks.

    • US government selling nearly $18 million in bitcoin seized from Silk Road

      Looking to buy some Bitcoin? The US government has plenty to sell. It’s put up for auction the more than 29,000 bitcoins that it seized from the underground drug sales site Silk Road earlier this year, all of which are currently valued at close to $18 million. The auction will occur and close later this month, and bidders won’t be required to purchase the entire, expensive chunk. Instead, it’ll be broken up into 10 chunks, most of which are worth about $1.8 million, and interested parties can bid on as many chunks as they want.

    • 10 Photos of Amazon Chiefs’ Clash With Brazilian Police at World Cup Protests

      According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s $1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • When Is Terrorism Not Terrorism?

      ABC-VEgasWhen a husband and wife allegedly murdered two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, the story received a lot of coverage. But it was coverage that mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said, “The revolution is beginning,” and a Revolutionary-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag closely associated with both the Patriot and Tea Party movements (Hatewatch, 6/9/14). The couple, both white, were also associated with far-right causes and had expressed extreme hostility toward authorities.

    • Plagiarism: Why It Matters

      When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed.

    • How Finance Controls the White House

      Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013) is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.

  • Censorship

    • Twitter Has Suspended An ISIS Account That Live-Tweeted Its Advance In Iraq

      Twitter has suspended at least six accounts affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist group gaining ground in Iraq and Syria since fighting escalated this week.

    • Police block publication of human rights newsletter, accuse group of trying to oust government

      Egyptian security forces confiscated copies of a human rights group’s newsletter, saying the publication threatened the government, the head of the group said Sunday.

      Gamal Eid, the head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said police seized 1,000 copies of the publication, entitled Wasla, or Link, from the print shop the night before, also arresting a worker at the press.

    • A Tribe Called Red Accused Of Racism Over ‘Caucasians’ T-Shirt

      A Tribe Called Red’s Ian “Deejay NDN” Campeau has become one of Canada’s most high-profile First Nations activists. As his Ottawa-based electronic music crew have surfed EDM’s wave to unprecedented heights — including a Juno Award for breakthrough group and Rolling Stone shoutout — Campeau has used his public profile to raise awareness about respecting Aboriginal culture.

    • Steve Coogan joins Index on Censorship as patron

      Steve Coogan has become a patron of Index on Censorship, the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.

      “We are delighted that Steve has agreed to be a patron of Index,” said its newly appointed chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.

      “Comedians, writers and performers often bear the brunt of attempts to stifle free expression – in both authoritarian regimes and in democracies.”

      Coogan said: “Creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished where it exists and fought for where it doesn’t. This is what Index on Censorship does. I am pleased to lend my support and patronage to such an important cause.”

    • Global media body condemns soft censorship by governments

      A new report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN) has strongly condemned “soft censorship” by governments and regulators as a “very serious threat to media independence and the very viability of media companies”. WAN, which is the umbrella organization of newspapers representing more than 18,000 publications and 15,000 online sites in 120 countries around the world, has urgently called for rapid action to stop this blatant repression of media and press freedom.

    • Behind the Great Firewall: What it’s really like to log on from China

      Censorship in China affects many popular Internet services and websites, but there are ways to make do

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Disbelief as FBI frames up St. Petersburg Florida man

      The US government used informants and spies to coax Osmakac into making “radical YouTube videos”. The FBI eventually got him to buy fake weapons, with money the FBI gave him, and then arrested him on felony charges. Osmakac’s trial is like many others in the US, where the government prosecutes Muslims and Arab-Americans for pre-emptive crimes–crimes the FBI sets up, but that are not actually committed. Osmakac’s defense said that the FBI entrapped a mentally ill man.

    • U.S. government lies as Sami Osmakac trial begins

      The federal prosecutors are using recordings from two FBI informants who had been spying on Osmakac or months. However, he had been talking with and led on by FBI informants for much longer. Sami Osmakac’s brother Avni Osmakac, said he had “seen agents around his house every day since 2010.” Their house frequently had undercover police vehicles parked nearby. Back then Sami had worked as a grocery stocker for a local market. This is where they think he met the first government informant. From there he spent over a year being coaxed and pushed by agents into making “radical YouTube videos”. He was eventually guided into buying fake weapons with money given to him by the FBI. Government videos show FBI informants teaching and pushing Sami into committing acts of terrorism.

    • Terrorism trial in Tampa coming to a close

      Osmakac was using government money to buy government weapons, Tragos said. The FBI was on “both sides of this transaction.”

    • A Party At The Last Magazine: An Exclusive Excerpt From Michael Hastings’ New Novel

      Michael Hastings was one of our generation’s best, most driven, and fearless reporters. His work at Rolling Stone changed the course of the American war in Afghanistan. At BuzzFeed, he told the story of the 2012 election and was building a beat on the dark side of Hollywood when he was killed in a car crash at 33, one year ago.

      Michael’s obsessive observation, his drive to figure it out, extended to his own profession. In his last years, he became obsessed with the internet, seeing, more so than most of his peers, that it would be a great home for big narratives. But Michael was ready for the change because he had seen the big changes shaking his business up close, watching the death throes of a great print institution as a young reporter for Newsweek from 2003 to 2008. It turns out that he observed that experience with the same obsessiveness and the same reflection.

    • Brazilian police fire tear gas at World Cup protesters
    • Ben Dangl: Capitalism’s Bullets in Latin America

      The notorious US private militia group Academi – previously known as Blackwater – trained Brazilian security forces in North Carolina in preparation for the current World Cup in Brazil, as reported by sportswriter Dave Zirin. Zirin pointed to the 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, which revealed that Washington viewed the expected World Cup-related crises as opportunities for US involvement. Zirin wrote that for Washington, “Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.”

      Capitalism’s bullets follow the World Cup just as they do Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with the US. Five years ago this month, protests were raging in northern Peru where thousands of indigenous Awajun and Wambis men, women and children were blockading roads against oil, logging and gas exploitation on Amazonian land. The Peruvian government, having just signed an FTA with the US, was unsure how to deal with the protests – partly because the controversial concessions in the Amazon were granted to meet the FTA requirements. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, on June 1st, 2009 the US State Department sent a message to the US Embassy in Lima: “Should Congress and [Peruvian] President Garcia give in to the [protesters’] pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” Four days later, the Peruvian government responded to the protest with deadly violence, leading to a conflict which left 32 dead.

    • Activists Poured Concrete All Over Some ‘Anti-Homeless’ Spikes This Morning

      The war against London’s “anti-homeless” spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action. In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.

    • Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

      Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements

    • U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn’t.

      U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.

    • Did US Send CIA Rendition Jet To Europe In The Hope Of Grabbing Snowden?

      The story’s credibility is greatly enhanced by virtue of who wrote it. Duncan Campbell has an unmatched track record for covering the world of spies and surveillance, which includes being the first to reveal the existence of both GCHQ and Echelon, the precursor to today’s Five Eyes surveillance system.

    • CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

      As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet – previously employed in CIA “rendition” flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible “black” imprisonment – flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.

    • Instagrams from Auschwitz

      Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?

    • America is Rapidly Being Transformed into a “Controlled” State

      While many Americans don’t seem to comprehend what’s happening all around them, the U.S government is implementing more methods of surveillance over this society and many of its agencies are acquiring more powerful weaponry. And now we are also seeing state and local law enforcement agencies following this government’s initiative of establishing greater and greater control over the American people. And that most certainly does not bode well for those who still value their privacy and rights under the Constitution.

      It seems as if the U.S. government is waging two Wars on Terror; one in foreign lands against Al-Qaeda and one here within this country and society. So with that in mind let’s examine some of the distinct similarities that are present in the U.S. government’s foreign surveillance and methods of hunting down suspected terrorists around the world and those same strategies and tactics that it and various other law enforcement agencies are using here in America.

      First let’s talk about surveillance. It’s no secret that, for many decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting comprehensive surveillance operations on various foreign governments and specific individuals in those countries. That’s been going on for so long that few Americans even give it a second thought.

    • Gov’t must give up 5 secret surveillance docs for court to review, judge orders

      In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.

    • Senate’s Latest NDAA Draft Further Tramples Americans’ Rights

      Senior legislative counsel for the ACLU estimates that if the Senate has its way, 100 U.S. citizens could immediately find themselves in Guantánamo-like indefinite detention.

    • Massachusetts Town Nullifies NDAA Indefinite Detention
    • NDAA, Barring The US From Indefinitely Detaining, Assassinating US Citizens
    • Black Man Driving Wife to Work Accused of Being Illegal Cab Driver: Lawsuit

      After dropping Palermo off, Keys was pulled over by TLC investigators and accused of operating the black Town Car as an illegal cab, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court.

    • The Tyranny of the Taxi Medallions

      The life of a taxi driver is hard. When cabbies start a shift, they owe about $100 to their company as payment just for the opportunity drive a taxi. They might not break even until halfway through their shift, or maybe not at all that day. In most American cities, they have to work very long hours to make a living.

      During a shift, taxi drivers play a strange form of roulette when they pick up anonymous customers. The customer could be a pleasant family that tips them well, a drunk college kid that vomits in their car, or a violent criminal that robs and assaults them. After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.

    • The Forgotten Fight Against Fascism

      Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.

    • Defence officials prepare to fight the poor, activists and minorities (and commies)

      The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist ‘extremists’ in the new ‘age of uncertainty’

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • 2nd Cir. Affirms That Creation of Full-Text Searchable Database of Works Is Fair Use

        The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.

      • MPAA’s Chris Dodd Praises Pirate Site Blockades

        This week, MPAA chief and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd praised pirate site blockades as an important anti-piracy measure. Speaking at the IP Summit in London, Dodd said that ISP blockades are one of the most effective tools available. Does this mean that Hollywood will try to get these blacklists in place on its home turf?

      • Copyright Troll Accuses Critic of Leading “Psychopathic” Hate Group

        Informing the masses about the activities of settlement-seeking copyright trolls is what FightCopyrightTrolls.com does best, so no surprise that its rivals are now hitting back. In a motion revealed this week, the world’s most prolific filer of lawsuits against BitTorrent users accuses the site of running an Internet hate group that is both “criminal and scary”.

      • Porn studio attacks blogger for leading a “fanatical Internet hate group”

        With the copyright lawsuit factory formerly known as Prenda Law now mired in sanctions, a California company called Malibu Media has become the most litigious copyright holder in the US.

      • Police & FACT Claim Big Successes in UK Anti-Piracy Drive

        City of London Police and Hollywood’s Federation Against Copyright Theft are claiming big results in a new government IP crime report. PIPCU say they have suspended 2,359 UK domains and cut off payment to 19 sites, with FACT claiming the closure of 117 pirate sites and the arrest of seven release group members in the past 12 months.

06.13.14

Links 13/6/2014: Docker Hype, Manjaro 0.8.10

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Extremadura health care has switched to open source

      The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organisations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organisations have migrated to a customised version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

  • Licensing

    • Zimbra moves to OSI-approved licensing for Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition

      Unified collaboration software vendor Zimbra announced the release of a beta version of Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 to the open source community under the GNU Public License V2 license. Calling it a “commitment to community-powered open source innovation,” company officials say the move is part of an overall plan to distribute future versions of the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition under Open Source Initiative-approved licenses.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Stop the EMA Backsliding on Open Clinical Data [Updated]

      Back in April, I noted that we had potentially a big win in the form of the opening up of drug safety data in the light of recent scandals that have seen big pharma companies hiding adverse effects of their products, often with fatal results. As I warned, we weren’t there yet, since the drug companies really don’t want their dirty washing for all to see, and they have been lobbying extremely hard to water down the provisions.

    • The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

      One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman’s GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption — things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That’s what Ecuador’s FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. “FLOK” is derived from “free”, “libre” and “open knowledge”; here’s how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project:

      The FLOK Society bills its mission as “designing a world for the commons.” The research project will focus on many interrelated themes, including open education; open innovation and science; “arts and meaning-making activities”; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining. The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualize the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.

Leftovers

  • Trojan horse: never mind schools, what about the parents?

    Bad things have been happening in some Birmingham schools: children have been taught things that are hard to reconcile with the broader culture and values of the country in which they live and which provides them with that education. That’s the consensus at Westminster, and Politicians will spend the day arguing about who is to blame, how this happened and how it can be stopped from happening again. Was it Michael Gove? Or Ofsted? Or Birmingham council? Or the governors? Or a whole political class that tacitly endorses a doctrine of multiculturalism, while turning a blind eye to its more troubling consequences? Everyone will have their preferred mixture of answers, so I don’t intend to offer you mine here. Instead, there’s one group that’s curiously absent from the conversation here: parents.

  • Best Reporters On The Supreme Court Forced To Grovel Before Competitors To Prove They’re Worthy Of A Press Pass

    Back in April, we wrote about the travesty of the very best reporters on everything Supreme Court related, SCOTUSblog, still not having a press pass to the Supreme Court. The issue is somewhat complicated, in part because of the seriously arcane credentialing process involved. Basically, the Supreme Court looks kindly on reporters who already are credentialed by the Senate. But the Senate credentialing process involves the “Standing Committee of Correspondents” who get to decide who else to let in. The committee, basically, are journalists who have already been let into the club deciding who else can join them. When you set up a guild that lets you exclude innovative and disruptive players, guess what happens?

  • App Store and iTunes Store Currently Down for Some Users

    Issues seem to have begun this morning, as several users noted an inability to download the Skype app following its release. Some users attempting to download the app received a message indicating the app was no longer available for download.

  • Science

    • No, A ‘Supercomputer’ Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better

      So, this weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time,” with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that’s what they do. First, here’s the press release from the University of Reading,

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding And Rejecting Science

      This report, co-published by DPA and MAPS, illustrates a decades-long pattern of behavior that demonstrates the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) inability to exercise its responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner or to act in accord with the scientific evidence. The report’s case studies reveal a number of DEA practices that maintain the existing, scientifically unsupported drug scheduling system and obstruct research that might alter current drug schedules. In addition to marijuana, the report also examines the DEA’s speed in moving to ban MDMA, synthetic cannabinoids, and synthetic stimulants. In contrast to the DEA’s failure to act in a timely fashion when confronted with evidence for scheduling certain drugs less severely, the agency has shown repeatedly that it can move quickly when it wants to prohibit a substance. The report recommends that responsibility for determining drug classifications and other health determinations should be completely removed from the DEA and transferred to another agency, perhaps even a non-governmental entity such as the National Academy of Sciences. The report also recommends the DEA should be ordered to end the federal government’s unjustifiable monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana available for federally approved research. No other drug is available from only a single governmental source for research purposes.

    • Pesticide and GMO Companies Spend Big in Hawai’i

      Hawai’i has become “ground zero” in the controversy over genetically modified (GMO) crops and pesticides. With the seed crop industry (including conventional as well as GMO crops) reaping $146.3 million a year in sales resulting from its activities in Hawai’i, the out-of-state pesticide and GMO firms Syngenta, Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Dow Chemical, BASF, and Bayer CropScience have brought substantial sums of corporate cash into the state’s relatively small political arena.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Exclusive: How FBI Informant Sabu Helped Anonymous Hack Brazil

      In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date.

    • How an FBI informant orchestrated the Stratfor hack

      Sitting inside a medium-security federal prison in Kentucky, Jeremy Hammond looks defiant and frustrated.

    • The Blair Legacy

      It is now extremely difficult for the media to pretend that everything is OK in Iraq, bar the odd car bomb. The AL-Maliki regime has been in the remarkable position of being both pro-Iranian and supported by the West with masses of military hardware – substantial quantities of which is now in the hands of ISIS. I don’t expect Al-Maliki to fall soon, but his area of control is decreasing by the hour. Whether the Al-Maliki regime has been any less vicious than that of Saddam Hussein is arguable. Certainly there has been a great deal less social freedom in Iraq.

    • Iraq Is a Place Where Americans Suffered

      Raddatz went on to talk about ab out how more than 200 Americans had “given their lives to secure this city,” and that Mosul “is just the latest city to spiral out of control after the US pulled out”–which might suggest that Iraqi cities were in fine shape when they were occupied by US troops.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • BP Rejected by Supreme Court on Gulf Payments Reprieve

      BP Plc (BP/) must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in claims after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt disputed payments stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

      In a one-sentence order issued today, the justices said they wouldn’t put a hold on lower court rulings that require the oil company to begin making the payments, part of a $9.2 billion accord.

    • A Federal Response to Navy SEAL’s ‘Threat Assessment’ of Keystone XL

      Last week we reported on a former Navy SEAL chief named David Cooper who was hired by the nonprofit group NextGen Climate to determine how vulnerable the controversial final leg of the Keystone pipeline network might be to terrorism. In a 14-page report, Cooper determined that it would be “easy to execute a catastrophic attack” on the fourth segment of the pipeline system, based on a mock attack he carried out on the completed Keystone I, or Gulf Coast Pipeline, which came online in January. He went on to describe multiple scenarios for spills ranging from 1.02 to 7.24 million gallons of diluted bitumen, the viscous, toxic, low quality oil derived from Alberta’s tar sands.

  • Finance

    • Higher Coffee Prices Kick in at the Supermarket

      The moment to hoard cheap coffee beans has passed. The price of coffee futures peaked in April, and those higher commodity costs are now trickling down to grocery stores. J.M. Smucker (SJM) on Tuesday announced that it has increased the price of its packaged coffee, including the country’s best-selling brand, Folgers, as well as packaged Dunkin’ Donuts beans, by an average 9 percent.

    • GoDaddy files for $100m IPO

      According to its filing with the SEC, the web-hosting company had revenues of more than $1.1bn in 2013

    • Joe Klein on the Itchy Grievances of Minority Groups

      Or consult the 2012 State of Working America report from the Economic Policy Institute, which features a number of distressing statistics on black unemployment (consistently about twice as high for blacks as for whites, though it would be hard to say that there are “plenty” of jobs for anyone, with overall unemployment at 6.9 percent) and racial disparities in median family income.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Eastenders Threat to Scots

      The Guardian has just published its eighth article in three days pushing Gordon Brown’s views on independence. This one warns Scots they would not be able to watch the BBC after independence.

    • Was John Doe Raid Led by Republicans?

      The description of alleged “raids” of private homes in Wisconsin’s John Doe criminal dark money investigation has captured the imagination of Republicans across the country as supposed evidence of the investigation’s political motivations.

  • Privacy

    • Court: Warrantless Cell Location Tracking Is Unconstitutional

      A federal appeals court has for the first time said law enforcement can’t snoop on phone location records without a warrant

    • RT Interview — the anniversary of Edward Snowden

      Here is an inter­view I did on 5th June, the anniversary of the start of Edward Snowden’s dis­clos­ures about the global sur­veil­lance infra­struc­ture that is being built.

    • The Government Can No Longer Track Your Cell Phone Without a Warrant

      The government and police regularly use location data pulled off of cell phone towers to put criminals at the scenes of crimes—often without a warrant. Well, an appeals court ruled today that the practice is unconstitutional, in one of the strongest judicial defenses of technology privacy rights we’ve seen in a while.

    • US pushing local cops to stay mum on surveillance

      US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology

    • 12 Hidden Tricks Advertisers Use to Sell You Stuff

      Marc Andrews wrote Hidden Persuasion to highlight the various methods advertisers use to lure us in. Here the World Wildlife Fund uses anthropomorphism to establish an emotional connection with users. The lion is experiencing secondary emotions (shame, disbelief), which are thought to be distinctly human. This make us feel closer to the animal, thus more likely to donate.

    • James Clapper Admits What Everyone’s Been Saying For Months: Snowden Didn’t Take 1.7 Million Documents

      You know, you’d think that the “intelligence community” would be a bit more intelligent. As we’ve discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of “harm” concerning Ed Snowden’s actions were based on the faulty assumption that he “took” (and revealed) every document he ever “touched” while at NSA — somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.

    • The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible
    • Facebook to add advertising to Instagram in Canada

      Facebook Inc.’s photo-sharing application Instagram will add advertising in Canada, the U.K. and Australia later this year.

    • Dropping Docs On Darknets: How People Got Caught

      Most of you have probably used Tor before, but I2P may be unfamiliar. Both are anonymization networks that allow people to obfuscate where their traffic is coming from, and also host services (web sites for example) without it being tied back to them. This talk will give an overview of both, but will focus on real world stories of how people were deanonymized. Example cases like Eldo Kim & the Harvard Bomb Threat, Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu)/Jeremy Hammond (sup_g) & LulzSec, Freedom Hosting & Eric Eoin Marques and finally Ross William Ulbricht/“Dread Pirate Roberts” of the SilkRoad, will be used to explain how people have been caught and how it could have been avoided.

    • Ars tests Internet surveillance—by spying on an NPR reporter

      On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy.

      This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online?

      [...]

      The experiment unfolded in two phases. In the first, we simply observed Henn’s normal Internet traffic. In the second, Henn, Porcello, and I stopped the broad surveillance of Henn and turned our tools on specific traffic created by leading Web applications and services. Here’s what we found.

  • Civil Rights

    • US bars British environmentalist on allegations it admits are unfounded

      The Telegraph has obtained documents that raise questions on US treatment of John Stewart, a key campaigner against Heathrow’s third runway, who the US said had threatened Barak Obama

    • UK Plans To Bring In Life Sentences For ‘Serious Cyberattacks’

      Much of this is the kind of activity carried out in the form of attacks sponsored by governments outside the UK — or, as in the case of the NSA, directly by those governments. Despite the recent grandstanding by the US when it filed criminal charges against members of the Chinese military whom it accuses of espionage, there is little hope of ever persuading the main players to hand over their citizens for trial, so the new UK law will be largely ineffectual against the most serious threats.

    • Boris Johnson to buy three water cannon for Metropolitan police

      London mayor justifies the speed of the £218,000 purchase by saying the machines are needed in case of disorder this summer

    • News from Caroline Pidgeon: “Mayor’s obsession with changing the culture of British policing beggars belief”
    • Taxi drivers to bring London to a standstill over Uber app

      Up to 12,000 black-cab drivers expected to block traffic in central London with cabbies in Europe staging similar protests

      [...]

      The streets of half a dozen European capitals will be jammed by strikes on Wednesday, as licensed cabbies in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan and Lisbon join their London colleagues in demonstrating against a technology that threatens their livelihood.

      Uber is one of a wave of new apps, which also include Hailo and Kabbee, that allows users to see the nearest registered cars and hail them from their smartphone. The services are particularly popular with private-hire drivers, who now have an advantage over licensed drivers.

    • My view on today’s taxi protests and what it means for the sharing economy
    • Israeli Abuse of Palestinian Children

      This is a heartrending documentary from Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC. The terrible fate of the Palestinians at the hands of a world which has accepted the ludicrous claim to a religious Israeli right to their land is incomprehensible in a rational world. The brutality of Israeli soldiers, motivated by views of racial and religious superiority, towards children is sickening.

    • Crossfire Clueless on Israeli Occupation

      There is just one problem with demanding an apology over this: The West Bank is currently under Israeli occupation. This was true whenever Clinton made her first visit. So the CNN host is demanding to know whether Clinton will apologize for saying something perfectly accurate.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Netflix refuses to comply with Verizon’s “cease and desist” demands

      Netflix will keep telling customers that ISPs are to blame for bad video.

    • Cable companies duped community groups into fighting net neutrality

      Last week, it transpired that the big cable companies were bankrolling fake consumer groups like Broadband for America and The American Consumer Institute. These “independent consumer advocacy groups” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, and instead represent the interests of its benefactors, in the fight against net neutrality. If that wasn’t bad enough, VICE is now reporting that several of the real community groups (oh, and an Ohio bed-and-breakfast) that were signed up as supporters of Broadband for America were either duped into joining, or were signed up to the cause without their consent or knowledge.

    • Comcast is turning your Xfinity router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot [Updated]

      Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • RIAA Revenue Drops to Record Low

        The RIAA’s latest tax filings reveal that the anti-piracy group’s revenue has hit a record low as membership dues from record labels continue to decline. But despite the downward trend RIAA CEO Cary Sherman received nearly $500,000 in bonuses in addition to his million dollar salary.

      • Megaupload Cases Put on Hold, But Asset Freezing Still an Option

        A United States District Court Judge has just granted Kim Dotcom’s request to put the MPAA and RIAA civil actions against him on hold . The reprieve, which will last seven weeks, expressly allows the entertainment companies the freedom to freeze Dotcom’s assets anywhere in the world if that is deemed necessary.

      • Why the Mana-Internet alliance is a potential game breaker

        His real “crime” as far as the Hollywood moguls are concerned is for doing something he hasn’t yet been convicted of any crime for – establishing Megaupload Ltd. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “Megaupload was a file hosting and sharing online service in which users could share links to files for viewing or editing….. The company was successful. However, millions of people from across the globe used Megaupload to store and access copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. Eventually it had over 150 employees, US$175 million revenues, and 50 million daily visitors. At its peak Megaupload was estimated to be the 13th most popular site on the internet and responsible for 4% of all internet traffic.”

      • Another Fair Use Victory for Book Scanning in HathiTrust

        Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a major book scanning program. For those counting along at home, today’s decision marks another in a serious streak of judicial findings of fair use for mass book digitization, including Authors Guild v. Google, Cambridge University Press v. Becker, and the district court opinion in the HathiTrust case itself.

      • Rise Up Against Govt Anti-Piracy Plans, ISP Urges

        An ISP that won a prolonged legal battle against a Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group has rejected plans to introduce three strikes and site blocking. Today, ISP iiNet is also urging citizens to pressure the government and fight back against the “foreign interests” attempting to dictate Australian policy.

      • “You could be liable for $150k in penalties—settle instead for $20 per song”

        Growing copyright cop Rightscorp hopes to be a profitable alternative to “six strikes.”

      • Google Joins New Coalition to Stop Ad Revenue to Pirate Sites

        An announcement later this week will confirm Google as a member of a new coalition to cut off “pirate” sites from their ad revenue. Following similar initiatives in the U.S. and UK, a Memorandum of Understanding between the online advertising industry and the music and movie industries in Italy will signal a creation of a central body to tackle the piracy issue.

      • MPAA: Consumer Right to Resell Online Videos Would Kill Innovation

        The MPAA is concerned that innovation in the film industry will be ruined if consumers get the right to resell movies and other media purchased online. Responding to discussions in a congressional hearing this week, the MPAA warns that this move would limit consumer choices and kill innovation.

06.12.14

Links 12/6/2014: Linux 3.15, New RHEL

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux hiring frenzy: Why open source devs are being bombarded with offers to jump ship

    Nine out of ten (87 percent) of hiring managers in Europe have “hiring Linux talent” on their list of priorities and almost half (48 percent) say they are looking to hire people with Linux skills within the next six months.

    But while they either need or want to hire more people with Linux skills, the data from the Linux Foundation suggests that this is easier said than done. Almost all — 93 percent — of the managers surveyed said they were having difficulty finding IT professionals with the Linux skills required and a quarter (25 percent) said they have “delayed projects as a result”.

  • Shortage of Linux professionals causes European skills crisis

  • Desktop

    • Chrome OS Features to Look for in Current Chromebook Crop

      With Father’s Day right around the corner, some dads out there might be requesting a new Chromebook. Chromebooks, which run Google’s Chrome OS, have quietly become quite popular among notebook buyers. As of this writing, Chromebooks are among the top 20 most popular computers available on Amazon, and sales continue to grow steadily. Although the devices got off to a slow start, Google has found a way to attract customers. With that in mind it might be a good time to revisit Chromebooks’ operating system, Chrome OS, and talk about key features that make the Chromebook so attractive. While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively. This eWEEK slide show will cover the factors that made this platform appealing to notebook PC users.

  • Server

    • How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user?

      Cloud computing has really become the buzz term for any online service. Your web browser is a client connecting to a server or clusters of servers hosted anywhere in the world. The point is that you don’t care. You don’t need to know.

      Generally speaking I have barely touched the surface. We all use the cloud everyday and most of us don’t even think about it.

      How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user? It turns out quite a bit.

      Is the cloud a good or bad thing? Neither. Each service has to be judged on it’s own merits.

      The term “The Cloud” is just something marketing people and the technical press get excited about. Anyone remember when they kept using the term “Web 2.0″?

    • Mesosphere Raises $10.5 Million to Create Massive Linux Clusters

      Thanks to the advent of multicore processors, the average data center these days has access to a massive amount of compute capacity. Tapping into it efficiently, though, is another thing altogether.

    • Mesosphere Closes $10.5M Series A Financing

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.15 Kernel Released

      The official release announcement from Linus Torvalds has yet to come down the pipe, but today’s 3.15 final release was expected. For those not up to date on our Linux 3.15 kernel coverage, there’s been dozens of articles in recent weeks about this latest major kernel update. A summary of this new kernel’s top features can be found via the aptly named The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel article. There’s a lot of great stuff in this new kernel release for everyone!

    • Linux 3.15 .. and continuation of merge window
    • Linus Torvalds Releases Linux Kernel 3.15 Stable
    • The 3.15 kernel is out
    • Linux Kernel 3.14.6 Is Now the Most Advanced Version

      Linux kernel 3.14.6 is now the most advanced version of the kernel, at least for a few hours before the final version of the 3.15 branch is out (unless something weird happens and the launch is postponed).

      The kernel developers have made quite an effort and this latest updates is one of the biggest so far. It’s still a young kernel and it’s not sure that it will reach the LTS status. There are already a number of long term support in existence already, but you can never know.

    • Linux 3.15 Speeds Up Suspend/Resume Performance

      The suspend and resume code impacts users who run Linux on laptop computers where there is a need to suspend disk and operating system operations when a device is closed and then start up again when the device is opened. Williams noted that his code contribution was inspired by an analysis and proposal from Intel developer Todd Brandt. Brandt’s proposal specifically dealt with a suspend/resume speed improvement, enabling a rapid wakeup from a device’s suspend state

    • MIPS For Linux 3.16 Gets Big Changes

      The MIPS architecture pull for the Linux 3.16 merge window pull is full of prominent changes for this next kernel version.

      First up, with the MIPS changes comes initial support for the Octeon 3. The Octeon 3 is Cavium’s new multi-core processor line-up announced at the end of 2013. The OCTEON III is MIPS64-based and optimized for Wind River Linux and VxWorks. The Octeon III claims up to 120GHz of 64-bit processing and is aimed for high-performance computing environments.

    • Stable kernels 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92

      Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels: 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92. As usual, each contains fixes all over the tree and users of those kernel series should upgrade.

    • F2FS Gets Enhanced For The Linux 3.16 Kernel

      Samsung has sent in their F2FS pull request for the Linux 3.16 to provide a number of enhancements for the Flash Friendly File-System.

      Improvements for the F2FS file-system with the Linux 3.16 kernel include enhanced wait_on_page_writeback, support for SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE, readahead flow enhancements, enhanced I/O flushes, support for fiemap, support for trace-maps, support for large volumes over two Terabytes, and a number of bug-fixes and clean-ups.

    • Torvalds hits ‘Go’ button for Linux 3.15
    • The Companies That Support Linux: Rackspace

      Rackspace has lately been in the news for its stock market gains and a potential acquisition. But over the past 16 years the company has become well known, first as a web hosting provider built on Linux and open source, and later as a pioneer of the open source cloud and founder of the OpenStack cloud platform.

      In May, Rackspace became a Xen Project member and was one of three companies to join the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with CoreOS and Cumulus Networks.

      “Many of the applications and infrastructure that we need to run for internal use or for customers run best on Linux,” said Paul Voccio, Senior Director of Software Development at Rackspace, via email. “This includes all the popular language frameworks and open virtualization platforms such as Xen, LXC, KVM, Docker, etc.”

      In this Q&A, Voccio discusses the role of Rackspace in the cloud, how the company uses Linux, why they joined the Linux Foundation, as well as current trends and future technologies in the data center.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

    • Docker libcontainer unities Linux container powers

      What makes this important, even vital, news to the larger world of system administrators, datacenter managers, and cloud architects, is that Google, Red Hat, and Parallels are now helping build the program. Indeed, they will work with Docker as core maintainers of the code. Canonical’s Ubuntu container engineers will also be working on it.

    • IT’S HERE: DOCKER 1.0
    • Docker 1.0 Officially Released
    • Docker 1.0 brings container technology to the enterprise

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • The Witcher 3 Announced for SteamOS, Studio Takes It Back

        The CD Projekt Red studio has announced that the upcoming The Witcher 3 action RPG is also arriving on SteamOS, which means that it will feature Linux support.

        The interesting fact about this announcement is that the studio has yet to make a formal statement, and they chose a more indirect way to tell Linux users that they will be able to play the game. If you happened to open Steam today, you might have noticed that The Witcher 3 game also said that is coming to SteamOS.

      • Steam for Linux Officially Gets Virtual Reality Support

        The Steam developers usually release quite few intermediary Steam versions, between major stable updates. This is one of the most interesting Beta updates so far in this cycle and the VR support that was just introduced will certainly make it into the next version.

        It looks like virtual reality is the next-gen feature that will be pursued by all the major gaming companies. Oculus is already having an impact on the industry, Sony is working on their own version, and Valve will most likely present their own solution soon enough. With all these advancements made with VR, it’s good to see that Linux is on the forefront.

      • Superb Interstellar Marines Tactical FPS Arrives on Steam for Linu

        Interstellar Marines, a tactical FPS developed and published by Zero Point Software, has just received Linux support with the latest patch.

        Interstellar Marines is a very promising first-person shooter and its developers said that they took inspiration from Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The game has been built mainly as a multiplayer experience, but a limited single-player is also available.

        The latest update for the Interstellar Marines also brought support for the Linux platform and it looks like this title aims to be one of the best-looking on the open source platform…

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 Released

        The third beta is out today ahead of the final release expected in July. This third beta brings many bug-fixes and other minor enhancements to ease in porting of software to this next-generation KDE stack.

      • KDE 4.13.2 Desktop Update Released

        The latest monthly point release update to KDE 4.13 is now available.

        KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.

      • PLASMA ACTIVE ON QT5/KF5: WALLPAPERS AND ACTIVITIES CONFIGURATION

        Hello, This is my second report for my GSoC. This week i was working on the Wallpapers and the Activities Configuration. While there was the support for changing the wallpapers the UI was more focused on a desktop rather than a touch device, which wasn’t exactly what we needed for Plasma Active. So the new UI looks like the old one (Plasma Active 1), and the only small change is that we don’t show the wallpaper name.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME MUSIC 3.13.2 RELEASED!

        The player bar now uses all horizontal space available, which I based on new mockups for playback buffer by Jakub Steiner (except that it still has the repeat/shuffle menu). With this, the song title and album song has more space, and it will no longer just show an ellipsis when the window is small.

        Updating of views is further refined, so it will not interfere when in selection mode. Tooltips were added to the buttons. Right-clicking songs inside albums in Albums view now starts selection mode. Albums list in Artists view are now insensitive when in selection mode.

      • Trevilla Theme Is One of the Best Flat Themes for Ubuntu and Linux Mint

        The Trevilla theme pack is made for people who like to have a flat desktop and it comes with clean headers and buttons that are very good for a minimalistic experience.

        The Trevilla designers are not the only ones using this flat look for themes. In fact, more and more distros come with flat desktops and it looks like these types of decorations are not going anywhere…

      • GNOME Board of Directors Elections 2014 – Preliminary Results

        The GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee is happy to announce the preliminary results for this year’s Board of Directors elections:

        Sriram Ramkrishna
        Ekaterina Gerasimova
        Karen Sandler
        Tobias Mueller
        Andrea Veri
        Marina Zhurakhinskaya
        Jeff Fortin

      • Quick Look: Ubuntu GNOME 14.04

        Ubuntu GNOME is a popular spin of Ubuntu that uses the GNOME desktop instead of Unity. Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 has been updated to include GNOME 3.10, and GNOME Classic. This release also includes some gorgeous new backgrounds that will spruce up you Ubuntu GNOME desktop. And since it’s a long term support release you will be able to run it for the next few years with the maximum amount of stability and polish.

  • Distributions

    • GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1-3 Reverts a Couple of Packages to Older Versions

      The GParted Life project undergoes dormant periods and hardly are any updates released, but now it looks like two versions have arrived inside a week.

      “The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2014/Jun/09),” reads the official announcement.

    • New Releases

      • OpenELEC 4.0.4 Now Out, Is Based on XBMC 13.1 “Gotham”

        The OpenELEC makers are following the XBMC development cycle very closely and they have released a new version of their distribution, 4.0.4. It comes packed with all the goodies from XBMC 13.1 “Gotham” and the devs have made some changes of their own.

        “This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 (final) which contains a lot of fixes for issues found after the XBMC-13.0 release (some of them we already shipped with OpenELEC-4.0.0).

      • Liberada version final de wifislax-4.9
      • Tango Studio 2.2 Is a Distro for Musicians and Professional Studios

        The Linux platform is home to quite a few operating systems dedicated to sound, video, and graphics editing. Some are better than others, but they all try to do the same thing and get some free tools in the hand of the people who need them the most.

        The advantage of Tango Studio is that you don’t need to configure almost anything in the operating system and most of the tools just work, without any extra input from the user. It’s a very helpful OS, especially for the people who just want to work and not tinker with a Linux distribution…

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro 0.8.9 Receives Fresh Update Pack with New AMD Driver and More

        “We prepared mhwd to support newer proprietary drivers. MHWD 0.3.901 reflect these changes. Blueman got updatedto support the latest bluez 5.19. We kept Wayland 1.4.0, as any higher version breaks bluetooth support. We have to deal with that later. Beside some libreoffice language acks,python updates, a newer Cinnamon we pushed also regular upstream updates to this update-pack,” said the developers in the official announcement.

    • Red Hat Family

      • New RHEL 7 Linux Stresses Apps, Scaling
      • Red Hat’s CEO Sees Open Source Cloud Domination

        Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the business opportunity of a generation in what he calls a computing paradigm shift from client server to cloud architectures. “In those paradigm shifts, generally new winners emerge,” says Whitehurst and he intends to make sure Red Hat is one of those winners. His logic is sound and simple: disruptive technologies like the cloud that arise every couple decades level the playing field between large, established firms and smaller, innovative challengers since everyone, from corporate behemoth to a couple guys in a garage, starts from the same spot and must play by the same unfamiliar and changeable rules. With the cloud “there’s less of an installed based and an opportunity for new winners to be chosen,” Whitehurst adds. His mission is “to see that open source is the default choice for next generation architecture” and that Red Hat is the preferred choice, particularly for enterprise IT, of open source providers.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Announcement Likely Tomorrow

        Red Hat was just sending out press invites this afternoon for a virtual event tomorrow regarding “an exciting product” that will be announced.

        Registration for the online event happening tomorrow (10 June) at 11AM EST can be found at RedHat.com. The site says it’s about, “redefining the enterprise OS.”

      • Fedora

        • Tools for Diagramming in Fedora

          If you’re a big-time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently. From the ‘Alternatives to Microsoft® Visio®’ department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser-known open source tool for converting Visio® stencils, these tips are for you…

    • Debian Family

      • Elive 2.2.6 Beta Is an Interesting Blend of Debian and Enlightenment

        Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has advanced to version 2.2.6 Beta and is available for download.

      • Fast-boot, open spec COM includes FPGA

        Technologic is sampling a fast-booting “TS-4740″ COM that runs Debian on a 1GHz, ARM9 PXA168 SoC and offers a 25K-LUTs Spartan-5 FPGA and gigabit Ethernet.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Unity 8 Desktop Preview Image Available For Ubuntu 14.10

            A session happened this morning about the Unity8 Desktop Preview Image as a way for early adopters and developers to try out the Unity 8 and Mir stack ported to the desktop on the Ubuntu 14.10 base, while the official Ubuntu 14.10 release image will still be using Unity 7 with the X.Org Server. Those interested in learning more about this image and the plans can find the details via summit.ubuntu.com with the Google Hangout Video plus notes.

          • Intel Core i7 4790K: Devil’s Canyon Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

            The Core i7 4790K has an 88 Watt TDP over 84 Watts on the Core i7 4770K but aside from the higher clock frequencies and thermal/power improvements, the i7-4790K shares much in common with the i7-4770K when it comes to being a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, 22nm manufacturing, DDR3-1600MHz memory support, and sports HD Graphics 4600. Like the i7-4770K, the HD Graphics 4600 top out at 1.25GHz. Pricing on the Intel Core i7 4790K is currently about $340 USD from major Internet retailers.

          • 14 Apps To Boost Ubuntu

            Making the switch to Ubuntu – or any popular Linux distribution – is more than the mere act of changing operating systems. You must also have apps that allow you to get work done.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 Release Candidate 1

              At Bodhi we work firmly on a “its ready when its ready schedule” as opposed to sticking to our set release goals and churning out something we are not happy with. Better late than never as the saying goes! Just ten days after the targeted release date I am happy to share our first Release Candidate for Bodhi Linux’s third major release…

            • Review: Pinguy OS 14.04 LTS “Papercut”

              This was originally supposed to be a comparison test against Antergos, which is another distribution that ships GNOME 3/Shell and aims for new users to Linux. Unfortunately, Antergos refused to boot. Therefore, what is left is a typical review of Pinguy OS, albeit with some more critical remarks than usual about how well it really caters to newbies (left over from when this article was a comparison test). Follow the jump to see what it is like…

            • Linux Mint 17 KDE RC “Qiana” Available for Download, Is Based on KDE 4.13.0

              This current version of Linux Mint 17 KDE “Qiana” comes with KDE 4.13.0, which is the latest version available right now. The rest of the packages are in place and, if you ever opened a KDE-powered distro, then you won’t be surprised by anything.

              Just like the other flavors that have been released so far, this one is also based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will benefit from an extended support period, after it becomes stable, of course. The Linux mint developers announced a while ago that they intended to only base their distros on LTS versions of Ubuntu…

            • Meet Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’

              If the end of XP demonstrated anything, it’s that disruption ensues when an OS reaches end of life. Linux users have long had LTS releases to stave off some of that, but the new Linux Mint 17 offers even more stability. Not only will it be supported until 2019, but it’s also built on a base that was made to last.

            • Linux Mint 17 OEM images released to manufacturers

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny open-source module aims to make IoT apps easy

      WeIO is sampling a tiny open source board, running OpenWRT Linux on an Atheros/MIPS module, that enables IoT applications controlled entirely via HTML5 code.

      Billed as “The Web of Things for Creators,” the fully open source, GPL3-licensed WeIO module is notable for its HTML5 programming interface and Python-based Tornado web server. Together, these let you connect and control objects from any device using only a web browser, says Paris-based WeIO. Designed for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, WeIO lets developers easily connect objects so they communicate with each other, or hook up to Internet services like social networks, says the company.

    • Wireless speakers run Linux, control IoT stuff

      Musaic is prepping an OpenWRT Linux and AllJoyn AllPlay-enabled wireless speaker and Internet radio that doubles as a home automation hub.

      U.K.-based Musaic ended its Kickstarter round in April, surpassing its goal of raising 60,000 U.K. Pounds, and promising products by September starting at 160 Pounds (about $269). Recently, the Musaic system was selected along with four other finalists by the John Lewis JLAB technology incubator program, which starts today. Commercial sales will open in the fall.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • OnePlus One Review: The CyanogenMod Powered Smartphone That Outclasses The Android Competition

          OnePlus has managed to create a bit of a buzz around their latest smartphone. Called ‘One’ (but I’ll go with the OnePlus One for most of this review to avoid the confusion with HTC) this is a handset that goes out of its way to be attractive. The styling is simple but functional, the specs are close to the top of the range in the world of Android, and the price is stunning. It’s not a typo, it actually starts at £229 in the UK ($299 in the US) for the 16 GB model.

        • Galaxy S5 vs. Nexus 5 vs. iPhone 5s

          When a buyer goes to purchase a new smartphone, he or she is often confronted with a tough choice. With so many flagship smartphones in the market today, which ones to choose from? There’s the Galaxy S5, which is a widely popular phone from Samsung and then there’s the iPhone 5s, which comes from the world’s most valuable tech company. And, as if that wasn’t confusing enough, Google offers its own flagship device known as Nexus 5.

          While the three smartphones mentioned above are wildly popular, users have a tough time investing their hard-earned cash into. That’s why, we’ve written this article to help you buy the best phone amongst the big 3. So, without further ado, here’s a quick comparison between the Galaxy S5, Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s.

        • Turning a smartphone into a PC in a pocket: Q&A with Analogix

          Q: Where and why is SlimPort being implemented?

          A: SlimPort was first implemented in the Google Nexus 4 back in 2012 and has continued to be used in a number of high-end tablets and smartphones from Fujitsu, Asustek, LG, and ZTE, as well as finding its way into Chromebooks from brands like Hewlett-Packard (HP), among others. The key is that the technology enables more features and can reduce costs. For example, users want to have the ability to take mobile audio and video and get it up on a big screen. Previously, the ability to get the video off of a tablet/smartphone was typically done by running it through a micro-HDMI port. Using SlimPort allowed the OEMs to drop the micro-HDMI port and simply run everything through the five-pin micro-USB port that is needed for charging. SlimPort simply takes control of the connector when a SlimPort dongle is plugged in, and while the devices are connected, SlimPort enables the display to also charge the mobile device. In 2013, support for Full HD was added but we really expect the technology to take off this year with SlimPort Pro.

        • CyanogenMod 11.0 M7 Released

          Release day is here again, with CM 11.0 M7 hitting the download servers. Last week’s post included the highlights from the changelog, but we’ll it again for those of you who prefer tl;dr.

Free Software/Open Source

  • VLC reveals it is working on Chromecast support for iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac

    Most everyone, at least the tech-savvy who read this, are familiar with VLC Player — the Video LAN Client. It’s a jack-of-all trades media player, that is capable of handling pretty much any format you can throw at it, no matter how obscure it may be.

  • VLC announces iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac support for Google Chromecast
  • OPENDAYLIGHT DEVELOPER SPOTLIGHT: LUIS GOMEZ

    Luis Gomez is Principal Software Test Engineer at Brocade and currently coordinates the Integration Group at OpenDaylight. Prior to this, Luis worked many years at Ericsson in end-to-end solution integration and verification for radio, fixed, core and transport functions…

  • Open Source Persistence: Resistance Is Futile

    One problem is that the GitHub generation does not seem to care as much about code vetting as did coders in earlier years. In the time span from 2007 to 2010, open source became very popular. Enterprises tried to manage it, according to MongoDB’s Assay.

    “My sense is that developers do not really look at licenses any more. They are not even looking at which license is applied and does it comply. I think these are issues that attorneys look at, though. I do not think the developers are thinking a lot about the licenses anymore,” he said.

  • DARPA gamifies open-source software testing

    Secret-squirrel military tech bureau DARPA has designed a series of computer games which can help to verify open source software.

    It is working on the games under the auspices of its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification programme.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Reports Cites Google Surpassing Microsoft in Browser Market Share

        ADI technology analyst Tyler White speculated that two underlying market forces are boosting Google’s numbers. “First, device defaults matter,” White said. “Internet Explorer leverages its Windows OS dominance to gain share as the default Web browser for the majority of people online. Today mobile OS is more important, giving Google and Apple a leg up with default status on Android and iOS.”

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 30 Binaries Now Available

        The Firefox 30 release announcement is imminent with the source and binaries for the upcoming browser update now being available.

        For those interested, Mozilla Firefox 30.0 can be obtained from the Mozilla FTP server while we’re still waiting for the official release announcement, which is likely coming in the day ahead.

  • Education

    • 16 FOSSisms all educators should know

      Ellis, who co-coordinated POSSE with Drexel professor Greg Hislop, told a crowd of nearly 20 faculty members from colleges and universities across the country that embedding their computer science students in open source communities could facilitate a kind of engagement traditional classroom experiences just can’t offer. But, she said, students and professors alike should be prepared for a bit of culture shock if they aren’t prepared to embrace the open source way.

      So Ellis derived 16 maxims from free and open source culture—what she calls “FOSSisms”—to explain how open source values might transform computer science education.

  • BSD

    • DragonFly 3.8 Finally Brings USB 3.0 Support

      DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.

      DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.

      “DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Voice of the Masses: Free Software vs open source – what do you use?

      RMS argues that “open source” misses the point, but a counter argument is that the name “Free Software” can sound like “free as in beer” – like malware-ridden Windows freeware. So we want to hear from you: which term do you use? Is it really important to you? Do you think RMS should have chosen a better word than “Free” originally, such as “Libre”?

    • ble http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2014-06/msg00006.html

      As anticipated, 3.15 was released upstream earlier today, and the scripts I updated yesterday have now done their job: 3.15-gnu sources are now available at http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ and shortly on mirrors too.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Australian government will go Drupal

      Tender documents issued this morning have confirmed that the Australian government will push ahead with seeking to build a whole-of-government content management system based on the open source Drupal platform.

      The Department of Finance has made an approach to market seeking request for proposals for ‘GovCMS’, which the RFP states will be based on Drupal and delivered via a public cloud service.

    • Here’s What’s Missing from the ‘Technology Manifesto’

      Although it’s good to see open standards in there, it’s disappointing that the Policy Exchange did not go further and call for open source, which is the most effective way of implementing those open standards. Simply mandating open standards allows lock-in through inertia – the argument being that the re-training costs etc. etc. make moving to new implementations of open standards too expensive. That’s a ridiculous way of looking at things, because it pretty much ensures that the status quo is maintained. What the Manifesto should have called for was a default use of open source software throughout government, unless there are compelling and clearly-articulable reasons not to take that route.

  • Licensing

    • Why Your Project Doesn’t Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement

      For nearly a decade, a battle has raged between two distinct camps regarding something called Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs). In my personal capacity, I’ve written extensively on the issue. This article below is a summary on the basics of why CLA’s aren’t necessary, and on Conservancy’s typical recommendations to its projects regarding the issue.

      In the most general sense, a CLA is a formal legal contract between a contributor to a FLOSS project and the “project” itself0. Ostensibly, this agreement seeks to assure the project, and/or its governing legal entity, has the appropriate permissions to incorporate contributed patches, changes, and/or improvements to the software and then distribute the resulting larger work.

Leftovers

06.08.14

Links 8/6/2014: Valve Funds Mesa Development, SQLite 3.8.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 3:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Diving into FOSS

        Before sometime I got in touch with KDE community and was overwhelmed by it. Then I became a member of this community and started exploring about open source environment. The most fascinating thing about KDE community members is how committed they are to open source technology. Through IRC I would be able to contact with genius coders all over the globe. It’s been quite a time that I am using open source software. It is very much important to aware people about open source. We can have access to all robust and efficient soft wares for free. After being a part of KDE it interested me to use open source systems and I am really enjoying this.

      • Plasma Active on Qt5/KF5: Wallpapers and Activities Configuration
      • The future of activity switching

        The new pretty thing that is taking away my time is the activity switcher which got a rather big revamp for the next release of Plasma.

      • Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on Arch User Repository

        As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.

        Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories

        So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.

      • GSoC 2014: KDE Games

        I am Anuj Pahuja(alasin), a Computer Science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, India. It is my first GSoC and I can’t thank KDE Community enough for accepting me as a student.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Get Your Ubuntu to Look like Mac OS X with a Simple Theme

        Most of the themes that can pull this Mac OS X transformation work on desktop environments like GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and so on, but not all of them work in Unity. The designer of this particular version made it compatible with GTK 3.10 and it works in Ubuntu as well.

        “The goal is to keep it as close as possible to ambiance on the code base with the same look as the original cupertino. If that isn’t possible for an element I will prefer the look of cupertino,” said the designer on gnome-look.org.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Release Announcement: LinuxBBQ “Cream”
      • GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1 Gets New Debian Base Update

        GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, has been released and is now available for download.

      • Robolinux 7.5.3 OS Wants to Keep You Safe from NSA

        Robolinux 7.5.3 is a fast and easy to use Linux distribution based on Debian, and its developer thinks that it can be the solution for people who look to protect their privacy.

        If you remember from previous releases of Robolinux, the developer of this particular distribution came up with a working idea on how to move people from the Windows platform to Linux without them having to give up their favorite applications.

      • SparkyLinux 3.4 LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt Distros Are Based on Debian Jessie

        SparkyLinux 3.4, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt desktops is now available for download.

        The SparkyLinux 3.34 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie” and is not all that different from the previous versions in the series, at least not in this particular aspect.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva Lx 2014 review

        OpenMandriva Lx 2014 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux. It is one of the distributions that rose out of the ashes of Mandriva Linux; the other being Mageia, and, to some extent, ROSA Desktop.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Apple Copies Ubuntu, Pimping Scientific, and 500 Steam Games
      • The ultimate Scientific Linux pimping guide

        Several weeks back, we reviewed Scientific Linux 6.5, a rather spartan incarnation of the legendary RHEL 6, which might be considered too boring and outdated for modern home use. Well, not so. Once long ago, I showed you how to transform CentOS into a home use beast.

        Today, we will do it again, with the most comprehensive guide on Scientific Linux pimping ever made on Planet Earth. Here, you get a bit of everything, and then so. Best of all? This guide is also relevant for CentOS and even Fedora, so make sure you keep it close to your heart. Let’s go.

      • Fedora

        • Public Fedora Board Meeting — Monday June 9th 2014

          Matthew Miller just announced that fortnightly public Fedora Board meetings are starting up again. The first meeting will be on Monday the 9th of June at 17:00 UTC time. (Matthew notes in the email to fedora-announce that the command date -d ’2014-06-09 17:00 UTC’ is an easy way to convert this into the timezone on your Fedora machine.)

        • More fedora.next branding ideas

          We previously posted about some of the logo design ideas that Máirín Duffy was working on for the 3 products of fedora.next (Cloud, Server, and Workstation). Since that post, Máirín has also posted a bunch of other iterations, and I also entered the fray with a few ideas of my own. Now, Máirín has done another round of design ideas. Check them out, and join the discussion over on her blog.

    • Debian Family

      • Elive 2.2.6 beta released

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Apple introduces Unity Scopes-like search and no one cries foul

            This week, Apple announced the new OS X Yosemite, and Linux users across the Linux-verse stood up and proclaimed “Oooo, I’d like to lay my hands on the lily-livered swab is writ that forgery!” Why so up in arms? Because Apple has done what Apple does — riff on features from other platforms and claim they’ve recreated a wheel that will make your life far easier. What did they do this time? Let’s chat.

            One of the big features of OS X Yosemite is included in the Spotlight tool. For those who don’t know, Spotlight is the OS X search tool that, up until Yosemite, searched the local drive. As of Yosemite, anyone who has touched the Ubuntu Unity Dash will notice something very similar to Scopes.

            [...]

            When Ubuntu released Unity Scopes, a very large and very vocal group from the Linux community cried foul, that Scopes was an invasion of privacy, was insecure, and would probably steal their identity…

            …maybe not that last bit. But there was plenty of backlash from the community (many of whom didn’t even use Ubuntu).

            How will the Apple community react when they start using the Scopes-like feature in Yosemite? They’ll love it. They’ll realize how convenient it is to be able to, from one location, search their local drive, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and countless other sources.

          • Ubuntu 14.04 – There has never been a better time to switch to Linux

            You would think that writing about the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 would be easy but it is hard to write about one of the biggest Linux distributions without repeating everyone else’s sentiments or covering the same ground that was covered with Ubuntu 13.10.

            With that in mind please don’t be disappointed that much of what I will be writing here has been written before.

            There is nothing revolutionary about Ubuntu 14.04, especially if you have already tried Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04. The improvements to Ubuntu have been slow and steady.

          • Meizu Will Present A Meizu MX3 Phone Running Ubuntu Touch, At The Mobile Asia Expo 2014

            Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2014) in Barcelona, Canonical has announced the first two phone manufacturers that will create Ubuntu Touch-based smartphones: Meizu and Bq.

          • More OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Found, Ubuntu OSes Get Patched

          • Flavours and Variants

            • An Ubuntu MATE Desktop Spin Might Still Materialize

              There’s been much talk in the past about creating a spin/derivative of Ubuntu Linux using the MATE Desktop Environment fork of GNOME2. While no spin materialized for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, talk of developing a new spin is again happening.

            • Ubuntu Might Get An Official Ubuntu MATE Flavor Soon
            • Linux Mint 17 Qiana MATE : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

              Linux Mint 17 Qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.

              Linux Mint usually comes with four desktop editions: Cinnamon Desktop Environment, MATE Desktop Environment, KDE and XFCE, although currently, only Cinnamon and MATE editions are available, XFCE and KDE edition should arrive shortly.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Your Android phone, now with NSA-grade security

        NSA-grade security is now coming to an Android device near you.

      • Tizen-powered Samsung Z smartphone with open source mobile OS

        The Samsung Z looks and feels very much like Samsung’s Android smartphones. There’s the tiles section at the top of the home screen, with some app icons at the botton, and there’s the pull-down notifications and settings tray at the very top. You also get the hardware Back and Menu buttons, in addition to the main Home button. The Settings app looks almost identical to Samsung’s Android version.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Solutions

    LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for accessing directory services. It runs on a layer above the TCP/IP stack incorporating simplified encoding methods, and offers a convenient way to connect to, search, and modify Internet directories, specifically X.500-based directory services. It is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol. LDAP utilizes a client-server model.

  • Nine Advantages of Open Source Software

    While it initially seemed revolutionary, open source software is actually rooted in traditional IT processes. Technology, after all, has always been about collaboration and continuous improvement. (In the early days of the ARPANET, for example, researchers established a “request for comments” procedure to improve the project.) Of course, there have been trepidations raised about open source. But the always-active open source communities are more than happy to address any concerns. As a result, more than one-half of the software acquired over the next several years will be open source, according to industry research.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • SQLite 3.8.5 Arrives with New Features

      SQLite 3.8.5, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine, has been released with an impressive list of changes and improvements.

      Most of the SQLite releases are maintenance ones, but from time to time the developers make some important changes. The current update features a few new options, so an update is recommended.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3 Beta 2 Is Now Available

      One week after FreeBSD 9.3 went into beta, the second beta update is now available.

      FreeBSD 9.3 is the next major FreeBSD 9 update due out that brings down some features from FreeBSD 10.0 like the Radeon KMS/DRM driver support, Xen HVM support, Apple MacBook trackpad support, disables hardware random number generators by default, and has a ton of other changes.

      FreeBSD enthusiasts can find out more about the forthcoming 9.3 update via the tentative release notes. FreeBSD 9.3 is expected to be officially released in mid-July.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNUstep’s position on Swift

      I wanted to make this post to make it clear to the community regarding GNUstep’s position on the new Swift language. If the language is released as open source then GNUstep will fully support it. If it is, however, not released as open source then we will either take steps to create an implementation ourselves or provide any assistance needed to a group of people other than ourselves who are willing to take that on.

    • We’re glad you liked Email Self-Defense. Let’s take it even farther.

      Yesterday was a big day for defending our freedom and privacy on the Internet. The FSF and its supporters joined the ranks of thousands for Reset the Net, the biggest-ever day of action against bulk surveillance.

    • Theming and Style in GNUstep

      Not only the pixmaps and colours can be changed, also the style of the interface. This include the menu style (vertical, in-window or Mac OS style), the scrollbar position (right or left), the behaviour of contextual menus, popup list and pulldown list (so these can have similar behaviour of the gtk components). The Silver theme include an style that let users run GNUstep’s apps on, for example, Gnome without problems.

    • GNU remotecontrol: Newsletter – June 2014

      GNU remotecontrol relies on OS file access restrictions, Apache authentication, MySQL authentication, and SSL encryption to secure your data. Talk to us you want to find out how you can further strengthen the security of your system, or you have suggestions for improving the security of our current system architecture.

    • GNU Nettle 3.0 Cryptographics Library Released

      The developers behind the Nettle project are out with a new major update to their dual-licensed GPLv2 and LGPLv3+ cryptographics library.

Leftovers

06.07.14

Links 7/6/2014: ‘Linux is Everywhere’, Valve Games Milestone (500)

Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux is Everywhere….So where do we go from here?

    We all know that Linux has changed the world….in small ways and large One of the ways it’s changed the world is by changing the way work gets done in corporations, big and small, around the world. As with the computer itself, the effects of ever-advancing Linux seem evolutionary and “slow & steady” from day to day. But in the 20 years since its introduction, the impact Linux has made in macro is truly staggering!

    Today everything from cars and jets to every supercomputer and most servers in datacenters have Linux somewhere…doing something important. Linux is, indeed everywhere! How’d that happen? And more importantly, what will happen next?

  • Why (Linux-)devs use Macbooks

    And I think that’s why many people prefer OS-X over Windows or Ubuntu/Fedora. For everyday tasks as email, picture stuff, booking flights, doing taxes etc. OS-X definitely offers a good solution. And being UNIX-y enough to be used in a Linux delpoyment context, you get a good compromise.

  • Desktop

    • Chromebooks Can Finally Play Movies and Shows Offline

      When Google launched Chrome OS, it touted it as a nearly entirely cloud-centric operating system. In fact, it wasn’t designed to store data or applications locally at all, or do anything local, really.

      Since then, Google has wisely hedged that bet, and it is doing so in a big way as it finally gives Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies and TV offline. Google announced offline viewing last month and new Chromebooks are indeed pulling the feat off via a new app for Chrome OS.

  • Server

    • Oracle, Extreme Join OpenDaylight SDN Group

      Oracle and Extreme Networks are the latest companies to join the vendor-driven OpenDaylight Project, which is developing an open-source platform for software-defined network and network-functions virtualization.

      Also joining the group June 5 was supply-chain services firm Flextronics, bringing the total number of members in the consortium to 39. The numbers have more than doubled since April 2013, when Cisco Systems, IBM and 16 others announced the formation of OpenDaylight.

    • Why are Linux professionals in such high demand?

      There’s no doubt that Linux professionals are in high demand. But how much are they getting paid? I took a peek at the average Linux salaries page on SimplyHired and it was quite interesting to see how much various Linux jobs paid. See for yourself in the image below. You can also compare Linux salaries on that page, and you can search SimplyHired for Linux jobs in your area.

    • OpenDaylight SDN Grows to 39 Members with Oracle

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.16 Handles 64-bit ARM EFI Stub Support

      The “ARM64″ pull request pertaining to EFI was sent on Thursday. This newest 64-bit ARM EFI patch-set enables EFI stub support similar to the x86 EFI stub support. The Linux EFI stub kernel support on (U)EFI systems to let the firmware function as the bootloader and to boot directly into the kernel without having to deal with a separate bootloader such as GRUB2 or Gummiboot.

    • Sound Support Gets Updated For The Next Kernel Release

      Most of the sound driver updates for Linux 3.16 revolve around ASOC (ALSA System-on-Chip) changes but there’s also a number of other noteworthy commits. HD Audio changes include Tegra HDMI support, a ThinkPad T440 dock fix, Realtek codec updates for several chips, Firewire audio support improvements, and various other changes.

    • Many ACPI & Power Management Changes Head Into Linux 3.16

      Rafael Wysocki has sent in his ACPI and power management pull that will target the next Linux kernel release cycle.

    • Understanding Intel’s RAPL Driver On Linux

      For many months now Intel has been working on RAPL support within the Linux kernel as part of their power-capping framework as a power feature for Intel hardware on Linux.

    • Trying Out kGraft Live Kernel Patching On Ubuntu Linux

      Graft is the SUSE-developed approach to live-patching the Linux kernel as another reboot-less option similar to Ksplice.

      Besides kGraft and Ksplice, Red Hat coincidentally shortly after the release of Ksplice had announced Kpatch as their means of live patching a running kernel. Both Red Hat and SUSE have open-sourced their live patching mechanisms and both hope to have their solution mainlined, or some unified form of both. While no solution has been queued up for merging in the Linux 3.16 kernel, there still is a lot of interest by Linux developers in these solutions.

    • Linux Kernel 3.10.41 LTS Is Available for Download

      The amount of changes and enhancements for this branch of the Linux kernel is rather large and the developers have added numerous drivers and other improvements. This is an LTS release and it’s likely that it will be updated for a long time.

      “I’m announcing the release of the 3.10.41 kernel. All users of the 3.10 kernel series must upgrade.”

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Calligra-powered Okular plugin for ODT, DOC & DOCX

        You might know that Okular has a plugin system, for adding support for more document formats. And you might know that Calligra since years also provides a plugin to Okular, which adds support to view slides from files in the OpenDocument Presentation (ODP) format. And not only for the ODP format: by simply using the Calligra import filters for PPT and PPTX you can also view the slides locked away in those formats.

      • Preview GCompris Qt 0.11

        Just a little video showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.

      • Political Map for Marble

        I am glad that I accomplished my first task to integrate political map with marble.

      • KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 Gets More Improvements

        A new development build of KDE Frameworks 5 is now out and the developers are making great progress. If things continue to evolve according to the plan KDE has laid out, we should see this new desktop environment pretty soon.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Popular Faience GTK / GNOME Shell Themes Updated For GNOME 3.10 [Ubuntu 14.04 PPA]

        A year and a half after the previous release, the beautiful Faience GTK / GNOME Shell theme pack was finally updated and it now supports GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10.

      • GNOME: Notify me

        Over the past several GNOME releases, we have been aiming to stabilise GNOME Shell as much as possible. We have been largely successful in this: the last major UI change was in 3.10, when we introduced the combined system status area, and the main improvements in the recent 3.12 release were for performance and bug fixing. This is a good thing. At the same time, there is one area where a number of us still feel that bigger changes are needed. This is notifications, particularly the Message Tray.

        In this post, I’m going to present a new set of designs for notifications and the Message Tray, which we’re hoping to implement for the next GNOME release. As ever, these aren’t set in stone and are in a state of evolution. The aim of publicising the designs is to get feedback so we can improve them.

  • Distributions

    • RoboLinux Smooths the Linux Migration Path

      RoboLinux is a robust Linux desktop solution for a home office, as well as for SOHO and enterprise users looking for a well-protected migration path away from other operating systems. Its modified traditional desktop design and built-in virtual machine packages for running windows XP and Windows 7 from within the Linux desktop make it an easy and reliable option.

    • Kali, Makulu, and Robo Linuxes

      In today’s Linux news, LinuxInsider has a review of RoboLinux saying it “smooths the Linux migration path.” Makulu Linux 6.1 is said to be “big, beautiful, and fun.” A new flaw has been patched and Shawn Powers discusses the new Linux professional.

    • New Releases

      • Black Lab Linux 5.0.1 released

        Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0.1. With this release we bring some much needed overhaul and advancements to our Linux desktop to make it the most stable, and easiest to use yet.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Valve improved X-Box gamepad driver for Fedora

          I’ve added to the Steam package repository for Fedora an alternative kernel module for xpad, the X-Box gamepad driver. This variant contains patches created by Valve to improve the driver and its behaviour.

          The module is available in both akmod (RPMFusion) and dkms package formats.

          This made my 3rd party X-Box controller work without any issue in Steam games and in the Big Picture Mode interface!

        • The new (potential) notification system for Fedora

          This new design allows for a greater amount of detail when glancing at your notifications, rather than just an icon, and the number of unread notifications. The upstream developers seem to be targeting getting this new design implemented for GNOME 3.14, so hopefully we should see this in Fedora 21 Workstation.

        • The new Fedora Project Leader is…

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-based NAS hosts private clouds and VMs

      Qnap unveiled a Linux-based, SOHO-focused “TS-X51 Turbo NAS” device with 2-8 HDD bays, plus private cloud sharing, video transcoding, and virtualization.

    • Wireshark support for AllJoyn: What it means for Internet of Everything developers

      The AllJoyn open source project is the core interoperability framework hosted by the AllSeen Alliance and works on Linux, Android, iOS and many other operating systems and platforms. This ability to discover, connect and interoperate regardless of the OS or manufacturer will enable a simple, seamless and universal experience for consumers and businesses.

    • Arynga and Mentor Graphics Showcase Over-The-Air Updates for Linux-Based…
    • Introducing the Linux Development Module for Rockwell Automation Processors
    • More APUs For Embedded And Mobile Devices
    • World’s first emotional robot runs Linux

      SoftBank and Aldeberan have teamed up on a Linux-based, $1,930 personal robot named Pepper that can read emotions and respond autonomously.

      As we gradually approach the “singularity” when robots overtake human intelligence, we often comfort ourselves in believing robots will never duplicate our often troublesome capacity for emotion. Yet such James Kirkian sentiments may prove suspect as roboticists make robots more sensitive to emotions while using emotional expression to communicate.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung and Barnes & Noble are making a Nook together

          Samsung and Barnes & Noble announced on Thursday a co-branded device called the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, a 7-inch reading-focused tablet designed to compete with the Kindle Fire HDX and the Nexus 7. It’s the first sign of life in some time for the Nook brand, the lineup of ebook readers and tablets that have been consistently great but never popular enough to unseat Amazon as king of the reading device. Now, however, with the combined retail and marketing weight of Samsung and Barnes & Noble, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook may have the might to find a place once again. (And there’s only the slightest irony in the fact that Microsoft owns part of the Nook brand, meaning it now owns yet another Android device.)

        • Linux Video of the Week: Meet the First Tizen Smartphone, Samsung Z

          At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Samsung unveiled the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system. In this video, CNET reporter Jessica Dolcourt walks through the phone’s features and demonstrates its camera capabilities.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Meta blogging

    Some time ago, I read Jos’ “meta” blog post. Jos argues that contributors to free software projects should blog more regularly. In my own “meta blog” post, I will confirm everything that Jos writes and share a few of my own thoughts on why blogging is important for everyone who is part of a free software community.

  • PicasaWeb integration: Add the Miner (Update 1
  • Contributing to OSS

    Many individuals may want to contribute to Linux or some open-source software project. However, many people may not be sure where to start or how to help. Others may not know computer programming and feel that there is no way they can contribute. Well, guess what? There are many ways anyone can contribute to Linux directly or some open-source software (OSS).

  • LinkedIn upgrades its search engine and ditches an array of open source extensions

    LinkedIn has overhauled its search engine infrastructure in favor of a new system dubbed Galene, a homegrown engine designed to improve search results and problems with maintenance, the company plans to announce Thursday.

  • An open-source robotics OS is moving from the lab to farms and even into space

    They’re routine activities for people, but this was a Willow Garage PR2 alpha robot. By navigating through eight doors and using nine outlets, it notched an important milestone—using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to accomplish its complex mission.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Mirantis offers Icehouse-based OpenStack 5.0

      Mirantis announced version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution. This version is based upon OpenStack Icehouse and is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments. I’ve spoken with company executives from time to time and have always come away impressed with their understanding of the market and OpenStack technology.

    • Hadoop Drives Storage Costs Down, Needs Friendly Front Ends

      The Hadoop Summit went on this week in San Jose, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, sponsored by Hortonworks and Yahoo. There were some interesting keynotes, including one from Microsoft on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” and Red Hat officials delved into “Enterprise Hadoop and the open hybrid Cloud.” At the Summit, it was clear that Hadoop has become a true open source success story. It’s also driving down enterprise storage costs.

    • Exploring OpenStack cloud case studies

      During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.

    • MapR, Syncsort Partner on Big Data ETL Hadoop Solution
    • Exploring OpenStack cloud case studies

      During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.

    • The challenges for enterprises going open source

      With Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of HP Helion, there are questions lingering about how the company can compete in the public cloud market, while using OpenStack as a way to get into the enterprise.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.3 Beta 2 Is Now Available for Testing

      The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new build in the LibreOffice 4.3 Beta branch, bringing even more changes than the latest update in the series. It looks like 4.3 will be quite interesting, but it’s going to take a while until it’s released.

  • Education

    • RASPBERRY PI IN SCHOOLS

      Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 10.0.2 Receives GNOME 3 and Cinnamon Updates

      According to the developers, the distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but it looks like that there is still room for improvements. The developers have made a few important changes and it’s recommended to update.

      “In preparation for the next release we have been fine tuning some of the new features and making sure the loose ends are tied up. We were also able to close out a good amount of trac tickets this week and commit the fixes for 10.0.2,” reads the official announcement.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reset the Net with our email self-defense guide

      One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA’s massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA’s job a little harder. We’re releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex.

    • Join the FSF and allies: strengthen the Tor anti-surveillance network

      Today we’re joining our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in kicking off the Tor Challenge, an effort to strengthen the global Tor network that protects Internet traffic from surveillance.

      Tor is a publicly accessible, free software-based system for anonymizing Internet traffic. Tor relies on thousands of computers around the world called relays, which route traffic in tricky ways to dodge spying. The more relays, the stronger and faster the network.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Weatherman’s best friend: How Australia used open source for its supercomputing network

      How did Australia scale up to cope with all of its public research agencies at the same time? FutureGov spoke with Allan Williams, Associate Director, Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to find out how they did this.

    • Help Labour Get Its Digital Policy Right This Time

      Long-time readers of this column may remember the great Digital Economy Bill saga back in 2010, which culminated in one of the most disgusting episodes in recent Parliamentary history, with the Bill being approved by a near-empty House of Commons in the dying hours of the last government, and with no substantive debate whatsoever. The result was an appalling piece of legislation, whose putrefying corpse is still polluting the UK’s digital landscape, acting as an ever-present reminder of just how badly the Labour treated the online world when it was in power.

      Labour is now out of power, and trying to get back into power. I leave readers to decide for themselves whether it would be better or worse than the present incumbents. Instead, I want to concentrate on two initiatives that the Labour Party is taking to help it come up with some decent policies for the digital world.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Natron 0.92 released with new roto and keying nodes

      The project is a free (Mozillla Public License v2) node-based compositor that relies on OpenColorIO for color management, OpenImageIO for file formats support, and Qt for user interface. It also works with 32bit float per channel precision and supports OFX plugins, both free and commercial.

    • Khronos Releases OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformance Tests

      The adopter program lets potential adoptees run the OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance test for possible certification as their driver’s implementation being conformant to the official specification. The ES 3.1 test is obviously built atop the existing OpenGL ES 3.0 test.

Leftovers

  • Tetris at 30: a history of the world’s most successful game
  • Tetris at 30: An Interview with the Historic Puzzle Game’s Creator

  • Hardware

    • Unboxing the Intel NUC at Tizen Developer Conference 2014

      This is a quick unboxing video of the Intel NUC device that was given out to attendees of the Tizen Developer Conference 2014, and represents reference hardware that developers can use Tizen Common to test and develop their applications with.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Deep Interest of the Deep State

      The language is the language of intelligence service tasking memoranda, which Obama is consciously or unconsciously reproducing.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something

      I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.

      Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fox News Enlists Fossil Fuel Industry To Smear EPA Carbon Pollution Standards

      Fox News hosts or guests cited a discredited report by the Chamber of Commerce seven times, even though it studied a scenario far stricter than the actual rule from the EPA. According to the executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries.”

  • Finance

    • Writing Unions Out of the Story on Fighting Poverty

      The New York Times (6/4/14) took a look at one of the economic puzzles of the last few decades: If growth has been strong, why aren’t we seeing a greater reduction in poverty? Interestingly, the research the Times is relying on offers some explanations–ones the paper doesn’t see fit to mention.

    • USA Today and Wal-Mart Poop

      It’s not often that anti-corporate activists are heard from in the corporate media. Do they really need to be called “party poopers”?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Guardian Installed SecureDrop Outside The UK, Due To Legal Threats

      In other words, the Guardian, a UK newspaper, is admitting that it simply doesn’t feel safe locating its SecureDrop implementation inside the UK. For people who believe in press freedom in the UK, this is a pretty scary statement — just the latest in the past few years that have really called into question the UK’s support for a free and open press.

  • Privacy

    • The Year of Edward Snowden

      A year ago I stumbled across a story about a wor­ry­ing new sur­veil­lance pro­gramme developed by the NSA: Prism. While nobody was iden­ti­fied as the source of the dis­clos­ure, I was awe­struck by the bravery of this unknown person.

    • The Best Ways to Better Protect Your Online Privacy
    • Edward Snowden and Reset the Net: Eight ways to take back your online privacy
    • Snowden: one year on and still no action by the British government

      It’s a year since The Guardian published the first of many news stories about the scale of GCHQ and the NSA’s intrusion into our private lives. Based on the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the stories had global implications, exposing the insecurity of the Internet, straining relationships between the US and its allies and raising questions about who has control over the agencies that purport to protect our freedoms.

      And as my conversation in Germany showed, surveillance has damaged global freedom of expression, affecting the way we think when we use the Internet. There have been other consequences to free speech in the UK as well. We have fallen five places in the Freedom House world ranking of countries’ press freedom. This was as a result of legal threats made by the Government against The Guardian, the destruction of hard drives in the newspaper’s offices and the detainment of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald – one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story.

    • Why should I care about privacy, when I have nothing to hide?

      We get this a lot. There are a million answers (our favorite short one is “Nothing to hide? Really?”) but here’s something thoughtful and comprehensive to share with a friend the next time it comes up. The short version? None of the freedom and progress we’ve won over the past century would have been possible without the freedom to change things (starting with our own lives first) that privacy gives us.

      Imagine a world where you were constantly being judged by everyone around you, suffering immediately, or years down the road, for anything you did or said that was unusual, unpopular, or against the rules. In that kind of world, social and economic progress grinds to a halt, because everyone’s afraid to rock the boat!

    • Email encryption using an email self-defense guide from the FSF
    • FSF publishes email encryption guide to mark Snowden anniversary

      The Free Software Foundation has released a guide to encrypting email to mark one year since the disclosures of NSA blanket surveillance by analyst Edward Snowden.

      The British newspaper, The Guardian, carried the first story on the topic on June 6, which also happens to be the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Since then, there have been a slew of stories on the topic in newspapers all over the world.

    • In Some Countries, Big Brother Listens In Without Telling Mobile Operators

      Vodafone, the world’s largest wireless operator outside China, says governments in some countries have installed permanent listening “pipes” into mobile networks, allowing authorities to monitor all communications and data without alerting or getting cooperation from network operators.

    • Vodafone reveals secret wires allowing direct-access government spying

      Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.

    • Vodafone Reveals Government Agencies Have Direct Access To Its Network Around The World, No Warrants Required

      One of the important results of Snowden’s leaks over the last year is that the companies involved are not only becoming more open about how their services have been used by the NSA and GCHQ to spy on people,

    • Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance

      Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a ‘nightmare scenario’

    • Google’s End-to-End is Unacceptable

      2) As if #1 wasn’t bad enough, Google has chosen to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Namely, the long-standing, mature, fully-debugged gpg2 open source OpenPGP standard codebase is being rejected out of hand, again because they want to do things ‘their’ way by creating a duplicate, immature, bug-laden codebase port of gpg2 as an incomplete subset into slow, interpretive Javascript. That’s right. Javascript. gpg2 is fully compiled C/C++ code.

    • U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU

      A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.

  • Civil Rights

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts