04.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The first customers will start getting the Chromebook Pixel LTE today, several weeks after the Wi-Fi-only version was available.
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Like many of us you are probably using your car almost every single day: commute to work, take the kids to school, run errands, go shopping, or just for fun. You name it. And while spending all this time on the road you may be using the in-vehicle infotainment system built into your ride for navigation, listening to music from the radio, accessing content stored on my mobile device, making phone calls, getting traffic updates and much more. And whether or not you are entirely happy with the solution that the maker has built into your car you may have the one or other idea on how things can be improved. Or maybe you think this is all lame and you can do a much better job. Well, here is your opportunity.
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I’ve written about this already, when I first changed the HDD in my laptop. I moved the same HDD from an HP Compaq C300 to a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 1505. The HDD had 4 operating systems installed: Windows XP, Mageia 1 KDE, Linux Mint XFCE and Debian Squeeze. I made a conclusion at that time that WinXP survived the move the best.
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I’m often told by trolls that other OS has better hardware support. Well here’s a comparison where a supported version of that other OS could not survive a hard drive transplant while GNU/Linux laughed.
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Everyone in the industry and particularly home users like to blame the obvious large targets for Linux never (at least at the time of this writing) quite making it to the average users Desktop in the masses. Many blame Microsoft, Apple, Patents or just anything proprietary in nature.
However I feel that there is one particular reason, made up of millions of small contributors, of why Linux has truly never landed on the Desktop. Who or what is it you ask? Your local PC shop is just as guilty and equally damaging as any of the large proprietary companies conspiring to hold Linux down.
They purposely keep Linux off the desktop and out of the picture for end users simply because the “Windows Virus, Adware, Spyware, Malware, Trojan and general shittyness repair money” is just to great, soo… a stable, working, capable, compatible, computer for the masses, is just out of the question.
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Server
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Move over Raspberry Pi, here comes Adapteva’s Parallella, a low-cost parallel chip board for Linux supercomputing.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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David Airlie of Red Hat has pulled in his own QXL KMS/DRM driver into his drm-next Git tree, which means this para-virtual graphics hardware with TTM/GEM support will premiere in the Linux 3.10 kernel.
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The Linux kernel is having to remove support for NWFPE and VFP emulation code due to a licensing conflict. Removing NWFPE and VFP from the kernel will effectively render older ARM hardware on Linux useless until a solution is determined.
Russell King, the maintainer of the ARM code for the Linux kernel, announced this removal on the linux-arm-kernel mailing list. The NWFPE (NetWinder Floating Point Emulator) and VFP (Vector Floating Point) code is for emulating floating-point operations within the kernel. While this code is critical to ARM hardware without hardware floating-point support, the code needs to be dropped due to a licensing conflict.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Hisense Mobile, Solarflare and Thomas-Krenn.AG are joining the organization.
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The Xen Project is 10 years-old this week, and its contributors have doubled in the last few years. Xen usage continues to grow and today the project is being deployed in public IaaS environments by some of the world’s largest companies.
Additionally, the Xen Project has adopted mainline kernel development practices and is progressing ever closer to the mainline kernel community. As of Linux kernel version 3.0, Linux can run unmodified as a Xen host or guest
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The Linux Foundation has taken over the development of Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Now Xen will be independently funded and will benefit from the collaborative development which will engage some of the biggest names in the IT world.
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In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.
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In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.
Citrix announced the donation Monday at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, being held this week in San Francisco.
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The Linux Foundation is offering live video streaming of all of the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions to be held Monday, April 15. Day 1 keynotes feature presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Intel, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.
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Xen, Citrix’s popular open-source hypervisor, is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with the backing of such major technology powers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Intel.
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The Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin sees a new trend in the technology industry toward a collaborative development model. Companies are focusing their research and development efforts outward and participating more in open source projects to accelerate innovation and progress, he said in his opening remarks at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the conference kicked off this morning with a warm welcome to the Xen Project, the foundation’s newest collaborative project, which is also celebrating its 10-year anniversary today as a virtualization platform. The announcement comes on the heels of last week’s OpenDaylight software-defined networking project launch.
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Keynote presenters had some interesting things to say at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on Monday. Here are some top quotes. What did you take away from the sessions? Please share your favorite quotes and moments in the comments, below.
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Graphics Stack
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Our latest benchmarks at Phoronix of the Linux 3.9 kernel are looking at the performance of the Intel DRM driver when handling an Intel Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” processor with HD 4000 graphics. The Intel OpenGL Linux graphics performance with this forthcoming kernel was compared to the earlier Linux 3.8, 3.7, 3.6, and 3.5 kernel releases.
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If running the latest stable components powering the Intel Linux graphics driver (namely the Linux kernel, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel), the open-source graphics support for the forthcoming Haswell processors should be in fairly good shape. However, like Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, it will take some time before the Linux graphics driver is fully-optimized. Fortunately, there’s another newly-enabled Haswell feature to report within Mesa.
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AMD has released a new Catalyst Linux graphics driver, which supports modern Linux kernel releases while having various other fixes in store too. Some of the OpenGL fixes will help those playing some Linux Steam client games.
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With the increasing popularity as of late with the Bitcoin virtual currency, the open-source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack has advanced to support Bitcoin mining.
Tom Stellard of AMD has spent the past few days working on getting the Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack in a state where it works to run the “bfgminer” Bitcoin mining application running on the open-source Radeon HD driver. After a few days, he has it working with some new code, but the performance isn’t all that great.
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Benchmarks
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When earlier this week delivering Btrfs benchmarks with various mount options for tuning the next-generation Linux file-system, some Linux users were hoping to see other file-systems tossed into the test mix too for reference. Here’s those numbers.
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Applications
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I’ve received this news from proxmox press office, I really like their effort and their product and so I’ve decided to post their press release that celebrate their 5th anniversary:
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ah Minecraft the massively popular sandbox building/survival game from Mojang, it’s still going strong and still getting big updates too, next up is 1.6!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It was a time when the first letter of many programs in Linux was “g” or “k”, to declare if something was made for GNOME or KDE. Back then, KDE programs (made of Qt) was looking awful under GNOME (made of GTK) and vice versa.
Nowadays with the very improved theming you can hardly understand if an application is written in Qt or GTK or even in another toolkit like Java. I remember when Mark Shuttleworth had talked 3-4 years ago for the development of a common environment in Ubuntu that could genuine run GTK or QT Apps, toolkit-invisible to users.
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After a year of development, I am happy to announce GNOME Photos 3.8.0. This completes the last unfinished GNOME 3.8 feature – Photos is now the latest in the set of Finding & Reminding applications for GNOME 3.
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Gaming on Linux is fun. A bit geeky, but fun. There is no dearth of free and open-source games for Linux. Some are plain awesome, some come handy when you want to kill time, and some exist just for the purpose of showing to the world that a geek in one corner of the world can build games on their own. The gaming universe is not as large on Linux as what it is on Windows, of course, but we’re getting there, one step at a time.
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Linux is one of the powerful and standard operating system which at present is growing faster and faster in computer operating system planet. It offers excellent performance and speed. Linux is very stable and reliable in terms of usage. It also provides several administrative tools and utilities that help you to manage your system effectively.
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New Releases
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I’m happy to announce the release of pfSense 2.0.3. This is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since 2.0.2 release. You can upgrade from any previous release to 2.0.3.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Arch Family
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CinnArch is no more as the work necessary to move to systemd was simply prohibitive and an announcement was made to close their doors.
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Red Hat Family
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In March 2013 two projects, CentOS and Scientific Linux, released updates to their respective distributions. Both projects provide clones of Enterprise Linux free of cost. As such both projects are important to the Linux ecosystem as they provide a means for users to take advantage of stable, high quality software without the high cost associated with enterprise quality products. While both projects released clones of Enterprise Linux 6.4 and while both projects maintain binary compatibility with their upstream software provider, these projects do carry subtle differences. They may be binary compatible with each other, but each project takes a slightly different approach in their presentation and configuration. With this in mind I would like to talk about what it is like to set up both CentOS and Scientific Linux.
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Red Hat is accelerating its involvement with the open source OpenStack cloud platform project with a new community distribution of OpenStack.
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OpenStack is an open source framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. RDO, the name for Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution (which stands for Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack), may not have a name as catchy as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, but its function will be similar.
The Fedora community adds new features upstream before they become incorporated in the Linux-based operating system and eventually make their way into Red Hat’s commercially available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RDO will be a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on RHEL, Fedora and their derivatives and offers a pure upstream OpenStack experience.
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Red Hat this week unveiled JBoss Data Grid 6.1, an update to its in-memory database, with significant new functionality for high availability and disaster recovery. Its first update in nearly a year, Red Hat’s database for large-scale enterprise applications now supports data-center replication across geographically dispersed clusters as well as the ability to perform rolling upgrades without interrupting service.
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Debian Family
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Lucas Nussbaum, an assistant professor of computer science from Universite de Lorraine, is the new leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there’s a few areas where the new Ubuntu Linux release delivers worthwhile performance improvements over the year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Ubuntu 13.04 will be released later this month, and whilst many will be focusing on the big bang-whizz changes – like new animation effects, features and app changes, few will give much attention to the subtler changes.
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But starting from Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), pre-pressed Ubuntu CD/DVD will only be made available only for LTS release (the next one will be 14.04 LTS ) from this point forward. This is in-line with Canonical policy to only concentrate on supporting Ubuntu LTS.
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Signing the Ubuntu Code of Conduct may seem difficult, especially for relatively new Linux users so to make things easier, Marten de Vries has created an application called Code of Conduct Signing Assistant which should make make it easier to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.
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Over the years, the methods of installing new software onto Linux systems has evolved a great deal. These days, modern distributions use tools like the Ubuntu Software Center to make software installation as simple as point-and-click.
In this article, I’ll explore the Ubuntu Software Center, it’s earliest beginnings, how the back-end works and where it still needs some fine-tuning for the future.
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Flavours and Variants
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Sadly, following on the heels of that story, Founder +Andrew Wyatt made a formal announcement this morning regarding his planned retirement from active work on and end of life for the Fuduntu project.
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Fuduntu’s last release will be version 2013.3, he added. September 30 will be the last official day of Fuduntu Linux.
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On Sunday, April 14, the Fuduntu team held a public meeting on IRC. Many things were discussed, including some issues that have major implications for both the team and community. Among the things discussed were introduction of team members, status of various teams, and the future of Fuduntu.
The biggest topic discussed was the future of Fuduntu. The team has been striving to bring a stable system to the community and we believe we’ve been able to do that. One of the key aspects of that was using GNOME 2. However, as time has gone by, support for GTK2 has decreased dramatically. With this, apps using GTK2 have been moved to GTK3 and old versions are no longer being maintained for either bugs or security flaws.
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The Fuduntu developers have decided that their current path of producing a GNOME 2 desktop with a Fedora based distribution as a rolling release is becoming technically problematic and have “voted to end-of-life Fuduntu Linux”. Fuduntu originally appeared in 2010 as a fork of Fedora designed for netbooks with power management applets and various optimisations for running on portable devices.The most recent release, Fuduntu 2013.2, appeared on 8 April.
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I rarely review hardware, mostly my own purchases, which usually come in the form of this or that laptop, some desktops, plus an odd phone here and there. Approx. a month back, I was contacted by Michael Mrozek, the CEO of OpenPandora GmbH, and asked to review their Pandora product, the world’s smallest, most powerful micro-gaming computer.
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CompuLab is shipping a Linux- and Android-ready COM built around the 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 processor, giving developers a choice of one, two, or four ARM Cortex-A9 cores. The CM-FX6 measures 75×65 mm, offers up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and uses dual 140-pin connectors to supply interfaces like I2C, CAN, SATA, and HDMI.
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Raspberry Pi is racking up some major sales. The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced last week that more than one million of the popular Linux-based devices have been sold to date.
Posting on the company’s blog, the team at Raspberry also announced that it has greatly scaled up production for the devices.
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Phones
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After reviewing more than 160 session proposals, the program committee of Tizen Developers Conference 2013 has published the event’s preliminary list of 45 presentations. The sessions will be organized in three tracks: Tizen project, process, and progress; app development and deployment; and platform and device development.
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If you have followed my column during the past few years, you’ll know that I am a big fan of having a portable Linux environment with me wherever I go. For years, this took the form of small laptops (like the Fujitsu P series) and most recently the Nokia N900, which took the form factor down to pocket size.
When I got the N900, I thought technology finally had caught up to a dream of mine: the ability to carry my computer in my pocket and, when I’m out walking around, interface with it via the small keyboard and touchscreen. When I get home, I can dock it, and it will expand to a larger display with a proper keyboard and mouse and become my regular computer. The big advantage of this idea is that I can keep my files and environment with me wherever I go.
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Ballnux
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The Jelly Bean version of Android is now available for AT&T subscribers who own the Samsung phone.
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Android
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Downloading huge amount of files using your web browser can be quite tedious. Many times downloads are interrupted and sometimes, you’ll find that they are slower than usual. One of the worst things, however, when it comes to downloading files using web browsers is that the moment you close the browser or lose the connection, all your downloaded effort goes to waste. This is where download managers come in handy. These small applications are responsible for ensuring that you have an uninterrupted download that can be resumed anytime you want. Moreover, apart from giving you the core features, these tools also let you download your favorite content via proxy and FTP as well.
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If you’re an iPhone user, you might be feeling a little left behind, because Facebook launched an application called Facebook Home, touted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “next version of Facebook.” In fact, you might be feeling this way if you’re an Android user, too. For now, only a handful of select devices can even run Home (officially) — notably missing from the lineup is Google’s Nexus 4, the latest in the lineup of Nexus-branded flagship Android phones — devices that users adopt in particular to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new app releases.
But Facebook promised that more handsets will be supported in time, as will tablets. Well, only Android ones, that is.
It’s too soon to say whether Facebook Home will live up to the company’s claims and expectations of becoming the new way people interact with the social network, or whether it will go down only as a notable experiment on the social network’s part. If the latter, it won’t be a major loss to the company, as Facebook will continue to have access to data from a core group of heavy Facebook enthusiasts. It will learn what keeps users engaged, what posts and images catch their eye and their clicks, and, eventually, which advertisements do, too.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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You know how you can upgrade some components in your computer when they start to feel stale instead of going out and buying a whole new PC? That’s a lot harder to do with a laptop than a desktop, and the only “upgrade” most mobile tablets offer is the option to add a microSD card.
Rhombus Tech wants to change that by developing a platform that lets you swap out the CPU, memory, and other vital components of a tablet (or laptop, or desktop) when you want to upgrade — without requiring you to buy a new display, case, or other components.
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The ABI Research report says that an estimated 150 million tablets will ship in 2013, worth an estimated $64 billion. The total number of tablets will grow by a projected 38% over 2012, and the total revenue will grow a projected 28%.
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As we’ve reported, the rise of the cloud and Big Data tools is also giving rise to a need for expertise in using these tools. Jobs for people with Linux and Big Data skills are readily available around the world.
In an interesting spin on this trend, though, there are also some signs emerging that Big Data analysis tools could even match skilled workers up with their ideal jobs in ways that human recruiters can’t. And, these tools may put special emphasis on how savvy job seekers are with open source technology and general computing knowledge.
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The License Clinic for US Federal Agencies is not the only new departure for the Open Source Initiative this May. OSI is also reaching out to a wide spectrum of open source communities with its Open Source Community Summit in Washington DC on May 10 2013, where we’ll be able to gain a much fuller idea of the needs of those communities. Sponsored by Google, Red Hat and Eclipse, and chaired by OSI President Simon Phipps, this is OSI’s first Community Summit.
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BCSWomen is working with BCS Open Source specialist group and Flossie to host a number of one-day career workshops to promote open source development as a second career opportunity.
These events are part of the organisation’s campaign to advise more women to take up or return to careers in IT, with modern estimates claiming that women account for less than a fifth of ICT managers and 21 per cent of computer analysts.
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Few women have been historically applying for Google Summer of Code, a program in which Google provides stipends for students to work for three months on FOSS projects. Last year, after many efforts by both the Google team and the community to increase the diversity in the program, about 100 of 1200 participants or 8.3% were women, which was a highest level of participation by women yet.
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In a bold experiment, nonprofit Mission software developer Yorba Foundation is bidding for sustainable support through crowdfunding for its open-source email program, Geary.
Founded in 2009 by Google alumnus Adam Dingle, the Capp Street nonprofit aims to raise $100,000 in the next nine days via a campaign on the funding platform Indiegogo. If the plan works, Yorba’s strategy could blaze a trail for other open-source companies to support the creation of free software.
“We want to be able to say, ‘Yeah this worked for us, and you should give it a try,’” said Jim Nelson, Yorba’s executive director. “This might be a way for other companies to raise money and keep going.” For now, Yorba gets its financial backing from Dingle.
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When the MP3 format was unleashed onto the relatively young Internet, it was an absolute game changer. It finally made audio files small enough to practically distribute over the Internet, as high-speed connections were still a luxury item for the majority of Internet users. But while it was the MP3 format that made it possible, it was undeniably Napster that brought it to the mass media.
In 1999, Napster completely changed the way people shared and listened to music; it helped start the trend of abandoning physical media for digital. Unfortunately, it also brought the wrath of the recording industry, and Napster was sued into oblivion after only 2 years.
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FOSS operating systems are great and I enjoy using and adapting them, but they are missing certain features which could make them even better.
One issue with FOSS operating systems is the plethora of package managers. Fedora even has two different package managers: apt-get and yum. Slackware has their own version of apt-get that they call slapt-get. The three BSDs use pkgsrc and the Sharp Zaurus used a similar package manager called ipkg. If you use KDE you are probably familiar with kpackage.
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Events
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Videos from the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions, recorded on April 15, are now available for on-demand streaming. The videos include presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chromebook users running the stable channel of the Chrome OS are getting an update 26.0.1410.57. This update brings some security improvements. But since Chromebooks gets update automatically, you don’t have to do anything. Just keep an eye on the notification bubble and if there is one, restart your machine to keep it updated.
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Mozilla
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Over at Mozilla, they continue to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Mozilla Labs is out with an early alpha version of TowTruck, a project designed to facilitate Skype-style collaboration online, leveraging new features found in the Firefox and Chrome browsers. In a post announcing the experiment, Mozilla Labs warns that the technology is experimental at this point, but it looks like a very easy way to incorporate real-time collaboration into any website.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Look out, Amazon Web Services. Rackspace is cloning its own cloudy service – and to quote Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady, it’s “comin’ to getcha.”
Way back when, Rackspace Hosting teamed up with NASA to create the OpenStack community precisely to leverage the smarts and excitement of the open source community to take on the closed and controlled AWS cloud. Now Rackspace will take OpenStack and leverage its own experience in building custom infrastructure to house OpenStack clouds, and deliver it as a service to telecommunication and service provider customers.
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The open source OpenStack Grizzly cloud platform release debuted the first week of April benefiting from over 480 contributors making over 7,600 updates.
While the base of contribution is broad, one vendor stands at the top of the list, in terms of number of code commits made. While the initial releases of OpenStack were dominated by code commits from Rackspace and Nebula, for Grizzly, Red Hat now leads the list.
Red Hat made 836 commits across core OpenStack projects and 1,854 commits across all OpenStack projects. Red Hat developers added 121,632 lines code and remove 87,145 lines of code.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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Coding is the language of the future, with the power to create and modify the computer programs and websites that increasingly shape our day-to-day lives. While millions of people in the United States spend hours each day engaged with interactive technologies, relatively few truly understand how they work; and fewer take an active role in developing software and websites.
Still, some organizations are advocating more be done to teach young people about computer programing and coding. It is no secret that younger generations, born into an age of smartphone apps and near-ubiquitous Internet access, tend to be more enthusiastic and adept at using new technologies than their parents and grandparents. The key word here is “using” technology, as opposed to creating new programs and reimagining existing processes.
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While compiling OSS Watch’s list of Open Source Options for Education, I discovered Koha, an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). I discovered, with some confusion, that there seemed to be several ILS systems called Koha. Investigation into the reason for this uncovered a story which provides valuable lessons for open source project ownership, including branding, trademarks, and conflict resolution.
Koha started its life in New Zealand (reflected in the name, which is a Māori word meaning reciprocal gift, or a gift with expectations). It was originally commissioned by the Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT), written by Katipo Communications Ltd, and released under the GPL. Crucially, Katipo held the copyright on the Koha code.
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Business
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Luxoft unveiled the new OpenFlow 1.3 module for its open source test automation platform, Twister. With over 200 test cases available, Twister helps equipment vendors thoroughly test and verify the conformance of their software-defined networking (SDN) products with the OpenFlow 1.3 standard.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Epiphany SDK started life as a prototype binutils & GCC port by Alan Lehotsky, which would run code on a Verilator model of the Epiphany chip.
Embecosm became involved in March 2009, initially providing an implementation of the GNU Debugger. Then over a period of 6 weeks starting that September we upgraded GCC to a commercially robust implementation, eliminating all regression test failures from the C and C++ compilers. This was still before the first silicon had been spun, and with testing against a Verilator model.
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It’s too much for ordinary consumers, the vast majority of users of IT, to deal with a pile of such issues when moving to Free Software. Over time more manufacturers are supplying drivers for Linux so this issue may well disappear, but in the meantime some compromise must be made in practice. There’s nothing wrong with the principles however. It’s the right way to do IT with shared, re-used, redistributable software because it’s the best quality at the lowest price and it respects the freedom of the users.
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GNU/Linux emerges thanks to the free software ideology, but independently of this ideology, we have a great freedom of choice and decision. For example, customized our operating system according to our preferences, tastes or needs. In Windows we can customize it partially through skins or themes, we can change the window color, transparency, change the login screen, boot screen among other little things. But you set out to change some other aspect in particular? Suppose the taskbar makes you ugly, annoying or maybe want to add some extra functionality. It will be difficult get this directly, that is, that it allows Windows you do beforehand, maybe we can use external programs, most of which are pay and usually, the result only partially mitigates the need that we had. In GNU / Linux this is possible and more so, if you do not like what you see can change completely, if you already bored as seen Gnome you can exchange it for KDE, If KDE does not fill your expectations can change for XFCE. If specific application has not simply what you expect you replace the other. Want to try another version of GNU/Linux? Just download and try it!
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Thank you to everyone for thinking of us at the Free Software Foundation office in downtown Boston as yesterday’s terrible news unfolded. We appreciate all the concerned emails and queries.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The Cabinet Office has announced the appointment of an Open Standards Board to oversee the development of a level playing field for open source and proprietary software providers in government.
Since November, departments have been required to ensure all new IT contracts with software suppliers abide by open standards principles, allowing interoperability and data and document format interoperability. The Cabinet Office central spend and control process is responsible for ensuring departments adhere to the policy when procuring software.
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Licensing
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Every open source project needs to decide on an open source license. This decision is of high economic relevance: Just which license is the best one to help the project grow and attract a community? The most common question is: Should the project choose a restrictive (reciprocal) license or a more permissive one? As an important step towards answering this question, this paper analyses actual license choice and correlated project growth from ten years of open source projects. It provides closed analytical models and finds that around 2001 a reversal in license choice occurred from restrictive towards
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Openness/Sharing
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Anyone who has had a computer and a connection to the Internet in 1999 quickly knew what it felt like to find any song that you wanted, and then listen to it almost immediately. Well, the immediate part wasn’t true, since you had to download the MP3s, which usually took quite a bit of time on a dialup connection.
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Different countries are moving at different speeds in terms of governmental adoption of free software, open data and openness in general. I wrote a year ago about Iceland, which seemed to be making particularly rapid progress at the time. Now it looks like it’s Italy’s turn.
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The open-source RF design initiative, dubbed Myriad, has the support of US-based distributor Richardson RFPD.
Richardson RFPD will begin stocking and selling the Myriad-RF-1 board to customers around the world via its website immediately.
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Open Hardware
Programming
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The developers of the Funf open source Java-based sensor framework for mobile phones have released version 0.4 of their software. Most changes in this version, the developers say, are under the hood and affect the architecture of the framework. Changes include a new pipeline interface, a redesigned configuration process, and changes that mean that Funf now runs as a single service instead of spawning a service for each sensor probe.
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PHP 5.5 Beta 3 was released today wotj a few bug-fixes and other minor changes. To complement the PHP benchmarks earlier this week, here are some benchmarks of the forthcoming PHP 5.5.
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RunRev is launching an open source version of its LiveCode application development software. The finance was raised by a Kickstarter campaign earlier in the year.
LiveCode has achieved a certain amount of success as a paid-for product designed for cross-platform application design, but RunRev wanted more users, so raised $750,000 in a Kickstarter campaign.
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Last week I was running load tests against a new server and needed to produce reports from the results. I wanted to have graphs to show the response time as the test progressed, and thought this would be a good time to try a couple of different methods of creating the reports. The first report was generated with Microsoft Word and Excel, and as I struggled with Excel’s insane copy and paste, and Word’s inane auto layout decisions, the one thought that kept occurring to me was “why does anyone put up with this?” The next step was to break out the power tools with Python and LaTeX.
I used siege for the load testing, and redirected the output to a file. The siege output gives me a nice baseline to work from, but simply redirecting the output also gives some cruft that needs to be cleaned up. During the first go around with Excel, I needed to open up each file in Vim to clean it up before I could import the data. In the process of cleaning up the files, of course the thought occurred to me that I should automate that task, but I try to avoid unnecessary scripting when I can. Once the graphs were created, they needed to be copied and pasted into the Word document, which I then spent ten minutes trying to get each graph to look uniform. Admitted, I’m not a Word or Excel expert, but I do know that repetitive tasks and document layout are two things that computers do well. I should let them do it.
Standards/Consortia
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Intel launched a free HTML5 Development Environment at IDF in Beijing last week. The tool is said to enable cross-platform development, test, and deployment of apps that can run on multiple device types and operating systems, and which can be distributed through multiple application stores.
Intel says it’s investing in HTML5 “to help mobile application developers lower total costs and improve time-to-market for cross-platform app development and deployment.”
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Photos taken of the Boston Marathon explosion carnage showed horrific images of smeared blood on the sidewalk, blown out windows and bystanders rushing to aid multiple people who had lost limbs and suffered other severe injuries.
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CORPORATE RAIDER Carl Icahn has agreed not to buy more than a 10 percent stake in Dell as arguments surrounding the firm’s attempted leveraged buyout continue.
Michael Dell, co-founder and CEO of Dell, announced a leveraged buyout deal for the company with Silver Lake Partners earlier this year that valued the firm at $24.4bn. However Icahn in particular has emerged as a fly in Michael Dell’s ointment, making a counteroffer that values the firm higher.
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The company has succeeded in diverting the takeover by signing an agreement with Icahn. Under this agreement, Icahn and affiliated entities have agreed not to make purchases that would cause them to own more than 10% of Dell’s shares or enter into agreements with other shareholders who, together with the Icahn entities, would collectively own in excess of 15% of Dell’s shares.
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Health/Nutrition
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As you may have read, by an amazing coincidence, most of the UK leading supermarkets have simultaneously announced that they will no longer use non-GM feed (I’m sure there was no collusion whatsoever…). The stated reason is that, much as they’d like to, they just can’t find non-GM feed anymore. Ain’t that a pity?
Oddly, though, ABRANGE, the Brazilian Association for Producers of Non-GMO Soy, has just released a statement saying there’s no shortage, just a queue of ships waiting to load goods at Brazilian docks.
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A consultant radiologist looks at some of practical dangers of the Coalition’s privatisation of NHS services, described by the BMJ as potentially the end of England’s NHS, and urges peers to vote against the privatisation regulations.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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2013, when all the news can fit your views.
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It makes peace synonymous with a state of warfare.
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The record of the U.S. government’s support for authoritarian, corrupt and/or murderous regimes is not really up for debate. The only question is whether one believes that the U.S. continuously suspends its its deep-seated preference for democratic rule and human rights in order to pursue certain policy goals, or whether the historic record suggests that there is little such preference at all.
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In recent years, the state of Washington has issued nearly 300 fictitious driver licenses to the CIA. That’s according to public records initially disclosed, but now withheld, by state officials. The state’s cooperation with the nation’s premier spy agency has been a secret for years — unknown to lawmakers and even the governor.
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In crafting legislation motivated by a Kitsap Sun public records request, the Department of Licensing, or DOL, acknowledged for the first time in about three decades it was issuing fake IDs to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies for undercover investigations. Not even former two-term Gov. Chris Gregoire, also once the state attorney general, knew about the program, a spokesman for Gregoire confirmed Monday.
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is appealing a January decision that allowed the CIA to withhold details of its drone targeted killing program. In a statement given to Wired, Hina Shamsi, the ACLU National Security Project director explained that “the targeted killing program raises serious questions about government power in a constitutional democracy.”
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The American Civil Liberties Union today appealed a judge’s ruling allowing the President Barack Obama administration to keep mum on its legal basis for its drone targeted killing program, including information connected to the killing of Americans via drones.
The appeal concerns an “Alice in Wonderland” decision by U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon of New York, who in January ruled that she was trapped in a “paradoxical situation” of allowing the administration to claim it was legal to kill enemies outside traditional combat zones while keeping the legal rationale secret.
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US drones fired two missiles and struck a house in the Dattakhel area of North Waziristan tribal region, killing four people on Sunday evening.Local villagers said two rooms and a double-cabin pick-up truck were damaged in the missile strikes.
The villagers said the drone fired two missiles when a double-cabin pick-up truck entered the house at Dattakhel, 50 kilometres west of North Waziristan’s headquarters Miranshah. “Four bodies were later recovered from debris of the house when two drones flying over the area disappeared,” said a local tribesman.
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RAF Waddington will soon be the control centre for British drone warfare. It may already be, we can’t be sure.
The fact we don’t know testifies to the secrecy that surrounds the operation of these remote control killing machines. Drones embody the sinister shift that has been taken in the West’s wars post Iraq.
They blur the distinction between war and state execution, with no chance for public scrutiny.
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A string of bombings across Iraq has claimed at least 55 lives, injuring 300 more, on Monday. The surge in violence comes barely a week ahead of Iraq hosting elections for the first time since US withdrawal from the country.
Officials said bombings hit 12 different areas, leaving 55 people dead and making Monday the country’s deadliest day since March 19, AFP reported.
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Cablegate
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High court hears government will not confirm or deny that documents are authentic in Chagos Islands case
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When Wikileaks released its latest batch of diplomatic documents earlier this month, it brought its holdings up to a total of 2 million records. What Wikileaks calls the ‘Public Library of US Diplomacy’ now consists of the original 250,000 US diplomatic cables – known as ‘Cablegate’ – and the 1,7 million new ‘Kissinger Cables’. REBECCA DAVIS trawled through the archive to see what US diplomats had to say about South Africa and its politicians.
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Even if Manning was engaged in principled civil disobedience, he must face the consequences that await anyone who violates the law in a supposedly higher cause. But the current charges against him go too far.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Myron Stafford may look like a man of faith, but he’s also a professional advocate for the Keystone XL pipeline
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Finance
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The claims made for Mrs Thatcher’s transformative powers are grossly exaggerated
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Coked-up bankers caused the credit crunch, according to the former drug tsar David Nutt. One former City worker can well believe it
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With President Obama fielding cynical cuts to Social Security to appease the Fix the Debt crowd and reach a budget deal, groups are teaming up to point out that there would be a lot less concern about the budget deficit if corporate America did what average Americans have to do and actually pay taxes. Taking advantage of loopholes, tricks and deductions, many U.S. companies pay far below the required 35% tax rate, and some, like General Electric have a negative tax rate. New web resources are shining a light on the firms and individuals that manipulate the U.S. tax system to their benefit, putting more of the burden on America’s middle class.
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The annual rate of consumer price inflation held at 2.8%, according to official data. That is the highest since last May and in line with economists’ forecasts.
The Office for National Statistics said the biggest upward pressures last month came from price rises for newspapers, books and digital cameras – including the effect of dearer ebooks, a new item in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. There was only muted relief from fuel prices which rose by less than a year ago and some easing in food price inflaiton.
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Bankers at Goldman Sachs – including its 6,000 London staff – are in line for another bumper year as results this week are forecast to show average pay packets of £85,000 for the first quarter alone.
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Do you know how much the average CEO in the United States makes in comparison to the average worker? Do they make 40 times what workers make? Not even close, the ratio hasn’t been that low since 1982. 200 times as much? Not since 1992.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A spokesperson for Darden Restaurants, which operates Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and other chain restaurants, contacted the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) to ask that a recent article be corrected to reflect that the company has dropped its membership in American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Rich Jeffers, Director of Media Relations at Darden, told CMD that the company had not renewed its ALEC membership since January 2010 because it “felt that different organizations like the National Restaurant Association would . . . serve us best.” The call indicates that the company is sensitive to being linked to the controversial ALEC agenda, which has generated recent negative press attention on the fight against paid sick days, controversial “ag gag” bills, “Stand Your Ground” gun laws, and voter suppression proposals.
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Even on PBS, the left and right agree that cutting Social Security is brave; I guess that makes the public a bunch of wimps.
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Corporate Europe Observatory, as a steering committee member of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU), was delighted to be involved in the ALTER-EU annual assembly last week, “Standing up to big business lobbies: Reclaiming Europe for the public interest ”. As part of this, CEO took part in a high-level public debate in Brussels, “Lessons from a Lobbycracy: Transformation for Transparency and Rules for Revolving Door ”, alongside Members of European Parliament (MEPs) and representatives of the European Commission, to discuss the upcoming reviews of the revolving-door rules for EU staff and of the EU’s voluntary lobby register. We also led the first-ever Dalligate lobby tour.
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Censorship
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Respect MP aims to block proposal to suspend parliament during funeral, and attacks ‘tidal wave of guff’ about former PM
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After Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead rose to No 2 in the UK charts following support from anti-Thatcher protesters, Neil McCormick wonders how many over-forties tuned in to the chart show for the first time in decades.
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Privacy
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Successive UK governments have seen data protection more as a cost overhead to be minimised than as an essential protection for the individual in an electronic age. This view started with Margaret Thatcher’s first government and has endured for over three decades.
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We need to defend ourselves and get control of our personal data amassed by private companies and government agencies
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Both paid and free apps in the Google Play store harvest the same amount of private information from Android phones, a researcher discovered
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Civil Rights
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The panel on Data Protection focused on the corporate lobbying to water down new European legislation. We looked at the key issues at stake, including the right to control your data through stronger consent, data ‘portability’ and the right to delete your data. ORG is heavily involved in a joint campaign to ensure the European Parliament sides with citizens in the forthcoming votes. (We’ve produced a short briefing on the Regulation.)
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Investigations by the United States Justice Foundation (USJF) into the plight of our military veterans and the assault on their Second and Fifth Amendment rights continues to uncover a disturbing pattern that confirms the VA is violating the Constitutional rights of America’s heroes on a daily basis.
The investigation included two separate requests to the VA under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). USJF asked for the criteria used for appointing a fiduciary for veterans to handle their financial affairs and for information on the criteria for adding such veterans to the list of Americans ineligible to buy firearms. The legal deadline for a response from the VA has passed and requests have been totally ignored.
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Lawmakers in the Last Frontier have passed a bill protecting the right of their citizens to keep and bear arms from federal infringement. Both houses of the Alaska state legislature approved HB 69 and the act now only lacks the governor’s signature before it becomes state law.
Although part of the measure was amended somewhat by the state senate — a provision that would have charged federal agents with a felony if they attempted to enforce federal gun grabs within state borders — the bill remains a bold statement of state sovereignty and resistance to federal plans to disarm civilians.
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When it is not simply being wasted, U.S. aid to Afghanistan is being spent on projects that the Afghan government does not have the capacity to sustain, and “millions” of taxpayer dollars could be ending up in the hands of the enemy, according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko.
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Today, that reality can be seen more clearly than ever due to police checkpoints, the PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act and drone strikes perpetrated against American citizens.
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Another state is stepping in and shielding its citizens from constant surveillance by the government or law enforcement.
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Congress has empowered the military to seize us and hold us indefinitely without access to the courts and a trial by jury.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Both the EU and the US have expressed their intent to include an IPR chapter in TTIP, though its final scope will be subject of negotiations. Given the vast economic potential of TTIP and the huge volume of trade in goods and services an IPR chapter seems unavoidable.
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Copyrights
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The EU Commission is not yet ready to change course on copyright policy. With the release of two new roadmap documents1 on copyright, patent and trademark policy, the EU body who negotiated ACTA decides to stick to the status quo. And ironically invokes the crisis to urge for more of the same broken policies.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.15.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) wants to simplify the process of certifying Linux-based devices to the IEC’s Safety Integrity Level 2 specs. Now, the group is asking interested parties to sign a letter-of-intent, through which various system components would be pre-certified on a cost-shared basis.
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Seems with Raspberry Pi, creativity sees no limit. Recently, a group of National University of Singapore engineering undergraduates has created an autonomous underwater vehicle, with the help of the Pi for memory-intensive functions and Arduino for precise control. And they call it “Coconut Pi”.
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I can appreciate someone who casts aside all other considerations in their quest for freedom from interference. We owe a debt to people like that. But not everyone needs to live up to that kind of standard. The differences in the nature of Linux and Windows software are instructive and eye-opening. I can use my experience with Windows to describe why I believe Linux is mostly just better than Windows.
Microsoft software is tinged by the behavior of its maker and its fans. Otherwise, there would be no impulse to question why someone would use software from multiple sources.
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Twenty years plus since being created, Linux remains a terrifying word in the global lexicon. Probably not as bad as it was for farmers watching cars take over the countryside in the early decades of the 20th century, but close. It’s an operating system all right, but one that does not warm the cockles of your heart. It’s the bastion of nerdy and geeky and difficult, and you are better off leaving it alone, to its bearded users. Which makes me think, why is the beard a status of sagacity in our society? Throw in a smoking pipe, and you have a PhD in trustworthiness. That’s how it works. And yet, even though Linux is an obvious choice among the people of science, academy and industry, the popular desire to emulate the prototype intellectual status is in low demand. For most folks, the hardship of becoming a Linux user outweighs the benefits. (Image credit: Wikipedia.org)
Because of this phenomenon, if you happen to burrow your face into the job-seeking networks, you will see the string Linux featuring tall and mighty. There’s quite a bit of demand for Linux system administrators and engineers, global recession and all notwithstanding. True, you will find a wealth of other occupations, professions and skill being hawked to the lowest bidder, but Linux is sort of a star.
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Earlier this week, Liquid Robotics unveiled the latest in its line of “Wave Glider” autonomous aquatic craft, due to ship in the third quarter, billing it as “the world’s first hybrid wave and solar propelled unmanned ocean robot.” In addition to its energy harvesting marvels, the 9.5-foot, Wave Glider SV3 is also notable for being the first Linux-powered Wave Glider. With its Linux- and Java-based Regulus operating system, the floating robot is far more adept at autonomous navigation than the Wave Glider SV2, and can now coordinate with its siblings in fleet operations.
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Desktop
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And now after more than two years in the experimental stage, the ZFS file system for Linux is ready for widespread use.
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I am a member of the GNOME foundation and an MS in Computer Science student. I contribute to GNOME’s Documents application, co-organize monthly Linux user group meetups and GNOME hackfests in Chicago, and help out with the Chicago Python Workshop. I’m working as a web developer while I complete my degree.
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Server
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Top-Cheap-Web-Hosting.com named the award winner of the best Linux hosting 2013 for personal and small business based on the web hosting cost, technology, features, reliability, speed and technical support.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The last episode was for absolute beginners, this one is for Geeks. I try to explain (and understand on the way) how images are stored in PNG and JPEG files. PNG (pronounced “PING”) does this lossless, the image can be retrieved in the same quality as the original. PNG works wonders with graphics with a lot of lines and clear colour areas, comics and logos for example, but it creates monster files out of photos and similar images. JPEG looses details, aquires artefacts and generally mangles the image. But it has so beautifully small files and the losses are in most cases invisible – except in the area where PNG is good. So both have their niche to live in.
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Kevin Wisher and Pegwole join Chad Wollenberg this episode. We discuss TLLTS 500th show, MakerFaire in Munich Germany, and we discuss network administration and how to utilize different utilities such as nmap and wireshark to do analysis on the packets causing problems. Make sure to catch Chad on Linux For the Rest of Us next week!
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In this episode: We’ve got oodles of Google news, Nvidia’s new Optimus driver, Dell selling Ubuntu games PCs and our own discoveries. Plus a new podcast challenge and the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Listening to Tony Awtrey sing Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem is awe inspiring. The classically trained tenor has a euphonious voice capable of taking your breath away. He’s also a Linux developer and Chief Scientist in the defense industry.
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Lennart Poettering announced systemd 201 on Monday afternoon. Features of systemd 201 include journalctl sub-command updates, improvements to reading the crypttab file, a “systemctl status” command for showing various bits of useful status information, improvements to the systemd libraries, and much more.
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So, clearly, it’s different strokes for different folks and while change is good, the contention over whether systemd is really a good thing remains hotly debated. One thread concerning ‘The Bad’ in the Arch Linux community is fairly representative of the concern for adoption of systemd. Arch Linux has a loyal following of pragmatic users who enjoy working at a component level because of how it allows one to truly learn the ‘build your own’ Desktop. The result is a clean, lean system and their is purity in that. So, they might be the most vocal of all critics and rightly so.
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Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.
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Things seem to be moving along swimmingly with ongoing development surrounding systemd, at least as far as Lead Developer Lennart Poettering is concerned who has outlined the plans for moving the project forward with hopefully full upstream community participation in lock step.
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Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, is faster for some OpenGL games when running on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.
Early this morning I published some new Nouveau benchmarks from Mesa 9.2-devel. After that testing, from the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics, I then compared recent Linux kernel releases. The Linux 3.9 Git kernel as of yesterday was compared to the vanilla mainline releases of Linux 3.8, 3.7, and 3.6.
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While some patches have turned up in the past, the mainline Linux kernel has yet to have support for Apple’s infrared remote control found on their computers since 2005. Fortunately, it looks like a new Apple IR driver is taking shape.
Based upon the earlier work of James McKenzie, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Bastien Nocera, Benjamin Tissoires has now provided a new patch ushering in the “AppleIR” driver for the Linux kernel.
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One of the areas of hardware power management that can yield a surprising amount of power-savings but is often overlooked comes down to the system memory. Fortunately, new Linux kernel patches continue to be written for improving the Linux kernel RAM power management.
On modern hardware with DDR3 and similar, there’s power management functionality for putting unused DIMMs into a low-power state when the RAM hasn’t been accessed for a period of time. While this is a hardware feature, with the operating system being made aware of such information, better decisions could be made by the kernel and in particular the memory management subsystem, e.g. first touching RAM that is actively being used rather than storing data on a DIMM currently in a low-power state. Other benefits can also come from making the kernel and memory subsystem power-aware.
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The Linux 3.7 kernel brought ARM multi-platform support and now with the Linux 3.10 kernel it may be extended to support the Samsung Exynos SoC family.
The ARM multi-platform feature allows for having support for multiple ARM SoCs/platforms within a single Linux kernel image. Traditionally, the ARM Linux kernel situation has been a fragmented mess and needing separate kernel images for different Systems-on-a-Chip. With the Linux 3.7 kernel and this multi-platform support, it became possible to have one kernel for covering Calxeda Highbank, Versatile Express, Altera, PicoXcell, and other SoCs.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 3D can now use the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) of modern Radeon graphics chips; this decoder is more efficient with common video formats than software that decodes using the main processor or the graphics processor’s shaders. The UVD support arrived with extensions that were created by AMD developer Christian König and have recently been added to Mesa 3D (1, 2). Therefore, it should become part of the next Mesa 3D generation that will probably be versioned as 9.2 or 10.0; once released, this generation is expected to be integrated into the Linux distributions’ development branches quickly, because Mesa 3D is an important component for these distributions’ 3D support for current graphics chips.
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After showing off early Mesa 9.2 benchmarks with Nouveau and Nouveau improvements with the Linux 3.9 kernel, our latest NVIDIA Linux benchmarks from one of our Lenovo ThinkPad laptops is comparing the NVIDIA vs. Nouveau driver performance on Ubuntu 13.04.
For those deciding between the Nouveau (the open-source default NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu) and the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that can easily be installed from Ubuntu’s package repository, here’s some new benchmarks. Overall though, these new benchmarks aren’t terribly surprising… NVIDIA’s binary driver still largely wins by a landslide, in large part because the Nouveau driver still lacks proper GPU re-clocking support.
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Developer Thierry Reding has released patches for the Linux kernel that enable the use of 3D acceleration features on Tegra processors. According to Reding, the patches are, however, not fully mature and are based on changes from other developers, in some cases from NVIDIA, which have not yet been merged into the Linux kernel.
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Mesa 3D can now use the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) of modern Radeon graphics chips; this decoder is more efficient with common video formats than software that decodes using the main processor or the graphics processor’s shaders. The UVD support arrived with extensions that were created by AMD developer Christian König and have recently been added to Mesa 3D (1, 2). Therefore, it should become part of the next Mesa 3D generation that will probably be versioned as 9.2 or 10.0; once released, this generation is expected to be integrated into the Linux distributions’ development branches quickly, because Mesa 3D is an important component for these distributions’ 3D support for current graphics chips.
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Building upon last week’s RadeonSI tiling patches for exposing this performance-boosting feature on the latest generation of AMD Radeon HD graphics hardware is the xf86-video-ati work. With a new patch, 2D tiling can be turned on for Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs on the open-source Linux driver.
Published last week and still baking were the “RadeonSI” tiling changes as they affect the Linux kernel with the Radeon DRM, the libdrm library, and the RadeonSI Mesa Gallium3D driver. Jerome Glisse has now put out the small xf86-video-ati patch for flipping on 2D color tiling within the Radeon X.Org driver.
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While the X.Org Foundation and other projects under its umbrella like Mesa and Wayland benefited from Google’s Summer of Code initiative for several years, last year it wasn’t accepted to participate in GSoC 2012. The list of accepted organizations for GSoC 2013 was announced today and X.Org/Mesa/Wayland again isn’t part of the acceptance list.
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Version 1.1 of Wayland and the Weston reference compositor will soon be released. The first major post-1.0 updates to Wayland/Weston bring a number of exciting features to this next-generation Linux display server.
Kristian Høgsberg has been preparing to get Wayland/Weston 1.1 out the door, which originally he hoped to have done by the end of March. However, a few remaining issues lingered, but now those are getting addressed.
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The 2013 X.Org Board of Director election results are now in for the four new board members responsible for stewarding the X.Org Foundation and related projects like Mesa and Wayland.
The four new board members though aren’t a surprise since there was only four candidates running for the four open spots this year… Those elected were Alan Coopersmith (110 votes), Peter Hutterer (86 votes), Martin peres (66 votes), and Stuart Kreitman (63 votes).
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Benchmarks
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While the release of Mesa 9.2/10.0 is still a ways away, for those users of the Nouveau reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver, here are some early benchmarks for reference compared to the stable Mesa 9.0 and 9.1 series.
The benchmarks being put out this morning are just some ThinkPad W510 numbers from an Intel Core i7 720QM system with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics. Ubuntu 13.04 was in use with the Linux 3.8 kernel and Unity 7.0 desktop. Being compared were Mesa 9.2 (master), 9.1, and 9.2 branches of Mesa Git.
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For those of you wondering the performance impact of using mount options for tuning the Btrfs file-system on the soon-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel, here’s some benchmarks of common Btrfs mount options.
There were Btrfs tuning benchmarks on the Linux 3.7 kernel offered on Phoronix, but with this next-generation Linux file-system still being in a state of flux, new benchmarks were conducted this week from a Linux 3.9 Git kernel.
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Applications
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Yes, it’s been almost a decade with us. And as it usually is with versions 1.0.0 after such a long time, it doesn’t actually bring anything breadth-taking. But there of course have been some fixes and improvements since version 0.9.7, and in fact even one larger feature found its way in, out-of-the-box support for the Clang compiler, including support for its plugins. Written by yours truly, after finding out about this compiler and finding out it was pretty difficult to get it to work with 0.9.7 icecream at least in some way. And also being the reason for repeatedly bugging Coolo about another icecream release 
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There are many who believe and say that you don’t need antivirus software on Linux, and it is true that Linux is far less of a target of malware than Windows, and a fair bit harder to infect as well. Additionally Linux users typically rely on central repositories to get their software instead of hunting for it on the world wild web, making it less likely for them to encounter malware, although it is not inconceivable for repositories to be compromised as well.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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If you are a Linux user and happen to be a gamer at the same time, chances are you already know that Steam is now available for Linux. If not, it’s time to come out of that solitary confinement cell of yours. Steam was initially released as an invitation-only beta for Ubuntu 12.04 and greater back in November last year.
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Krakow, 12.04.2013: Following numerous requests from players DRAGO Entertainment is pleased to announce the Mac and Linux versions of Grimlands. To celebrate the developer has also released the second part of the Making Of video series that focuses on vehicles and crafting.
“We always planned to bring Grimlands to more platforms besides the Windows PC”, explains Lucjan Mikociak from DRAGO Entertainment, “but the amount of requests from the Mac- and Linux communities has convinced us to make these versions happen in 2013. And there are even more versions planned down the road.”
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After popular titles such as Counter Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) and Shank 2, Don’t Starve becomes the latest entrant into the Linux gaming scene. And as always, Steam for Linux facilitated the arrival. Don’t Starve is basically an endless wilderness survival game. Game’s goal is to survive for the longest time, while avoiding starvation, insanity, and hostile enemies.
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Atom Zombie Smasher is a real-time strategy game developed by independent developer Blendo Games. In it, the player attempts to rescue as many citizens as possible from an oncoming zombie horde using helicopter rescue units and an array of military units to protect the citizens and defeat the zombies.
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It is official now: Grimlands the mix of Shooter and MMORPG with an open, post-apocalyptic world will also be available for Linux and Mac OS X!
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Grimind is a 2D physics-based horror-themed adventure platformer. You are cast into forgotten caves and ancient crypts, and demonstrate your skills in passing obstacles and solving non-trivial puzzles to escape these chilling and lonely environments.
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While ioquake3 projects continue to thrive as open-source projects spun off from the id Tech 3 game engine, when it comes to the open-source Doom 3 (id Tech 4) engine, there is barely any public activity.
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The Spearmint Game Engine, which aims to be a more impressive and feature-rich version of ioquake3, as well as Watermint, a “realistic” fork of Spearmint, are still actively being pursued.
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The 14th alpha release of the visually impressive Unvanquished open-source game has been released. Notable to this month’s alpha update are enhancements to the game engine’s OpenGL 3.x renderer.
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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the latest installment to Valve’s Counter-Strike franchise, is being tested on Linux and might soon be released to the general public.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of Valve’s more recent titles that was officially released last August as their fourth CS title. Counter-Strike: GO improves some of the assets found within Counter-Strike: Source and also offers a wealth of new content, engine improvements, and other enhancements.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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In my previous article I’ve tried to investigate the RAM memory requirements for running some of the most common light window managers and desktop environments available in the Linux world. Prompted by a number of readers, I’ve decided to include also the big, well-known memory hogs that grab most of the Linux market, i.e. KDE, Unity and Gnome 3.
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Over the last few days I was wondering what is a “lightweight” desktop. And I must say I couldn’t come up with an answer to that question.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We’re delighted to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC), for the ninth consecutive year. GSoC has been valuable in bringing new developers into the KDE Community and other free and open software projects. And it has been successful at achieving the goal of creating quality code for the use and benefit of all.
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Bugs are inevitable in complex software, and digiKam is no exception. So what should you do when you’ve discovered a bug in your favorite photo management application? As a non-programmer, the best thing you can do is to file the bug with the KDE bug tracking system (digiKam is managed as part of the KDE project). Submitting bugs can be considered a tedious task, but this greatly helps the developers to improve digiKam, and the KDE bug tracking system makes it relatively easy to file bugs and issues.
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We are pleased to announce that KDE will take part in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) this year. OPW started in 2006 with an intention to reach talented women who are passionate about technology, but who may be uncertain about how to start contributing to free and open software projects. Since its beginning, OPW has included commercial and non-profit organizations that are leaders in free and open software.
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KDE and openSUSE developer Will Stephenson is working on a slimmed down version of KDE that he calls KLyDE, short for K Lightweight Desktop Environment. In a blog entry about the project, Stephenson says that he thinks: “KDE is not intrinsically bloated”, but that most distributions of the open source desktop environment would, by default, install almost all of the software developed within the project. In his opinion, this leads to an overwhelming number of applications, widgets and options being presented to users. With KLyDE, Stephenson wants to create a modular distribution of KDE that can be reduced to the bare bones of what is necessary for a desktop environment.
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While Qt 5.1 is just around the corner, Digia released Qt 5.0.2 today as the second stable point release update. Qt 5.0.2 incorporates more than 600 improvements in 17 different modules of Qt 5.0.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Some of you will still remember the early days of SolusOS. Every community member was involved in testing and feedback, and we put out ISO after ISO with sequential improvements.
It was fun, and it worked.
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XP’s end of life-support is in sight and not everybody wants Windows 8. So, what are your other choices?
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While Cinnamon is a great user interface and we’ve had a lot of fun implementing it, it’s become too much a burden to maintain/update going forward. We’d like to remain faithful and compatible to our parent distro, Arch Linux, and further support of Cinnamon would strain that by causing incompatibilities/hacks in the entirety of the Gnome packageset. It is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release as we are. They’re 1 year behind with upstream code. Arch Linux is going to have soon Gnome 3.8 and Cinnamon is not compatible with it. The Cinnamon team still have to migrate some of their tools to fully work with Gnome 3.6.
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New Releases
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We are happy to announce the release of Manjaro 0.8.5. We worked hard to make this release the best Manjaro experience featuring Openbox 3.5.0 and Xfce 4.10. A graphical installer got added and a Manjaro settings manager handling user accounts, keyboard layouts, locales and translation packages is also included. Pamac got enhanced and is now translated to several languages. A special thanks flies out to Carl Duff for his great beginners guide, which makes it easy to install and start Manjaro Linux for everyone!
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ClearOS Community 6.4.0 is now available! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, this release introduces a new reports engine, a storage manager, an antimalware file scanner, RADIUS, a basic POP/IMAP server, and mail retrieval.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Getting hit by this seasonal flu has not been exactly fun. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with my work and studies but, at this busy hour, I’m glad it’s me who gets the virus and not my computer. Starting my work from scratch AND recovering from the flu would be a lot worse.
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Mageia 3 Beta 4 was released two weeks ago with a note saying live images to come. Well, by last week, I’d given up. But, low and behold, Claire Robinson posted a little announcement today saying she hopes they were worth the wait. Hmmm, good question.
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Black smoke is bellowing, church bells are ringing, trumpets are blowing… well, bloggers are blogging at least. The OpenMandriva canon have pondered, discussed, argued, researched, star gazed, and flung spaghetti on the wall; but they’ve finally decided. They’ve reached a decision as to the new logo and face of the OpenMandriva Association (and assuming the still officially unnamed distribution too). Thank goodness, it’s a pretty one.
As you might have guessed, the logo above is the winner. The announcement said of it, “after internal voting, this was the most voted and consensual proposal.” The following is the official soon-to-be-copyrighted logo for the OpenMandriva Association.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat and the JBoss Community recently announced that they will be releasing a single compiled binary under the EAP.Alpha terminology, rather than posting a community release on the community site and a separate EAP early release on the Red Hat site. This naming change has confused some members of the community, but rest assured the EAP.Alpha release is still under the LGPL as per previous JBoss Community releases.
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Open source leads the data center, says John Mark Walker, Gluster Community leader at Red Hat. OK, what’s next? This is the question Walker plans to address in his keynote on Monday at Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, though he hints at the answer in this Q&A.
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Support calls are extremely important for a billion dollar company like Red Hat. However, you won’t often hear about the CEO of company himself taking support calls. Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst does that. He takes support calls for customers.
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Fedora
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Last week the Fedora Board had an open, public meeting in IRC to discuss Fedora’s user base / target audience. Robyn announced the topic ahead of time and invited folks to join in. You can read the full meeting minutes, but I’ve gone through them and tried to pull out all of the interwoven threads of discussion and summarize it here for you as well.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu wants to be the Google of your desktop. Yes, it really does. It wants you to be able to search for anything right from your desktop without even opening your browser. Sounds crazy right? On one side, you have Google letting you place all your world in your web browser, Ubuntu, on the other hand, tends to pull you away from the web and instead brings the web to your desktop. Now, as convenient as both ideas sound, many users are afraid of extremes. I, for example, would not like moving my whole life to a web browser much like Google Chromebook proponents do.
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With Canonical’s Mir Display Server for future releases of Ubuntu Linux, they are supporting Android’s graphics layer and drivers rather than inventing their own solution, trying to push X.Org drivers, or demanding mobile graphics drivers modelled after the desktop Linux graphics stack. Why did they do this? Here’s an explanation.
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The second edition of Ubuntu’s online developer summit, UDS 13.05, was announced yesterday. The virtual developer summit will run through May 14-16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. The summit is divided into five tracks – App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.
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Flavours and Variants
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I recently came across Emmabuntus in Distrowatch, it is a Xubuntu 12.04.2 LTS based distro which comes with a large number of pre-installed applications. You can say it to be Ultimate Edition for Xubuntu. Naturally, I was inclined to try it out – to check if it is just mindless collection of applications or the developers have used their judgement in selecting those apps.
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Trisquel 6.0 LTS was recently released so it’s time to give it another look. Trisquel is a popular distro for users that prefer to use only free software. You won’t find proprietary software included in Trisquel, it’s dedicated to the idea of truly free software.
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Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2 has been released, so I thought I’d check it out for a sneak peek.
The ISO file I downloaded weighed in at 825.5 MB. Note that Ubuntu 13.04 is a live distro, so you can try it without having to do an install on your system. I recommend this if you just want a quick look at it, while you wait for the final release.
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I havent tried any new distro for months. So on the occasion that a new version of Fuduntu got released, I decided to download then install it on my Samsung netbook. As a matter of fact, I had used an older version of Fuduntu last year and somehow liked it. However a problem occurred that the downloading speed was terribly slow back then, it just took me forever to upgrade system and install new packages. So I had to ditch Fuduntu for Linux Mint and havent tried Fuduntu again since then. But after installing and using the new Fuduntu for over a day, I can say that it is different now with many improvements.
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Fuduntu Linux, based on Fedora distribution released its Fuduntu 2013.2 version recently which has a user-friendly, rolling-release with RPM package management and the classic GNOME2 desktop environment. This release comes with many new features, application and bug fixes. It has released with two flavors. A Full version with lots of software installed by default and a new Lite version which uses 3-4GB less hard drive space depending on architecture. It supports Steam gaming and Netflix video streaming. XBMC, the popular media center developed by the XBMC Foundation is also now available in Fuduntu 2013.2 distribution.
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Fuduntu, the Linux based operating system earns its name by its ambition to fit somewhere in-between Fedora and Ubuntu. It had started a few years ago as a netbook-friendly OS. It had at that time, featured some desktop environment tweaks, which had sure improved performance on Eee PC netbooks with slow SSDs and small screens. Fuduntu has come a long way since then. The OS that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu, uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but the design and usability get their tinge from Ubuntu.
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VersaLogic announced a rugged, credit card-sized COM Express Mini module based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom E6x0T processor. The Linux-ready VL-COMm-26 is also available as part of a “Falcon” subsystem that sandwiches the module with an I/O board of the same size.
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In a post on the company’s blog today, Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood announced that more than 5 million of the company’s iconic Roku players have now shipped. Wood provides a brief history of the Roku player, from its modest 2008 launch as “the Netflix player,” to the point where it offers “about 750 channels,” including games.
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The hype of Raspberry Pi still going strong. But a new single board tiny computer just joined the game and currently raising fund on Kickstarter. It is UDOO ( pronounced “you do”) , and it can run both Android and Linux.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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We’ve learned that Boost Mobile will be adding the highest-end model, the F7, to its LTE lineup in short order. It will be the carrier’s third LTE-capable device, following the HTC One SV and Boost/ZTE Force. Featuring a 4.7-inch, 720p display, 1.5GHz dual core processor, and eight-megapixel camera, the F7 (Boost codename: LG FX1) should prove a popular addition to the prepaid carrier’s handset portfolio.
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Samsung has unveiled two new smartphones that push the envelope of screen size in the smartphone space.
Dubbed Mega, the two devices Samsung showed off today come with the customer’s choice of a 5.8-inch screen or a 6.3-inch option. Both devices come with Android 4.2 (Jelly Ben) and a dual-core processor. The higher-end 6.3-inch option comes with a 1.7GHz processor, while the 5.8-inch version has a 1.4GHz chip. Both handsets have 8-megapixel rear-facing cameras and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras.
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Android
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ZTE today introduced its latest Android smartphone, the Intel-powered GEEK, however there’s nary a release date or detail about market availability. Running Android Jelly Bean, the ZTE GEEK features a 5-inch 720p HD display, 8GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, an 8-megapixel camera, and 1-megapixel front-facing camera.
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Chinese manufacturers have long stood for their capacity to blast away affordable devices that might perform well but come with sub-par quality and uninspiring design. That has been the cliche, and Huawei seems to have had enough of it.
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It covers apps and games, with the prices referring to the initial download: so (Free) may mean (Freemium) in some cases. The equivalent iOS roundup will be published later in the day. For now, read on for this week’s Android selection.
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This handy list of top-rated Android apps lets you remotely access any computer from your Android device. Remote access is useful when you need to collaborate with co-workers, help a friend with a PC problem or grab files from your desktop.
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In today’s fast paced world, we don’t have time for anything to slow us down. We constantly rely on our technology to help us get through the day. Whether it’s a way to get directions, emergency, mobile games or just a plain old phone call, smartphones are one of the leading and most developed tech we have. Unfortunately smartphones constantly get bogged down by old apps that continue to run in the background, which slows your device way down.
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Profound Logic has open sourced its User Interface application development tool framework citing user and developer flexibility among its key reasons for doing so. Profound UI version 4.5 will now also benefit from improved integration between the IBM i and other compatible platforms.
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Networking giant Cisco Systems is no stranger to the world of open source software. In 2009, Cisco was identified as one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and its core IOS XE operating is based on Linux as well.
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The developers of the Funf open source Java-based sensor framework for mobile phones have released version 0.4 of their software. Most changes in this version, the developers say, are under the hood and affect the architecture of the framework. Changes include a new pipeline interface, a redesigned configuration process, and changes that mean that Funf now runs as a single service instead of spawning a service for each sensor probe.
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Kaldin is an open-source web-based examination software that supports creation and management of various types of online assessments – exams and tests.
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proxmox_logoMy journey in finding the best platform for web scale applications has brought me to ProxMox, an open source virtual environment that combines OpenVZ containers and KVM virtualization in a single pane of glass. ProxMox has the best balance between management and performance optimization using containers. We spent today bringing up a four node cluster, and it was dead easy.
I love the architectural concept of containers. They allow you to slice up a single hardware server into multiple, independent environments, while still allowing full access to the hardware. It is not really virtualization, because none of the hardware resources are virtualized like they are with KVM or VMware. The ProxMox management layer is actually a base install of Debian running a modified OpenVZ Red Hat kernel. The base install weighs in at right around 1GB, and is so thin that there is only a 1-3% processing overhead incurred.
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Since 2003 the open source Metasploit framework has been actively developed and used as a penetration testing tool for IT security. While ease-of-use was not top of mind in the early days of Metasploit, that is changing with the latest Metasploit 4.6 Pro release.
“In the industry, there is a shortage of security folks and that puts a lot of pressure on the people that are working in security today,” said Christian Kirsch, product manager for Metasploit at Rapid7. “With the Metasploit Pro 4.6 release, there is the concept of wizards to make things easier.”
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The free and open source software community operates on a very simple principle: obey the license which the software is released under. But what happens when the rules of engagement set down in FOSS licenses like the GNU GPL are ignored? What do you do if a rival developer or company takes your code and doesn’t pass on the freedoms afforded by your original license?
This is a fear that every FOSS developer has had at one point or another, and it only gets stronger as your project gains momentum and grows. It’s something that has kept untold lines of code closed up; arguably the biggest argument against opening up the source of a particular piece of software.
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Events
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I interviewed a few FOSS (free and open source software) conference organizers to round up a handy list of suggestions to help you write a better conference talk proposal. But first, here’s my pep talk to women who have never submitted a conference talk proposal before:
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In a huge announcement from Mozilla, the nonprofit entity behind the Firefox browser and other open source tools has detailed significant changes to its executive management. CEO Gary Kovacs, who has been running Mozilla for three years, will step down later this year, and there is a search on for a Kovacs replacement. Kovacs will remain on Mozilla’s board of directors, and there are other executive shifts as well, during a time of transition for the company.
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The latest Aurora and Beta releases of the open source Firefox browser show privacy features are at the top of the feature list for the browser. Currently in Beta, Firefox 21 now includes a new user interface for the Do Not Track (DNT) system and Firefox 22, available in the Aurora test channel, has the new cookie policy, announced in February, implemented.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Network World – Less than a year ago the cool thing for IT vendors to do was jump on the OpenStack bandwagon.
Everyone was hopping on: Red Hat, IBM, and even VMware signed on as partners to the open source cloud computing platform, joining Rackspace, HP, Cisco and Dell that were already backing the project. All these companies had a unified goal, says Marc Brien, an analyst at Domicity, who tracks the movers and shakers of the cloud world. They wanted to stave off the fast-growing dominance of Amazon Web Services in the cloud.
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The OpenStack vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud battle will stretch across the United States next week. Indeed, cloud consultants and integrators will flock to OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. (April 15-18), while Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) partners and customers will gather for an AWS Summit in New York (April 17-18). Terry Wise, head of AWS’s wordwide partner ecosystem, will be on hand for the conference. For channel partners, it’s nearly time to choose sides
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There is some skepticism about whether vendors and channel partners providing Hadoop services are yet bringing in the revenue they need to make it a viable business case, but according to a new report from TechNavio, the big bucks are ahead. And not that far ahead, really.
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There have been reports that the OpenStack cloud computing platform is becoming overly fragmented for some time, and now it appears that the OpenStack Foundation is going to take aim at some players in the OpenStack space who don’t seem to be following interoperability guidelines. ITWorld, among other sites, has reported on comments from Josh McKenty, CTO of Piston Cloud and an OpenStack Foundation board member, who points out that HP and Rackspace, in particular, need to shore up their OpenStack interoperability efforts.
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Very steadily, Piston Cloud has gained a reputation as a company with some smart strategies surrounding the OpenStack open cloud computing platform and how it can serve enterprises. In February, the company also announced that it had raised $8 million in Series B financing follows a $4.5 million Series A round in July, 2011.
This week, the company has delivered its “turnkey” Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 distribution, which looks like a relatively easy way to start dabbling with an OpenStack cloud deployment.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6. This version, available for those more conservative users, is said to have arrived with over 50 bug fixes, many of which were backported from LibreOffice 4 and most of which were quite juicy. It’s always recommended to upgraded to the latest release.
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The Document Foundation has released a new update of the LibreOffice suite, LibreOffice 3.6.6. This release fixes over 50 bugs and other improves the software’s stability greatly. As it is a bug fix release, no new features have been added and all users are advised to update to this release as soon as possibile.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While planning next week I started to notice a plussy (the symbol of FSFE‘s Fellowship) in my calender.
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An updated version of the GNUnet C tutorial is available. Developers starting to hack on GNUnet are strongly encouraged to have a look there. It covers basic installation, writing services, APIs and clients, descibes how to connect peers even on a large scale and much more…
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Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It’s interesting.
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Project Releases
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VideoLAN has released a new update of popular open-source media player, VLC. This version is an important release, and all users are advised to update to this release as soon as possibile. Some of the notable changes in this release are:
* fixes some regressions of the 2.0.x branch of VLC.
* introduces support for Matroska v4 files.
* introduces an important number of fixes for MKV, Ogg, AVI, WMV, HTTPS and subtitles support.
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A new development release of Wine v1.5.28 is out. Among other new stuff in this release are: built-in FixedSys fonts, new icon for the joystick control panel, and postscript driver improvements. This release fixes 21 bugs, including some graphics issue with Guild Wars 2 and Bioshock Infinite. In fact, it has been confirmed that this years blockbuster game Bioshock Infinite works with Wine 1.5.28.
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Public Services/Government
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The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been reforming itself into a more outward-facing organisation and has now taken another step in that process by announcing that it will be hosting a “small open source license clinic” at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in May. The event is designed to bring together individuals, organisations and government agencies to help all better understand the nature of open source licences. Discussions will also look at identifying problems unique to government. Although a small event, it is the first of what will, hopefully, be many, as the OSI pursues its “non-profit educational mission”.
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The Dutch government will use open source software for developing its e-ID card solution. The e-ID plans were presented to the Dutch Parliament by Ronald Plasterk, Minister of the Interior last week Wednesday.
The ministry is considering to use a chip card similar to the German government, according to a spokesperson for the minister. It has also looked at the smart card system developed by the Belgian government. “Apparently the German approach for smart card allows a few more options that we’re interested in, but it is too early to tell.”
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Licensing
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You don’t see many discussions about free software licenses any more. Once a burning issue, licenses and their implication hardly seem to be mentioned these days. Increasingly, we seem to be moving into a post-license era, and the implications for free and open source software are potentially troubling.
The reasons for this apparent shift of interest aren’t hard to find. To start with, most of the important license issues have already been resolved. It’s hard to imagine any licensing issue today that would be as significant to the community at large as the release of the OpenOffice.org code in 2000, or of the discussion of the third version of the GPL in 2005-07.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’ve been to your local hacker/makerspace and there weren’t many women, did you stop and wonder about that? I hope so, but unfortunately a common reaction is to think, “I guess women just aren’t into building stuff.” As one of the few women directors of a U.S. makerspace, I know that this just isn’t true. In this and future posts I’d like to share my perspective on the problem, and what I think can be done about it.
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Open Data
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Karen Cranston (@kcranstn) is an evolutionary biologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. NESCent promotes the synthesis of information, concepts, and knowledge to address significant, emerging, or novel questions in evolutionary science and its applications. They collect new data under a Creative Commons license (CC0) to free scientific data and make it more widely available.
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Open Hardware
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Designed by Bitcraze, the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter is an open source development kit to make your own tiny drones. It’s $173 from Seeed Studio Depot and looks like great fun to make and fly! “Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter Kit 10-DOF with Crazyradio”
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Lakshmi Mandyam, ARM director of Server Systems and Ecosystems, said on last week that ODMs are looking to standardize on both a single operating system and a single chip architecture across their product stacks. In other words, they want a single chip that can scale from a smartphone to a server and one OS like Linux to rule them all. Vendors are finding this idea “very interesting”.
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A project to build a compact, low cost, open-hardware SBC (single board computer) has turned to Kickstarter for funding its way to production. The 110×85 mm UDOO board runs Linux or Android on an ARM i.MX6 Freescale applications processor, and also has a built-in Arduino Due-compatible subsystem.
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Programming
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Now, five years later, I’m incredibly proud to be part of a company with 158 team members dedicated to helping our 3.5 million users collaborate across 6 million repositories. It’s been a wild ride and I couldn’t be happier with the amazing community of people who use and love GitHub every day.
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While the PHP-GTK project has basically been dead for years, to provide GTK2 bindings to the PHP programming language, there have been several other projects worked on in more recent times to advance the GNOME support for the PHP programming language.
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With version 5.5 of the common PHP server-side language due for release soon, here’s some interesting benchmarks showing off the performance of PHP 5.5 compared to the earlier 5.4, 5.3, and 5.2 releases of this popular scripting language.
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Standards/Consortia
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ABI Research forecasts that by the end of 2013, about 1.4 billion devices in the wild will be equipped with HTML5-compatible browsers. Despite this tantalizing opportunity for new HTML-enabled web apps, however, the “vast majority” of developers continue to create “native model” apps rather than web apps, reports the analyst firm.
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The BBC has been accused of “tying itself in knots” after agreeing to play a five second clip of a song mocking the death of Baroness Thatcher days before her funeral.
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Peter Zatko, the computer hacking expert better known by the handle Mudge, says he’s leaving his job as a program manager at DARPA to join Google. He announced the change overnight on Twitter.
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Released last month by Facebook was their open-source HipHOp “HHVM” 2.0 virtual machine. Benchmarks of HHVM at Phoronix show that the code does live up to Facebook’s performance claims.
For several years now Facebook has been experimenting with making PHP faster through various techniques. Facebook heavily relies upon the PHP server-side scripting language and for handling their immense traffic, they need PHP to be as fast as possible.
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Security
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Tatu Ylonen, author of the SSH protocol, isn’t afraid of criticising his own work: he’s calling for a new version of the Secure Shell to make it more manageable and get rid of the problem of undocumented rogue keys.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The panicky style of reporting on North Korea doesn’t seem to be changing much, if you glance at the front pages of the big papers this morning. The Washington Post headline (4/12/13) blares, “N. Korea Thought to Have Warhead, ” while over at the New York Times (4/12/13) it’s “Pentagon Says Nuclear Missile Is in Reach for North Korea.”
But both pieces, if read carefully, undermine the alarmism–and make you wonder why the stories are on the front page.
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I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV — at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.
Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem — a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).
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CIA’s Directorate of Operations recruited CIA officers for a “project to insert small teams of assassins into other countries to hunt down and kill people that the Bush administration had marked for death.”
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ONE balmy evening Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.
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The last drone strike occurred in the agency on March 22, when US drones targeting a vehicle in Datta Khel killed four militants.
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He said there was no way to ascertain the identity of the slain men as their bodies were mutilated.
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The town had witnessed another drone strike on March 22 that killed four militants.
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An eyewitness said that the compound caught fire after the strike leaving all the bodies burnt.
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This suggests Obama is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted,” Zenko said. Other sources said some of these strikes killed militants who weren’t affiliated with al-Qaeda at the behest of Pakistan.
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Cablegate
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has released a database of diplomatic records by Henry Kissinger, who ran American foreign policy under two presidents. Why does the former diplomat interest liberals like Assange?
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…working to overthrow the government and defend US corporate interests in the Andean country.
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Despite this, a report in the Sydney Morning Herald said that the Australian embassy in Washington is closely monitoring the prosecution of former US Army private Bradley Manning for leaking the information to WikiLeaks publisher Assange.
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Among the cables, a series of diplomatic communications exposes the relationships between the Vatican and a number of dictatorial regimes, from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla to Spain’s Francisco Franco.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs has explored a sale of its metals warehousing business Metro International, three sources with knowledge of the matter said, just three years after the investment bank bought the firm for $550m.
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These are the confessions of an outsourcer. She has spent more than a decade helping some of Canada’s biggest financial institutions shed workers and replace them with low-wage help.
She has made a good living doing this. But she now thinks that contracting out middle-class jobs — the very practice she aided — is short-sighted and morally wrong.
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Goldman’s directors, who were already among the best-compensated corporate directors in the country, will receive an additional 500 shares, for 3,000 shares a year in compensation, according to a regulatory filing submitted Friday.
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It is difficult to be empathic and honest when the banks, the justice system and the government conspire together to cover up fraud in the mortgage servicing and securitization systems. Lavalle is one of those persons who insists on pursuing the truth to the best of his ability as shown in his report gong back to frauds beginning in the 1990s.
Goldman Sachs committed accounting control fraud and forgery through robo-signing and only ever had to pay a small fine for its gigantic frauds.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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You get a sense that media on this side of the Atlantic are more fond of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher than their British counterparts. And this reminds me that who gets to the top of the journalistic establishment probably has a lot to do with what they think of Thatcher’s hard-right policies.
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When it comes to elite media and political circles, there’s no doubt that these two very controversial political figures were treated the same way when they died: with gushing, uncritical celebration of their lives.
No, the problem would seem to be that many in the British public–damn them!–have bitter memories of life under Thatcher. One has to assume that this is especially baffling to Burns, who believes Thatcher restored the country’s self-confidence.
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The American Legislative Exchange Council, which for decades has been known by the acronym “ALEC,” is asking members to stop calling it ALEC since the name is now associated with a “distant, mysterious, Washington alphabet organization of unknown intentions.”
“You may have noticed we are limiting the use of the acronym ‘ALEC,’” wrote Bill Meierling, ALEC’s recently-hired Senior Director of Public Affairs in a March 13 email sent to ALEC members and obtained through an open records request.
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Censorship
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An anonymous online post on a Facebook page called Humber Epic Hookup Fails bragging about an apparent sexual assault has outraged Humber College, its students and the police.
In the post, the anonymous male claims that he met a girl at the end of the night, when “she could barely walk,” and brought her home where she was “stumbling all over the driveway.”
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Privacy
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Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on the ‘rush’ from public bodies to gain access to the data collected under the Home Office’s Communications Data Bill.
According to information uncovered by Big Brother Watch, “Council staff, health and safety inspectors and even Royal Mail want to harness the Government’s proposed “Snoopers’ Charter” to monitor private emails, telephone records and internet use.”
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It had been thought that only police, intelligence agencies and the taxman would be able to use the Communication Data Act, which will also allow scrutiny of social network sites including Twitter and Facebook.
But dozens of public sector organisations have applied to use the powers. They include nine Whitehall departments, NHS trusts, the Environment Agency, the Charity Commission and the Pensions Regulator. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has argued that the legislation is vital to combat terrorism and other serious offences.
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oogle has wired its worldwide fleet of servers up with monitoring technology that inspects every task running on every machine, and eventually hopes to use this data to selectively throttle or even kill processes that cause disruptions for other tasks running on the same CPU.
The search giant gave details on how it had developed the planet-spanning technology in a technical paper (PDF) due to be published next week – and its contents will be of major interest to anyone running massive Linux-based infrastructure clouds.
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Should text messages carry the same privacy protections as phone calls when it comes to government snooping? That’s the latest privacy issue that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is tackling, as it urges the Washington State Supreme Court to recognize that text messages are “the 21st Century phone call” and require that law enforcement officers obtain a warrant before reading texts on someone’s phone. The case is only the latest in a string of debates about the U.S. government and alleged electronic privacy invasion.
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Civil Rights
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In the last three months alone, the House has released three different cybersecurity bills and has held over seven hearings on the issue. In addition, the House Judiciary Committee floated changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the draconian anti-hacking statute that came to public prominence after the death of activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. Politicians tout this legislation as necessary to protect against foreign threats every single time they introduce a bill with “cyber” somewhere in the text. And it comes as no surprise that every hearing has opened up with a recap of computer security attacks faced by the US from China, Iran, and other foreign countries.
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State lawmakers continue to advance legislation seeking to prohibit Michigan law enforcement agents and National Guard members from assisting the federal government in the potential detention of U.S. citizens without trial.
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Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.
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DRM
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Since version 2.0, experimental Blu-ray support has been a feature of VLC. However, playback of disc protected by AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is not supported. VLC also does not support of BD+ discs because Sony, the developer of the Blu-ray copy protection, only provide encryption keys to licensees.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Public Domain Review is a proponent of this message and actively supports other institutions in opening up their digital works to the public domain. Today, the public domain is in danger of being locked up by private companies and institutions who want to try to resell access and reproduction rights to the copies that they make.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.12.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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For The Linux Foundation, April is not the cruelest month: it’s one of the busiest. Every year, we hold our Collaboration Summit in mid-April to bring together our members, Linux and open source community developers, open source legal minds, and large scale Linux and open source users in an intimate setting. Even as The Linux Foundation has expanded its event lineup to include LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Automotive Linux Summits, and more throughout the world, this remains our original event, and because of that, as well as it’s small size and unique format, it’s special to many of us in the community.
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Applications
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Games
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Indie Royale is back with a brand new sale called the Spring Sun Bundle. The bundle contains Nifflas’ Games’ complex platformer Knytt Underground, Kitty Lambda Games’ Zelda meats Ultima mash up The Real Texas, Uber Entertainment’s MOBA meets third person shooter Monday Night Combat, ASTRO PORT’s side scrolling shooter Satazius, and Phr00t’s Metroid inspired FPS Gentrieve 2. The bundle also contains the soundtracks for Gentrieve 2 and The Real Texas. Those who pay more than $8.00 for the bundle will also receive Ben Landis’ comic book meets music album Adventures in Pixels.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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It’s Hack Week 9 at SUSE, and I’m working on a cracking project this time around. I’ve codenamed it ‘KLyDE’, for K Lightweight Desktop Environment, and it’s an effort to point KDE at the lightweight desktop market. Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan’t fit in the same sentence. I think they can.
This project has been bouncing around my head for a couple of years now, starting on a train ride back from the KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück in 2010, then I presented it at COSCUP 2012 in Taiwan last August. But work commitments and family always got in the way of completing/finishing it. SUSE’s hack week gives me 40 hours to throw at it and this time I wasn’t going to tackle it alone, so I enlisted my bro(grammer)s Jos and Klaas.
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Red Hat Family
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Cloud computing is driving many disruptions to traditional technology business models these days, and open source technology is a big part of it. Through participation in initiatives such as OpenStack as well as its own deep roots with Linux, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) has been an open source trail blazer. To get a better sense of both the trends in cloud computing and the momentum behind public cloud migrations, we spoke with Paul Cormier EVP at Red Hat and president of the companies technologies and products division. Here’s what he had to say about his philosophy of open source and the state of the market today.
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When asked about the most important part of social-media engagement, Red Hat Inc.’s Stephanie Wonderlick offers a simple answer:
“Listening.”
Wonderlick, corporate communications director for Raleigh-based technology firm Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), says companies shouldn’t use social media just as a way to get out their own messages. They also should use it as a way to gauge how their customers are feeling.
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Phones
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Jolla, the start-up company built around former Nokia N9 engineers developing the Sailfish OS for mobile phones, might be dating Wayland. Jolla’s Chief Research Engineer has made it possible to run Wayland atop Android GPU drivers. Additionally, it’s being done with glibc rather than Android’s Bionic libc derivative.
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Android
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Application development may have once been the exclusive domain of professional programmers, but today a growing number of amateur-friendly development environments invite just about anyone with an app idea to bring it to life.
In the past few years we’ve seen the arrival of BuildAnApp and Google’s App Inventor for Android on the mobile side, for example. An even longer-standing contender, however, is RunRev’s cross-platform LiveCode, a recently renamed version of the HyperCard-inspired “Revolution” development system born in the early 2000s.
[...]
LiveCode 6.0 is released under the GPL3 license
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Web Browsers
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SaaS/Big Data
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This week sees the arrival of OpenStack Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.
Global contributors to OpenStack have now grown 45 percent in the last six months. This figure sits alongside a total of 230 new features now recorded to support cloud production operations with broad Software-Defined Networking support.
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Basho was founded in 2008 by a group of executives and software engineers from Akamai Technologies. Over the last five years, the team has received $26 million ($39 million based on GigaOm’s estimates) in venture funding. While the company name may have been selected for other reasons, it seems likely that there was inspiration from Matsuo Basho, a famous Japanese poet who lived during the 1600’s. This connection to Japan may have proved useful to help the American company achieve funding from Japanese companies IDC Frontier and Tokyo Electron Device Limited, along with quite a few American ones chipping in too. The Basho logo features a face with hair styled in a Japanese-style topknot, not too unlike the look that Basho’s CTO Justin Sheehy sports.
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Licensing
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The Open Source Initiative (OSI) will host a small open source license clinic as part of its non-profit educational mission, in collaboration with federal agency participants and the Washington D.C. technology community.
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Openness/Sharing
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The iPad mini is a unique device in that it offers much more portability than the standard iPad, while still providing a much bigger screen than the iPhone for more enjoyable gaming. Techdy has recognized that as an opportunity to build a game controller specifically for Apple’s smaller tablet, which aims to turn it into a much more capable gaming rig.
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The Free Diagnostic Pathology Software Project uses the open source principle to give doctors access to improved cancer testing workflows
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Programming
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When I first started aggressively using open source code , freshmeat and sourceforge.net were typically the first places I’d go to look.
In 2006, Google shook up the open source code repository market with Google Code and I started to find great stuff there.
Today, the VAST majority of all open source code that I seek, use and play with is all found on GitHub.
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I used to be a Google fan. I must have tried most of their services as early as possible.
But lately, they are pushing towards a version of the WWW that I don’t like. A WWW where things only happen if you use the “right” browser, where URLs are second class web citizens, where you have to have a Google account, you have to have Google+ enabled, you must be logged in and you have to notify Google of your every move and then Google decides what goes and what not.
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Security
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The Hack in the Box (#HITB2013AMS) security conference in Amsterdam has a very interesting lineup of talks [pdf]. One that jumped out was the Aircraft Hacking: Practical Aero Series presented by Hugo Teso, a security consultant at n.runs in Germany. According to the abstract, “This presentation will be a practical demonstration on how to remotely attack and take full control of an aircraft, exposing some of the results of my three years research on the aviation security field. The attack performed will follow the classical methodology, divided in discovery, information gathering, exploitation and post-exploitation phases. The complete attack will be accomplished remotely, without needing physical access to the target aircraft at any time, and a testing laboratory will be used to attack virtual airplanes systems.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Arkansas department facing series of lawsuits over fatal shootings as victims’ families allege officers violated LRPD rules
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Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said Thursday the United States needs to pressure Russia and China to cooperate in breaking the alliance between North Korea, Syria and Iran.
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In a must-read column, Micah Zenko of Foreign Policy notes the many ways the Obama Administration has misled Congress about its targeted-killing program, and calls for a comprehensive official history so that we’re no longer at the mercy of dishonest national-security officials. If you haven’t heard, they’ve been talking as if American drone strikes are mostly killing members of al-Qaeda who pose an imminent threat to the United States. In fact, a minority of the people they’ve killed belong to al-Qaeda far fewer than that pose an imminent threat to America, and many victims of U.S. drone strikes are killed without the CIA knowing their identity.
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It may sound melodramatic but one of the most tragic examples of blowback from our terror war in Pakistan is that the Taliban there are now trying to prevent Pakistani children from getting the polio vaccine, which has been available to Americans since the 1950′s and is all but gone from every corner of the earth, save for Pakistan and Nigeria where the remaining victims, and traces of the virus, linger.
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Washington, Apr 11 (Prensa Latina) The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refused to provide information about whether it knew or was involved in a plot to assassinate the late President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed today.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, the organization filed a lawsuit regarding recent allegations that U.S. agencies plotted to kill Chavez.
The CIA issued an official response which argues that it will not confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of files that respond to the request of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
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Cablegate
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From ‘Collateral Murder’ to this latest release, his whistleblowing has laid bare US military misconduct and American realpolitik
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Director visits Julian Assange at Ecuadorian embassy in London and praises the Wikileaks founder’s strength of mind
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The Oscar-winning filmmaker met with the wanted web activist in England, then took to Twitter to slam several high-profile upcoming movies tackling the subject.
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Never far from controversy, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has conveniently attacked two forthcoming movies about Julian Assange after meeting the Wikileaks founder at the Ecudorian embassy in London last week. Stone tweeted a picture of himself with the political activist during the visit, saying, “A sad occasion in that Julian could not follow me out the door. He lives in a tiny room with great modesty and discipline.”
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Oscar-winning director OLIVER STONE has given a boost to WikiLeaks founder JULIAN ASSANGE by visiting him at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Say you wanted to build an industry from the ground up. On a macro level, the research, development, manufacturing, sourcing, distribution, and fueling would require a lot of energy. This is particularly true for energy industries. But the great thing about renewable energy is that it generally requires no fuel and starts to pay for itself as it scales.
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A ship moored off Beirut is helping Lebanon overcome electricity shortages – and many developing countries may follow suit
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Finance
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The Royal Bank of Canada will make a public apology to the workers affected by the bank’s outsourcing arrangement with a foreign company.
The apology comes at the end of a week of drubbing from RBC customers and labour critics after the bank’s outsourcing plans were disclosed in media reports.
RBC should have been more sensitive and helpful to the affected employees, chief executive officer Gord Nixon says in a letter to be published in newspapers Friday.
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N
ew York City’s raid on Occupy Wall Street that cleared the group’s Zuccotti Park encampment will cost the city more than $350,000 — and that total could still rise.
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In a free market capitalist system ‘price signals’ are everything. Prices are determined by buyers and sellers in the free market and these prices are broadcast from the exchanges reaching all corners of the economy — where they are used to transact business. In a centrally planned economy, prices are set by fiat and implemented in a ‘top down’ approach organized by a committee; rather than by the bottoms-up, animal-spirits-driven, self-interested, individualistic, free market approach.
But we have a problem with free market capitalism. Where free markets have failed over the past few decades is in maintaining fair and equitable ‘price discovery’ on various exchanges to compliment those animal spirits. Instead of buyers and sellers coming together and letting the ‘invisible hand’ of self-interest determine prices; more and more we see the dead hand of Wall Street monopolists and their market-rigging determining prices.
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Banks including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., along with congressional staff members and trade groups, received potentially market-moving Federal Reserve information 19 hours before the public in a release the central bank called accidental.
Brian Gross, a member of the Fed’s congressional liaison staff, distributed the March 19-20 minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting at 2 p.m. yesterday Washington time, according to an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Gross referred questions to Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith.
Distribution List
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Censorship
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In the wake of a major pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, Exxon has launched a dirty tricks campaign to prevent Little Rock television stations from running a political ad titled, “Exxon Hates Your Children.” The ad, which can be viewed at exxonhatesyourchildren.com, makes an obviously over-the-top assertion about the company’s views about children, in order to call attention to the creators’ serious concerns about the company’s policies. To try to keep it off the air, Exxon is circulating a memo to television stations claiming that the commercial is “defamatory toward each of ExxonMobil’s 80,000 employees and their families.” Exxon goes on to describe good things the company does for children and the environment.
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Amidst reports of media intimidation at the site of the Mayflower, Arkansas tar sands oil spill, ExxonMobil has now taken to bullying local Little Rock television stations into canceling the airing of a satirical but cutting advertisement critical of their business practices.
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Scotland Yard says no one has taken up its offer to facilitate lawful protests, but activists decry ‘insidious’ deterrent policing
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Tory hagiographers are intent on recasting the prime minister who divided Britain as a national hero, writes Jonathan Freedland.
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Last month there were revelations about the EU Parliament IT system, and the arbitrary way in which email blocks on legitimate topics can be implemented with lighting speed. Yesterday, Christian Engstrom MEP, has received a response to his complaint from EU President Martin Schulz. It states, in short, that Mr Schulz can’t do maths, and doesn’t understand technology, or the importance of being able to contact elected representatives.
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The Athens Indymedia website previously located at https://athens.indymedia.org has been shut down by the Greek government…
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Privacy
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We’re used to being watched when we shop. Cookies track our every move online, and salespeople follow us around high-end stores. But many walk-in retailers are taking spying to a new level.
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Civil Rights
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To date, thousands of people have sent messages to Congress demanding reform of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act through EFF alone, not counting the ones sent through our friends at Demand Progress and elsewhere. But the citizens of the Internet will need to shout even louder if we’re going to drown out the corporate interests that have already dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence lawmakers to change the CFAA for the worst.
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A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol.
On his way to vote on Thursday, state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) was confronted by 8-year-old homeschooler Aamira Fetuga, who presented him with a petition signed by people opposing his welfare bill, according to the Tennessean. Nearby, a choir of about 60 activists sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”
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Violence has broken out in Chile following a massive rally in support of calls to reform the country’s education laws.
The clashes erupted after thousands of students, teachers and their supporters took to the streets to demand free and fair access to education for all, and not just for the rich and well-off.
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California lawmakers are pushing a bill that would exempt the state from federal laws authorizing indefinite detention of citizens.
The California Public Safety Committee voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of the California Liberty Preservation Act, which was introduced by Republican Assemblyman Tim Donnelly.
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Famously outed former CIA agent Valerie Plame said Thursday she is not bitter despite being “betrayed” by the government officials who exposed her identity.
But people need to “continually hold our government to account,” she said at the Conference on World Affairs discussion.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.11.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Fanboy. Tin foil hat. They are both common accusations that are thrown between fellow Linux users. Often intended as a joke, yet sometimes with some serious amount of truth behind it. The most common users that usually get this sort of words thrown at them are Linux users. The unknowing and general public are usually only aware of two primary operating systems: Windows and Mac. And they’re also usually only aware of two computer companies: Microsoft and Apple. If you introduce the words Linux, Ubuntu or Red Hat to them, you are usually presented with an odd startled look on the persons face. Usually because they have no idea what you are referring to or what any of those strange words are or mean.
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Desktop
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The widely referenced web statistics are a poor measure of Desktop GNU/Linux adoption. They either count unique visitors which is warped by NATing firewalls in organizations or page-views which are strongly dependent on the nature of the sites being counted.
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Server
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UBS’s Steve Milunovich this morning raised his rating on shares of International Business Machines (IBM) to Buy from Neutral, and raised his price target to $235 from $210, arguing that the company is “one of the better positioned IT vendors” for an era of “IT as a service,” or “ITaaS,” given its history in outsourcing and providing data center infrastructure.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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In an effort to develop a set of standardized interfaces for programatically controlling networking gear regardless of brand and without access to the physical hardware, The Linux Foundation, in conjunction with other industry heavyweights, Monday took the wraps off OpenDaylight Project.
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From now on the help text for shown during configuration will indicate if a kernel feature is experimental. Linux now has the ability to “suspend freeze” and can throttle Intel CPUs with power napping. The KVM hypervisor now supports ARM cores.
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The arch/arm/nwfpe/ directory of the ARM code in the Linux kernel includes code which has a licence that contains an indemnity clause. Russell King has pointed out that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) feels that such clauses are not compatible with section 6 of the GPLv2, which is used for the Linux kernel. King stated his intention to remove the code, which is used for emulating a floating-point unit (FPU). Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn’t see a problem with the licensing and is fighting against the removal, King later wrote.
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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It seems nearly every pundit, every mouthpiece on the planet has decided that the Linux desktop is a “mess.” This “downfall” of the Linux desktop started with GNOME 3 and seemed to gain more momentum with Ubuntu Unity. I have a theory — and an idea for a fix.
Linux is all about choice. It’s always been that way; from the earliest inception of the desktop, the Linux community has enjoyed CFE, AfterStep, FluxBox, XFCE, Enlightenment, KDE, LXDE, Cinnamon …
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At first the question sounds obsolete. Where once GNOME and KDE accounted for seventy percent of Linux desktop installations, today the choice has broadened, with half a dozen environments vying for users’ attention.
However, the change is less dramatic than it appears. GNOME 3, Linux Mint’s Cinnamon/Mate, and Ubuntu’s Unity offer different interfaces, but the same GNOME utilities and applications underneath. Add their popularity together, and the same seventy percent of the Linux users — give or take — continue to select either KDE or GNOME. So the question of which to choose remains as timely as ever.
In fact, regardless of the percentages, the question has become even more important today because the old user loyalties have broken down. Although many are growing resigned to the changes brought about by GNOME 3, Unity, and KDE 4, many others continue to search for their ideal desktop environment.
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That’s a lot less than GNOME/KDE, around 200MB. Of course, RAM is cheap these days, but why waste it? I could use Joe’s Window Manager at just 3MB or even Rat Poison at 1MB.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Digia has announced a new version of Qt, the C++ toolkit and this revision comes with over 600 improvements. As noted from their blog, it is a big release and all users are advised to upgrade to this version as soon as possible.
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Continuing on where I left off last time I decided my next order of business would be to set up my e-mail accounts and calendar. KDE provides a number of different, more or less single purpose applications to handle all of your personal information management. For example e-mail is handled by KMail, RSS feeds are pulled in via Akregator, calendars are maintained through KOrganizer, etc. Each of these applications could easily be reviewed on their own, however there is yet another application provided in KDE, Kontact, that unifies all of these distinct programs into one. For the purposes of this article I will be treating all of these as part of Kontact as a whole but will still try and focus on each individual component where needed.
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It’s been a while since I’ve used KDE, however with the recent rapid (and not always welcome) changes going on in the other two main desktop environments (GNOME 3 and Unity) and the, in my opinion, feature stagnation of environments like Xfce and LXDE I decided to give KDE another shot.
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KDE SC 4.10 was released six months after KDE 4.9, adding many new features. In the background, work is in full swing for the next generation, KDE Frameworks 5: a KDE based completely on Qt5 and QML.
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Once most people had arrived at the KDAB offices in Berlin, the KDE PIM sprint started around 4 in the afternoon with an introduction by Till Adam. He welcomed everyone and issued a warning: there were only one-and-a-half crates of beer and all KDAB attempts at ordering more had failed. The participants would have to take care of this!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The developers of the Cinnarch Linux distribution have decided to move away from their nominatively definitive Cinnamon desktop. Cinnarch, which is based on Arch Linux and has thus far been packaging the desktop developed by the Linux Mint developers, is now looking to switch to the GNOME desktop environment. The developers say that the technical situation of Cinnamon makes it too hard to deploy on Arch while still staying true to the distribution’s goals of distributing cutting edge software and doing so without unnecessary duplication of packages in the repositories.
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I have talked many times about the things I like about KDE, to the point where many people reading my blog consider me a KDE fan. That´s not exactly true, though. In fact, in the last three Fedora releases, I have always installed KDE and GNOME side by side on the same box, so I could get an actual understanding of how they fair against each other. For several releases now, it would always be the same thing. I would like some of the concepts in GNOME Shell, but after a while, I would always end up going back to KDE. Applications were better, the overall feel was more familiar and, even if certain things worked better in GNOME, it was a trade off I was happy to accept… Until GNOME 3.6 came about, that is. GNOME 3.6 had improved significantly over the original, included several new applications that I loved, and it got cloud integration down perfectly.
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GNOME 3.8 looks incredibly slick and balanced. I can’t wait to take Ubuntu GNOME Remix for a spin with latest GNOME 3.8 on it. We were in the process of reviewing the brand new GNOME 3.8. And then I saw this animated video on GNOME 3.8. Probably the best (and really quick) “what’s new” video on GNOME 3.8 I have seen yet. Take a look.
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I am such an attention who … I mean, what a plucky title! So appropriate. Anyhow, I received a lot of emails, i.e. more than one, telling me I ought to review the Snowlinux distribution. And it does sound interesting. Somewhat like Mint, a combination of Debian and Ubuntu, and other fancy stuff.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Are you still trying to discover the perfect GNOME distro? You are just loosing your time! There is no such thing.. However what seems to make a difference is Arch Linux. Huge super active community, pure rolling release, native GNOME experience, unlimited packages, the very best documentation.
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As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Acer Aspire S3Having reached the venerable age of one and a half, Acer’s Aspire S3 is no longer what you’d call a hot ultrabook. And yet its specs are not exactly dated, including such goodies as old-school Sandy Bridge processors, Intel HD Graphics 3000 and 4 gigs of RAM.
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In many ways, the Ubuntu that Canonical will officially release on April 25 (when 13.04 will become “stable”) barely resembles the versions of the popular Linux-based desktop, server and cloud operating system that it put out just a few years ago. Ubuntu now has a new interface, Unity, and a much broader hardware footprint as Canonical seeks to “converge” its ecosystem across PCs, servers, tablets, smartphones and even TVs.
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Seems Raspberry Pi innovations are now not limited to gadgets only. Students at Norwegian University of Science and Technology have successfully modelled a car which uses the cheap $25 PC as its brain. To keep the car light, the body has been created with carbon fiber. Even the engine has been designed without using iron.
The motor draws power of about 100 watts and capable of giving a maximum speed of 40 kilometers an hour.
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MSC Vertriebs has introduced a quick-start kit for embedded Linux system designs using AMD’s single- and dual-core Embedded G-Series APUs. The kit includes one of three MSC Qseven COMs (computer-on-modules), a baseboard, bootable Linux in flash, and (optionally) an XGA-resolution LCD.
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Phones
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Android
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When I ordered by Nexus 10, the first thing I was looking for was it’s case, but there was no official case being sold by Google. Now, almost 5 months later Google has started selling the Nexus 10 cases.
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Open source projects are increasingly opting to form an independent entity – a “Foundation” – to form the core of their community, rather than relying on goodwill or corporate oversight. Foundations often hold shared assets such as money, trademarks and copyrights, provide infrastructure, and sometimes employ staff.
The idea is seductive, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. A Foundation can’t solve your community problems; it can only make firm the solutions you devise, by providing a canvas on which to paint the trust and governance you have all agreed and to guarantee it for future generations of your community. You need to solve the problems first.
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ICEsoft Technologies Inc., a leading global supplier of open-source technologies for enterprise, announced today that ICEpdf is shipping. ICEpdf is an open source Java PDF engine for viewing, printing, manipulating, and annotating PDF documents. The ICEpdf API is 100 percent Java-based, lightweight, fast, efficient and easy to use.
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No one is going to tell you we’ve been winning the battle against the illegal wildlife trade. In most cases, we’re outmanned, outgunned, and probably most of all, out-spent. That’s why an alliance of six conservation organizations have come together to build an anti-poaching tool designed to bridge the technological gap between poachers and wildlife rangers.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google just announced version 27 of Chrome beta for Android. This release brings one of the most notable improvements to the smartphones — the ‘fullscreen’ mode which removes the address bar and gives more real estate for content.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has officially announced that the second Alpha release in the Firefox 22.x branch is now available for download.
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Today we are announcing changes to our executive leadership team as we build up our pivot to mobile and build upon the foundation that’s now in place to accelerate into the opportunities in front of us.
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Mozilla’s chief executive is stepping down amid a re-positioning of the managerial brass after barely two years into a mission to take Firefox mobile.
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Mozilla is about to release an update for the stable version of the Firefox web browser bringing the version of the program to 20.0.1 after the update. This may or may not come as a surprise for some users of the browser as Firefox 20 has just been released a week ago. Some criticize Mozilla for the lack of quality control and base that judgement on the number of updates the company releases after a new version of Firefox stable is released. Others applaud Mozilla for releasing fixes to issues that users encounter after updates in a short period of time.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Open source cloud computing software CloudStack, which is developed by all-volunteer association the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has this week graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project. The move signifies the maturity of CloudStack as an open source tool for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.
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Databases
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Although it sometimes might seem as if relational databases have gone the way of the dinosaur, making way for non-relational (NoSQL) databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, a very large number of systems still depend on a relational database. And, although there is no requirement that a relational database use SQL as its query language, it’s a rare database product that does not do so.
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CMS
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Researchers at Sucuri have found that version 4.0 of the WordPress Social Media Widget, also referred to as social-media-widget, has been injecting spam advertisements into sites. It is recommended that anyone using the widget, which has over 900,000 users, remove or disable it as soon as possible. The researchers believe the malicious code, which added “Pay Day Loan” spam into sites which ran the plugin, was added at the end of March when the developers released version 4.0 to the WordPress.org plugin repository.
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Drupal development shops Realityloop and Cross(Functional) have partnered with US-based Commerce Guys to deliver Australian training for Drupal Commerce, a module for the open-source Drupal Web platform.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.0.9, the next maintenance release for the 2.0.x stable series.
This release represents 347 commits by 15 people over 4 months.
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I consider Free Software to be a capitalist pursuit. I don’t say Open Source, and I do so in adherence to the distinction the author draws between the terms. My support of Free Software is moral, it is about the rights of individuals, and it is fundimentally Libertarian.
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Project Releases
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In the time since our last major version update (Funf 0.3) last year, we’ve had a chance to see how the framework has been used by developers and end users. In addition, we compiled our own “to do” list of features that didn’t make it into the 0.3 release.
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Public Services/Government
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The Australian government’s technology and procurement division has released a draft roadmap for moving the data.gov.au website to the open source CKAN platform. The shift will begin at the end of April.
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Meet Kris Trujillo, Senior Software Architect at Accela. I met Trujillo at last year’s CityCamp Colorado and was curious about how Accela is advancing the open government movement with their software. I was impressed to learn about some of their solutions aimed at government agencies and how those solutions help to provide transparency into government processes and civic information.
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Openness/Sharing
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The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has introduced a new initiative to develop an open-source database of real-world performance from solar facilities across the US.
The database, called Open Solar Performance and Reliability Clearinghouse (O-SPaRC), is being developed as part of the DOE’s SunShot Initiative, and is designed to improve access to low-cost financial capital by enabling credit rating agencies and potential investors to assess the underlying risk of the asset class.
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Programming
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As Google’s Go programming language version 1.1 nears release, the developers have announced the release of the latest beta, providing a working preview of its new features. Not least among these is an estimated speed increase of 30%-40% in several use cases. Version 1.0 of Go was released a little over a year ago in March 2012, and to this point Google has released bug fixes but version 1.1 will bring new features while upholding their commitment to backwards compatibility with 1.X version. The updates affect the toolset, language features, and changes to the standard library.
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A cache of around 400 documents, most of them from the past six years, provide a look at the inner workings of McGill’s department of Development and Alumni Relations (DAR), including detailed profiles of the University’s top donors, and proposal for partnerships with some of the world’s largest companies.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has been placed on a list of wanted criminals in Finland for his ties to a motorcycle club. Putin reacted to the news in his trademark ironic manner, while Helsinki issued a number of apologies.
On Wednesday, Finnish TV broadcaster MTV3 exposed that Vladimir Putin’s name surfaced in a secret criminal register for his contact with the Russian motorcycle club, the Night Wolves. Being placed on the list translates to automatic detention at the Finnish border as a criminal for a possible jail term of at least six months.
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Ted Menzies, the Minister of State for Finance, yesterday delivered a talk on the Canada – EU Trade Agreement that marked an important shift in the government’s rhetoric on the agreement. Aside from a bizarre reference to the value of the agreement being $17 trillion dollars (total Canadian GDP is $1.8 trillion), the talk is most notable from the move away from promising swift completion of the agreement. After years of setting missed deadlines, Menzies now says there is no deadline for completion, suggesting that the government is beginning to hedge on whether there even will be a deal. I wrote about the prospect of the agreement dying altogether last month.
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Science
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Health/Nutrition
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Chicken and eggs sold by Tesco are to come from birds fed on a diet of GM soya as the company abandons a commitment not to use the controversial feed.
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“The value of rare earth metals and their relatively limited supply would seem to work in North Korea’s favor. Rare earth metals are used in the construction of everything from iPods to precision guided missiles. China currently produces more than 95% of the world’s output of these metals. China’s control over these minerals has regional implications for Northeast Asia. For example, in 2010 Japan alleged that China suspended its export of the minerals to Tokyo in response to a territorial dispute between the two countries. The EU, U.S., and Japan also recently brought a case against China at the WTO for unfairly inflating the prices of these minerals.”
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Security
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I was utterly surprised by this for several reasons.
First of all I should make clear that I did not actively participate in Project PM, I merely decided to host the domain with my CloudFlare account and to maintain the server the wiki was being run on.
Examining the site one will quickly realize that its content is gathered from publicly available sources on the Internet, none of it looks illegal even by the most restrictive laws.
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The lack of security in communication technologies used in the aviation industry makes it possible to remotely exploit vulnerabilities in critical on-board systems and attack aircraft in flight, according to research presented Wednesday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Munduruku leaders hit out at ‘betrayal’ after government pushes on with dam construction without community’s consent
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Egypt’s armed forces participated in forced disappearances, torture and killings across the country – including in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum – during the 2011 uprising, even as military leaders publicly declared their neutrality, according to a leaked presidential report on revolution-era crimes.
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The Justice Department’s findings that Seattle police routinely used excessive force chapped many officers — including the city’s new interim chief, Jim Pugel.
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Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist and the co-developer of popular web tools like RSS feeds and Reddit, ended his life earlier this year at the end of a long battle with federal prosecutors in Boston — who had accused him of engaging in digital piracy.
Under the umbrella of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the prosecutors in Swartz’ case, led by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, piled multiple criminal counts on him that collectively could have locked him up for a quarter century. His alleged transgression: Stashing a laptop computer in a closet of a building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus (where Swartz was a research fellow) and using it to download several million academic articles — many the product of taxpayer funding — from the archives of a nonprofit online library called JSTOR.
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The drone campaign managed to kill 482 people, but only 6 were high-ranking members of al-Qaeda.
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Al-Qaida in Yemen posted a statement on militant websites Monday saying that its second-most senior commander has not been killed. It was the second time the group has denied Saeed al-Shihri’s death.
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The United States’ use of unmanned drones to strike terrorists is coming under increasing scrutiny. Those in favor say the drone strikes have been highly effective, but critics suggest they could violate international law. The New York Times claimed Sunday it had uncovered a secret deal between the U.S. and Pakistan over the use of drones in Pakistani airspace.
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Top secret documents show that half of those killed in a year were ‘unknown extremists’
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The Obama administration’s drone attacks have not just targeted Al Qaeda leaders, but a wide variety of groups and individuals in Pakistan, according to classified intelligence documents obtained by McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay.
“At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were ‘assessed’ as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists,” Landay writes in the story, published today.
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A 15-month investigation exploring war crimes long denied by the Pentagon lays out the tragic truth.
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Tuesday was the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad by invading US troops, marked infamously by the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdous Square.
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The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations
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Overall majority of 68 to 31 means debate cannot be filibustered while NRA hardens opposition to background checks
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Past three months saw windfarms produce more electricity than any other source for first time, trade body says
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Cablegate
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4:05 PM EST The judge read a ruling on closing the proceedings and “John Doe,” the Defense Department “operator” that the government wants to testify on Al Qaeda evidence that was obtained during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. He will be allowed to testify from an undisclosed location and in disguise so long as the defense can see his demeanor. The defense must be able to see facial and eye movements.
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A fresh US cable exposed by WikiLeaks has revealed that three assassination attempts were made on Congress leader Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency, a leading English daily reported on Thursday.
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Precisely 40 years before Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi called India a beehive buzzing with complexity and energy, the analogy was used was by opponents of the Gandhi scion’s grand-mother Indira Gandhi to target her party.
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US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks say that late former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had written to the then Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974 offering to share nuclear technology but only if proper conditions for trust were created. The offer was rejected by Bhutto.
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Wikileaks shows in an US embassy cable sent on September 17, 1976, Kamal Nath was described as Sanjay Gandhi’s school buddy and chief operator in West Bengal. It also said that Nath sponsored Bengal’s power and irrigation minister Ghani Khan Choudhury who was said to have awarded a very large contract to Nath’s firm (Nath manufactures power cable),” as replacement for Siddharth Shankar Ray.
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The Indian government’s assertions that its first nuclear blast in 1974 was for peaceful purposes was described by Chinese diplomats as “nonsense” and that the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had “inherited the hypocrisy” of her father Jawaharlal Nehru.
Peking also had a grouse that it was not informed about the tests by Indians.
The latest round of disclosures of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks show that Peking had commented briefly on the Indian tests as the Pokharan explosion did not affect China and was not viewed as a “particularly important event”.
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A former US Ambassador to the Philippines had doubted the government investigation that cleared current Cagayan lawmaker and senatorial aspirant Jack Enrile in the 1975 murder of a Navy officer’s son, but hinted of a possible conspiracy to sow intrigue between Enrile’s father, then-Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, and then-President Ferdinand Marcos during the height of Martial Law.
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The Oscar-winning filmmaker met with the wanted web activist in England, then took to Twitter to slam several high-profile upcoming movies tackling the subject.
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The State Department cables show that the Palestinian leader was a key asset to the U.S. during the Kissinger years
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A fresh set of US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks show that in 1975 just before it invaded, Indonesia suggested an international intervention into East Timor, but the suggestion wasn’t taken up by Australia.
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All week, official Washington is fixated on the question of whether the 14 senators who’ve promised to filibuster any gun safety legislation will succeed in their efforts to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, gun violence continues unabated in the rest of the nation.
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The military judge ordered that the government must prove the whistleblower “aided the enemy”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.
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Sherry Appleman awoke abruptly in the middle of the night less than 48 hours after a pipeline rupture last month sent thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil into the streets and swamps of Mayflower, Ark.
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The sudden cooling of Europe, triggered by collapse of the global thermohaline circulation in the north Atlantic and the slowing of the Gulf Stream has been popularized by the movies and the media. The southern half of the global thermohaline circulation is as important to global climate but has not been popularized. The global oceans’ coldest water, Antarctic bottom water forms in several key spots around Antarctica. The water is so cold and dense that it spreads out along the bottom all of the major ocean basins except the north Atlantic and Arctic. Multiple recent reports provide strong evidence that the formation of Antarctic bottom water has slowed dramatically in response to massive subsurface melting of ice shelves and glaciers. The meltwater is freshening a layer of water found between depths of 50 and 150 meters. This lightened layer is impeding the formation of Antarctic bottom water, causing the Antarctic half of the global thermohaline circulation to falter.
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Startling government survey sheds new light on Chinese water crisis
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All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.
The comments, made during the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, are “highly unusual” for a current or former member of the safety commission, according to The New York Times. Asked why he had suddenly decided to make the remarks, Jaczko implied that he had only recently arrived at these conclusions following the serious aftermath of Japan’s tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear facility.
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Around 120 tons of contaminated water with an estimated 710 billion becquerels of radioactivity has probably leaked into the ground under the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. revealed Saturday.
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Finance
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Recall the classic cartoon scene of a cat who simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring that she has no longer ground under her feet – she falls down only when she looks down and notices she is hanging in the abyss. Is this not how ordinary people in Cyprus must feel these days? They are aware that Cyprus will never be the same, that there is a catastrophic fall of the standard of living ahead, but the full impact of this fall is not yet properly felt, so for a short period they can afford to go on with their normal daily lives like the cat who calmly walks in the empty air. And we should not condemn them: such delaying of the full crash is also a surviving strategy – the real impact will come silently when the panic will be over. This is why it is now when the Cyprus crisis has largely disappeared from the media that one should think and write about it.
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In a day full of stunners, we next get news from Cyprus, where a few weeks after the start of the “investigation” into who pulled their cash out of the country’s doomed banking system in advance of the confiscation news on March 16 (and where even the current president was implicated in transferring over €20 milion in family money to London) the parliamentary committee tasked with tracking down the leaks, has suspended its probe.
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Plunge happens on the same day one anonymous redditor made it rain in Bitcoin.
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Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government’s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.
[...]
A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap: because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job: all the money you earn is extra income. The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. It would be financed by progressive taxation: in fact it meshes well with land value tax.
These ideas require courage: the courage to confront the government, the opposition, the plutocrats, the media, the suspicions of a wary electorate. But without proposals on this scale, progressive politics is dead. They strike that precious spark, so seldom kindled in this age of triangulation and timidity: the spark of hope.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether Goldman Sachs (GS) and other banks are skirting post-crisis “role switching” rules aimed at preventing banks from giving biased investment advice to municipalities.
According to The Wall Street Journal, regulators are probing whether banks have run afoul of Dodd-Frank regulations that prohibit banks that provide financial advice to municipalities from underwriting certain municipal bond transactions.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A Forbes media reporter criticizes the company’s attack on “sponsored content.” He couldn’t be more wrong
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In an era of corporate aggression into the public sphere, not even the classroom is safe. As the corporate reach extends into public schools, our kids are increasingly reshaped as products, as data to be collected, as pawns in the corporate fight to rid the country of unionized jobs. In our classrooms, the humanity and education of students is gradually being replaced with corporate systems and profit-values.
As if the only human activity with any meaning or moral relevance is the pursuit of money, corporate education transforms the entire scope of the education process into pre-employment training. Instead of investing in the future, corporate education looks to squeeze a profit from it before it arrives.
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Censorship
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As the world burns, a new movement to reverse climate change is emerging – fiercely, loudly and right next door
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Access to information is a basic foundation of democracy. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms also gives us “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”
We must protect these rights. As we alter the chemical, physical and biological properties of the biosphere, we face an increasingly uncertain future, and the best information we have to guide us comes from science. That scientists – and even librarians – are speaking out against what appear to be increasing efforts to suppress information shows we have cause for concern. The situation has become so alarming that Canada’s Information Commissioner is investigating seven government departments in response to a complaint that they’re “muzzling” scientists.
The submission from the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre and Democracy Watch alleges that “the federal government is preventing the media and the Canadian public from speaking to government scientists for news stories – especially when the scientists’ research or point of view runs counter to current Government policies on matters such as environmental protection, oil sands development, and climate change” and that this “impoverishes the public debate on issues of significant national concern.”
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A three-week investigation at a Butterball turkey farm in North Carolina by an animal welfare activist with a hidden camera documented workers beating birds with metal bars, stomping and kicking them, and throwing them violently into metal cages by their necks (video below). Mercy for Animals, the non-profit organization responsible for the investigation, turned the footage over to prosecutors in December 2011, and the police raided the facility. Five workers were charged with criminal animal cruelty, and a top-level Department of Agriculture official was convicted for obstruction of justice in February 2012.
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Privacy
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The U.S. House Intelligence Committee overwhelmingly passed a cyber-security bill on Wednesday, angering privacy advocates who believe the bill fails to protect critical personal information.
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A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.
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CISPA’s sponsors are doing the same thing they did last year when confronted with serious opposition to a terrible bill: they start lying about it. First, they released a “fact vs. myth” sheet about the bill that was so ridiculously misleading that the EFF had to pick apart nearly every dubious claim. A big part of this is trying to hide the fact that the bill has very broad definitions that will make it much easier for the NSA to get access to private data. No one has claimed that this automatically allows the NSA to do full “surveillance” via CISPA, but that’s what CISPA’s supporters pretend critics have said, so they can fight back against the strawman.
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new Google feature lets you decide what happens to your data when you die, Twitter had the sniffles this morning, and social browser Rockmelt will start working in other browsers.
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Civil Rights
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As noted here previously, a revamped version of CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), which is just as bad in terms of privacy protections as its first failed iteration, is in the “mark up” stage in the House. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU are working together to rally opposition to the bill, which would entail companies potentially handing over users’ private information and browsing histories to the government.
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Educators and activists representing a swath of organizations and institutions — from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to George Washington University — took to Reddit Tuesday in an Ask Me Anything interview, seeking to educate the public about the controversial CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and to push for reform.
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The Metropolitan Police has asked groups planning to demonstrate during or in advance of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral to make themselves known to officers so that their “right to protest can be upheld”.
The call, which echoes similar ones made in the run-up to the Olympics, is an attempt to avoid any outbreak of violence or public order issues which might threaten to mar the funeral procession. However, the suggestion will anger those who say the right to protest should not need prior authorisation by police.
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Philadelphia is the latest front in the battle over workers’ rights, with a coalition of paid sick day advocates urging city council members to override a veto by Democratic Mayor Michael Nutter against a bill passed last month that would allow almost 180,000 workers to take a sick day without losing pay or their jobs. As has been the case around the country, corporate interests associated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have lined up in opposition to the legislation.
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Greater Manchester police receives first report of hate crime under new category connected to alternative subcultures
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The state of Internet access in Canada has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years as consumers and businesses alike assess whether Canadians have universal access to fast, affordable broadband that compares favourably with other countries. A new House of Commons study currently being conducted by the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology offers the chance to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Canadian high-speed networks and what role the government might play in addressing any shortcomings.
The study is ongoing, yet my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that two issues are emerging as key concerns: access and adoption.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It’s certainly never a dull moment as PP-UK Leader. Since my last update I have been busy advocating for our politics, including a lecture at the London School of Economics, meetings at the House of Commons, attending events about open data and taking part at the international “Rethinking the Internet” conference in Venice.
Equally, I have been working on the ground for residents in Manchester- whether it’s helping to run a community consultation on possible new uses for an derelict building in Bradford ward where I stood last year, or pressing for regeneration in the East of the city. I also had an amazing visit to community projects in the Liverpool district of Toxteth. Great to see real transformation, it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. I like this combination of the visionary and the practical, that’s what politics is about for me.
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The common refrain coming out of the MPAA and RIAA over the past few years has really focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs!” This is a message that often works with Congress. If you can convince Congress that “jobs” are at risk, they go scrambling to protect those jobs, even if the economy would be much better off with obsolete jobs going away, and better jobs taking their place. That said, the MPAA and RIAA have a long history of making up ridiculous claims about the number of people employed in their industries, as well as the number of supposed “lost jobs.” So it’s rather noteworthy to see that the good folks over at ZeroHedge have pointed out that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industries hit an all time high in December.
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Send this to a friend
04.10.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For an institution that is Asia’s oldest stock exchange, technology plays a pivotal role. With more than 30 million trades being executed on a monthly basis, and transactions running into billions — at no moment, can the BSE afford any performance issues related to its IT infrastructure.
“We need our IT infrastructure to be extremely dynamic in nature. Almost every day, there are requests for enhancements in existing IT applications. This is extremely challenging, as every change has to be done or released by keeping in mind the impact on integrated IT systems,” says Kersi Tavadia, CIO, BSE.
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Desktop
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I didn’t believe open source was properly represented by hardware companies. The big guys only flirted with open source desktops. I thought smaller companies were missing some key components to success. So, with a friend and $1,500, I founded System76 in my basement. It has worked out far better than I could have imagined.
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Server
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Since 2011, HP has been developing microservers for cloud data centres under the code name Project Moonshot. Pilot customers are already able to use pre-release versions with systems on a chip (SoCs) from US company Calxeda. Each of these Energycore chips has four ARM processor cores, albeit 32-bit Cortex-A9s. The first commercial Moonshot devices are, however, equipped with Intel server Atom chips. Intel released its Atom S1200, also known as Centerton, in late 2012; the more powerful Avoton is scheduled for release in late 2013. In contrast to Atoms for netbooks and for smartphones, the server versions support more RAM, ECC error correction, virtualisation and PCI Express 2.0.
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The next generation of low-power Atom chips for microservers is due in the second half of 2013, ahead of rival ARM’s chips aimed at the data center.
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HP’s Moonshot servers went into production with Intel’s Atom processor first, but expect a fast follow with an ARM system powered by Calxeda.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Software Defined Networking (SDN) is difficult to explain, mainly because most of the parts that describe it are not quite built yet. At a 10,000 ft view, as I understand it, SDN describes a set of APIs for centrally managing network devices and being able to reconfigure them on the fly. The details of how this is accomplished are still up in the air, but now that the Linux Foundation has stepped in to create the OpenDaylight project, a standardized, hardware independent protocol and syntax may not be far behind.
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Samsung developers last week provided patches for a new cpufreq governor dubbed “LAB”, or the “Legacy Application Boost”, for the Linux kernel.
The Legacy Application Boost cpufreq governor uses historical cpuidle usage information for determining the number of currently active processor cores and uses that with the number of idle CPU cores for determining the next frequency dynamically.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has released a beta version of its proprietary Linux graphics driver which introduces some support for its Optimus hybrid graphics technology. However, in its announcement of the changes in version 319.12 of the driver, NVIDIA only mentions the Optimus support in passing. Only the documentation goes into any detail about the feature. According to NVIDIA, users need an X server version 1.13 and version 1.4 of the XRandR command line utility xrandr. The Linux kernel used with this driver must also be able to provide a number of specific interfaces, but the documentation does not list which Linux kernel versions provide them.
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After a snafu yesterday with the Google Melange web-site not listing all participating organizations, it turns out that the X.Org Foundation is in for the 2013 Google Summer of Code. Here’s some of the possible X.Org/Mesa projects that might see some attention this summer.
While it comes down to qualified students needing to apply to work on a particular project, on the X.Org Wiki is a list of 2013 ideas. While there haven’t been any X.Org student applications posted to the mailing list yet, the list of interesting items for possible work includes:
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Self-publishing developer Larian Studios announced today that their KickStarter campaign to enhance Divinity: Original Sin reached its funding goal of $USD 400K in less than a fortnight.
Divinity: Original Sin is an open-world, traditional RPG featuring turn-based combat and single-player and cooperative gameplay, in which the actions and choices of players have true significance and consequences. It will ship with the editor that was used by the developers to make the game, making it the first game in a long time to sport an RPG editor that supports multiplayer.
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Shovel Knight from indie developer Yacht Club Games has surpassed yet another stretch goal on Kickstarter. As a result of its ability to continuously get dat money, the game will now be available for Mac and Linux in addition to Steam, Wii U, and 3DS.
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In Consortium, you play the game as yourself. “You are you (as in you can speak as yourself, a man/woman from our world) and you’re being given the opportunity to physically control a man from a parallel world. This man is first day Consortium field agent Bishop Six, operative for a powerful peacekeeping force in a not-quite-utopia future of 2042.”
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE has been, for the nineth consecutive year, accepted as a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2013. The KDE project will also be hosting Season of KDE 2013 (more details will come soon).
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The KDE Telepathy team has released version 0.6.0 of KDE Telepathy (KTp), KDE’s instant messaging suite. This release brings many, as usual, bug fixes and new features. Telepathy allows a user to interact with users from different services such as Gtalk or Facebook. Since it’s a KDE project it offers great integration with the desktop by providing plasmoids and runner interfaces as well as providing the traditional contact list and chatting application.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I’m extremely proud to announce that MediaGoblin is in for a summer of awesome… we’re participating in both GSOC 2013 (under the GNU umbrella) and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women 2013! (Yes, you might notice we’re not a GNOME project, but the super awesome people at GNOME have extended the program to other free software projects.) Are you a student looking for a summer job contributing to free software? Or maybe you are a woman interested in contributing to free software, something like MediaGoblin maybe? Then you should apply! (Maybe you are both… we encourage you to apply to both programs then, actually!)
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Google has announced the mentoring organisations for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013. After reviewing 417 applications, the company has selected 177 open source projects to participate in this year’s cycle of the program that brings together organisations and students to foster development of open source code. Google pays the students a stipend while they work on projects chosen by the mentoring organisations, which provide guidance and training to the participating students.
The application period for students will open on 22 April and conclude on 3 May, at which point the mentoring organisations will pick among student’s proposals. Google says interested students should use the time until the application period opens to familiarise themselves with prospective mentoring organisations’ ideas pages to discover which areas the various organisations are interested in. As with previous GSoCs, the mentoring organisations will decide for themselves which student proposals interest them most. In the previous eight cycles of the program, more than 6000 students from over 100 countries have taken part. Last year’s completion rate among the 1200 participating students was 88 per cent.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS (PCLOS, for short), the once popular Mandriva-derived Live distribution, came up with a shiny new release a couple days back. Unlike in its glory days, when a minor release would set the whole Linux world abuzz, this one came out quitely with its usual set of goodies. Featuring latest versions of all major included apps, PCLinuxOS 2013.04 comes in 3 flavors — the usual KDE, the fits-on-CD MiniMe, and the extravagant FullMonty.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has released version 6.1 of in-memory database JBoss Data Grid. It is based on grid computing platform Infinispan and supports programming languages including Java, C# and the Spring and .NET frameworks. JBoss Data Grid was developed for enterprise and cloud use and provides a distributed, highly scalable cache which, by caching data, reduces response times and increases reliability of applications using it.
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Fedora
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It just so happens that yum while performing updates is simultaneously running a journal transaction set recording your update to a transaction id along with all of the excruciatingly painful package update and dependency information you’d ever want to know. Most of the time, you’ll never care about it. In some situations however, you may encounter a post-update problem.
The good news with yum is you have a recourse. If you need to or at the direction of your Distro’s technical support team, you may be called upon to perform a rollback.
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Debian Family
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Last month I wrote about the work being done by a small Linux distribution that most users likely have never heard of, SprezzOS, trying to rewrite Debian’s APT utilities. Reported last month were significant performance gains out of rewriting the APT utilities, but work hasn’t let up. There’s more progress to share.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The second edition of Ubuntu’s online developer summit, UDS 13.05, was announced yesterday. The virtual developer summit will run through May 14-16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. The summit is divided into five tracks – App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.
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Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) is nearly here. Ah, April: Cruel though it may be, it’s the month where spring finally comes to stay, and I get my tax return. Even better, it does markCanonical’s unveiling of Ubuntu 13.04. And with the final beta release now out, it’s time to take stock of what the latest and greatest iteration of Ubuntu has in store.
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Flavours and Variants
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The second 2013 release of Fuduntu is here, and 2013.2 now comes with a light install for users that want a base system, and updated LibreOffice
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Advantech has introduced a tiny, fanless embedded motherboard based on 1.6 or 1.86GHz dual-core N2000 Series “Cedarview” Atom processors. Constructed in Advantech’s unique “MI/O-Ultra” version of the Pico-ITX form-factor, the MIO-2262 simplifies system integration by providing three internal headers for all I/O, expansion, and power connections.
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Are you thinking about rolling your own Linux-powered device as part of a start-up, or through a Kickstarter project? Before you go that route, it’s best to understand what’s ahead of you, suggests Opengear co-founder Tony Merenda in this LinuxGizmos guest column.
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Phones
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The developers at Jolla have released the SDKs for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for SailfishOS, their continuation of the ideas behind Maemo and Meego. Those two operating systems were the basis for Nokia’s operating system strategy until it switched over to Windows Phone. The Jolla team have been working on SailfishOS, which combines Mer, a fork and refinement of Meego, with the Nemo project and Qt to provide a UI framework for mobile devices. SailfishOS is destined to power the company’s mobile devices which are expected to debut in the second half of the year.
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Ballnux
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Both the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and 6.3 will run on Android Jelly Bean and will use Samsung’s own TouchWiz Nature UX interface.
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Android
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Talking about numbers. Huawei posted its annual report and admitted it only sold 32 million smartphones all of last year, far less than its target of 60 million, the number that the management had been promoting as recently as February of this year. I mentioned in my final 2012 numbers that there were a lot of discrepancies with Huawei numbers from various sources and I had adjusted my Huawei annual number downward due to this, but not enough. Still, its good to know now officially.
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was revealed, all signs point to another hit smartphone and big growth for the Sammy. They keep expanding the Galaxy series as was expected and the juggernaut should continue to roll on. I found it funny that the Galaxy Camera only now arrived to American shores, we’ve had it here in Asia since last year. Samsung’s Q1 financial guidance said massive growth in smartphones, driving up their profits.. yeah, this ‘surprised’ some after the Christmas season, but not our readers, we know China’s gift-giving season is in January for Q1 and as Samsung is China’s top-selling smartphone nowadays (used to be Nokia) that means big good sales for the Samster…
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The 7-inch Asus MeMO Pad tablet can now be purchased in the US. It is one of the cheapest brand-name Android tablets ever made, as it can be yours for just $149. As you’d expect though, for that price there are a few pretty big caveats.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s landgrab on the open source space of Android poses problems for Google: given that both companies want user data, it can’t afford to sit back and watch
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The One Laptop Per Child Association has posted a statement distancing itself from Satish Jha, an entrepreneur who founded the Association in India.
The Association’s beef with Mr Jha relates to what it describes as “certain recent statements”.
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It was nearly one year ago that we took an in-depth look at the Pwnie Express Pwn Plug, a security appliance that absolutely exploded its way onto the scene. By combining an off the shelf hardware platform that was well supported by open source software, custom software front-end, and the experience and knowledge of their team of security researchers, Pwnie Express managed to create something totally unique.
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Eighteen mainly large communications and software companies have created the Open Daylight Project in the Linux Foundation to develop open source code for software-defined networks (SDNs). The group will develop a wide range of software including an SDN controller and an applications interface for it with the first elements slated for release this fall.
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UNStudio will in June relaunch as an “open-source architecture studio” inspired by technology start-ups, the Dutch firm announced today.
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Web Browsers
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The growing popularity of Web browsing from tablet devices and smart phones has been a boon for Apple’s Safari and Google’s Android, but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are having a hard time maintaining a hold on usage share, according to a recent report.
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Chrome
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Google’s Chrome OS and Android are heading in the direction where they look and feel identical.
While the company executives have denied merging of Android and Chrome OS they have hinted at convergence and if you are monitoring the Chrome OS development for a while you can notice how the design and layout of Chrome OS is shaping up.
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The other day, while indicating how much I loved the Chromebook Pixel, I wrote a piece on what I would change. Therefore, it only seems fair to more detail what I really liked.
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Mozilla
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The project started out as a release of the Netscape browser and email client/suite back on March 31 1998, at which point Netscape Communications Foundation formally created Mozilla.
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You have to hand it to Mozilla — the company really does pursue policies that favor users even when commercial interests cry foul. Case in point: Last month, I wrote about the fact that The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has accusied Mozilla of “undermining American small business” with its plan to block advertising cookies by default in the Firefox browser. Fast-forward to today, and the pre-release version of Firefox version 22 does indeed proceed with the plan, which will make many users happy.
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SaaS/Big Data
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What can online retailers do that their brick-and-mortar can’t? Besides not charging sales tax (in many instances, at least, and for the time being), they can leverage the cloud to expand into new geographic markets and handle fluctuations in sales volume in particularly effective ways. And a partnership announced this week between Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and Magento is designed to make it easier to do exactly that.
Rackspace, which provides cloud hosting services based on flexible open source technologies that it touts as protection against lock-in, already has a strong presence among ecommerce sites. It is the most popular hosting provider for Magento deployments across the world, according to BuiltWith, and is also the No. 1 host for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites.
The partnership between Rackspace and Magento, which the companies announced Monday, will expand the former’s reach into the online retailer space even further. According to a statement, the collaboration aims to provide ecommerce sites with “a low-cost entry into new markets around the world without the cost of establishing a physical presence.”
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The OpenStack project itself is not even three years old, but thanks to maturing technology, a growing membership, and the OpenStack Foundation formed last year, OpenStack has matured to the point that it is getting attention from large service provider and enterprise users, including companies in telecommunications, retail and research.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler has been making much progress in recent months on being able to build high-priority open-source/Linux software packages. When using the latest LLVM/Clang compiler, it appears to be in good shape for handling LibreOffice.
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Education
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Nearly every week, if not every day, there are more and more open source and open educational resources available and accessible to us. It’s impossible to ignore. It also seems impossible to keep pace with the sheer volume.
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Business
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Brothers Aleksander and Bård Farsted founded eZ Systems with a strong belief in open source in 1999. At that time, there were no scalable open source business models, so they developed and pioneered their own while developing eZ Publish, an Enterprise Content Management System.
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Funding
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Lots of open source projects raise money from their user communities by soliciting donations. Most open source projects will have the ‘Support’ or ‘Make a Donation’ button on their home page or download page. At Eclipse we have had the Friend of Eclipse program for a number of years to solicit financial support for our community.
Earlier this year, we started looking for ways to increase the number of users making donations. We have millions of people downloading Eclipse but very few making donations. Inspired by Ubuntu’s new donation page and Mozilla’s download page we changed where and how we asked users to make the donation.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The involvement and energy of the free software community make LibrePlanet what it is: brilliant and passionate people coming together around software freedom, drinking lots of coffee and forging the future of our movement. This year, we particularly appreciated your contributions to the theme of “Commit Change”: a focus on making connections to other movements and building diversity within free software.
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Public Services/Government
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Open Source for America (OSFA), an organization promoting the use of open source technologies in the U.S. federal government, today announced the election of Deb Bryant and Kane McLean as co-chairs of the organization.
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Openness/Sharing
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MapBox, a service used to design and publish custom maps, has announced that Le Monde, one of France’s largest newspapers, has unveiled a brand new paid website and used MapBox’s interactive maps.
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Open Hardware
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Cyrus is an open source 3D printer currently funding on Kickstarter designed to “close the gap between consumers and makers.”
Its frame is built from the construction tool designed for the maker revolution, MakerBeam– which also started its life as a kickstarter project.
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Programming
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So back to the title of this article. VB or Qt Whats the difference? As far as I am concerned one is based on BASIC and one is based on C++. Apart from that they are both as easy to use and program with and both are very graphically rich. Oh, one more thing. Qt is cross platform while VB is not. This means that your program done with Qt can work on Linux, Windows, MacOSx, Android, IOs (iPhone, etc.), Symbian, Maemo, Unix or even different CPU architectures like ARM and x86 platforms. VB can only work on Windows.
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Fears of civil disorder in capital as plans are revealed for partially state-funded ceremonial funeral. Meanwhile lawyers warn against pre-emptive arrests as police scan social media to identify likely protesters
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Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death yesterday brought waves of mostly flattering coverage of the divisive right-wing leader. It was striking to see the parallels between the way Thatcher was covered on the PBS NewsHour and Fox News Channel’s most popular show, the O’Reilly Factor. Though some people like to think that PBS and Fox couldn’t be further apart, they were basically singing the same tune.
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In the week they took hundreds of pounds from people in severe poverty, MPs and Lords claim up to £3,750 each to return from their luxury holidays to spout off in honour of Margaret Thatcher. Meantime the media are busy classifying any potential protest or expression of opinion at the taxpayer funded funeral jamboree as “potential terrorism”.
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Science
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Margaret Thatcher, 87, died yesterday. She is being hailed as the Iron Lady who transformed Britain. Every newspaper across the globe has paid rich tributes to her. Some have even carried her obituary on the front page, which is quite a rare honour.
I only know that she had a steely resolve. Whatever she thought of doing, she did it. That’s what I have read over the years. And knowing the determination with which she destroyed public sector science, I can understand why and how she earned the title Iron Lady. Nevertheless, let me share this story of how Britain’s only woman Prime Minister, the unyielding Margaret Thatcher, eclipsed one of the world’s best known research centre in plant sciences, which was emerging as a global leader in plant molecular biology and genomics.
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Stephen Moore, libertarian economist and Wall Street Journal columnist learned the hard way that spin doesn’t work in the face of facts. At 1:16, 19-year-old Zack Kopplin, science advocate and history student, offers up the only response one should give whenever a pundit starts talking about cutting science. And at 2:25, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Bill Maher both pile on and fact-check Mr. Moore’s spin again.
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Security
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Six cybertools have been designated as weapons by the U.S. Air Force, allowing the programs to better compete for increasingly scarce Pentagon funding, an Air Force official said on Monday.
Lt. Gen. John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told a conference held in conjunction with the National Space Symposium that the new designations would boost the profile of the military’s cyberoperations as countries grapple with attacks originating from the Internet.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.
The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.
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A leaked top-secret Justice Department white paper reveals the true extent of US drone killings—and lays bare the fact that unmanned aircraft are targeting far more than just Al-Qaeda terrorists.
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It appears that the Central Intelligence Agency has been taking advantage of a legal loophole to avoid submitting reports on cyber surveillance, based on a 2007 definition of “data mining” established during the last Bush administration.
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Official Washington has long ignored the genocide and terrorism that Ronald Reagan inflicted on Central America in the 1980s, making it easier to genuflect before the Republican presidential icon. That also helped Reagan’s “death squad” tactics resurface in Iraq last decade.
A recent British documentary Death squads, torture, secret prisons in Iraq, and General David Petraeus are among the featured atrocities in a new British documentary – “James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq” – the result of a 15-month investigation by Guardian Films and BBC Arabic, exploring war crimes long denied by the Pentagon but confirmed by thousands of military field reports made public by WikiLeaks.
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For much of the past century, US relations with Tibet have been characterized by kowtowing to the Chinese and hollow good wishes for the Dalai Lama. As early as 1908, William Rockhill, a US diplomat, advised the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that “close and friendly relations with China are absolutely necessary, for Tibet is and must remain a portion of the Ta Ts’ing [Manchu] Empire for its own good.” Not much has changed with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama one hundred years later. After a meeting in 2011 with President Obama in the White House Map Room—the Oval Office being too official—the Dalai Lama was ushered out the back door, past the garbage cans. All this, of course, is intended to avoid condemnation from Beijing, which regards even the mildest criticism of its Tibet policy as “interference.”
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Cablegate
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Bangalore: Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder has launched a new search engine, which is a portal to an archive of 1.7 million US diplomatic cables, reports Times of India.
Named as PLUS D (The Public Library of United States Diplomacy), the search engine includes 2, 50, 000 leaked State Department cables that were publicized during Cablegate, a time when memos of Henry Kissinger as U.S. Secretary of State were made public in U.S. history.
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The US Government had suggested musicians Bod Dylan, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor as part of a plan to undermine communism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
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In what appears to be a pretty remarkable coincidence, a 1970s–era cable in which a U.S. diplomat shares his early impressions of Margaret Thatcher was released by the website WikiLeaks, just hours before the death of the former British Prime was announced.
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THREE months before Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975, Gough Whitlam dismissed an Indonesian proposal to send a joint international military force to restore peace to the civil-war-torn colony.
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WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange, who is languishing in self-imposed confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has kept himself busy by scraping more than one million documents from the US national archives.
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The votes are in, with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks winning the People’s Choice Award for 2013. Noam Chomsky won the 2013 Human Rights Award and the 2013 Grassroots Award Honoree is Crystal Lameman, member of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation.
Global Exchange organize and run the voting for these prestigious Human Rights awards and this year they are celebrating their 25th anniversary. The Human Rights Awards honor the achievements of groups and individuals whose work embodies the principles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: peace, justice, and equality.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Not surprisingly, the Goldman Sachs “occupation” of the US Treasury coincided almost exactly with the Fed’s embrace of financialization, leverage, and speculation as crucial tools of monetary management. Its legates in Washington during this era, Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, never once agonized over violating free market rules. They simply assumed that the good of the nation depended upon keeping the Wall Street game up and running.
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Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the “new normal.”
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Margaret Thatcher enforced essential reforms to revive the British economy, but the nation paid a heavy price for her rigorous laissez-faire dogma, German editorialists write on Tuesday. Thatcherism no longer provides solutions to today’s problems. In fact, they argue, it even caused some of them.
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The latest wheeze to come to light is the rapid growth of people, mostly young and desperate, trapped in what are euphemistically called zero-hours contracts. The number doubled between 2004 and 2011, and rose 50% last year.
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According to the National Audit Office, The UK National Debt rose by £1.5trn as a result of the Bank Bailout. This is twice the nation’s total annual budget. For this amount, the UK could have funded the health service (£106.7bn a year) for fourteen years , the entire education system for forty years (£42bn a year) or over three hundred years of Job Seekers Allowance (£4.9bn a year). Not a single banker has gone to court, let alone to jail. Instead bankers are being let off with fines and the removal of honours, effectively buying their way out of justice.
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Even as news is surfacing that the Cypriot bank “bail-in” will now confiscate up to 62.5% of depositor funds, a new budgetary document from Canada’s finance minister suggests that America’s neighbor to the north may be considering a Cyprus-like bail-in system of its own.
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Censorship
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This Monday, I received a reply from the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, where he confirmed that a decision to block certain emails from citizens to members of the parliament was taken on March 7, and said that this decision was ”justified”.
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The wife of a hunger-striking Libyan journalist has told Amnesty International of her disbelief that her husband has been imprisoned and denied bail for ‘offending’ the judiciary under an al-Gaddafi-era law.
Amara al-Khattabi, the editor-in-chief of al-Umma newspaper, was arrested last December and has been on hunger strike since 28 February in protest at his detention. He was arrested a month after his newspaper published a list of 84 judges allegedly involved in corruption.
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Privacy
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But wait… there’s more. The report also found that it’s likely GCSB violated other laws as well, including the Privacy Act and the Defence Act. Not surprisingly, the report also finds a mess of an agency with terrible management, poor record-keeping and little oversight. Shocking, isn’t it, that such conditions would lead to abuse of power and illegal surveillance, huh?
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Civil Rights
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Anti-Kremlin punk band member gives defiant first interview with western media since being sent to prison eight months ago
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Journal Communication’s right-wing talker Charlie Sykes (WTMJ Radio 620), delights in stirring controversy. But last week he went too far. In a segment discussing whether food stamp recipients should be allowed to buy unhealthy food, Sykes played a clip of an incredibly offensive video that is a favorite of neo-Nazi websites.
Dwelling on a popular Sykes topic the “growing gigantic culture of dependent people” or “moocher culture,” Sykes slips in a long clip (at 29.20) where the voice of an African American woman can be heard listing all the fast food joints — even liquor stores — where one can allegedly use an electronic benefits (EBT) card. Sykes did not explain the clip or where it originated. The full song portrays women as having kids in order to receive food stamps to fund a party lifestyle. (For the record, you can’t buy booze with food stamps.)
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The Arizona House of Representatives will not cooperate with the federal government in denying due process to citizens of the Grand Canyon State.
By a vote of 34 to 24, the House passed HB 2573, a bill that would, among other things, prevent state officials from participating in the indefinite detention of Americans by the president as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA).
The measure would amend Title 41 of the Arizona code by adding a section prohibiting state governmental compliance with unconstitutional federal mandates.
A majority of Arizona’s state lawmakers recognize that Arizona is, along with her 49 sister states, a sovereign entity endowed with what James Madison described as “numerous and indefinite powers.” The federal government, on the other hand, possesses only “few and defined” powers, Madison wrote in The Federalist, No. 45.
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“He said, ‘Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler,’ said Harvey, who did not want to give his last name.
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On Yom Ha-Shoah, one of the few remaining living survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Chavka Fulman-Raban, delivered a fierce denunciation of evil and injustice, including the Israeli Occupation. Her speech was offered to guests at the ceremony of Beit Lohamey Ha-Getaot (the Ghetto-Fighters House).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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When it comes to picking issues that bring protesters out onto the street, alfalfa probably isn’t the first one to jump to mind.
But plans to allow a genetically engineered variety of the crop to be planted in Ontario has activists readying to rally across the country Tuesday, including in London, Sarnia, Stratford, Goderich, Kitchener, Guelph, Brantford and Toronto.
The London protest is planned for noon hour in front of the office of London West Conservative MP Ed Holder.
“We know that genetically modified alfalfa will contaminate farmers’ field. This is a huge problem that no one appears to be addressing,” said Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, which is organizing the protests in partnership with the National Farmers Union.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.09.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There are community managers for Linux distributions who spend their whole time spinning this or that and trying to influence opinion without dealing with the reality.
There are others in similar roles who spend all their time contradicting people on mailing lists and discussion forums and flinging mud at anybody who says the smallest thing negative about their distribution.
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Desktop
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Is Linux on the desktop worth a second look if Chrome gives an old PC a new lease of life?
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Server
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When HP Moonshot servers launched today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) was quick to note that the new Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) servers will leverage Atom processors — though HP does eventually plan to offer ARM-based support as well. It’s a significant near-term win for Intel, which hopes to defeat potential rivals like ARM in the emerging market for so-called “microservers.”
According to an Intel spokesperson, Atom is an ideal choice for the HP servers because the architecture can run excisting operating systems (Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.) with no porting requirements.
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Kernel Space
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Things seem to be on track, and it’s been a mostly boring week. Lots of small fixes, a few reverts. Networking, some small arch fixes (arm, mips, s390, alpha, tile, x86), drivers, minor filesystem updates (gfs2, ext4, tiny reiserfs xattr fix). Nothing really exciting stands out, I think the appended ShortLog gives a good overview for people who want to wallow in the details..
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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The Darktable team has announced the release of version 1.2 which brings some new features, supports for more cameras and bug fixes. Darktable is one of the most important free software apps (along with GIMP) which is must have for someone like me who shoots in RAW from his DSLR camera. This apps is the first stage of my post-processing and does a great job when compared with Adobe’s Lightroom.
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The latest release of the open source photo workflow package darktable adds de-noising profiles for camera sensors, support for using the same plugin multiple times on one photo and the ability to import workflow data from Adobe’s Lightroom. Additionally, darktable 1.2 includes a number of other improvements, bug fixes and an improved user manual.
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We are happy to announce the immediate release of Kdenlive 0.9.6.
This version fixes several bugs and crashes, including a very annoying bug that caused project files to seem corrupted. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
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A great amount of productivity comes from writing tasks, whether it be for school assignments, articles for your blog, or much more. While full-featured office applications tend to be the norm for such tasks, it may sometimes be a good idea to go in the opposite direction and use some simpler or specialized tools, depending on what you’re working on. Often, this can either help you focus more on the work that’s ahead, or simply improve your overall workflow to save some time.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Thousands of aliens, giant spiders, mutant lizards, and more are on the attack – can you survive the onslaught? You will consistently unlock new and better perks that improve your ability to use a devastating arsenal. Crimsonland features 3 modes of play, online high scores, and endless hours of pressure packed fun.
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Shovel Knight has dug a tunnel to the Mac and Linux platforms, lined with Kickstarter money, in a tortured metaphor for which we apologize. The point is that Shovel Knight’s fundraiser has passed the stretch goal required to ensure ports to those two platforms.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As I prepped a new virtual server template the other day, it occurred to me that we need more virtualization-specific Linux distributions or at least specific VM-only options when performing an install. A few distros take steps in this direction, such as Ubuntu and OEL jeOS (just enough OS), but they’re not necessarily tuned for virtual servers.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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All in all Mint’s Debian branch offers a pleasant experience with a friendly graphical installer, useful tools and lots of software all in a convenient package. The one detractor Mint’s Debian Edition may have is, oddly enough, Mint’s own Main Edition. While the Debian branch of Mint is a fine distribution its technology base prevents users from having access to certain helpful features available in other Mint editions. For example Mint’s Debian Edition isn’t able to use Ubuntu PPAs, it is missing some third-party software packages built for Ubuntu, and One storage & store support is missing. It would also appear as though the kernel which ships with Mint’s Debian Edition doesn’t have all the hardware support available in the Main Edition. These features tend to be edge cases and many people will probably get along fine without them, but I still suspect the strongest competitors to Mint Debian Edition are Mint’s other flavours.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Beta 2 was also released today, April 5, along with all the others Linux distributions that are part of the Ubuntu family.
Ubuntu Kylin is a new flavor of Ubuntu Linux, and Raring Ringtail (version 13.04) will be its first ever stable release. Today’s final testing version fixes last minute bugs, such as an updated PM2.5 API in the China Weather Indicator, and saving note issue with the Chinese Calendar.
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Flavours and Variants
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My wife now has a new desktop computer. Her netbook computer (Acer Aspire One) works fine, but its Linux distro (Fedora 11) is getting positively antiquated. I’ve just upgraded the hard drive in my laptop (Compaq Presario 2170CA), so it needs a Linux. And the “hand-me-down” process means I have upgrades for my other two PCs (audio processing and ham radio); they also need Linux upgrades. Ideally I’d like to put the same Linux on all five of them. Which Linux?
Although I like Debian on my desktop, I must admit that it is difficult for a novice to administer. (Hell, it’s difficult for me to administer.) And while I like the economy of LXDE, I confess that its tools are still a work in progress; it’s a bother to administer, too.
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Fuduntu is a Linux-based operating system that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu. The OS uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but takes design and usability cues from Ubuntu.
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In a post at Linux.com, Eric Brown, former editor of LinuxDevices.com, presents a slideshow of 10 new ARM-powered COMs. The current boom in ARM boards is, in part, fueled by the continuing growth of ARM-friendly Linux, and more recently Android, in the general embedded market, he suggests.
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Movea’s motion-processing software now supports TV set-top boxes (STBs) built with STMicroelectronics “Orly Platform” STB SOCs (system-on-chips). The “SmartMotion Server” software can add gesture-based user interface features to TV STBs running Linux and Android.
The SmartMotion Server motion-processing software is intended to ease the process of developing intuitive motion-based user interfaces for TV STBs and other connected home systems, according to Movea. The SmartMotion framework provides gesture-based interaction support for applications such as web browsing, video-on-demand catalogs, media center and social media navigation, and gaming.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung said that it expects to post first quarter operating profit of about 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion USD), up 53 percent from the 5.7 trillion won operating profit it earned a year earlier. The South Korean tech giant also said that its sales likely rose to between 51 trillion won and 53 trillion won from 45.3 trillion won a year earlier.
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Android
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Is the brand new Google Play Store coming? Timed for I/O summit?
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This past week at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a big one for third party publishers like Electronic Arts and Konami. It was also the place where supporters for the OUYA system got a first look at what they invested in. The company held a private event Thursday evening for a number of its KickStarter backers and other guests, providing plenty of food, drink and hands-on time with the system before it ships in June. We managed to go a few rounds with it to see what it was like.
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Facebook Home “is an idea that deserves to be copied,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “If your primary use for a smartphone is some activity, why not have it front and center of your Android experience rather than buried in an app or widget somewhere? Flipboard, Twitter, Edomondo, Max MP, Gameloft, Androidslide and other Android developers should explore this avenue.”
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Researchers at the University of NSW are preparing to launch a public beta of a new open source system that could drive a digital revolution in the field of archaeology.
the Federated Archaeological Information Management System (FAIMS) Project, led by UNSW’s Dr Shawn Ross, a senior lecturer at UNSW’s UNSW’s School of Humanities, received funding from the federal government’s the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program.
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If you own an Android the chances are you’ve heard, or experienced, one horror story after another about data theft and privacy invasion that comes as first nature to malware meant for Android phones. Android spyware is nothing new and the platform is home to a plethora of cell phone spy apps. There are apps that will pretend to be games (like the Drop.dialer fiasco earlier this year) and steal your information and cost you a buck load of money you never knew you were spending, and then there are apps that other people can use to spy on you, using your own phone. Sure the Jelly Bean is slated to slash all security issues to pieces, but just because it’s coming out doesn’t mean your phone will be compatible with it – unless you can easily jump from one phone to another.
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Application development tool vendor Profound Logic has taken its user interface framework open source citing benefits such as increased capability for users to control their own software, improved integration between the IBM i and other platforms, no-cost opportunities for companies and developers to test the application modernization waters, and a route to development that avoids vendor lock-in. It’s Profound’s latest step in providing IBM midrange shops with an RPG tool that is more open and transparent.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 21 is now in Beta and it introduces a number of new features that will become generally available inside of the next 6 weeks.
At the top of the list is a new Health Reporting feature that Mozilla first publicly started talking about in September of 2012.
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Mozilla has added automatic third-party cookie-blocking to a preview version of Firefox 22, a move that will put the feature in most users hands by late June and the company on a collision course with the online ad industry.
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The recent release of Firefox 20 means that Mozilla has also updated the various Firefox testing channels — Beta, Aurora and Nightly.
If you’d like to see what’s coming in future versions of Firefox you can grab pre-release versions from Mozilla’s channel downloads page. If you’d like to try out the bleeding edge, you can grab a copy of Firefox Nightly.
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That is, there were two key aspects to Mozilla’s previous work: hacking code, and hacking the system. Both will be important in the years to come. The following comment from Baker in her post shows how the two are intertwined:
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SaaS/Big Data
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The latest release of the OpenStack cloud orchestration software adds support for large scale clouds spread across multiple datacentres.
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CMS
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Mumbai, Maharashtra, India : LoudCloud Systems has taken an important step forward in brining next generation technology oriented teaching and learning in India. Mumbai based company has been selected as the Learning partner by Delhi based Modi Academic International Institute (MAII) for all of their education programs.
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Education
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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This year’s SugarCRM annual gathering starts today and like every year there are vendors lining up to announce the good things they are doing with SugarCRM either now, or in the coming year. First off the market this year is Colosa, which has just announced the release of ProcessMaker SugarCRM Edition.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.
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Challenge #5 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a CGI script that serves up HTML pages with embedded Scheme, a la PHP. It is the first challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.
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Openness/Sharing
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There are a lot of websites out there that can tell you everything you want to know about a residential building in New York City. StreetEasy can show you floorplans and amenities. The Department of Buildings can tell you how a place is zoned or what its roof is used for. The library can give you a detailed history. But there’s no resource that brings all these elements together. Enter, Condopedia, a wiki for condo and co-op buildings. Founded by real estate agent Laurence Putnam, the site provides all of the above, plus more, in the easy-to-use Wikipedia format that people are familiar with.
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Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012.
As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.
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Open Data
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Medicine’s evidence base — our hard drive — is corrupt, in all senses of that word.
She was 86 years old, frail, with limited income. Her aching and fever had started two days ago. Although she had gotten the flu shot like I had asked her to, this was still most likely the flu. Ads for Tamiflu came immediately to mind, but like Ben Goldacre, I knew that the published data on Tamiflu has been as cherry-picked as your weekend bounty from the farmers’ market. My patient asked me: “Should I be on Tamiflu?” Should she, indeed. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know because I don’t trust the hallowed literature. I don’t trust PubMed, or highly cited articles in prominent journals, or the glossy circulars in my mailbox. Sitting across from her, at that moment, I felt my desire to practice evidence-based medicine completely undercut by the systematic suppression of “unfavorable” studies. The corruption of the evidence by publication bias isn’t theoretical. It’s there every day in our clinics and bedsides, affecting every patient and every doctor, breeding cynicism and distrust.
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Who or what inspires you?
People who fight back.
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Trial charge for messages to people outside users’ social circle, from 71p for Robert Peston to £10.68 for Tom Daley
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Facebook was ridiculed for setting a $100 (£61) fee to contact founder Mark Zuckerberg. He has previously said he would like Facebook messaging to become an alternative to email. The network rolled out @facebook.com email addresses to all users last June.
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We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade
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So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.
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CNN has drawn unwanted attention on the internet after broadcasting a picture of Margaret Thatcher with Jimmy Savile.
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Science
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The Polynesians’ epic voyages of exploration and colonization across the Pacific are one of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments (even if the local bird life wasn’t likely to have enjoyed it). Having most probably started in Taiwan, the explorers reached and settled on islands across most of the Pacific, as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand. And recent evidence shows that they also stopped in South America, where they stayed long enough to pick up food crops that eventually wound up distributed across the Pacific as well.
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Health/Nutrition
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Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.
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Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.
The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”
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The new White House budget proposal is getting a lot of attention because it explicitly connects the Obama administration to an agenda that includes cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. As the New York Times (4/5/13) put it, Obama “will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” Apparently the most important risk is to the one to him, and not to millions of people whose benefits will be cut.
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Security
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Someone claiming to be a “1337 hacker” has defaced programming projects hosted by SourceForge.net
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Iraq is executing more people than it has done for almost a decade. The country now has the third highest number of executions in the world, according to a report to be published this week.
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At the height of Emergency, fiery Socialist labour leader George Fernandes sought to get funding from the American Central Intelligence Agency and the French government while he was underground organising sabotage activities.
Mr. Fernandes, who liked to project himself as a sworn enemy of American imperialism and foreign capital, said in November 1975 that “he was even now prepared to accept money from the CIA,” according to a new set of U.S. diplomatic cables from the Henry Kissinger era obtained by WikiLeaks and accessed by The Hindu.
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A group of Iranians reported to be involved in a sophisticated operation involving a deal with Chinese intelligence and involvements of Huawei have been able to obtain information about the certificate authority infrastructure produced and operated by Equifax at first, then sold to GeoTrust, Verisign and finally Symantec.
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US media on Sunday repo rted that Pakistan’s ISI and CIA made a secret pact to facilitate drone strikes against selective terrorist targets. Citing excerpts of a soon-to-be released book, American media said Pakistan gave access to US drone strikes on condition they would not target nuclear facilities and terrorist camps where Kashmiri militants underwent training for attacks against India.
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Despite the CIA chief technology officer’s stunning claim last month that “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” the agency does not submit a congressionally mandated report on data mining, The Huffington Post has learned.
That’s because under the CIA’s reading of the law, it doesn’t do any data mining at all. A legal loophole allows it to skip submitting the report even though other agencies, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, do.
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When the CIA came into being in 1947, its mandate was to keep tabs on events around the world. Gather intelligence about foreign governments. Spy. But the agency has evolved away from this original mission, as Mark Mazzetti reports in a new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.
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This does raise the question that the US fight against terrorism is self-centred, and that its rhetoric against international terrorism is one-sided and need hardly be taken at face value (as many here tend to do). Evidently, the US agreed to Pakistan’s terms on drones in their self-interest. That is not surprising.
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Cablegate
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That strategy was, according to the cable, to be carried out via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).
The cable has received almost no media coverage. I wonder why.
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The whistleblower website this morning published more than 1.7 million American diplomatic records dating between 1973 and 1976.
According to Wikileaks, the cables include “significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.”
The documents also include many references to Ireland. In one document dated October 9th, 1973, the US embassy in Dublin assesses Ireland-US relations.
Describing them as “excellent”, the cable says “those in the power queue of both major parties are generally well-disposed toward the United States”.
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A 1974 diplomatic cable, released by Wikileaks Monday, points to the enormous respect and attention Margaret Thatcher drew both in and outside of her party and from the press, even before she became leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.
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Julian Assange – currently a fugitive from justice in the Ecuadorean embassy in London – has released a new batch of information on the internet. Published by ‘Wikileaks’ the data covers almost two million records from the USA relating to diplomatic information – some of it potentially embarrassing.
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WikiLeaks has published the ‘Kissinger Cables’: its largest public release of documents in nearly a year, totaling some 1.7 million classified files, including information on the US’s secret diplomatic history.
A variety of files have been collected and collated, including from congressional correspondence, intelligence reports, and cables.
Julian Assange, who heads the organization, told the Press Association that the documents were illustrative of the “vast range and scope” of global US influence. He is to present and mark the release of the documents on Monday in a mass-press conference.
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Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s.
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Not so long ago, WikiLeaks represented the world’s most radical group of investigative journalists. Lately, Julian Assange‘s organization has been acting more like radical librarians.
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GOUGH Whitlam was a proud, “even arrogant” leader who hoped to abolish the Senate and cool relations with the US, but lent a sympathetic ear to an ageing Mao Zedong who confided in the visiting prime minister that he had a looming “appointment with God”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The cleanup is still underway from a massive pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, but you don’t hear anything about it at public hearings across the nation dealing with the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Resolutions supporting the controversial KXL pipeline have now been introduced in seven states, but while TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Chamber of Commerce have been lobbying in force for the bills to pass, there have been few opposing voices by either Democrats or environmentalists at public hearings dealing on the measures. The massive pipeline project will transport tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for processing and export and once underway, the project will be a major contributor to global warming.
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Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they’ve been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.
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Finance
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Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, led MF Global, a futures broker and bond dealer that collapsed in 2011. MF Global investors lost as much as $2.1 billion. At the time MF ran into trouble, Corzine was eligible for as much as a $12.1 millon golden parachute. However, Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, told me this afternoon that Corzine didn’t take any compensation when he stepped down. He also said Corzine has been unemployed since then, spending time with his family and doing philanthropic work.
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Sorry about the silence — I spent yesterday being human (the High Line in NYC is all it’s cracked up to be!), and then had a hellishly busy day today. If I had more energy left I’d plunge into the next stage in the European crisis; the moving finger of instability has now reached Portugal, with the government, of course, proposing to cure matters with More Austerity. But it will have to hold until tomorrow.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Huh. Anything else U.S. officials want you to share with the public, absent even a shred of skepticism?
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Censorship
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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.
In February, 2013 PA House Bill 683 was proposed by nine Pennsylvania lawmakers – Reps. Gary Haluska [D-73rd], Carl Metzgar [R-69th], Stephen Barrar [R-160th], M. K. Keller [R-86th], Dick Hess [R-78th], Dan Moul [R-91st], Mike Fleck [R-81st], C. Adam Harris [R-82nd] and Tom Murt [R-152nd]. Steve Todd was among the first to report on it in his February 26 post, PA State House Judiciary Committee: NO on HB683. This bill would prohibit people from photographing oil and gas operations because they are occurring on agricultural lands. By fracking farmland, gas drillers would gain new impunity under a piece of anti-whitsle blower legislation, commonly known as an “Ag-gag.”
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On March 7, 2013, a large number of citizens tried to email members of the European Parliament to express their views on the ”Report on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report had attracted public attention on the internet and in media, since it called for ”a ban on all forms of pornography in the media”.
One of the bloggers writing about this was the Pirate Party’s founder Rick Falkvinge, who asked citizens to email members of the European Parliament to let their views be heard, and set up a simple internet service to make it easy to find the addresses to the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).
Around noon on March 7, approximately 350 emails from concerned citizens had arrived, but then they suddenly stopped appearing.
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Decision follows campaign by Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up in memory of girl fatally attacked in 2007
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A Twitter account called @ExxonCares has been suspended after tweeting about Ninja Turtles and finding the men who built the Pegasus pipeline 65 years ago.
The parody account was created last week in response to the Arkansas pipeline rupture that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, a suburb 25 miles outside Little Rock.
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Privacy
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Phil Zimmerman has always been a privacy advocate, and while he developed PGP, others fortunately saw fit to follow and extend his work and developed an open source and compatible equivalent, called Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG).
Today, GnuPG or GPG is the linch-pin for the vast majority of Linux Distributions (Distros) and provides a ‘keyring’ feature to ensure that software obtained from a Distro’s repository will be guaranteed to be safe from tampering (trojan horses, viral code insertions). So, too, GPG is compatible with PGP email and allows users to encrypt (envelope) their email correspondences to guarantee privacy.
Thus far, however, the implementation of low-cost or free, ‘easy-to-use’ email systems with standard encryption have been few, so there truly is a huge unmet need here–world-wide.
As more users embrace the Internet and become comfortable incorporating it into their daily lives, they have also come to understand the crucial importance of privacy. In fact, many feel that such privacy is their given right. I agree with that. The right to privacy is implicit and incorporated into our nation’s Bill of Rights. It’s no different than the paper mail envelope analogy I gave above.
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It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.
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Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar Tuesday dodged a query from a legislator who asked if US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials are in the state to probe casinos and their alleged links to terrorist activities.
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Civil Rights
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Online privacy is something I feel very strongly about, and when I heard about the current government’s plans to opt out of new EU social media laws, I decided enough was enough and it was time to take bigger stand. I won’t get into the depths of my views in this post but here is a brief idea of the situation.
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When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he’d been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn’t the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely — even though the website didn’t want to press the matter — the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to “exceed your authorization” on any online service.
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Today, EFF and a host of organizations across the political spectrum are launching a week-of-action imploring Congress to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the expansive law used to prosecute the late activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz.
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Local authorities in Scotland have rushed to install even more CCTV cameras, which are proved to be an expensive and evidentially unsuccessful means of surveillance.
The public would be far safer if the money was spent on street lighting, proper policing and actually punishing criminals when they are caught, rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and putting them back on the streets. In too many towns we now have a CCTV on every street corner, yet never see a police officer there.
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Four men were convicted of inciting race hatred Monday from the Italian website of the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. The four, aged 23 to 42 and from various towns across Italy, were sentenced to terms ranging from 30 months to three years for “promoting and directing a group whose purpose was the instigation to ethnic, religious and racial discrimination and violence”. A Rome judge found the four guilty of targeting “Jews and immigrants, advocating the supremacy of the white race and instigating racism and Holocaust-denial”. The four, who were placed under house arrest Monday, were arrested November 16 after police shut down the website, which had regularly posted anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Corporations and lawmakers have put us on course for a world where consumers do not own the things they buy
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PIRATE PARTY FOUNDER Rick Falkvinge is a travelling evangelist for the political group and its ideals, and he says that Pirate Parties will spring up when and where they are needed and that they are becoming needed more and more often.
Falkvinge founded the Pirate Party when he realised that political change needed to come from the inside.
“I realised activism isn’t enough. Politicians won’t care about an issue if their job isn’t on the line over it; they’ll look at all the activists and remember their own time on the barricades nostalgically, then go back to serving corporate interests,” he said. “My key insight was that votes beat all the money in the world when it comes to getting politicians’ attention.”
The Pirate Party won its place in the European Parliament in 2009 after gaining success in the Swedish elections, and Falkvinge said that gave it credibility that previously it had been lacking. “Well, we certainly got credibility we didn’t have before,” he said. “Kicking the first politicians out of office forced them to take the threat to their power – us, not their incomprehension of the issues – seriously.”
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.07.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I was browsing the website of one of my favourite suppliers when I came accross an ad for VMware Desktop. Even though it was an old version they asked $177 for it. I poked around VMware’s site and found that it was available for GNU/Linux or that other OS so, if you used “7″ you have to pay an additional ~$100.
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I am, of course, being sarcastic. Windows 7, after five months of public availability, had captured 10.5% of the market. Even the much-maligned Windows Vista did better than Windows 8 at release — and in fact, to this day, still has a larger share of the market than Windows 8 (5%). Manufacturers aren’t celebratorily cutting the price of Windows RT tablets; they’re discounting the devices in a desperate attempt to shift unwanted stock. There’s really no other way to look at it: For a new version of Windows to grow by just 0.4 or 0.5% per month is simply atrocious. As you see in the graph below, Windows 8′s growth rate shows no signs of accelerating. At this rate, Windows 8 probably won’t break 10% before the end of the year. Eventually, having failed to reach critical mass, Windows 8 runs the risk of being eclipsed by Microsoft’s other OSes, just like Vista.
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Desktop
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Kernel Space
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I have been writing regular updates to the Alien’s ARM page on this blog which can be found in the top of left sidebar. Readers of this blog who only visit the blog’s front page, will probably not have noticed, so I decided to write a more visible status update on the main page.
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Graphics Stack
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A proposal has been made to develop a new LLVM compiler back-end that would generate TGSI instructions, the intermediate representation used by Mesa’s Gallium3D drivers.
Francisco Jerez, the open-source developer that has long been involved with Nouveau and did an X.Org EVoC project to work on Gallium3D OpenCL, is the developer proposing this LLVM TGSI back-end. During his “Endless Vacation of Code” project for the X.Org Foundation, the student made the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker nearly work. Well, it does work for OpenCL on Nouveau to some extent.
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Richard Hughes, the free software developer that has been quite involved within GNOME’s color management areas, wrote a set of patches providing an initial color management framework for Weston.
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AMD’s open-source “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards and newer now has early compute/GPGPU support.
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The xf86-video-intel 2.21.6 driver has been released, which among other changes, supports kernel mode-setting on OpenBSD.
OpenBSD finally received Intel KMS support and due to slight differences in the interfaces, there were some small changes needed to the Intel X.Org driver to support the BSD operating system.
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Curious how NVIDIA Corp and Valve Software brought the Source Engine to Linux and their game porting lessons learned?
Earlier this week I wrote about the NVIDIA and Valve sharing their lessons in porting Source to Linux. That article drew a fair amount of interest from the many Linux enthusiasts and Linux gamers reading Phoronix. Questions were raised whether there was a video recording of the presentation to shed additional light on the matter.
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Benchmarks
Applications
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One of the most important features of a video editor is its timeline interface. The timeline allows users to arrange, trim, and position video clips over time. The next version of OpenShot will feature a new timeline, built from the ground up using modern web development technologies, such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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When I exclusively reported last year that Valve would be releasing their Steam client for Linux and Source Engine, most Linux desktop users and gamers were filled with joy. However, now that the Steam client is out in the wild and more and more games are coming to Linux via this digital distribution system, it seems not everyone is happy.
For the past week within the Phoronix Forums has been a very active thread entitled Is Valve’s Steam antithetical to Linux and the very core of the open source spirit?
The thread has sparked dozens of responses. The original poster’s views are that Steam is anti-ethical to Linux because developers must sign an NDA not to discuss their Valve contracts, Valve has some say over which games are distributed/promoted, control over some game pricing, reduces rights of the game developers, etc.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of OS4 OpenDesktop 13.4. With this releases we bring in a lot of updates as well as some new functionality to enhance one of the most popular linux distributions around.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The OpenMandriva team today announced that infrastructure delays are being addressed. The OpenMandriva Web presence was due to be in place by the end of March, but progress has only slowed – not stopped. In fact, Anurag Bhandari said they were picking up steam again. In other news, Mageia is pressing onward, sans live images again.
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Debian Family
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Earlier this week, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services which will be hosted in a new data centre in York, UK. The hardware, generously donated and hosted by Bytemark Hosting, consists of a fully-populated HP BladeSystem (containing 16 server blades) and several HP Modular Storage Arrays (providing a total of 57 TB).
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical developers have hit the milestone of being able to run their “Unity Next” desktop atop the Mir Display Server. The work is still very early, but it shows for Ubuntu Touch they can swap out Android’s SurfaceFlinger for Mir.
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To get the most out of Ubuntu, a user must either be just comfortable enough to adapt without caring about specific features and apps, or so advanced that customization and under-the-hood tweaks are a cinch. And this ideal user must not own a laptop, or a touchscreen PC, as Ubuntu is not at its best on those systems.
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Flavours and Variants
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Some time after midnight Thursday morning, after getting home from my “day” job, I upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Bodhi Linux, numbered 2.3.0, which was announced on Easter Sunday by the project’s Lead Developer, Jeff Hoogland, on his blog Thoughts on Technology.
This isn’t a major upgrade. I’m sure there are some bug fixes and minor enhancements, but it mainly upgrades some essential software, such as the Linux Kernel, Enlightenment window manager, Midori browser, Terminology terminal emulator and Ubiquity, the Ubuntu default installer used by Bodhi. In addition, this update adds eCcess, a new system tool, and includes a slew of new themes for dressing-up the desktop.
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Canonical announced today the release of the last testing version for its upcoming *buntu Linux operating systems, including Lubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail).
Just like the other Ubuntu flavours, Lubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 is powered by kernel 3.8.0-16.26, which is based on the upstream Linux 3.8.5 kernel.
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According to Wikipedia, “A video wall consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include LCD panels, LED arrays, DLP tiles, and rear projection screens.”
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Phones
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Sailfish OS screens
Software development kit (SDK) installers for the Sailfish smartphone operating system are now out, Jolla has announced on Twitter. The SDK was previously demoed at Mobile World Congress in February.
Jolla, which is led by ex-Nokians, has taken the abandoned MeeGo OS and wrangled it into a new, slicker version called Sailfish. The Linux-based OS will in theory be available for a number of device types, but the first commercially-available version will be on a smartphone sold through the Chinese distributor D.Phone and the Finnish carrier DNA.
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Ballnux
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I’m in a black Mercedes-Benz (DAI) van with three Samsung Electronics PR people heading toward Yongin, a city about 45 minutes south of Seoul. Yongin is South Korea’s Orlando: a nondescript, fast-growing city known for its tourist attractions, especially Everland Resort, the country’s largest theme park. But the van isn’t going to Everland. We’re headed to a far more profitable theme park: the Samsung Human Resources Development Center, where the theme just happens to be Samsung.
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Android
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Most Android-powered PCs-on-a-stick lack an external antenna, meaning Wi-Fi connectivity can be significantly hampered.
Earlier this year, we saw a DIY modification allowing users to add an external antenna to their sticks. However, cracking open an electronic device and pulling out the trusty soldering iron is probably just slightly more than most users would be willing to do.
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There is certainly no shortage in regards to apps for Reddit on Google Play. In fact, if you search for Reddit apps in the store you end up with more than 1000 results. While not all have been designed for Reddit exclusively, it is fair to say that you’d spend days going through all of them even if you’d limit the apps to those with a rating at least four stars.
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If you’ve ever flashed an Android ROM before, you know it can either be a great experience or send you screaming back to your stock experience. What if you could just run that ROM in a service like Parallels and switch to it whenever you wanted to try something new? If you believe the video above, that’s exactly what a couple of St. Petersburg Academy students have created.
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Web Browsers
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Time for Midori 0.5.0. I’ll say upfront the big number 5 doesn’t convey any major amazements or surprises. What this number does mean is two things that will unfold their true meaning in the near future: We’re adding support for WebKit2 behind the scenes, much of which didn’t make the feature freeze. Another behind the scenes feature is improved extension loading, which will enable extensions in private browsing or in app mode.
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On Wednesday, Google announced it would change a part of its Chrome browser that users never touch directly, with differences that might take months or years to surface. The result was predictable: stories about Google’s “divorce” from Apple, underscored in some quarters with the claim that this is really Google sticking a shiv into Apple’s back.
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Chrome
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After writing earlier this week about VIA quietly having a Gallium3D driver unknown to most of the Linux desktop community, I was digging a bit deeper to see if there’s any other hidden mysteries for VIA on Linux. To not much surprise, the OpenChrome open-source VIA graphics driver is far from being feature-complete by any means.
For those unfortunate souls stuck with VIA x86 hardware, the FreeDesktop.org OpenChrome support matrix was coincidentally updated this week. This Wiki page reflects the state of OpenChrome for both its user-space mode-setting and kernel mode-setting drivers.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Business
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xTuple vice president Wally Tonra, account executive Stacey Pandeloglou and software engineer Tom Atkins are suiting up for the big game. That ‘big game’ – in the world of industrial distribution – is the IMARK Showcase, an annual marketing conference and trade show that gives the group’s members an inside track on the latest products for wholesale distributors.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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According to Morozov, O’Reilly hijacked Richard Stallman’s free software movement and turned it into the more corporate-friendly open source movement. From there, O’Reilly would go on to redefine web freedom as freedom for companies like Google to do whatever they want online, and to redefine open government not as a movement for transparency and accountability but as the need to give free data sets to for-profit companies.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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…role MIT played in Swartz’s prosecution and the vigilance of the U.S. Attorney General in the case.
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Programming
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Hardware
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While Intel will surely have a role in the future of all IT, profits are sure to be reduced as Moore’s Law cannot eclipse the advantages of ARM and the cost of development, production and operation of x86 will always be higher than ARM. M$ will have revenue capped and probably cut by more than half. Within a few years every human on the planet will know they have a choice and M$ and Intel will have to compete on price/performance. Gone will be the days when either of them was the default choice. IT has outgrown being locked in a dark closet of exclusive deals.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Italy, which has pardoned a US air force officer convicted in a CIA abduction case, has hoped that India will follow the same example. While pardoning Colonel Joseph Romano, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said that the decision was inspired by hope that India would do the same for the Italian marines – Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone – accused of killing two Indian fishermen, BBC reported on its website.
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Her name is Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and, according to independent reporters Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, she is a CIA analyst who is partially responsible for intelligence lapses that led to 9/11. The two reporters recently released a “documentary podcast” called “Who Is Richard Blee?” about the chief of the agency’s bin Laden unit in the immediate run-up to the 9/11 attacks and featuring interviews with former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, former CIA agent Bob Baer, Looming Tower author Lawrence Wright, 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Keane, and others. In it, Nowosielski and Duffy make the case that Bikowsky and another CIA agent named Michael Anne Casey deliberately declined to tell the White House and the FBI that Khalid al-Mihdhar, an Al Qaida affiliate they were tracking, had obtained a visa to enter the U.S. in the summer of 2001. Al-Mihdhar was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77. The CIA lost track of him after he entered the U.S.
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Bikowsky was also, according to Nowosielski and Duffy, instrumentally involved in one of the CIA’s most notorious fuck-ups—the kidnapping, drugging, sodomizing, and torture of Khalid El-Masri in 2003 (El-Masri turned out to be the wrong guy, and had nothing to do with terrorism). As the Associated Press’ Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported earlier this year, an analyst they described only by her middle name—”Frances”—pressed for El-Masri to be abducted even though some in the agency weren’t convinced he was the terrorist that Frances suspected he was. Instead of being punished or fired for the error, “Frances” was eventually promoted to running the Global Jihad Unit by then-CIA director Michael Hayden. According to Goldman and Apuzzo’s story, “Hayden told colleagues that he gave Frances a pass because he didn’t want to deter initiative within the counterterrorism ranks.”
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In the midst of an ongoing hunger strike, the military is denying reporters access to the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.
The military is telling reporters it will be over a month before there’s even a possibility of a tour of the detention facilities that house most of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners. A military spokeswoman based in Guantanamo told HuffPost on Friday that there would be no opportunity for press to access any of the prison facilities until May 6 at the earliest. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage had been trying to fly down for a visit next week, but told HuffPost that he was informed Friday afternoon the trip wasn’t happening.
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The FBI classifies such people, who refuse to recognize government authority in virtually any form, as part of a domestic terrorist movement.
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A notorious British neo-Nazi has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after he was accused of posting racist and inflammatory material on the internet.
Darren Clifft, 23, from Walsall, West Midlands is believed to have been one of the ringleaders behind last month’s far-right rally in Swansea, when around 50 white supremacists were confronted by a crowd of around 500 anti-racism campaigners.
Clifft, who also goes by the name Daz Christopher, is known to police having previously voiced support for the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree in Norway in 2011.
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Yet isn’t the CIA’s real job to steal other countries’ secrets, rather than to carry out targeted killings?
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Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.
Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a “changed man” and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to “find the intelligence” that he wanted to use to justify going to war.
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The Federal Aviation Administration has finally released a new drone authorization list. This list, released in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, includes law enforcement agencies and universities across the country, and—for the first time—an Indian tribal agency. In all, the list includes more than 20 new entities over the FAA’s original list, bringing to 81 the total number of public entities that have applied for FAA drone authorizations through October 2012.
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks released a State Department cable from 2006 detailing the efforts of former president George W. Bush’s administration to aid opposition to Venezuela’s now-deceased president Hugo Chávez.
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The Wikileaks Party’s campaign director says Julian Assange is a real chance to win a Senate seat in September, but what then?
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Documents released by WikiLeaks explain in detail former US ambassador’s strategy to undermine Chávez’s regime.
After the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) in 2002, in the best tradition of the Cold War, the US Embassy in Venezuela launched a plan to put an end to Chavismo (the name given to Hugo Chávez’s left-wing political ideology), as revealed in secret documents released by WikiLeaks.
An investigation carried out and published on March 18 by Pública — the independent Brazilian Agency of Investigative Reporting and Journalism— exposed the five-point strategy implemented between 2004 and 2006 by the former US ambassador, William Brownfield.
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“By this logic, Woodward’s sources are aiding the enemy.”
Despite the seemingly ominous potential consequences Manning’s case could have on future whistleblowers and the ability of journalists to conduct high-profile investigations using anonymous sources, many news outlets are only now picking up on the broader implications of Manning’s case.
“It is troubling to see how much the mainstream media has ignored the Manning case,” says Timm. “Manning gave the media a treasure trove of information that they have been using for the past two years. Almost every day you see a story that originated from Manning’s leak. It has enriched the public’s knowledge of what the government is doing in their name. Yet many in the press have been ignoring the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge and how it could affect their work going forward.”
Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers, is revered in media circles and among government transparency and First Amendment advocates as a paragon of virtue. Why not Manning? Especially after news broke last year that the military was virtually torturing him in captivity.
The reason may be simple generational pettiness and old media snobbery.
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Former State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has written a column for The Guardian that argues the United States military should not give America’s enemies and rivals a “propaganda victory” by taking Pfc. Bradley Manning’s case to trial. He suggests the military may be “martyring” Manning and the military should accept his guilty plea and send him to prison for 20 years.
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“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”; “Keep shoot’n, keep shoot’n”; “Light ‘em up, come on fire!” the captions say.
Jónsdóttir is struck by the fact that the only person who has been prosecuted as a result of the video was its alleged leaker, Manning. “None of the individuals responsible for the war crimes shown in Collateral Murder have been put on trial. Only him.”
In Jónsdóttir’s view, the heavy-handed approach of the US government towards those she considers internet whistleblowers has started to taint the reputation of America around the world. “It’s like China, the surveillance state. When the US government ordered its employees not to look at WikiLeaks, that was like the Chinese regime telling its people not to look at internet material on Tibet – I don’t see any difference.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In 2010, PlanetSolar’s Tûranor solar-powered boat completed a 19-month voyage around the world. Now the eco-vessel is set to set sail again over the Atlantic Ocean in order to conduct experiments along the Gulf Stream in a project known as PlanetSolar DeepWater. The 115-foot Swiss catamaran, whose name means ‘power of the sun’ in Elvish, will take measurements on behalf of the University of Geneva.
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Even as ExxonMobil was mopping up after its disgusting tar-sands oil spill in Arkansas on Wednesday, it spilled an unknown amount of unknown chemicals — possibly hydrogen sulfide and cancer-causing benzene — during an accident at a riverfront refinery in Louisiana.
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More recently, Canadians introduced North America’s first economy-wide carbon tax in British Columbia (The Economist called it “a winner”), and the continent’s first true feed-in-tariff program, in Ontario. As a result of the latter policy, by the end of this year Ontario will unplug from coal power forever. We also have cleantech sectors that have spurred cool innovations, like CO2-sequestering concrete.
It’s getting tougher for many of us to square these accomplishments, and our national character, with the vision of those who insist, in this age of accelerating climate change, that it is our destiny to become the world’s gas pump — with Keystone XL serving as one of the hoses.
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Six beavers at Utah’s Willard Bay State Park are being called superheroes after helping to contain an oil leak from pouring into the bay and marsh land. Sadly, three of the beavers were severely burned while the family built a dam that blocked a large portion of the spill.
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Canadians who want to tell the National Energy Board what they think about proposed pipeline projects – either in person or in writing – must now complete a 10-page application form proving they would be directly affected by the development or that they have relevant expertise.
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Finance
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The expression “Time is money” was coined by Benjamin Franklin. It is a relatively new saying, among countless others, that represents the rot that started to eat at the core of our global social edifice during the industrial revolution. With the exchange of clock hours for money began the notion of time as being an entity independent of any natural phenomenon. Such a concept is still absent from some cultures, like that of the Amondawa, a rare Amazonian tribe that had the luck to remain isolated from modernity. Of course, the Amondawa understand the idea of meeting somebody at sunset, or tomorrow, but time as something with a value per hour that may be traded for goods and services is unknown to them.
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Zombie foreclosure: (noun) A home whose owner has abandoned the property but which the bank never finished foreclosing upon, leaving the owner legally and financially responsible for the decaying building.
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U.S. PIRG, Sen. Levin, Small Business Leaders Release “Picking up the Tab 2013: Average Citizens and Small Business Owners Pay the Price for Offshore Tax Havens”
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So word is out, if not officially from the White House, that mega-bundler and Goldman Sachs partner Bruce Heyman, and his wife, Vicki, are off to Ottawa, assuming he makes it through his senate confirmation. True, it’s not London or Paris—those are already occupied, for the time being, by other Chicago bundler ambassadors. But Ottawa is considered to be a lovely posting, and the ambassador does not have to worry much about speaking any language except English.
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The list detailing the identities of thousands of people hiding money in offshore accounts could reveal 160 times more data than Wikileaks.
Analysing the details of what is now become known as Offshore Leaks will take some time, according to Catherine Boss, a journalist at Swiss paper Sonntagszeitung, who worked on the investigation to track the hidden cash.
“It’s just the beginning. We have only looked at about 10 percent of the Swiss businessmen and women involved and we’ll continue to work on it.”
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Economist Richard Wolff is a proponent of democracy at work: an alternative capitalism that thrives on workers directing their own workplaces. In the documentary film Shift Change, producers Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young tell the stories of successful cooperative businesses from Spain to San Francisco. We caught up with Dworkin and Young to find out what makes cooperative businesses work.
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Nate Thayer’s whiny post about the Atlantic asking for permission to run one of his articles for free has attracted a lot of online attention. As usual, I agree with Matt Yglesias’s take. And like Matt my career as a professional writer was made possible because I wrote for free for a number of years before people started paying me. I contributed daily to a group blog called the Technology Liberation Front for more than two years before I started getting paid opportunities to write about tech policy. And this blog (for which I get paid based on the traffic I generate) began its life as a personal blog in 2009. It took almost 2 years before Forbes approached me about moving it to their site.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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On Saturday, Wikimedia France posted a press release regarding the recent deletion of a Wikipedia entry titled “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute.” According to the foundation, France’s Homeland Intelligence agency had demanded “classified” information taken down from Wikipedia.fr, and when the Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts Wikipedia) refused, it allegedly sought out a volunteer systems operator with the power to delete articles, brought him to the agency’s office, and demanded that he take the article down there or face legal charges.
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Can Google be liable for content displayed on its Autocomplete service?
This question has been raised quite often and a bit everywhere in the past few years.
As Kate reported some time ago, courts in Germany, France, Japan, Argentina, Ireland, and Italy (just to name but a few) have been asked to determine whether a provider like Google can be considered liable for potentially defamatory terms associated with a particular term searched for on its platform.
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And I feel that although we’re in good shape, with a promising future, the same isn’t true for the internet itself. (This is thing number two.) Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development, and who is not. Last year we at Wikimedia raised an alarm about SOPA/PIPA, and now CISPA is back. Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we’re –increasingly, I think– seeing important decisions made by unaccountable non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based internet to one that’s consumption-based. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online — what’s good for ordinary people — but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that’s what I want to do next.
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Executives with itchy Twitter fingers can rest easier after federal securities regulators blessed the use of social-media sites to broadcast market-moving corporate news.
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Privacy
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US officials have accused Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE of having close ties with the Chinese government and military. They claim the companies’ equipment raises the threat of “cyber-espionage” or attacks on US communications networks, although a White House review last year found no clear evidence that Huawei spied for China.
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Tech news site CNET has an interesting, but I suspect somewhat misleading, story today suggesting that text messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service—an Internet-based alternative to traditional cell phone SMS text messages—are “impossible to intercept” by law enforcement. Yet that is not quite what the document on which the story is based—an “intelligence note” distributed to law enforcement by the Drug Enfrocement Administration—actually says.
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We know it’s open season on our data. Simply by examining your online interactions, your trades of email or gender in exchange for access, it’s not that difficult for big companies, government agencies or unscrupulous persons to establish a profile of who you are—political affiliations, religious beliefs, relationships, consumer habits, job history, schools you attended, locations you frequent, and in some cases, even your home address. It’s not dead, but privacy will never be the same.
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Google’s first privacy director, Alma Whitten, is to step down after three years in the role.
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Civil Rights
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In 2011 federal prosecutors were working with magistrate judges in the Northern District to resolve concerns about the government’s use of sophisticated surveillance technology known as a stingray to track people using their cellphone signals.
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It “appears” to be the first time a major communications company is pushing back after getting a so-called National Security Letter, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group. The challenge comes three weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that NSLs, which are issued without a warrant, are unconstitutional.
“The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google,” said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman, who represented an unidentified service provider that won the March 14 ruling. “So far no one has really stood up for their users” among large Internet service providers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant’s goods.”
The letter was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’
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Copyrights
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IFPI wants governments worldwide to facilitate plans to tackle online piracy, whether voluntary or not. The music group’s CEO Frances Moore mentions the U.S. six-strikes program as a prime example. On paper the agreement between copyright holders and ISPs was voluntary, but Moore reveals that Vice President Joe Biden was one of the driving forces behind it.
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For years, many a music fan has wondered what we first posited back in 2008: “Can I resell my MP3s?”
After all, as we’ve pointed out in the past, nearly all digital good sales are really licenses rather than sales as conventionally understood. The question here is, can such a license be bought and sold to other users?
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Today the Prenda Law enterprise encountered an extinction-level event. Faced with a federal judge’s demand that they explain their litigation conduct, Prenda Law’s attorney principals — and one paralegal — invoked their right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As a matter of individual prudence, that may have been the right decision. But for the nationwide Prenda Law enterprise, under whatever name or guise or glamour, it spelled doom.
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Well that happened much faster than expected. While Judge Otis Wright apparently had cleared his entire schedule today for the Prenda hearing, the actual hearing lasted all of 12 (count ‘em) minutes, with Judge Wright declaring “we’re done” before storming out. We’ll have a more detailed writeup from Ken White, who was in the courtroom, shortly, but here’s a quick summary of what happened. Unlike last time, everyone actually showed up (well, except for the imaginary Alan Cooper of AF Holdings who does not appear to exist) and promptly pleaded the fifth.
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We had Ken White’s awesome analysis of what happened at the Prenda Law hearing earlier this week, but now the full transcript of the hearing has been released so you can read along (or figure out how to incorporate it into the necessary movie script).
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Theresa May: determined to spy on everything we do on the internet.
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Copyright laws that represent the one-sided concerns of Hollywood at the expense of the broader public interest do not belong in trade agreements. Period.
Yet just days after dozens of public interest groups around the world issued called on the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to keep copyright and patent regulations out of a new international trade agreement, a Senator with longstanding ties to the entertainment industry introduced a misguided bill that would create a new position for a “Chief Innovation and Intellectual Property Negotiator” — in other words, an Ambassador from Hollywood, paid for by the general public.
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04.06.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Jubilar 20th Croatian Linux Users’ Convention DORS/CLUC 2013 will be held from 15th till 17th of May 2013 in Croatia’s capital city Zagreb. Convention is going to be for the first time under Croatia’s president Dr. Ivo Josipović high sponsorship.
According to organisers, “Whether you are a beginner or advanced user of free and open source technologies, we believe that Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 will bring you three days of interesting keynotes, workshops, vast of new information and new business contacts.”
Croatian Linux Users’ Convention is one of the biggest conventions in region that covers free and open source technologies and gathers experts from all around the globe with the goal of knowledge and experience exchange. Harald Welte, Ivan Guštin, Theodore Ts’o, Mark Shuttleworth, Dobrica Pavlinušić, Brian Fitzgerald, Rasmus Lerdorf are only some of the names of the big experts who attended the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention so far.
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After four years of development, Micromag Systems has finally completed the Mantis Hexapod Walking Machine, claimed to be the world’s largest all-terrain operational hexapod robot. The device stands nearly three meters tall, weighs just under two tons, and is controlled by a PC/104 module stack running embedded Linux.
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I was watching The Real Story Behind Wayland and X, a talk by Daniel Stone. The way he described the X server, we had been using a terrible piece of technology for years (still are). Linux had an inferior product doing critical things for the user. There were developers trying to fix its issues but were hindered by many other issues. A fresh start was needed and Wayland it was. It could even have been Mir.
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Even as the job market has remained generally dismal for much of the working world over the past few years, there have been a few notable exceptions.
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This morning, the U.S. employment report came out, with disappointing results that have sent markets down around the world. It’s still a tough time out there for job seekers, but we’ve been steadily reporting that in the arenas of Big Data and Linux, there are not only opportunities, but many good paying ones. This week, more reports have arrived corroborating these bright spots in the weak job market.
As I recently reported, The Linux Foundation has done extensive surveys showing that demand is very high for job seekers with Linux skills. In fact, 93 percent of respondent employers in The Linux Foundation studies say they plan to hire at least one Linux professional within the next six months. And, more than 90 percent say they are having difficulty finding people with Linux skills.
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CHIP DESIGNER ARM has said that vendors are looking to standardise on both one chip architecture and a single operating system such as Linux across their product lines.
With many of ARM’s licensees preparing to make a big splash in the server market, the firm claimed its architecture is the only one that scales from smartphones all the way up to servers. Lakshmi Mandyam, ARM director of Server Systems and Ecosystems told The INQUIRER that the ability to stick with one chip vendor and run the same operating system throughout its product stack is something “people find very interesting”.
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Desktop
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Current mobile device: Nexus 4
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People still hear something about computers and repeat it mindlessly without understanding the world around them. One such example is the support for 32-bit architecture and the bundled application base. For them a home desktop performs better on any 32-bit OS and the native 32-bit applications than their 64-bit counterparts, and the user should restrict to it. It’s true if that mythical user never goes beyond web browsers, word processors and media players. That’s very much it. If he/she jumps into some database work, media encoding and some other number-crunching CPU-intensive task, the power of 64-bit shows, almost revolves circles around 32-bit thingy.
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The many recent big moves going on at Google got many people excited about the idea that Google might merge its Chrome OS and Android platforms, creating a simple and open unified operating system strategy. I’ve weighed in on why I don’t think this merger will happen.
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Server
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In case you missed it, in October of last year, Adapteva wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to build a Raspberry Pi-inspired $99 Linux supercomputer. The campaign was successful in raising $898,921 for the first versoin of the Parallella computer, a supercomputer equipped with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 16- or 64-core Adapteva floating-point accelerator. Quite a few people have questioned this idea, but it’s actually quite interesting and could usher in the era of grassroots supercomputing. Adapteva’s CEO Andreas Olofsson has recently been shedding more light on the project.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has railed frequently and loudly against kernel developers breaking user space.
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The Linux kernel has been ported to the Texas Instruments TI-Nspire. The TI-Nspire series platform powers higher-end graphing calculators in recent years from the Dallas-based company.
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Graphics Stack
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In one of the most prolific contributions to open-source by a hardware company ever, AMD has contributed code to enable the Unified Video Decoder on AMD Radeon GPUs using the open-source Gallium3D based driver.
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Think Tegra is only for smartphones and tablets? Think again! New third party drivers — which have been developed both with Nvidia’s blessing and assistance — will help to give the platform a foot in the server room door.
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Last month at the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC), NVIDIA and Valve shared their experiences and pitfalls in porting the Source Engine to Linux. While talking about Valve’s experiences, many of the information can apply to any game developer (or Direct3D/OpenGL application) wishing to come to Linux.
The PDF slides in full from the GDC 2013 presentation by NVIDIA/Valve can be found in full at developer.nvidia.com. To Many Phoronix readers, this information isn’t too new. Below are a few of the highlights from these slides.
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The Gallium3D HUD that makes it very easy to show various driver/hardware related real-time performance metrics on a heads-up display drawn over OpenGL applications, has already received a few improvements.
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As a potential performance-boosting addition, the “RadeonSI” Linux driver for open-source support of the AMD Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards now has patches for supporting tiling.
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Benchmarks
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Our latest benchmarks from the ASUS S56CA-WH31 Intel Ultrabook is comparing the performance of this Ivy Bridge laptop between Fedora 18 and a recent Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot under various workloads.
The ASUS S56CA-WH31 is the laptop/ultrabook powered by an Intel Core i3 3217U “Ivy Bridge” processor with HD 4000 graphics that was used for the Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu Linux Intel OpenGL benchmarks and is also going to deliver some results from Windows 7 SP1 with Fedora and Ubuntu and other configurations later today or tomorrow. In this article are just some quick and early Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 comparison results for reference purposes.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Pidgin is the default chat client of many Linux distros like Mint, Fuduntu, Solus … It supports many protocols, like Yahoo, Google, MSN and of course, Facebook. Here is how you set up and use facebook chat with Pidgin:
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Games
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Take a deep breath: once a cult sandbox builder, Minecraft has racked up a total of more than 10 million sales across PC, Mac and Linux. Looking at the rather handy Minecraft Stats page, you can see that right this second 10,002,651 have bought the game, with 11,321 of those sales made in the last 24 hours. Those stats have probably changed by the time this post goes live, but just take that as evidence that Minecraft sells. A lot.
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It gives a good nod to SDL as well which is used for Steam and the game ports, the latest version of which improves alt-tabbing on full screen windows dramatically for me.
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The Activision and Raven Software game studios have open-sourced two of their games for “for people to learn from and play with” the code.
The source code to the games Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy are now open-source and hosted on SourceForge.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Clean-up efforts were continuing Thursday near White River, Ont., where more than 63,000 litres of oil were spilled from a freight train after 22 cars came off the rails.
Canadian Pacific Rail revised its estimate of how much oil was leaked. Initial reports on Wednesday said about 600 litres of oil had leaked from the tank cars.
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Early estimates are that about four barrels of crude oil were spilled when a Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd train derailed in northern Ontario on Wednesday, a company spokesman said in an emailed statement.
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Today a new cool feature arrived in Krita development version (many thanks to Boudewijn Rempt who did it): the “LayerGroupSwitcher”.
Basically it’s just two little shortcuts (not assigned by default), that switch to next or previous group layer, hiding the previous group and showing the current one.
With this it’s much faster to work on an animation or image sequence using group layers to separate frames.
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In their monthly stabilisation update, the KDE developers have fixed 107 bugs in the open source desktop environment and its associated applications. In particular, KDE 4.10.2 improves the desktop environment’s Personal Information Management (PIM) application, Kontact, and its window manager and compositor, KWin. The KDE Development Platform has also been updated. More information about the update can be found in the announcement from the KDE team. KDE 4.10.2 is the second stabilisation update to KDE 4.10, which was released in February.
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The Kate text editor received a large number of bug fixes for the 4.10 release, and some exciting new features. A mini-map scroll bar is now available for Kate users, and an improved notification system. If you use the Kate text editor for KDE, be sure to take advantage of the latest changes.
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Free software projects heavily rely on user feedbacks, especially bug reports. Filing bug reports is one of the best ways for a user to contribute to his favorite app and make it better. However at times lack of proper bug report makes it harder for a developer to understand what problems a user is facing. So as important as it is to file a bug report, it’s more important to file it correctly. Incorrect bug report irritates a user as he feels that no one pays attention to his report and discourages him to file a report in future. At the same time it irritates a developer because he wants to know what’s wrong, help the user and make the application better he doesn’t even understand what the problem is.
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Linpus has informed us via email that the second maintenance release of the Linpus Lite 1.9 Linux Live operating system is now available for download and upgrade (for existing users only).
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New Releases
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David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system, proudly announced a few hours ago (April 4) that the server edition of the highly anticipated Pear OS 7 Linux distribution is now available for download.
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Arch Family
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I have used almost every major GNU/Linux based distribution out there whether it be Debian, Xandros, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Linux Mint, Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu. Each of those distributions have their own pros and cons. After using Debian for a while I switched to Ubuntu in 2005 and had been using it as my sole distro till 2011 when Unity happened. I was not just a user but also an advocate and a very strong supporter of Ubuntu. However, things changed with Ubuntu lately and online integration was the last straw on the camels back. I switched to openSUSE running KDE on it.
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Slackware Family
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It is well known that Slackware ships with KDE4 and codecs for various types of audio and video. However, MP4 and a few other codecs are not supported OOB. I spent some time mucking around with different phonon backends for KDE4 in an attempt to get some of my audio files to play in Amarok. Unfortunately, nothing like that worked for me. It finally occurred to me to check into gstreamer codecs packs. I discovered that GST has ffmpeg support. These are the things I needed to install to make this work:
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Red Hat Family
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Hosting company Peak 10 on Thursday revealed that it would provide colo services to popular open source and enterprise Linux provider Red Hat.
In addition to general availability of its data center network, Peak 10 is also providing Red Hat with a private test lab for the company to scrutinize its applications preceding full release.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project has announced that Bytemark Hosting has donated a fully populated 16 server blade HP BladeSystem with HP Modular Storage Arrays containing 57TB of storage. The new server, which will make its home at Bytemark’s new data centre in York, is said to be worth £150,000 per annum in commercial terms. Bytemark said that they have relied on Debian on their servers since they started the company in 2002 and said it “was always an embarrassingly good deal”.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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PC gaming is steadily finding new footing in the living room. Valve has pushed the movement along recently, announcing plans for the Steam Box and adding controller functionality with Steam Big Picture Mode. The company has also championed Linux as an alternative platform, and as reported by Engadget, PC manufacturer Alienware is now following suit with an Ubuntu-powered X51 gaming rig.
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Dell is one of the few PC makers that attempts to cater to Linux users with its computers. The company’s “Project Sputnik” laptop, a developer-centric version of its XPS 13 that comes with Ubuntu, is one such effort. PC gamers can also get in on the fun with the Linux version of Dell’s Alienware X51 slimline desktop, which as of today can be purchased running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Flavours and Variants
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Fuduntu is a pretty awesome distribution. Rarely do I give a perfect ten to one, and so far, only Linux Mint managed that accolade. But then recently, I tested the last edition of Fuduntu, and it turned out to be magnificent. So much, in fact, that I had it committed in my production setup, where it failed just short of the 10/10 mark, but still exhibited fairly great results.
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Developers of embedded Linux- and embedded Android-based system software are well aware of the benefits of open-source software and its collaborative community of developers. One key resource is the growing abundance of free video tutorials and demonstrations amassed on the websites and YouTube channels of embedded-Linux and embedded-Android oriented projects, organizations, and companies.
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Denx Computer Systems has introduced a second member of its SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) product line. The M53 module is available with Freescale’s i.MX535 or i.MX537 SOCs (system-on-chip processors), which integrate an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core, graphics engines, and numerous other functions.
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The micro computer Raspberry Pi has become a real hit among tech fans all over the world. The model A was sold out in the US just within a few hours. Everybody wants this credit-card sized computer. And of course, being cute and cheap isnt the main reason behind its success. It is because with Raspberry Pi, people can create a lot of amazing things. And if you wonder what these amazing things are, here is a list of 10 awesome projects created with Raspberry Pi.
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Go for Windows 7 if you need a mainstream OS and Ubuntu 12.10 if you don’t.
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Phones
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Android
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The chief developer of the popular alternative Android firmware CyanogenMod thought that requiring devices to report unique smartphone and tablet data would be an unqualified blessing. They reckoned without their users.
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The CyanogenMod developers have reversed a change in how the alternative open source firmware for Android devices transmits anonymised development information about its users to the project maintainer after users protested about the change.
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We’re all still reeling from Disney’s shuttering of LucasArts yesterday, and tributes to the once-indomitable game studio are sprouting up all over the Web. One such tribute sure to bring a smile to programmer geeks everywhere comes from development house Raven, which has this morning released the source code for its two Star Wars titles: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. The two FPS titles were released in 2002 and 2003 and continued the story of Kyle Katarn, the bounty hunter and Jedi first introduced in 1995′s Dark Forces.
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Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.
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Web Browsers
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The latest NetMarketShare browser numbers are in for March 2013. They reveal a three-way battle for the hearts and minds of PC web browser users, but on tablets and smartphones, Safari is leading by a wide margin. StatCounter, however, has Chrome and the Android native browser leading respectively.
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Chrome
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There’s some more interesting web-browser related news. Google has pushed out the beta of their Chrome 27 browser and it comes with several new user-facing features.
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Mozilla
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When it comes to making payments, lots of us still turn to credit cards, checks and other longstanding ways to get the job done, but the race is on to have most payments made via “digital wallets.” You can already make electronic payments via your smartphone using PayPal, Square, Google payments and other solutions, although the number of places you can do so is limited. Now, Mozilla is taking a big step forward in the digital wallet space by developing a mobile electronic payment platform that is likely to be standard in the company’s Firefox OS.
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Mozilla has released an early draft version of a payment service API, enabling Firefox OS app developers to process purchases. The API design is in part based on Google Wallet, but the WebPayment API will remain open to being used for a wide range of payment service providers.
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SaaS/Big Data
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If you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation hIf you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation has just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.
OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors. as just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.
OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors.
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Roughly six months after the launch of its “Folsom” release last fall, OpenStack on Thursday unveiled version 2013.1 “Grizzly,” the seventh and latest release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.
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I have news for him. Folks who have choices and know they have choices do open their eyes and look at what’s available. Further, they like FLOSS because is does allow the flexibility people want. Non-Free software is advantageous to some. Free Software works for everyone else.
I guess it takes time. Only a few years ago Gartner gave FLOSS no chance at all. Some of Gartner’s staff are still in denial but they will surely evolve faced with such overwhelming popularity of FLOSS with Gartner’s customers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Business
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Getting data out of one app and into another is big business. It’s a business that enterprise integration firm Mulesoft is now growing with new funding and products.
Mulesoft announced this week $37 million in new funding, bringing total investment in the company to $81 million.
Mulesoft is not a new company, having started out under the name Mulesource in 2003.The company originated as a commercial effort around the open source Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) created by Mulesoft founder Ross Mason.
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BSD
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More of the Radeon kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver stack being ported to FreeBSD from Linux is beginning to function.
For the past few months, the open-source Linux Radeon KMS driver has been ported to Linux. It’s shown signs of life but still isn’t fully working or in a state where it will be merged to the mainline code-base in the near future.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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The latest version of the GNOME 2 fork, MATE, is now out. MATE 1.6 includes updates to Caja, the panel and the control center
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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To many, “open source” refers to software that is usually (though not always) nonproprietary, easily modifiable, and free. The term “open source” can also be applied to hardware — for example, optical-mounting hardware, as recently introduced by a lab at Michigan Technological University (MTU).1
In a further twist, the hardware comes in software form, as downloadable files to be used with a 3D printer to build the final product. These 3D-printable mounting and other devices include lens holders, customizable chopper wheels, lab jacks, and optical rails — and even optics, in the form of a liquid-filled lens.
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Programming
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For years now, RedMonk has argued that programming language usage and overall diversity is growing rapidly. With developers increasingly empowered to select the best tool for the job rather than having to content themselves with the one they are given, the fragmentation of runtimes in use has unsurprisingly been heavy. Where enterprises used to be at least superficially built on a small number of approved programming languages, today’s enterprise is far more heterogeneous than in years past, with traditional compiled languages (C/C++) coexisting along with managed alternatives (C#/Java) as well as a host of dynamic options (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby).
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Standards/Consortia
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On Tuesday, OASIS made an extremely rare announcement for an information technology consortium: that it has successfully completed the process of becoming accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). As a result, it is now able to submit its standards to ANSI for recognition as American National Standards (ANS). And also to directly submit its standards for adoption by ISO and IEC. This is a milestone that’s worthy of note, despite the fact that over 200 standards setting organizations (SSOs) have achieved a similar status in the past.
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It aims to ”harvest” the entire UK web domain to document current events and record the country’s burgeoning collection of online cultural and intellectual works.
Billions of web pages, blogs and e-books will now be amassed along with the books, magazines and newspapers which have been stored for several centuries.
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Science
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Health/Nutrition
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Every Sunday from noon to 4pm, volunteers gather at their “mobile clinic” to make a difference, and offer free healthcare in downtown Eugene, Ore. What started as a temporary first aid tent along the Occupy Eugene movement in October 2011 became the Occupy Medical clinic in February 2012.
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These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”
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It is made of trash, is as large as maybe even Texas and is in the middle of the ocean. Oh, and it’s severely under-populated. Actually, no one lives in Garbage Patch, no man, no animal.
Okay, Garbage Patch is not really a country but to focus on monumental examples of man-made pollution, the United Nations’ cultural and science agency UNESCO will designate the conglomerations of rubbish a veritable territory of its own.
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Security
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Reading the news should be an essential habit, especially for students and children, yet anyone under 18 found browsing through the news online could hypothetically face jail time under the latest draft of proposed changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is supposed to be “rushed” to Congress during its “cyber week” in the middle of April.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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As much as our leaders would like them to have taken the bait, North Korea has not declared war on the South or the U.S. in response to our unprecedented provocations. So when all else fails, leave it to yellow journalism like this piece of work from the New York Times or this obviously Photoshopped image that came out this past week.
The much touted “state of war” declaration is not a declaration of war from Kim Jung Un but rather a statement of support for whatever decision he has too make from the “the government, political parties and organizations of the DPRK.” It claims only they will declare themselves in a state of war WHEN their leader makes that decision showing they are completely behind him. It is a statement of support from the people and perhaps a warning to the South that the North will not fold under their attack. But not a declaration of war from Kim Jung Un.
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There is a need to create a culture of panic in the United States and, arguably, everywhere else where the major media conglomerates have established news outlets. This arises from the ebb and flow of world events and our collective need to move on from one event to the next. What was once headline news will not be for long, so a headline blitz is needed to make things feel urgent, relevant and pertinent to our personal lives.
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Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has pardoned a US Air Force colonel convicted in absentia over the rendition of an Egyptian imam in 2003.
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Italy’s president on Friday pardoned a US Air Force colonel convicted in absentia by Italian courts in the CIA-conducted abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street in a move he hoped would keep American-Italian relations strong.
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The first striking paradox of this conference is that it is being held in Qatar, a country where women’s rights remain limited, to say the least. In mid-March, the Qatar government even expressed concerns “about references to women’s sexual and reproductive rights“ which are contained in the UN Declaration of the Commission on the Status of Women called Elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.
[...]
Were a US proxy regime to be installed in Damascus, the rights and liberties of Syrian women might well be following the same “freedom-threatening path” as that of Afghan women under the US-backed Taliban regime and continuing under the US-NATO occupation.
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Drones are proving the best recruiters for the Taliban, writes Ben Doherty in Islamabad.
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The story is odd, because such high-ranking CIA officials are normally named in news reports about their activities. So why is the media concealing her identity in this case? Because the CIA asked them to–that’s apparently all it takes.
The real question is: Why did the CIA ask? The Agency reportedly wants her identity concealed because they say she is undercover, suggesting that disclosure could be a matter of national security or safety. But FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola (3/28/13) casts doubt on that claim, pointing out her high rank and the fact that her name is well-known to establishment reporters.
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A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.
[...]
If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.
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The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantánamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part.
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Cablegate
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It was the video that put WikiLeaks on the map: “Collateral Murder” turned the tide of war in Iraq and landed Private first class Bradley Manning in military detention. But for Army veteran Ethan McCord, it was just another day on duty.
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JULIAN Assange cannot even look out of the windows of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, but his confinement has not dampened his work ethic, his father says.
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Julian Assange – seen here in London’s Ecuadorian embassy where he has claimed diplomatic asylum – has a new voice of support.
The Wikileaks founder is fighting extradition to Sweden in connection with sexual assault allegations which the Australian says are trumped up charges.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It’s been gone since 1983, but the Lazarus Project has brought it back to life.
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Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 barrels had been lost, amounting to almost 30,000 gallons of crude oil.
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According to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry of Japan, this year was a record low for the whaling fleet, with only 103 Antarctic minke whales and no fin whales caught for its “research whaling” program. Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi blames the “unforgivable sabotage” by activists, particularly by the militant environmentalist group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
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The oil giant can deny permission to journalists, observers in fly zone over tar sands disaster
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Often described as “uncontacted,” isolated groups living deep in the South American forest resist the ways of the modern world—at least for now
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Finance
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A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.
Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM.
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The free market is a myth. From drug patents to quantitative easing, businesses make money because of state help
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U.S. President Barack Obama has selected a partner at the investment firm of Goldman Sachs in Chicago to be the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, CBC News has learned.
Sources tell CBC News Network’s Power & Politics that Bruce Heyman has accepted the job but still has to pass a vetting process in order to be be formally nominated. His confirmation will be up to the U.S. Congress.
If he is approved, Heyman would replace David Jacobson, who has held the position since 2009. Jacobson is also from Chicago.
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As the effects of the sequester agreement ripple through the American economy–massive cuts, that is, to social programs, and the military to some extent–one thing is clear: both sides–President Obama and the leadership of the Republican Party–seem to think that public debt is the biggest challenge facing the American economy. Well, our next guest begs to differ.
Now joining us in the studio is Michael Hudson. He was a Wall Street financial analyst, is now a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His recent books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.
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The covert handling of huge amounts of money away from public accountability has fueled the global austerity crisis by shifting tax burdens onto average citizens…
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A former trader at Goldman Sachs pleaded guilty Wednesday to fraud linked to a scheme to hide an unauthorised $US8 billion ($7.6 billion) futures bet he made at the US banking giant.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to “illegal immigrants,” except in direct quotes. The term “illegal,” AP’s new rules state, refers only to actions, and not to people.
Though they say it’s just the result of an ongoing in-house effort to rid the Stylebook of “labels,” the change is undoubtedly a victory for activists, who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term. Not only because it’s dehumanizing. As AP’s executive editor Kathleen Carroll points out, it’s also bad reporting, a “lazy device” that obscures meaningful distinctions.
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Seventeen bills introduced in the Arizona legislature in 2013 can be tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and every member of the Republican leadership in the state are current or recent ALEC members, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and its allies “ALEC in Arizona: The Voice Of Corporate Special Interests In The Halls Of Arizona’s Legislature.”
“ALEC is a secretive but powerful force in Arizona politics,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director. “This report exposes how corporations and Arizona legislators, have worked together to keep citizens in the dark about ALEC’s extreme agenda.”
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Censorship
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We just recently had a post on the head of one of Homeland Security’s “Fusion Centers” (the same Fusion Centers found by a Congressional investigation to be a near total waste of time and money, finding no terrorists, but violating the public’s civil liberties) who claimed that the DHS centers did not spy on Americans, and then immediately admitted that they spied on “anti-government” Americans.
The definition of “anti-government” was mostly left as an exercise to the reader. However, in a bout of good timing, the Partnership for Civil Justice has released some new DHS documents it received via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showing that DHS regularly spied on peaceful demonstrators and activists.
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Eight of the 10 victims of the neo-Nazi NSU underground organisation killed between 2000 and 2007 were Turkish citizens but no Turkish media organisation has been granted guaranteed seats for this month’s trial of suspected NSU member Beate Zschäpe.
Yesterday Sabah said it was going to the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe to demand a seat reservation. The mass-market Hürriyet is considering joining the complaint.
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Privacy
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The National Security Agency is closing a secretive listening post it has quietly operated near Yakima since the early 1970s, a newspaper reported Thursday.
#The electronic eavesdropping operation, located within the U.S. Army’s Yakima Training Center, has been linked to Echelon, a global surveillance network operated by the NSA.
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The National Security Agency is closing a secretive listening post it has quietly operated north of Yakima since the early 1970s, The Yakima Herald reported Thursday.
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Utah Governor Gary Herbert is lobbying the Obama administration for his state to become one of the six drone testing sites to be established next year by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
In a story published by the Deseret News, the Governor’s Office of Economic Development is identified as playing a lead role in convincing the FAA to choose Utah from among the other sites in 37 states vying for this distinction.
While the exact location of the site is “under wraps,” Herbert’s office is promoting the idea by publicizing the economic benefits to the Beehive State.
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Worried that its citizens might be spied upon by eyes in the sky, a Twin Cities-area community has become one of the nation’s first cities to stand up against drones.
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Missouri lawmakers advanced two bills this week that would outlaw the government use of drones — though they are rare in the state — and the implementation of Agenda 21, the United Nation’s program promoting sustainability, though it simply makes recommendations.
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Learn to programme and assert your independence or resign yourself to being incarcerated in a digital prison, albeit one with wall-to-wall carpet, television and central heating..It’s an open prison but it’s still a prison. Google Reader is dead. Long live RSS.
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Civil Rights
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Dear Free-Range Kids: A few days ago CPS served my wife and me with a complaint alleging that we are neglectful. They want to take custody. Here is the chain of events that has led to this:
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Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted
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Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.
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Nullification is not the right of states to nullify any federal act. Rather, it is the right to choose to not enforce any federal act that fails to conform to the constitutionally established limits on its authority. Nullification presupposes that there are myriad (albeit limited) areas over which the Constitution has given purview to the federal government: defense, naturalization, foreign relations, interstate commerce, etc.
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Not only has the president ignored his promised platform planks, he’s actually reinforced and strengthened some of the most egregious portions of Bush-era abuses of power.
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THE murder of infants with a disability in Nazi Germany was recalled during a highly charged debate on abortion, as doctors voted to reject radical calls for changes in the law.
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Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the U.S. government, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acknowledging it is one of the first firms to do so.
Google took the unusual step last month of revealing, albeit in vague terms, the number of NSLs it received from the US government. At the time the company said it was working with the authorities to improve transparency around the subject, but according to court filings it is also fighting against handing over users’ data.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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No-one forced, or compelled, Duncan Smith to make that statement. The assertion that it’s possible is one that rankles many people, however. Of course not everyone is feeling the pinch of recession and csuts, and that includes the former Conservative Party leader. While he may have been on unemployment benefits in the ’80s, he’s had steady employment for the last twenty years, all on public funds. Now asking him to try living on the same solutions he’s proposing for others isn’t really that big a stretch. In fact, given his experiences being a ward of the welfare state, and his military service, it shouldn’t be that difficult for him to survive, adapt, and overcome.
However, the speed with which he’s back-pedalled and tried to move away from his initial position shows how promises trip lightly off the tongue when you’re a politician defending your party base. It’s ‘a stunt’ he claimed, ignoring the simple fact that after 20+ years as an MP, one currently earning significantly more (£134,565/year) than the average wage (£28,700 for UK males, according to the BBC in November) he may be a bit out of touch, and a bit clueless about the realities of his policies. Sure it looks good on paper, but without experiencing it first-hand, he’s not going to understand why it doesn’t work. At the time of writing, over 400,000 people have already said they’d like him to re-acquaint himself with that area of his job, to help him perform better.
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Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.
Google receives 20 million “takedown” requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.
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A new poll today places the Icelandic Pirate Party in parliament, with their election three weeks out. This follows a continuous and rapid ascent for the Icelandic Pirate Party. The poll will probably have the additional effect of putting the media spotlights on the party, further accelerating its growth.
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