12.30.12
Posted in IRC Logs at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: December 16th, 2012
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12.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Taken as a whole, 2012 was a great year for Linux. The most popular stories, however, were more about the day-to-day happenings of Linux then the big picture.
2012′s top Linux story was The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. The title said it all. We’d long known that Google uses its own house-blend of Ubuntu on its PCs, but it wasn’t until this summer that Google finally revealed exactly how its workers use Ubuntu,
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The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive.
That doesn’t mean we won’t see Linux on a tablet, but you’ll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop – clinging to a tiny percentage of the market.
There is of course Android, which does use a Linux kernel somewhere under all that Java, but when Canonical or Red Hat talk about building Linux tablets, obviously Android is not what they have in mind.
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The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception.
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2012 was the year that the Linux desktop diversified.
Two years ago, users could choose between two or three desktop environments. But by the end of the first quarter of 2012, they had at least eight choices, with more on the way.
Similarly, the year started with LibreOffice as the main office suite. But halfway through the year, LibreOffice was joined by Apache OpenOffice as well as Calligra Suite.
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Many Phoronix readers have written in over the past few days about the new effort to bring the Torque 3D Game Engine to Linux. The desire for Torque 3D coming to Linux is because the engine developers believe Linux is turning into a commercially viable platform for gaming.
Torque 3D is the game engine out of Garage Games as the successor to the original Torgue Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) but with modern functionality like deferred lighting, NVIDIA PhysX, and modern shaders. The original Torque Game Engine had been originally developed in 2001 for the Tribes 2 game but it’s been developed much more extensively since its inception.
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Desktop
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Server
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We talk to Andreas Olofsson, founder and chief executive of Adapteva, about his company’s project to create a $99 many-core pocket-sized supercomputer: Parallella
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has announced the first pre-release version of Linux 3.8, releasing it on the “longest night of the year”. As previously reported, it includes support for the Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS), which has been designed for use on flash storage devices such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and internal storage in devices such as cameras, tablets and smartphones.
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While there’s a lot of features that are new to the Linux 3.8 kernel as covered in The Feature Overview For The Linux 3.8 Kernel, there’s also several promising new features and functionality that didn’t make the cut for this next kernel release.
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Linus Torvalds is one of the most influential people in the Linux world and among the most active figures that promote open source as a real alternative.
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When one says mechanical keyboard you think gamers, at least I did. Gamers prefer mechanical keyboards because the physical act of typing is more precise. That’s it in a nutshell, the feedback provided by mechanical keyboards gives gamers another edge over the game and opponents. So, one may think Windows, because gaming in Linux is rarely as competitive. But I’m here to tell you a Linux user, not even an avid gamer, can and does love her new CM Storm QuickFire TK.
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Applications
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I think it is fairly obvious at this point onwards that as a project in itself, its no longer viable to continue development of compiz. Lots of people still use it though, so its is worth maintaining for those that use it, but nothing more than that.
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Podcasts are usually the first media I consume when I wake up in the morning and the last media I consume before falling asleep. Sadly, some of my favorites have gone AWOL over the past few years, but I haven’t stopped discovering new ones to listen to. I’m now going to tell you about the top Linux – and open-source-related podcasts making the rounds in my media player.
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The REAPER digital audio workstation software may be coming to Linux per a statement by its developers.
REAPER, short for Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording, is one of the professional audio software solutions available on Windows and Mac OS X. While REAPER can work to some extent under WINE, the development studio behind this software, Cockos, is working towards a native Linux port.
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As you may know Dan Vrátil and I are working in a brand new screen manager that will solve most of the issues that we currently have on the desktop, making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple.
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Kraft developer Klaas Freitag has announced version 0.50 of the Kraft, a software for easy business document management. As per announcement on the official blog, Main change in Kraft 0.50 is support for multiple tax rate in a single document. For example one invoice items without tax, with reduced or full tax rate are supported.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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It’s Christmas time for Linux games, Humble Bundle has launched Humble Indie Bundle 7. This version includes many cross platform and DRM free games.
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The history of Linux in gaming is quite poor, but this year so many changes happened in this area that we might be able to review top commercial video games very soon. By commercial I mean those created by most significant gaming companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda, and not indie video games. Even though real gaming in Linux based operating systems got a boost this year, emulators were everywhere to be found, for most known video game consoles.
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Much hyped god game GODUS has been fully funded on Kickstarter. The game is being developed by Peter Molyneux, who created god games Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White.
GODUS blends the power, growth and scope of Populous with the detailed construction and multiplayer excitement of Dungeon Keeper and the intuitive interface and technical innovation of Black & White.
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The Unvanquished open-source game is preapring for a great year ahead and for kicking off the New Year they will soon be releasing Unvanquished Alpha 11.
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Lately there’s been an increasing number of open-source projects sprouting up to design open-source game engine implementations around older closed-source engines to handle certain game content. Another one of these projects is Prequengine, which is for Little Big Adventure.
Among the open-source game engines that re-implement closed-source game functionality and have been talked about recently on Phoronix include Xoreos, GemRB, and OpenMW. A Phoronix reader wrote in this weekend about another such game engine project, Prequengine.
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It’s been another successful Humble Indie Bundle so far with the latest pay-what-you-want, cross-platform, DRM-free game offering approaching the two million dollar mark.
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Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 12 Loucetios”, the twelfth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features diplomacy, packing siege engines, super fancy water and more!
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Desktop Environments
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A few years ago, my neighbors asked for help securing their computer. They were running Windows, so my knowledge was limited, but I did set up a separate administrative account and add passwords to their regular accounts. When I looked at their computer a month later, they had removed both — and were back to getting viruses and malware along with their movie downloads. Their explanation? That my simple safeguards were “too inconvenient.”
“Let me get this straight,” I wanted to say (but didn’t). “It’s too inconvenient to spend ten seconds typing a password, or twenty logging into a different account to install software. But it’s not too inconvenient to have your computer at the shop every few months to scrub it clean and to sometimes lose files because you haven’t bothered backing them up.”
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Awesome, the dynamic X window manager written in C and Lua that started off as a fork of dwm, is out with its version 3.5 “Last Christmas” release.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A new screen manager is being worked on for the KDE desktop to dramatically improve the multi-monitor experience by making it work “auto-magically” or at least be “super simple” to configure.
Dan Vrátil and Alex Fiestas have been working on writing a brand new screen manager for KDE to overcome the current configuration shortcomings of the current settings panel. As Fiestas wrote today on his blog, “We are trying be as smart as possible adapting the behavior of it to each use case making the configuration of monitors as simple as plugging them to your computer.”
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The Krita community has created Stichting Krita Foundation to support the development of Krita through funding. The foundation will also help the community by organizing creative and open content projects like, Comics with Krita DVD. The have done some funding before where Lukáš Tvrdý was sponsored before actual development work and currently they are sponsoring Dmitry Kazakov, who is working on Krita performance improvements.
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Qt is one of the most important projects for both commercial and non-commercial players, especially in the embedded space. Now RIM is trying to lure Qt developers for the success of BlackBerry. If you are a developer of Qt apps RIM is offering a great deal for your Qt applications under Blackberry Qt porting program.
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The Qt project and Digia, the company behind Qt framework, have released the most awaited C++ framework for developers, Qt 5.0. The company claims that it’s one of the best releases till date and has invested a significant amount of time behind this release. It’s an overhaul of the Qt 4.x series and makes Qt fit for the future.
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GNOME Desktop
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It seems fair to say that Linux users enjoy a degree of choice that’s unmatched by the proprietary players in the desktop computing world, what with the wide variety of both distributions and desktop environments from which they can choose.
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The last few years have been troubled for the Gnome Project. Once a premier desktop environment for Linux, it has seen its market share diminish amid user dissatisfaction over Gnome 3 and accusations that the project was ignoring users. Yet, over the last six months, something important has been happening: Slowly and quietly, the members of Gnome have started trying to turn the situation around.
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There is a nice Search in Calendar, by Reda, a support for two batteries and plugged devices in Power Panel, by Allan and some mockups in Gnome Maps, by Andreas.
Keep on mind that these are just early designs that may never arrive in GNOME the way they look now, or the may arrive at all!
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The goal that Gnome board of directors set for the upcoming year is to improve the safety features of our favorite desktop environment by implementing and integrating special tools and features.
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These were my 2 first GNU/Linux distros that I used on my home desktop (actually, I met with GNU/Linux a little earlier – the very first GNU/Linux distro that I saw, it was RedHat 9.0).
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Several familiar names cropped up in the news the last few days. The Mint team finishes out their lastest family tree and the Slax guys has rushed out a couple of bug-fix updates to the recently released 7.0. And KNOPPIX got an update too.
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You know how I like to rate distributions at the end of each year? Yes, you do. However, while I do try to make those articles be as impartial and fair as possible and encompass as broad spectrum of users as possible, they ultimately reflect one man’s experience, me. Not bad, given my awesomeness, but still.
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Between the new innovations that emerge practically every day and the fairly constant rate of change in general, things never stay the same for long in technology.
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Unlike many of the Linux distributions out there today that are little more than minor user-facing changes to Ubuntu or another tier-one Linux operating system, Slax for the past many years has followed its own dance. Slax, a LiveCD Linux distribution built around Slackware, is very lightweight and calls itself a “pocket operating system” as with the most recent release it can fit a full Linux OS with the KDE4 desktop in about 200MB. Slax is also intended to be quite easy for others to modify and create custom images via Slackware packages and Slax modules. The recent Slax 7.0 release was the first update for the open-source operating system in several years. For those interested in knowing how this very lightweight and customizable operating system can work so efficiently, Tomáš Matejícek, the Slax creator, has written an exclusive Phoronix article about the process.
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Presented in two formats based on two distros, which version of Puppy stays true to the commitment of being small and fast?
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New Releases
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Steven Shiau proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 18, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.
Being based on the Debian Sid repository as of December 17, 2012, the Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15 operating system is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.35 and incorporates various improvements, bug fixes and updated translations.
This release also blacklists the floppy module from the kernel, just because none really uses a floppy drive anymore. But, in case you’re one of those people who still use a floppy drive, you will be able to manually load it by running the “modprobe floppy” command in a terminal.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Finally here is Mageia 3 beta 1. This first beta release was a bit tricky as it comes with some major new features in installer. GRUB2 has been included as an option for now.
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Gentoo Family
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When you are running Gentoo with SELinux enabled, you will be running with a particular policy type, which you can devise from either /etc/selinux/config or from the output of the sestatus command. As a user on our IRC channel had some issues converting his strict-policy system to mcs, I thought about testing it out myself. Below are the steps I did and the reasoning why (and I will update the docs to reflect this accordingly).
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Red Hat Family
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Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says “the state of the union at Red Hat is strong.”
Whitehurst took a break from running the billion dollar company to blog about accomplishments over the past year, as well as to look ahead to what he called “massive” potential in 2013.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) is a success story for troubled times. The economy falters? No problem. Southern Europe on the brink of collective bankruptcy? Sure, but sales are growing there anyway. Corporate IT budgets trimming down? Hey, that’s actually a business opportunity!
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Big Blue has been talking about the Power7-based “Blue Waters” supercomputer nodes for so long that you might think they’re already available. But although IBM gave us a glimpse of the Power 775 machines way back in November 2009, they actually won’t start shipping commercially until next month – August 26, to be exact.
The feeds and speeds of the Power 775 server remain essentially what we told you nearly two years ago. Today’s news is that the Power 775 is nearly ready for sale, and the clock speed on the Power7 processors and system prices have – finally – been announced.
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What does it feel like to be the CEO of a super-hot company as it crests the billion-dollar-revenue mark and grows to 5,000 employees?
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says that it’s hard to notice the changes. Then something happens to make you realize you are the boss of a very big place.
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Fedora
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Fedorians have a nice sense of humor, and FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the new upgrading tool for Fedora 17->18 and beyond, that replaces PreUpgrader.
Earth survived from Mayan prophecy, end of days didn’t come, and Fedora 18 release will make it at Jan 8, 2013 -hopefully
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After the 2 months delay and the 8 months release cycle of Spherical Cow, Fedora now will try to make a “Speedy Gonzales” release inside in just 4 months. This is the shortest release cycle that Fedora ever had from its day one – Nov 2003, Yarrow / GNOME 2.4 / Linux 2.4.19.
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One of the gripes of the Fedora users, and mine as well, was that it doesn’t come bundled with any office suite. Users have to manually install LibreOffice or Calligra to get some work done. This is changing now. The LiveCD of Fedora 18 Spherical Cow will be shipped with LibreOffice installed. This is a great step from Fedora developers towards usability. This change is pushed by Bill Nottingham to Fedora 18.
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Debian Family
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Welcome to this year’s twenty-fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Bits from the DPL
* Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests
* Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin
* Other news
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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It has been a while since I wrote about bitcoin, the decentralised peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the state of bitcoin in Debian again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package is now maintained by a team of people, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We owe a huge thank you to all these team members. But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt Corallo in a PPA for Ubuntu, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the Debian package.
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Derivatives
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Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD, made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by an automatic hardware detection and support for many video cards, SCSI and USB devices, is now at version 7.0.5.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Unity desktop environment is something which has intrigued me a lot over the past year or so. My interest has partly been in the strong reactions, for or against the environment, from Ubuntu users. The other key point of my interest has been that I’ve really only used the desktop in short bursts and, as a result, I don’t feel I’ve really got a feel for it. Once every six months I will install Ubuntu, play with Unity for a few days, not long enough to unlearn the habits I’ve picked up from using other desktop environments, and then I’m off to another distribution and another desktop. In these quick looks at Unity I’ve certainly encountered things which rubbed me the wrong way, but I’ve also caught sight of design features which struck me as being beneficial. Or they would be beneficial if one were to use them long enough to form new work patterns. At any rate, I wanted to find out how I would feel about Unity if I used it long enough to unlearn old habits, behaviour learned after over fifteen years of using desktops with approaches different from Unity’s. With that in mind I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on one of my machines and tried to use Unity as much as I could while still taking time to test other Linux distributions. Right upfront I want to say that it took about a week for the old habits to fade away and for using Unity’s controls to become reflex rather than considered actions. Little things like moving the mouse pointer to the right of the window instead of the left have long been actions performed automatically and they were hard to break. This led to several days of jerking the mouse right, then back left to close windows or minimize them. There was also some trial and error at first finding the best way to handle window organization, launch applications and deal with window grouping on the launch bar. Typically, I have found I am most comfortable with setting up multiple virtual work spaces, populating them with related applications and switching between the work spaces. This allows for a small number of open windows in each space and avoids programs grouping on the task switcher. Unity, on the other hand, while it does allow for multiple work spaces, the desktop appears to be much better suited to having few windows open at a time and I slowly came around to typically using one workspace and grouping program windows together, switching between windows rather than work spaces.
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Over the years, I’ve watched Ubuntu develop into quite the impressive Linux distro. While Ubuntu definitely has room for improvement, it does offer the casual user an outstanding experience overall. In this article, I’ll share the areas where I think Ubuntu is raising the bar on Linux for the masses.
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Thus going after someone like Canonical and calling what they doing spying actually hurts the promotion of free software. What they are doing is a huge step in the right direction.
Having run a business based on free and open source software for a decade, you can imagine that I am a big fan of it. Last year, for a variety of reasons, I decided to make the jump to using a desktop based on Linux. I tried a number of options, but the one that worked for me, the one that “stuck”, was Ubuntu. Using it just comes naturally, and I’ve been using it for so long now that other desktops seem foreign.
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‘Unredirect Fullscreen Windows’ option is finally enabled by default in Ubuntu 12.10. Compiz developer Daniel Van Vugt and his team has done lots of work in past few months to make sure that all the bugs related to this feature are fixed.
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Ubuntu may not quite be a religion, but it has its committed evangelists all the same. And now, Canonical has made their jobs easier with the release of an official “Ubuntu Advocacy Development Kit.” Will Ubuntu fans soon be showing up on your doorstep, asking you to convert? Probably not, but the move is an interesting endeavor nonetheless.
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Flavours and Variants
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All the Linux Mint Editions have arrived just in time for the holidays – Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce dekstops, and Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 6 with Cinnamon and MATE desktops.
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Linux Mint does it again! The thing I admire about Linux Mint is the ability to work on any type of system and refined interface that it brings on the table – every time! When I reviewed the Mint Maya KDE, I was wondering if I had seen any KDE distro more complete than this. With the Mint Nadia KDE release my impression has changed. This edition not only looks gorgeous but the KDE bloat-wares are gone to actually give the users a more functional set of applications.
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I now refrain from comparing Linux based distribution because what my needs are could be different from yours and what works for you may not work for me, but I am really impressed with Linux Mint in the ‘out-of-the-box’ experience department, it’s becoming one of my favourites along with openSUSE and Kubuntu.
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It is not far-fetched to say, open source and its poster child, Linux, is going through a golden period. The emergence of internet has a lot to do with the popularisation of open source way of thinking. But in the world of Windows and Macs, what makes Linux tick? Redhat was the first to explore Linux’s potential. But Redhat had a very enterprise centric approach. And in 2004, Ubuntu came along with the focus firmly back on end-users. This kick started a flurry of activity and a number of new Ubuntu based Linux distros started to sprung up. The latest one being elementary OS Luna. And this brand new OS has a lot going for it.
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A real, useful, open source computer, the $35 Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to use as a PBX. A DIY laptop is coming, too
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The Raspberry Pi now has an accompanying store where users can download software, raw code, tutorials, tools or games for the Linux computer.
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I decided to replace my aging Compaq mini desktop in the bedroom with the Raspberry Pi,
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[Jacken] loves his lossless audio and because of that he’s long been a fan of Squeezebox. It makes streaming the high-bitrate files possible. But after Logitech acquired the company he feels they’ve made some choices which has driven the platform into the ground. But there is hope. He figured out how to use a Raspberry Pi as a Squeezebox server so that he can keep on using his client devices and posted details about the RPi’s performance while serving high-quality audio.
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Phones
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Android
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HTC is preparing to launch an Android handset, codenamed M7, according to Unwired.com. This device, claimed to be the flagship phone, is expected to ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, skinned with the latest iteration of HTC’s love-it-or-hate-it UX enhancement, Sense 5. M7 will have 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal flash memory.
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Japanese bathrooms are about to become a little more interactive, thanks to a new smartphone-controlled toilet known as the Satis. Manufactured by Tokyo-based Lixil, this Bluetooth-enabled commode can be controlled with an Android app called “My Satis,” allowing users to flush, raise the toilet seat, and activate a bidet jet stream with the touch of a button. The app also lets you stream music through the toilet’s speakers and will automatically monitor “usage history,” giving you a better idea of how much electricity and water you’re consuming with each visit.
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A Brazilian company has risked inciting the rage of the world’s biggest technology firm by releasing its own ‘iphone’.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland has launched a new tool that allows Nexus 7 users to install the Bodhi Linux OS on their Google slates.
The new tool means that Ubuntu is no longer the only Linux-based operating system that can run on the popular Google Nexus 7 tablet. To offer this tool, Hoogland basically piggybacked on Canonica’s work with Ubuntu, and Nexus 7 owners can now install Bodhi on their tablets.
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Netbooks – those compact, underpowered, inexpensive notebook PCs once hailed as the future of mobile computing – are set to disappear from retailer shelves in 2013, as the last remaining manufacturers of the devices prepare to exit the market.
According to Taiwanese tech news site DigiTimes, Acer and Asus are the only two hardware makers still producing netbooks, and they are mainly doing so to sell them to emerging markets such as South America and Southeast Asia.
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Dell, what’s wrong with competing on price/performance like everyone else except M$? Others are making tons of money selling Android/Linux devices. So could Dell. If Dell’s business is making and selling hardware, just do it.
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Zanata is an open source translation platform written in Java that offers translation memory, an online translation editor, and workflow integration with REST APIs and command-line tools. For translators, it is a web browser-based translation environment where previous translations provide context for their work. For software developers, it’s an integration tool that provides a centralized localization repository along with translation tools that save time and resources.
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Given that now even some small open source projects are forming their own foundations, Glynn Moody thinks that perhaps open source foundations have come of age. He suggests that the time may now be right for the formation of an umbrella foundation to help share best practices, legal advice and other information and support.
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Open source used to be an aberration — now it is an imperative. If you’re not using or developing open source projects, you’re putting your business at risk. That’s the message from Black Duck Software and Forrester, as recently presented in a webinar describing Open Source software and innovation.
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DESPITE the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run to hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.
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I remember first meeting Jeffrey A. “Jam” McGuire in person at DrupalCon Denver. We talked about communities, music, and shared ways to show why open source is a better way. Even before meeting him, I could tell from my first interaction with him that he was passionate about Drupal and open source. He’s becoming an in-demand Keynote speaker and presenter at Drupal and other business and software events around the world. He’s already a staple for the Intro to DrupalCon session and always seems to incorporate music and singing as part of the performance.
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Think of all the photos and videos you’ve stored on various devices and social networks over the years. Enter: OpenPhoto, a new, open source platform all about gathering them into one place and never losing them. Their software imports your photos from Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram, and there’s an app for the iPhone (Android coming soon).
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At the same time, women make up an estimated 2% of the open source community, far lower than the percentage of women in computing overall, estimated at around 20%. Is it any wonder that women founders are so rare in Internet-related startups, when many of the founders come from a population that is 98% male?
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Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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The OpenStack open source cloud platform started out with only two components: Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Nova originally came from NASA and Swift came from Rackspace.
Over the course of the last two years, OpenStack has expanded beyond NASA and Rackspace and has been embraced by many large tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, AT&T, Cisco and Intel among others. As OpenStack participation has grown, new capabilities have been added, including most recently the Cinder block storage project and the Quantum networking project. Cinder and Quantum both debuted in the recent Folsom release.
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Databases
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For Gunnar Hellekson — a chief technology strategist at Red Hat who closely follows the government’s approach to open source software — this language posed a threat not only to Accumulo but to open source project across the government. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see that same ‘adequacy criteria’ applied to all open source software projects,” Hellekson wrote earlier this year. “Got a favorite open source project on your DoD program, but no commercial vendor? Inadequate. Only one vendor for the package? Lacks diversity. Proprietary software doesn’t have a burden like this.”
From where Hellekson was sitting, it was obvious that Accumulo was very different from the likes of Hbase and Cassandra. “When Accumulo was written, it was definitely doing new work,” he told us. “Some of its differentiating features are being handled by other pieces of software. But other core concepts are unique, including the cell-level security…. That’s an incredibly important feature, and to do it properly is incredibly complicated.”
But it appears the Senate has now backed down. In that joint House-Senate statement on the DoD bill, Accumulo is cited by name. “[The Department of Defense] has already determined that the Accumulo database that NSA developed using government and contract engineers is a successful open-source project that is supported by commercial companies,” the statement read. “[We] expect that future acquisitions of Accumulo would be executed through such commercial vendors.”
Those commercial vendors include Sqrrl. But Oren Falkowitz isn’t quite ready to celebrate. “Obama still has to sign it,” he says. “I wouldn’t jump for joy until it’s actually a law.”
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The MySQL relational database serves as a back end for millions of websites, and powers millions of non-Internet data-handling applications. In 2009 ownership of MySQL passed to Oracle when it bought Sun, which had acquired MySQL the previous year. Since then developers and IT managers have worried that Oracle would someday cease support for MySQL because it competes with the company’s profitable proprietary database products. This fear may be justified. In August, Alex Williams wrote at TechCrunch, “Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.” We tried to get Oracle to rebut that accusation, but multiple emails and phone calls did not get a response. Does this mean it’s time to move from MySQL to another open source database – and if so, which one?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Although there are many others, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are the two 800lb gorrillas of the open source office suite world. One or other comes bundled with pretty much every Linux distro out there.
Without OpenOffice.org, it’s fair to say that the OpenDocument format would never have stood a chance of becoming an open standard. Pretty impressive, when many open standards haven’t had anything like the same success (how many people – even hard core Linux users – commonly spurn mp3 files for ogg vorbis?). Because (nearly) everyone needs a word processor and spreadsheet, OpenOffice.org has long been one of the open source poster children to encourage take up – “Why pay $$$ for Microsoft Office when this is just as good and you can have it for free?”.
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Italo Vignoli today published lots of cool graphs and stats demonstating the growth and other accomplishments over the course of 2012. From the growth in number of contributors to high-profile roll-outs to increasing numbers of downloads, 2012 has been a banner year. He said, “Looking back, it has been amazing.”
Starting with the contributor list, LibreOffice had 379 contributors at the start of the year, but that number had grown to 567 by Christmas 2012. The Document Foundation also announced 14 LibreOffice releases in 2012 and the team is currently working on LibreOffice 4.0, which should be released in February 2012.
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The Oracle Java Development Kit 7 Update 10 (JDK 7u10) release provides new updating and control capabilities that go beyond what Java users have enjoyed in the past.
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Education
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Advocates of free and open source are warning that the Greek government is going to waste millions of euro on proprietary software licences for the country’s schools. They are calling on the Ministry of Education to cancel its latest procurement. “Favouring proprietary software while ignoring the potential of open source, constitutes a choking of the educational process.”
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Healthcare
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Open source in healthcare remains in its infancy. This year saw some great activity with open source in health. Our community covered medical devices with available source code, electronic patient records, open product design and 3D printing, crowdfunding, and big data. These big ideas and innovations, but I predict that as more people take personal responsibility for their health in 2013, the greater the demand will be for faster, more affordable solutions… read: open source.
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Business
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You can’t just expect a community to emerge
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Funding
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Ever since OStatic’s inception, we’ve been fans of the Piwik online analytics application, which is a free, open source alternative to tools like Google Analytics. For example, we discussed Piwik in our roundup of open source tools aimed at web developers. When it comes to doing web analytics, it’s beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with Google Analytics or on its own.
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BSD
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PC-BSD is a desktop based derivative of FreeBSD and typically PC-BSD releases follow FreeBSD releases. That’s not quite the case with the new PC-BSD 9.1 release which is actually coming out *before* the official release of FreeBSD 9.1
FreeBSD 9.1 was originally set for official release at the end of October but has been hit by some delays. Though an official announcement has not yet been made the primary FreeBSD mirror currently has FreeBSD release ISOs available (ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.1/)
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Work began on the Hurd, the true kernel of the GNU operating system, in May 1991, but it has yet to materialise as a production-ready kernel. Richard Hillesley tells the story…
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But sometimes all Stallman had to offer on the topic was “We still prefer C to C++, because C++ is so ugly”.
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The fight against DRM often pits us against some of the biggest companies and the most dominant ways of thinking in the technology business. What gives us the independence to speak out — and the power to make your voice heard –is the support of our members. Now, we need your help to keep Defective by Design strong in 2013.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) Open source software adoption by the U.S. Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or a designated country.
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The European Commission will postpone until early next year the publication of its guideline on how to make best use of ICT standards in tender specifications. Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, in a video speech on Friday said that the guideline should ensure that public authorities get the most value from open source and open standards. “And also that open source suppliers can compete fairly in tenders.”
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I wanted to share my notes with you all from this TED talk with Clay Shirky. You can watch the video—and I recommend that you do—but since I took notes I figured I’d share my textual summary as well!
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As the United States military marches further into the age of networked warfare, data networks and the mobile platforms to distribute and access them will become even more important.
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Licensing
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The European Union’s open source licence, EUPL, is to be revised, aiming to make it compatible with the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 and other licences. A public consultation begins today on Joinup, with the publication of a first draft and a background document on some of the proposed changes.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’ve seen an unbelievable interactive projection or a mind-blowing piece of generative video art, odds are you’ve come across openFrameworks, an accessible programming platform that has helped create projects like Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald’s Faces, a real-time face-substitution project, the EyeWriter graffiti headset from F.A.T. Labs, and Chris O’Shea’s playful, Monty Python-inspired Hand from Above, among many other works of technology-based art. What makes openFrameworks and similar coding tools like Processing so powerful in an artistic context is that they are open source, free for any artist to use and hack to their own ends, and are made by artists, for artists.
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Open Data
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The Commission has launched an Open Data Strategy for Europe, which is expected to deliver a €40 billion boost to the EU’s economy each year. Europe’s public administrations are sitting on a goldmine of unrealised economic potential: the large volumes of information collected by numerous public authorities and services. Member States such as the United Kingdom and France are already demonstrating this value. The strategy to lift performance EU-wide is three-fold: firstly the Commission will lead by example, opening its vaults of information to the public for free through a new data portal. Secondly, a level playing field for open data across the EU will be established. Finally, these new measures are backed by the €100 million which will be granted in 2011-2013 to fund research into improved data-handling technologies.
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Open Access/Content
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Instagram has undergone several big changes lately, most noteably taking away the ability to quickly view Instagram photos on Twitter. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom described this update during the LeWeb Internet conference in Paris as Instagram’s evolution, and explained that the company would naturally change as it grew.In an article from Business Insider on December 6, Alyson Shontell calls for Instagram to make a bolder move: to publish all photos under Creative Commons unless the photographer specifically changes their publishing license.
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Open Hardware
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Standards/Consortia
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Protecting sensitive electronic information in different situations requires different types of cryptographic algorithms, but ultimately they all depend on keys, the cryptographic equivalent of a password. A new publication* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aims to help people secure their data with good keys no matter which algorithm they choose.
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The W3C announced today that the HTML5 definition is now complete. This is a big deal for the web and all of us that work and use it…but it’s not end of the story.
The definition is not a final standard for HTML5, though it is an important milestone. HTML5 will not likely be a full bona-fide standard until mid 2014 according to what Jeff Jaffe told me during a conference call today to talk about HTML5.
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The problem on Reddit is the quality: They’re drowning in crap.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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…Paul Scott, who was a nationally syndicated columnist. He was illegally wiretapped by the agency in 1963…
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The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.
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Washington, Dec 27 (Prensa Latina) Investigations around the attack against the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, resulting in the killing of the US ambassador and another three officials, have exposed a secret CIA armed wing.
The CIA security force had been created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington and was so far an almost unknown defensive arsenal.
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The National Rifle Association and its allies would have us believe that the solution to this epidemic, itself but a sliver of America’s overall gun violence, is to put firearms in the hands of as many citizens as possible.
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In a potentially precedent-setting decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a Guild lawyer’s challenge to military spying on peace activists can proceed. The ruling marks the first time a court has affirmed people’s ability to sue the military for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights.
“This has never been done before,” said NLG member attorney Larry Hildes, who is handling the case. “The U.S. government has spied on political dissidents throughout history and this particular plot lasted through two presidencies, but never before has a court said that we can challenge it the way we have.”
The ruling is the latest development in the lawsuit, Panagacos v. Towery, first brought by Hildes in 2009 on behalf of a group of Washington state antiwar activists who found themselves infiltrated by John Towery, an employee at a fusion center inside a local Army base. Fusion centers are multi-jurisdictional intelligence facilities which house federal and local law enforcement agencies alongside military units and private security companies. Their operations are largely secret and unregulated. There are currently 77 fusion centers in the United States.
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Cablegate
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The Swedish Pirate Party wants a probe of banks’ role in the blocking of donations by Visa, PayPal and others
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Julian Assange has said, he is willing to answer questions in the UK relating to accusations against him, or alternatively to go to Sweden provided the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the US where plans are ready for him to be tried for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuse to give such assurance. Mr. Assange is right to be concerned about the dangers of extradition to USA. American media has reported that the US Justice Department and the Pentagon have been conducting a criminal investigation into ‘whether wikileaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the groups release of government documents including possible charges under the espionage act’.
Mr. Assange’s only crime is that he embarrassed the USA and powerful governments with Wikileaks release of thousands of US state department cables and of the video footage from an apache helicopter of a 2007 incident in which the US military appears to have deliberately killed civilians, including two reuters employees, revealing USA’s Crimes against humanity. For this truth telling he has inherited the wrath of the US government, and has been targeted in a most vindictive way – as has American soldier, pt. Bradley Manning, currently undergoing a military Court hearing for allegedly leaking classified documents to wikileaks. Pt. Bradley Manning has been subjected, according to formal UN investigation, to ‘cruel and inhuman’ treatment whilst held in solitary confinement in US prison for nine months. The American government has admitted to the torture of Pt. Bradley Manning, one of their own soldiers.
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Two Swedish transparency sites that have supported WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been abruptly shut down at the request, seemingly, of the Swedish defence forces.
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Despite Crippling Financial Blockade And Other Efforts To Set Them Back, Publishers Of Biggest Leaks In Journalistic History Press On
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Many documents produced by the U.S. government are confidential and not released to the public for legitimate reasons of national security. Others, however, are kept secret for more questionable reasons. The fact that presidents and other government officials have the power to deem materials classified provides them with an opportunity to use national security as an excuse to suppress documents and reports that would reveal embarrassing or illegal activities.
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“Swedish (government) officials got the impression that they were working under direct orders of the CIA” – Mike Ölander’s reportage “CIA demanded that Sweden would expand cooperation”, Expressen, 6 December 2010
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In the third part of our recent interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson, Kristinn talks about a Russian measure to form an independent banking mechanism that was the subject of diplomatic cables from the US and was susequently killed, US spying and information mining and profiling, communications analysis, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Kristinn makes the revelation that the entire foreign apparatus of the US was activated by banking concerns to stop the Russian measure.
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The best way to arrive at the truth is to first figure out what the media are trying to sell you. The people at the top are aware of all the ongoing scams and revel in them. One must understand that people at the top don’t read the MSM or turn on the telly to find out what’s happening in the world – they have their friends for that. They read and they turn on tellies to find out what’s being sold to you.
It’s an informal setup. People who don’t perform are shut out. It’s a cruel game up that high. But they’re all in for a penny and a pound and they rarely go away willingly.
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Despite the pressures from the United States and other pro-western governments, the Republic of Ecuador has granted political asylum to Mr. Assange. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has hindered the free movement of Mr. Assange even though the same government blocked the extradition to Spain of the late Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Pinochet was wanted for the murder of 94 Spanish citizens and many other charges of torture and rape against his own people. Although Julian Assange is an Australian citizen, the Australian government has refused to protect him and has instead accommodated Swedish Ambassador Sven-Olof Petersson, who supports rendition and torture. This is unacceptable in a free, democratic and transparent society.
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Here is a man who has dedicated his life (possibly literally) to defend the right to expose corruption in high places…
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Finance
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A constant conservative charge against President Obama is that he is inherently anti-business. However, businesses keep defying the storyline by making larger and larger profits, rebounding nicely out of the Great Recession.
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If you are as cynical as I am, I know you are not surprised that Facebook paid Irish taxes (via Tax Justice Network) of about $4.64 million on its entire non-US profits of $1.344 billion for 2011.* This 0.3% tax rate is a bit below the normal, already low, Irish corporate income tax of 12.5%.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who became nationally known for severely limiting the union rights of teachers and other public employees, has indicated support for arming those same school officials who apparently cannot be trusted to collectively bargain.
As Americans search for answers and policy solutions in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Gov. Walker has apparently decided that the problem is not too many guns — it is that there are not enough.
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When George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February, Zimmerman — who considered himself a neighborhood watchman — almost certainly thought of himself as a “good guy.”
In November, 45-year-old Michael David Dunn likely thought he was playing the role of the “good guy” when he confronted a vanload of teenagers for playing their music too loud, then fired nine shots into their vehicle after claiming he saw a shotgun barrel. 17-year-old Jordan Russell David was killed, and neither Jordan nor anyone else in the van had a gun.
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Censorship
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…just in time for Christmas. In better news, the Government has decided against ‘default on’ internet blocking
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Five days ago, the Department for Education announced a very reasonable approach to child protection online. Their plan was to make sure parents are supported in making easier, more informed decisions about how to keep their children safe online.
This was based on a consultation that focused on evidence, engagement with stakeholders and soliciting to the views of parents and industry.
But today the Prime Minister is singing a different tune. His article in the Daily Mail today suggests he is taking a more restrictive line, and that he wants to see ‘default on’ filtering. This has created a lot of confusion, seemingly just to satisfy the Daily Mail’s editorial whims. Are they really to be the drivers of Internet policy?
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Privacy
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Current interception and surveillance laws are simply not built for a digital age which is seeing exponential growth in the production of personal information. More data than ever before is available.
The draft Communications Data Bill is a dangerous fudge of a solution that should not simply be redrafted and brought back to the table. A fundamental review of surveillance law is the only justifiable basis for any future legislation. This should examine how pervasive, personal and intrusive data now is and what powers over its collection, storage, and use would be proportionate and appropriate.
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Civil Rights
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FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.
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The US Senate has voted to approve the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, which will authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans for counter-terrorism purposes for another five years. The bill extends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008, which granted retroactive immunity for wiretaps and email monitoring under the Bush Administration and created a framework for future warrant-free surveillance as long as one party is located outside the US and terrorism is suspected.
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Nearly 12,000 people over the past five years have wrongly been branded criminals or seen irrelevant or inaccurate information disclosed during criminal record checks.
* 11,893 people successfully challenged CRB results in past five years
* £1.98m paid out in redress
* 4,196 people challenged information held by a local police force
* 3,519 people given the wrong person’s criminal record
* 4,088 found inaccurate information or potential wrong identity on police national computer
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Oregon resident Julie Keith was shocked when she opened her $29.99 Kmart Halloween graveyard decoration kit to find a letter, folded into eights, hidden between two Styrofoam tombstones.
Coming all the way from unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China, the letter written mostly in English read,
“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”
The letter went on to describe 15 hour work days, no days off, and pay at 10 yuan per month ($1.61 US Dollar) if any. It also described the 1-3 year average forced labor terms without trial, and the large amount of Falun Gong practitioners in forced labor, a banned spiritual group.
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Acting CIA director Michael Morell has publicly disputed the accuracy of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, Zero Dark Thirty.
The movie, which examines the 10-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, features scenes of torture and depicts actual CIA agents involved in the hunt for the founder of al-Qaeda.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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2012 was surprisingly good for Canada. The decade long revision of the Copyright Act was completed; most parties agree that it was a good compromise. Amendments included: expanding fair dealing to include parody, satire, and education; protecting consumer behavior that reflects the conduct of consumers in a digital age; maintaining the independence of ISPs and the privacy of subscribers; implementing a cap on damages for non-commercial infringement ($5,000 is the maximum but a judge can award as little as $100; this is intended to discourage file-sharing lawsuits); and, creating an exception for non-commercial user-generated content. To be sure, all the exceptions come with the expected provisos, and all are subject to the overarching ban on any circumvention of technological protection measures. It still strains credulity as to why Canada in 2012 adopted a prohibition first conceived in 1996; but, given the fierce opposition by rights-holders, the fact that the user allowances were not rolled back in committee speaks well. Michael Geist gives a good synopsis of the new Act here.
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Open Rights Group intervened in the case on behalf of the Internet users potentially affected by the Order. We were able to do so because of the extraordinary generosity of the supporters who donated to our appeal.
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PRQ, the infamous ISP created by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm of The Pirate Bay, has been nuked by PayPal. After a fruitful partnership lasting three years, PayPal decided to ruin their relationship with the so-called “bullet-proof” hoster by freezing the company’s funds for up to 180 days. On PayPal’s advice PRQ opened a second account to get by while the dispute was being sorted out, but then without warning PayPal seized those funds too.
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Yesterday the Government announced its plans to implement the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review – namely, how it will put in place various exceptions to copyright that permit more uses of copyrighted work. Here is the detail (pdf).
These were reforms recommended in the report by Professor Hargreaves in May 2011. (See our write up from the time in Comment is Free). After that, the Government announced its intention to implement his proposals and ran a three month consultation on the plans. You can read our response to the consultation here, and a full list of responses is available at the IPO website.
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12.28.12
Posted in EFF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 3:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Summary: Markus Persson and the better known billionaire provide cash infusions for the EFF to destroy software patents
MR. Cuban previously protested against software patents. Now he puts his money where his mouth is, as explained by the EFF:
America’s broken patent system needs major reform to protect innovators and the public. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is announcing a major new boost to its patent work: a half-million dollars in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and game developer Markus “Notch” Persson.
“The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful,” said Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. “Silly patent lawsuits force prices to go up while competition and innovation suffer. That’s bad for consumers and bad for business. It’s time to fix our broken system, and EFF can help. So that’s why part of my donation funds a new title for EFF Staff Attorney Julie Samuels: ‘The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents’.”
The EFF’s patent busting scheme never got this much support. It is slow and expensive to kill one patent at a time as Samsung is still doing:
A key Apple patent used against Samsung in court is under close scrutiny by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after a re-examination.
This is one of several. Apple patents are repeatedly shown to be junk, but it takes time to prove this.
Speaking of Apple, there is this update regarding its biggest case against Android:
Judge Koh has denied Apple’s motion for an injunction, ruling that Apple has not proven irreparable harm. She has also denied Samsung’s motion for a hearing or a new trial based on its claim of jury misconduct, essentially accepting Apple’s theory that Samsung could have discovered the Seagate litigation if it had acted more promptly in ordering the jury foreman’s bankruptcy file, hence waiving its claim. I’m sure that will be appealed. For that matter, Apple is likely to appeal as well. I think they’ll have to, in that her order rejects essentially their entire design patents theory. I asked our reporter at the hearing on all this what he thought her inclinations were, and he said he thought she was sick of both of the parties and wanted to kick them out and upstairs to the appeals court. And on these two motions, that is what she has done.
Nokia is pressuring Android and suing by proxy, having just signed with RIM a deal similar to what it signed with Apple. One report says:
Nokia Corp. said Friday it has reached a new patent license agreement with Canada’s Research In Motion Ltd. that will end all the patent litigation between the two handset makers.
As part of the deal, Nokia said it would receive an undisclosed one-time payment, as well as continuing license payments, from RIM. RIM didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The attacks on Android are already happening and Google filed formal complaints against Nokia’s (Microsoft’s) troll proxies. Nokia’s doomed strategy is imposed from above by Microsoft. And to put things in perspective:
And do you really want to cry? Nokia’ second best-selling smartphone in mid December online sales in China was.. the N9 running MeeGo.
Why again did Nokia not stay with Linux and instead chose to attack with patents, the antithesis of Linux? Microsoft entryism, or former Microsoft staff infiltrating rivals. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 3:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by timedebugger
Summary: The Bill Gates successor (not Ozzie) announces his plan of leaving amid serious issues inside the company
After Microsoft had announced losses and saw its common carrier failing [1, 2] the arguably #2 man at Microsoft called it quits (many others already left). Mundie is a key lobbyist for Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4]. Our reader iophk shared this report with us:
Craig Mundie, who inherited some of Bill Gates’ duties when Gates left his full-time position at Microsoft, will take on the role of “senior adviser to CEO.”
Major news. And as iophk added, another Microsoft product dies, adding itself to a long list we hardly update anymore (it’s hard to keep track because Microsoft hides it):
Microsoft has announced that the Expression suite of design tools is no more. It has been removed from sale immediately and it has been placed on a maintenance only status until it reaches its end of life.
Microsoft is in deep mud. I tried Vista 8 this month and it’s a joke even on very high-end hardware. It’s the return of Microsoft Bob and it confuses even some Vista apologists like this good FFII member who writes:
I am confused. I don’t get the branding. Windows RT, or Windows Surface RT, the Operating System or Microsoft’s own tablet device (where Microsoft competes with OEMs)? We do know “Windows NT”, the server and enterprise operating environment from Microsoft, where I guess NT stood for the next/new technology kernel of the operating system. But what does RT mean? Dennis E. Hamilton says RT stands for “Retweet”, the legacy method of relaying twitter messages. I was aware of that of course, but… Wikipedia says there is no official explanaition! RT means RT.
OEMs are complaining too and big press covered it, not just individuals with their anecdotes. To give some examples:
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Then, I spent a few days on Windows 8. That experience was traumatizing.
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Microsoft’s attempt to regain relevance and defend its core franchise with Windows 8 is off to a “shaky,” “tepid” start, says the New York Times.
Emmanuel Fromont, president of the America’s division of Acer, the number four PC maker, tells Nick Wingfield at the Times sales of Windows 8 PCs are coming in worse than expected. “It’s a slow start, there’s no question,” says Fromont.
Watch this picture, accompanied by an explanation:
It wouldn’t have been half as bad if Windows had included a ‘Shut Down and Restart’ button. But no, the only way to install these ‘compulsory’ updates is to hit ‘Restart and Update’. Tell me, who would ever hit restart to wait for Windows to update it self (read: wait till the end of the world) instead of getting some work done.
The platform lacks polish and it is not secure. It shows. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google gets around Microsoft’s patent attacks against Android by removing ActiveSync support (as a whole!) while Microsoft grows its anti-Google lobbying team
MICROSOFT has been trying to use software patents to make its main rival less appealing an option for hardware companies. Despite having no software patents in Europe, at least in principle, Microsoft used them there to extort companies like TomTom. In general, despite having no legitimacy in the patent sense in the EU, FAT and ActiveSync patents have been used by Microsoft extensively in order to tax Linux and Android, respectively. ActiveSync is Microsoft patent tax for Google, as we noted years ago. Now it looks like Google responds by removal:
Google has officially announced that it’s removing support for Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol (Google Sync) as of January 30, 2013. Those currently using Google Sync to connect their mobile devices to their Gmail will remain unaffected, but new users will not be given the option to use Google Sync.
Microsoft is very worried about Google and it shows. Based on this report from the middle of the month, Microsoft has been hiring more lobbyists to fight Google’s cash cow:
Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.
Since Mr. Penn was put in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft in August, much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.
Drawing on his background in polling, data crunching and campaigning, Mr. Penn created a holiday commercial that has been running during Monday Night Football and other shows, in which Microsoft criticizes Google for polluting the quality of its shopping search results with advertisements. “Don’t get scroogled,” it warns. His other projects include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.
We wrote about this before. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Some Windows users that I know (not power users in any sense) state that they do not migrate to Linux because, as they say, “the OS is different”. Of course, they never consider that they had to adapt from XP to Vista and then to 7…(One wonders what they will say after buying a computer with Windows 8).
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While my wife’s migration was very successful, mine was not a smooth process. But I know that is bound to happen when you change OSs.
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The term “naked PC” is used by Microsoft Corporation to refer to a personal computer that is sold without any operating system preinstalled on the hard disk. The term was coined for its dramatic value and as a means for creating the impression that it is evil to sell computers without operating systems because they might be used for so-called software piracy (i.e., copying or using software in violation of its license).
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“Canonical is kicking off the New Year with a bang, and launching a brand new Ubuntu product. We’ll be holding an exclusive event hosted by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, to give full details of what we believe is the next generation of cross platform operating system.”
Usually press releases get redirected to /dev/null, but a guy dropping off a brown envelope full of non-sequential £20 notes little bird told us that this is going to be interesting. However, we don’t know any more than this.
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Mandrake Linux was my best early experience with Linux, way back in the last millennium, back when literal floppy disks roamed the Earth and 4 megabytes of RAM was riches. Back then you could buy boxed sets of Red Hat Linux in stores, and Red Hat was popular as a desktop Linux. Red Hat had good printed manuals, but it had one difficulty: it did not support as much hardware as Mandrake, and I had a lot of trouble getting 3D acceleration on my video card. Red Hat didn’t support my fancy Promise 66 IDE controller, so I had to connect my hard drive directly to the poky old 33Mhz controller on the motherboard. It didn’t like my sound card either.
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And we are on the verge to cross yet another year and blog posts regarding the year-in-review have already started to pour in on the web. The blog post, one of that kind, round-up top Linux (and open source) stories of 2012.
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2012 was a very quiet, but very successful year for Linux. How successful? The most popular end-user operating system is now Linux.
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You can write shell scripts in mere seconds, hack the kernel in your sleep and perform other feats of Linux wizardry—but can you teach?
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One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about it, Linux is probably the only OS that has a unified code base. For example, Microsoft and Apple use different kernels for their desktop and mobile OS versions (Windows NT/Windows CE and OS X/iOS). Two of the reasons this is possible on Linux are that the kernel has many abstraction layers and levels of indirection and because its build system allows for creating highly customized kernel binary images.
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Desktop
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Bodhi can best be described as a lightweight Linux flavor coded to run across a wide range of hardware.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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In the first part of our three-part interview, Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds talked about how he got into computing, Raspberry Pi and the “free software” movement.
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Support for touch-enabled devices traditionally hasn’t been high on the list of Linux kernel developers, who tend to focus their energies on more traditional computing platforms. But if all goes according to plan, future versions of the open source operating system may come with significant touch support built in, according to developers. And if that happens, it could have major implications throughout the channel.
Linux, of course, already powers a lot of touch-enabled devices, from Android phones to the Ubuntu Nexus 7 tablet. But the software that makes touch work for those platforms was generally developed on a case-by-case basis, since the Linux kernel itself lacks integrated support for touch-ready hardware.
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The Linux Foundation has released a video of what it sees as the 2012 highlights for Linux – but the presence of decent video-creation and editing software running on Linux does not seem to be one of them.
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Linus Torvalds has integrated code to support the F2fs filesystem into the Linux kernel’s main development branch; this branch is currently used to prepare Linux 3.8 (1, 2, 3). Introduced in October, F2fs is a filesystem that was mainly developed by Samsung employees and is specially tailored for storage media that use flash memory chips and a rather simple Flash Translation Layer (FTL) – for example USB flash drives, memory cards (eMMC, SD cards, …) and the storage media that are included in cameras, tablets and smartphones.
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The two new features for Linux 3.8 with EXT4 are Inline Data and SEEK_HOLE/SEEK_DATA support. Ted Ts’o mentions that the inline data feature allows small files or directories to be stored within the in-inode extended attribute area. This inline data assumes that the file-system uses inodes that are 256 bytes or larger.
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Graphics Stack
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After yesterday publishing the 2012 AMD Catalyst Driver Year-In-Review, here is the recap of the NVIDIA Linux graphics driver progress made in 2012.
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Applications
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Besides the clean, well-organized interface, you get lots of nice features that make listening easy. One such nicety is an intuitively created playlist that retrieves information from Last.fm and what song titles from your collection that you most frequently play. I like the way the display shows me information about the currently playing song.
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Lightworks, a professional non-linear editing solution built by EditShare LLC and used for mastering videos, will be making an appearance on Linux, in the first quarter of 2013.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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THQ says it is evaluating the costs and benefits of Linux, following consumer feedback on the Humble THQ Bundle.
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Edmund McMillen, the developer of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, has shared some interesting information about Canonical’s practices, at least for his games.
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Desktop Environments
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A few weeks back, we talked about KDE and Gnome in daily life, and how they fared from the applications perspective, when you pit programs developed for one environment against those created for the other. We learned a valuable lesson that technology and practicality do not necessarily go hand in hand, nor that you can easily draw a clear line between the two. Finally, we discovered the joy of freedom, in that you can mix software, regardless of whichever desktop you choose, and get the best of all worlds. Now, the big question is, does the same set of conclusions apply when you try to administer your box? Well, to answer that, we will check how easy and intuitive it is to manage Linux when you choose KDE or Gnome as your platform.
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Normally, at the end of the year, I do my usual Linux distro showdown. But I have never really done a proper desktop environment comparison, regardless of which operating systems run them, even though in the Linux world, quite often, it is hard to separate the two. Well, it seems to me, this is a great opportunity to give you a comprehensive head-to-head clash between the leading desktop environments that bless our distros.
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Enlightenment 0.17 (a.k.a E17) is the next generation of graphical desktop shell from the Enlightenment project. When you first run it and get past the initial setup wizard, you should end up with a desktop not unlike the above. It is a very traditional UNIX/X11 style desktop, because that is what E primarily is and attempts to be, BUT with a bunch of bells, whistles and modernities that were never there, as well as a different core design philosophy. There seems to be some obsession with Window Manager vs. Desktop Environment debates. It doesn’t much matter what you call it. It manages windows. It does compositing. It manages files. It launches applications. It handles UI and system settings.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Fifteen years ago Matthias Ettrich started the KDE community. On 14th October 1996 he wrote his famous email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc group on Usenet. He called for other programmers to join him to create a free desktop environment for Linux targeted at end users. Many, many people joined. Thousands of developers wrote millions lines of code. We did 90 stable releases of our core set of applications alone, not counting all additional stuff and the thousands of 3rd party applications.
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Today the Krita project announced the formation of their new foundation Stichting Krita Foundation. Though officially part of the KDE project, KDE e.V. can not sponsor development. The new Krita foundation will help with development and more.
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This is the second part of the report on the joint Kate/KDevelop development sprint that took place in Vienna from the 23rd to 29th of October this year. It provides an overview of the changes in KDevelop. For more background and details about what happened with Kate during the sprint, make sure to read the first part of this report.
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Earlier Ubuntu developers managed to create a installer for Nexus 7, but those builds also showed that Unity, in its current form, is not ready for touch-based devices. KDE has an edge here as it has optimized versions for netbooks, desktops and touch-based devices so a user doesn’t have to make any compromises as one has to do with other DEs or shells which are focusing more in touch-based devices only.
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GNOME Desktop
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Our current login performance is pretty bad. We do way too much I/O and processing. If you write an application or service that automatically starts at login, please take a long hard look at how much extra work you’re doing on a cold start. It might seem small, but it all adds up very quickly with the rest of the applications competing for resources, as you can see in the bootcharts I made for that bug report:
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Like everybody in the Linux community, I have at last been dragged kicking and screaming onto Gnome 3. We had no choice; everything on our Linux desktops has been slowly failing from being so badly aged. My old Fedora release experience has so far been rescued by the graces of “fallback mode” on the laptop, while the desktops were still running old Ubuntus. So I had dodged being affected by Gnome3 so far.
At the same time, Gnome now has the entire Linux desktop world at gunpoint: The majority of software that runs on Linux requires Gnome and GTK. I’ve tried running everything on alternatives – Gnome has a desktop lock-in going on right now that is worse than anything imagined by Apple or Microsoft in their kinkiest dreams. Do without Gnome, and your printers will break, your Bluetooth will refuse to connect, none of the weather applets will talk to your desktop, your videos will freeze, and taxi cabs will suddenly pass you by in the snow without stopping for you.
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The core applications in GNOME version 3.7.3, which has now been released, now include gnome-shell-extensions. These have long been under development under the GNOME project umbrella and enable GNOME 3′s control centre to be modified so that it behaves more like a traditional desktop environment. ‘Alternate Tab’, for example, makes the alt+tab key combination switch between windows, rather than between applications, , whilst ‘Apps Menu’ adds a menu reminiscent of the old Gnome 2 menu. Extensions such as these mean that GNOME 3.8 will also have an built-in mode, selectable when logging in, to replace fallback mode. The fallback mode currently offers a “classic” interface, but will be dropped in version 3.8.
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When I last posted about Every Detail Matters, 27 detail bugs had been fixed by 9 contributors. About two and a half months later, 43 bugs have been fixed by a total of 12 contributors. We’ve made impressive progress, and the results are already making themselves felt. Testing the latest and greatest GNOME Shell, things definitely feel more polished and better executed.
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GTK+, a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that provide a complete set of widgets, suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites, is now at version 3.7.4.
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One of the plans I had during my vacation time was to try Chakra Linux. This latest release was named “Claire” to honor the memory of Claire Lotion, a KDE developer whose untimely passing away made the KDE community grieve.
I finally had the opportunity today. I really liked it. I also learned certain things, too.
Let’s see what happens when one boots the Chakra Live DVD. A screen asking you to select your language greets you. I had seen it before. Back then, I thought that the language selection was rather scarce.
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The Cinnarch distribution is an interesting mix of technology. It combines the Arch Linux distribution, which features a rolling release approach to package management, with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Cinnarch is a fairly young project, still in its beta stage of development, so it should be approached with a degree of caution. The distribution is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds and can be downloaded in two flavours: a full live CD (670 MB) with the Cinnamon desktop or a minimalist CD (190 MB). Whichever edition we select the installer will perform a net-install, downloading packages from an updated repository rather than from the CD. While this means we will be up to date right from the start, it also means a successful install depends on having a reliable Internet connection and any re-install will likely take longer than if we were installing from local media.
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Free and open source software didn’t invent Live Disks (external CDs, DVDs, or flash drives from which you can boot a computer). That honor, according to Wikipedia, goes to FM Towns OS in 1989.
However, no other segment of IT has made Live Disks so much a part of their culture as the open source community.
Most major Linux distributions use Live Disks for installation because they are a quick way to test-drive an operating system without changing a computer’s setup or endangering its contents. When using a Live Disk, at worst, you may need to reset the BIOS temporarily to boot from an external device, and users have to set about deliberately to alter files on the hard drive.
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With all the wide variety of free and open source software out there, it can sometimes feel like an insurmountable challenge to download and try each and every one that interests you.
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The lightweight Arch-based distro uses Openbox to help make it blazing fast without losing too much functionality
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First place: Linux Mint 13 Maya
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Mac OS X always deserves a special mention in the operating system world, for being the most attractive (arguably) distro around. It is kind of an aspiring product for almost everyone I know – they want to own a Mac at the end of the day! However, exorbitant price and seeking value for money at times limit our aspiration to own a Mac. But, don’t worry! Linux can help you create our own Mac! And those who don’t know how to customize Linux, there are three distros to help you out.
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If you’ve heard of Open Source software, and you’re thinking about giving it a try, you may be wondering why Dream Studio claims to be the best creative system available, when there are so many other options.
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This one is well overdue, but the time has finally come. In my defence, I installed CRUX 2.7.1 as far back as summer, but a hard drive failure wiped it all, and since then 2.8 was released. Just as well, so we’ll be testing the latest version 2.8. CRUX is a DIY distribution that is perhaps less known than others, but it is the inspiration behind the mighty Arch Linux as the distribution Judd Vinet was originally using. I would point to this dated interview if you want to know more about the origins of Arch.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I just found an interesting problem in the way Mageia 2 handles typing Asian languages with iBus, the Input Method Editor (IME) that is configured easily during the installation of the distro.
For work reasons, I need my computers to be able to handle Japanese (and for fun, Korean and Thai). You can do this with iBus (a more modern IME) or SCIM. I chose iBus because you can install it during the installation process of Mageia.
I had not seen this situation before because I have installed iBus only to computers that have an English keyboard. However, since my main desktop computer has a Spanish keyboard, when I opened LibreOffice, I discovered that iBus was preventing the keyboard to display the accents (“tildes”) of Spanish and those of French.
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This video has been shot at the OW2 Conference and shows Michel Catan (Innovation Cluster Manager at Mandriva) and Gaurav Parakh (Partners manager at Mandriva) discuss Mandriva’s general strategy and its research & development activities.
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Gentoo Family
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Back in mid-November I wrote about Gentoo developers looking at forking udev after being unhappy with its direction under systemd leadership. The Gentoo project has now announced eudev as their fork.
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Red Hat Family
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Bloomberg’s Dina Bass reported, “Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of Linux operating system software, rose in late trading after reporting third-quarter sales that exceeded analysts’ estimates and saying it plans to buy cloud software company ManageIQ Inc. Red Hat rose 3.8 percent after the company yesterday reported sales of $343.6 million in the period that ended Nov. 30. Analysts had on average projected sales of $338.1 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Excluding certain items, profit was 29 cents a share, meeting the average projection compiled by Bloomberg.”
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Gunnar Hellekson has many awesome-sounding job titles.
He’s the chief technology strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where he works with government departments to show them how open source can meet their needs, and with systems integrators to show them what they can do to provide the government with what it needs.
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Debian Family
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Paul’s got a great Debian setup across a lot of interesting hardware. I appreciated this interview, though, because Paul makes the argument that although software should be free (as in freedom), there are often technical limitations/complications with that free software that create a barrier-to-entry for less sophisticated users. Unfortunately, with Linux, the price of freedom is often technical ease. It’s nice to hear a Debian developer contemplating the issue. It’s not an easy fix, but it is a fixable problem. Especially with developers like Paul on the case.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’ll start off by making a few things clear. Firstly my family PC runs Ubuntu 12.04LTS its great. Ive had no problems whatsoever with the distro and from my young lad playing Tree Fu Tom on the CBBC’s website, to handling of all the tasks I put to it there are no complaints. None at all.
I’ve spoken to Jono Bacon (Canonical Community Manager) on a number of occasions, he’s open, friendly and above all makes time for people (he certainly made time for myself and Dr Schestowitz when he was a guest on the TechBytes show). I supported the integration of Amazon into the Ubuntu search, I personally had no privacy concerns, citing that myself and my wife are regular customers of Amazon and saw it as a feature that would be useful to us.
[...]
If you start dictating (or sorry, advising) people on how to advocate your product, then its not really advocacy any more is it?
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Spying was probably “not the idea behind the Unity tool,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. “I think they are struggling to become a nice ‘normal user’ OS, with some helping, commercial tools.” Nevertheless, “it’s mandatory for a GNU/Linux distribution to warn the user, and easily allow them to switch on/off such a tool. I hope Canonical rethinks that tool.”
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Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distro for desktop users, moves to the cloud with the new Ubuntu 12.10, codenamed Quantal Quetzal.
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Unity isn’t the only desktop environment that Ubuntu has. There are many and as they said, Unity is a shell for Gnome but it is not Gnome-Shell. I have been using Unity for a few years now and figured I would have a bit of a play with Gnome Shell for a bit. It is very easy to install, on Ubuntu clicking here: gnome-shell will with a bit of luck set it up for you. At the lightdm login screen you can then select gnome shell from the list of desktops and you are done.
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There will always be things that we differ on between ourselves, and those who want to define themselves by their differences to us on particular points. We can’t help them every time, or convince them of our integrity when it doesn’t suit their world view. What we can do is step back and look at that backdrop: the biggest community in free software, totally global, diverse in their needs and interests, but united in a desire to make it possible for anybody to get a high quality computing experience that is first class in every sense. Wow. Thank you. That’s why I’ll devote most of my time and energy to bringing that vision to fruition. Here’s to a great 2013.
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“Save the date: Jan 2 — Ubuntu set to disrupt a new ecosystem,” read the urgent message. “Ubuntu will announce a brand-new product.” All lips were maddeningly sealed at the Ubuntuplex, of course, but the same couldn’t be said of the blogger crowds camped outside in the hopes of learning more detail.
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s been just a few weeks since the launch of Linux Mint 14 “Nadia,” but already the project behind the popular distribution has been making plans for its next release.
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Linux Mint 14 was recently released. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and offers the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments. This review covers the Cinnamon version, I will try to get a separate review up for the MATE version soon.
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The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer board with a built-in processor, memory, and input and output. But if you want to use it as a full-fledged computer you need to connect some storage, a keyboard, display, and other peripherals.
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Phones
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A Finnish startup created by former Nokia executives is hoping to break through with their fledgling mobile operating system.
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The nice thing with a strongly-growing giant industry is, that all the numbers keep growing, eh? The unfortunate side effect is, that almost any number you bother to memorize, becomes obsolete within months… But lets do this again. All major mobile numbers, now updates for End of Year 2012:
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Android
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open-source community. Brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth and the Canonical team, Ubuntu for Android project has started getting a lot of attention lately. The main reason for this is that Canonical is attempting something unique by merging two of the most popular open-source platforms around. Hoping to provide a bridge between the desktop and mobile, Canonical is heavily banking on this project.
That said, there are many doubts and speculations whether this project will succeed or not. Ubuntu and Android are established brands; however, whether their marriage will be a triumph or a disaster remains to be seen. We know that you too are excited about this project as much as we are and hence we’ve come up with a list of features and expectations for the upcoming project.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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U.S. retailer Costco has slashed its prices for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 tablets. It’s not known whether the sale will be ongoing or if it’s just a short-term event; but at $280 and $170 respectively, these tablets are a “must have” for those who’ve been on the fence.
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Ten years ago, if you were working on an open-source project, you probably hosted it yourself. At the most, your team may have used SourceForge for storing your project code. But today, there is only one name in open-source software project repositories: GitHub.
Throughout 2012, GitHub consistently played host to the biggest, most complex and most useful open-source projects. Relative newcomers to the open-source scene, such as Twitter’s Bootstrap, Raphael and Phusion Passenger, are all gaining popularity with both users and developers adding to these projects. But what is it about GitHub that makes it different from SourceForge?
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It’s been a good year for Linux and open source. As we wind it all down, I wanted to take a moment to have a little bit of fun with traditional holiday song — “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” It’s a lighthearted way to wrap up some of the things open source (OS) has given us this year.
So, forget the partridges and lords leaping, here we go!
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Gabriella Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. She recently released a new book titled “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking” after having spent three years working and living with hackers in the San Francisco Bay area. The community she chose to study was the Debian Linux community. In this interview with Linux.com, Coleman shares her perspective on the role of Linux in hacker culture and what it really means today to be a hacker.
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I do my best to support the people that use my open source projects. I don’t always do things right, I don’t always respond in a timely manner. Sometimes I just have to walk away from an issue or request and let it die from lack of attention. But I do my best, and I take the time to provide meaningful answers whenever I can. I get a lot of “thank you!” notes from people because of this, and every now and then I get a comment like “best open source project leader, ever” or “you do so much more to help, than any other oss project leader i’ve dealt with.”
The first few times this happened, I was genuinely shocked. The next few times, I began to think “wow, I’m doing something great, here.” But then the last few times it happened, I started moving back in to “shocked”. I started wondering why people were reacting this way. Am I really doing something special? Am I going above & beyond? I don’t think I am… but maybe I am?
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The global economic slowdown has of course been mostly bad news for most people, business verticals and individual companies.
But it’s important to remember that recessions can also be good as they flush out the old dead wood and help us to re-position for leaner and more economically efficient times ahead.
Can we take this reality forward then and apply it to open source?
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Bryan Lunduke wrote a piece for Networkworld… or something like that. I’m NOT going to link to it because I don’t want to encourage more page hits for such lunacy. I heard the article when I listened to the latest Everyday Linux podcast. I strongly recommend that so check it out if you haven’t already. One of Montana guys is one of the hosts. They don’t always get it right, but they do make me think.
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If you run a website, or have build a software application, you’ll need to have a certain amount of interaction with your users. One of the best ways to facilitate that is through forums. Forums not only allow seamless communication between users and developers, they also let companies provide support for their users. On the Internet, you’ll find millions of forums dedicated to various issues. From teenage problems to geriatric care, forums bring people with similar tastes or issues together and let them communicate effortlessly.
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Events
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Organising Australia’s national Linux conference is hard work. At times, given the vagaries of the climate Down Under, the best laid plans of men go awry and there is double work – as there was in Brisbane 2011, when the floods hit and the event had to be be shifted from one venue to another.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Firefox outfit has published a round-up of its achievements this year, including what it says is proof that ‘there is a real user appetite for choice on issues of web privacy’.
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SaaS
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It used to take a warrant, a sheriff’s deputy, and an axe to chop down your door and stop your business dead. But the cloud makes it so much easier.
Today, if you rely heavily on a public cloud service provider, your entire business infrastructure could be taken offline without judicial review, useful explanation, or workable recourse, simply because a customer, a politician, or even a competitor claims there are issues with your — or your customers’ — activities.
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Databases
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For years, MySQL has been the dominant open-source database management system (DBMS). Recently, MariaDB, the MySQL fork created by MySQL’s founder, has been making in-roads and Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most popular Web site, is shifting over from MySQL to MariaDB.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It’s taken a strong political decision to overcome the lock-in inertia of ICT procurement in Bern. Will the policy succeed?
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CMS
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With more than 2650 reported active sites just since the August beta release, you’d be in good company giving Drupal Commerce Kickstart a try. And, now that the world isn’t going to end, what better time is there to launch that online store you’ve always wanted?
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BSD
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The developers of PC-BSD have released version 9.1 of their FreeBSD-based Unix distribution for desktop PCs. Version 9.1 of FreeBSD has yet to be officially released, but it appears that the ISO images for the FreeBSD release are queued up on the official server and may just be waiting for an announcement to be made.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Paolo Bonzini said in a message, in which he also announced the release of a new version of GNU sed, that he had decided to sever his links with the two software initiatives due to technical and administrative decisions with the Free Software Foundation and its head, Richard M. Stallman.
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Paolo Bonzini, the maintainer of GNU sed and GNUgrep, has announced the release of version 4.2.2 of the GNU sed and used the moment as an opportunity resign from his position on both projects. His decision to lay down the responsibility. after eight years of holding the post of GNU sed maintainer, and three on GNU grep, comes in the wake of a controversy over the control of the name and code base of the GnuTLS library, another member of the GNU Project.
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Activists representing the Free Software Foundation disrupted an event at the Microsoft retail store in Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, urging passers-by to shun the software giant’s Windows 8 operating system in favor of free software alternatives.
The demonstrators, wearing Santa Claus and elf hats in the spirit of the holiday season, arrived at Boston’s Prudential Center shops during a planned “TechTots” children’s event at the Microsoft Store, accompanied by a man dressed as a gnu, the FSF’s horned mascot.
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Thursday, December 20th, 2012 — Today, FSF activists visited a local Microsoft store during its “Tech for Tots” session to wish passersby happy holidays with copies of the Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8. The activists were accompanied by a gnu (free software’s buffalo-like mascot) and sported Santa hats in the spirit of the season. Their action drew smiles from mall-goers who had expected to see costumed people giving gifts, but not quite like this.
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The problem I am seeing, and it is a serious problem in my opinion, is the constant use of the term “free software” when “open source” should be used. This is obviously not a recent problem, and I really cannot recall when was the first time I noticed this happening. But maybe because I am much more involved with (real) free software movements now, I have the strong impression that this “confusion” is starting to grow out of control. So here I am, trying to convince some people to be a little more coherent.
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Project Releases
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Our campaign to stop Restricted Boot hit a big milestone this month.
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Public Services/Government
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I have been commenting few times the evolution of the Italian “Code for a Digital Administration” – Codice dell Amministrazione Digitale (CAD) in Italian – either on this blog or when interviewed by journalists, and to date nothing has really happened.
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Licensing
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The H talks with Bradley Kuhn, noted GPL compliance enforcer, about whether there should be more people patrolling the GPL perimeter and what tools and techniques a potential protector should take into battle.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang has announced he is planning to build a DIY laptop from openly documented hardware in an effort currently codenamed “Novena”. Open hardware means that there are no licensing fees for circuit diagrams and specifications. Whilst the open source movement has been well established in the software field for some years, open hardware is still something of a rarity in the PC component field. The project plans to make a system that works with both open source hardware and software.
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Programming
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In 1991, I’d just gotten my first real programming job for two reasons: nepotism, and a willingness to write code for $12/hour. I was working as a contractor to a blood testing laboratory, where the main development job was writing custom software to handle, process, and do statistical calculations on blood testing results, primarily for paternity testing.
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The PROSE team are developing a detailed specifications for an online software system that can support EC ICT teams to carry out open software development work. Better known as a software forge we here in PROSE want to understand teams’ intentions for using forge platforms and the types of new features that you think should be available via a forge.
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Every day 10,000 new users sign up for GitHub, an online repository for open source projects that already has 2.8 million members.
Those users create 25,000 new repositories each day, adding to the 4.6 million already on the site.
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Standards/Consortia
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For those who haven’t heard, Instagram is an online photo-sharing service, like Flickr. Some months ago Instagram was purchased by Facebook, and several days ago they announced that they would begin selling users’ photos to advertisers (with no compensation to the users). As many of their users are professional photographers, this caused a storm of outrage.
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Instagram now says it was all a huge mistake, that users own their pictures and there’s no way Facebook is going to sell them to anyone… but the company hasn’t yet revealed alternate legal language, which they should have been able to cobble up in an hour or two. The underlying problem of mean-spirited, self-serving, over-reaching terms of service is still with us at Instagram and almost everywhere else. Their revised terms of service were stupid and couldn’t stand. Let’s hope in their next attempt to grab rights (because that’s what this whole thing was about and probably still is) Instagram and Facebook treat their users fairly. Until they do, most of what’s below still stands.
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Dear businesses that post us marketing material through email,
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Health/Nutrition
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The details of that scandal are laid bare in a recent book by Frederick Kaufman, Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food. As it turns out, we are already acquainted with this story’s villain: Wall Street. There, bankers and investors are investing unprecedented amounts in commodities such as wheat. And when wheat speculation on Wall Street drives up the price of real wheat everywhere, people around the world can no longer afford to eat. Kaufman details exactly how this has happened in a story of traders, long-standing commodities markets meant to stabilize the price of food, and corruption.
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If the food movement really wants to improve the food supply, it needs to follow the money instead of wasting its time on labels.
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The Transportation Security Administration is deciding to determine, once and for all, whether the so-called “nude” body scanners being deployed at airports nationwide are nuking passengers at unacceptable radiation levels.
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Security
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The targets were on relatively modest connections (think SOHO grade), so their pipes were flooded by the traffic and the people who were relying on that connectivity were not getting much network-related done. The sites weren’t totally offline, but just about anything would time out without completing and life would be miserable. I’ve made a graph of the traffic available here, in a weekly view of that approximate period that nicely illustrates normal vs abnormal levels for those networks, generated by nfsen from pflow(4) data.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Since last year 2channel, Japan’s largest internet forum, has been subject to pressure from Tokyo police. According to a January 2012 post by Avery (2channel Fights Police Pressure, So-Called “Viral Marketers”), the whole police investigation began after Fuji TV aired a sensational news report about drug dealers making posts on the site. The news report was aired only a few days after 2channel users helped organize street protests condemning Fuji TV’s alleged anti-Japanese bias.
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As it turns out, the film as a political statement is worse than even its harshest early critics warned
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Cablegate
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This is the first time that citizens can offer their financial support to WikiLeaks, since donation processing for the organization was shut down by extra-judicial government pressure on Bank of America, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Amazon.
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In December 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing a selection of leaked U.S. State Department cables through the New York Times, the Guardian, and other traditional media, opening a deep crack in the thickening wall of secrecy that has been forming worldwide around the internal processes of democracy since 9/11. They helped catalyze the “Arab Spring.” They struck a blow for the right of citizens everywhere to know what is being done in our names. And they thoroughly freaked out the U.S. Government, sending it into a security spasm of Cold War proportions.
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Of course Exhibit A in the case against payment censorship has been the shameful economic blockade of Wikileaks, where the intermediaries that were assisting people in giving money to Wikileaks refused to do business with them, based in part on not-so-veiled threats from members of Congress.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This announcement has since led to the magical thinking that we can somehow take ownership of this future “extra oil” not 8 years from now, but rather…. today. In other words, the additional 3 mbpd (million barrels per day) of crude oil and the 1 mbpd of NGL (natural gas liquids) that the IEA forecasts for 2020 have suddenly been booked into the “readily-available” column and are already being factored into U.S. growth projections. That is premature, to say the very least.
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Finance
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NETWORK EQUIPMENT VENDOR Cisco reportedly has hired Barclays to find a buyer for its Linksys business.
Cisco bought Linksys back in 2003 to get into the consumer networking business and the firm has put out some good products, most notably the WRT54G wireless router that was a favourite with technology savvy punters. Now Cisco is looking to offload Linksys as it continues to pull back from the consumer networking market.
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The New York Stock Exchange called time on two centuries of independence on Thursday, agreeing to an $8.2bn takeover that will hand control of the icon of American capitalism to an Atlanta-based energy trader.
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But history is written by the victors, and the past generation has seen the banks and financial sector emerge victorious. Holding the bottom 99% in debt, the top 1% are now in the process of subsidizing a deceptive economic theory to persuade voters to pursue policies that benefit the financial sector at the expense of labor, industry, and democratic government as we know it.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Representative Tim Scott (R-SC), who was a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as a state legislator and was voted into Congress in the Tea Party wave of 2010, has been nominated to replace Jim DeMint in the U.S. Senate.
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You know you are not going to be seeing the brightest bulbs on TV defending America’s loose gun laws the weekend after the mass slaughter of children. Even the NRA had gone dark, taking down its Facebook and Twitter accounts and refusing to respond to reporters.
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Censorship
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On Friday (14 December), UK government announced that it will not force internet providers to block online pornography. Despite high-profile campaigns by Claire Perry MP and the Daily Mail newspaper to engineer a moral panic, sense has prevailed.
Index opposed the proposals on the basis they would have led to the filtering legal material by default; ergo censorship. Index also had serious concerns that child safety would be used as a criteria to filter a range of content beyond pornographic material. Under the Daily Mail’s proposal, only consumers over the age of 18 who had completed a “strict age verification check” would be able to remove such a block.
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Privacy
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The National Security Agency’s Perfect Citizen program hunts for vulnerabilities in “large-scale” utilities, including power grid and gas pipeline controllers, new documents from EPIC show.
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A loophole that permits software companies to sell cyberstalking apps that operate secretly on cellphones could soon be closed by Congress. The software is popular among jealous wives or husbands because it can continuously track the whereabouts of a spouse.
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In 1987, the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached Columbia University librarian Paula Kaufman with a request: Keep an eye out for commies.
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Civil Rights
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The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has published interim guidelines on when it is appropriate to prosecute people for communications they send on social media. If the objective was a return to common sense policing, issuing twenty-five pages of guidance has risked complicating the situation even more.
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The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.
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This is the second part in a series of posts about the importance of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). CDA 230 limits the liability of a number of Internet services that host user-generated content.
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Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on how a little-known government agency—the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)—got the keys to government databases full of detailed, personal information of millions of innocent Americans. Using the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with officials, the Journal obtained emails and other information detailing how the massive new spying program, which the Attorney General signed off on in March, was approved by the White House in secret—over strenuous objections from government privacy lawyers.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Web may be less permanent than we once thought. According to archivists, after two years, 27 percent of social media, pictures, video, and blog posts vanish. For many who regret oversharing, this may be welcome news. But for historians eager to document the tweets that inspired the Arab Spring or who want a snapshot of how the Web looked on September 9, 2001, the impermanence of the Internet presents a challenge.
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DRM
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The number of people who are reading printed books is declining. But reading isn’t. According to the Pew Research Center, we’re buying Kindles and Nooks and reading more e-books at a rapidly growing rate.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve talked in the past about patent system supporters’ somewhat blatant cluelessness to China’s clear recognition that its own growing patent system is the perfect tool for backdooring protectionism and trade barriers, without making it look like protectionism and trade barriers. I sometimes can’t tell if this is just because those system supporters are so focused on the narrow “more patents must be good” argument that they’re missing the big picture, or if they truly don’t understand what’s happening. Either way, we’ve got the latest example, as the folks at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a part of the UN, are celebrating the fact that China’s patent system has received more applications than any other patent system this year.
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Raft of measures announced by business secretary Vince Cable to tackle copyright infringement
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Copyrights
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One of the top executives of the US-based anti-piracy outfit Digital Rights Corp has submitted a patent application that promises to turn piracy into profit. The patent describes a system where Internet users caught downloading will receive a notice from their Internet provider along with a request to pay a small fee to the affected copyright holder. Pirates who refuse to pay risk the ultimate punishment of being disconnected from the Internet.
There are many ways copyright holders approach the “online piracy” problem. Some copyright holders prefer to do it through innovation, others prefer educational messages, warnings or even lawsuits. Another group is aiming for lots of small cash settlements.
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As a new session of the U.S. Congress convenes in early 2013, don’t expect lawmakers to rush out a new version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
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12.16.12
Posted in IRC Logs at 7:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: December 9th, 2012
IRC Proceedings: December 10th, 2012
IRC Proceedings: December 11th, 2012
IRC Proceedings: December 12th, 2012
IRC Proceedings: December 13th, 2012
IRC Proceedings: December 14th, 2012
IRC Proceedings: December 15th, 2012
Enter the IRC channels now
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[I will be away until after Xmas]
Contents
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With barely two weeks left in 2012, the inundation of “year-in-review” blog posts, podcasts, videos and–if we’re really lucky–songs has begun. This week, the Linux Foundation did its part by releasing a video celebrating major accomplishments over the last year in the Linux channel. What did the Foundation think were the most important developments? Read on for a look.
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Kernel Space
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A new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel was announced on Saturday. This new scheduler is based upon the controversial “Brain Fuck Scheduler” scheduler but attempts to support multiple run-queues for better CPU scaling.
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Graphics Stack
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With the recent improvements to MSAA Gallium3D support, if you have been wanting to benefit from anti-aliasing with the open-source Gallium3D drivers but your game/application doesn’t have options to toggle the MSAA level, it’s now a bit easier to configure.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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NetGore is a free, open-source 2D online RPG engine written in C#. It is cross-platform and supports both top-down and sidescroller games. NetGore comes with a large amount of the fundamental MMORPG components built in which allows you to focus more on designing your game.
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The open-source GemRB engine is an open implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine to handle running the game assets from Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. GemRB is GPL-licensed and works on Windows, OS X, BSD, Android, iOS, and other platforms while being nearly feature-complete with the original closed-source engine. Various improvements over the original Infinity were also made like providing touch input support.
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THQ, the American game company responsible for a great deal of computer games and was the company behind the recent controversial Humble Bundle, is currently evaluating the market for bringing their titles to Linux.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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After finishing with all the work this term, including written reports, oral reports in meetings, and two rather risky academic presentations in a Congress (described here by Megatotoro), I can take some free time at last.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is stopping at nothing when it comes to promoting their latest operating system, Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), and the Windows platforms from Microsoft seem to be the perfect target.
When Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) launched, Canonical used Windows 8 as a target practice and actually asked the users to avoid the pain of owning a Windows 8 operating system.
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Raj Mathur (aka OldMonk), one of the leading figures of the Indian FOSS (free and open source software) community, passed away on 12.12.12. The cause of his death was a massive heart attack. This is the second major loss for the Indian FOSS world another notable figure, Kenneth Gonsalves passed away in August this year.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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2012 was an incredible year for Mozilla. We mobilized. We did a better job than I have ever seen us do identifying the places where we needed to have impact, and then we focused and delivered. There’s a lot for us all to be proud of in 2012; I’ve gathered up a few of my favourites.
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Project Releases
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The last several years have found us in the midst of more catastrophes than we could ever, in our worst nightmares, have dreamed of. We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political constitutional principles in place since the 17th century.
Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the new order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK our government’s lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War – the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention – have been deliberately avoided or ignored.
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Opponents of President Morsi say they were detained for hours and beaten while security forces chose not to intervene
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The captors of a journalist in Syria are threatening to execute her tomorrow (13 December) unless their demands for a $50m ransom are met.
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The head of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin resigned following an investigation that found conflicts of interest in a study on the risks of natural gas drilling.
Raymond Orbach, 78, resigned as director of the institute last month, the university said in a statement released today. The study’s lead investigator, Charles Groat, 72, also retired from his faculty position, according to the statement.
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Group says organised crime syndicates are ‘outgunning’ governments, leading to sharp rise in elephant and rhino deaths
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Throwing the nation over the climate cliff will make our current fiscal challenges look like a minor bump in the road.
As the highly scripted stagecraft of the presidential campaign fades from the headlines, there’s a new show in Washington. ”Fiscal Cliff” stars President Barack Obama, who urges Republicans and Democrats to agree on a ”grand bargain” that would soften the economic shock of the impending across-the-board tax and spending cuts. But that bipartisan handshake would be nothing to celebrate.
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The government has lifted restrictions on the controversial practice of fracking, a method of extracting gas from shale rock, giving a green light to drilling that could produce billions of pounds worth of gas.
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Finance
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You may have heard that Afghanistan has something of a corruption problem, with billions of dollars flowing out of the country annually even as the US and international community pour money into reconstruction efforts. Instead of curbing the exodus of illicit cash, however, the Afghan government is apparently making it easier to smuggle money out of the country, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
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The political friends of America’s rich aren’t aiming to convince us that higher taxes on the nation’s highest incomes make no sense. They’re just hoping to keep us distracted.
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The Federal Reserve made a big announcement today, promising to keep interest rates near zero until either the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent or the inflation rate rose above 2.5 percent. The Fed had already promised to keeping interest rates near zero until 2015, so why was this announcement important?
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Republican members of Congress expressed dismay on Wednesday about the prospect of reaching a deal with the White House to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis before Christmas.
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The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.
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Majority of ministers have not paid into national coffers beyond contribution taken from state salaries, alleges tax report
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The New York Times reports this morning: “State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system. … While the settlement with HSBC is a major victory for the government, the case raises questions about whether certain financial institutions, having grown so large and interconnected, are too big to indict.”
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A former UBS and Citigroup banker and two others had their homes raided early on Tuesday morning and were taken in for questioning as part of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the manipulation of Libor interest rates.
The intervention came amid mounting speculation that the Financial Services Authority is preparing to take action against a number of banks in relation to Libor setting.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Investigative Fund and The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.
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Censorship
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This TV program is a breakthrough. CNN IBN, a leading English-language channel, started a campaign for the freedom of Sanal Edamaruku. “Does a rationalist deserve to be jailed for questioning a religious miracle?”, asked firebrand moderator Sargarika Ghose on 4th December in CNN IBN’s flagship program Face the Nation, calling upon the public to take a stand. The response was impressive: people from all walks of life expressed unequivocal support for Sanal, on camera, on twitter and on facebook. The wave keeps running… And 87% of the viewers who participated in a public internet ballot answered the question “Are blasphemy laws out of place in a secular democracy?” with a clear Yes! The blasphemy law should go.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned that Israeli airstrikes targeted individual journalists and media facilities in the Gaza Strip between November 18 and 20. Journalists and media outlets are protected under international law in military conflict.
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Here’s a somewhat curious story: The Russian TV channel NTV showed a performance by the rock band “Leningrad”, which is famous for incorporating many Russian expletives in its lyrics. The expletives were censored by beeping, which is the usual and expected practice, comparable to beeping on words like “fuck” in American TV. The surprise in this performance, however, was that the names of president Putin and prime minister Medvedev, who were mentioned in the song, were censored the same way. The name of the the Church of Christ the Savior, which recently became famous as the stage of Pussy Riot’s notorious performance, was partly censored as well, although the name “Pussy Riot” itself was not censored.
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Security will be rigid at the African National Congress’s (ANC) elective conference in Mangaung. Most sessions are closed to the media and the party has said it will use phone-jamming technology to prevent interruptions. Journalists who stray where they shouldn’t will be given short shrift.
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Privacy
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A recent swell of digital-medical data collected on devices outside of a doctor’s office is raising some thorny questions: Who owns the rights to a patient’s digital footprint and who should control that information? WSJ’s Linda Blake reports.
The small box inside Amanda Hubbard’s chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.
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Depending which browser you’re using, you should see a little lock or some such in the address bar. On the right are readouts from (top down) Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You can click on that readout to get some information on the privacy/security settings.
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Civil Rights
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Computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the US was blocked, will not face charges in the UK, bringing to an end a 10-year legal battle.
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Action star says Hong Kong residents ‘scold China, scold leaders, scold anything’ and calls for regulations against dissent
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After the attempted Christmas Day bombing of 2009, a Senate investigation concluded that the National Counterterrorism Center had received information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be underwear bomber, but had failed to query other government agencies about him. This allowed him to board his flight to the U.S. and nearly detonate his bomb. President Obama responded by ordering all agencies to send their leads to NCTC, which was ordered to “pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads.”
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DRM
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DRM is becoming less and less prevalent these days as more companies are realizing that the backlash from crippling the purchases of paying customers far outweighs any perceived prevention of infringement. It’s not a wholesale conversion, but new DRM-free converts are appearing more frequently, including some surprising holdouts.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve argued, for a long time, that just railing against “middlemen” misses the point. There are always middlemen. But not all middlemen are created equal. The distinction, that we’ve discussed multiple times, is the difference between enablers and gatekeepers. That is, historically, many middlemen came to power because they were gatekeepers. If you wanted to do something — be a musician, write a book, sell a new product — you effectively had to get “approval” and support from a gatekeeper who had access to those markets. Being a gatekeeper gave them enormous power, such that the gatekeepers often became central to the market, rather than the people/companies they were working with and it also allowed them to craft ridiculous deals that were incredibly favorable to themselves, at the expense of those they were working with. That, of course, is why there tends to be so much inherent antipathy towards traditional gatekeepers.
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Copyrights
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France’s Hadopi graduated response approach, also known as “three strikes”, occupies a special place in the annals of copyright enforcement. It pioneered the idea of punishing users accused of sharing unauthorized copies of files, largely thanks to pressure from the previous French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who seems to have hated most aspects of this new-fangled Internet thing. Sadly, other countries took up the idea, including the UK with its awful Digital Economy Act, New Zealand, Spain and, more recently, the US.
Hadopi hasn’t been going too well. Despite putting out some dodgy statistics, the Hadopi agency hasn’t really been able to show that the three-strike approach is doing anything to reduce the number of unauthorized downloads. In the two years that Hadopi has been running, only one person has been brought to court — and he was innocent, but fined anyway.
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I’m excited that my friend Jerry Brito has pulled together an edited collection of copyright reform essays by libertarians (and one from a pair of libertarian-leaning conservatives) called Copyright Unbalanced. Several recent developments have suggested growing sympathy for copyright reform on the political right. Jerry’s book promises to be a handbook for free-market copyright reformers, pointing to some of the most serious problems with the present system and explaining how Republicans could capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties.
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