02.20.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Recent news stories about Free/Open Source software (FOSS)
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For most students, an internship presents a major opportunity to learn and grow in a real-world environment. Interns who join an open source company or project also seem to learn a lot about themselves along the way. Recently, I asked some former Red Hat interns—both newly hired and long-time Red Hat associates—what lessons they learned by working in an open source culture and what advice they have for our next group of interns.
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Wikipedia defines “open-source” software as computer software with its source code made available and licensed with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Translated into English this just means it’s free to anyone who wants to download it. Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Google’s Android are open source operating systems and are available and easy to download even for computer illiterates like myself.
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The University of California, Berkeley, has been authorised by Alcatel-Lucent to open sauce all Plan 9 software under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.
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The takeaway from this presentation should be that , not necessarily because of the usual claims of superior quality (Many eyes make fewer bugs etc.) but because FLOSS emphasizes Freedom and flexibility. I agree with FLOSS being the right way to do IT but I still believe the FLOSS that users will use from solid distros like Debian will be featureful and of high quality as well as being Free. The Debian developers filter out most of the crud included in the depressing statistics of median number of developers and such. It’s a part of their social contract: “We will give back to the free software community
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For the last decade we’ve watched an epic contest unfold between open source and proprietary technology, and 2014 is the year that this dynamic will radically transform. The lines between open source and proprietary are becoming irrevocably blurred as proprietary firms pour resources into open source development and open source companies dial in their revenue models. Above all else, the open source community is producing the technologies businesses need to be competitive in the data-rich 21st century.
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VCs are realizing the next billion-dollar software company won’t make money from software, but from what open source enables it to deliver
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These were some of the questions asked by Amandeep, a New Delhi based owner of a small scale clothing company, when I pitched to him a few open source solutions that could make his day-to-day operations more efficient. For someone without any IT background (but a sharp business sense), these were brilliant and relevant questions. The answers to these questions won’t just help Amandeep, but if shared broadly may help reduce the apprehension of a significant number of small scale business owners, especially in India. My interactions have shown that a lot of these businesses are looking to grow, enhance their productivity, and most importantly, save costs.
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Marcus Hanwell is a physicist by training, but his background in science led him down a different path than most reseachers. Today he is a contributer to a number of open source projects aimed at helping the scientific community better analyze and visualize their data. If you’ve got a question about finding the right open source tool for a scientific application, Marcus can point you in the right direction.
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Red Hat is perhaps the most recognized player in the entire open source field. As addition to promoting its operating systems, the company has been involved in storage for quite some time. Red Hat Storage is an open platform that is available for on-premise, public clouds such as Amazon, and hybrid cloud deployment. Pricing is by annual subscription based on the number of storage nodes.
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He went on to tell me how he had looked up “Linux” on the Internet and became interested in the “free” part of software. It took him a bit to get his head around the fact that people from around the globe are contributing to FOSS for not much more than the spirit of kinship and giving. From that moment, in Eddie Baker’s eyes software became more than things you click on to make other things happen.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Closure of society, assassination, surveillance, and rendering of certain speech “a crime”
Solutions
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YaCy is a Linux OS and software stack designed to de-centralize the Internet by allowing users to build their own peer-to-peer search portals, limiting its potential only by the number of active users connected to the Internet. The technology can also be used for Intranet searches on corporate and school sites. The user only needs to download and install the software stack on a dedicated machine in order to contribute to the network.
Corporate Spying
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New leaked documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA authorized the monitoring of torrent sites including “malicious foreign actor” The Pirate Bay. The internal discussions further indicate that tracking people through multiple proxies is possible and suggest that once a release is made on Pirate Bay it’s possible to go back over old traffic to see where it originated from.
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Addressing recent concerns that its Steam anti-cheat program Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) is sending users’ browsing history back to the company, co-founder Gabe Newell took to Reddit to calm these fears.
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Requests to LinkedIn from the government for information affected fewer than 250 accounts. This number reflects the choice that LinkedIn made with regard to the disclosure of information request statistics. The government gave companies two choices for revealing national security request numbers. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all chose to report “content” and “non-content” requests separately, which the government required be done in increments of 1,000. LinkedIn opted to lump both types of requests together in their report, which allowed them to report in increments of 250.
War on Journalism
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The disgraceful judges of Britain’s High Court – who have gone along with torture, extraordinary rendition, every single argument for mass surveillance and hiding information from the public, and even secret courts – have ruled that it was lawful for the Home Office to detain David Miranda, a journalist as information he was carrying might in some undefined way, and if communicated to them, aid “terrorists”.
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A British lower court has ruled that London police acted lawfully in employing an anti-terror statute to detain and interrogate David Miranda for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport last summer, even while recognizing that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom.”
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Top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed new details about how the United States and Britain targeted the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks after it published leaked documents about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. According to a new article by The Intercept, Britain’s top spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, secretly monitored visitors to a WikiLeaks website by collecting their IP addresses in real time, as well as the search terms used to reach the site. One document from 2010 shows that the National Security Agency added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a “manhunting” target list, together with suspected members of al-Qaeda. We speak to Assange live from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has sought political asylum since 2012. Also joining us is his lawyer Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Edward Snowden
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Edward Snowden, whose leaks of government secrets have sparked an ongoing public debate about state surveillance in the U.S., delivered an address to the Oxford Union Wednesday congratulating Chelsea Manning on winning the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence.
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US government has been withholding from public much more information than is needed and the trend threatens democracy, Edward Snowden said in a video address congratulating Chelsea Manning on winning the Sam Adams Award.
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The election of Edward Snowden as Glasgow University’s new rector has been criticised as “naive” by a former CIA intelligence officer.
War on Free Speech (“for the Children!”)
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The UK government’s futile and ham-fisted attempts to purge the Internet of all of its rough edges and naughty bits are about to see international escalation. The country is only really just kicking off their campaign to impose porn filters that not only often don’t work, but also have so far managed to accidentally block numerous entirely legal and useful websites including technology news sites like Slashdot, digital rights groups like the EFF, rape counseling websites, and more. David Cameron’s government has long-stated they want this filtering to eventually extend to websites deemed “extremist” by the government, and it appears that new proposals being drafted hope to make that a reality sooner rather than later.
Just as child porn is used to justify broader porn filters, beheading videos appear to be the magic bullet into scaring people into accepting filters that move well beyond porn. According to the BBC, government-funded operations within the counter-terrorism referral unit will soon order UK broadband ISPs like TalkTalk, Virgin Media and BSkyB to expand filters to include websites declared to be promoting terrorism. As most filter opponents have warned, the slope in the UK is moving beyond slippery and is getting downright muddy thanks in part to new UK Immigration Minister James Brokenshire…
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Because there are many different actors involved – all with their role to play. There’s a lot that can be done by the ICT sector itself – after all, they make a lot of the tools, devices and services that kids use. The coalition of CEOs I set up is looking at areas from reporting harmful content to age classification – now I’m hoping we can scale up actions, reach out to and inform everyone – including with durable public-private partnerships.
War on Critics
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The NSA and Department of Homeland Security have abandoned efforts to shut down an internet site selling parodies of its logos on T-shirts, coffee cups and bumper stickers.
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The National Security Agency was worried about their image when the 1999 blockbuster Will Smith film Enemy of the State was released. In an interview with CNN in 2001, then-NSA chief Michael Hayden invited the cable news network to profile the agency in part because of the movie.
Spin and Admissions
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Responding to the revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the U.S. government has provided unprecedented transparency about the nation’s spying apparatus—all in a bid to quell public dissent—by releasing thousands of pages of once-classified documents.
The government even has released formerly secret documents criticizing itself for breaching Americans’ privacy rights while also divulging the once-secret legal basis for its bulk telephone metadata collection program. But many documents contain redactions—or black marks—in key places.
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“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will,” National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in an exclusive Daily Beast interview on government surveillance.He continued, “had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program [part of the Patriot Act]—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards…We wouldn’t have had the problem we had [with the Snowden revelations].”
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has weathered a firestorm of criticism in the months since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the NSA’s bulk surveillance activity. Since then, he has declassified numerous documents as a means of showing transparency on the part of the government. However, in an interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper goes so far as to say that had the agency been transparent about data collection from the beginning, the issue would not have exploded into a scandal.
Anti-Social Official
Getting the Word Out
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Artist Trevor Paglen spends much of his time photographing places you’re not supposed to see, whether that’s desert military bases or mountainside listening posts or classified spacecraft. His first photographic monograph, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, captured those secret spaces as hazy, nearly unreadable images: a collection of lights on the horizon, or a dark smear across the sky. He’s also reported on the CIA’s covert rendition flights and collected 70 military patches representing secret government projects.
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NSA Expansion
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On Dec. 5, the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a spy satellite called NROL-39 into space. In the midst of the Snowden scandal coupled with the revelations of NSA’s extensive spying, the NSA earned itself an Orwellian “Big Brother is watching you” reputation. Rather than try to curb this reputation, the NSA chose a logo for the rocket that reinforced it. The logo depicts a giant octopus with its tentacles wrapped around planet Earth. Beneath this image, a motto reads, “Nothing is beyond our reach.”
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DHS wants to implement a nationwide license plate tracking system. And yes, that means tracking everyone, everywhere.
Illegal Behaviour/Surveillance as “Anti-Crime”
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The U.S. government is considering enlarging its National Security Agency’s (NSA) controversial collection of Americans’ phone records — an unintended consequence of lawsuits seeking to stop the surveillance program, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
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The government is considering hording old phone records that have been amassed as part of the National Security Agency’s controversial data dragnet, the Wall Street Journal reported on its website Wednesday night.
The newspaper said that with a lawsuit filed, federal court rules may force the spy agency to stop what has been a routine purge of records older than five years — setting up an awkward choice for the government to either hold onto data that some argue has been collected unconstitutionally, or ditch it and be accused of criminal destruction of evidence.
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Opinions
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) offered a full-throated defense of the government’s collection of data on billions of American phone calls, saying Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s practices have safeguarded the nation without trampling on civil liberties.
“What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States. And I see enough of the threat stream to know that is possible,” Feinstein said at a Pacific Council on International Policy dinner in Century City.
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America is the “land of the free.” Or so we thought. The National Security Agency’s constant monitoring of American citizens through their Internet use has led many Americans to feel like their freedom and rights are at risk.
Until last year, many people were unaware that the American government was tracking their every move. Some were not even sure what the NSA actually was. When Edward Snowden released NSA secrets to the public in 2013, citizens were outraged. I remember feeling violated by the government when I found out that the NSA tracks pretty much everything we do through technology.
War on Silent Protest
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A former CIA analyst claims in court that police at George Washington University “forcibly and falsely” arrested him for turning his back to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a 2011 speech on Internet freedom. McGovern says the arrest violated his First Amendment rights, as Clinton “was not impeded or disrupted in any way” because of his “silent expression of dissent.” As he was being dragged out of the auditorium by the police, Hillary Clinton was encouraging other governments to be tolerant to protestors and respect freedom of speech.
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A former CIA analyst and antiwar activist claims in court that police at George Washington University “forcibly and falsely” arrested him for turning his back to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a 2011 speech on Internet freedom.
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The circumstances of McGovern’s 2011 arrest were marked by stinging irony. McGovern was brutalized and arrested after peacefully and silently standing with his back to Hillary Clinton as she gave a policy speech condemning authoritarian governments who repress dissenters and internet freedom.
As described in the Civil Complaint: “As Secretary Clinton was reading from her prepared remarks regarding Egypt’s dictatorship saying, ‘Then the government pulled the plug,’ the then-71-year-old McGovern was forcibly and falsely arrested by GWU police officers, grabbed by the head, assaulted, and as Secretary Clinton continued undisturbed stating, ‘the government … did not want the world to watch,’ Mr. McGovern was removed from public view with excessive and brutal force, taken to jail, and left bleeding with bruises and contusions.”
War on Due Process (Drones)
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The petition reads:
“Mr. President, Without making any exception for the president, the Constitution requires adherence to the Fifth Amendment. ‘Due process’ is mandatory, not optional. Legality is a question of law, not policy. You are not allowed to kill whoever you want on your own say-so.”
Within the first several hours, over 10,000 people had signed.
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Medea Benjamin is co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human rights organization Global Exchange. She has been organizing against U.S. military interventions, promoting the rights of Palestinians and calling for no war on Iran. Her latest work includes an effort to stop CIA drone attacks, and she is the author of a new book, “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.”
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Imagine this: a president and his top officials as self-professed assassins — and proud of it, even attempting to gain political capital from it. It’s not that American presidents have never been associated with assassination attempts before. At a National Security Council meeting, Dwight D. Eisenhower personally ordered the CIA to “eliminate” Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, then feared as a future “Castro of Africa.” “After a dead silence of fifteen seconds,” Tim Weiner tells us in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA, “the meeting went on.” And the Kennedy brothers were evidently involved in at least one attempt to kill Fidel Castro, while the CIA of Lyndon Johnson’s era mounted a massive assassination program in Vietnam. Still, in those days, something dark and distasteful clung to the idea and presidents preferred to maintain what was called “plausible deniability” when it came to such efforts. (In 1981, by Executive Order, President Ronald Reagan actually banned assassination by the U.S. government.)
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Pakistani human rights organizations have evidence that the real scale of attacks of US drones on Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan is much higher than what the official reports are saying. This means that the number of victims of these attacks (and these victims are usually civilians) is also much higher than it is commonly believed.
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Civilians are dying. Campaigners are being kidnapped. The world cannot turn a blind eye to America’s drone attacks in Pakistan
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A senior US lawmaker intends to renew his fight to require the Obama administration to fully shift its armed drone program from the CIA to the Defense Department.
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A deadly US drone strike on a December 2013 wedding procession in Yemen raises serious concerns about US forces’ compliance with President Barack Obama’s targeted killing policy, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
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Yemen’s president has said that the UK is a participant in a secret ‘joint operations control room’ in Yemen’s capital, from which individuals who are ‘going to be targeted’ are identified.
President Abdel Rabbo Mansur al Hadi made the claim while speaking to Human Rights Watch (HRW) researchers about covert US drone operations in his country.
The US, Yemen and Nato were also participants in the control room, the president added. A Yemeni government official told the researchers the room was used for ‘intelligence-sharing activities’ rather than purely for counter-terror operations.
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The president’s willingness to violate the Constitution publicly calls into question his fitness for office.
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Kinane is from Syracuse. He was arrested outside the gates of Hancock Field.
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Karim Khan is a lucky man. When you’re picked up by 20 armed thugs, some in police uniform – aka the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – you can be “disappeared” forever. A mass grave in Balochistan, in the south-west of the country, has just been found, filled with the “missing” from previous arrests. But eight days after he was lifted and – by his own testimony, that of his lawyer Shasad Akbar and the marks still visible on his body – tortured, Mr Khan is back at his Pakistani home. His crime: complaining about US drone attacks – American missiles fired by pilotless aircraft – on civilians inside Pakistan in President Obama’s Strangelove-style operation against al-Qaeda.
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Human rights group condemns missile strike allegedly carried out by the U.S. in December for killing civilians
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Stewart called Obama our “all-time leader in outside battlefield sky-killing’ and mocked the idea that he realizes it’s unconstitutional to kill an American citizen, unless it’s “an American we’d really like to kill.” And the maneuvering around this “aerial citizen reduction program” shows exactly how this White House conducts themselves.
Intervention
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Democracy and covert machinations on the scale we see today are incompatible.
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On Friday, Feb. 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. 19 of them were eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in clashes with the guards. It was just another daily episode highlighting the utter chaos which has engulfed Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011.
Much of this is often reported with cliché explanations as in the country’s “security vacuum,” or Libya’s lack of a true national identity. Indeed, tribe and region seem to supersede any other affiliation, but it is hardly that simple.
On that same Friday, Feb. 14, Maj. Gen. Khalifa Hifter announced a coup in Libya. “The national command of the Libyan Army is declaring a movement for a new road map” (to rescue the country), Hifter declared through a video post. Oddly enough, little followed by way of a major military deployment in any part of the country. The country’s Prime Minister Ali Zeidan described the attempted coup as “ridiculous”.
Others in the military called it a “lie.” One of those who attended a meeting with Hifter prior to the announcement told Al Jazeera that they simply attempted to enforce the national agenda of bringing order, not staging a coup.
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Look to your right, and you see happy Iraqis pulling down Saddam’s statue and showering U.S. Marines with flowers and candy. Was that exactly how it happened? Who really remembers? Now, you’re walking on the flight deck of what they used to call an aircraft carrier behind a flight-suit-clad President George W. Bush. He turns and shoots you a thumbs-up under a “mission accomplished” banner. A voice beamed into your head says that Bush proclaimed victory that day, but that for years afterward, valiant U.S. troops would have to re-win the war again and again. Sounds a little strange, but okay.
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Take the August 2, 1964, “Gulf of Tonkin Incident.” It was a key moment of American escalation and, by the looks of the Pentagon’s historical timeline, just what President Lyndon Johnson made it out to be when he went on television to inform the American people of “open aggression” on the part of North Vietnam. “The USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin,” reads the entry. A later one mentions “U.S. Naval Vessels being fired upon by North Vietnamese on two separate occassions [sic].” Case closed. Or is it?
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In 1970s, the CIA used this ship to capture a sunken Russian nuclear submarine — i.e., lifting a 2000-ton object from a depth of three miles to the surface. It was the most expensive intelligence operation ever and it only kind of worked.
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02.19.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of some recent developments involving Red Hat, its partners, and its desktop-centric operating system
Hortonworks
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HDP combined with Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization integrates Hadoop with existing information sources, including data warehouses, SQL and NoSQL databases, enterprise and cloud applications, and flat and XML files. Among the results are business-friendly, reusable and virtual data models with unified views created by combining and transforming data from multiple sources, including Hadoop.
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Open source technology is slowly finding its way into the public sector as governments seek to build infrastructures based on those tools, says Red Hat’s Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager for the Asia-Pacific region.
Server
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Red Hat (RHT) is taking off in the world of open source virtualization solutions for the cloud—or it has scored a major enterprise customer, at least. This week, it announced that British Airways (BA) is deploying the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform to power its private cloud, an important win for a Red Hat product that until now has seen few enterprise adoptions on this scale.
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It’s surely a testament to Red Hat’s prominence in the cloud arena that the makers of key enterprise technologies increasingly want to work with its cloud offerings, and on Tuesday, storage company Inktank provided a perfect example. Specifically, Inktank launched version 1.1 of Inktank Ceph Enterprise, an upgrade that’s certified for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
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Ceph is a massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that is playing a big role in many cloud computing deployments, as Patrick McGarry made clear in a guest post on OStatic. He noted: “Ceph, in particular, is one of these interesting pieces that plugs into both CloudStack and OpenStack. It has the potential to transform the storage industry just like the use of commodity hardware transformed the cloud industry. Built on the idea of using commodity hardware, Ceph’s innovative approach to reliability and near-infinite scalability delivers a storage platform unlike any other.”
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 is going to require applications that want to appear within their GNOME Software Center to ship an AppData file, which is a meta-data specification for providing basic data about the program. AppData is a GNOME-backed specification based on a subset of the AppStream meta-data proposal. An AppData file comes down to an XML file that specifies the basic program information like the license, name, and descriptions of the program. Screenshots of the program can also be specified via URLs. The AppData specification can be found on this web page.
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Dubbed Spherical Cow, the Fedora 18 distribution was released exactly one year ago, on January 15, 2013. The system was powered by Linux kernel 3.11 and it featured the GNOME 3.6 desktop environment for the main edition, MATE, Cinnamon, KDE 4.9, Xfce 4.10, and improved storage management.
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I’ve certainly used this feature in the Debian installer to create Xfce and LXDE systems, and I’m looking forward to doing it with the Fedora installer in the future. (Disclaimer: I did my recent Fedora Xfce installations from the excellent live media that are part of the Fedora Spins portion of the project.)
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Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution is in the process of being revitalized and will see some major changes this year. We still won’t see Fedora 21 come until at least August and there’s already lots of questions over the future of Fedora under this new “Fedora.Next” shift. How Fedora’s various “spins” will be handled also has yet to be determined given a new mailing list thread.
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For those in need of some open-source drama to get your Friday morning started, there continues to be a lot of dissenting views shared between Fedora users and developers over the future of the Linux distribution with the ongoing “Fedora.next” initiative.
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The main reason for that: Fedora.next is a huge effort that seems to make everything even more complicated. It imho is also sold pretty badly right now, as you have to invest quite a lot of time to understand what Fedora.next actually is. And Fedora.next to me seems like something the core contributors push forward without having really abort those Fedora contributors who don’t have Fedora as one of their top priorities in life.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Coverage of SliTaz GNU/Linux 5.0, Evolve OS, Distro Astro 2.0, NeuroDebian, Netrunner 13.12, m23 rock 14.1, SparkyLinux 3.2.1, Pinguy OS 13.10, Manjaro Linux 0.8.9, Tiny Core 5.2 and several other distributions which are compared and classified
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After two years of hard work, the development team behind SliTaz, an open source and minimalistic Linux distribution built from scratch, has announced that a new development (cooking) release is now ready for testing.
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Evolve OS is a new upcoming Linux distribution based on openSUSE and sporting a new desktop environment based on the Gnome 3 stack. You may immediately be thinking, is this yet another ‘Ubuntu Killer’ promising a lot and ultimately delivering little? But Evolve OS has a different philosophy and some interesting ideas. Read on to find out more.
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Distro Astro 2.0 is an excellent Linux OS to learn about the basics of a simple desktop environment as well as explore the marvels of the universe. It is also an excellent all-in-one Linux platform for astronomy enthusiasts and professional astronomers alike with some of the best celestial-studying software included. Distro Astro is an impressive and solidly performing Linux distro.
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In past articles, I have looked at distributions that were built with some scientific discipline in mind. In this article, I take a look at yet another one. In this case, I cover what is provided by NeuroDebian.
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The Netrunner distribution is a project based upon the Ubuntu operating system. Netrunner strives to be an easy to use desktop operating system that completes most tasks with free software while offering convenient add-ons and web-based solutions to round out the user experience. Netrunner ships with the KDE desktop to provide a mix of flexibility (for power users) and familiarity (for newcomers). The latest release of Netrunner, version 13.12, is based upon Ubuntu 13.10. The distribution comes with several appealing features, including multimedia support, Windows application compatibility via WINE and the Steam gaming portal software. Netrunner is available in just one edition and can be downloaded in 32-bit or 64-bit x86 builds. The project’s installation media is approximately 1.6 GB in size.
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The latest m23 release focuses on two main new features: For one, on support for Apache CloudStack® and on the other hand on the extended options to clone machines.
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The SparkyLinux development team has announced earlier today, January 31, the immediate availability for download of a new edition of their popular Linux operating system, this time based on the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.
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The desktop is mostly the same as before, so I won’t dwell on that for too much. The Axe Menu, which essentially brought the Linux Mint Menu to GNOME 3/Shell, is sadly gone, replaced by the slightly less nice GnoMenu. There is a Conky system monitor sitting on the top-right of the desktop background that also displays the date and time. Docky gives a dock on the bottom that has been expanded to full width, but for some reason it shows an opaque background until the desktop background changes (after which point the Docky background becomes fully transparent). On the whole, the desktop works decently well.
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Arch Linux is highly respected throughout the Linux community as a cutting edge, well designed, rolling-release Linux distro with superb documentation. But at the same time, it is also discarded as a non-option by many Linux users, including experienced ones, for being time consuming to install and configure.
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Tiny Core 5.2 was released yesterday as the latest version of the ultra light weight Linux distribution. The bare-bone version of this Linux distribution with the flwm window manager comes in at just an 8.9MB ISO while the “Core Plus” version with extra GUI functionality is still a mere 72MB.
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Change log:
* rebuildfstab: do not replace fstab entries for a device that does not have “Added by TC” on the line (thanks to Gerald Clark)
* init: increase the default inode count
* ondemand: don’t list extensions under subdirs in onboot maintenance
* ldd: add wildcard to support both x86 and x86_64
* busybox updated to 1.21.1 plus wget patches and split suid/nosuid for better security
* ldd: Added quotes for binaries with spaces in their names
* /etc/services: modified to suit rpcbind rather than portmap
* tc-functions: Removed the getpasswd stars to allow backspace to work
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What is a Bleeding Edge Linux Distribution ? Bleeding Edge Distribution is a distribution developed by technologies incorporating those so new that they could have a high risk of being unreliable. No matter how much we want to use these distributions, they will always have stability issues. Well, we are here to prove that wrong. Even if it sound impossible, I will give you 5 distributions that are bleeding edge as well as stable enough for daily use.
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Q. I want to install Linux on an old PC to get a few more years out of it, but I don’t know which version to use. What is the difference between Ubuntu and Mint for a new user and are there any free guides to using either?
A. Linux, an alternative computer operating system to Windows and Mac OS X, comes in many versions, or so-called distributions. Some Linux distributions are easier to use than others and each one has its ardent followers, but Linux Mint and Ubuntu have emerged as two of the easiest options for those new to the system.
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Users are confused when they first come to Linux about which distribution they should be using and I have heard people say “I was thinking of Ubuntu or Arch” or “I was thinking about Gentoo and how hard is it to use Linux From Scratch”.
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This article lists the top 10 distributions according to Distrowatch for 2013 and gives a brief outline of the purpose of those distributions and whether they are the sort of operating systems a new user or average computer user should be using as their first port of call.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Content management systems that challenge proprietary legacy
Drupal
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Drupal v7.25, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended.
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WordPress
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The open-source WordPress content management system (CMS) project officially released its 3.8.1 update on the evening of Jan. 23 and provided users with bug fixes and stability updates. The 3.8.1 release is the first update to the WordPress 3.8 platform, which was originally released in mid-December 2013.
Others
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Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A platform for PHP/MySQL, currently running on more than 11,000 sites in 40 languages.
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02.18.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Categorised outline of news from yesterday evening and so far today
Honours
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Four journalists who reported on the extent of the U.S. National Security Agency’s secret surveillance based on documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden are among the winners of the 65th annual George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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Students at Glasgow University are going to the polls to chose their new rector, with nominees including whistleblower Edward Snowden. The computer analyst was nominated by a group of students at the university who said they had received Mr Snowden’s approval through his lawyer.
War on Journalism
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First Amendment rights matter most. Without them all other freedoms are at risk. Post-9/11 policies threaten them.
Bush waged war against them. Obama escalated it. He promised transparency, accountability and reform. He called whistleblowing “acts of courage and patriotism.” He said one thing. He did another.
Press freedoms are endangered. An October Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report discussed Obama and the press.
Journalists say he’s waging war on dissent. He exceeds the worst of George Bush. He’s heading America on a fast track to tyranny.
War on Free Thought/Reading
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Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution.
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UNITED STATES AND BRITISH spying agencies the National Security Agency (NSA) and Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) are digging into the lives of Wikileaks supporters and visitors to other contentious websites, according to documents released by communications surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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US spy agency, the NSA, and its British equivalent, the GCHQ, deployed Internet surveillance technologies against Wikileaks in a campaign that also encouraged international governments to take action against the website’s founder, according to newly leaked documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Surveillance in Video Games
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“Now even when you’re just recreationally playing video games, you can’t have fun either. You have to be careful what you say. You don’t want to say a word that can flag you and you get a visit from a law enforcement officer or something,” Marmolejo said.
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Valve is looking at your browsing history right now, if a recent report is to be believed. It seems that the company’s Valve Anti Cheat system (VAC) reportedly looks at all the domains you have visited, and if it finds that you’ve frequented hack sites, who knows what actions it will take.
War on Lawyers
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Jesselyn Radack, a human rights lawyer representing Edward Snowden, has claimed that she was detained and questioned in a “very hostile” manner on Saturday by London Heathrow Airport’s Customs staff.
Radack told civil liberties blog Firedoglake that she was taken to a room to be questioned by a Heathrow Border Force officer who showed very little interest in her passport documents but subjected her to questioning about whistle-blowers Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
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She was “stone face cold” during the interrogation but afterward was shaking and in tears. “How did he know to bring up those names?”
This blatant attempt to intimidate Snowden’s lawyer, who was informed that she was on an “inhibited persons list,” comes in the wake of news that a US law firm was spied upon as it advised the Indonesian government in a trade dispute with Australia. It confirms that for the US and UK governments, nothing is exempt from their total surveillance, not even information traditionally covered by attorney-client privilege.
Australia
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Indonesia’s angry foreign minister says it “is a little too much” to suggest shrimp exports have an impact on Australian security.
NSA Leadership
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The National Security Agency (NSA) will send its recommendations for where to store telephone metadata records to President Obama later this week, the outgoing NSA director said Friday in a speech defending his agency’s surveillance tactics. General Keith Alexander, who is retiring as NSA director next month, did not say where he thinks the data should be held. President Obama recommended on January 17th that the government stop holding Americans’ phone call records, but pushing the data out to either telephone companies or to a third party are both seen as having significant drawbacks.
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The Director of National Intelligence has admitted that, in hindsight, the US intelligence community would have been smarter to disclose some details about how telephone records belonging to millions of Americans have been collected for years.
Partisanship
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Last June, on behalf all Americans, I filed two class action lawsuits against President Barack Hussein Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Justice (DOJ) and federal Judge Roger Vinson of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), who authorized and issued an illegal order allowing the NSA to intercept and collect so-called telephonic and Internet metadata on nearly the entire U.S. citizenry. Metadata allows the government to access and track the most intimate details of a person’s private and professional life.
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Drones
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There will be drone legislation introduced in the Iowa legislature addressing privacy and surveillance issues. How much more ought we be concerned with the killing of civilians (a fate much worse than losing privacy) done with the dollars, and in the name of, Iowans.
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The once-extraordinary circumstances required for the US to assassinate a human being have become all too ordinary
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In service since 1984, the American AGM-114 Hellfire missile has not only proved enormously useful in the war on terror, it has also defeated numerous efforts to replace it with something better. It didn’t help that an improved Hellfire, Hellfire II, appeared in 1994 and over 30,000 have been produced so far. These have been the most frequently used American missiles for over a decade, with over 16,000 fired in training or (mostly) combat since 2001.
Militarism
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I had a heck of a time making sense of the U.S. Navy’s new motto “A Global Force for Good” until I realized that it meant “We are a global force, and wherever we go we’re never leaving.”
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Torture
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The federal correctional institution of Loretto, Pennsylvania, where former CIA officer John Kiriakou is serving a thirty-month jail sentence, appears to be scrambling to find any way they can to stop him from sending letters from prison. He has written another letter that details what seem to be clear acts of retaliation.
Since August of last year, Firedoglake has been publishing “Letters from Loretto,” by Kiriakou, an imprisoned whistleblower who was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the George W. Bush administration. He was convicted in October 2012 after he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he provided the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter. He was sentenced in January 2013 of this year and reported to prison on February 28, 2013.
Firedoglake has been publishing Kiriakou’s “Letters from Loretto” since the summer of last year. In fact, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) considers copies of Kiriakou’s letters to be a danger to the Loretto prison: a threat to the “security, good order or discipline of the institution” or “to the protection of the public” or a document that “might facilitate criminal activity.”
In Kiriakou’s most recent letter from prison, written on February 10, he reports a threat allegedly made by a “senior prison official,” who told him months ago that officials have discussed putting him in “diesel therapy” for the rest of his sentence.
Coup
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On the same day, former military chief Major General Khalifa Hifter called for the parliament and government to be suspended, in an announcement some described as a coup attempt.
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It is quite interesting that the newspaper chose to place Hifter’s “ridiculous” coup in an Egyptian context. There is a more immediate and far more relevant context which the newspaper and its veteran correspondents should know very well. It is no secret that Hifter has had strong backing from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for nearly three decades.
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Venezuela is a country engulfed in myth in the US media. It is almost impossible to get the truth from corporate media outlets. Indeed, Venezuela may be the most lied about country in the US media. Sadly, groups that had been previously trusted like Human Rights Watch have joined the anti-Venezuela propaganda campaign and their reports on the country have been rebutted in great detail. In this current round of misinformation, the presence of propaganda against Venezuela also been evident in the social media.
The misinformation in the United States is because Venezuela is the lynch pin of the movement of Latin America away from US domination. Further, the oligarch class in Venezuela continues to control much of the media and big business interests. They are able to have a big influence on the economy, create scarcity of key goods and can impact the value of Venezuelan currency by flooding Venezuela with off-market US dollars. The oligarchs lost big in recent municipal elections and have lost national elections to Chavez and Maduro repeatedly. Not only is Venezuela a challenge to US hegemony in the Americas, it is a challenge to big finance capitalism. It has rejected the corporate-based neoliberal economics that the US is pushing throughout the world to the detriment of most people and the benefit of the wealthy. For all these reasons Venezuela is a top target of the United States and the oligarchs in Venezuela.
Police
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Thousands of farmers marched on Brazil’s capital Wednesday in the face of riot police, tear gas and rubber bullets, demanding justice for the millions of landless farmers they say have suffered for years under the country’s agricultural policies.
The farmers, organized by the Landless Workers Movement (MST), numbered around 16,000 in the streets of Brasília where they were confronted by riot police in the city center as they headed towards the presidential palace.
Many of the MST protesters today are angry that President Dilma Rousseff is backtracking from the policies of the past two administrations and allowing “agro-business to undercut chances of land reform.”
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If a recent night out at Denny’s is any indication, public life may not go back to normal any time soon for one California police officer even after being acquitted of murder.
Former Fullerton, California, police officer Manuel Ramos was one of two officials accused of beating a homeless schizophrenic man named Kelly Thomas to death back in 2011. Thomas was beaten and tasered multiple times during the confrontation, which left him in a coma. He died five days later in a hospital bed.
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A Valentine’s Day outing turned tragic for one Oklahoma family who claims five police officers beat their father to death during a confrontation outside a local movie theater.
The death is currently under investigation, and three police officers have been placed on administrative leave as the probe unfolds.
The incident occurred February 14 in Moore, Oklahoma, when an argument erupted between Nair Rodriguez and her daughter Lunahi. Nair slapped her daughter during the dispute and ended up leaving the theater. When Luis Rodriguez chased after his wife in a bid to stop her, law enforcement officials intervened and asked for his identification.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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So, could it be that CryEngine is actually about to announce Linux support? Seems not so far fetched now with this new information.
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Pixel counters, pick up your magnifying glasses: Konami has revealed that the PS4 version of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes will be the only one that runs at a full 1080 lines of vertical resolution on HDTVs, with Xbox One and last-generation players stuck at 720p resolution. Both the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will run at 60 frames per second, Konami said, while versions for the older PS3 and Xbox 360 will only run at 30 frames per second.
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One of the founders of the CD Projekt RED, spoke about why the developer of The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 has not yet shown any support towards Linux.
Iwinski believes that if you are going to support Linux, you cannot simply pick one distribution to support. Instead, he feels that CD Projekt RED would have to support at least five.
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There is very little information as to what will be in the DLC, looking at the different teaser trailers and the name of the expansion, it’s easy to put it altogether to think that it will contain at least a bunch of new scary monsters to die from.
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“Created by real world astronauts, scientists and architects. Build vast colonies and cities. Explore the many unknowns of our universe!” That’s the tagline of the ambitious space sim/real time strategy game Kickstarter project by Space Enigma Studios, who is also promising day one Linux support.
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Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians, the spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics from creator Yasumi Matsuno, has crossed its crowdfunding goal with hours to spare. The game is in development for iOS and Android devices, but the additional funding will allow the publisher Playdek to release on PC, Mac, and Linux as well.
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In GhostControl Inc you manage a team of ghost hunters and free London from paranormal terror in turn-based battles. Develop your own strategy and build your business well.
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Wow has it been a year already? A year ago today Valve released the Linux version of Steam to everyone. Removing the beta tag on the client and having the first big Linux sale.
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