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12.09.12

The Story Behind Criticising Ubuntu’s Privacy Settings

Posted in FSF, Ubuntu at 11:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

1035776_money_issues

Summary: Techrights agrees with the take of the EFF on the latest Ubuntu (and now the FSF’s stance too)

LAST night when I returned home Richard Stallmanh (RMS) had finally published an article he wrote about a month ago. “RMS’ article on Ubuntu has been published,” told me one person in the IRC channels. The substance was covered in much of the press/news sites while I was away down south for a couple of days, e.g. British press with this deceiving headline which the editor probably used to get hits rather than report correctly and accurately (a colleague let me know about this article). This was covered in a lot of US media and elsewhere in the world. The truth is, I approached Stallman after the EFF had published its piece and suggested addressing the subject, saying “spyware” rather than “malware” as early drafts called Ubuntu. Yes, he originally called it “malware”, not “spyware”, arguably a subset of “malware” which is a correction I suggested because I thought it would be gentler on Canonical. I am not against Canonical or Ubuntu, but this one development in their software (which I use) required some diplomacy to fix. One must be polite to bring about change. Did Canonical acknowledge the issue and fix it? Of course not, at least not yet. It was the same with Mono. They don’t want to admit being wrong. My guess is, such settings will be silently altered in future releases. Canonical will never attribute this to angry users, the EFF, FSF, or anyone else. They think they gain respect through control. Richard Stallman once said: “Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.”

“My guess is, such settings will be silently altered in future releases.”Mr. OpenRespect Jono Bacon posted the most widely-cited reply to Stallman’s piece. Bacon tackles the argument but uses a personal angle, which is a spurious surplus. Canonical’s official response was more polite than that.

Muktware‘s Swapnil Bhartiya stressed that what RMS is doing is not much different from what the EFF was doing; I heard Jono’s unconvincing explanation as to why when the EFF said the same it got no criticism and personal addressals like Stallman got. Anyway, others in Muktware believe that both sides have a level of validity. The important thing is, people can see that there are two sides here and decide for themselves which one suits their ideology better.

Ryan in our IRC channel said that “Jono Bacon responded with a personal attack on Richard Stallman,” but the article he linked to did not quite support it. It wasn’t an “attack”, it was relatively polite, but still, why speak of the messengers at all and distract from the message? Here is a better summary:

Canonical’s Jono Bacon has already responded with his own blog post and accuses Stallman of spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and that at times Stallman is shortsighted.

Sam Varghese covered this properly as well:

The founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M. Stallman, has slammed Ubuntu over its provision of Amazon search results for a regular search, prompting Canonical’s community manager, Jono Bacon, to hit back, accusing him of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

The responses from Microsoft boosters at Ars Technica (even former Microsoft boosters of Ars Technica) did the usual thing, which is incitation against Stallman’s stance and views. Jon Gold, another FOSS hater and colleague of the aforementioned Microsoft booster, covered this too. They attack Ubuntu and Stallman at the same time. In some sense it is helpful to Microsoft, but this was intended by neither side. One writer called Stallman “the grand old man of open source software” — this sounds wrong for so many reasons!

Anyway, the important thing is, Ubuntu has a privacy problem. Canonical should acknowledge this and fix it, not stick to its guns for some profit from Amazon (which they make at the expense of Ubuntu users’ rights). Make Ubuntu the product, don’t make Ubuntu users the product. █

12.06.12

Links 7/12/2012: More Games and RHT News

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8: Head-to-Head at Last

    “There must be 50 reasons to prefer GNU/Linux over ’8′ — all of them sufficient for one or more groups of users,” asserted blogger Robert Pogson. “Where GNU/Linux appears on retail shelves, a significant number of consumers do choose it — we saw that all over the world when ASUS brought out its netbook with Linpus GNU/Linux, and we see it in Brazil today, where GNU/Linux outsells M$’s OS at Wal-Mart.”

  • Why Linux May Be Better For You Than What You’re Using Now

    I’m not saying Linux is the best thing to use for everyone. I am saying, however, that it may be better for you than what you’re using now.
    Linux is different from Windows or Mac OS X in some fundamental ways.
    For thousands of people, these differences are a reason to choose Linux
    over its alternatives. Are they for you? Read on to find out!

  • Desktop

    • Do Devs Need Custom Linux Laptops? Dell Thinks So

      Rumors began circulating earlier this year that Dell might be developing a laptop specifically designed for developers. Then Barton George, Dell’s Web Vertical Director, began blogging about Sputnik, a “scrappy skunkworks project” that would combine the XPS 13-inch laptop with the Ubuntu 12.04 Linux distribution.

    • Early Reviews for Low-Cost Chromebooks Are….Surprisingly Good

      In recent posts, we’ve been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Now that these systems have been in the wild for a few weeks, reliable reviews are appearing, and, users are liking them.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Changes in Gwenview for KDE SC 4.10

        I have been kept very busy during the last six months with Homerun, spending little time on Gwenview. Luckily Gwenview received several contributions from other developers during this cycle, so Gwenview 2.10 (from KDE SC 4.10) features some significant improvements.

      • KDE 4.9.4 Has Been Officially Released

        The KDE Project has announced a few minutes ago, December 5, the immediate availability for download of the fourth and last maintenance release of KDE Software Compilation 4.9.

  • Distributions

    • Puppy 5.4 Screenshots
    • Slacko Puppy 5.4 introduces installable layers

      Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.

    • The best Linux distro of 2012!

      As promised in this week’s Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here’s our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine.

      Our annual distro competition is as close to a tradition as we get here at LXF Towers. We do it because we love distributions – we love their variety and the way that so much changes over the course of a year. If you want to see what conclusions we came to last year, for example, check out our previous feature, The best Linux distro of 2011.

      But if we restricted our comparisons to the same old dominant stalwarts, our yearly parade of victors would look more like political oscillation than a reflection of Linux distribution development. Which is why this year we wanted to do something different…

    • ZevenOS 5.0: a lightweight Linux with a multimedia twist

      There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.

      That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.

    • ZevenOS 5.0 Screenshots

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 2 on Acer Inspire One

        Today I performed the easiest Mageia install ever. It was on an Acer netbook (an Inspire One D257-1408 that came pre-installed with the curse of Windows 7 Starter).

        The machine packs an Intel atom N570, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB HD. When I first saw it, my worry was the strange keyboard configuration: there are functions scattered all over the keyboard. Besides, I still had the usual concerns: Graphics server and effects, Wi-fi, sound, and the SD card reader.

    • Red Hat Family

      • ManageIQ Announces Support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1

        ManageIQ, the leading provider of IT Cloud Management ™ solutions, today announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. ManageIQ support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 provides customers with unified monitoring, management and automation capabilities that are quick-to-deploy and easy-to-use, reducing the cost and complexity of enterprise virtualization and cloud computing.

      • Red Hat Advances Hybrid Cloud and Virtualization
      • Red Hat RHEV gets storage savvy

        Less than a year after a major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, Red Hat has upgraded the software to offer more advanced storage capabilities.

        Released Wednesday, RHEV 3.1 allows administrators to make snapshots and clones of running virtual machines. And, in a technical preview mode, RHEV 3.1 supports storage migration for virtual machines (VMs), in which the backup disk image of a running VM can be moved from one SAN (storage area network) to another without stopping the running VM, said Chuck Dubuque, Red Hat product marketing senior manager for Red Hat virtualization infrastructure.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

          It was decided at today’s FESCo meeting to not disable the mounting of /tmp as a tmpfs file-system by default for the forthcoming Fedora 18 Linux release.

          For months the Fedora developers have been planning to mount /tmp with tmpfs for putting the temporary directory in RAM/SWAP volatile memory as it will lead to less disk reads/writes, potentially save power / better the performance, not preserve temporary data across reboots, and other benefits.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • My review of The Official Ubuntu Book (7th Edition)

            After reading this book I can say that I have a better understanding on how this Ubuntu operating works. The nice thing about this book compared to other books on Ubuntu that cover how to use Ubuntu, is this books covers not only these topics, but goes over why and how Ubuntu came into being and thoroughly teaches the readers how the Ubuntu community runs and operates.

          • HP Envy m4 1015dx Initial Impressions with Ubuntu 12.10

            Over the Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Cyber Week madness, I managed to pick up a new laptop that, as it turns out, is decently Linux-friendly, so I thought I’d share my findings with you! As it turns out, I have a tendency to ramble on, so enjoy this 14+ minute video! Click “Read More” to see it.

          • Foobnix Music Player Gets New Ubuntu PPA

            A quick update for our Ubuntu readers using Foobnix: the player has a new PPA, so remove the old one and add ppa:foobnix-team/foobnix-player instead.

          • Ubuntu 12.10
          • Dell Ubuntu Laptop Developer Speaks About Future Plans

            Project Sputnik, Dell‘s innovative initiative for building a high-end, open source laptop, launched a week ago with the release of an XPS 13 “Developer Edition” laptop powered by Ubuntu Linux. But Dell’s far from done on this front, according to Barton George, the brain behind the project. In an interview, he explained where Project Sputnik — and Dell’s open source channel strategy more broadly–might be headed next. Read on for what he had to say.

            The Sputnik laptop released last week was the product of an effort that began about six months ago, when George floated the concept of creating a laptop tailored for programmers to the Dell Innovation Program. Sputnik was the inaugural project for the Innovation Program, which Dell established earlier this year to help inspire innovative product ideas from company employees.

          • First “alpha” arrives for Ubuntu Raring Ringtail 13.04

            The Ubuntu development cycle moves up a notch as the first alpha release of what is to become Ubuntu 13.04, Raring Ringtail, and images for Edubuntu 13.04 and Kubuntu 13.04, are released to the public. A decision has been made by the developers to reduce the number of milestone builds and switch to daily and fortnightly quality tests. Raring Ringtail will be continuously updated and new daily images will be released over the coming months to test it. There will not be a milestone release of Ubuntu 13.04 until 28 March 2013, and that will be a “FinalBetaRelease”. Rather than there being an Alpha 1 image, users should download the most recent daily image and use that.

          • Introducing Ubuntu PyPi Lens for Unity

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 14 for KDE Users is Almost Ready

              Every release KDE users are treated like red-headed stepchildren over there at Linux Mint. We wait and wait… Fortunately, Clem announced the Release Candidate today, which means version 14 with KDE should be along any time now. It comes with most of goodies outlined earlier and we’ll miss the showstopppers that prompted a quick update.

              Clement Lefebvre today announced Linux Mint 14 RC with KDE 4.9.2. Like the others, this release is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and includes Linux 3.5, Xorg X Server 1.13.0, and GCC 4.7.2. KDE 4.9.2 in Mint includes improvements such as enhanced Dolphin metadata, New “Change Directory To” upon drop in a Konsole, and Kwin got lots of quality and performance improvements. Kontact received many bugfixes and performance improvements too and Workspaces now have MPRIS2 support.

            • Linux Mint 14 Review
            • Linux Mint 14 RC KDE Edition Has Been Released

              Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • ODROID Boards Offer High-End Raspberry Pi Alternatives

      There’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite ARM development board right now: it’s cheap, silent, and exceptionally power efficient. The Raspberry Pi makes an excellent choice for low-energy applications like personal servers, routers, firewalls, environmental monitoring setups, etc, etc.

    • TI rolls open-source RTOS for MCUs

      Texas Instruments released a real-time operating system developed entirely in-house for its microcontrollers. TI will offer the code for on a royalty-free, open source basis, aiming to ease the path to market for its customers.

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • $120 tablet that runs both Android and Linux to launch in early 2013

        For anyone who has ever used his or her Android tablet and wished that it could double as a desktop-style device, PengPod has a product just for you. Ars Technica reports that the new PengPod tablet, which runs both Android and Linux, has met its crowd-sourced fundraising goals and will so on sale in January for $120 a 7-inch model and $185 for a 10-inch model. According to Ars, the tablet will be able to “dual-boot Android 4.0 and a version of Linux with the touch-friendly KDE Plasma Active interface.” Overall, the tablet received funding of nearly $73,000, or around 49% more than the $49,000 that the company had been seeking.

      • Archos GamePad Goes On-Sale In Europe

        The Archos GamePad is now available in Europe for €149.99, with a North American release scheduled for early Q1 2013. As the name suggests it combines physical gaming button controls and a patented mapping tool that allows you to link the virtual controls of any game to physical controls.

Free Software/Open Source

  • GWT: No future without the community

    Vaadin, the company behind the GWT-based web framework of the same name, has published a report on the future of Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based web framework that includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. Google had appeared to scale back its own GWT development efforts following its shift in focus towards Dart as an alternative to JavaScript and, earlier this year, had promised to create a more open development process. This resulted in the formation of a steering committee, which includes Google representatives as well as developers from Red Hat and Vaadin and which will be responsible for the future development of GWT.

  • Oldest open-source software kept by Army

    Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
    But during the decades of providing support to the nation, BRL quickly became involved in the move toward modern computing. Indeed, nearly 70 years ago, BRL unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — ENIAC, the world’s first operational, digital computer.
    The development of this computer was driven by the Army’s need to speed calculation of firing tables. And ever since the development of the ENIAC, ARL has provided the U.S. military with unprecedented scientific computational capabilities.

  • RFID News Roundup

    Transcends upgrades Rifidi open-source RFID software, introduces new appliances, reader; Napa Valley’s AuburnJames Winery to test RFID-enabled pallets; ADR’s Automated Workforce Monitor service initiated at Texas construction sites; Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ parking lot uses TagMaster RFID tags; Toshiba certifies Omni-ID UltraThin IQ 400 and IQ 600 RFID labels; Intellitix intros RFID MiniPortal.

  • U.S. Department of Labor Grantees Converge to create Nation’s first Open Source Nursing Textbooks under $2 Billion Federal Grant Program

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Art meets the open web

        Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

  • Databases

    • 1 million euros pledged to new MariaDB Foundation

      SkySQL’s CEO Patrick Sallner, Percona’s co-founder Peter Zaitsev and MySQL AB co-founders Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson have come together to announce the creation of the MariaDB Foundation. “The time is right for an independent organisation to safeguard the interests of MariaDB users and developers as we head towards MariaDB 10″, said Axmark. According to the announcement made at the Percona Live conference in London, the organisation has secured a pledge of one million euros from the foundations two initial sponsors and is seeking other sponsors.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.6.4 Is Now Available for Download

      The Document Foundation announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.6 open source office suite is now available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.

    • LibreOffice 3.6.4 fixes over 60 bugs

      The LibreOffice developers from The Document Foundation have released LibreOffice 3.6.4, an incremental update to the open source office suite that fixes over 60 bugs. The fixed bugs include problems with the office suite’s RTF support, display problems with Hebrew font symbols, and several crashing problems. Bugs in the LibreOffice UI were also addressed, such as check boxes that would not retain their state, resetting configuration dialogs, and sorting of tables in the Calc spreadsheet application that did not work correctly.

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

    • The Picket Project: Innovative Open Source Effort Seeks Funding For New Collaborative Online Community

      The Picket Project, an open source effort to create a new crowdsourcing software, launched on Indiegogo this week with the goal of funding their initial software release. This is the final push in the launch of their platform. The software was developed to tackle large, complex political problems in a new, innovative way. The Picket Project Platform allows engaged citizens to build their own solutions by connecting and building on related, similar ideas.

  • Project Releases

    • Ekiga 4.0 offers a fresh, open source Skype alternative

      Longtime users of Ubuntu Linux may already be familiar with open source Ekiga, which used to be the default Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) client in that popular Linux distribution, but late last month the telephony software got a major update.

  • Public Services/Government

    • U.S. Customs and Border Protection Decision Boosts Open Source Software for Government Procurement

      Talend, a global open source software leader, announced today it has received a favorable advisory ruling from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency around the government’s ability to purchase open source software. The CBP has determined that software products are compliant with the Trade Agreement Act (TAA) when that software is manufactured in a designated country through numerous, complex and significant activities including key product research, writing the specification and architecture, and the actual software build – even if the majority of its source code was created in a non-designated country.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open science spreads with new version of mMass spectrometry tool

      Over the last months, I became more and more aware of the “open” movement. “Open” as in open access, open source, open data, open science.

    • Can open source technology save music?

      We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Say Goodbye to Presentation Software With Reveal.js
    • Amazon connects node.js to AWS services
    • GRAILS: An open source framework for rapid app development

      You might get confused with the name of a musical band group but here we will talk about a serious technology. The framework is inspired by Ruby on Rails that makes use of Groovy language which is a dynamic and agile scripting language. The syntax is somewhat very similar to that of Java. In fact, you can use groovyc just like javac to produce bytecode files. Also, Groovy integrates with Bean scripting framework, which allows you to embed any scripting engine into your Java code. It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the “coding by convention” paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Intel Proposes Tool To Auto-Convert Code To C++11

      An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM’s Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner.

      Edwin Vane of Intel Canada has called for comments on his proposal to develop a Clang-based tool using the LibTooling library for automatically transforming C++ code-bases to take advantage of modern C++11 features without needing any manual code rewriting.

Leftovers

12.05.12

Links 6/12/2012: White House on FOSS, Drones Backlash Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 4 Alternatives to Google Drive for Linux

    We’ve covered using Google Drive on Linux with third-party software, but why bother jumping through those hoops? You can use a cloud storage service that officially supports Linux instead – several of Google Drive’s competitors do.

    Google may be leaving Linux users out, but other services like Dropbox, Ubuntu One, SpiderOak, and Wuala don’t ignore Linux users. They even offer more storage and other useful features, such as local encryption of your files.

  • Linux Top 3: Sputnik, Spherical Cow and Secure Boot

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • [E17] Alpha Is Go

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Spaceship Earth viewed through Marble

        Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps. He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer. He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center. Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce. The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map. Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.

        I remember when Google Earth got big. I was already into Linux so I went through the rigmarole of getting it to work on Linux. In actuality, it wasn’t much work although it wasn’t installed in the usual manner. I played with it for a few days, but I was already past the age of caring too much about geography. I would have loved Google Earth when I was in elementary school and I used to marvel at my globe and peruse atlases. It certainly would have been interesting to grab the update on the day the Soviet Union collapsed. Rather than have an out of date globe or map I’d have an up-to-date resource. Of course, that does go back into the whole political thing – when Google decides to show this or that disputed region as belonging to someone they are, in a sense, making a political statement. And they make another one – they tend to show country names as written in that country in addition to English.

      • New QML components: Know thy dialogs
      • KDE Ships December Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform
      • KDE 4.10 Beta 2 Is Now Available for Testing
      • KDE 4.9.4 Update Released Kor Kubuntu

        The two most recent releases of Kubuntu, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, have both received a new update for KDE, pushing the version number up to 4.9.4.

        The announcement was made today on kubuntu.org and lists 71 bug-fixes, major improvements to Dolphin file manager and Kontact PIM as well as stability improvements. Improvements to the 55+ available translations have also made this release.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME’s Next Step

        The GNOME project took an important step when Matthias Clasen announced that it would support a set of extensions that would re-create the GNOME 2 desktop. Many observers, including me, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Katherine Noyes immediately interpreted the news as proof that GNOME was turning itself around and finally starting to listen to users.

      • Privacy Panel lands in GNOME Control Center 3.7.x

        Privacy Panel arrived today in GNOME Control Center, and is one of the three new Panel (Privacy, Search, Notifications) we will get on the next GNOME. But there is also a re-designed Power Panel, and there are many improvements for Wacom, Users (added History Logs), Wireless, Bluetooth..

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Slacko Puppy 5.4 introduces installable layers

        Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.

      • ZevenOS 5.0 – Early christmas present

        I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0 and thank you all for funding this release.
        In this release we made the switch from our deskbar tool to the xfce4-panel ‘deskbar’ mode which introduces many new features just like extensible plugin support and the ability to more flexibly configure your desktop.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 1 EOL

        Mageia 1 has now reached EOL (end of life) and will not receive any further security or bugfix updates.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Avnet and Red Hat Partner On Open-Source Embedded Software
      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Set to Improve Microsoft Interoperability

        RHEL 6.4 provides users with improved security enhancements as well as a number of new Microsoft-enabling features. The new RHEL beta update follows RHEL 6.3, which debuted in June and provided users with enhanced virtualization scalability.

      • Red Hat Delivers Beta of RHEL 6.4, Improves Virtualization
      • Red Hat Launches Open Source Solutions for Hybrid Clouds

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Sneak Peek

          The beta of Fedora 18 has been released, and here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find in it. This release has been dubbed “Spherical Cow.” Apparently, the Fedora developers have decided to follow in the footsteps of Apple and Ubuntu by using cute animal names for their operating system releases.

        • The heroes of Fedora 18 Alpha/Beta testing
        • Can a 7 year old install Fedora 18?

          There have been a number of threads about how the new Anaconda UI is unintuitive or hard to use. So many that I thought maybe there was something to the claims. Maybe working on Fedora for the past many years and being involved constantly for the past year and a half has skewed my opinion so much that I wouldn’t even recognize something being hard to use. So I decided to find a couple people that don’t work on Fedora and have never done a Fedora install at all. That is to say, I used my family as guinea pigs.

          Now, before you shout and rant about this, I am not claiming this is a scientific study. I’m not pretending this is somehow valid User Experience interaction data. This is is just me wanting to observe what happens when you sit someone down in front of a newUI screen and ask them to complete a default install. I found it interesting. If you don’t, then that’s cool with me. That’s why I gave the short answer at the top. OK, onto my experiment.

    • Debian Family

      • Amnesiac Incognito: Tails Secure Distro

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Is Ubuntu Software Management User Friendly?

            Many people believe Ubuntu revolutionized dpkg package management with its Ubuntu Software Center. And there is no question, Software Center is certainly user friendly by most people’s standards.

            But is it truly good enough for the masses?

            In this article, I will look at the current state of Ubuntu software management, how far software management has come since Ubuntu first came out, plus where I think Ubuntu software is headed.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 294
          • ZFS Administration, Part I- VDEVs

            So, I’ve blogged a few times randomly about getting ZFS on GNU/Linux, and it’s been a hit. I’ve had plenty of requests for blogging more. So, this will be the first in a long series of posts about how you can administer your ZFS filesystems and pools. You should start first by reading how to get ZFS installed into your GNU/Linux system here on this blog, then continue with this post.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope for Unity

            The Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope is an Unity Scope that allows users to easily search the Thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms or words. It uses the same API as the Dictionary app.

            The best part is that Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope allows you to search words right from Unity home, without accessing a Lens first.

          • The Shoreline Ubuntu Desktop

            If you’re running Ubuntu and want the same look and feel for your system, it won’t take much to make it happen

          • Introducing Ubuntu Medicines Lens for Unity

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi hack event sees Spooks team crowned winners

      Husband and wife-led team developed a board game offering customisation abilities which encourages players to experiment with programming at 24-hour hackathon in Leeds

      [...]

      …Dhajan developed a Pi operating system to replace the Pi’s Linux.

    • Raspberry Pi: One of the Top Linux Innovations of 2012

      It’s a rare product indeed that surpasses expectations as utterly and thoroughly as the Raspberry Pi did this year.

      Conceived as an educational tool that would be used in teaching kids to program, the device has since gone on to inspire countless new uses that must surely boggle the minds even of its creators.

    • Phones

      • Nokia dispels Android rumors, says Linux hire is for Here

        There was certainly a loud buzzing on the internet regarding Nokia’s recent moves. Nokia is certainly on the spotlight since people are watching what they will do next. After all, the company practically vowed revenge and plans to take the number 1 spot in mobile phones once more.

      • Android

        • Android Review: Zookeeper Battle

          After accepting a phone upgrade from my service provider, I decided to embark on a mission of investigating some new Android software and for the first time found myself genuinely keen to download a game. The game in question – Zookeeper. Why? Because its probably the one game I wasted months of my life to on the Nintendo DS (before giving over ownership of aforementioned DS to my kids)

          So now I’m presented with the “adult” version of the same DS title. I say adult because by my reckoning anything that goes on my phone is just as acceptable for adults to play as anyone else and I can fully justify wasting hours of time on a tile matching game featuring cute animals as long as its on my phone.

        • Half of all app store revenue goes to just 25 developers
        • Google now lets businesses build private Android app stores

          Announced on Tuesday for Google Apps customers, the Google Play Private Channel lets IT shops build their own applications and distribute them to employees on the Google Play store without making the apps available to the general public. “Whether you’ve built a custom expense reporting app for employees or a conference room finder, the Google Play Private Channel is designed to make your organization’s internal apps quick and easy for employees to find,” Google Play Product Manager Ellie Powers wrote in a blog post. “Once your company has loaded these internal apps using the Google Play Developer Console, users just need to log in with their company email address to browse the Private Channel and download apps.”

        • Toshiba Releases Android App for FlashAir SDHC Card
        • Has Google Android’s Open Source Business Model Failed?

          Yesterday’s WSJ.com video “Tablet Wars: How Are People Using Tablets?” had a shocking statistic: 98% of the web traffic from tablets comes from Apple’s iPad. Further, most of mobile commerce is from Apple’s iPhone:

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Most Popular Android Tablet: Nexus 7

        There are plenty of great Android tablets on the market now that weren’t around even a year ago. If you’re looking for one to wrap up for someone special, get your game on, or get some work done, you have plenty of options. Earlier last week, we asked you which models you thought were the top of the class, and then we took a closer look at the five best Android tablets. Now we’re back to crown the overall winner.

      • Amazon’s Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, For The Kids

        Amazon has introduced Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a special bundle available only on the new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD that brings books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows—into one easy-to-use service for kids ages 3-8.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The open source advantage: Executives learn how to stay competitive

    Let’s say you’re a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive.

    You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.

  • Easy, Real-Time Big Data Analysis Using Storm

    Conceptually straightforward and easy to work with, Storm makes handling big data analysis a breeze.

  • Open source Java projects: Storm

    Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm’s API with a small demonstration app.

  • Events

    • open2012 to introduce open innovation to Silicon Valley

      open2012, Maven’s upcoming conference at the Computer History Museum on December 11th, 2012, seeks to bridge that gap. open2012 will bring leaders of the Open Innovation movement to Silicon Valley to highlight their successes and discuss areas of pain. The event will feature keynote addresses by Venture2 and Procter & Gamble, Open Innovation case studies by Intel, Strategyn, Boston Consulting Group, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, panel discussions including Roche, SAP, Agilent, Wrigley, GSV Capital, and Citi Ventures, and company presentations by BrightIdea, NetBase, Spigit, Inno360, competIQ, and many more.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Run Firefox OS in Gnome ;)

        I guess you all know about the upcoming Firefox OS, but what you might don’t know is how easily you can run it in GNOME and play with it.

        Its Apps and Interface is made totally by WEB Technologies (CSS JavaScript, HTML) and I think it could easily catch up with Apple’s and Google App Stores. Besides we all have bored to listen and talk about Google ;)

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • MariaDB Gets a Foundation
    • MariaDB steps out from MySQL’s shadow

      The MySQL community in exile made a significant announcement yesterday in London at the Percona Live conference. The three main companies investing in the MariaDB fork of MySQL joined with leaders of the MySQL development community to unveil the MariaDB Foundation, intended as a home for serious, commercially backed development of future versions of the popular open source SQL database. Already enjoying substantial commercial backing, the new foundation is seeking further participants and aims to elect a representative board in two months.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Revealed: The gift that keeps on giving to Oracle … is dying

      Even as traditional enterprise IT vendors come under pressure from modern cloud and open-source applications, these old-school businesses have one strategy that is the gift that keeps on giving: Enterprise licence agreements.

      Not only do ELAs help to shield vendors from pricing pressure from open-source alternatives, they also increase friction for those anxious to swap out ageing applications and infrastructure for better alternatives. But how long can ELAs block customers from embracing the future of IT?

      [...]

      Matt Asay is vice president of corporate strategy at 10gen, the MongoDB company.

  • Healthcare

    • VA sets Gold Disk VistA as EHR baseline

      The Veterans Affairs Department will establish a separate repository for its fully open source Gold Disk version of its VistA electronic health record system to assure a common software baseline compared with the 133 instances of VistA operating at its hospitals and clinics across the country.

      VA also will put in place a software testing platform, standards supporting open source development and documentation of open source community outreach planning, according to a Nov. 27 announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.

  • Business

    • Open vs. Closed Clouds: What’s Best For Business?

      As an end consumer looking at the cloud space, there are two major types of clouds to choose from: open source clouds, championed by the likes of Citrix and Rackspace, and closed clouds, characterized by Amazon, HP and Google. There are reasons that the two types of cloud technology are differentiated, whether from a functional or marketing perspective, but in the end which is better for an end consumer’s business?

    • Open Source Entrepreneurship

      One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • OpenACC Still Not Loved By Open Compilers

      The OpenACC 1.0 API has been public for more than one year as an open standard to simplify parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs, but to this point it’s basically only backed by commercial compilers. OpenACC is similar to OpenMP in terms of using PRAGMA compiler directives and special functions for tapping multiple CPU cores in an easy and straight-forward manner with C/C++ and Fortran code, but unlike OpenMP, OpenACC is also aware of GPUs.

  • Public Services/Government

    • What does open government mean to you?

      Open government means different things to different people. Is it about transparency, collaboration, or participation? Maybe it’s a combination of all three? If you listen to Tim O’Reilly speak about open government, he’ll tell you about his vision of government as a platform.

    • Open Source and the Power of Community

      You say sure. When she returns the screwdriver a couple days later, your friend mentions that she made an improvement: now it works with both Phillips and flat head screws. Another friend hears this and asks if he can take a look, too. When he returns the screwdriver, it’s been upgraded again: now it’s a power screwdriver. Then a third friend gets excited and adds some extra speeds and a better battery.

      This situation sounds improbable, but it’s how open source software development takes place.

    • Issa open source language comes under criticism

      Draft legislation proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to overhaul federal information technology has drawn opposition for its section on open source software adoption.

      The draft (.pdf) would require the Federal Chief Information Officers Council to issue guidance that mostly reaffirms open source’s status as a commercial item under federal acquisition regulations, but it would also create a governmentwide open source software approval process to address “issues such as security and redistribution rights.”

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

Microsoft Squeezes Locked in Customers as the Windows Platform Dies

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Businesses to pay the price (fourfold!) of swallowing lock-in

Cause: Burning platform!

House on fire

Summary: Microsoft is unable to keep Windows monoculture and it raises prices aggressively to make up for it financially

Microsoft is desperately trying to evolve for mobility, but all Vista 8 has done is, it harmed Microsoft’s desktop monopoly which is also the common carrier (Office is by far the largest cash cow, but not the common carrier). When Windows collapses Microsoft does too.

Microsoft has begun squeezing the goose, even quadrupling the prices in some cases. We wrote about it only days ago (early UK reports) whilst arguing in favour of ODF. This Slashdot discussion points to this new article which says:

Microsoft is trying to make up for below expected earnings following Windows 8’s and Surface RT’s lack luster adoption rates by increasing the prices of its products by as much as 400 per cent it has been revealed.

Yes, exactly. The platform is just a carrier for expensive lock-in. Here are several points from an article predicting Microsoft’s death:

For the last decade, Microsoft’s fastest growing business segment has been Server & Tools, which did $7.4 billion in sales last year.

A lot of these sales come because Microsoft business apps — Exchange, SharePoint, and Dynamics — require these products. But as companies stop buying these apps, they will have less reason to buy the Microsoft platform products that run them, and the System Center ($1 billion+) products used to manage them.

Here is the original article. Some Microsoft-friendly sites strike back, which means that the original articles was damaging to Microsoft and thus effective.

For those who wish to know how bad things have become for Microsoft’s platform, read this, it’s hilarious:

There are eight – EIGHT – sales reps in a very small space. When I get there I am the only customer. Note it is 7pm on a Wednesday night and the place is bustling with holiday shoppers and tourists. I am the only person at their ”store.”

I approach the closest rep and ask for a 32GB Surface and a red keyboard. She asks me if I’d like a demo. ”No”, I tell her. I just want to buy it. She seems lost and does not know what to do. She calls over the “manager” and he unlocks a case and pulls out a Surface and the red keyboard.

He hands them to me and asks me if I want a demo. Seriously WTF is up with the pushing of the demo??? I tell him no and just want to buy it. My original sales rep takes the items over to the register, pulls out a tired old scanner gun and zaps my two items. The Microsoft laptop acting as the register immediately crashes. She looks up at me and says “Sorry my computer crashed. Just give me a second to reboot.”

She reboots, rings me up and asks me if I’d like my receipt. I ask her to email it to me. She says they can’t do that. So I tell her sure, I’ll take the receipt. She hits print, the computer crashes again and I walk out.

This is in part the achievement of many activists who helped make Microsoft widely ridiculed; Microsoft is viewed so negatively because people know about the company’s abuses, the company’s lack of competence, and even the expensive PR Bill Gates is planting in the media he bribes is not enough to make up for it all. People just feel too shy to step into Microsoft stores. It’s very “uncool”.

The numbers speak for themselves:

Why is Microsoft being so coy about producing numbers regarding how many Surface tablets have been sold since they hit the shelves? According to one analyst, it is because sales have been, “disappointing.”

FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger made the comments, who, in a note to clients, went on to say that sales, have “underwhelmed expectations.”

On the OS-only side things are also bad: [via]

IHS iSuppli, a market watcher, has admitted that its expects world PC sales to fall this year even further than it previously thought they would. Whatever the degree of decline, it will mark the first time global personal computer shipments have fallen in 11 years.

In a discussion of world chip sales posted yesterday, iSuppli noted that it is currently anticipating 2012 world PC shipments will fall 7.8 per cent below 2011’s total. Back then, some 352.83 million personal computers shipped worldwide, so that means 325.31m units will do so this year, if iSuppli’s forecast proves correct.

Well done, Microsoft. Go away faster, please. █

Supporting UEFI in 2012 is Like Supporting OOXML in 2007

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

As a reminder, as part of its many OOXML abuses, Microsoft paid companies to ‘support’ OOXML

OOXML Suppets

Summary: The similarities between the effect of adding UEFI code and adding OOXML code to Free software

IN 40 comments or so I have been discussing UEFI with the developer of Shim, whose latest work one can read about in:

  1. Shimming your way to Linux on Windows 8 PCs

    So, while Garrett’s shim will soon be bring many more varieties of Linux to many more Windows 8 PCs, UEFI Secure Boot will remain a significant worry for anyone wanting to run Linux or other alternative operating systems on Windows 8 PCs.

  2. HP Pavilion dm1-4310: SSD installation, and fun with EFI Boot

    Next I went to the other extreme, disabled Legacy Boot and enabled Secure Boot. In this configuration, the Live USB media for Linux Mint and openSuSE wouldn’t even try to boot as they don’t have EFI bootloaders included. Fedora 18 Beta would try, but failed — the necessary security certification is not yet included on the 18 Beta distribution. But Ubuntu 12.10 booted with absolutely no problem. Hooray!

UEFI was designed with lock-down — not just “security” — in mind. It’s like TPM. Thus, Microsoft hoped to embrace the darn thing, making it harder to boot Linux. It doesn’t take a wild theory to deduce this. We saw the same things around 2007, as I explained in comments alluding to hundreds of posts I had written in 2006-2008. Antitrust is bound to be hurt when the anticompetitive is embraced by that who is being hurt.

Speaking of which, check out what Simon Phipps says about Freiburg:

We recently saw the news that the German city of Freiburg had decided to end its open source migration and instead switch to using Microsoft products again. The rationale provided seemed curious to me – after all, at the same time the German city of Munich announced total savings amounting to €10 million from its own successful and ongoing migration.

What seemed odd was there was no account of how they changed course to make the migration succeed. Munich learned lessons from early challenges and updated its strategy in order to succeed. But not Freiburg.

From what I could see, instead of ditching the old versions of MS Office and OpenOffice.org they’d started with and installing up-to-date LibreOffice using expert in-house help, they had just hung on to outdated software and expected staff to muddle through to success. When that didn’t happen, they blamed the software and not the strategy. Everything was in German, so rather than risk misinterpretation I turned to German-speaking friends in the technology industry to explain the report to me (if I got anything wrong, please tell me – the documents seemed very complicated).

My (guided) reading shows three points of concern in the situation over the last four years. First, the only ongoing expenditure in support of the migration is running costs of less than €15 per seat per annum, all associated with licensing supposedly superceded proprietary software. Second, substantial one-off costs of around €231/seat associated with interoperability – a topic that is always an indicator that proprietary software is controlling people’s thinking. Third, no obvious investment in ongoing community engagement or equivalent commercial subscriptions for open source.

“Very good article,” Matthias Kirschner calls it. He is right. Phipps did a fine job and he should know. He was overseeing a lot of aspects of OpenOffice.org for several years at Sun. He also led some efforts to spread ODF and opposed Go-OO, whose team moved on to LibreOffice.

As we showed before, Microsoft had also used OOXML to derail the kind of migrations we saw in Freiburg. Those who were paid by Microsoft to pretend to support OOXML were also to blame. They helped legitimise it. It was always disguised as “choice”, where one choice was lock-in, i.e. no choice. For proprietary software lobbyists, to be “neutral” is to choose proprietary lock-in, as shown in this new article:

Two members of Congress, reaching across the partisan divide, are pushing the government to think broadly — governmentwide — about open-source software, provoking warnings from industry groups that they are ignoring the core principle of technology neutrality.

No, this is not such a matter. To deny choice using lock-in is not to be neutral, it’s to be predatory.

Anyway, one can hopefully grasp the similarity between the two cases; when Microsoft introduces new FOSS-hostile traps it requires that some "useful idiot" — either paid or unpaid — ‘proves’ that the traps are digestable. An effective diplomatic approach is to reject what is worthy of rejection, not give up. This is not a compromise, it is giving up/surrendering to Microsoft, █

Apple Stomps on Civil Liberties

Posted in Apple at 2:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple continues banning opposition to CIA’s assassination policy and Apple denies anonymous purchases

Drones, or electronic death bots, are of great relevance to us not just because they run Linux but because they are ethically wrong, as many warn with great passion (this includes politicians, human rights groups, and TV hosts). The question has become, who doesn’t oppose predator drones? The press is filled with articles against drone strikes these days. Many of them we include in our daily links now (my personal site too). Predator drones are why groups like the FSF remain relevant and important, as computer programs are now directly responsible for killing some innocent people who just happen to be in the ‘wrong’ place or favour the ‘wrong’ side. Drones will continue to be a focus here. They are an imminent threat not only to suspected terrorists. Apple has been defending drones in the sense that it censors opponents of drones. It still does. Here are two new reports about it:

Apple has been close to president Obama. Steve Jobs was hanging out with the president and now he supports his foreign policy, even from his grave. Apple does not care about civil liberties; it patented remote deactivation of cameras, for instance. Today I went to buy iPhone 5 for a friend who insisted on getting it and although I paid in cash (for which I had to visit the bank, as it exceeds ATM limits) the salesperson insisted on having my full name and E-mail address. I declined. He gave me a funny look (although I was exceedingly polite and well dressed) and still insisted, so I gave fake details. Most UK shops don’t require it. Only one does.

We will try to focus on Apple’s attack on Android, which takes a patent gown. █

Lawsuits map

Apple to Reveal Secret Settlement (Patent Extortion) Details to Comply With Judge’s Demands

Posted in America, Apple, Asia at 2:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple’s imperialistic behaviour to enjoy no backroom treatment anymore

A while back we wrote about Apple’s inability to keep extortion secret (the HTC case). Based on this analysis, only the extortion fee (if any) will stay secret:

The judge in the Apple v. Samsung case, the Hon. Lucy Koh, has just ruled that the HTC-Apple license agreement that was signed on November 11 will be made public, the only exception being the pricing and royalty terms, which will be sealed. Samsung’s lawyers have already gotten to see them, but we won’t. But we will get to see the list of patents covered by the agreement. If the patents on the list are the same patents as in this case, it will make it much easier for Samsung to avoid an injunction. As you just saw in the Microsoft v. Motorola case in Seattle, if money can make you whole, you normally can’t get an injunction. And if they aren’t, there is a Samsung argument that customers don’t care about those features enough to pay for them, which could impact the damages figure. This will be part of what is discussed at the hearing on the 6th.

A lot of this is the result of software patents, which Apple hopes to take global (India’s policies on patents, suggests this new article, still appears to be influenced by the software patents lobby). Why do companies from Taiwan and Korea need to bow to US courts and play by the rules of some bureaucracy known as USPTO, run by an American cartel of multinationals? Is Asia now a US colony? These phones are all made in Asia, even though Apple is trying to USA-wash the hypePad with labels like designed and assembled (boxed?) in USA, based on a report from last week. █

12.04.12

Links 5/12/2012: NetBSD 5.2, Linux 3.7 RC8, New KDE Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Circuit Design?
  • OpenSUSE’s Jos Poortvliet: Collaborate or Become Obsolete

    Last month, Jos Poortvliet’s job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle.

  • 4 open source software to analyse big quantity of log files

    Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.

  • Web Browsers

    • Browser battle: Chrome vs. Firefox vs. IE vs. Opera

      After a long, quiet period of Microsoft dominance, the PC browser market has been broken wide-open again in recent years, with Firefox and Chrome challenging Internet Explorer, and Opera sniffing at the margins.

      Earlier this year, in fact, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer in one major measurement of browser market share, in what was hailed as a watershed moment for the new browser wars.

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome Stands Out at Beating Phishing Attempts

        Quick, which major Internet browser does the best job of weeding out attempts from phishers to take control of your personal information? The answer is Google Chrome, according to a new report from NSS Labs. In addition to finding that Chrome stood out at foiling phishers, the report also found that the number of malicious, phishing-connected links online is growing very rapidly.

    • Mozilla

      • Moodle 2.4 is now available!
      • Mozilla’s WebRTC Marries Video Calls and More with Firefox Browsing
      • Mozilla demos WebRTC-based Social API in Firefox

        Mozilla has presented a demonstration of what it hopes to achieve with future social features in Firefox that make use of the new WebRTC capabilities in the browser. The Social API and its sidebar interface were integrated into Firefox 17 and the latest beta version of the browser adds WebRTC functionality which gives the browser the ability to transmit voice, video and data. Mozilla’s demonstration shows how the Social API, working with WebRTC, allows for richer video-, audio- and image-based social networking and collaboration.

      • Firefox 17.0.1 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Mozilla and Google Rally Against New Challenge to a Free Internet

        Top officials from both Google and Mozilla are loudly objecting to proposed changes to international telecommunication rules, slated to be discussed this week in Dubai as part of an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference. In a piece published on CNN.com, Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet freedom guru and considered by some to be a “father of the Internet,” writes: “Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn’t even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba…Some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas.”

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • MariaDB fixes zero day vulnerability in MySQL

      A recently published security vulnerability in the MySQL open source database has been met with fixes by the developers of the open source MariaDB fork. The updates take care of the CVE 2012-5579 buffer overflow problem, which an attacker could use to crash the database server or execute arbitrary shell code with the same privileges as the database process. The MariaDB developers say that another vulnerability (CVE 2012-5611), despite being reported separately, is just a duplicate of CVE 2012-5579.

    • Open-source MariaDB, a MySQL fork, challenges Oracle

      MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.

      Specifically, “the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities.”

  • CMS

    • Rules for Drones

      The Obama administration has recently announced that it is developing a legal framework for drone warfare. It is now technically possible for a “pilot” sitting behind a computer terminal in Nevada or Virginia, with a few keystrokes, to eliminate virtually any person on the planet. But simply because it is technically possible does not make it a good idea, or a legal one. What legal principles should govern the use of drones to kill people?

    • Crimes in Yemen: Militancy, Regime Attacks, and US Drones

      t…arget rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.

  • Funding

    • Who wants to be an (open source venture capitalist) millionaire?

      Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm’s ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.

      The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over £18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as “Investor Growth Capital” as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 5.2 Released!

      The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.2 is the second feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Users running NetBSD 5.0.3 or earlier are encouraged to upgrade to either NetBSD 5.2 or NetBSD 6.0, depending upon their specific requirements.

    • NetBSD 5.2 Brings Small Updates

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Philadelphia Announce Mobile App To Access L&I Property Data

      The City is also releasing the app’s underlying source code as part of an open source project in order to encourage others to build on it. The new app is the latest way L&I is striving to be a more transparent, accountable, and customer friendly agency.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • International Open Data Day — An Update

        Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.

    • Open Hardware

      • Sometimes Being an Open Source / Open Hardware Evangelist Really Stinks

        My evangelism brings about positive change, but as much of it is done despite the community as is done with their cooperation. It’s emotionally difficult, it leaves me in a bad mood, and it uses up what would otherwise be paid time. Why am I doing this to myself? I care deeply about Open Source. But I am increasingly unconvinced that my involvement in it is good for me.

      • The first open-source 3D-printed gun

        In its continuing mission to build a “Wiki Weapon,” Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 assault rifle and tested it to failure — on video (embedded below). The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun.

      • Toward An FSF-Endorsable Embedded Processor

  • Programming

    • A code hosting comparison for open source projects

      If you’re starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you’ll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you’re not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here’s an overview of some of the more popular options.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Tobacco companies ordered to admit they lied over smoking danger

      US judge says tobacco firms must spend their own money on a public campaign admitting deception about the risks of smoking

    • The Year According to Monsanto: A GMO ‘Roundup’

      Monsanto’s marketing efforts pull imagery of an idyllic world of cooperation, support…downright hippy-esque harmony between the largest seed and pesticide company in the world and millions of struggling farmers. But the controversial manufacturer known for the toxic glyphosate-based Roundup and widespread genetically modified and hybrid seeds, paints a much different picture than what’s really going on in the fields.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Senators’ effort to add Internet sales tax to defense bill falls short

      An effort by three U.S. senators to add an Internet sales tax amendment to a military spending bill has failed, at least for now.

    • Corporate profits are highest-ever share of GDP, while wages are lowest-ever

      Corporations are doing well. Workers, not so much. That could be the opening of just about any discussion of the American economy at least over the past couple years since corporations recovered from the great recession while workers didn’t. But that’s because there are always new specifics coming out to illustrate the point. Like this: after-tax corporate profits were a record share of the gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012. Wages were the smallest share of GDP they’ve ever been.

    • Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror

      In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst of a major natural disaster. But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1 Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity.

    • How Boehner’s counteroffer raises taxes on the middle class

      The “fiscal cliff” plan Republicans offered today could hit the middle class to preserve tax breaks for the rich

    • Starbucks to slash paid lunch breaks and sick leave

      Coffee chain sparks fresh concern over business practices amid fears low-paid staff will bear cost of potentially increased tax bill

    • WaMu Trustees Seek Goldman Probe

      Trustees for creditors left unpaid after the biggest banking failure in U.S. history say they suspect Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) of targeting Washington Mutual Inc., in a naked short-selling scheme.

      If those suspicions prove out, the alleged wrongs could translate into a damage award for those still looking for money from Washington Mutual’s Chapter 11 case, according to papers filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Where Did All those Super PAC Dollars Go? 1/3 of All Outside Money Moved Through Handful of Media Firms

      In 2012, the total spending of outside groups — the Super PACs and dark money nonprofits which spend money to influence elections, but do so separately from campaigns — amounted to about $1.3 billion.

    • Common Cause WI: Incoming Senate Majority Leader Launches Nonsensical Attack on the Non-Partisan Elections Board

      The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore, vindictive winner. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like creating the promised 250,000 jobs and improving Wisconsin’s economy? Apparently not.

      Yesterday, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), who will again become the State Senate Majority Leader in January, inexplicably launched a vicious attack on the under-funded and under-staffed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.). Why? Because he disagreed with some of their rulings and said the non-partisan board, composed of six retired judges (two of whom were at one time Republican legislators and two others who were appointed to the board by Republican Governor Scott Walker), delegated too much authority to the professional staff whom he said issued opinions in favor of Democrats.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights/Sppoks

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN Agency’s Leaked Playbook: Panic, Chaos over Anti-Internet Treaty

      he International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.

  • Copyrights

    • Top BitTorrent Sites Have Domains Put On Hold Pending Legal Action

      Several BitTorrent sites including Torrentz and Fenopy have had their .EU domains put on hold by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. The new status for the domains, forcibly applied by EURid within seconds of each other yesterday afternoon, suggests that legal action against them might be pending and prevents the owners from making changes.

      [...]

      Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.

    • HBO Has A Distribution Problem, But Just ‘Going Without’ Does Nothing To Push Them To Solve It

      Many, many posts and discussions have taken place here at Techdirt about content providers and their love of windowed releases. A point frequently made is that there would likely be a lot less piracy and a lot more purchasing if these 30/60/90 day rental/PPV/premium cable windows were eliminated on new releases. Another frequent target are premium cable providers and their original offerings, which suffer from long delays between original airings and their appearance on retail shelves.

    • A hearing transcript or a comedy screenplay? A must-read for those who think about settling
    • Porn trolling case thrown out for “attempted fraud on the court”

      Porn trolling has never been a glamorous business. But as judges, bar associations, and others have gotten wind of just how sleazy the porn-trolling business model is, trolling law firms have faced more and more obstacles. One trolling firm hit a new low on Tuesday, when an exasperated federal judge in Tampa, FL, threw out its copyright infringement case.

      In a surreal court session, Judge Mary Scriven grilled several individuals with ties to Prenda Law, a law firm that specializes in copyright trolling, and its alleged client, a porn company called Sunlust Pictures. (We say “alleged” because Prenda now claims, unconvincingly, that it was never involved in the case.) It quickly became obvious that no one in the courtroom had any significant ties to the supposed plaintiffs, or even knowledge of who they were. So Judge Scriven dismissed the case for, among other things, “attempted fraud on the Court” for sending a “representative” to court who knew next to nothing about the company he was representing.

    • Editorial: How piracy changed my life

      lately about piracy and how to combat it, including some pretty radical measures. But I believe most people glance over some of the positive effects that piracy has. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging it and I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. Piracy is only a symptom of something more: whether it’s bad business models, restrictive markets, or economic problems. And I think my own story proves this point.

      I was born in Romania, a country that had just gone through a revolution and was re-becoming a democracy. We, as a society, were just remembering what democracy was and how a free market works. We were just seeing what major technological breakthroughs had happened in the last 30 years in the west while our own country and populace had remained uninformed and technologically inept.

    • UK ISPs Block Pirate Bay’s Artist Promotions

      Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.

    • Stop BT, Virgin Media and BE from blocking The Promo Bay: Let customers access promobay.org.
    • First Amendment Concerns About Internet Radio Bill Not Just Overblown But Completely Backwards

      I’ve been tossing around a longish blog post about some of the controversy concerning the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) over the past month or so, but haven’t had a chance to put it all down in a blog post. I did, however, wish to pick up on a small thread that got a brief spark of attention from some people who don’t seem to understand legal stuff in the slightest. It started with musician David Lowery (you may remember him from past nonsensical rampages) claiming that Section 5 of the bill muzzled free speech and thus violated the First Amendment. This isn’t just wrong. It’s completely backwards. But the language and history here is a bit complex, so let’s dig in a bit.

    • BitTorrent Book Promotion Drives 40% Of Downloaders To Book’s Amazon Page

      Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it’s run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and… doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute “an exclusive bundle” of extra, related, content. That’s still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.

    • News Corp Is Shutting Down iPad-Only Newspaper The Daily

      The latest News Corp press release says that the Daily, its standalone daily iPad newspaper, will “cease standalone publication”.

      The newspaper had a high profile launch in February 2011, but had apparently struggled to pay its way — recent reports suggested the losses were looking like $30 million a year, and rumors that Rupert Murdoch would kill the publication have been around since at least early summer.

    • Unauthorized Remix Improves On Landmark Unauthorized Mashup, The Grey Album

      Jay-Z has since referred to it as “genius” and expressed how honored he was to see it happen. EMI, which controlled the Beatles’ rights, felt differently, sending cease-and-desist letters to tons of sites that had the mp3s. In response, folks on the internet planned Grey Tuesday for February 24th, 2004 — a day of digital civil disobedience, where lots of sites would distribute the mashup album. EMI, still not understanding what it was dealing with, sent off more cease-and-desist letters to any site that had indicated that it would participate. End result? Even more interest in the whole thing.

      Of course, since then, Danger Mouse has gone on to be an in-demand guy in the recording industry (among other things, he’s one-half of Gnarls Barkley, who of course had a massive hit with the song “Crazy” a few years ago). EMI later admitted that The Grey Album didn’t “harm” them at all, but still defended the decision arguing, pointlessly, “it’s not a question of damage, it’s a question of rights.”

    • Homeless Man Who Got Free Boots From Cop Now ‘Wants His Cut’ Of YouTube Attention

      Ah, this is what you get when you build up ideas around the idea that every bit of content must be “owned.” You may have heard the somewhat heartwarming story last week of NYPD Officer Lawrence DePrimo, seeing a homeless man in NYC without any shoes on, buying the man some boots and giving them to him. Without either man being aware of it, a tourist from Arizona, Jennifer Foster, saw this happening and took a photo of the situation.

    • Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia

      In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?

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