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08.08.14

Links 8/8/2014: Qt a Separate Company Again, KDE Frameworks 5.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 1:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Computer Dating, Linux Style

    Look…let’s face this together. Dating can suck.

    When you’re young, it’s an adventure. One has relatively little baggage, the emotional scars are few and you haven’t even begun to think about dating’s therapeutic value yet. In other words, the dating world is your oyster.

    Then you find yourself at midlife, when you’ve accumulated a large pool of of crises. You know, stuff like that divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained and…oh yeah…that messy conviction for hacking that’s still on your record. These are things that tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss.

  • Desktop

    • HP Slatebook price higher than expected

      Most price speculation put the device at around $399, and considered the device expensive. Now that the official price is known, the unique device seems even less appealing than before. With HP’s Chromebooks ranging from $279 to $349, and LTE models available, the Slatebook looks woefully overpriced.

    • Ubuntu Used on the International Space Station to Control Rover Back on Earth

      Ubuntu has been spotted aboard the International Space Station and it seems that it was used to control a rover back on Earth.

      Astronaut Alexander Gerst has published a photo that he took on board the ISS (International Space Station), bragging with the fact that he controlled a rover back on Earth and with his brand new “Rover driving licence.”

      Alexander Gerst is an ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut and he is currently onboard the ISS. He’s also a geophysicist and volcanologist, and now he seems to be a certified Rover driver. The image that he published on Twitter and Google+ got a lot of people interested, including Linux users…

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.16 Release: ARMed and Ready
    • ACPI 5.1, ACPI On ARM Are Among The Power Management Updates For Linux 3.17

      The generally interesting ACPI and power management pull request was sent in for the Linux 3.17 merge window.

      The changes corralled by Intel’s Rafael Wysocki for the ACPI+PM area of Linux 3.17 include an ACPICA update to bring ACPI 5.1 support, potentially faster hibernation, and basic work towards ACPI on ARM support. The faster hibernation is via using radix trees for storing memory bitmaps.

    • Many Intel DRM Changes Abound For Linux 3.17

      The Intel DRM graphics driver will feature its usual large amount of changes with the in-development Linux 3.17 kernel.

    • Linux Foundation Opens 2014 Scholarship Program for Open Source Training

      The Linux Foundation is once again this year sponsoring scholarships for students and young professionals interested in open source software development through the Linux Training Scholarship Program, which is now accepting applications.

    • Linux 3.16 Debuts Improving Samsung ARM Support

      As always there is no shortage of driver related updates in the new kernel and there are also a few interesting features too. Perhaps the most interesting is the unified control group hierarchy which is a feature that Jon Corbert of LWN has done a masterful job of explaining what it does. With Linux 3.16 and beyond there is even more fine grain feature for control and the how users are grouped for that control.

    • Linux 3.17 To Drop Old POWER Processor Support

      The PowerPC pull request for the Linux 3.17 merge window reveals that support for pre-POWER4 hardware is being eliminated. Among the affected hardware is POWER3 and IBM RS64 processors, which are from the late 90′s. POWER3 was used in IBM RS/6000 servers at the time and clocked at only a few hundred megahertz. Support for the old POWER hardware is being dropped since its Linux usage is minimal these days and the support was already regressed for some kernel releases.

    • Facebook Is Hiring To Make Linux Networking Better Than FreeBSD

      Facebook is hiring another Linux kernel engineer to join its growing kernel team. The goal for the new employee will be to make “the Linux kernel network stack to rival or exceed that of FreeBSD” and carry out other improvements to the Linux network stack.

    • Facebook wants Linux networking as good as FreeBSD

      Facebook wants better comms performance from the Linux kernel, and is recruiting developers to get it.

      Its job ad, here, says the House of Zuck wants a Linux kernel software engineer who will focus on the networking subsystem.

    • Facebook wants Linux network stack to ‘rival or exceed’ FreeBSD

      FACEBOOT IS LOOKING to hire a high-level Linux kernel developer, as it seeks to upgrade the Linux network stack to rival FreeBSD.

    • Out-Of-Tree “BLD” Kernel Scheduler Updated
    • BLD-3.16 release

      It’s been quite a long time since the announcement of the Barbershop Load
      Distribution (BLD) Algorithm. Quite a few changes have been made, since then.
      Now it more reflects what it really should be Wink. It’s a simplistic approach
      towards load balancing, typical x86 SMP boxes should run okay (tested personally)
      , but, yes it can break your boxes too. I’m looking forward to get some feedback,
      to keep further development up and going.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Linux 3.17 DRM Pull Brings New Graphics Driver

        The new DRM/KMS driver for the Linux 3.17 release is the STI KMS driver for STMicroelectronics with their STIH416 and STIH407 chipsets. Nouveau is missing out on changes for this pull request due to Ben Skeggs still tracking down a longstanding Nouveau issue but he’s expected to send in a separate Nouveau pull request in the days ahead that will have the new improvements for the open-source NVIDIA driver.

      • NVIDIA 343 Linux Driver Improves EGL Support, Fixes Many Bugs

        NVIDIA today has announced their first beta Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD driver release in the 343.xx driver series. As expected, this release drops pre-Fermi hardware support from the Linux mainline driver code-base.

        As we have known for months, those with GPUs older than the GeForce 400 “Fermi” series, you’ll need to use NVIDIA’s 340.xx legacy driver from here on out until you’re able to switch over to the open-source Nouveau driver. The NVIDIA 340 legacy driver will still maintain support for newer Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases along with prominent bug-fixes, but won’t otherwise receive new driver features, etc. NVIDIA’s now maintaining multiple legacy drivers and they’ve been doing a good job at still supporting these drivers for vintage hardware for several extra years.

      • NVIDIA 343.13 Beta Driver for Linux Has Bug Fixes and It Can Uninstall Older Versions

        NVIDIA has just announced that a new version of its Beta driver for the Linux platform, 343.13, has been released and is ready for download and testing.

        The new driver from NVIDIA doesn’t feature anything out of the ordinary, but the developers have made a series of changes and improvements, which should translate in better support and performance.

      • Broadcom VC4 Gallium3D Driver Soon To Merge Into Mesa

        The Broadcom VC4 Gallium3D driver, which provides the open-source user-space component to an OpenGL driver for the Raspberry Pi, will soon likely be added to mainline Mesa.

    • Benchmarks

      • Perf-Per-Watt: Catalyst vs. Radeon Gallium3D

        In continuing of yesterday’s tests of comparing the OpenGL performance of the latest Radeon Gallium3D and Catalyst drivers with an array of AMD Radeon HD/Rx graphics cards, here’s some complementary data including the performance-per-Watt and overall system power consumption for a few of the different AMD GPUs of recent generations.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Digia To Spin Off Qt Business Into Its Own Company

        Digia has officially announced today they will be spinning off their Qt division into its own company (still wholly-owned by Digia) that will focus exclusively upon Qt development.

      • Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

        Over the last years, many changes have been happening in the Qt ecosystem. One of the biggest was the creation of Qt Project where Qt is now being developed as an open source project. The Qt Project was created to provide a space open for all to further develop and foster innovation for the Qt technology.

      • Digia spins Qt unit as a separate company

        As the adoption of Qt is increasing in commercial as well as Open Source projects the company behind the project, Digia, has decided to spin Qt unit as a new company.

        Digia has been facing a resource challenge with Qt as 75% of the contribution comes from Digia employees. Qt has dual presence one at qt.digia.com and one at qt.project.com and these two sites or two entities have drifted apart instead of coming closer. Now what is the difference between the two? Same as with any open source project and commercial product. qt.digia.com is all about commercial offering whereas qr-project is all about the community.

      • Plasma-nm 0.9.3.4 is out!

        After 5 months we are releasing a new version of plasma-nm for KDE 4.x containing a lot of bugfixes, minor design improvements and internal changes (see my previous blog post). This is probably last major release since we are now focused to KF5/Plasma 5 version, but we will be still backporting all fixes and you can expect at least one more bugfix release in future.

      • First Update to KDE Frameworks 5

        KDE has today made the first update to KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks are our addon libraries for Qt applications which provide numberous useful features using peer reviewed APIs and regular monthly updates. This release has 60 different frameworks adding features from Zip file support to Audio file previews, for a full list see KDE’s Qt library archive website Inqlude. In this release KAuth gets a backend so you can again add features which require root access, KWallet gets a migration system from its KDELibs 4 version and support has been added for AppStream files.

      • KDE Frameworks 5.1 Officially Released, Plasma Desktop Now Uses OpenGL
      • KDE Ships First Update To Frameworks 5
      • Plasma Addons – Where we are in Plasma5

        When we were building towards 5.0, we made the choice to focus all the effort on the core, and not release plasma-addons. It would have been simply too much work and quality of the core would have suffered.

        The intention was to start bringing them back from 5.1, which will be in approximately 2 months from now.

        The amount of stuff in plasma addons is huge.

      • KDE Frameworks 5.1 released

        The KDE Community has released Frameworks 5.1. KDE Frameworks is the evolution of KDE Libraries which is now extremely modular and optimized for Qt applications. This modular nature of KDE Frameworks makes is easy to use for Qt developer as now they can choose only those libraries that they need instead of having to install the entire set which would as one may say ‘bloat’ the system.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+ 3 Plugins in WebKitGTK+ and Evince Browser Plugin

        The WebKit2 GTK+ API has always been GTK+ 3 only, but WebKitGTK+ still had a hard dependency on GTK+ 2 because of the plugin process. Some popular browser plugins like flash or Java use GTK+ 2 unconditionally (and it seems they are not going to be ported to GTK+ 3, at least not in the short term). These plugins stopped working in Epiphany when it switched to GTK+ 3 and started to work again when Epiphany moved to WebKit2.

      • GUADEC 2014

        This year’s GUADEC was in Strasbourg, a very beautiful city with its old streets and architecture.

      • Post-GUADEC
      • GUADEC 2014: the aftermath
      • GTK Text Editor CherryTree 0.34.3 Gets New Keyboard Shortcuts

        CherryTree 0.34.3, a hierarchical note-taking application that features rich text and syntax highlighting, storing data in a single XML or SQLite file, has been released and is now available for download.

      • A pile of reasons why GNOME should be Debian jessie’s default desktop environment

        GNOME has, for some reason or another, always been the default desktop environment in Debian since the installer is able to install a full desktop environment by default. Release after release, Debian has been shipping different versions of GNOME, first based on the venerable 1.2/1.4 series, then moving to the time-based GNOME 2.x series, and finally to the newly designed 3.4 series for the last stable release, Debian 7 ‘wheezy’

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Gesture-controlled home automation hub runs Linux

      Sydney, Australia-based Ninja Blocks was one of the earlier entries in the Linux home automation game. The startup’s open source Ninja Block hub launched on Kickstarter in 2012, and began shipping in a more advanced version last October. The $199 Ninja Block Kit integrated a BeagleBone Black SBC and an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, and offered remote access via smartphone apps and a cloud service. Using a 433MHz RF radio, it controlled vendor-supplied sensor inputs including motion detectors, contact closures, temperature and humidity sensors, and pushbuttons.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android Captures 85 Percent of Smartphone Market Worldwide
        • Google adds a callback button to Android Device Manager

          Stolen or lost phones have been a big headache for some Android users. There’s almost nothing worse for some folks than realizing that their phone is no longer in their possession and that they have no idea where it went. Now Google has released an update to its Android Device Manager that may help recover lost or stolen Android phones.

        • CyanogenMod improves their information portal with the ‘Device Status Roster’

          CyanogenMod have today launched a central device information point on the CM website. The ‘Device Status Roster’ is an extremely easy to navigate point of reference for anyone looking to install CM or find the latest download available.

        • Sony gives up on PlayStation Mobile for Android

          Sony has announced that it will no longer support the Android side of PlayStation Mobile, its initiative to support cross-platform indie game publishing for the PS Vita and Google’s OS. The service will continue to operate on PlayStation Certified devices running Android 4.4.2 and below, but from Android 4.4.3 and up, Sony can’t guarantee that games will play correctly or that users will be able to access the store. Phones and tablets on Android L, the upcoming major refresh, won’t have store access at all, and Sony says it has no plans to give any more devices PlayStation Certified status.

        • Forked Android devices might be a threat to Google’s control
        • Google under threat as forked Android devices rise to 20% of smartphone shipments

          Android dominates the world’s smartphone market. A new report from analyst firm Strategy Analytics pegs the Google-owned operating system’s global market share at 85 percent. That means that nearly nine in ten phones shipped are built on Android.

        • Android head-up display responds to voice and gestures

          Navdy’s Android 4.4 based automotive head-up display (HUD) combines a projected display with voice and gesture controls to interact with smartphone apps.

          Transparent head-up displays (HUDs) are becoming increasingly available as pricey options for luxury cars, promising to improve driver safety by keeping eyes on the road. Now, San Francisco-based startup Navdy is introducing a one-size-fits-all aftermarket solution for the 99 percent. The Navdy HUD is available at a steep discount of $299 throughout August before moving to $499, and will ship in early 2015.

        • This month’s best Android tablets

          There are a lot of different Android tablets, but sometimes it can be a time-consuming headache to find the best ones. ZDNet has a helpful roundup of the best Android tablets for this month, and there’s even one from Nvidia that will appeal to Android gamers.

        • Best Android tablets (August 2014 edition)

          Given the broad choice, and combine that with rock-bottom prices, there’s never been a better time to pick up a new Android tablet.

        • How Google Benefits From The Increased Market Share Of The Android Open Source Project

          Recent numbers from ABI Research on the market share of mobile smartphone platforms splits out the two major variants of Android. Both Google’s flavor of Android (namely the Android variant used by members of the Open Handset Alliance, with the Google Play support and services), and the Android Open Source Project, which is free for any manufacturer to base their handset on, are listed.

        • For Google, the Open and Less Open Channels for Android are All Good

          Android’s march to the top of the smartphone field has been nothing short of meteoric. Back in 2008, there were still questions about the viability of the platform. But in July, Strategy Analytics researchers delivered their latest smartphone market share numbers, which showed Android reaching new highs at a record 84.6 percent share of global smartphone shipments. That is commanding share.

          Some people forget, though, that Google steers a preferred version of Android (the version used by members of the Open Handset Alliance, with Google Play support and services), while the Android Open Source Project walks its own path. The fact is, though, both channels benefit Google in big ways.

        • Android/Linux Smartphone Results
        • Android Device Manager Updated To v1.3.8, Adds Convenient Callback Button To Remotely Locked Phones

          One last app came rolling in at the tail end of update Wednesday. This time, we’ve got a relatively small update to Android Device Manager, Google’s answer for lost or stolen phones. The changelog hasn’t been posted on the Play Store, but a quick teardown told us everything we needed to know. There’s a new callback feature that makes contacting the owner a one-touch operation.

        • OnePlus One is capable of 60 hours continous music playback claims Qualcomm

          Qualcomm were quick to add that the success of such power capacity during playback was largely due to their Snapdragon processor. The Qualcomm 801 processor contains a ‘Qualcomm Hexagon DSP’ “a technology block found inside certain Snapdragon processors” which works harmoniously with the One’s 3100mAH battery. Qualcomm suggest while other processors rely on CPU to playback media the Snapdragon is able to “funnel” the media through the DSP thus limiting battery consumption.

        • Google update Android L developer preview for Nexus 5 and 7

          Shortly after Google’s I/O event we announced the release of a developer preview of the upcoming and hotly anticipated L preview. This was specifically for Nexus 5 and 7 devices and allowed users to get a taste of what L might eventually look like when it is released in the fall.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Optimizing the front door (your website) for your open source project

    An open source project’s website is the main gateway for potential users and contributors to learn about your project, and it assists existing community members to contribute to the project. But it has to do it right. Does your website clearly present your project, its goals and status, and assist your community members to efficiently communicate with each other? Is it attracting new contributors?

  • 4 lessons from the trenches of community management

    Since the very beginning, I knew that we wanted to build a community around the philosophy of the open source way at Opensource.com. That would be easy because once people understood the benefits of open source, they’d be onboard, right? But, what would be the best way to reach new people? Who would participate? How and why would they want to? All of these questions were swimming around in my head. When I set out to find the answers, I could tell it wouldn’t be easy. Understanding group dynamics is a complex beast, but one that comes with satisfying rewards.

  • Open Prosthetics Founder: Challenges Ahead for Open Source Medical Devices

    Before he lost his arm serving as a Marine in Iraq in 2005, Jonathan Kuniholm was pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering. Now as a founder and president of the Open Prosthetics Project Kuniholm is working to make advanced, inexpensive prosthetics available to amputees around the globe through the creation and sharing of open source hardware designs.

  • Basho Adds Scalability, S3 API Compatibility to Riak NoSQL Storage

    Riak CS 1.5, the latest release of the open source distributed NoSQL database for cloud storage from Basho, is out this week, with new features aimed at enhancing performance, scalability, Amazon S3 compatibility and more.

  • Even Cities Are Jumping on the Open Source Bandwagon

    When most people think “open source” they think of software Github projects and hackers determined to code for the Greater Good. But it’s also a wholesale philosophy that can be applied to many aspects of society—like running a city.

  • Scale like Twitter with Apache Mesos

    Twitter has shifted its way of thinking about how to launch a new service thanks to the Apache Mesos project, an open source technology that brings together multiple servers into a shared pool of resources. It’s an operating system for the data center.

  • Open vs Proprietary? A question of practical philosophy

    Within our industry, there is a growing divide between two schools of thought; between those companies that believe that the future of the network lies in openness, and those that think a proprietary approach is the compelling way to go.

  • Salil Deshpande: Software Engineer. Venture Capitalist. Open Source Investor.

    Midas List VC Salil Deshpande talked to TechRepublic about why he’s betting on open source software and what he thinks about the future of IT.

  • New Zenoss Open Source Project Powered by Docker

    Zenoss Inc., the leading provider of unified monitoring and analytics solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT, today announced Zenoss Control Center, an open source project.

  • How an open source software pioneer made his millions: Best of the Web
  • Open Source Partnership Between 2600hz and Range Networks Give Mobile Carriers a New Option

    Move to commodity hardware: All elements of the system run on low-cost standard Linux servers, signifying a transition away from traditionally proprietary, closed hardware systems to a software-based, IP network future.

  • Build an Open Source Community Platform With New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla
  • Top 10 Best Open Source Softwares that Rocks World Wide Web

    Open-source software is also called as OSS, which is a computer software program designed and deployed with its source code made available and licensed with a free license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to an anonymous entity for any purpose. People using OSS can distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose because Open-source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open-content movements.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Best Chrome Apps and Extensions for Foodies

        Chrome is not just a browser. It has managed to reinvent itself by first turning into a full-fledged operating system, and then an ecosystem. Thanks to the relative openness of the platform and the plethora of efforts developers have put in, extensions and apps on Chrome offer pretty much the same functionality as a big ol’ desktop.

      • Google Chrome 38 Dev Lands with Improvements for X11

        The Development branch of Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has advanced to version 38.0.2114.2 for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • NoSQL startup MongoDB names BladeLogic founder as new CEO

      MongoDB has appointed venture capitalist and former entrepreneur Dev Ittycheria as its new chief executive, adding fuel to speculation that the NoSQL database firm may be planning to go public soon.

    • The Story Behind Acquisition of ‘MySQL’ by Sun Microsystem and the Rise of ‘MariaDB’

      A database is an information organized in such a fashion that a computer program can access the stored data or a part of it. This electronic file system is stored, updated, selected and deleted using a special program called Database Management System (DBMS). There is a huge list of DBMS, a few of which makes to the list here are – MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, LibreOffice Base, Microsoft Access, etc.

    • Out in the Open: The Abandoned Facebook Tech That Now Helps Power Apple

      Facebook engineers Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik originally built Cassandra to power the engine that let you search your inbox on the social network. Like other so-called “NoSQL” databases, it did away with the traditional relational model—where data is organized in neat rows and columns on a single machine—in order to more easily scale across thousands of machines. That’s vitally important for a growing web service the size of Facebook. Lakshman had worked on Amazon’s distributed data storage system called Dynamo, but the two also drew inspiration from a paper Google published in 2006 describing its internal database BigTable.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Meet Solaris 11.2, where SDN means ‘Software-Defined Net profit’

      Larry Ellison’s Oracle bowled out Solaris 11.2 last week – and what does this Unix-like give us? Cloud computing, yes, but also a stab at a datacenter-in-a-(large)-box.

    • Oracle Solaris 11.2 Officially Released

      Oracle Solaris, one of the most widely deployed UNIX operating systems, which delivers critical cloud infrastructure with built-in virtualization, simplified software lifecycle management, cloud scale data management, and advanced protection for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, has finally reached version 11.2.

  • CMS

  • Education

    • Does having open source experience on your resume really matter?

      “Code is the next resume.” These words by Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation tell profoundly about how our technology industry, and the many businesses that depend on it, are transforming. The unprecedented success of open source development methodology in the recent past raises some fundamental questions about the way the businesses are designed, the structure of the teams, and the nature of work in itself.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU ease.js v0.2.4 release
    • GNU Health patchset 2.6.2 released
    • GNU APL 1.4.released
    • More Details On GCC & LLVM Collaboration

      Last month in Cambridge was the 2014 GNU Tools Cauldron where GCC as a JIT compiler and other interesting topics were discussed by developers. One of the topics discussed was surrounding better collaboration between GCC and LLVM developers.

    • Roll Your Own YouTube/Flickr with MediaGoblin

      Everyone has wasted an afternoon on YouTube clicking through videos of talking cats, screaming goats and bad-lip-reading renditions of popular movies. Heck, there are plenty of YouTube videos of me doing odd and silly things as well. (Does anyone remember ‘Buntu Family Theater?) For important family videos, however, I much prefer to control my own data. I’ve tried over the years to keep an archive of home movies and such in a folder on a server somewhere, but they never get seen because getting to them in inconvenient. That’s where MediaGoblin comes in.

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: August 8
    • FSF Talks Up Libreboot As New Coreboot Downstream

      The laptop that the Free Software Foundation awarded last year as the first laptop they endorsed that “respected your freedom” was the Gluglug X60, old refurbished models of the IBM ThinkPad X60. These old laptops that were recommended by the FSF came loaded with Core Duo/Solo processors and GMA950 graphics along with other outdated specs, but were free of needing any firmware blobs or binary drivers. The Gluglug X60 ships with Coreboot as its boot-loader and since the initial announcement the Gluglug company has evolved into offering a “Libreboot” project.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • What Immigration did with just $1m and open source software

      The Department of Immigration has showed what a cash-strapped government agency can do with just $1 million, some open source software, and a bit of free thinking.

      Speaking at the Technology in Government forum in Canberra yesterday, the Department’s chief risk officer Gavin McCairns explained how his team rolled an application based on the ‘R’ language into production to filter through millions of incoming visitors to Australia every year.

    • GSA’s open source first approach gives more software options, better savings

      The General Services Administration last week announced a new policy requiring open source software be given priority consideration for all new IT projects developed by the agency. And while some may question whether open source software will be as effective as its conventional, proprietary counterpart, Sonny Hashmi, GSA’s chief information officer, is confident this new IT model will put the agency in the best position to procure and develop software in the most cost-effective manner.

    • GSA pushes open source, cloud for all new IT projects

      The General Services Administration will require all new IT projects be open source, according to a policy announced by the agency Aug. 1.

    • Russian Ministry of Health to Replace Microsoft and Oracle Products with Linux and PostgreSQL

      The Russian government is considering the replacement of Microsoft and Oracle products with Linux and open source counterparts, at least for the Ministry of Health.

  • Licensing

    • Contract corner: open sourcery

      Back in the good ol’ days, a customer could reasonably add a representation to a software or development agreement that promised “no open-source materials will be provided in the work product/software.” Those days are long gone because nearly every product incorporates open source. It seems that every vendor has a list of open-source software that is incorporated into its products and is more than eager to share the list with customers.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • From bench scientist to open science software developer

      When I was at school, computers were only really just beginning to show their promise and few people had Internet access. I remember begging my Mum for a ZX Spectrum and using it to write basic code to draw things on the screen. From then on I was hooked, but didn’t really know if there were careers programming computers, and it wasn’t at all clear whether this was of any use if I wanted to do scientific research. As I moved to a much faster Amiga 500 Plus, I continued to enjoy programming as a hobby and loved writing simulations to understand mathematics and physical phenomena.

    • Real debate between citizens and officials with DemocracyOS

      Mancini and her colleagues at Democracia en Red, though, might just have the answer to that. It’s called DemocracyOS, and it’s an open source platform that enables citizens to debate proposals that their representatives are voting on. It’s also a place for voters to present projects and ideas to their representatives for debate.

    • Open Hardware

      • LowRISC: Trying To Bring Fully Open Hardware In A High Risk World

        LowRISC is a new venture that’s “open to the core” with a goal of producing fully open hardware systems.

        A Phoronix reader wrote in this week to share lowRISC, a hardware platform aiming to be open-source from its System-on-a-Chip (SoC) to the development boards. As implied by the name, lowRISC is based upon the 64-bit RISC-V instruction set.

  • Programming

    • Parse Releases Official Open-source PHP SDK

      Parse released the Parse PHP SDK, aimed at enabling Parse integration “for a new class of apps and different use cases.” The company also said that this is its “first SDK for a server-side language, and the first to be truly open-source.”

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Beyond Open Standards and Open Access

      A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the huge win for open standards – and thus, by implication open source – in the realm of document formats in the UK. There’s an interesting Cabinet Office document from 25 March that is the record of the meeting where the final decision to go with PDF, HTML5 and ODF was taken.

      [...]

      The issue of patents rather hinges on the new Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court, both of which I expect to be bad news for free software. There’s not much we can do about it until we know exactly what the problems are, and even then it’s not clear how much we can change things.

      The point about fonts is a good one, and something that several people have mentioned to me after I published my article on the ODF decision. The issue is that it is all very well setting ODF as the standard for exchanging documents, but if everyone is using different sets of fonts, there could be interoperability problems. So we need to draw up some basic list of such fonts, and make them part of the new government standard.

Leftovers

Microsoft’s Android Lawsuit Against Samsung Shows That Windows is Dead Beef

Posted in Site News at 4:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft resorts to AstroTurfing, lawsuits, vapourware, and attack ads, revealing that it is a feeble aggressor whose only remaining hope for revival is destruction of rivals

Samsung sells computers with Windows, but Microsoft is now suing Samsung. This is very revealing.

Now that Microsoft takes its Android-hostile patents to court we might finally see them defanged, or as SJVN put it, this “could be the beginning of a war over the validity of Microsoft’s Android patents.”

“The Apple vs. Samsung case recently suffered a setback after Samsung had used the SCOTUS ruling against ‘abstract’ patents.”There is no such thing as Android patents, just as there is no such thing as FOSS patents. This is the wording style of the aggressor. The Apple vs. Samsung case recently suffered a setback after Samsung had used the SCOTUS ruling against 'abstract' patents. Additionally, China told us which patents Microsoft is using against Android, so there too lies an opportunity for a final smackdown (prior art can be brought forth).

All this lawsuits talk ought to remind us that Microsoft really hates Linux and FOSS. It only pretends otherwise because it needs to (Slashdot gives some help to Microsoft’s “open” proxy/PR/charm offensive), as many businesses/people who use Windows also use GNU, Linux, Android, Firefox etc. We quite enjoyed this new analysis from Jim Lynch, who correctly said:

Microsoft has never been a…er…fan of Linux, to say the least. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even likened Linux to cancer back in 2001. Now Microsoft has an unintentionally hilarious comparison of its server products and Linux on a site called Why Microsoft.

[...]

I hadn’t heard of this site before, but I bumped into it via a Reddit thread. Talk about a one-sided comparison bathed in “marketing-speak!” I particularly enjoyed the ridiculous bit about security threats where Microsoft just says this: “Persistent threats and dedicated attackers can slow your projects and put your IT environment at risk with Linux projects.”

It was a fun read this morning while I finished my first cup of coffee. I was fortunate not to snort coffee through my nose while reading through it. Thanks for the laughs, Microsoft.

[...]

Feel free to put me in the cynic category when it comes to Microsoft and open source. I think the Why Microsoft site is a much clearer indication of where Microsoft’s thinking is at than the speculation in this Dev Ops article. In other words, I’ll believe that Microsoft is actually embracing the open source community when it actually happens.

Windows is in trouble, so Microsoft’s lawsuit against a massive partner (Samsung) is not entirely shocking. Windows is in so much trouble that releases of it get altogether cancelled and Microsoft started using vapourware tactics (talking about versions of Windows that do not even exist). To quote the British press:

Microsoft has at last revealed the date when its second major update to Windows 8.1 will ship to customers: never.

Vista 8 has been an utter disaster (worse than Vista). No wonder Microsoft goes to court in a desperate attempt/attack to tax the Android leader. No wonder Microsoft uses vapourware tactics as well (all links to examples are omitted as we don’t wish to feed fiction, fantasy, and marketing).

Microsoft will mostly likely continue its attack ads against Google, even though Microsoft reads your mail [1] while repeatedly accusing Google of doing that.

Windows is a passing fad. We don’t expect it to be widely used 5 years from now. Other Microsoft products heavily rely on Windows’ inertia, so they too will gradually perish and be shut down (while more staff gets laid off by the tens of thousands). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Microsoft tip leads to child porn arrest in Pennsylvania

Only Foolish Governments Would Choose Microsoft or Apple

Posted in Apple, Microsoft at 4:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Proprietary operating systems are demolished by Snowden’s valuable leaks that exposed and/or confirmed more back doors

Senate spying

Summary: China bans Apple’s operating systems (just like Microsoft’s) while Apple retreats on it litigation strategy from 2010, showing perhaps where Microsoft is heading now that it is suing Samsung (as Apple did some years ago)

Back doors in Windows are nothing new, but the media does not discuss them too often (unlike iOS back doors). Earlier this week, according to this report, “IT security firm Kaspersky Cyber security firm Kaspersky [...] claimed it has detected an old, widely known vulnerability that was used in a cyber attack to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme in some versions of Windows platform across 19 million computers, including in India.”

Remember Stuxnet?

“Countries that the US does not like would be utterly irresponsible to still deploy and use proprietary software from the United States after all that.”The press seems to have quickly move on, without ever connecting it to material from NSA leaks showing Microsoft complicity with the NSA. Countries that the US does not like would be utterly irresponsible to still deploy and use proprietary software from the United States after all that.

China has already banned Windows and Russia moves away from x86 (hence no Windows). China is now banning Apple operating systems as well. Is Russia next? They’ve asked Apple and SAP for source code, having silently kicked Microsoft out (by moving to ARM).

According to this report from China, Microsoft is asked to obey the law it so often ignores (it is said to be bribing Chinese officials and engaging in other serious crimes). The report says: “Microsoft isn’t exactly welcome in China nowadays. The company and the government have many issues between them. The software company is believed to be guilty of breaching Chinese antitrust rules.

“Microsoft was told not to obstruct the antitrust investigation by Chinese regulators by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC).

“Special investigations by the Chinese government are common these days. It seems the SAIC only wants to make sure Microsoft isn’t doing anything that is against the law.”

China has meanwhile moved on to banning the other NSA back doors [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] and one article makes it clear that all Apple operating systems are banned:

China seems to be on a mission to isolate itself from the world, at least in terms of technology. After banning Windows 8 on government PCs and raiding several of Microsoft’s offices in China as part of an anti-trust investigation, Chinese officials have now prohibited to purchase of several Apple products for government use.

China will instead use Linux-based platforms. Some are AOSP forks.

Apple is meanwhile also retreating from lawsuits against Samsung [1, 2, 3], albeit only after it lost the biggest case in many practical terms (only cents granted on royalties per phone sold). Yes, Apple is dropping some lawsuits after Samsung tried a SCOTUS case (precedence) in its legal strategy. It has also been pleasant to see the EFF’s Daniel Nazer telling the US Patent Office to “End the Flood of Stupid Software Patents”:

We have often written about how software patents feed trolls and tax innovation. We’ve pushed for patent reform in Congress, in the courts, and at the Patent Office. While new legislation has stalled (for now), reformers have won significant victories in the courts. Of these, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank may be the most important. In this case, the court issued a landmark decision cutting back on abstract software patents.

He is explicitly talking out against software patents — something which they have not done in a while at the EFF. Even a Microsoft booster like Bill Snyder could support this with an article titled “The battle against stupid software patents is on”. We will cover patents in more depth in the next post, █

08.06.14

Links 6/8/2014: Linux 3.17 Features, Ubuntu in India

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Spotted in the Wild, Perfect Linux, and Six Cool Distros

    Today in Linux news, Christine Halls strolls down memory lane to a time when real men still wrote their own drivers and backups were for sissies. Tecmint.com has six cool distributions for your older PC and a couple of favorites were spotted out in the world doing real work. One blogger writes of his year without Windows and there are several interesting gaming notes. We have all this and lots more on this Monday, August 04, 2014.

  • Ladislav Bodnar Reports On Some Web Stats

    His numbers for browsers are even more startling. Even those who use that other OS to visit these sites are using M$’s browser only a few percent, 9% on Wikipedia but only 2.7% on Distrowatch. The world of FLOSS and */Linux has come a long way and the popularity of Free Software amongst the technologically literate is spreading to the mainstream of ordinary users of IT. Two of the greatest lock-ins that M$ developed are fading rapidly.

  • The Connected Car, Part 1: The Future Starts Now – Will Linux Drive It?

    The Age of the Connected Car is dawning. The Linux Foundation is positioning an open source Linux OS to take the front seat in steering carmakers to adopting Automotive Grade Linux, or AGL, as the engine driving all in-car electronics.

    Today’s automobile has from 60 to 100 sensors to control everything from climate to airbags and dozens of vehicle components. Carmakers expect that number to double as cars get smarter. The so-called “smartcar” will use these sensors to do much more than give the driver a hands-free option for changing lanes, breaking and parking.

    Today’s new cars have options for Internet connectivity and can connect to applications for entertainment, vehicle service and maintenance. These connected cars can use apps on smartphones and tablets to provide driving services such as directions, traffic reports, motel and restaurant locators, and much more. They can do it independently of any hard-wired navigational or entertainment system the carmaker provides.

  • Desktop

    • The cloud might be the key to the triumph of desktop Linux

      There’s no denying the power and utility value of the cloud. We all use it and it’s certainly something that most Linux users can appreciate. However, I disagree with the basic premise of the article that Linux “Linux needs…a major win in the desktop arena.” Why? Linux is alive and well, and doing just fine without having tons of desktop market share.

      I’m not sure where this obsession with market share comes from, but I think it’s an altogether unhealthy thing. And it’s particularly bad when you consider that mobile devices have been chipping away steadily at desktop usage across all platforms. I’d much rather see Linux offer more mobile device options than trying to go on some quixotic quest to gain desktop market share when most users are moving away from the desktop anyway.

      The author uses Chromebooks as an example, and I can understand his affection for them. For what they do they are fine computing devices, and their popularity can’t be questioned at this point (as always see Amazon’s list of bestselling laptops to see just how popular they are right now). But we already have Chromebooks, so why do we need a Linux “cloudbook?”

    • Chrome OS Dev gets improved Gallery and Files app features

      Running on the latest Chrome OS Dev version? Google recently published a few new changes to the Gallery and Files apps.

  • Server

    • Docker Sells Its dotCloud Legacy to PaaS Vendor

      Docker sells its platform-as-a-service business to cloudControl to ensure that “dotCloud PaaS customers have a good home with an experienced PaaS provider.”

      The popular open-source Docker container virtualization technology was born inside a company originally known as dotCloud. Docker Inc. today announced that it is shedding its legacy and selling the dotCloud business to German platform-as-a-service vendor cloudControl. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

    • What does Docker provide if not virtualization?

      Let me start by saying this is absolutely not a Docker bashing article. I actually love Docker, and I think it is an outstanding piece of software that will have great success. But I have to confess, I’m not sure that it deserves the virtualization moniker that so many in the industry are hanging on it.

    • Docker comes to openSUSE

      Docker is more popular in enterprise data centers and clouds now than ice-cream on a hot summer day in a day-care center. So, it comes as no surprise that openSUSE, SUSE’s community Linux distribution, has adopted Docker as well.

    • Dockerizing nginx
    • Cumulus Linux Network OS Brings Modern Data Center Networking to the Enterprise

      Cumulus® Linux® 2.2 brings greater flexibility, simplified operations and end-to-end resiliency along with a new hardware architecture and new ecosystem solutions

  • Kernel Space

    • A Haiku Poem Dedicated to Systemd
    • Linux Foundation Opens Submissions for 2014 Linux Training Scholarship Program
    • Linux Foundation offers training scholarships

      The Linux Foundation has opened submissions for its 2014 Linux Training Scholarship Program to fund classes in topics including embedded Linux and Yocto.

      The Linux Training Scholarship Program awards free tuition to Linux Foundation training courses for the most promising Linux developers, IT professionals, and students who lack the ability to attend. Last year, nearly 700 applications were received for the Linux Training Scholarship Program, says the not-for-profit Linux Foundation (LF). The average age of the submitter was said to be 25 years-old.

    • Linux Kernel Shuffling Zombie Juror aka 3.16 released

      Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.16 codenamed ‘Shuffling Zombie Juror’, which brings many notable improvements.

    • LinuxCon and CloudOpen to include Linux Quiz Show, 5K Fun Run and more

      The Linux Foundation has announced a host of onsite exciting activities to go along with information-packed keynotes, co-located events, conference sessions and more taking place at LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America August 20-22, 2014 at the Sheraton, Chicago.

    • The Companies that Support Linux: Daynix Consults on Cloud and Virtualization Technologies

      The modern data center is rapidly evolving, with the advent of cloud computing bringing new technologies, tools and best practices. As enterprises seek to understand and take advantage of emerging areas in virtualization and the cloud such as software-defined networking and storage, microservers and containers, many are seeking third-party consultants and services to ease the transition.

      Daynix is a software development and consulting company based in Israel that helps companies navigate this new world of cloud infrastructure and virtualization. Its services range from hypervisors and paravirtualized devices development to cloud infrastructure. The company also works closely with open source communities on cloud-related technologies, which are rooted in Linux.

    • Linux 3.16 final released; Linux 3.17 merge window timing ‘sucks’

      Following a rather quiet week and ‘nothing particularly exciting’ after release of Linux 3.16-rc7, Linus Torvalds has pushed out Linux 3.16 final.

    • Shuffling Zombie Juror – aka Linux kernel 3.16 – wants to eat … ARMs?

      You’ll be excited by 3.16 if you’re keen to run Linux on Samsung’s Exynos or other ARM SoCs. Those keen on ARM CPUs as data centre alternatives to x86 will be pleased to note work to help Xen virtual machines suspend and resume. There’s also a boot-from-firmware feature on ARM.

    • F2FS Gains New Features With Linux 3.17

      The Samsung supported Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will sport some new functionality with the Linux 3.17 kernel release.

    • DMA-BUF Cross-Device Synchronization Hits Linux 3.17

      The work that was ongoing for months to provide DMA-BUF cross-device synchronization and fencing is finally landing with the Linux 3.17 kernel.

      The patches by Maarten Lankhorst for DMA-BUF cross-device synchronization were up to eighteen revisions and are now finally in a condition to be merged with Linux 3.17 via the driver core subsystem pull. DMA-BUF has now proper fence and poll support along with other new functionality that affects many different kernel drivers. For Phoronix readers, one of the benefits of DMA-BUF cross-device synchronization is to reduce tearing when sharing buffers between multiple GPU DRM drivers.

    • 14 Staging Drivers Get Nuked From Linux 3.17

      Over 200,000 lines of code is being removed from the Linux 3.17 kernel in the staging subsystem due to the removal of a bunch of old, unmaintained drivers.

      Greg Kroah-Hartman shared that with the staging driver patches for Linux 3.17, there’s over 39,000 new lines of code while over 254,000 lines have been removed. The big code delta comes from 14 different drivers being removed that were “obsolete and no one was willing to work on cleaning them up.”

    • AMD Radeon Graphics Get Many Changes For Linux 3.17

      The Radeon DRM driver changes have been published for queuing into drm-next before hitting the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel tree.

      Among the exciting work to be found for the AMD Radeon graphics kernel driver in Linux 3.17 include:

      - Good Hawaii support for the AMD Radeon R9 290 series. The R9 290/290X should now work with the open-source driver at long last, but besides Linux 3.17 you’ll need newer microcode files and also the latest Gallium3D code. Once 3.17-rc1 has been tagged, I’ll move ahead with my open-source Radeon Hawaii benchmarks on the R9 290.

      - Support for a new firmware format to make updates easier to manage.

    • Malevolent Developer Trolls Linux Kernel Development with Lots of Broken Patches
    • Input Drivers Get Renewed For Linux 3.17

      The HID (Human Interface Device) pull request was sent in this morning for the Linux 3.17 merge window.

      Jiri Kosina’s HID pull request for Linux 3.17 features the following prominent work:

      - The Sony HID driver features improved support for the SIXAXIS device support. The SIXAXIS gamepad line was part of the original Sony PlayStation 3.

    • Linux 3.17 Adds Support For Intel “Braswell” HD Audio

    • Graphics Stack

      • Radeon Gallium3D Is Running Increasingly Well Against AMD’s Catalyst Driver

        After last week running new Nouveau vs. NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics benchmarks, here’s the results when putting AMD’s hardware on the test bench and running both their latest open and closed-source drivers. Up today are the results of using the latest Radeon Gallium3D graphics code and Linux kernel against the latest beta of the binary-only Catalyst driver.

        Similar to the NVIDIA GeForce tests of last week, on the open-source side was the Linux 3.16 kernel with Mesa 10.3-devel and other updated graphics user-space using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64. When benchmarking the proprietary Catalyst 14.6 Beta driver from mid-July, we had to pull back to the Linux 3.14 kernel for kernel compatibility with this binary blob release.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • The Linux desktop-a-week review: MATE

      One thing that MATE has in common with both Enlightenment and Awesome is the general peppiness. Everything in MATE is just plain snappy and light on resource usage. And you could say that memory/CPU usage isn’t a huge deal with modern hardware. But, in my testing on this i5 with 8 gigs of RAM, MATE is so much more responsive than GNOME Shell, KDE or Unity that it’s just plain silly.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt Creator 3.2 RC1 Is Out

        Qt Creator 3.2 rolls in new functionality while this release candidate delivers on the last of the fixes and tacking on some extra features. Among the extras found in Qt Creator 3.2 RC1 include more panes that are searchable, QBS plug-in now supports adding/removing files from projects, and the C++ code mode lhas received additional fixes.

      • Image Manipulation Software digiKam 4.2.0 Brings a Couple of New Features

        Famous digital photo management application for KDE and Linux digiKam 4.2.0, which includes an image editor for photo corrections and manipulation, is now available for download.

      • digiKam Software Collection 4.2.0 released…

        As usual, we have worked hard to close your reported issues since the previous stable release 4.1.0. A list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.2.0 is available through the KDE Bugtracking System.

      • A Wallpaper Plugin Demo For Plasma 5.

        As part of the core Plasma team I have spent a long time helping in the migration to make everything QtQuick2.0 based, making sure we get the most out of the OpenGL backing.

        This weekend I wanted to make some sort of demo which shows the power of this in the form of an interactive wallpaper.

      • luajit2 backend for Cantor

        I am happy to announce the new luajit2 backend for Cantor, that will be released with KDE 4.14. If you haven’t heard of Cantor yet, it is a KDE application that provides a notebook-like frontend for various programming languages, with a mathematical and scientific focus.

      • Go code completion plugin for Kate

        I’ve wrote a simple plugin for KTextEdit (Kate, KDevelop, and other programs that uses the KDE text editor component) that provides code completion for Go, by using gocode as backend.

      • Monday Report: Application Design

        Besides these application the VDG is also working with developers (or without) on an image viewer and a video player. Besides that we want to make slight improvements to key areas of Plasma 5 e.g. the system tray. As you can see there’s still much to do, but we’re pleased with the progress made so far.

      • [Krita] The votes are in!

        Every backer who pledged 25 euros or more had a chance to vote for their favorite feature — and the now the votes are in and have been tallied up! Here are the twelve features that Dmitry will be working on for Krita 2.9:

      • Coming up: excitement and work

        First, many of us will be taking off this week for Randa, Switzerland. Many sprints are taking place simultaneously, and the most important to me is that we’re writing another book. Book sprints are fun, and lots of work! As well as the team in Randa, a few people will be helping us write and edit from afar, and I’ll be posting a link soon so that you can help out as well.

      • Qt Creator 3.2 RC1 Is Now Ready for Download and Testing

        Qt Creator 3.2 RC1, a cross-platform IDE (integrated development environment) tailored to the needs of Qt developers and part of the Qt Project, is now available for download and testing.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Sonar GNOME 2014.1 Is a Linux OS Built for People with Impairments – Gallery

        Sonar GNOME 2014.1, a Linux distribution based on Manjaro and Arch Linux and developed specifically for people with various impairments, has been released and is now available for download.

      • MATE 1.8.1 Now Available in the openSUSE Repositories
      • Builder — a new IDE specifically for GNOME app developers

        One of the many interesting things covered in Jiří’s coverage of this years GUADEC was GNOME Builder — an IDE that will focus purely on GNOME applications, with a goal of making it “Dead Simple”. Jiří’s post about day 4 at GUADEC covers the content of Christian Hergert’s talk about Builder (including him announcing the brave step of quitting his day job to work on it). While there are other IDEs in Fedora (like Adjuta and Eclipse) that can be used for development on the GTK+GNOME stack, none of these are focused purely on development of this type.

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

      • How to easily install AUR packages in Arch Linux

        Arch Linux is one of the best GNU/Linux based distributions out there which give ‘full’, and I mean total, control to its users. There is no company behind it which may have to make compromises with what its users want vs what it needs to be able to monetize from the product; Arch is purely community driven project.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Rating Lowered to Buy at Wells Fargo & Co. (RHT)

        A number of other analysts have also recently weighed in on RHT. Analysts at RBC Capital raised their price target on shares of Red Hat from $64.00 to $70.00 in a research note on Friday. Separately, analysts at Susquehanna upgraded shares of Red Hat from a neutral rating to a positive rating in a research note on Friday. They now have a $70.00 price target on the stock, up previously from $57.00. Finally, analysts at TheStreet upgraded shares of Red Hat to a buy rating in a research note on Wednesday, July 9th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eighteen have assigned a buy rating to the company. The company presently has a consensus rating of Buy and a consensus target price of $63.48.

      • How to think like open source pioneer Michael Tiemann

        Ancient Greece had its Great Explainers, one of whom was Plato. The open source community has its Great Explainers, one of whom is Michael Tiemann.

        Several thousand feet in the air, in a conference room on the 10th floor of Red Hat’s Raleigh, NC headquarters, Tiemann is prognosticating. The place affords the kind of scope he relishes: broad, sweeping, stretched to a horizon that (this morning, anyway) seems bright. As the company’s VP of Open Source Affairs explains what differentiates an open source software company from other firms in a crowded market, he exhibits the idiosyncrasy that has marked his writing for decades: the tendency to pepper his exposition of open source principles with pithy maxims from a diverse range of philosophers, politicians, political economists, and popular writers. It’s a habit borne, he says, of the necessity of finding something that resonates with the many skeptics he’s confronted over the years—because necessity, he quips (quoting Plato, of course), is the mother of all invention.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Linux Developers Eye Docker and More for Fedora Cloud

          Fedora.next, the major revamping of Fedora Linux, is shaping up to feature tight integration with container-based virtualization for the cloud, according to a recent discussion among developers of the open source operating system, which forms the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

        • 64-bit ARM Is Looking Good For Fedora 21

          While Fedora 21 will be arriving later than anticipated, on the plus side is that the 64-bit ARM support is coming along well and the (indirect) delay gives developers extra time for polishing up this first Fedora Linux release with great AArch64 support.

        • Fedora 21 and ARM aarch64 status for alpha

          With the Fedora 21 Alpha freeze looming in the rear view mirror, although the object wasn’t as close as it would appear, I thought it was high time that I gave a brief overview of the state of ARM aarch64 in Fedora. Some might assume the silence means not a lot has been happening but this is extremely far from the truth!

        • Support for the 64Bit ARM architecture on Fedora 21 progressing nicely

          On the hardware side of things, Peter also recently blogged about some of the ARM hardware support that the newly released 3.16 Linux kernel will provide, including support for the NVIDIA Jetson TK1, Samsung EXYNOS, Qualcomm MSM 8×60, 8960 and 8974, APM X-GENE, and AMD Seattle. He also reports that the graphics driver support for ARM systems is also improving with nouveau, freedreno and etnaviv all possibly being supported on some specific ARM devices.

        • Final Term repo for Fedora updated

          We previously reported about Final Term, a new terminal emulator for Fedora that features many nifty features including context menus, reflow, smart command completion and 24-bit colour in the terminal. Final Term is not yet in the official Fedora repositories, as it is still under heavy development, and the UI is still slightly buggy. That said, the COPR repo that provides Fedora packages for Final Term was recently updated (and has been periodically since it was created) with the new development versions from upstream. So if you still want to try out this new terminal, jump over to the COPR page, and follow the instructions there.

        • Flock Day One: Gijs Hillenius Keynote

          After a rousing introduction by Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Matthew Miller, Flock kicked off with a keynote by journalist Gijs Hillenius. In the keynote, Hillenius discussed free and open source adoption in European public institutions.

          The title of the keynote, “Free and Open Source Software in Europe: Policies & Implementations” was slightly misleading – Hillenius only discussed public/governmental adoption of FOSS, and didn’t really discuss corporate adoption or use by individuals. This is not surprising, Hillenius focuses on use of open source for public administrations for the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR). Still, he provided an interesting picture of adoption by public European institutions.

    • Debian Family

      • VolksPC Linux PC Capable Of Running Both Debian And Android Launches On Indiegogo (video)

        VolksPC has taken to Indiegogo this week to launch to launch a crowd funding campaign to help take its low cost solid state Linux PC into production.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Web app dev kit supports Android and Ubuntu

            Toshiba Electronics has introduced two starter kits for early development of web applications using the Toshiba TZ5000 Application Processor Lite (ApP Lite) series.

            The RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 and RBTZ5000-6MA-A1 starter kits provide drivers for internet applications using HTML5.

            Both kits provide drivers for video playback using Wireless LAN and HDMI output, with the RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 on Ubuntu Linux, and the RBTZ5000-6MA-A1 on an Android 4.4 platform.

          • Intel Graphics Installer for Linux Arrives with Latest Drivers and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Support

            The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux, a tool that allows users to easily install the latest graphics and video drivers for their Intel graphics hardware, is now at version 1.0.6 and is ready for download.

          • GNU C Library Exploits Closed in All Ubuntu Supported OSes

            The developers have identified some security issues with the GNU C Library and an update has been pushed into the repositories.

            “Stephane Chazelas discovered that the GNU C Library incorrectly handled locale environment variables. An attacker could use this issue to possibly bypass certain restrictions such as the ForceCommand restrictions in,” reads the security notice.

          • India opens up to operating system Ubuntu

            India is the fastest growing market for open source operating system Ubuntu, helped by tie-ups with top PC vendors and the increasing adoption of cloud-based applications in the country.

            The Linux-based operating system grew 50% year-over-year in India. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has partnered with Dell and HP to bundle the OS with certain models of their laptops offered in India.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • First impressions of Deepin 2014

              Deepin 2014 is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. The download image for the distribution is approximately 1.5 GB in size. Booting from the project’s live media brings up a menu we can navigate with either the keyboard or the mouse pointer. The menu asks us to select our preferred language from a list. Once our language has been selected the system boots to a desktop interface with a starry sky in the background. On the desktop we find an icon for launching the project’s system installer. At the bottom of the screen we find a quick-launch bar filled with icons for commonly accessed applications. There are also buttons for bringing up the distribution’s application menu and settings panel on this launch bar.

            • ExTiX 14.1.2 Shows Users What They Can Do with Ubuntu 14.04, a Fancy Dock, and a Custom Kernel

              ExTiX 14.1.2 64-bit, a distribution based on the recently launched operating system from Canonical, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, has been officially released.

              The developer rebased the distribution on the newer Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) a while ago and this new build is mostly about updates and fixes. Users are provided with a GNOME 3.10 desktop and GNOME Classic 3.10. For users who want a lighter system, Razor-qt 0.5.2 is also available in ExTiX Light.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Rugged DAQ system runs real-time Linux

      NI unveiled a rugged 4-slot “CompactDAQ” system for data acquisition and control (DAQ), with real-time Linux, an Atom E3825, and optional sensor modules.

      Usually, when you have a choice of Windows or Linux, the Windows version costs more. In the case of the National Instruments (NI) CompactDAQ cDAQ-9134 Controller, however, it’s the Linux version that costs $500 more, at $4,999. That’s because it’s a special real-time Linux variant called NI Linux Real-Time, also available on NI’s CompactRIO cRIO-9068 controller and sbRIO-9651 computer-on-module, both of which are based on the Xilinx Zynq-7020 system-on-chip. The cDAQ-9134 instead runs on a dual-core, 1.33GHz Intel Atom E3825 SoC.

    • RasPi magazine launches today – get your free downloads here

      Our brand new sister magazine RasPi is here! Issue #1 is out today, available to download through Apple’s App Store. It’s jam-packed full of amazing content and only costs 69p/99¢.

      Each month we’ll be walking you through a big Pi project, showing off some of the best work in the community, sharing your tweets, letters and emails, and of course giving you a whole bunch of tutorials to teach you how to get the most from your Raspberry Pi and make amazing things with it.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Factory-fresh delivery: Get your OpenSUSE fix daily

          Until now, as with most new versions of software, new code for a new version of OpenSUSE had been bottled up for group testing at a beta or milestone stage.

          In the OpenSUSE world, this milestone stage had taken place in something called the “Factory”.

      • Android

        • CyanogenMod CM11 M9 released and ready to install

          August is here and just like clockwork CyanogenMod have released a new version of CM11. For those of you unaware CyanogenMod recently changed the way in which they list downloads. Until recently CM was always released as either stable, snapshot (mostly stable) or nightlies (experimental and buggy) versions. However CM11 over the last few months have used an ‘M’ release system which instead simply refers to ‘milestone’. The M releases are technically snapshots but are considerably more stable than nightlies and are considered to be suitable for main or daily usage.

        • Ugoos reveals Cortex-A5 Android 4.4 TV dongle

          Ugoos is prepping an Android 4.4 “S85″ media player dongle with a quad-core Amlogic S805 Cortex-A5 SoC clocked to 1.5GHz, and a quad-core Mali-450 GPU.

          Ugoos has spun a variety of Android media player boxes and dongles over the last few years, including a UT3 box, featuring Rockchip’s quad-core, Cortex-A17 RK3288 system-on-chip with a 16-core Mali-T760 GPU, now selling for $130. Before that was the Ugoos UT2, with the quad-core, Cortex-A9 RK3188 SoC clocked to 1.6GHz, with a Mali-400 GPU. Last year, the Chinese company introduced a dongle-style UM2 stick, running on the same RK3188 and Mali-400 GPU.

        • Android grabs record 85 percent smartphone share

          Google’s dominance of the smartphone market has reached new heights, with its Android operating system now accounting for a record 84.6 percent share of global smartphone shipments, according to research by Strategy Analytics.

          The growth in Android phones during the second quarter of this year came at the expense of BlackBerry, Apple iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, the research firm said Wednesday.

        • CyanogenMod 11.0 M9 Released

          Another month, another release to mark the occasion – today we fire off the builds for CM11 M9. The M9 build incorporates changes from June 31st through its branch date on Sunday July 27th.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Securely back up personal files with Duplicati: Q&A with the open source client’s creators

    The authors of Duplicati, an open-source file backup client, discuss the impetus for the creation of their project, keeping data secure in the cloud, and backup integrity with incremental data storage.

  • Sonny Hashmi: GSA to Foster Open Source Tech Development

    The report noted that GSA is already using the Github open source community alongside the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, while the U.S. Geological Service is exploring the community to facilitate software development crowdsourcing.

  • Banned San Francisco Parking App Goes Open Source To Find A Solution To SF’s Parking Problem

    Sweetch, which lets users secure a parking space for a flat fee of $5 and sell one for $4, was one of several apps mentioned by name in the cease and desist letter from City Attorney Dennis Herrera to fellow parking app MonkeyParking, TechCrunch reports.

  • Carnegie Mellon creates open source tool to ‘extract’ 3D objects from 2D images

    Image being able to move an object in an image maintaining its perspective as if you are physically holding the object and moving it around? Let me give the example of a chair in a picture. How would you feel if you are able to turn it around or “even upside down in the photo, displaying sides of the chair that would have been hidden from the camera, yet appearing to be realistic”?

  • Zimbra CMO on being a great guardian of open source’s three C’s

    Zimbra’s Olivier Thierry talks about the three C’s that open source firms must support, the need to be market driven in tech, and how his firm’s solutions address security and data privacy issues.

  • Is open source the key to innovation?

    Collaboration is a core component of modern business, and over the years, collaborative efforts have resulted in some of the world’s most groundbreaking innovations, in the areas of technology, medicine and engineering. The opportunities are seemingly endless when people unite and work together, whether within a single organization or across many.

    But what if this collaborative ethos is extended to include practically every human being on earth? Are there any limitations on what can be accomplished?

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • AWS Names MapR a Big Data Competency Partner for Hadoop Distribution

      MapR’s Big Data platform, based on open source Apache Hadoop, gained the endorsement of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has included the company’s software as the first Hadoop distribution in the new AWS Partner Network (APN) Competency Program.

    • ownCloud is enjoying startling community contribution

      ownCloud is one of the most important free software project considering our move to the ‘cloud’ is inevitable. Most of us use more than one computing devices (I have 8) and we want to be able to access some of our data from any device we want and thus the need of cloud based syncing and storing solutions. However, the moment you use 3rd party cloud services such as Dropbox, iCloud, Drive or OneDrive you lost control and ‘ownership’ of your data. At the same time you expose your otherwise private data to these companies and law-enforcement authorities.

    • ownCloud 7 pulls in users and open source developers

      Sure you could join everyone else and put your data on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, or you could use the latest ownCloud 7 to run your own private cloud.

    • Community helps set the OpenStack Summit agenda
    • The fight for OpenStack’s Soul

      OpenStack recently celebrated its fourth birthday and it seems as we pass this milestone, it’s a healthy, vibrant and growing project. It has been embraced by players big and small including such industry luminaries as IBM, Microsoft, HP, Red Hat, SAP and many others. It’s all good for OpenStack.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.2.6 “Still” Released by The Document Foundation

      The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new stable build in the 4.2.x version of LibreOffice, just a few days after the main branch of the suite, 4.3, made its grand appearance.

      “The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2.6 ‘Still,’ the seventh and last minor release of the most solid version of the software, ready for enterprise deployments and conservative users. LibreOffice 4.2.6 arrives just one week after the successful launch of LibreOffice 4.3 ‘Fresh,’ the most feature rich version of the office suite,” reads the official announcement.

    • Samba Patched, LibreOffice 4.2.6, and Best Browsers
    • Oracle Delivers Solaris 11.2 with OpenStack, Integrated SDN Features

      Just before summer began, Oracle unveiled the beta version of Solaris 11.2, which is only the second point release of Solaris since version 11 of the platform appeared in 2011. The really notable thing about the beta was that Oracle began positioning Solaris as “a modern cloud platform that melds efficient virtualization, application-driven software-defined networking (SDN) technology and a full OpenStack distribution.”

  • Education

    • Everyone’s your partner in open source

      When Opensource.com said they wanted to do a series of articles on how having an open source job has changed us, this story came to mind. Can you think of any other industry that would do this kind of thing for a “competing” company? I can’t! But then again BibLibre and ByWater aren’t competitors, we see ourselves as partners. Everyone who works on or with Koha is a member of the worldwide community and as such works together toward a common goal: making Koha awesome.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD product distribution will move

      At the end of September, OpenBSD distribution will move to a new distributor. As a result the old stock (CDs, Tshirts and posters) will become unavailable.

    • OpenBSD and the Intel NUC

      Although the NUC is a tiny computer, it’s packed with power. The model I purchased has a 1.3GHz i5 with four cores. I added 16GB’s of RAM (the maximum) and a 250GB mSATA SSD. The NUC comes standard with gigabit Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports. There is also a mini PCI Express slot for adding wifi, if wanted. Since the NUC was going to be living on my desk, I decided against the wifi for now. The NUC has integrated Intel graphics (Intel® HD Graphics 5000) which as an OpenBSD user is exactly what I wanted. It’s also capable of driving a high resolution display, and since I had recently acquired one of the beautiful Monoprice 27″ IPS 2560 x 1440 displays from Massdrop* it was a perfect fit.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU MDK 1.2.8 released
    • Replace your proprietary BIOS with Libreboot

      With the launch of the Libreboot project, users now have an easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs. This project is important; currently, many computer-makers notoriously deny free software developers the information they need to develop free replacements for the proprietary software they ship with their products. In some cases, manufacturers do not even share enough information for it to be possible to install a free operating system.

    • FisicaLab’s new icon

      I started the development of version 0.4.0 of FisicaLab. And what better to start with a new icon. I’m not a graphical designer, so I wanted keep this simple. To start I used one of the icons at module of dynamics of circular motion, the icon of final system. The three particles and the lines (I think these are called “kinetic lines” in comics, but I’m not sure) represent a system in movement. The “f” is not only for FisicaLab but also for “final state of the system”.

    • Planning to use Net::Gnats

      The original author of Net::Gnats has transferred maintainer status to me since it is planned that the next version of Gnatsweb will be leveraging this module.

  • Project Releases

    • BH release 1.54.0-3

      At the request of the maintainer of the recent added RcppMLPACK package, it adds the Boost.Heap library. Boost.Heap implements priority queues which extend beyond the corresponding (and somewhat simpler) class in the STL. Key features of the Boost.Heap priority queues are mutability, iterators, ability to merge, stable sort, and comparison.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The future of scientific discovery relies on open

      Ross Mounce is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bath studying the use of fossils in phylogeny and phyloinformatics, completing his PhD at the University of Bath last year. Ross was one of the first Panton Fellows and is an active member of the Open Knowledge Foundation, particularly the Open Science Working Group. He is an advocate for open science, and he is actively working on content mining academic publications to reuse scientific research in meta-analyses to gain higher level insights in evolutionary patterns.

    • DevStack Ceph, OpenStack Paris Summit voting, and more

    • Open Hardware

      • Open hardware resources from Opensource.com

        Pardon the noise. We’ve been banging around for a few months in our workshop, toiling away at our latest creation: What is open hardware?, a new resource page. And it’s finally finished!

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Army Will Lay Off 500 Majors This Month

      The Army will lay off about 500 majors as part of its ongoing downsizing effort, the service has announced.

      The military branch used involuntary separation boards to determine to determine where the number of soldiers exceeded future force requirements. The Army announced earlier this year it planned to select from a pool of 19,000 captains and majors to reduce the size of its force in the post-war era. The service laid off 1,100 captains earlier this summer.

    • Intolerable inconsistencies in Washington

      If the GOP position sounds contradictory, that’s because it’s less about the Constitution than cleavages within the party. There are real questions about Obama’s abuses of power — say, the spying on Americans by the National Security Agency or the use of drones to kill U.S. citizens overseas — but the opposition party has left those largely untouched. The planned lawsuit was a bone thrown to conservatives to quiet their impeachment talk. The legislation restricting Obama’s executive authority on immigration was a similar effort to buy off conservatives who had been encouraged to rebel by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas..

    • US Actions Strengthen Al-Qaeda In Yemen – NDC

      The decision by Western countries, especially the United States, to make Yemen their main military base lead to al-Qaeda getting stronger in the region, a representative of Yemen’s National Dialogue Committee (NDC) said in an interview with Rossiya Segodnya news agency.

    • Pakistan: US Drones Kill More Than 3,000 People in 10 Years

      From 2004 to July, 2014, between 2,340 and 3,790 people have been killed by U.S. RC (Remote-Controlled) aircrafts, stated a study from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released here today.

      As of open sources, the institution estimated that more than a third of those killed were civilians and about 200 children, while at least 1,100,000 citizens have been seriously wounded.

  • Finance

    • Why The Proposed New York Bitcoin Regulations Are Absolute, Total Bullshit

      New York’s Department of Financial Services has presented draft regulations for bitcoin trade that are an absolute heap of bullshit, and that’s even before going into what the proposal actually says. The propsed regulations require a so-called “BitLicense” in order to trade in bitcoin with residents of New York and with everybody else in the world. The problem is, that’s an absolute joke from a legal standpoint, completely ignoring the very concept of a jurisdiction.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Edward Snowden’s Russian asylum expires

      The temporary asylum of the US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who has been hailed as a hero by a majority or ‘well-informed’, expired yesterday. Russia has not yet confirmed the extension of his asylum, as the country is preparing for a war with Ukrain.

    • Ron Paul pushes White House for clemency for Edward Snowden

      Former Rep. Ron Paul has taken his push for clemency for Edward Snowden to a new level, announcing he’s collected more than 37,000 signatures in the past five months — about a third of what he says he needs to get a White House response.

    • Ron Paul: Bring Edward Snowden Home
    • American spy agencies out of control

      With the recent news that Germany has expelled our CIA director in Berlin after the CIA paid two Germans to spy on two German government employees, we can see very clearly that our American intelligence agencies are out of control.

    • Relief among Israelis as troops pull out of Gaza – but no sense of victory
    • Gaza Strip Crisis: Boycotting Israel is a Stupendous Failure

      If you believe in getting a decent outcome, then you should adjust your methods of achieving it to those that are most likely to find success.

    • Amnesty International says Lichfield factory protest is ‘understandable’
    • Israel snooped on John Kerry’s phone calls during Middle East peace talks
    • Snowden Documents Show ‘Constant and Lavish’ US Support for Israel Facilitating Gaza Attacks
    • Report: Intelligence between US, Israel strong despite political tensions

      Leaked documents published by ‘The Intercept’ reveal continued cooperation between the NSA and Israeli intelligence agencies.

    • Germany’s Spy Agency Is Ready To Shake Off Its Second Tier Reputation

      “In the CIA people view liaison relationships as a pain in the ass but necessary,” says Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whose identity was infamously disclosed by aides to President George W Bush soon after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Liaison relationships are the CIA’s term for cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, and, given that not even the world’s mightiest spy outfit can go anywhere it likes, the CIA maintains plenty of such liaisons.

    • Keeping Brennan as CIA Director = Triumph of Secret Government

      Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says that John Brennan, the director of the CIA who has finally admitted that he lied when he angrily and repeatedly insisted that the agency did not spy on staff members of the Senate committee charged with oversight US intelligence agencies, “has a lot of work to do,” before she can forgive him for lying to and spying on her committee.

    • Abbott and Brandis to fight terrorism with mandatory metadata retention

      The Coalition government led by Prime Minister Tony Abbott today announced controversial legislation mandating data retention for telecommunications companies, to be put to the parliament before the end of the year, while simultaneously abandoning anti-discrimination changes.

    • In our opinion: An ability to conduct widespread surveillance doesn’t mean permission to do so

      A report by two organizations committed to the protection of civil liberties is raising new and valid concerns about how government surveillance programs have created an impediment to free speech and freedom of the press. The report gives additional weight to efforts in Congress to end the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate gathering of telephone records.

    • Caught Stealing Data in Europe, U.S. Now Seeks to Legalize the Theft

      Many examples of extraterritoriality grow out of America’s archipelago of military bases around the world, where Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA) allow service members exemption from local laws, even when they commit crimes against host country people. The U.S. also stations Customs and Border Patrol agents in other nations, denying boarding on U.S.-bound flights from Canada, for example, to Canadian citizens otherwise still standing in their own country. Imagine the outcry in America if the Chinese were to establish military bases in Florida exempt from U.S. law, or if the Russians choose which Americans could fly out of Kansas City Airport. Never mind drone strikes, bombings, deployment of Special Forces, invasions and CIA-sponsored coups.

      The snowballing NSA revelations have already severely damaged U.S. credibility and relationships around the world; nations remain shocked at the impunity with which America dug into their private lives. NSA spying has also cost American tech firms $180 billion in lost revenues, as “We’re not an American company” becomes a sales point.

    • How will US data companies suffer in the wake of the Snowden leaks?
    • What would happen if American tech giants turned off the lights?
    • UK spy agency GCHQ confronts cybersecurity skills shortage with certified degrees
    • GCHQ accrediting some university degrees

      GCHQ accrediting some university degreesThe NSA’s British counterpart, GCHQ, is now accrediting certain university degrees from some of the top colleges in the United Kingdom, including Oxford. The accreditations are provided with some online security degrees, and they are essentially the GCHQ’s stamp of approval which could help students find jobs at the government agency once they graduate.

    • Google Inc (GOOGL) Defended On Sharing Private Emails

      Judge Andrew Napolitano spoke on Fox Business about the role that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) played in the arrest of a Florida sex offender. He talked about the lengths that the world’s biggest Internet search engine can go to protect itself from indictment as a conspirator in unlawful activities.

    • Tor on Campus, Part I: It’s Been Done Before and Should Happen Again

      German newspapers recently reported that the NSA targets people who research privacy and anonymity tools online—for instance by searching for information about Tor and Tails—for deeper surveillance. But today, researching something online is the near equivalent to thinking out loud. By ramping up surveillance on people simply for reading about security, freedom of expression easily collapses into self-censorship; speech is chilled; people may become afraid to research and learn.

    • Tor on Campus, Part II: Icebreakers and Risk Mitigation Strategies
    • The push to protect student data

      In fact, lots of them are spending their summer breaks grappling with student data. What to gather. How to use it. And how to protect it.

    • Tough talks on snooping, immigration bill leaves John Kerry disappointed

      There was broad convergence of views and interests between the US and India when John Kerry, accompanied by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and other senior American officials, visited India last week, despite India’s decision not to ratify the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA).

      The TFA, which was agreed upon by all WTO member states in Bali last year, had to be ratified by all signatories by July 31 to come into force. The deal was designed to reduce trade barriers by lowering import tariffs and standardizing customs, and was expected to boost trade and add up to an estimated 1 trillion USD to the global economy.

      The new Indian government, led by Modi, made a U-turn, vetoing the trade deal over disagreements on New Delhi’s food subsidies. The failure to reach an accord overshadowed Kerry’s three-day hop-over to New Delhi for an annual Strategic Dialogue meeting between the two countries.

    • NSA leaker Thomas Drake says Oz security reforms are ‘scary’

      National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake says Australia’s looming national security reforms makes him ‘shudder’, labelling them ambiguous and a plot to stamp out legitimate public-interest whistleblowing.

    • Apple faces class action suit for tracking users without consent

      Apple’s been hit with a class action suit [PDF] in the US for using the location service function on its iPhones to track customers without notice to, or consent from, customers when it comes to their whereabouts being tracked, recorded, sent to Apple, and potentially provided to third parties.

      A Californian woman, Chen Ma, filed the suit on behalf of Apple’s 100-million-plus iPhone users in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

      She accuses the company of violating iPhone users’ privacy by not only being able to pinpoint their locations but also to “record the duration that users stay at any given geographical point and periodically transmit” the data to Apple’s database.

    • More join class action suit against Facebook
    • Over 11,000 claimants join class action against Facebook’s NSA collusion

      When twenty-six year old Austrain law student Max Schrems filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming damages because it allowed the NSA to spy on him, as in the average user, he helped to open up a potential world of hurt for the company.

      Because, now, there are over 11,000 people joining the class action lawsuit against Facebook after the first weekend of the campaign “Europe vs Facebook.” People are joining from Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK. The objective? €500 or the equivalent of £398 at current exchange rates.

      “We want to show to the US industry that they have to respect [European] fundamental rights if they want to do business in Europe,” Schrems said in an interview. “We love the technology, but we want to be able to use things without permanent worry for our privacy. Right now you have two options: live like in the stone age, or take action. We decided for the second.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Disgraceful Partisanship from Prince William

      In the dreadful nationalistic war between rival Imperial powers, the Belgian Empire was probably the most evil of all. To commend its resistance is ridiculous. Joseph Conrad’s great “Heart of Darkness” and “Congo Diary”, and the formal revelation by British Consul Roger Casement of the dreadful enslavement and abuse of the Congo population to provide vast profits to the Belgian crown, provide lasting testimony to the malignity of the Belgian Empire.

    • Scotland’s First State Visit

      The same consideration rules out other countries which have the Queen as Head of State. Otherwise New Zealand might have been a good choice. A similar size to Scotland, a thriving democracy and a population very heavily of Scottish descent.

    • Bill O’Reilly’s Attacks On Black Culture

      O’Reilly portrays himself as the moral and intellectual authority on how to solve the problems he says plague black communities and black culture, decrying “race hustlers” and prescribing harmful “solutions” to issues like the mass incarceration of black men.

    • Empty prisons could be put to good use

      After reading the recent story about a ‘correctional officer’ intimidating a network news reporter for accidentally filming an empty prison at Wilton, NY, I googled ‘empty prison’.

    • A Constitutional Scandal Worse Than Iran-Contra or Watergate

      The stark admission by the CIA’s inspector general that the agency had broken into a classified computer network used by its overseers at the Senate Intelligence Committee violates the core principle of separation of powers of governmental branches enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Along with the CIA’s illegal rendition, detention, and torture of suspected terrorists and the NSA’s secret monitoring of Americans’ phone traffic, it shows that U.S. spy agencies are in danger of going rogue and need to be severely disciplined. Such intelligence organizations are supposed to defend the republic and not undermine it.

    • EDITORIAL: Restraining the spies

      There are still plenty of loopholes in Mr. Leahy’s bill, and it’s not hard to see where they came from. “In developing this legislation,” says Mr. Leahy, “I have consulted closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the NSA, the FBI, and the Department of Justice — and every single word of this bill was vetted with those agencies.” That’s hardly reassuring.

    • It’s Now Possible to Eavesdrop on Your Conversation Using a Bag of Chips

      If you’ve managed to get over your own NSA-induced, Snowdenian fear of typing, here’s another important privacy question: Do you trust that bag of potato chips you’re holding? The word out of MIT is that you probably shouldn’t. Nearby potted plants should also be treated with suspicion. What makes these everyday items a threat to your (conversational) personal data? It’s just that MIT announced on Monday that its researchers, along Microsoft and Adobe, have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct sound simply by analyzing video of the vibrations of objects around you.

    • Court Says Black Secret Service Agents Can Sue Government as a Group

      Several African-American Secret Service agents who claim the agency denied them promotions because of their race can sue the government as a group, according to the latest court ruling in a 14-year-old lawsuit.

    • Pentagon Training Still Says Dissent Is A Threat ‘Indicator’

      A new version of a computer-based cyber-security training course from the Pentagon still classifies disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy as a “threat indicator” that a federal employee might be a spy.

      That training, available online and still being used as recently as last week, has been administered to millions of military and civilian employees throughout the federal government. Little seems to have changed since HuffPost reported on an earlier version of the same training course last year — even though a spokesman said then that the training was being “updated.”

    • Documents Show 100 Officers From 28 Law Enforcement Agencies Accessed A Photographer’s Records

      Here’s what exercising your First Amendment rights gets you in certain parts of the US. Photographer Jeff Gray has been filming cops and photographing public structures, as well as documenting the reactions of law enforcement to his activities.

    • Internal Affairs Departments, District Attorneys’ Offices Helping Keep Bad Cops From Being Held Accountable

      A certain percentage of police officers are “bad cops,” just like a certain percentage of the human race is composed of thuggish sociopaths. That’s an unfortunate fact of life. Whether the percentage of bad cops is greater than the percentage in non-law enforcement positions is still open for discussion, although there’s a lot about a cop’s job that would attract thuggish sociopaths: power, better weapons, nearly nonexistent accountability, etc.

    • Lawyer: Silk Road seizure may have been improper—if so, toss evidence

      Ross Ulbricht claimed he couldn’t have laundered money, as Bitcoin isn’t money.
      Alleged Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s defense attorney Joshua Dratel has asked the court to suppress nearly all of the evidence collected against his client. Should the motion be successful, it would likely put a substantial damper on the government’s efforts to prosecute Ulbricht.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Analysis: New motions show gaping holes in Supreme Court’s Aereo ruling

        In an emergency motion (PDF) filed Friday, TV-over-Internet startup Aereo submitted its most detailed legal arguments yet as to why it should be allowed to be a cable company. It also asked, based on those arguments, to resume operations until a final decision was reached.

      • Sky TV Bans ‘VPN’ Ads on Copyright Grounds

        A series of ads created by a New Zealand-based ISP has been rejected by Sky TV on copyright grounds. The ban on the ads, which contain references to a VPN-like service providing access to geo-blocked content such as Netflix, has been decried as “unjustified and petty” by ISP Slingshot.

Latest Attacks on Android From Apple/Microsoft and Their Network of Trolls/Partners

Posted in Apple at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Net Applications (Apple- and Microsoft-funded) makes a misinformation comeback, Apple retreats from some Samsung litigation battles, and Microsoft dives deep into it

A couple of days ago we noticed that an editor had a headline changed from “Android users MORE ACTIVE than iOS fanbois for the first time” to something else. This report about numbers from “Net Marketshare” (part of Net Applications) coincides with contradictory reports like this from the Gates-friendly press (among others), titled “iOS Users Seven Times More Active Than Android Users, Suggests Net Applications”. These cite Net Applications, which is partly funded by Apple. There are some contradictions and reports about this are generally confusing. It’s not clear what they are measuring and based on past years, Net Applications is mostly a propaganda agent. This Apple-affiliated firm is saying something which makes Apple sounds more favourable than Android (common trick like citing buyer spendings, something about security — not absolute sales — and so on) because Android has the lion’s share of the market and it’s impossible to deny it’s unstoppable growth. Perhaps Apple paid Net Applications some more money to produce propaganda. Their pie charts are widely disgraced and recognised as inaccurate, misleading, and biased by design (improper data).

Anyway, Android is perpetually being smeared by both Apple and Microsoft. Apple had sued Samsung using patents and Samsung recently hit back at Apple using a case against software patents. Apple now retreats. “In a totally unexpected move,” writes SJVN, “Apple and Samsung, who’ve fought patent wars around the globe, agreed to drop all their cases outside of the US.”

Microsoft too had just sued Samsung. This was covered by the Microsoft-friendly press first (including BBC, as we noted the other day) and coverage has thus far been shallow. They just can’t call “racketeering” what clearly is racketeering. It oughtn’t be too shocking, except if one considers how close Microsoft and Samsung have been over the year (including UEFI restricted boot collaborations). “Apparently Secure Boot is blowing up on Windows too,” tells us Ryan in the IRC channels. “People upgrading their graphics card report their computer won’t boot up again until they disable secure boot, restart the system, install the signed drivers for the new card, and then they can turn secure boot back on.”

Maybe they should just stick to Free software, abandoning both Apple and Microsoft. The future is free/libre and no amount of misinformation can successfully deny it anymore. █

Symantec Deserves a Ban in China for Not Reporting US Government Back Doors

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Tick the box to ban

Symantec logo

Summary: Symantec, a Windows insecurity firm, is miserably trying to divert attention away from reports about distrust that led to a ban in China

According to many reports this week [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16], China does not trust some US- and Russia-based companies to take care of ‘security’ in China. It’s about time.

Reports focus on two firms, but another one is seemingly affected (Symantec). While Kaspersky (which we occasionally mention here) does not deny the claims, Symantec does strike back and “Says its Products are Still Allowed in China”. This is a cleverly-worded denial. Some products are definitely banned, but the “Security software developer Symantec Corporation denied its software has been banned in China.” Symantec merely says or emphasises that not everything is banned.

Just to be more specific: “It is important to note that this list is only for certain types of procurement and Symantec products are not banned by the Chinese government.”

Kaspersky is hyping up security threats at the moment and Symantec is trying hard to dodge the negative publicity because trust is fundamental to their sales. Symantec, which has strong Microsoft connections and disdain for FOSS, should not be trusted if China does not trust Microsoft (we already know how China feels about the ‘new’ Microsoft). To quote an IDG report:

Symantec and Kaspersky Lab have become the latest tech firms to be kicked off the Chinese Government’s approved list, according to an unconfirmed report in the country’s media.

The People’s Daily newspaper broke the news at the weekend in a report that claimed that local supplies including Qihoo 360, Venustech, CAJinchen, Beijing Jiangmin and Rising would from now on be the preferred software for antivirus duties.

The news seems to have surprised both firms, which have until now have been approved suppliers for desktop security.

Symantec has been overlooking government back doors such as the ones Microsoft puts in place and lets the US government know about. This is an older debate which made a comeback amid NSA leaks (other antivirus makers seemingly exempt government malware and such, e.g. Stuxnet). Here is Wall Street’s press coverage:

That’s a lesson that Microsoft and Symantec are learning right now. An antivirus company from Silicon Valley, Symantec competes in China against local favorites like Beijing-based Qihoo 360 Technology. According to reports by Bloomberg News and the Chinese media, China has instructed government departments to stop buying antivirus software by Symantec and its Moscow-based rival, Kaspersky Lab. Symantec software has backdoors that could allow outside access, according to an order from the Public Security Ministry. Not coincidentally, Qihoo’s New York-traded shares rose 2.7 percent yesterday, following reports of the move against Symantec and Kapersky.

Well, good for them. After being cracked by the NSA they need to secure their systems by better identifying possible moles (in the software sense).

Dan Goodin, who typically slams FOSS over security issues (less severe than in proprietary software), finally writes about Microsoft’s best known back doors that it tells the NSA about (Goodin does not mention the NSA connection):

There’s a trivial way for drive-by exploit developers to bypass the security sandbox in almost all versions of Internet Explorer, and Microsoft says it has no immediate plans to fix it, according to researchers from Hewlett-Packard.

The exploit technique, laid out in a blog post published Thursday, significantly lowers the bar for attacks that surreptitiously install malware on end-user computers. Sandboxes like those included in IE and Google Chrome effectively require attackers to devise two exploits, one that pierces the sandbox and the other that targets a flaw in some other part of the browser. Having a reliable way to clear the first hurdle drastically lessens the burden of developing sophisticated attacks.

What can Symantec do to stop this other than suggest abandoning Windows (its bread and butter)? Symantec must have known about back doors in the form of IE vulnerabilities, but did it properly protect China from it? No, Symantec makes money from the prevalence of Windows and the company’s management is deeply connected to Microsoft’s. █

Microsoft Wants Us to Think That ODF is Bad for Britain

Posted in Microsoft, OpenDocument at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft is not giving up as OpenDocument Format spreads between British citizens and government departments, obviating the need for Microsoft cash cows (Office on top of Windows)

TO a monopolist like Microsoft it seemed just fine to bribe people in order to keep its abusive monopoly in tact (see our OOXML abuses index). To others, such as British authorities, it finally appears clear that supporting monopolists is not a good service to British citizens, especially when this monopolist is foreign. When ODF was embraced by the UK Microsoft was very quick to complain and shortly thereafter we found out that OOXML is becoming less compatibility-centric than ever before. The plan is to get everyone — both governments and citizens — stuck with the monopolist, so it is clear that Microsoft has no legitimate case and it should be pushed away as soon as possible. Writing about a new article from the British press, Pogson wants to see some enthusiasm from the British public because Microsoft pretends that not using OOXML is bad for Britain.

So, the move by the government of UK is a win/win/win/win situation however you look at it, unless you are M$ or a “partner”. The rest of us should rejoice too because the whole world is watching and taxpayers everywhere will ultimately benefit as M$’s empire shrinks and Freedom reigns.

Indeed, and here is the original claim from Microsoft:

Blighty’s government brought a tear to Microsoft’s eye this week when it chose the Open Document Format for the default UK.gov file format. From this week forth, all electronic documents produced and used by Whitehall and other government agencies will have to be ODF, annoying Redmond since it backs its own Office Open XML or possibly a combo of the two.

Microsoft has attempted to paint this move as anticompetitive or bad for the British public, but just like the tobacco lobby, Microsoft is completely reversing the truth. How long before English offices realise they don’t actually need Office and Windows, then follow Munich’s footsteps? █

08.05.14

“Patent Progress” Now Acting as a Front of Large Corporations (CCIA), Tells Michelle Lee (USPTO Deputy Director) About Trolls But Not About Software Patents

Posted in Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Framing it as a scale — not as a scope — issue

Ed Black
Source: DECLAN MCCULLAGH PHOTOGRAPHY

Summary: The narrative put forth by CCIA, a Microsoft-funded front group, continues to present the patent debate as revolving around the size of extortionists rather than methods and the scope of patents

Trolls (small companies) are not the only patent issue. There are large companies like Microsoft, which still engage in strategic extortion using dubious software patents and NDAs. The goal is to drive companies away from Microsoft’s competitors and/or tax these competitors.

The USPTO almost had a patent extremist appointed to lead the way, but this is no longer likely to happen. In fact, the USPTO is now backing away from some of its extremism, perhaps much to the chagrin of David Kappos, its former head.

Michelle Lee, in the mean time, is being approached regarding changes in the USPTO. The other day we noticed that CCIA, somewhat of a Brussels- and Washington DC-based lobby group that’s open for corporations to join and does not reveal all of its corporate members and their relative contributions (Microsoft is among those who pay and its head, Ed Black, received millions of dollars from Microsoft), contacted Lee. Knowing that CCIA is clearly not a public interest group but a corporate front, representing the interests of very large corporations, we needed to check what was said to Lee. CCIA had received a lot of money from Microsoft and in recent years promoted Microsoft interests. In last week’s article at The Hill we found that “The Supreme Court’s decision to toss out some software patents earlier this year led to a swift change of operations at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), the agency’s deputy director said on Wednesday.

“Michelle Lee told the House Judiciary subcommittee on Intellectual Property that the high court’s June decision caused an immediate flurry of activity.

“It does affect the examination of cases before us and as soon as the ruling came down we were in a position at the PTO where we had to offer guidance to our examiners,” she told lawmakers.’

The site called “Patent Progress”, which is run by CCIA's Matt Levy, hardly told Lee about ‘patent quality’ and instead focused on patent trolls (not even referring to them as such, usually alluding to them as “PAEs”). Lee, the Deputy Director of the USPTO, received this text:

The patent system plays an important role in promoting innovation in the United States. Patents encourage investment in R&D and facilitate technology transfer. But when patent assertion entities (PAEs), commonly called patent trolls, exploit low-quality patents to extort payments from America’s most productive companies and job providers, they harm innovation and the very purpose of the patent system. The solution to this problem is two pronged: the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) must improve the quality of the patents it issues, and Congress must pass patent reform legislation so that PAEs cannot leverage the high cost of litigation as a weapon against economic growth.

Ed Black signed this letter. Remember how much money he received from Microsoft. Not too shockingly, software patents are not even mentioned.

Ali Sternburg, writing in the same blog amid minor updates, said that “CCIA filed comments with the PTO on guidelines after Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank.”

As the case was mostly about scope, why bother focusing on trolls at all?

On the brighter side of things, software patents did get mentioned as “computer-implemented inventions” (CII), which is a term some patent lawyers prefer to use (it’s a loaded term). Here is the relevant part: “Unfortunately, patents claiming computer-implemented inventions frequently have unclear boundaries. This is largely because, to date, some patents have been allowed to issue without much more than a description and recitation in the claims of an abstract idea implemented on a conventional computer system. The Alice decision makes clear that this practice is not consistent with 35 U.S.C. § 101, because such patent claims preempt all practical implementations of the abstract idea and stifle innovation. Further, the public notice function is best served by clear claims and a thorough prosecution history explaining the examiner’s understanding of those claims, as well as express statements by the applicant regarding the meaning of the claims. Computer-implemented inventions are too often patented using ambiguous, vague, or overbroad language. When such poor quality patents issue, they can become weapons in the hands of patent assertion entities, which currently drain billions of dollars a year from U.S. businesses.

“Accordingly, CCIA believes that it is critical for both the examiner and the patent applicant to create a clear prosecution history. In the context of § 101 rejections, the examiner should provide more than a conclusory rejection. Rather, any rejection should identify the abstract idea to which the claim is directed. Further, such a rejection should explain the examiner’s understanding of the claim’s scope, including why the combination of claim elements do not add “significantly more” to the abstract idea, either expressly or through interpretation under 35 U.S.C. § 112(f). This analysis should include an explanation of whether a claim qualifies as a “means-plus-function” claim under section 112(f) and why or why not.”

Well, “poor quality patents” not only “can become weapons in the hands of patent assertion entities” (to quote the above); it is often misused by large companies too, like the companies which are funding CCIA. Here is a new example of a small troll: “Personal Audio LLC is an East Texas shell company that gleaned national attention when it claimed it had the right to demand cash from every podcaster. The company was wielding a patent on “episodic content,” which it said included anyone doing a podcast, as well as many types of online video.”

Today in the news we have many articles about a much bigger troll: Microsoft. Here is an article which says: “Alleging that the company is being stiffed by Samsung, Microsoft turns to the courts.”

Microsoft “stiffed” because Samsung is not engaging with a racketeer/troll? Really? Microsoft sued Samsung because Microsoft can hardly sell any real products, let alone force them on OEMs. It makes Microsoft very similar to trolls. It’s a non-practicing strategy; it makes Microsoft and patent assertion firm. The BBC quotes Samsung as saying: “We will review the complaint in detail and determine appropriate measures in response.”

The BBC rightly points out that “[t]he case marks the first time that Microsoft has launched legal action against Samsung.

“The two companies have a long-running partnership, due to the Asian manufacturer’s sale of Windows PCs and Windows Phone handsets.”

This is why it’s a misguided move by Microsoft; it is likely to alienate Microsoft even further. Perhaps CCIA should stop promoting this narrative where only trolls are the problem and focus again on showing abuses by Microsoft, which is using software patents to abuse its competition or pressure companies to adopt Microsoft Windows rather than the competition (notably GNU/Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and so on). █

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