10.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World Program, “an educational web series making computer science fun and accessible to all”. If it had been just that, I might not have been interested.
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Ugh, here we go again with the Windows versus Linux desktop blather. I hate having to wade through this stuff, but it’s necessary because articles like this continue to promote the idea that the desktop is of primary importance to Linux and that simply isn’t true. Usage habits have shifted considerably from desktop computers to mobile devices.
Linux will always be around on the desktop, it may or may not have a sizable percentage of market share, but it will always be there as an alternative to Windows and OS X. And Windows 10 (or 11 or 12 or 13) isn’t going to change that, no matter what Microsoft does to improve its desktop operating system.
The real action is in mobile devices and in that arena Linux has utterly smashed Windows and Microsoft into oblivion. You see Linux in Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks, Kindle ebook readers and in many other devices. The article grudgingly notes the success of Linux in mobile at the very end but otherwise seems totally focused on a pointless desktop horse race between Linux and Windows.
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Server
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With CloudOpen Europe now less than two weeks away, we took another look at the data from the recent open cloud survey, conducted by Linux.com and The New Stack. Three surprising conclusions emerged that aren’t necessarily obvious on a quick read through the survey results.
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One company looking to benefit from this trend is Cumulus Networks. Cumulus does not produce or sell hardware, only a network operating system: Cumulus Linux. The Debian-based OS is built to run on whitebox hardware you can purchase from a number of partner Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs). (Their hardware compatability list includes a number of 10GE and 40GE switch models from different vendors.)
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The most obvious of these is the Linux operating system, used by almost all HPC systems. MPICH, OpenMPI, and their variants are examples of other open source tools that “facilitate scalable, distributed computing and have supported decades of research, including spinning off multiple derivatives that have made their way into commercial offerings by big name vendors such as Cray, IBM, and Intel,” says Schroeder.
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Kernel Space
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Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I’m also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won’t be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won’t be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn’t work, the number of fucks I’ll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.
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DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai out of India are aiming to redesign the Linux kernel as MOOL, or the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux. The project site explains, “MOOL (Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux) aims at redesigning the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of OO (Object Oriented) abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in existing kernel. Studies have shown that common coupling is increasing in successive versions of Linux. This will make maintainability of Linux difficult in coming years. As a starting step we have tried to reduce the number of global variables of the kernel. Some global variables are used only by two or three kernel modules. These are passed as function arguments. The performance of the modified kernel is measured with the standard performance analysis tools. The modified kernel performs almost same as original. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules.”
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The primary reason behind using a procedural language like C for writing the Linux kernel was efficiency. However, this resulted in higher degree of dependencies (or coupling) among different parts of the Linux kernel and makes it difficult to maintain. A touch of object-oriented design may make things easier.
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Graphics Stack
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At FOSDEM on the 31st of january and the 1st of February 2015, there will be another graphics DevRoom.
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For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that’s what most Q4’2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here’s a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.
Using the Mesa 10.3 packages that recently landed in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn are some fresh benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 14.10 state but with switching to the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel. All tests were done from the Intel Core i7 4770K system with Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard, 8GB of RAM, and 140GB Western Digital WD1500HLHX HDD. Ubuntu 14.10 was in its updated state as of a few days ago with Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16.0, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, xf86-video-intel 2.99.914, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11. Mesa 10.3.0 was present while as said we upgraded to the Linux 3.17 Git kernel as Ubuntu 14.10 by default is shipping with Linux 3.16; there’s a few DRM driver improvements in 3.17 worth testing.
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One of the most frequent reasons we here when it comes developers not getting involved with the open-source Linux graphics driver development (or even just driver bug-fixing) comes down to the high barrier to entry due to a lack of comprehensive documentation, etc. As one step towards improving the driver documentation situation, Daniel Vetter has begun a long process of documenting the Intel (i915) DRM/KMS kernel driver.
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So far it looks like there’s just 2~3 women interested in the X.Org program but there’s also a lot of other projects involved for Phoronix readers that were assigned female at birth or anyone who identifies as a woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth.
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Benchmarks
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With the very latest development packages for Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21, here’s some new Linux benchmark results when running from the Core i7 5960X platform and using the new MSI X99S SLI PLUS.
The MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard played well with both Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 that are powered by the modern Linux 3.16 kernel. As a quick comparison just for kicks I ran some benchmarks using all of the same hardware and the stock settings for each of F21 and Ubuntu Utopic on this system with the latest packages as of yesterday~today.
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For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that’s what most Q4’2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here’s a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.
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Applications
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This is an overview of document viewers and e-book readers for Linux, but also several CHM viewers. Currently there are 8 applications reviewed here. Notice that I didn’t include ChmSee in this review, since it was announced that it is no longer maintained, and as such it doesn’t come included in the latest Ubuntu repositories (14.04).
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Calibre, the document viewer and organizer (also called an e-library), has received another major update today, just one week away after the 2.4 version was published on September 25. This version brings three new features and includes many bug fixes for the popular document viewer.
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Fotoxx is a free, open source Linux photo editing application that is appealing to both beginners and advanced users. A new update has been made available by the developer, bringing even more features and options.
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Proprietary
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Back in August I wrote about new software that claims to be 4.5x faster than QEMU for running Intel x86 binaries on ARM. That software is available today.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When you’re dealing with audio files, you’ll run into a few problems every so soften. This is especially true with voice recordings and audio that was converted to a digital format from a cassette tape or a vinyl record.
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine development team was able to produce a new experimental release today. 1.7.28 bringing many new features and as many as 21 bugfixes.
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Games
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Pier Solar and the Great Architects is a 2D RPG originally made for the Sega Megadrive that went to Kickstarter to fund a HD version. The game is now available on Linux thanks to those who helped fund it.
I think it looks absolutely beautiful and it’s fantastic games like this are still being made.
The reviews are positive, so it’s looking like it’s being well received so far. They are putting up a demo too, but it seems it isn’t all there yet as it doesn’t download anything for me yet.
With 50+ hours of game-play this could be quite the winner. Lots of places to explore and lots of NPCs to talk to.
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This is now the second Linux port to use Virtual Programming’s eON porting technology and it works really well with Stronghold 3 Gold.
Before anyone decides to complain about it not being a fully native port, eON has come on immensely since The Witcher 2′s first version, and it shows. I’ve personally tested this port and found it to be acceptable, so I imagine a lot of others will.
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Here is the latest instalment of Steam’s Hardware Survey, as usual we do our monthly thing and compare it and talk about it and make sure you know not to use it as a hard figure.
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Play Linux is built on top of Ubuntu and because it utilises the Cinnamon desktop it is easy to install and easy to use.
Play Linux needs something to set it apart from Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Zorin and the way it is trying to do this is by providing the applications people want that aren’t ordinarily installed such as Steam, PlayOnLinux, Spotify and Minecraft.
I found Play Linux to be fairly stable although I had a few minor issues such as Spotify not working and my keyboard layout defaulting to US English despite choosing UK English during the installation.
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Just a few minutes ago Urban Terror 4.2.20 was released with a rather long list of bug fixes to the new mod introduced in 4.2.19, Freeze Tag.
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Just a few hours ago, the third installment of the Stronghold series, Stronghold 3, has been released on Steam for Linux too.
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Satellite Reign was funded on Kickstarter to create a game inspired by the classic Syndicate and it looks fantastic in the new footage.
The Kickstarter finished last year hitting a tidy £461,333. Linux wasn’t even a stretch goal which was fantastic to see at the time.
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I remember the days of old when “Linux has no games!” was a common argument against using it. Now with developers flocking to put Linux versions of games up on Steam we are seeing over 700!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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First of all, this post is not meant to criticize Qt in any way, just to raise some thinking points for people who create libraries.
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OSMhyd showing hydrants in Wennigsen (Deister) I’m one of those persons that always prefers a native application over some web stuff. Usually this comes from some things I want to have, may it be speed, offline capabilities or just hacking possibility. So as a long-time user and contributor of OpenStreetMap as well as an active firefighter I of course know about OpenFireMap. And of course I want a local version of it.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.14.1 are available for Kubuntu 14.04LTS and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
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Muon has been a project that I’ve been very eager to port and iterate for a longtime. I’m happy with the 2.0 series, lots of changes were made and it has served us well. More importantly though, we have a solid technology to keep pushing our work on.
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Looking for the answer to a 64-bit build question I ran into a news item titled “The Unicorn Getting Interested in KDE“. Since I never saw an unicorn before this made me curious.
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I have been working on better ways to write asynchronous code. In this post I’m going to analyze one of our current tools, KJob, in how it helps us writing asynchronous code and what is missing. I’m then going to present my prototype solution to address these problems.
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Qt Developer Days Europe is next Monday to Wednesday in Berlin. It features tutorials and talks on making the most of the Qt toolkit most KDE Software is based upon. Since Qt opened up its development process a large part of KDE Frameworks development has been to ensure close cooperation between the two projects. This has succeeded spectaularly well and at this Qt Dev Days an incredible over 50% of the speakers are active or past developers with KDE.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.14 is now out. It’s a release full of polish from the desktop environment once preferred by most Linux distributions—and almost a story of redemption. After arguably losing its way around GNOME 3.0, GNOME is back with a vengeance.
GNOME Shell has matured immensely since their immature launch. Thanks to solid releases like GNOME 3.14, GNOME will once again be the default desktop on Debian, pushing out Xfce. GNOME 3’s “classic mode” offers enough familiarity to be the default desktop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, too.
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The open-source GNOME 3.14 desktop release is the second major update to the popular Linux user interface in 2014. Version 3.14, which the GNOME Project released Sept. 24, follows in the footsteps of GNOME 3.12, which debuted March 26. As was the case with GNOME 3.12, as well as GNOME 3.10, the emphasis is on the refinement of features and function as opposed to any larger-scale desktop overhaul. That doesn’t mean that there are not a whole lot of changes in GNOME 3.14. According to the GNOME Project, the new release includes 28,859 changes that 871 contributors made. While many of the changes are bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements, there are also a number of user-facing feature and function improvements. GNOME 3.14 offers a renewed emphasis on multi-touch capabilities, including improved gesture support. Window animations have also been improved giving the overall desktop more polish and refinement. Within GNOME, the included bundled applications also have been updated with the new release. Among the updated applications is the Maps tool, which now gains an integrated navigation capability. eWEEK looks at new and enhanced features in the GNOME 3.14 release.
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Ok, that’s just about it for the features of the manual partitioning tool. The next two screenshot shows what happened when I tried to install Netrunner Rolling 2014.09.1 on real hardware. The computer is an all-in-one system with a 320 GB hard drive. I had two Linux distributions installed in dual-boot mode on the hard drive, but the computer is my crash-and-burn system, so I didn’t have to keep whatever data was on it.
Everything I’ve written so far about the computer should tell you that it has existing partitions on it. However, when I started the installer and navigated to the manual partitioning tool, it failed to detect any partitions on the hard drive. In other words, it detected it as a brand new drive. I wasn’t about to create new partitions manually, so I tried the default automatic partitioning option.
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New Releases
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The developers from Black Lab have made available a new version of their Professional Desktop series. The 6.x branch is now out and packs a ton of new features. It’s designed more for stability than anything else and that can be easily observed from what packages have been included.
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OpenWrt is a GNU/Linux distribution for embedded devices that has been designed to work on routers and a number of other platforms. It’s been under development for a long time and now the final version, 14.07, has been released.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has released Storage Server 3, which has 200 percent more storage capacity and better Hadoop integration, among other features. The company also plans to keep Inktank Ceph around for now.
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Here’s a list of activities and bugs fixed the KDE team has been working on the past month.
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Fedora
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Overall everything I’ve tried works fine. I like to get started with new Fedora releases as early as possible in the development cycle so I can help report any bugs I find (in Fedora provided packages) and be up-to-speed with all of the new features on release day so I can deploy to other machines immediately. I’ve been doing it that way for several releases now. I do really appreciate all of the work the Fedora developers put into each release.
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Debian Family
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Exactly 15 years ago I uploaded to Debian the first release of my whois client.
At the end of 1999 the United States Government forced Network Solutions, at the time the only registrar for the .com, .net and .org top level domains, to split their functions in a registry and a registrar and to and allow competing registrars to operate.
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Derivatives
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Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by automatic hardware detection and support for a large number of hardware devices, is now at version 7.4.2.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Netflix recently got in touch with the Ubuntu developers to ask them to update a library in the latest 14.04 LTS release that would allow for native playback on that platform. Now, it looks like they are also working on an app for Ubuntu Touch.
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The Ubuntu Touch platform is preparing for its release in December and it really needs a powerful ecosystem of apps to succeed. A Canonical representative has revealed just how fast a developer can submit an application to the store and how fast it will be available for download.
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This is a very useful method to employ if you forget your password and need access to the operating system
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Back in July 2013, Canonical proposed a new type of smartphone, an extremely powerful device that would be built with the best the industry had to offer at that point. It’s safe to say that it attracted a lot of attention and that people keep wondering if there still is a chance to see something like it.
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Ubuntu MATE is a new flavor based on Ubuntu that will see an official launch alongside all the other regular ones on October 23, and it’s very likely that it will steal the show.
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The Ubuntu Touch operating system has just received a new RTM branch and the developers are working hard to provide a stable and good operating system. We’ve put together a video tour of Ubuntu Touch.
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IBM today is expanding its POWER8 server lineup as part of the company’s continuing effort to provide a competitive alternative Intel x86-based server systems.
The Power8 silicon and server system first debuted in April. One of the new systems is the IBM Power S824L server.
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Flavours and Variants
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The 2013, or Luna, version of Elementary OS is a very solid Linux distro. Its pending replacement, Elementary OS Freya version, will push the unique desktop design to a new level of dependability. However, one question left unanswered is whether this new Linux distro will give seasoned Linux users enough configurability to be more than just a pretty desktop face.
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Elementary OS is a Linux distribution that has been making waves as of late. For a lot of people, including our own Akshata, it made them switch to Elementary OS full-time from Windows. However, the latest stable release, “Luna”, is becoming quite old. Now, we’re getting a glimpse at the first beta of the next released, codenamed “Freya”.
What’s new in Freya, and is it worth upgrading or switching to it from other distributions? Let’s take a look.
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elementary OS is a GNU/Linux distribution that you will either adore or on the other hand, find isn’t for you. Fast, tight and favouring beauty and a logical simplicity over the ability to customize every little thing, eOS takes a different approach to many Linux distributions. In this article we shall take a look at elementary OS Freya Beta 1, a preview of the upcoming Freya release.
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Atmel is sampling a Linux supported, Cortex-A5 based SAMA5D4 SoC that bests the earlier SAMA5D3 with new NEON, L2 cache, 720p decode, and security features.
Atmel announced the SAMA5D4 system-on-chip at ARM TechCon 2014, which is underway this week in Santa Clara, Calif. The SAMA5D4, builds upon the foundation of the earlier SAMA5D3 SoC, and similarly uses ARM’s Cortex-A5 processor. It supports Internet of Things (IoT) applications including control panels, communication gateways, and imaging terminals, says Atmel. The SAMA5D4 is supported with an Atmel Xplained development kit, as well as a mainline Linux BSP, with Android support coming in December.
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Google Glass wasn’t the first eyewear computer, but it achieved several technological breakthroughs, especially in its sleek, lightweight construction. The much maligned device has spawned a growing industry of head-mounted smart eyegear. Our slide show of 11 Android and Linux eyewear devices includes simple Bluetooth accessories for notifications, full-fledged industrial headgear, sports gear for bikers and skiiers, and even a motorcycle helmet (click Gallery link below).
Like Glass, eight of the 10 other devices listed in our slide show are based on Android, while two — Laforge’s ICIS and Tobii Glasses 2 — use embedded Linux. Almost all the devices are open for pre-orders at the very least, and most are shipping, although sometimes only in beta form. Several are OEM-focused devices. Glass only recently became publicly available for $1,500, and sales are still controlled by Google, with restrictions in terms of age (18+) and a requirement that you live in the US or UK.
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The world’s favorite abortive mobile operating system, webOS, refuses to go away quietly. After being open-sourced by HP and then sold off to LG, webOS is now apparently returning to mobile devices in the form of a new LG SmartWatch. A developer website hosted by LG teases a software development kit for a webOS SmartWatch, while the familiar Bean Bird from LG’s webOS TVs also shows up, this time supporting a classically styled analog wristwatch.
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LinkSprite unveiled a “pcDuino Acadia 1″ SBC that runs Linux or Android on a 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 Quad SoC and features eMMC flash and dual microSD slots.
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Using input device / control events in the Tizen Linux they were able to control mouse and keyboard events. You can charge the Tizen phone when it is place inside the robots head, and notifications messages are displayed in the robots LCD screen. You can also perform file transfers between devices and even use the robot as a media output device.
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We have discovered another Linux computer module, the HummingBoard from Israeli firm SolidRun.
The HummingBoard allows you to run many open source operating systems – such as Ubuntu, Debian and Arch, as well as Android and XBMC.
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Phones
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Android
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By all accounts, Android L’s release is coming soon, perhaps even this month (or in November). We’ve known for months what Google wants its next mobile OS version to look like, since the company’s already presented its new Material Design. But what about the different phone makers? They’ve so far gotten used to modifying the looks of stock Android quite a lot, so it’s interesting to see how they’ll approach this version.
And now we can get a look at what Samsung’s interpretation of Android L will look like, as someone got their hands on a pre-release build of the new OS for the Galaxy S5. This build is said to be very slow and buggy, so there’s clearly a lot of work that Samsung still has to do (and this is the reason why it hasn’t been made available for download).
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A report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google tried to buy Cyanogen, Inc, the maker of the custom Android ROM CyanogenMod. According to the report, Cyanogen’s chief executive told shareholders that Sundar Pichai, the head of Chrome and Android at Google, met with the company and “expressed interest in acquiring the firm.” The report says Cyanogen Inc. declined the offer, saying that it was still growing.
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I have somewhat mixed feelings about Android One, but I can completely understand why Google has created it and why it’s so important to them. It might help them maintain and grow profits by making sure that their applications and services are in as many Android devices as possible. Google is a publicly traded company so they have a responsibility to maximize profit for their shareholders.
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Nvidia announced that its Tegra SoC will run Android on a newly tipped Honda Connect IVI system in 2015 Honda Civic, Civic Tourer, and CR-V cars in Europe.
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A startup that distributes smartphone software based on Google’s Android mobile operating system recently drew attention from Google’s rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo. Now it’s gotten Google’s attention, too.
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As you may have noticed, the Next Big Thing is the Internet of Things. It’s certainly true that in addition to computational capabilities, connectivity is also being added to an ever-wider range of everyday objects. On the other hand, in the light of Snowden’s leaks about pervasive surveillance of our online activities, you might have thought people would be a little more cautious about wiring up even more of their lives.
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In a discussion that will sound familiar to Australian readers, US military development agency DARPA wants to create provably-secure software.
According to Threatpost, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar told a Washington Post security conference that embedded systems are among the kinds of applications for which it’s feasible to create such OSs.
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In July of this year, NICTA open-sourced the code for its seL4 microkernel, identifying DARPA among the software’s users.
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An open source approach to software-defined networking (SDN) moved several steps closer this week to becoming a de facto standard. Here are the details.
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Zentyal is one solution. Zentyal Community Edition is a free, open-source all-in-one server that includes all of the features listed above. Plus, you get Samba4 integration, so it’s a perfect replacement for that aging Active Directory server. One of the best parts about Zentyal is that you can take advantage of less powerful hardware. Even though there’s a graphical interface, the server is fully administered via a web browser (which means you can manage it from anywhere on your network).
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ARM hasn’t been paying attention. While the rest of the world has turned to open source for essential infrastructure software, ARM’s Mbed operating system for the Internet of things (IoT) is proprietary, with just enough open source sprinkled in to attract developers.
ARM insists this is necessary to prevent Mbed from becoming fragmented, which is a reasonable concern. What may not be reasonsable, however, is relying on a proprietary operating system to dominate IoT.
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Ericsson is resurrecting its WebRTC-based browser, Bowser, to help spark the development of more websites and apps that embrace voice, video and messaging features.
WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) is a technology designed to help developers add real-time communications features to Web browsers and apps via JavaScript APIs.
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The type of license you choose for your open-source project is paramount. Some licenses are very rigid, while others are more flexible. It is advisable to tap into the developer community for their feedback to find out what will work best for your target audience.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Google has has achieved more success than many people thought it would with its Chromecast dongle, which performs many of the tasks that set-top boxes do, but the Chromecast dongle is headed for some competition. And, given the historical competition between the Chrome and Firefox browsers, it’s fitting that the dongle that is poised to compete with Chromecast is based on the Firefox OS.
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SaaS/Big Data
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TokuMX is a MongoDB distribution from TokuTek, a company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA).
TokuMX is a drop-in replacement for MongoDB, the most popular NoSQL database. It is to MongoDB what MariaDB is to MySQL.
TokuMX is said to offer 50x performance improvements and 90% reduction in database size over MongoDB. And it has support for ACID transactions and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC).
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Interested in building an open source cloud using the latest and greatest that OpenStack has to offer? You’re not alone. We’ve collected some of the best howtos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection. Take a look, get ready to learn, and when you get stuck, remember that he official documentation for OpenStack is your friend, too.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Seriously? Quickly, am I the only one who laughs when I hear the words Oracle OpenWorld spoken aloud, the name of Oracle’s conference now being held in San Francisco? Can I at least see a show of hands of people who find this expo’s name even the slightest bit ironic?
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BSD
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GhostBSD 4.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64 and i386 architectures, it GhostBSD 4.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded via SourceForge or TorrentFTP as described in the section below.
MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISOs and memory stick images are included the bottom of this message and in Download page.
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GhostBSD 4.0 highlights include replacing GCC with the LLVM/Clang compiler by default (as many other BSDs are also doing), make has been replaced by NetBSD’s bmake, pkg is now the default package management utility, NetworkManager is enabled by default, and MATE is now the default desktop environment. This is a pretty big shake-up for the GhostBSD 4.0 release codenamed Karine.
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Public Services/Government
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The German city of Hamburg should do like Munich, and switch to open source, says the city’s Alliance ’90/The Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen). Switching to free and open source software enables innovation and increases security, and the city administration should emphasise this when selecting ICT solutions. “We want to lead by example”, says Farid Müller, spokesperson for the party in Hamburg. “We want an exit strategy for proprietary software used by Hamburg’s administration.”
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Hamburg’s local Green party has expressed that it wants to see the city follow the lead of Munich by adopting free and open source software. Citing innovation and increased security, the Greens want to make sure that the city has an ‘exit strategy’ from using proprietary software.
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An open source solution developed for the government of South Tyrol (Italy) to automatically test government websites and services is now also being used to probe sites of the region’s tourism sector. The software will help avoid double bookings and lower the costs of building and maintaining tourism portals, the government expects.
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The Italian city of Genoa will continue to use open source where possible, says the city councillor responsible for IT, Isabella Lanzone. A pilot with Linux PCs is underway and the city is also gradually moving to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools that is being installed side by side with a aged version of the ubiquitous proprietary alternative.
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Openness/Sharing
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A new Google project aims to create nothing less than an open standard for the entire “Internet of Things,” which the company’s Chrome team is calling the Physical Web.
The idea is to create a comparatively simple system, using a subscribed discovery service, of beacons broadcasting URLs to smartphones in a given area, allowing users to interact with vending machines, posters, and bus stops in a location-aware, organic way, using only Bluetooth and web technology – no specialized app required.
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Open Hardware
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A new toolkit could help veteran and beginner roboticists design, create and assemble a variety of soft-bodied bots. The online resource, which includes a trove of blueprints, tutorials and how-to videos, could spur the development of new robots to operate in the medical industry, disaster relief efforts or an array of other applications.
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Arduino may be known for revolutionizing open source hardware platforms, but this week enters the 3D printer market with the small and (relatively) affordable Materia 101. Produced in partnership with fellow Italian company Sharebot, the printer is targeted towards educators, beginners, consumers, and makers.
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Programming
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Frank Karlitschek, the founder of the ownCloud project, is making the case that PHP isn’t that bad of a scripting language and should be taken to the next level with its shortcomings addressed so it can regain some of its popularity.
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Former close associates from within Kagame’s inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda’s economic miracle and apparent ethnic harmony has led to the country being one of the biggest recipients of aid from the UK. Former prime minister Tony Blair is an unpaid adviser to Kagame, but some now question the closeness of Mr Blair and other western leaders to Rwanda’s president.
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Science
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When a honeybee stings, it dies a gruesome death. The bee’s stinger is structured in such a way that once it punctures human skin, the bee can’t yank it out without self-amputating. As the honeybee tries to pull out the stinger, it ruptures its lower abdomen, leaving the stinger embedded, pulling out instead a string of digestive material, muscles, glands and a venom sac. What results is a gaping hole at the end of the abdomen.
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The person who runs the American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market lobbying group that opposes policies to fight climate change, is not sure whether humans actually cause climate change, according to an interview with the National Journal published Wednesday.
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Security
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Many Phoronix readers likely heard of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and other hosting providers rebooting their clouds in recent days as a result of a Xen security issue. If you’re not yet familiar with this XSA-108 security issue, our friends at Xen Orchestra have a nice write-up covering the issue.
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It hasn’t been a good year for open source. Not for its generally golden reputation for software quality and security, anyway. But in a rush to lay blame for the Bash Shellshock vulnerability (and previously for Heartbleed) some, like Roger Grimes, want to dismantle some of the cardinal tenets of open source, like the suggestion that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Months before the U.S. started bombing Syria, American commandos made detailed plans to hit al Qaeda planners there. But the targeting packages weren’t even sent to the White House.
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Inspectors had found that outdated tools were being used to dismantle ammunitions and that explosives were not being stored properly, the labour ministry said. It has now closed the plant, where 150 people worked.
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America has been at war since the “War that will end all wars” or World War I…
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KILIS, TURKEY- Syrians fleeing their homes have suffered nearly four years of devastating civil war and now a U.S.-led coalition is launching airstrikes on jihadists in their country. But at least 20 non-combatants appear to have been killed in the early raids and civilians seeking sanctuary in Turkey are asking why.
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Islamabad High Court (IHC) has directed the petitioner to attach all the record of decisions given by Peshawar High Court and IHC in drone attack cases with the petition filed by him for registration of murder case against former president Pervez Musharraf in respect of people killed in drone strikes.
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A petitioner Mian Zahid Ghani here on Wednesday filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court (IHC) for the registration of an FIR against former President General (retd) Pervez Musharraf for allowing US drones to operate in Pakistan.
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Stephen Harper’s heritage minister, Shelly Glover, says the Islamic State “are people who are violent and brutal and they have decapitated journalists, they have raped and brutalized women. That is all we need to know…” in order to start bombing. With respect, let me suggest what else we might need to know.
Harper himself, who’s been channelling his inner Churchill (“when we think something is necessary and noble we don’t sit back and let others do it”), lacks Churchill’s direct experience of war. When he was young, in Sudan, Churchill felt the “exhilaration” of being shot at and missed. He didn’t experience the obverse (being killed) but that’s what made a lot of upper-class Brits effective officers and war-makers: their snobby sense of invulnerability.
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The Obama Administration has acknowledged that its strict policy of preventing civilian deaths does not apply to American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
The statement confirming the loosening of high standards pertaining to minimizing collateral damage comes amid reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a Syrian village.
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A familiar critique of corporate media is that journalists too often avoid discussing one grim reality of US wars: the innocent civilians who die from American bombs and missiles. But one Fox News regular isn’t ducking the issue: Not only is he not afraid to talk about civilians deaths in Syria–he complains that there aren’t enough of them.
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The North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice, Chapter 45 of Veterans for Peace and the House of Peace will sponsor a protest against the U.S. use of drones to attack and kill and for surveillance in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other parts of the world 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the intersections North Main, South Main, Central and Market streets Saturday, Oct. 4.
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In a perverse way, maybe it’s progress that the US is now admitting that it doesn’t really care about how many civilians it kills in its efforts to “decapitate” a few suspected terrorist leaders.
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The statement coincided with the heaviest attacks so far in the air war in Syria and Iraq, with US and allied countries launching 24 strikes, 12 in each country on Tuesday, with British warplanes making their first attacks.
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Yahoo News reported Tuesday that Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told the news outlet that a standard imposed last year by President Obama, which requires “near certainty” that civilians will not be harmed in drone strikes, does not apply to the expanding war on Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Iraq and Syria.
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A man convicted on several charges resulting from a drone protest last year was sentenced in DeWitt Town Court Wednesday evening.
Jack Gilroy, 79, was sentenced by Justice Robert L. Jokl Jr. to 90 days incarceration in the Onondaga County jail and three years probation in Broome County, where he resides. Jokl also fined Gilroy $1,000.
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Peace activist Mary Anne Grady-Flores is out on bail pending an appeal of her conviction for violating a court order of protection set up for the commander of Hancock National Guard Air Base in Dewitt. She was arrested in February while protesting at the base, where weaponized drones are piloted by remote control to target and kill people on the ground in Afghanistan.
She has been an activist for decades and now sees the connections among many injustices. “The issue of what’s being done to people of color here and around the world, and to the poor, it’s all related,” she said. “Drone warfare intersects with the militarization of the police. [Using drones] is the same as us being global cops.
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Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner charged in an emotional address that domestic and US interests were pushing to topple her government, and could even kill her.
Domestic business interests “are trying to bring down the government, with international (US) help,” she said.
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Ashraf Ghani, the newly inaugurated Afghan president, has signed a bilateral security agreement(BSA) with the US to allow US troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond the end of 2014 when the present agreement will expire.
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The very first act of the unity government of Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah was to soothe frayed American nerves and sign the Bilateral Security Agreement. Hamid Karzai, erratic to the very end, had eventually left the decision to his successor. This is why the US was so involved in hashing out an agreement between Ghani and Abdullah over the disputed election. It was worried about the possibility that the agreement would not be signed before the troop withdrawal began at the end of the year. The BSA itself, and a similar agreement with Nato, is hardly what either Afghanistan or the US needs. It would extend what is already the longest war the US has ever fought by another 10 years. US troops, ostensibly staying on to train the Afghan army and security forces, will still control all their bases in the country. Most scandalously, these troops will have immunity from prosecution under Afghan law. It was that very point which scuppered a similar agreement when the US withdrew from Iraq – and it should have signalled the death of the BSA too. US troops have killed and tortured their way through the country, indefinitely holding thousands of Afghan citizens in secret prisons without charge. They can now continue doing that with impunity till 2024.
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I won’t say that drones have not killed militants. But was that worth taking hundreds of other lives? Was there no other alternative? North Waziristan is an area where there is no major war or military offensive going on. They could have used assassins with precise ground intelligence to find militants without indiscriminately bombarding areas and causing civilian causalities. Such attacks are helping create dozens of suicide bombers, including young girls and women. These attacks are also creating local facilitators, collaborators and sympathizers against those who are supporting or siding with this senseless war on terrorism.
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American drone strikes have killed over 2000 people, many of whom were civilians and children.
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Transparency Reporting
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A few days ago, we wrote about the CIA redacting information regarding the price it paid for a single Amiga computer back in 1987. After such news reports came out, the CIA admitted that this was an error and shouldn’t have been redacted. Of course, the only reason the documents with that information came out in the first place was because of the efforts of former CIA agent Jeffrey Scudder, who had come across a bunch of classified documents internally that he realized should no longer be classified. Based on that, he filed a FOIA request for those documents — leading the FBI to come after him and end his CIA career (despite his actions being entirely legal).
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The inspector general for the CIA conducted a review of whether the agency was keeping information secret that should be public and found “no instances of over-classification.”
The Reducing Over-Classification Act, signed into law on October 7, 2010, requires the inspector general for each United States department or agency with an officer who makes classification decisions to evaluate whether information is being appropriately classified. The inspector general is also to assess policies, procedures, rules, regulations, etc, to reduce “persistent misclassification of material.” This is to be done in “consultation” with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).
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Finance
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Naturally, the most striking feature of this particular fat finger is its size: $600 billion, bigger than Sweden’s economy ($552 billion). The second unusual aspect is that this error cancelled sales by mistake, rather than make them. That was fortunate for the company concerned, since it probably limited the damage caused.
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As for being “against doing programs for the poor,” that was one of the knocks on Ryan’s budget proposals that made him a national star even before he was named Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate. This characterization of Ryan’s policies was, as his critics often pointed out, accurate; his plans called for deep cuts in spending paired with tax breaks for the wealthy.
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Privacy
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The ECtHR has recognised the importance of this case by giving it priority status. The case is currently adjourned pending judgment in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) case brought by other human rights NGOs. We expect it to proceed in 2015 following the judgment in the IPT case.
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The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation, and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress.
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After enduring a tumultuous cooling period in August, Darkcoin’s prospects were beginning to look up. Kristov Atlas’ review of Darkcoin’s source code was mostly positive, and developer Evan Duffield announced Darkcoin would soon become open-source. Moreover, the Darkcoin price increased during the first half of September. After declining a bit from its mid-month highs, the Darkcoin price rallied before Darkcoin’s open-source release. However, the Darkcoin price has declined since the actual release. Nevertheless, Darkcoin investors should not panic-sell yet.
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Norwegian Nobel Committee will soon decide this year’s winner of the peace prize from a list of nominees including Edward Snowden, Jose Mujica and the International Space Station partnership. Who would you add to the list?
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More law enforcement officials are coming forward to express their dismay at Apple’s and Google’s decision to encrypt cellphones by default. And the hysteria seems to be getting worse. As was recently covered, FBI director James Comey stated that no one was above the law, while failing to realize there’s actually no law preventing Apple or Google from doing this.
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Civil Rights
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Numerous alternative media outlets, including WikiLeaks, have pointed out the connections between Occupy Central and the United States government through an organization called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). I am not surprised at this, nor do I welcome it, given the United States’ questionable record (to put it nicely) at bringing “democracy” to countries where it has intervened in the past. It is most likely in Hong Kongers’ best interests that the US withdraw its monetary support for Occupy Central, as unlikely as this is to happen.
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Sparking a controversy, singer K.J. Yesudas on Thursday resented women wearing jeans, saying this went against Indian culture.
“Women should not cause trouble to others by wearing jeans,” Mr. Yesudas said at a function organised by a voluntary organisation in connection with Gandhi Jayanti celebrations in Thiruvananthapuram.
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Amiran Natsvlishvili is not complaining about the kidnapping. Nor about the brutal beatings, or the huge ransom his family had to pay for his release. The former managing director of a state car plant in Georgia is not bitter, either, about the accusations of embezzlement and misuse of public funds.
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The European Commission, NATO’s neighbour in Brussels, has a code of conduct barring former commissioners from lobbying the EU’s executive body for 18 months after leaving office.
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America’s forever war has come to this — the front lawn of the White House may become a kill zone. That’s crazier than whatever prompted Iraq war veteran Omar J. Gonzalez to jump the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue two weeks ago, running for the Oval Office.
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A radical Muslim cleric who bought plane tickets for three of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackers was communicating with the FBI for years afterward as a likely informant.
Newly released internal documents indicate that Anwar al-Awlaki, also known as the “bin Laden of the Internet,” was emailing and leaving voicemails with an FBI agent in 2003 and 2004, after having been captured at JFK International Airport in 2002 but released at the instruction of the agency.
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Earlier this year, I published an article called “Folk International Law,” in which I argued that there were many unappreciated and little understood costs to the convergence of LOAC and international human rights law. I suggested that the legal debate over targeted killing had driven US-based human rights advocates to contribute to and participate in a bizarre legal admixture of IHRL, IHL and jus ad bellum in order to attempt to impose some legal regulation on the seemingly extra-legal lethal strikes on targets outside of situations of armed conflict. I suggested that many lawyers seeking to influence the Obama administration’s decisions had accepted an approach to global NIAC that treated distinct bodies of international law as a policy toolkit that could be used to create “folk international law” norms that were not recognizable to most international lawyers outside of the immediate US conversation.
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Summer 2014: a year since George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin. Another summer of violence and justification: US shells incinerating Palestinian children, devastating UN refuges in Gaza, pounding Afghan villages, again. Another trial of another white man who says he was scared, who had to defend himself with a blast of ammunition against an unarmed black teenager – a womanchild this time, 19, in Michigan this time, shot through a locked screen door. Another police killing on the front pages of the New York tabloids: a big man, a black father, put in a choke hold, kneed in the back as he gasped for air, as he told cops he couldn’t breathe; extinguished for passing a cigarette to someone on a street in Staten Island. He may have been selling looseys, police said, and he refused to submit; they had to bring him down. Then they watched as he expired. “The perpetrator’s condition did not seem serious,” one stated.
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Dozens of soldiers were killed and more than 70 wounded in car bomb attacks and clashes between troops and Islamists around Benghazi airport, a Libyan army spokesman said today, as the UN threatened sanctions.
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Is the Obama regime preparing for mass arrests of American civilians? Some indicators suggest this is a real possibility.
It has all the laws it needs to imprison anyone should it plan to make mass arrests (thanks, Congress, for the unconstitutional Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act).
It has illegally compiled lists of some 8 million names, (thank you, FBI and NSA).
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Okay, so we thought the response from San Diego’s District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis was pretty bad to the revelations about ComputerCOP. After all, she was responding to the news that she had purchased and distributed dangerous spyware masquerading as software to “protect the children” — and the best she could come up with was that her “security” people still thought it would protect kids? But apparently Damanis has nothing on Sheriff Mike Blakely of Limestone County, Alabama.
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Limestone County’s Sheriff is clashing with an activist group over a new computer program to protect children online.
Sheriff Mike Blakely started offering the program “Computer Cop” for parents to better protect their kids from predators or inappropriate websites.
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Send this to a friend
10.02.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Kano Computing, a startup that plays in the learn to code space by adding a step-by-step hand-holding layer atop the Raspberry Pi single-board microcomputer to make hacking around with code and learning about computational thinking child’s play, has shipped all the hardware kits in its first batch of crowdfunded orders and pre-orders.
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Linux rose to 1.16% while Windows dropped 0.12% down to 95.35% and OS X usage rose 0.05% to 3.42%. When it comes to Linux hardware status for the month, Linux users were mostly running with around 3GB of RAM, 77% used Intel processors, 1920 x 1080 was the most commn display size, and Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit was the most popular distribution.
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Server
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Elizabeth K. Joseph is an Automation and Tools Engineer at HP, who works on the OpenStack Infrastructure team running a totally open source infrastructure built for OpenStack development. In her upcoming talk for All Things Open, she outlines the tools her team uses, how doing their work in the open affects their operations, and what other organizations seeking to make their workflow more open can learn from HP’s experience.
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StackEngine remains in private alpha and has yet to unveil publicly the automation tools that it thinks will become a crucial part of the adoption of Docker and possibly other containerized virtualization platforms. But the company, whose co-founders Quillin and Eric Anderson have backgrounds at CopperEgg, Hyper9 and VMware, has already received backing in the form of $1 million seed funding from Silverton Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners.
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Bias
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Corporate sector overwhelmingly dominates public TV governing boards
[...]
Last year, the issue of corporate influence over public television was thrust into the spotlight when the film Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream was broadcast by PBS affiliate WNET (New Yorker, 5/27/13; FAIR Blog, 5/21/13). The film examined the concentration of wealth and power in the United States by looking at the super-rich residents of 740 Park Avenue—who included then-WNET board member and major station donor David Koch, a billionaire industrialist well known for his donations to right-wing causes.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Last week I wrote about AMD working on a new VA-API state tracker for Gallium3D after the original VA-API support was dropped two years ago. That new state tracker has landed in mainline Mesa Git.
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Linux recently received an update to their AMD drivers dubbed the fglrx 14.41. The new driver was AMD’s first OpenCL 2.0 driver. Following close on the heels of this new driver, however are talks about test builds of “fglrx 14.50”. The next driver from AMD and the features listed for this next driver does seem a hell lot more exciting!
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Applications
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Audacity is a free, open source digital audio editor and recording application. Edit your sounds using cut, copy, and paste features (with unlimited undo functionality), mix tracks, or apply effects to your recordings. The program also has a built-in amplitude-envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode, and a frequency-analysis window for audio-analysis applications. Built-in effects include bass boost, wah wah, and noise removal, and the program also supports VST plug-in effects.
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In this article I will overview the main things that make SMPlayer stand out of the crowd, putting it on the top of the video playback applications list. SMPlayer is written in Qt 4.8 and uses MPlayer2 for video playback. Personally I have only words of praise for this player, which is why I decided to write this review. So let’s proceed and see what the most important features of SMPlayer are.
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Proprietary
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When Google first announced its cloud-centric Chrome OS platform, which is designed to use applications and data in the cloud while primarily eschewing applications that reside on the desktop, people came out of the woodwork citing popular applications that wouldn’t run on it. Among these applications, the Windows crowd made a big deal out of the fact that Photoshop wouldn’t run on Chrome OS. Photoshop, is, after all, a very sophisticated and popular application.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dex is a beautiful looking side-scrolling RPG from Dreadlocks Ltd that has just landed on Linux. It’s currently in Early Access, so remember to watch out for those bugs!
Dex was funded on Kickstarter back in December of last year, so it’s great to see another game that promised Linux support to deliver on it. It uses the Unity engine, so it should work as well as other Unity games.
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Despite Valve’s longstanding push to increase the profile of Linux gaming (and the Linux-based SteamOS that is still hanging out in beta), the growing list of Linux games on Steam remains dominated by smaller, independent titles and a few ports of big-name classics. So it’s worth paying attention to the fact that 2K Games has announced that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel will have full Linux/SteamOS support on the same day it launches on Windows machines and consoles, October 14. The announcement comes alongside news that 2K has also released a port of Borderlands 2 for SteamOS, and it’s offering the older game at a 75 percent discount to celebrate.
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The developers behind the hit survival game Rust have been hard at work on their next-generation branch and it is now the default. It brings a lot of changes with it.
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Counter Strike: Global Offensive was recently released for Linux gamers to much fanfare, but the client was a little on the flaky side. Thankfully as we know Valve support their games very well and have just put out a new update to improve it for us.
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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was recently launched on Steam for Linux, and now users have just received the first major update for the game and it includes a few Linux-oriented changes.
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It’s been rumored for some time that Borderlands 2 was going to be getting some Linux treatment, but with the looming release of Pre-Sequel, due out on October 14, it seemed like we wouldn’t be getting it in time. Well, any Linux fan who hit Steam’s main page up last night was in for a bit of a surprise, as not only was it shown that Borderlands 2 was now available for Linux, but so too will Pre-Sequel be. That’s just… awesome.
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Fans of exploration platformer You Have to Win the Game can finally get their nostalgia sunglasses on for a new bout of precision platforming as the sequel, Super Win the Game, releases on Steam for Linux today.
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Borderlands 2, one of the best cooperative FPS action games ever made, has been released on the Linux platform and is available with a huge 75% price cut.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE 4.14 was released in August 2014 but I did not have time to write about new features in Cantor for that release.
So, let’s fix it now!
New backend: Lua
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Last week GNOME 3.14 was released. I’ve been using my jhbuild copy since last Wednesday, and have to say I’m most happy with the improvements this cycle brought. I wanted to talk a bit about it, and this is one of the reason of this post.
As you can see in the release notes this version includes improvements around the whole stack: the network and sharing settings; the input system, with support for gestures and improved touchscreen support; the shell and a bunch of updated applications.
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We’re picking our best Linux distributions for 2014. It’s always an odd task and this year we’ve decided to take the chance to delve into the genus behind the distros that we use every day. We’ve been inspired by the GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline at http://futurist.se/gldt which we’ve mentioned before, and decided that we’d explore why the major families in the GNU/Linux world sprang up and how they’ve evolved over the years.
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to release the next revision of the Black Lab Professional Desktop series. Black Lab Professional Desktop 6 offers the stability and redundancy of the current LTS technologies, with the tools and functionality that enterprise desktop users would expect. With this release we bring many new features that bridge the Linux desktop environment with your existing desktop environments. We also include utilities for deploying web applications and current web technologies.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Arch Family
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Chakra Linux, a distribution specifically built to take advantage of KDE Software Compilation and the Plasma desktop, has been promoted to version 2014.09.
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The KDE Community has just announced that a Beta version for the second Plasma 5 update has been released and that it’s now available for download. The changes are quite consistent and users should take a good look at the screenshots because they show the future of the KDE project.
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Red Hat Family
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Here at Red Hat is pretty nice, you have all the commodities you could imagine like resting room with PlayStations and pool table etc. or massages room or a little gym. So you are sometimes tempted to skip work =P
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Remember when gigabyte drives were big? Recall when a terabyte of storage was enormous? Those days are long gone when your business is moving to petabytes. To manage that kind of storage you need a program that can handle “scale-out” file storage. For your colossal storage needs, Red Hat has a new open source, software-defined storage manager: Red Hat Storage Server 3 (RHSS).
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Fedora
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It’s too late for this to happen for Fedora 21 but if getting the interest of enough Fedora stakeholders could potentially be approved by FESCo for Fedora 22 in 2015. The thread has been started within Dash as default shell.
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Christian’s lengthy blog post covers the Wayland session advancements for Fedora 21 although it still is run as the non-default session, software installation improvements for Fedora Workstation, and general user-interface polishing.
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Wayland in Fedora Workstation 21 is also an important milestone as it exemplifies the new development philosophy we are embarking on. Fedora has for a long time been known to be a linux distribution where a lot of new pieces become available first. The problem here is that it has also given Fedora bit of a reputation for being not as dependable as some other distributions or operating systems, which has kept a lot of people away from Fedora that I think would be inclined to use it otherwise.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu is a very popular base and it’s used by too many systems to count. Ubuntu itself is based on Debian, but for now we’ll stick with Ubuntu. elementary was not supposed to be an operating system, and in fact it started its life just as a collection of themes and a few other packages that allowed users to make Ubuntu look different.
The developers soon realized that they could do better than this and made their own operating system. Only two versions of it have been released until now, Jupiter and Luna. They are now working on a third one called Freya, which is in the Beta stages. What is happening with this incredible rate of adoption for this OS and why is it so popular?
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Phones
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Android
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The 2015 model of Honda Civic, Civic Tourer and CR-V will be the first vehicle to ship with Honda Connect, and that will be on the European models. Honda Connect looks nice, but a standalone infotainment system that can be used on any car is a much better idea.
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Its answer is Android One, and it hopes that the new for 2014 off-the-shelf package will stem the flow of handset manufacturers in China and India rolling their own flavors of Android from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Every manufacturer switching to Android One will benefit Google’s bottom line and tighten its grip on the so-called open ecosystem.
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When I first read that Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora would be changing careers to work full-time on behalf of women in open source communities, I never imagined it would lead so far so fast. Today, The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization with global reach, whose programs have helped create positive change for women in a wide range of communities beyond open source. Building on this foundation, imagine how much more they can do in the next four years! That’s why I’m pledging my continuing support, and asking you to join me.
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Open source is key to the development of the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, the Eclipse Foundation is taking a hard look at IoT for Java developers. In fact, the Eclipse IoT community is making it easier for Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution by delivering at JavaOne 2014 an open IoT stack for Java developers. Based on open source and open standards, the Eclipse Open IoT Stack for Java simplifies IoT development by enabling Java developers to reuse a core set of frameworks and services in their IoT solutions. In addition to the core Open IoT Stack, a set of industrial frameworks are available to accelerate the process of creating home automation and SCADA factory automation solutions. “Our goal with this is to ensure that Java developers have a free and open-source platform for building IoT solutions,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse.
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Facebook is opening up its cookbooks — but these recipes won’t taste good from the kitchen. Chef is Facebook’s engineering framework, and Facebook engineers have decided to open source that technology.
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Back in July, when there were only a few details available about it, I covered the announcement of Inbox, an email-focused startup company founded by MIT graduates who had worked for Dropbox.
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I’ve been working on Telescope (an open source Hacker News-type app built with the Meteor JavaScript framework) for close to two years now, and along the way I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make an open source project successful.
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On this week’s Structure Show, hear how Talko stood on the shoulders of AWS and Azure — and wielded the Opus codec, WebRTC, FreeSwitch and other open-source tools to build an app that actually makes voice calls worth making again.
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The much-anticipated chat service that Goldman Sachs has been rumored to be working on with startup messaging company Perzo was formally announced Wednesday under the brand name Symphony.
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The Linux Foundation has added another string to its virtualisation bow, with the launch of OPNFV, its project for an open-source network function virtualisation (NFV) platform.
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Rival telecom operators and infrastructure vendors lay down their swords to collaborate in an open source NFV consortium that will develop standards for productizing interoperable technology.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The first Firefox OS based media player has arrived on Kickstarter, in the form of a $25 open-spec HDMI stick that supports Chromecast-like content casting.
The Matchstick, which has already zoomed past its Kickstarter campaign’s $100,000 funding goal, with 28 days still remaining, was teased back in June by Mozilla developer evangelist Christian Heilmann. The unnamed prototype was billed as an open source HDMI stick that runs Mozilla’s Linux-based Firefox OS and offers casting capabilities. Few details were revealed at the time except that the device used the same DIAL (DIscovery And Launch) media-casting protocol created by Netflix and popularized by Google’s Chromecast.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Red Hat is a role model for other companies by proving that you can become a billion dollar company purely on Open Source technologies, without a single proprietary component. The company registered impressive revenues of over $1.53 billion (yes, that’s a ‘b’) in 2014.
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Databases
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If you think Oracle’s only goal when it gained control of MySQL was to undermine it, Oracle has a message for you: Get over it.
Speaking at the annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday, Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven said there was never any question of the database giant mothballing MySQL.
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CMS
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Almost every person associated with the web industry realizes the fact that open source solutions tend to produce better and cost-effective results. And the open source feature can be considered as a crucial factor that led to the evolution of the most popular and extensively used CMS, WordPress. I doubt that WordPress would have received the same recognition as it enjoys today, without the open source feature. This post throws light on how open-source feature has been the driving force behind WordPress popularity, but before that let’s have an overview of what open source exactly means.
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Business
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ERPAL for Service Providers is the world’s first open source ERP built on Drupal, a popular content management system.
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Funding
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A little over two weeks ago, I told you about the Brothers Nielsen, Jared and JR, who produce short educational videos which teach Linux and other tech skills to nine to thirteen-year-olds under the “Hello World” banner — a name which should be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a “programming for dummies” course.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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To travel to Hanoi, Vietnam from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, we have to do two flights and my first flight was flying to Vientiane, Laos. I had to wait for 1 hour to transfer to Hanoi, Vietnam. Laos (WATTAY) International Airport was small, so I did not take any picture of it. Just after I landed like you see in the below picture. I departed from Phnom Penh at 5:50PM and arrived at WATTAY International Airport at 7:15PM and left there at 8:00PM and arrived Hanoi at 9:00PM.
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To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
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Public Services/Government
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With Britain looking to cut it’s deficit the Government is looking to cut costs where it can including on the software-front by moving from proprietary solutions from the likes of Microsoft over to Free/Libre and Open Source solution. HealthWatch England, a part of the United Kingdom’s national health service, is the latest governmental body to move to open source solutions for some of their work.
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Licensing
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It is a testament to the success of the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) branding campaign for open source software that “open source” and “licensing” are functionally synonymous. To the extent that people are familiar with open source software, it is the source code released under a license that lets anyone see the “crown jewels” of a software program as opposed to an opaque binary, or black box that hides its underpinnings.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Open source has contributed to 3D printing in such a tremendous way. Without the open sourcing of many desktop 3D printers several years ago, the space would not be nearly as advanced as it currently is. Open source allows for brilliant people to take brilliant ideas and products, and then develop them further through the implementation of their own ideas. Open sourcing is not for companies looking to make huge profits, although it definitely still remains possible. Open sourcing is meant for those individuals who believe that the ideology behind technology should be for the greater good of mankind, not for the profits on certain individuals. We have seen many companies originate as part of an open source movement, only then to slowly migrate into closing off the rights to their designs, through the filing of patents and other means.
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Programming
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ownCloud is one of the biggest open source project written in PHP if you look into the latest statistics. It is used for the server part of ownCloudas most of you know. We use other technologies like C++ and Qt for the Desktop Clients, Java for the Android app and Objective-C for iOS, JavaScript for the web-interface and more. But the heart of ownCloud is the server component which is using PHP 5.3 or higher..
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The British National Party has expelled its former leader, Nick Griffin, over allegations that he harassed members and told “lies” about its top brass.
Mr Griffin, who stood down as leader of the BNP in July, was found guilty of a string of offences by a party conduct committee, which released a statement that said Mr Griffin was “trying to cause disunity by deliberately fabricating a state of crisis” in the party.
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The British National party has expelled former leader Nick Griffin for allegedly “trying to cause disunity” in a bid to destabilise the organisation.
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China’s foreign minister made it clear Beijing would not allow other countries to meddle into its ‘internal affairs’, responding in this way to US Secretary of State’s call for Beijing to grant Hong Kong the “highest possible degree of autonomy.”
The American and the Chinese heads of foreign offices exchanged their views on the massive protests in Hong Kong before their talks at the US State Department on Wednesday.
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Security
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More details are now public on the open-source Xen hypervisor vulnerability that triggered full Amazon, Rackspace and IBM cloud reboots.
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Finding bugs isn’t an act of charity; it’s a time-consuming process that researchers should be rewarded for. That’s a fact that Google understands well and is now increasing the amount of money it pays out to security researchers for disclosing bugs.
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Censorship
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The European Union Court of Justice ruling of 13 May 2014 on a case brought by Google Spain highlighted the problems for the protection of freedom of expression and the right to information posed by the right to de-indexation from search engine results and, more broadly, the right to be forgotten. Privacy and freedom of expression are fundamental rights of equal value (articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and articles 8 and 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). Whenever one conflicts with the other, a balance must be reached under a judge’s authority because, as a matter of principle, one cannot be given more importance than the other.
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Privacy
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Darkcoin this week announced that it has exited beta and is now ready for mainstream use. Also, the software’s code is now open source.
Darkcoin — a Bitcoin competitor — is the first fully open source cryptocurrency with financial privacy built directly into the software, its developers claimed.
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U.S. intelligence agents have broad authority to spy on U.S. companies as long as they are “believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” — a description that could conceivably apply to any company with foreign shareholders, subsidiaries, or even employees—according to newly released government documents published this morning by the ACLU.
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Executive Director of Open Rights Group, Jim Killock said:
“This will make it very convenient for the government to carry on with mass surveillance and ignore future legal decisions limiting GCHQ’s whole population profiling. It is clear is that this government is determined to reduce the human rights protections available to ordinary people in order to avoid facing limitations on its own powers. But it is precisely these limitations that allow democracies to hold governments to account.”
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Civil Rights
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But will Ferguson shift media ideas on ‘fixing’ black men?
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In May of 2011, Wisconsin Republicans took the rather extraordinary step of stopping work on the budget to pass a voter ID bill in advance of the recall elections. Earlier this year, Walker vowed to call the legislature back into session to pass a new voter ID law if courts didn’t ultimately uphold the measure, which lower courts had blocked.
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There was never any doubt that the accusation of terrorism against Moazzam Begg was, once again, a tissue of politically motivated lies. What is still more appalling, I am told by a Home Office source that the decision to arrest and detain him was taken by Theresa May herself. This involvement of politicians in the abuse of individuals by the state is appalling.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the wake of the debate on the Telecom Single Market, which is becoming quite intense within the Council of the European Union, La Quadrature du Net has joined other organisations, consumers groups and industry representatives in sending to Member States representatives in Brussels a letter urging them to protect to Net neutrality in the European Union.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Following the coming in to force yesterday of the copyright exception for parody, ORG wonders whether the use of parliamentary broadcasts in parodies is now allowed.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.01.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sometimes people can be downright rude and nasty, for little or no reason. In the world of open source this kind of behavior can have the unfortunate effect of driving away new Linux users who are attacked in online forums for asking basic questions. Foss Force has some examples of open source bullies.
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On a monthly basis — on the last Saturday each month — members of the Felton Linux Users Group drag their collective butts out of bed at the crack of 9:30, or possibly earlier, and make their way from various points in the sleepy little town just northeast of Santa Cruz to the solar-powered Felton Fire Station for their meeting.
It’s a good group with core regulars hosting meetings since the Lindependence Project held three open houses to introduce the town to Linux in the summer of 2008. In those open houses, various distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandriva, along with hardware maker ZaReason, and even an open-source stuffed penguin maker called Open Animals based in Phoenix, appeared to show their wares to the curious in the San Lorenzo Valley area. Around 600 people appeared over the three days and more than 300 live CDs went out the door.
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For years I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of ‘Ubuntu Edge’ or some similarly convergent distribution of Linux capable of running my Android applications as well as a full Linux desktop.
The idea of docking my smartphone (now phablet) to get a full Linux desktop including all the applications I am accustomed to using with all the responsiveness and flexibility that we have come to expect from mature distributions such as we get currently from the open source community, is from a business perspective, the return on investment that is necessary when investing into ever more expensive technology.
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In the world of embedded systems, systems-on-chip and single-purpose hardware solutions, it’s easier to list the products that don’t have Linux as their operating system! This month, we focus on putting Linux into tiny places, and that means everything from the tiniest “Android Wear” watch to the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. As Linux users, we’ve been sneaking open source into server rooms for decades. Now we get to sneak it in everywhere!
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Desktop
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“This laptop is going blue screen again.”
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Server
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Linode has added new features to its managed cloud hosting offering, including free cPanel administration software and site migrations, as well as discounts on server-administration services.
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Kernel Space
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Last month following the launch of Intel’s Core i7 5960X Haswell-E platform I ran into a rather odd situation with the first system assembled using the X99 chipset and eight-core, $1000+ processor: the motherboard failed. Coincidentally it happened at the same time as another motherboard failure at a fellow review site. Fortunately, since then, there’s been no other major reports of failures with Intel’s new platform. MSI has been helpful in this matter and I’ve since received a new MSI X99S SLI PLUS to confirm there’s no fundamental issues with their board.
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The project is launching with thirty-eight founding companies, including many of the largest IT companies in the world. Importantly, they include not only cloud and service infrastructure vendors, but telecom service providers, developers and end users as well. (Disclosure: my firm and I represent the Linux Foundation and OPNFV).
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The Linux Foundation – with support from many big names in the industry – has launched a project to build an open platform for network functions virtualisation (NFV).
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In 2014, companies and open source programmers alike are working as hard as they can to virtualize hardware into software. The latest example of this is Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
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Open source network functions virtualization (NFV) took a major step forward today with the announcement of a new Linux Foundation initiative, the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), that aims to advance software-based networking, storage and communications.
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The Linux Foundation today is announcing a new Collaborative Project, Open Platform for NFV, or OPNFV. It involves nearly 40 companies and has largely been driven by end users like AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others. Together this community aims to build a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform to accelerate Network Function Virtualization.
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The response has been fantastic with thousands of people signing up to take the exam from all corners of the globe. We have also engaged with large companies who are buying certifications in mass as a requirement for their teams. It’s been very satisfying to see so many of you engaging with the program.
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Graphics Stack
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The AMD developers have announced that a new Catalyst 14.9 Linux driver is now out and that it brings support for a couple of new operating systems and a few bug fixes.
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Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has landed the new presentation extension for Wayland that currently is living within the Weston compositor code-base until it’s fully vetted.
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The latest open-source component of Intel’s Linux graphics driver stack receiving hardware enablement for Skylake is libdrm.
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Earlier this month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 as their highest-end offerings based on their Maxwell architecture. Since the GTX 750 series debut I have been anxious to see Maxwell succeed Kepler in the high-end space and finally last week I got hands on time with the GTX 980. As long as you are not committed to using pure open-source graphics drivers, the GeForce GTX 980 is the best you can get as a Linux gamer/enthusiast for high performance graphics for ending out 2014.
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Intel’s Haihao Xiang has announced the version 1.4.0 release of the VA-API library along with the company’s updated VA-API driver.
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There’s a lot of work going on right now to the AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver. We’ve written about new features coming to an upcoming Catalyst Linux driver but silently being pushed into the latest round of release is a GLSL shader disk cache.
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NVIDIA on Tuesday released an updated Linux x86/x86_64/ARM graphics driver in their 340.xx long-lived branch.
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For those using the Gallium3D HUD, RadeonTOP, or other utilities, more data is being exposed with new patches for the Radeon DRM driver.
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Applications
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The 4K Video Downloader is a software solution that allows users to download video and audio files from YouTube, with the help of a simple and efficient interface. It’s not freeware, but it’s a good tool and it deserves a closer look.
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Musique is a minimalistic music player for the Linux platform that features a simple and clean interface. It’s not like there is a lack of open source music players, so we’ve decided to see if this one is any good.
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DraftSight is developed by Dassault Systèmes, a French company specialized in CAD design. On the website you can find both the free and a paid, Pro version.
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Scribbleton is a very infant — as in alpha — release of an innovative note-taking app for Linux that provides cross-platform access with Windows and Apple computers.
It creates a personal wiki for storing everything from quick notes to detailed checklists to outlines. It creates links between pages in Scribbleton. Think of this as an easy-to-use database to create links between words, phrases and pages. You can just as easily use Scribbleton to store snippets or volumes of text and quickly locate cross-referenced information.
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Calibre is the premiere application on the Linux platform to convert, edit, view, and download eBooks. It has so many features it would be difficult just to count them all, but it’s time to take a closer look at this app and see what changed in the years that passed since our last review.
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Proprietary
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The latest Lightworks 12 includes a new Content Manager structure, rewritten Lightworks Play engine for improved playback performance along with new Blur, Color Correction and Selective Color Correction effects and more.
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In partnership with Google, Adobe is now offering Photoshop, its flagship photo-editing software, on Chromebooks.
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The Opera browser is now based on Chromium and this simple fact has delayed the release of a stable Linux version for more than a year. Now, the Linux platform will finally get a release and some final touches have been made to the client.
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Pithos 1.0.1 was released recently and it includes some minor improvements and bug fixes – for instance, the bug that was causing the Ubuntu Sound Menu to stop working when using Pithos was fixed in this release.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Borderlands 2, the popular action RPG video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games, is now available on Linux / Steam OS.
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Borderlands 2 is available today as the newest action RPG / first person shooter on Linux. Borderlands 2 — a game powered by a modified Unreal Engine 3 — is now available natively via a port done by Aspyr Media.
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Courtesy of our friends at Aspyr Media the new port may have a few rough edges (what new port doesn’t?), but it’s a really great game to have on our platform. The game is also on sale, so there’s never been a better time to pickup a copy, or if you already owned it be sure to grab some DLC to show your support.
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Outland is a 2D platformer with action game elements developed by Housemarque and published by Ubisoft. Gameplay mainly revolves around using Light (blue) and Dark (red) energies, which allows the player to pass through their respective barriers, and attack monsters born of the opposite alignment (e.g. use Light to attack Dark monsters). The game uses an open world structure.
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Divinity: Original Sin, a masterfully executed true RPG game developed by Larian Studios, might be getting a Linux version before the end of the year.
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A new SteamOS update has been made available by Valve to correct a bug that caused some problems during the booting process.
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I now have over 300 games for Linux. In most ways this makes me very happy. But there is one thing that is getting me very unhappy. Currently games seem to be saving wherever the hell they like, it’s making one hell of a mess. Heaven forbid I might want to ever backup all my savegames.
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Valve pushed down a big update yesterday following their successful Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Linux launch last week.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This being done, we will be able to focus on things planned in Randa: transfer to KDE infrastructure, code cleaning, port to KF5… Big changes hidden behind small words!
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September 30, 2014. Today KDE releases the beta for the second release of Plasma 5. Plasma 5 was released three months ago with many feature refinements and streamlining the existing codebase of KDE’s popular desktop for developers to work on for the years to come.
This release is for testers to find bugs before our second release of Plasma 5.
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Plasma 5.1 is the first update to Plasma 5 that was released three months ago. The Plasma 5.1 update features new switchers for panels, the restoration of the icon-only task manager, a new System Settings module for switching desktop themes, a new Breeze widget theme, and various other changes.
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Qt 5.3.2 has entered testing a few hours ago. This will be the version of Qt we will release with Debian Jessie, and it happens to be a nice coincidence, because upstream focused in stability for the 5.3 branch.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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One of the best things about open source software is the ability to use software without having to pay for it. But is this really a sustainable model? Or has the time come for open source developers to start requiring users to pay for software? A redditor thinks that GNOME developers should start making him pay for software.
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I’m pleased to announce the release of California 0.2, Yorba’s GNOME 3 calendar application. A lot has happened since we announced California (way back in March) and I’m happy to say that we got more features into this first release than I thought we’d make.
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Following on from last month’s update to Geary and Shotwell the non-profit software outfit Yorba is back, this time with a new release of their California calendaring application.
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After launching last month on Kickstarter, the project has turned into a failure and all development has ceased. Operating System U by Andrew Bernstein only raised $1,948 of its $50,000 goal over the month-long period for the OS that claimed numerous advantages over Ubuntu and Windows 8. Andrew then posted, “Unfortunately OS U was unsuccessful. I truly, truly appreciate everyone who backed us, but unfortunately since we where unsuccessful, combined with other circumstances, OS U will not have any more continued development.”
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New Releases
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The Chakra team is happy to announce the first release of the Chakra Euler series, which will follow the 4.14 KDE releases.
A noticeable change in this release is the major face-lift of Kapudan, which now gives the option to users to enable the [extra] repository during first boot so they can easily install the most popular GTK-based applications. Kudos to george2 for the development and Malcer for the artwork.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Today in Linux news Jessie Smith has a nice article on Gentoo-derivative Calculate Linux 14 in this week’s Distrowatch Weekly. Linuxbsdos.com has a review of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, released last week. Mageia 5 Beta 1 is delayed and openSUSE 11.4 is “truly, finally dead.” We have all this and more in tonight’s Linux news recap.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat seeks to become a significant corporate cloud player, boosting the OpenShift open hybrid cloud application platform – or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – and, principally, the open cloud software platform OpenStack.
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As you all know already, CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources provided by Red Hat. This is the eleventh update for the distribution and probably the last one. It features all the packages from all variants, including Server and Client, and the upstream repositories have been merged into a single one.
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Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ) plans to offer $700 million of convertible senior notes that mature in 2019 to raise funds to repay the cost of hedge transactions and other purposes, with $400 million of the proceeds targeted to repurchase the software company’ stock.
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Red Hat will raise $700 million in debt offerings to finance a $400 million share-buyback program; remaining proceeds will go toward other liquidity requirements of the company
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Fedora
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It’s no secret that Fedora has had a challenging time sticking to their release schedules for a long time. With taking care of blocker bugs, Fedora Linux releases tend to frequently slip — with Fedora 21 it’s about two months behind schedule and we’re just past the alpha stage. By the time Fedora 21 actually ships, Fedora 20 will have been at least twelve months old. However, a new release scheduling strategy might be tried starting with Fedora 22.
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2014 has been a strange year for Fedora and one in which the Red Hat community distribution has yet to release a single milestone update. No that’s not a typo.
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In tonight’s Linux news, GamingOnLinux.com poster says “game saves are messing up our drives” – stop it! Phoronix.com is reporting on discussions of changing Fedora release schedule. Jack Germain says Scribbleton creates a personal local wiki to store anything from notes to books and Opera 25 draws near.
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2014 has been a strange year for Fedora and one in which the Red Hat community distribution has yet to release a single milestone update. No that’s not a typo.
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Assuming no further schedule slips, Fedora 21 is set to be released on 2 December. The release is looking really good, let’s keep the momentum going and get Fedora 21 out the door!
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Debian Family
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Adam D. Barrat published some release team news. The window for new transitions closed on September 5, and ongoing transitions should be completed as quickly as possible. The final architecture check was completed in mid-September, and the current agreed list of architectures for Jessie is amd64, armel and armhf, i386, kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc and s390x. The final decision for kFreeBSD ports, for which human resources is a concern, and arm64 and ppc64el ports, which made good progress and have strong support, is expected in the very beginning of November. The freeze for Jessie is scheduled for November 5. In order to get their packages into Jessie before the freeze, maintainers of packages should take into account the fact that starting from October 5, the migration delay for all packages uploaded to unstable to enter Jessie will be 10 days.
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For years there’s been the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port that ships the same Debian GNU user-land as Debian GNU/Linux but replaces the Linux kernel with that of the FreeBSD kernel.
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Steve showed me one of the Debian ARM buildd boxes which are Marvell development machines. These systems are powerful quad core machines housed in compact steel enclosures.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While Ubuntu 14.10 on the desktop isn’t using Mir by default, Mir 0.8.0 is being prepared for release by Canonical and it has a number of interesting changes.
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Flavours and Variants
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We are pleased to announce that the beta images for Simplicity Linux are available. These releases use LXDE as for the window manager and ship with the 3.15.4 kernel and come in Netbook (cloud based apps), Desktop (local apps) and Subdivision (Windows XP style desktop) editions. We have tested these images on hardware as low as a 900mhz Intel Atom with 1gb RAM.
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NI unveiled a fanless, rugged vision computer that runs NI Linux on a quad-core Atom E3845, and offers an FPGA and support for 350MB/s USB3 Vision cameras.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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The list of major corporations getting involved with open source communities is persistently growing, a trend evidenced by the rapidly expanding financial backing of open source foundations like the Linux Foundation. Samsung is one of these companies through its Open Source Group which was established in February of 2013. It’s part of an effort to bridge the gap between the company and the open source communities it relies on and to promote the use and development of open source technology within many sectors of the company.
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Android
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A “Com 1″ Indiegogo project is the first Android Wear smartwatch to use a Ingenics MIPS SoC. The watch offers IP67 waterproofing, WiFi, and a $125 price.
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Late in August, Samsung unveiled its new Gear S smartwatch, a Tizen-powered timepiece capable of making calls and going online without a smartphone. Other features, as noted at the time, included turn-by-turn navigation provided by the Nokia-owned HERE mapping platform, which brings genuine usefulness to the wrist-worn contraption.
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TiVo has finally updated its Android app to allow streaming of recorded shows and movies. You can also access additional content via Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon’s Instant Video service. The TiVo blog recently announced the updated app.
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Calling all Android users – the wait is finally over! The Android streaming app is now available. With this update, users can stream most recorded and live shows directly to their Android mobile device to enjoy in or out of the home.*
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ITTIA has added bidirectional sync to ITTIA DB SQL for Android, enabling a back-end RDBMS to store device data and download sync’d updates for each device.
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Open source networking is becoming a reality now that standards bodies, vendors and development communities are working together. Yet these players face a slew of challenges.
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Facebook. It’s one of the world’s most well-known tech companies and on the forefront of open source technology. Just take a look their portfolio of over 200 open source projects on GitHub.
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Women are an underrepresented group in the open source world. According to data from the FLOSS 2013 survey, a little more than 10% of open source developers are women. Recently, there have been several attempts to make open source more welcoming to women contributors and supportive of their accomplishments. Two good examples of these efforts are GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women, an internship program designed to welcome women into the open source community and provide them with mentoring, and Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Award.
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Open source has promised to unseat proprietary competitors for decades, but the cloud may make the threat real.
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Three months ago I quit my job to work on Sidekiq and build a brand new OSS project and commercial product. Tomorrow I want to introduce it to you.
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What do you do when you have terabytes and more of data and you want to work it with in real time? Well, one solution is to turn to Apache Storm.
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Events
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Inbox, the email startup founded by Dropbox and MIT alums offering modern APIs that allow developers to build new applications on top of email’s aging underpinnings, is today taking steps to make it even easier for developers to get started with the launch of open source email apps. The company is also announcing the pricing for its hosted version of the Inbox API for the first time publicly.
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Web Browsers
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Both Mozilla and Google updated their Web browsers on Sept. 24 for a vulnerability that had been present in all prior releases. The updates fix a single issue in the core Network Security Services (NSS) library that is present in both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The new Mozilla update is Firefox 32.0.3, and the Google Chrome update is version 37.0.2062.124.
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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The streaming stick market is apparently heating up. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all have entrants in this space, and if a new Kickstarter appeal succeeds, there will soon be a Firefox OS stick getting in on the action.
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Streaming media dongles are a dime a dozen these days. Google’s Chromecast was the first on the block but since then, we’ve seen a number of different devices from major players like Microsoft and Roku. None, however, have been able to compete with Google on price… until now.
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But what it fails to recognise is that one of the key ways of making the Web medium “less free and open” is the use of legally-protected DRM. DRM is the very antithesis of openness and of sharing. And yet, sadly, as I reported back in May, Mozilla has decided to back adding DRM to the Web, starting first with video (but it won’t end there…) This means Mozilla’s Firefox is itself is a vector of attack against openness and sharing, and undermines its own lofty goals in the Open Web Fellows programme.
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That’s why we are joining together today to launch the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program, a landmark initiative to create a worldwide community of leaders who will advance and protect the free and open Web.
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In partnership with Ford, Mozilla has just launched its Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows Program, which is “a Global Initiative to Recruit the Heroes of the Open Internet.” In short, Mozilla is convinced that the bulk of the available tech talent in the job market goes to companies like Google and Facebook (which would also be companies that pay up for tech talent), while government organizations and nonprofits can’t attract talent.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The platelets are definitely shifting in the OpenStack cloud computing race. Last week, I reported on Oracle’s release of its OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution. Based on the OpenStack Icehouse release, it allows users to control Oracle Linux and Oracle VM through OpenStack in production environments. It can support any guest operating system (OS) that is supported with Oracle VM, including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Microsoft Windows,and other Linux distributions.
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I just found out that McKenty is leaving Piston, the company he helped to create after leaving NASA and is now moving to a new role at Pivotal.
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This week I noted in a post that the platelets are shifting in the fast-growing OpenStack cloud computing arena, and there is more and more evidence that this is translating into opportunity for many companies and individuals. Pivotal has just hired some monster OpenStack talent in the form of Joshua McKenty, a cloud computing guru and one of the original architects of OpenStack. He joins Pivotal as field CTO for Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform-as-a-Service.
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Funding
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Nantes-based open source software startup Akeneo has raised $2.4 Million from Alven Capital, the VC fund reported this week. After initially raising a seed round from Kima Ventures and Nestadio Capital, cofounders Frédéric Gombert &
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not somehow benefitted from his contributions, and many have benefitted to the tune of billions. In return for the countless billions of wealth that people made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule. Now that the world is done taking from him, they are heading to the next step of villifying him as incompetent.
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Public Services/Government
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Without the fuss and delays that have plagued so many large government IT projects, a key part of the NHS digital infrastructure was recently migrated and updated in a single weekend.
The collection of applications and directory services known as the Spine connects clinicians, patients and local services to core NHS services such as the GP2GP patient record transfer, the Electronic Prescription Service, patients’ Summary Care Records, and the Choose and Book service. More than 250,000 health service staff connect to it every day, sending more than 400m messages each month.
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England’s Healthwatch organisations are now using CiviCRM, an open source solution for customer relationship management. “Open source affords access to a wide community of developers, which means that the software continues to develop and security updates and bug fixes are regularly rolled out”, explains Tim Schofield, the organisation’s interim systems manager.
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The Italian city of Udine is ‘gradually and painfully’ removing all the ties that bind the city’s ICT systems to the usual proprietary operating systems and office productivity solutions, reports head of the IT department, Antonio Scaramuzzi. The city aims to slowly introduce more free and open source software alternatives.
Unhurried, the municipality is implementing open source technologies where feasible, avoiding big migration projects, Scaramuzzi writes to the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).
Earlier this month, IT trade news site Zdnet that the town is making Apache OpenOffice the default office suite. The software is already installed on all of the city’s 900 PCs. ZDNet writes that this switch will save the city about 400 euro per PC in proprietary software licences.
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Licensing
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Looking at open source softwares particularly, this is a fact that is probably useful to you if you are thinking about business models, many people don’t care about it anymore. We talk about FOSS, Free and Open Source Software, but if we really are strict there’s a difference between free software and open source software. On the left, I have free software which most typically is GPL software. Software where the license insures freedom. It gives freedoms to you as a user, but it also requires that the freedoms are maintained.
On the right-hand side, you have open source software which is open for all, but it also allows you to close it. So here we come back to the famous clause of the GPL license, the reciprocity requirement which says, “If I am open, you need to be open.” So software that comes under the GPL license carries with it something that other people call a virus. I call it a blessing because I think it’s great if all software becomes open.
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Openness/Sharing
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What does the above have to do with open source? Do you use tools like c:geo? Then, you are using open source to go geocaching! Geocaching is an offline scavenger hunt, out in the real world, with the help of GPS coordinates. The person who hides the “cache” is the owner and prepares it by finding a nice hiding spot and putting sheet of paper, the log book into a cache container. Cache containers come in different kinds sizes and forms. The most popular kind is a 35mm film container. There are others that look like old rusty screws, parts of a tree, bird houses, or look-a-like rocks. The owner then hides the container, records its GPS coordinates, and makes it available to other geocachers so that they can go find the cache and sign the log book to record the finding.
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Open Data
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France is the first country to appoint a Chief Data Officer (Administrateur Général des Données, AGD), to ensure open data reaches its full potential in improving government services. On 17 September, France appointed Henri Verdier, director of Etalab, which runs the Inter-ministerial open portal, data.gouv.fr. Verdier is to coordinate government actions aimed at inventorying, governing, producing, circulating and using government data. With the CDO, France aims to enhance evaluation of government policies, increase government openness and boost research and innovation.
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Open Hardware
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For almost three years a community of independent filmmakers called the apertus project have been developing an open source digital cinema camera with Axiom, which would allow filmmakers the ability to modify, repair and create their own custom cameras. After creating a proof-of-concept prototype, the Axiom Alpha, the group launched a crowd-funding campaign on indiegogo.com in September 2014 to raise further development funding for the Axiom Beta, a second model which will allow the team to test and advance the product further.
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A new toolkit could help veteran and beginner roboticists design, create and assemble a variety of soft-bodied bots. The online resource, which includes a trove of blueprints, tutorials and how-to videos, could spur the development of new robots to operate in the medical industry, disaster relief efforts or an array of other applications.
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David writes, “A year ago I pledged to make a fully interactive version of my augmented jack-O-lantern, Gourdy; I’ve finally gotten around to doing it, and I’m releasing him free for anyone to use.
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Open source hardware maker unveils Materia 101, a “precision 3D printer.”
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Programming
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While GCC 4.9 features OpenMP 4.0 support, it doesn’t feature the OpenMP offloading support, but that should be coming soon to mainline GCC.
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Security
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The first thing to notice here is that these bugs were found – and were findable – because of open-source scrutiny.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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So that’s a current government official, a retired general, and retired Pentagon and CIA officials. Now that’s a diverse line-up.
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If only its intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance activities, conducted from as high as 11 miles off the ground and on flights of up to 32 hours, weren’t classified. Pentagon officials are tight-lipped about the drone’s role in recent U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
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Holder supported the Obama administration’s use of drones to kill suspected terrorists — even U.S. citizens — on foreign soil without trial or evidence they were in the process of launching a terrorist attack.
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Ironically, while Holder scored on the civil rights front, he failed on the civil liberties front. His Justice Department authorized the use of drones to kill American citizens on foreign soil, without a fair trial. His department defended the National Security Agency’s wholesale collection of phone data on millions of Americans accused of no crime. And Holder has invoked the Espionage Act against government leakers and journalists more times than all prior administrations combined. Charges against reporter James Risen are still pending.
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John Oliver’s been looking for information about the unmanned death robots, such as what exactly an “imminent threat means or how many people are killed during any given drone strike. So far, “hard facts” have been hard to come by, and in the “Last Week Tonight” host’s words, it’s “completely fucking terrifying.”
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There is a collective amnesia that continues to block government and society’s memory that we have been there and done that many times before. Therefore, the war machine keeps rolling on with the encouragement of hawkish politicians, pundits and the military industrial complex.
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The motivating question behind John Oliver’s look at the American military’s use of drones is this: Given the secrecy around their deployment, the uncertainty about whom they actually kill, and the psychological toll that drones inflict on civilians in countries where they are routinely deployed, why do so many Americans favor their use overseas?
It’s a good question.
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Since 1990, the people of Iraq have sustained some level of US military aggression by four successive US presidential administrations. Yet they failed to find WMDs much like they failed to preclude the rise of the Islamic State.
The Obama administration, while channeling weapons to anti-government Syrian rebels, many with connections to terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, was at the same time ignoring the rapid rise of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (now Islamic State, or IS) in Iraq, which aspires to the creation of a caliphate throughout the Middle East. This tragedy has its roots at least as far back as the first Bush administration, when the decision to attack Iraq in 1990 was first made.
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Pakistan drone launched by the United States killed at least four people who are suspected to be militants, according to the statement the Pakistani officials made on Sunday. The drone attack was made on Sunday afternoon in Karikot, which is located in the South Waziristan tribal region.
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U.S.-led air strikes hit grain silos and other targets in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern and eastern Syria overnight, killing civilians and wounding militants, a group monitoring the war said on Monday.
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We’re bombing Iraq again. Isn’t it nostalgic?
[...]
Why, for instance, did we never send troops in when central Africa was being torn apart by various countries and militias? Were it happening now, would we, the UK, be calling in airstrikes? Millions died, and yet I think not. If barbarity and a disregard for human rights is the key criterion (or, indeed, a propensity to start wars), we could all think of a number of countries just crying out for a bombing.
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Nafeez Ahmed examines how the rise of ISIS was both predicted and evitable, and argues the West’s current military campaign is already being used to neuter mass surveillance reforms at home and will likely produce further political destabilisation in the region.
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Tariq did come back alive – but only because his beating was caught on tape and because he was a U.S. citizen.
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The website shows satellites and drones hovering as well as men and women hacking into computers and carrying out surveillance operations.
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While drone operators are not physically in harm’s way — they do their work at computer terminals in darkened rooms far from the actual battlefield — growing research is finding they too can suffer some of the emotional strains of war that ground forces face.
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Host John Oliver of HBO’s Last Week Tonight criticized the U.S. government’s drone program for inflicting fear in children.
“When children from other countries are telling us that we made them fear the sky,” he says, “it may be time to ask some hard questions.”
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What does the U.S. government want us to know about drones? Approximately nothing.
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Sana’a: A US drone strike killed three Al Qaida militants and injured three civilians on Friday evening in the northern province of Jawf, local official and a witness told Gulf News.
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A U.S. drone strike killed three Al Qaeda militants and injured three civilians on Friday evening in the northern province of Jawf, local official and a witness told Gulf News.
The strike occurred in a remote village called Al Khasaf near the province’s capital, the local government official.
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Despite the Sept. 5 ceasefire, fighting has flared frequently around Donetsk international airport, in eastern Ukraine. seven Ukrainian soldiers were killed when a separatist shell hit their armoured personnel carrier
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None of the Slain Identified, But All ‘Suspects’
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US airstrikes hit Syria oil refinery near Turkey
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As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.
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The White House has acknowledged for the first time that the strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.
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Two years ago, Andy Bacevich published an important piece, “How We Became Israel.” His argument concerned strategic doctrine more than ideology. He noted similarities between Washington’s seemingly continuous low-grade military campaigns, which commenced once the Cold War was over, and Israel’s regular attacks on its neighbors. Both countries sought through military strength a kind of absolute security; both had no problem with starting preemptive wars; both employed “targeted assassinations” against opponents as a matter of course. Both relied on air power. Both were perfectly willing to endure perpetual war in their quest for dominion over their region.
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It is, to be blunt, a blatant misrepresentation of reality: one need hardly be a defender of Hamas to note the critical differences. The comparison was, as 972′s Larry Derfner put it, “a crude attempt to brainwash people, to put the most horrifying image in their mind and associate it with Gaza, thereby cleansing Israel of those images of Gaza’s agony.” A twofer in other words. Israel is exonerated of killing 500 innocent children, and America is associated with Israel, for we are doing the same thing. The ISIS/Hamas comparison is valid only so far as both organizations are Muslim and militant.
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This begs the question: If drone strikes are so precise, why do Pakistanis condone them? There are three main causes:
1. Signature strike
2. Double tap strike
3. Lack of supported media
There are basically two different kinds of strikes conducted by US drones in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas: Signature strike/kill list and personality strike.
Those people which are killed on the basis of behavior or pattern, as it resembles to that of terrorists rather than knowing their precise identity, falls in the category of signature strike. Drone strikes shows that hardly any civilians may be targeted in personality strikes and interestingly people have no reservation over the nature of such strikes, because Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in personality strikes.
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Islamabad High Court (IHC) has been moved for registration of murder case against Pervez Musharraf in respect of the innocent citizens who have been killed in drone strikes in tribal areas of the country.
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IHC moved for registration of murder case against Pervez Musharraf over killings in US drone strikes
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After sharply criticizing Israel for civilian casualties in its air campaign in Gaza, which the IDF consistently attempted to avoid, the White House has now issued a statement abandoning the strict policies Obama implemented last year to prevent civilian casualties.
This statement came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib province on the morning of September 23.
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Yesterday, Yahoo News reported a pretty ominous new development in the American air war against ISIS. In the Afghanistan and Pakistan drone campaign, the US puts relatively strict restrictions on targeting to avoid civilians. In Syria, Yahoo reported, these standards won’t be used — putting Syrian civilians, like the roughly 12 already killed by one US strike, in greater danger.
Last week also saw the first reported civilian casualties from American strikes in Iraq, according to Iraq watcher Joel Wing.
Expect to see more stories like this. While the American war against ISIS has so far been unusually, impressively clean, the nature of that war virtually guarantees that more civilians will be killed.
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The Obama administration has acknowledged that its strict policy of preventing civilian deaths does not apply to American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
The statement confirming the loosening of high standards pertaining to minimizing collateral damage comes amid reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children, were killed by a U.S. strike of a Syrian village.
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The road to Agadez is long and treacherous. The city lies in the middle of the Sahara, about 900 kilometers away from the capital city of Niger, Niamey. Yet Agadez is strategically important to the United States. The American government plans to build a drone base in the former caravan city from which it can strike against Islamist groups in the Sahel region.
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The noted peace activist Fred Branfman passed away this past week after suffering the effects of ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease). In 2002, while researching the history of the Vietnam War, I came across Fred’s slim volume, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War in the Brandeis library and the book had an immediate effect on me. It was one of the few books written from the vantage point of the victims of the US air war in Indochina, or of US bombing and covert intervention carried out anywhere in the world. As a means of evading the Vietnam-era draft, Fred had signed on to work as a volunteer in Laos with the International Voluntary Service (IVS) and developed a deep attachment for the country’s people. Unlike many of his peers, he did not subscribe to the dominant US cold war ideology or to a paternalistic attitude towards the Lao, but loved and respected them. He struck a particularly close friendship with a village elder where he stayed, Paw Thou Douang, a devout Buddhist, farmer and medic whom he later found out was a local leader of the pro-communist Pathet Lao (the organization which had led Laos’ liberation struggle against the French and had sunk deep popular roots as a result of their commitment to nationalist principles and land reform).
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The risk of civilian deaths from bombs dropped in Syria and Iraq could be much higher than drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to US officials. This is due to a lack of intelligence on the ground and a change in bombing policy.
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This may kill more of them, but it will not conquer them. It will only deepen their hatred and defiance. Beyond ISIS, U.S. drone policy doesn’t even require identifying who will be killed, and it accepts all collateral damage as simply part of the operation.
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The Guardian asked Matthew’s superior, Captain Brad (who also withheld his last name), why the group is dressed in the single-piece uniforms that symbolise the combat-readiness of the traditional air force pilot when today they spend all day indoors in front of computer screens. Isn’t all that Top Gun stuff unnecessary in the age of the drone?
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I like to call it The War of the Heads. ISIS beheads people one-on-one, up-close-and-personal on You Tube while the United States of America and its coalition of cautious or secret partners prefers “decapitation,” as in using powerful F16 bombs and drone rockets to whack off metaphoric heads.
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Osama bin Laden is the reason we’re fighting ISIS today and the reason we’ve wage two wars in the Middle East. His vision for chaos in the region was clearly stated even before he murdered 3,000 Americans and long before we entered Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. Our national amnesia fueled by the righteous indignation of watching Americans murdered on ISIS video plays right into the trap bin Laden set on 9/11 and mires us further into the sectarian and religious quagmire in Iraq and Syria. Actually, to be completely accurate, bin Laden’s terror and maniacal visions were only half of the problem. The other half rests with America’s penchant for being lured into never-ending counterinsurgency wars against an enemy who wears tennis shoes, hides in apartment buildings, drives pickup trucks with gun turrets, and makes horrifying videos to frighten the average American household into blindly accepting a forever war. After 4,486 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and 2,347 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, close to 1 million U.S. soldiers wounded in both wars, and a cost that will easily exceed $6 trillion, the last thing American soldiers and their families need is an electorate who willingly accepts perpetual war. Mind you, this blind acceptance is coupled with the fact that according to Forbes, over 900,000 Americans have had their lives altered fighting terror in the Middle East:
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Why do Americans hate beheadings but love drone killings? What accounts for our irrational response to these two very different forms of illegal execution, one very profitable and high-tech, usually resulting in many collateral deaths and injuries, and the other very low-tech, but provoking fear and righteous condemnation from the citizens whose country prefers the high-tech?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Whew. Back on planet Earth, burning more fossil fuels is going to have at least one consequence: It will continue contributing to the heating of the planet. But Samuelson never mentions climate change, which is too often treated as a non-event in coverage of energy (FAIR Blog, 5/15/12; 9/9/14).
In a way, this is merely a different type of climate change denial, one that wishes away the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels. Interestingly, the Samuelson column has a “Read more about this topic” link at the bottom, which takes readers to a Post editorial on the same subject, headlined “Commerce Dept. Should Allow Exports of US Crude.” This is notable because the Post editorial page has drawn attention for a series they’re calling “A Climate for Change,” which is supposed to represent the paper’s decision to take the climate crisis seriously. Except, apparently, when the same editorial page is making the case for drilling for more oil.
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Finance
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The number of African Americans living under the poverty line ( $11,139 for an individual in 2010) rose to 10.7 million i.e. 27.4 percent of African Americans were living in poverty in 2011 [1] .
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MPs being investigated for alleged abuses of their expenses will have their names kept secret, the Commons watchdog has announced.
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The high streets of our poorest towns are strewn with betting shops, bargain booze outlets, pawnbrokers and payday lenders.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The headline alone–”PBS Self-Destructs: And What It Means for Viewers Like You”–was surely going to rankle people at PBS. And it did; as reported in Current (9/18/14), PBS distributed talking points for station managers who might be asked about the article. They aren’t intended to rebut anything in Williamson’s piece; it is mostly a compilation of awards and ratings data to show that PBS is actually doing a wonderful job.
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The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has endorsed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for reelection.
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Privacy
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Privacy-centered digital currency Darkcoin (DRK) is now a fully open-source cryptocurrency as it unveils its source code and moves out of the beta stages of development.
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If you don’t already know, Darkcoin was released in the first quarter of 2014, and it’s unique selling proposition as a digital currency was it’s enhanced privacy and security structure relative to the almighty Bitcoin. A minor-league detective can figure out the transaction origins made on Bitcoin’s Blockchain, and mine your privacy, in effect. Darkcoin aims to take your financial dealings into total darkness, with a security-centric design language.
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Darkcoin is a revolutionary new cryptocurrency which offers privacy and fast transaction speed. Four years ago, the mysterious and brilliant Satoshi Nakamoto developed a revolutionary piece of software called Bitcoin. In doing so, Satoshi created both a digital currency (so-called “cryptocurrencies” are decentralized and secured by cryptography, rather than by a government) and an inexpensive payment network. Bitcoin uses a decentralized financial ledger called a “blockchain” to keep track of everybody’s balances and to transfer money from one bitcoin address to another.
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As scheduled during the release of RC5 last week, the Darkcoin Foundation today open-sourced Darksend. The code of this anonymity-offering platform was kept closed-source since the time of its launch. The reasons given for hiding Darksend’s source code were the unsureness of its functionality in mainstream market, due to which the platform had to go through some really rigorous testing and audit procedures.
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Now this argument has been solidly debunked in various articles, breaking down to these main reasons:
You don’t know what you have to hide
You should have something to hide
Privacy is a basic human need
On the first two, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike wrote for Wired Magazine.
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Open Rights Group has responded to the Home Secretary, Theresa May’s call for a revival of the snoopers’ charter to give the police greater powers to access communications data.
Open Rights Group’s Executive Director, Jim Killock said:
“We already have GCHQ engaging in illegal mass surveillance justified by the investigation of terrorism. Why exactly does Theresa May need to revive the snoopers’ charter which would give the police the same powers to infringe our liberties? We need targeted surveillance not data trawling and population profiling.”
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The Conservatives have made a clear offer to the public: they are saying that they will, if elected, revive plans for the Snooper’s Charter. Massive data gathering and analysis of your online habits would become available to the police and a range of public bodies. Powers that are currently being challenged in the courts, but are in practice available to GCHQ under programmes like TEMPORA, would become an everyday policing tool.
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Wading into a fight that’s about to get more interesting, Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday urged tech firms to cooperate with law enforcement.
“We would hope that technology companies would be willing to work with us to ensure that law enforcement retains the ability, with court-authorization, to lawfully obtain information in the course of an investigation, such as catching kidnappers and sexual predators,” Holder said.
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That was all too typical in Holder’s call to tech companies to leave device back doors open to police.
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Civil Rights
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The European Union’s “Digital Agenda” should not only be about digits and economy. It is also about rights and freedom. After several hours of hearing of Günther Oettinger, the designated EU Commissioner for the “Digital Economy and Society”, one question remains unanswered: what about the protection of fundamental rights in the digital environment?
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Last Tuesday, in a courtroom in New York City, a long-running chapter in the “war on terror” came to an end, when Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, 48, a Kuwaiti-born cleric who appeared in media broadcasts as a spokesman for Al-Qaeda the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, received a life sentence based on the three counts for which he was convicted after his trial in March: conspiracy to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
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A fair society is one where laws are clear and crimes are punished in a way that is deemed fair. It is not one where thinking about crime is criminal, or one where talking about things that are unpalatable is criminal, or one where everybody is notionally protected from the arbitrary and the capricious. Over the past 20 years life has become safer, not more risky, for people living in an Internet-connected West. That’s no thanks to the listeners; it’s thanks to living in a period when the youth (the source of most trouble in the world) feel they have access to opportunity and ideas on a world-wide basis. We are pretty much certain to have hard challenges ahead in that regard. So for all the scaremongering about Chinese cyber-espionage and Russian cyber-warfare and criminal activity in darknets, we are better off keeping the Internet as a free-flowing and confidential medium than we are entrusting an agency with the job of monitoring us for inappropriate and dangerous ideas. And that’s something we’ll have to work for.
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The American Civil Liberties Union and other activist groups denounced a speech that Holder gave at the Northwestern University School of Law in 2012 in which he argued that Barack Obama’s administration had the authority to engage in targeted killings anywhere in the world without judicial review, a critical check on executive power. In May the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld deference to the administration in a case brought by the family of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011 after he had been placed on a kill list. Journalist Jason Leopold recently obtained a copy of a DOJ memo about the justification for extrajudicial assassination that was heavily redacted, and the human toll of both intended targets and civilian casualties remains shrouded in secrecy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In my last update, I mentioned plans to organise a European Citizens’ Initiative, a formal petition against both TTIP and CETA. I think everyone assumed that the European Commission would just ignore this when it was presented, but in fact it has done something rather more spectactular – and stupid: it has refused to allow the ECI to go ahead at all.
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Copyrights
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After nine years of campaigning, Open Rights Group is delighted that copyright exceptions for parody and format shifting have passed into law.
Executive Director Jim Killock said:
“It has been a long, drawn-out campaign but we’re delighted that people who contribute to the rich creativity of the internet by creating parodies will now have protection under the law. It’s also right that copying our own legally bought music or books for personal use will no longer be illegal.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
09.29.14
Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Patches are available to fix the bash vulnerability known as Shellshock, along with three additional security issues recently found in the bash shell. The patches are available for all major Linux distros as well as for Solaris, with the patches being distributed through the various distros.
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Since sometime last week the popular Linux site Tux Machines has been under an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. For the last several days, those trying to visit the site have been redirected to Tech Rights, another site operated by Roy Schestowitz, the owner of Tux Machines, to a post dated Saturday by Schestowitz which reads:
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In years past, it wasn’t uncommon to rely on a particular operating system because of the software it provided. Mind you, this was before the popularity of web-based applications that can work on any Internet-capable platform. Back then, any task – ranging from word processing down to video editing – had to be done from locally installed software.
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Desktop
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Learning Linux empowered me to explore and create in a way I never dreamed possible. Open source was initially very challenging as some parts needed configuration that I was unfamiliar with. However, I learned much of what I needed by using search engines and reading forums at Red Hat, Fedora, and other Linux user groups on the internet.
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Spain’s Tax Administration Agency has renewed its support contract for development and maintenance of its anti fraud information analysis systems. The proprietary database solution runs on Suse Linux server. The massive database system is built and operated using standard free software components.
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Now that OEMs have acknowledged that smaller and cheaper is better (the customer is always right) we should see a lot more GNU/Linux on retail shelves along with all those Android/Linux devices. The market is converging on a system with options not restrictions. Expect to see Android/Linux + GNU/Linux systems being offered in bulk really soon, perhaps by Christmas.
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There is new data out showing that Chromebooks–portable computers based on Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are continuing to eat into Microsoft’s share of the portable computing market. The NPD Group is out with research that shows that during the 10-week period from July 4 to Sept. 1, both Chromebooks and Mac portable computers eroded Microsoft’s share.
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Server
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The new systems ramp up ARM’s competition with Intel and give data centers greater compute choices.
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As to the operating system to use, the team wanted a system, which puts the Afghan staff in a position to perform all the necessary work with as little training as possible and if possible without our support. Over the years, the ZiiK team and its Afghan partners tried out numerous different operating systems, primarily different Linux distributions. The youngest of the computer centers, the IT Center Kandahar (ITCQ), was the first to set up all the servers on the basis of Univention Corporate Server (UCS), which proved to be the best for them in terms of ease of use, flexibility and scope of action due to its App Center, which offers the installation and integration of numerous other proven open source solutions. Until the end of 2015, the other four universities will follow and migrate completely to UCS.
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Kernel Space
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So I was really hoping that I could have left rc6 as the last rc and just releasing 3.17 today, but that was not to be. It’s not that anything particularly scary happened, but quite frankly, things just didn’t calm down as I hoped for.
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While Linus Torvalds was looking at possibly releasing Linux 3.17 this weekend, there’s been a chance of course with a 3.17-rc7 kernel instead having been released.
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After years of development, more than two dozen versions of the file-system, and real-world deployments in some Linux distributions, OverlayFS is trying again to get in the mainline Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Years ago there was a VA-API state tracker within Gallium3D for offering drivers support for the Video Acceleration API. That implementation, however, was dropped back in 2012 as it was largely unmaintained and the VDPAU state tracker proved to be more popular. Now, however, it seems AMD is working to introduce a new VA-API implementation for Gallium3D.
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As another interesting NVIDIA Linux news item before ending out the month are some patches published just before the start of the weekend by NVIDIA. A NVIDIA developer has proposed explicit synchronization support for the Nouveau driver, complete with some “RFC” patches.
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While there’s no supportive driver out at this time, NVIDIA continues to be working in the direction of supporting non-X11 windowing systems like Mir and Wayland.
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It’s been a while since hearing anything new about the proposed overhaul of the Linux OpenGL driver ABI, but it’s continuing to be pursued by NVIDIA.
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Roy Spliet, the student developer behind funded by the X.Org Foundation to work on Nouveau re-clocking, continues making great progress on this critical feature for the open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. With the latest patches, DDR2 / DDR3 / GDDR3 memory re-clocking should be working for a lot more NVIDIA graphics cards.
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AMD has released the Catalyst 14.9 Linux graphics driver today with some modest changes but it’s not the really big driver update we’re waiting for.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Adobe’s popular Photoshop software landed on Linux sort of today with a streaming version that will be available to Chromebook users running Chrome OS.
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The Adobe Reader is no longer an item of interest for the Linux users and the company that makes it removed the Linux platform from the list of supported OSes.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Five months ago today was when LGP was planning a server migration with minimal downtime, while to this day they’ve yet to return.
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Neverending Nightmares is a black and white psychological horror that looks pretty awesome. There are moments of colour for things like blood, but it’s mostly black and white.
The game was funded on Kickstarter last year and hit a tidy $100K, so it’s pleasing to see another crowdfunded game have a full release.
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Tesla Breaks the World! A platformer that mixes puzzles, adventure and Nikola Tesla into a mixed bag of gameplay.
The current reviews of the game are mixed, so it’s one of those hit-or-miss platformers that you may or may not want to pickup. The current issues with the game seem to stem from the imprecise controlling of your character which is noted in multiple reviews.
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Following last week’s release of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for Linux I published many AMD/NVIDIA GPU benchmarks of CS:GO. Those initial results were done using the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers while starting today will be the open-source graphics driver results for this highly popular Valve game.
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Like this morning’s RadeonSI results, the Intel HD Graphics 4600 trial run was done with the current Ubuntu 14.10 development packages — the Linux 3.16 stable kernel and Mesa 10.2.6, although Mesa 10.3 is in the process of landing. As said in the article as well, I will have Mesa 10.3/10.4 results out soon for the open-source Intel/Radeon/Nouveau graphics on Linux, among other Steam on Linux benchmark results.
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Cosmochoria is a funny little game that puts you in the space-suit of little naked cartoon cosmonaut who jet packs around space.
The game although it is in early access is very playable right now, and it’s quite fun as well. The Linux version of the game seems to be well done as far as I can see with no immediate problems that I noticed at all, so it’s great to see early access games come out that actually work reasonably well. That’s a refreshing change of pace from other early access releases.
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This instalment of the GOL World Tour visits Germany, differing from the last two in that it will focus on a country more established in the video game industry and that most people will know quite a bit about anyway. So to make it more interesting and less controversial, the History and Culture section has been replaced with some interesting facts.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME “has truly reached new levels of desperation by tying itself to Systemd in an attempt to seem modern, but they’ve castrated and compromised the user experience,” Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza opined. “The same people that made Linux popular to begin with — systems administrators — are not interested in a candy-coated UI which wastes screen space.”
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New Releases
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Black Lab Linux 6.0 Beta 2, a distribution that is now based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and is using the Xfce desktop environment, has been released for download and testing.
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Today we are pleased to announce the availability of Black Lab Linux 6 Beta 2. As we march on to the release date of November 1, 2014 we have introduced a few new features for Black Lab Linux 6 Beta 2.
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We are pleased to announce release of Q4OS 0.5.19 version. An alternative “Kickoff” menu has been significantly improved and more GUI translations has been made. There is new “ipcodecs” installer script for super-easy installation of all kinds of proprietary multimedia codecs that you might need.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop distribution derived from the old Mandriva Linux.
Though OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 is a minor update to OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0, which was released back in June (2014), it comes with some significant changes, including, according to the Release Notes, support for booting on computers with UEFI firmware. To quote from the Release Notes: “This is the first release of OpenMandriva Lx that incorporates support for UEFI booting.” Interestingly, the same thing was said of OpenMandriva 2014.0.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux, based on the latest Icehouse release of OpenStack, is now available for download.
Last December, Oracle became a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and announced a set of plans to add OpenStack compatibility or integration to a range of its products.
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Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project Leader recently appeared on episode 332 of the Linux Action Show titled Weaponized Bash to talk about the recent flaw discovered in Bash (aka Shellshock). Matthew also covers how the Fedora Security Team works and how they work together with the Red Hat Security team. Additionally, the interview also covered the future of security, including where containers fit into making a more secure Fedora.
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In GNOME 3.14 we show any valid application in the software center with an application icon of 32×32 or larger. Currently a 32×32 icon has to be padded with 16 pixels of whitespace on all 4 edges, and also has to be scaled x2 to match other UI elements on HiDPI screens. This looks very fuzzy and out of place and lowers the quality of an otherwise beautiful installing experience.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Be careful of headlines, they appeal to our sense of the obvious and the familiar, they entrench rather than challenge established stereotypes and memes. What one doesn’t read about every day is usually more interesting than what’s in the headlines. And in the current round of global unease, what’s not being said – what we’ve failed to admit about our Western selves and our local allies – is central to the problems at hand.
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The Ubuntu GNOME makers have been encouraged by an important Ubuntu developer to implement the latest build of the GNOME desktop environment in the future versions of their distro.
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Canonical has this week announced the release of a new version of its Ubuntu operating system with the rollout of the new 14.10 beta version which is now available to download and test out.
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Canonical made a very good release back in April. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was very well received and it integrated many features. It was very different from Ubuntu 13.10, so it was spared the “boring” rhetoric. On the other hand, Ubuntu 14.10 will not bring any important visible changes to the operating system and it will be very difficult to set it apart from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
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Calao Systems unveiled a Linux-ready, industrial “PinBall” SBC based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, plus special M2M and home-automation models.
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Phones
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Android
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Google posted a developer overview for Android Auto, offering guidelines for designing extensions to existing Android apps for customized IVI interactions.
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Music player apps for Android are a dime a dozen. There are lot of paid ones too but one app called Jams is about be offered for free. Apparently, it’s developer, Psaravan on Github.com, is now making the app available for free. To formerly paid app on Google Play Store, it is also now an open source because the developer can no longer provide support for the paid users. He doesn’t want the app to just go offline so he’s releasing the app for free and open sourced it.
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Apple’s introduction of larger screen iPhones came as no surprise to industry observers, despite the fact that the company had loudly proclaimed the importance of one-handed phone use. But what motivated Apple to finally offer larger screen iPhones? Forbes analyzes the numbers that got Apple to change its tune about big screen phones.
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The iPhone 6 era is just 10 days old, but for Apple it was already underway sometime last year. By April 2013, company executives understood they had a strategic vulnerability. The booming smartphone market had expanded remarkably in 2012, growing from 494 million units the year before to 722 million sold. While 70% of the gains occurred in phones below $300 — a market Apple had no intention of partaking in — the rest came from phones with screens larger than the iPhone’s 4-inch display. Worse still, premium-priced phones with 4-inch screens actually was a shrinking segment, down 22 million. That Apple managed to sell more iPhones was a remarkable achievement but it meant challenges lay ahead.
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InfoWorld is out with its 2014 Bossies awards–one of the most widely followed award roundups for open source projects. It’s always a treat to find out which projects the publication’s editors deem to be on the rise. This time around, there are lots of surprises, including xTuple, CyanogenMod, and Scribus–one of our favorite open source desktop publishers.
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Clearly, open source is changing the way software is procured. In the era of monster contracts and a few monster software vendors, upper IT management called all the shots and passed down applications and tools the rest of the organization had to live with. Open source is helping to crack that monolith, so businesses and individuals can make their own software decisions.
Make no mistake: Although open source incurs less capital expense, it’s not free — nor even necessarily cheap compared to proprietary software. Generally speaking, at scale, open source solutions require a higher level of effort and expertise to implement and maintain. Open source’s rapid pace of innovation often results in more frequent updates, which means a closer eye on dependencies. In addition, professional services and commercial open source contracts result in significant cost.
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HHVM, stands for HipHop Virtual Machine, is an open source virtual machine developed by Facebook development team. It is designed for executing massive amount of codes written in Hack and PHP languages. HHVM gives superior performance, and improves the efficiency of PHP execution, and increases the productivity for the developers. The developers says that compared with the regular Zend PHP 5.2 engine + APC, HHVM has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook. This is how Facebook handling millions of active users everyday. According to this blog, the wordpress sites running with HHVM delivers better overall performance, approximately 63%, than the websites which are running using traditional LAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Sounds awesome? Indeed!
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OpenDaylight is in good position to do for SDN what OpenStack did for cloud. It has increasing support among the biggest vendors in the networking space and an active membership overall with over more than coders and growing. Brocade, Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and Citrix are among the supporters.
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The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight Collaboration Project is out today with its’ Helium SDN platform release.
The Helium is the second major release since the OpenDaylight effort got underway in April of 2013. The first major release for OpenDaylight was the Hydrogen release, which debuted in February of this year.
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Open source software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) are ready for enterprises to start building the networking and cloud computing infrastructure of the future. So says the OpenDaylight Project, which released the second major version of its platform today.
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Open source is playing an ever-expanding role in education at all levels. One school board that’s embraced open source is the Penn Manor School District in Pennsylvania. The District has rolled out the largest open source student laptop program in the state, with 3,500 Linux-powered computers distributed to students.
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I came back from OSCON this year with a new fire to contribute to an open source project. I’ve been involved in open source for years, but lately I’ve been more of an enthusiast-evangelist than a hands-on-contributor to an open source community. So, I started some thinking about what to do next. When I was involved in projects before, it was due to a clear progression from user to forum guru to contributor. It’s a great path to take but what do you do if you just want to jump into something?
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The Eclipse IoT community is helping Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution by delivering an Open IoT Stack for Java.
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Events
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The KVM Forums are a great way to learn and talk about the future of KVM virtualization. The KVM Forum has been co-located with the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon events for the past several years, and this year too will be held along with LinuxCon EU in Dusseldorf, Germany.
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For a long time various people have been telling me there’s not much information on the low-level / plumbing details of the virt stack on Linux. Especially information related to qemu and its various settings, devices, and so on.
[...]
I updated the KVM and QEMU wikis to ensure the Planet gets more visibility, and hope this goes a small way to quell the complaints of not enough available information.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Tor, which is capable of of all that and more, crucially blocks websites from learning any identifying information about you and circumvents censorship. It also stymies eavesdroppers from discovering what you’re doing on the Web. For those reasons, it would be a powerful addition to the arsenal of privacy tools Firefox already possesses.
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SaaS/Big Data
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One of the crowning achievements of cloud computing is the significant reduction in time required to provision new infrastructure and services. Traditional hardware procurement, installation, configuration and deployment were laborious processes requiring careful planning and often took weeks or months. Efficiencies introduced by modern cloud environments have reduced the time required to complete the same procedure down to hours and minutes. How is this achieved? The key is software automation.
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Databases
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NoSQL, object storage and Hadoop have ushered in a brave new world of storage technologies and applications for the cloud and Big Data. But Oracle (ORCL) thinks the future remains bright for MySQL databases, too, and has unveiled new technologies to make the traditional storage platform easier to administer and deploy.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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At Oracle OpenWorld 2014, CTO Larry Ellison announced that users will be able use a new cloud database service to send their Oracle Database instances to the cloud with “the push of a button.”
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eG Innovations, a provider of automated performance monitoring, diagnosis and management solutions and a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced support for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM in its flagship offering, eG Enterprise. The company will be showcasing its solution at Oracle OpenWorld, September 28 – October 2 in Moscone South Exhibition Hall at the Oracle Linux and Virtualization Showcase, Booth 611.
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You have to hand it to Oracle CEO — sorry, Chairman — Larry Ellison: No one can bash a competitor like he can. Unfortunately, while Ellison may have hit the mark with SAP (“I have no idea what runs on HANA, but it ain’t their cloud. That runs on Oracle”), he failed to address his own company problems: an almost complete lack of interest from developers.
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Business
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“Why not get the open source software that you plan to use for free, and then use the money that you would otherwise have spent on proprietary license fees to modify the open source software to meet your needs more closely?” he asks. “Why pay for software that is the same for all users when you can pay to have something that is unique?”
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BSD
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Instead, libressl is here because of a tragic comedy of other errors. Let’s start with the obvious. Why were heartbeats, a feature only useful for the DTLS protocol over UDP, built into the TLS protocol that runs over TCP? And why was this entirely useless feature enabled by default? Then there’s some nonsense with the buffer allocator and freelists and exploit mitigation countermeasures, and we keep on digging and we keep on not liking what we’re seeing. Bob’s talk has all the gory details.
But why fork? Why not start from scratch? Why not start with some other contender? We did look around a bit, but sadly the state of affairs is that the other contenders aren’t so great themselves. Not long before Heartbleed, you may recall Apple dealing with goto fail, aka the worst bug ever, but actually about par for the course.
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Time for another FreeNAS release! This one fixes a number of issues in 9.2.1.7 as well as addressing the “shellshock” security vulnerability in bash (to which FreeNAS is not generally vulnerable as bash is not the system shell, but it was still worth fixing).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I am pleased to announce a new version of GNU guile-ncurses. guile-ncurses is a library for the creation of text user interfaces in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It is based on the ncurses project’s curses, panel, form, and menu libraries.
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The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.6.4, the fourth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.
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This only affect code maintained by GDB project (not binutils or GCC). Also, support for any other target on MIPS (including embedded ones) will be maintained as is.
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Licensing
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Game Politics reports that the company has been accused of stealing code from a number of open-source emulators including the SNES9x (SNES), FCEUMM/FCEUX (NES), VBA NEXT (Game Boy Advance), GenesisPlusGX (Mega Drive and assorted Sega consoles).
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Openness/Sharing
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After delivering his address at the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting last week, President Obama dropped a tidbit of interest for open data advocates: he promised to produce an open source policy by the end of 2015.
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Open Hardware
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Some of our readers might remember the Microduino Arduino compatible development board that launched last year over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website. This week the same team at Microduino Studio have now unveiled their new Microduino-Joypad in the form of an open source game console.
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In this and future columns, I will try to record and analyze the current trends with regard to open-source. Despite the fact that we have seen many open-source products in the market, and also that many people have been involved with these products, the picture remains not-so-clear for the majority of people.
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Programming
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The latest open-source project devising an LLVM back-end is a Common Lisp implementation.
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Security
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Last year, the web optimization network CloudFlare promised it would double SSL usage on the web in 2014 — and last night, the company made good on its promise. Overnight, CloudFlare deployed its Universal SSL feature, offering free SSL encryption to any site that opted in. All told, that meant two million new sites with the feature, effectively doubling encryption on the web overnight.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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On September 25, in Brussels, Belgium, the Russell Tribunal gathered to examine allegations of war crimes and genocidal intent by the Israeli military against residents of the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge. I was among those invited to provide testimony before a jury that included Michael Mansfield, John Dugard, Roger Waters, Ken Loach, Vandana Shiva, Richard Falk, Ahdaf Soueif, and Ronnie Kasrils. The following day, I presented testimony in the European Parliament alongside Israeli journalist David Sheen and Mohammed Omer, a journalist from the Gaza Strip. (Two other invitees from the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Committee on Human Rights director Raji Sourani and filmmaker Ashraf Mashharawi, were prevented from leaving the besieged coastal enclave by the Egyptian regime.)
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Finance
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Changes in the capitalist system’s operating procedures, rules and regulations are always presented as if they were in everyone’s interest, a kind of “everybody wins” social progress. The changes usually turn out to be mostly or entirely in capitalists’ interests since they run their system that way. Are we surprised and shocked?
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Privacy
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The inventor of the world wide web has warned that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.
Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called on Saturday for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users’ privacy.
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Civil Rights
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Some organized “student groups” in Hong Kong tried to occupy government buildings and blocked some streets. The police did what it does everywhere when such things happen. It used anti-riot squads, pepper spray and tear gas to prevent occupations and to clear the streets.
The “western” media are making some issue about this as if “western” governments would behave any differently.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
09.28.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Back in August Rockchip published a DRM driver for their SoCs. While this driver has yet to be mainlined, Rockchip continues revising the open-source driver to address upstream developer feedback.
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Benchmarks
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These quick weekend benchmarks were comparing EXA and GLAMOR on the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card. The Radeon HD 7000 series hardware and newer (with RadeonSI Gallium3D) only supports GLAMOR — 2D over OpenGL — for 2D acceleration. The Radeon HD 6000 series hardware and older meanwhile has the dedicated 2D code-paths to support EXA by default while GLAMOR can be enabled via the xorg.conf if you wish. Fedora 21 has the X.Org Server 1.16 release and with its post-alpha updates was the Linux 3.17 nodebug Rawhide kernel.
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For those anxious to see NVIDIA’s newest high-end Maxwell graphics card, the recently launched GeForce GTX 980, on Linux, here’s some preview results.
My GeForce GTX 980 sample just arrived on Friday so I’ve been busy testing it over the weekend and plan to have the review out in the next few days. So far, the GeForce GTX 980 is running great on Linux.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.14 is out, and all users now want to try it and see what’s new. The developers have provided us with a list of changes and improvements that have been implemented in this latest version.
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The official support for openSUSE 11.4 officially ended back in November 2012, but the openSUSE ecosystem has things that sets it apart. One of those things is called Evergreen support. Basically, after a version of OpenSUSE reaches End of Life, the community can extend the life of the system by integrating patches and fixes long after the developers have finished with it.
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New Releases
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The embedded operating system built specifically to run the famous XBMC media player solution, OpenELEC, has been upgraded to version 4.2.0 and the image is now ready for download.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The OpenMandriva Association association has announced that OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, the first update for this beautiful KDE-based Linux distribution, has been released and is now available for download.
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Phones
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Android
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Schmidt was on Bloomberg TV Wednesday to talk about “How Google Works: The Rules for Success in the Internet Century,” a book he co-wrote with Jonathan Rosenberg. When mention was made of how customers are lining up for blocks to get Apple’s new iPhone models, Schmidt pointed out more than once that Samsung’s similar phones were available a year ago.
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A notable Mesa DRM library update was released today.
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Motorola as a company has gone through what can only be described as a roller coaster ride over the past several years. The company was once highly recognized solely for their popular Droid line (which is so well-remembered that many people synonymize the term “Droid” with “Android”, when they in fact do not mean the same thing), but soon became irrelevant as other manufacturers came along with more powerful products (which also had better availability). When Motorola was purchased by Google in 2011, it felt like forever before the name Motorola resurfaced again. When it finally did, we were greeted with the Moto X.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The famous office suite built by the Linux Foundation, LibreOffice, has just turned four years and the developers have been quick to celebrate this momentous occasion.
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I was invited to give a talk in Bern, Switzerland, for the LibreOffice Conference. The LibreOffice people are a nice crowd with diverse backgrounds. I talked to design people, coders doing rather low-level GL things, marketing folks, some being new to Free Software, and to some being old farts. It sounds like a lot of people and one is inclined to think of boat loads of people attending the conference when having the community statistics in mind. But it has been a very cosy event, with less than a hundred people. I found that surprising, but not necessarily in a bad way.
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BSD
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The third BETA build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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They could have made millions.
“Screw it,” says lead engineer Javed Gangjee, in his basement in London Ont., when asked about the commercial potential of his work.
The engineer, a Western University grad, is part of an organization that’s giving a voice to people who were trapped in their own bodies.
And it’s open-source. When he’s satisfied with the code, he’ll publish it online so anyone can use it. They just have to help people along the way in return.
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It’s not just people who have tuned out politics who feel perplexed.
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Security
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So it probably shouldn’t surprise anybody that Mitnick, who post-prison reinvented himself as a skilled penetration tester, security consultant and social engineer, is now offering to sell zero-day exploits at the eye-popping opening price of $100,000 (£61,283).
Not a humble price!
As Wired reports, Mitnick last week unveiled a new branch of his security consultancy business called Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange that will both develop zero-day exploits – i.e., tools that take advantage of as-yet unpatched software bugs – in-house, as well as buy them from developers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It is official: US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama is at war again. After toppling Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi and bombing targets in Somalia and Yemen, Obama has initiated airstrikes in the Syria-Iraq belt, effectively declaring war on the Islamic State – a decision that will involve infringing on the sovereign, if disintegrating, state of Syria. In his zeal to intervene, Obama is again disregarding US and international law by seeking approval from neither the US Congress nor the United Nations Security Council.
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The aerial war waged by the United States and its Western and Arab allies against the cutthroats of the so-called “Islamic State” (formerly known as the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” – ISIS – or the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” – ISIL) is a mere tactic in a war without a strategy.
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So far this year foreign policy and defense issues have been pretty absent from the campaign trail. Will this week finally be the week when the 2014 candidates for Congress finally discover foreign policy?
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It is important to question not merely the legal bases of the administration’s claim, but also the wisdom of establishing a national security policy without congressional aid. It is important to note that several national security experts have made arguments that congressional vetting of proposed executive actions improves the quality of the product, legitimizes the policy and lends itself to lesser chance of backlash, either by the public, the federal judiciary or Congress. In short, getting Congress’s approval is often in the best interest of the president.
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Now it’s a new war or better yet the latest phase of an endless war against whatever new “enemy” is out there to be demonized and contrived as the latest threat to America and Americans.
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The men, David Phillip Ryan, 50, of Miami, and Carlos Quirola-Ordonez, 57, of New Jersey, are believed by the federal government to have attempted over a four-month period in 2012 to sell a cache of guns smuggled out of Iraq. The firearms, a mixture of exotic shotguns and handguns, was understood to be stolen from the family of Saddam Hussein following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and obtained by Ryan who enlisted Quirola-Ordonez and two others in an attempt to sell the guns for between $250,000 and $350,000. The plan came apart when the buyers turned out to be undercover federal agents working with Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.
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Two Tornado aircraft which left an RAF base in Cyprus to fly the first combat missions over Iraq have returned without carrying out air strikes, the MOD says
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MPs have voted to back Britain joining US-led airstrikes on Islamic State in Iraq in a vote on Friday. Attacks could begin within days, as ministers admit that UK military intervention could last two or three years.
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In 2000, the United States had about 50 drones. There are some 7,500 today, armed and unarmed.
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An al Qaeda splinter group claimed to have fired a rocket that intended to hit the U.S. Embassy in Yemen on Saturday, wounding several guards in an attempt to retaliate against an air drone strike carried out by the United States in Yemen a day before.
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Intelligence officials in Pakistan say a US drone strike has killed four suspected militants in a northwestern tribal region along the Afghan border.
The two officials and three local Taliban fighters say the strike Sunday killed two Arab militants and two of their local allies in a compound in the town of Wana in South Waziristan.
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You Mr. President accused Russia of aggression, arming the rebels in Ukraine, even though Russia has done its utmost to find a political solution and now, there is a ceasefire on the ground. Far more progress towards a political solution has been made in Ukraine, than in any other recent theatre of war.
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A United Nations Security Council resolution unanimously adopted this week, which aims to curb foreigners joining extremist militants in countries such as Syria and Iraq, is in line with existing South African legislation, according to the Department of International Relations.
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The most popular analogy used to describe Fidel Castro’s turning Cuba into communism’s only bastion in the Western Hemisphere in 1959 was “cancer.” And the fear, to carry the analogy further, was that it would metastasize elsewhere in Latin America.
The CIA, therefore, decided that invasive surgery was needed and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Lacking air cover, all 1,400 anti-Castro paramilitaries were killed or captured as they waded ashore. That was taken to mean that the Castro regime posed a potential military as well as a political threat to the area. It was decided that the best way to excise the malignancy was to cut it out.
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Thanks to a dizzying barrage of lies, mainstream media fear-mongering and a couple of beheadings, the Obama Administration finally achieved its long sought after war in Syria. The tactic that proved most effective in mobilizing the American public back into a shivering, post-9/11 fetal position, was the same tactic used by elites in the UK to convince Scotland against voting for independence. That tactic, as I detailed in a recent post, is fear.
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Wouldn’t that be a pretty turn of events. Obama started out trying to form a Sunni alliance to take down Shiite Assad and now the NYT suggests that he form a Shiite alliance to take down Sunni ISIS. But then again, the NYT is Obama’s mouthpiece.
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ISIS. ISIL. Alibaba. Ebola. Khorasan.
I checked The Daily News archives for records of such words.
ISIS? Our first reference to this was in June.
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Since 2003 more than 1 million people in Iraq have been killed in the conflict. Do you think that more surgical strikes will change anything, other than to anger the citizens that live there and live under the threat of being accidentally targeted? Is this how we are to win the peace? This will do nothing but send even more “freedom fighters” into the camps of the terrorists.
It would be prudent to ask where did ISIS get all the weapons and training it currently seems to have and the answer is very alarming. We allowed half a billion dollars of weapons to get into the hands of anti-Gaddafi organizations. Their leadership includes former generals of the Iraq Army that we disbanded.
Apparently, we arm and train “freedom fighters” when we don’t like the current ruler. Then we have to go fight those same organizations that we built a few years later. We are supplying the resistance forces in Syria and now we want to side with that same government to reduce the capabilities of the rebels?
Here’s an idea: leave the internal affairs of other countries to the people that live there and lets mind our own business. Let’s get our economy back on track and get our Fourth Amendment robbing government restrained.
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It was only just six weeks ago that the president argued that arming the Syrian rebels was “fantasy.” Now, as he abruptly shifts his strategy – both in bombing Syria and aiding the opposition to President Bashar al Assad — he should first answer three important questions: Who will be on the receiving end of these weapons? And, just who are these “moderate” rebels? And, now that the U.S. is at war with the Islamic State, what is to guarantee the weapons will stay out of their hands?
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In the skies over Syria, U.S. and Arab combat aircraft have bombed Islamic State targets 20 times since Tuesday. But on the ground, commanders for rebel groups that are part of a CIA-run program say they’ve pleaded in vain for arms, ammunition and even field rations so they can fight the same extremists.
Although they are among the few chosen to receive aid under the covert U.S. program, the commanders say the U.S. has done little to help them as they struggle to hold onto their main supply route from Turkey against a determined Islamic State offensive.
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The U.S. war establishment is using the ISIS propaganda scare to police the world and continuously subject resistant nations to their global NATO imperial plans through massive aerial bombardment violence that is already murdering people not taking part in hostilities.
[...]
The U.S. war criminals dropped as many bombs on Syria in one night on September 23 than the entire span of recent bombings/170 plus death dealing airstrikes on Iraq in the name of waging war against ISIL, which is really a campaign designed to further destroy the Iraqi nation to control its petroleum . In Syria, U.S. NATO imperialists bombed 50 targets in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hasakah provinces and also conducted airstrikes in Alleppo.
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The United States and a couple of Arab allies yesterday bombed small oil refineries in eastern Syria controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, seeking to deprive the group of one of its top funding sources. The strikes came as President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly, delivering a 39-minute speech that left no doubt he’s given up his aspiration of bringing an end to U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East — and now views himself, however reluctantly, as a wartime president.
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When President Barack Obama decided to drop bombs in Iraq this month, television news turned to a group of familiar faces to decipher the plan for viewers.
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Eager for scoops, both credulously relayed the stories; and eager to furnish serviceable information, the CIA gave them credence. Together they helped trigger one of the most disastrous interventions in recent history.
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Transparency Reporting
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Assange repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the mass surveillance of tech giants Google and Facebook, assailing Schmidt and the omnipresent search engine he oversees as worse than the National Security Agency (NSA) in terms of privacy concerns and the sheer, unregulated power it wields via the mass personal data voluntarily handed over by users.
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The story of the CIA’s complicity in the cocaine trade is finally coming to the big screen next month, through the tragic story of Gary Webb, as told in “Kill the Messenger.” Old timers will remember that Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, broke the story in a huge series called “Dark Alliance” in 1996, detailing how CIA contract employees used multi-kilo sales to a notorious LA crack dealer named Rick Ross (from whom that Rick Ross took his name) to finance the agency’s counter insurgency in Nicaragua. As Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept reports, Webb’s worst enemy was not in Langley, but in DC, New York, L.A., and Miami, where mainstream newspapers put squads of reporters on the task of picking his stories apart. The CIA, naturally, observed all this with glee. Webb committed suicide a decade ago, having seen his once promising career reduced to ruins (he was working for a tiny alt-weekly in the end). His work abides though (you can read it all here.) And he was mostly right. (Edward Ericson Jr.)
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Sometimes, they kill the messenger, and the message takes flight, only to return later, with its truth self-evident to a new generation. And then, the messenger is resurrected.
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Webb committed suicide after his reports linking the Reagan-era CIA to the cocaine epidemic in the United States was discredited by major outlets in the mainstream media, though Webb was largely accurate. (There’s also a righteous profile of Webb and the whole story in this 1988 Esquire piece.)
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Instead of a superhero or super soldier, Renner is playing real life journalist Gary Webb – a man who uncovered the CIA’s role in cocaine entering the US.
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Possibly the most insightful statement ever made by a journalist was from Gary Webb, who killed himself in 2004, years after the CIA and media rivals destroyed his career and credibility.
I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.
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Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.
The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.
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So how far have we come in the last 30 years? As Pearson points out, the federal government is currently testing bots to interview people for national security purposes. But, there’s still some way to go, since even this year’s “most intelligent” chatbot isn’t as smart as its developers hyped it to be.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Renowned US environmentalist Bill McKibben will be one of the recipients of this year’s Right Livelihood Awards, known as the ‘Alternative Nobel’, it has been announced.
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Evidence for Mr. Wong’s close ties to the U.S. that the paper cited included what the report described as frequent meetings with U.S. consulate personnel in Hong Kong and covert donations from Americans to Mr. Wong. As evidence, the paper cited photographs leaked by “netizens.” The story also said Mr. Wong’s family visited Macau in 2011 at the invitation of the American Chamber of Commerce, where they stayed at the “U.S.-owned” Venetian Macao, which is owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp.
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Censorship
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A group of about 15 students gathering Wednesday night in Greenlaw Hall to discuss the history of banned books agreed that banning literature keeps people from considering important ideas.
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The report in question cites the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as the main example, where 11,851 titles have been banned from their prisons. “Of the 11,851 total blocked titles, 7,061 were blocked for ‘deviant sexual behaviour’ and 543 for sexually explicit images,” says the report. “Anthologies on Greco-Roman art, the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, Mexican muralists, pop surrealism, graffiti art, art deco, art nouveau and the National Museum of Women in the Arts are banned for the same reason, as are numerous textbooks on pencil drawing, watercolour, oil painting, photography, graphic design, architecture and anatomy for artists,” the report went on to say. Works from Gustav Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Ovid, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Shakespeare and Alice Walker were all found on the banned book list. The report also touched on American schools, where people like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker are examples of writers banned based on “objections centering around moral and religious reasons.”
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So let’s be clear. People have every right to object to art they find objectionable but no right whatsoever to have that work censored. Free expression, including work that others may find shocking or offensive, is a right that must be defended vigorously. As an organisation, while we condemn in no uncertain terms all those who advocate censorship, we would – as a free expression organisation – defend their right to express those views. What we do not and will never condone is the use of intimidation, force or violence to stifle the free expression of others.
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I still think that my argument was right. Pornography, libel, sedition, hate speech and lies are a fair price for freedom of speech. They would be powerless in a justly ordered, well-educated society. If pornography incites your lust, commend the pornographer for success and condemn yourself for succumbing. If you believe the propagandist, he or she has done his job: It is your critical faculties that are at fault. If the advertiser exaggerates, caveat emptor.
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Free-speech organisations find US government is ‘failing to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens’ as popular books – including Shakespeare – are banned from institutions
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Students at six Denver-area highs schools walked out their classrooms en masse, protesting a plan by the conservative-majority Jefferson County school board to push for curriculum changes to Advanced Placement history courses to promote patriotism and deference to authority. The proposed changes would include the removal of topics that could ‘encourage’ civil disobedience from textbooks and materials.
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It is the call for a review of the Advanced Placement curriculum for U.S. history classes to ensure that teaching materials present positive aspects of U.S. history and its heritage. According to the wording of the proposal, teaching materials should “promote citizenship, patriotism … (and) respect for authority” and not “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
“I understand that they want to take out our very important history of slavery and dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it portrays the U.S. in a negative light,” said Casey McAndrew, a high school senior.
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This week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used recent terrorist threats as the backdrop of a dire warning to Australians that “for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others.”
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The Australian government is primed to give the nation’s spy agency unfettered access to citizens’ computer networks and potentially put journalists in jail thanks to drafted national security reform laws passed by the country’s Senate Thursday, The Sydney Morning News reported.
The Australian Senate passed an anti-terrorism bill called the “National Security Legislation Amendment Bill” that would give the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) more power to monitor Web traffic. If finalized, the law permits ASIO agents to search and monitor an unlimited number of computers on a particular network based on a single warrant request. Journalists, bloggers and government whistleblowers could also spend up to 10 years in prison for revealing details of intelligence operations, as part of the law. The bill is set to be voted on and approved by Australian’s House of Representatives next week.
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Free speech advocates from across Australia’s political spectrum have raised concerns about new counter-terrorism legislation passed by the Australian senate this week.
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Australia is in the process of passing new intelligence gatherings laws that, on the face, appear troublingly wide-ranging, even by American privacy standards.
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Bitcoin and Dogecoin were among the list of at least 20 words banned by the popular /r/technology subreddit. The scandal shook the Reddit sphere last week. Monday, Reddit punished the censorship by obscuring the community. They officially pulled the subreddit from the list of “default subreddits” awarded to popular sub-communities.
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Privacy
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Plans by Apple and Google to increase the security on their smart devices have made FBI Director James Comey “very concerned,” he told reporters on Thursday at FBI headquarters in Washington.
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A few months ago, the Chinese government was said to have prohibited all state officials and agencies from using Apple devices and the now the Chinese government has banned Samsung devices too. However, in Apple products’ issue, China later said that the issue has been greatly exaggerated.
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Ultimately, a decision on whether to allow Supo to continue in its current capacity or to establish a new security intelligence service will be taken by policy-makers. The issue is expected to be on the agenda in the government negotiations to be held after the upcoming parliamentary elections to ensure that a vision for the organisation of security and intelligence services is inscribed into the next government programme.
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The White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.
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One of the bothersome aspects of the war escalation in Iraq and Syria has been the commitment of President Barack Obama’s administration to using language to conceal their war plans.
The White House has insisted this is not a war. The attacks on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are a part of a “counterterrorism strategy.” The US has not launched a war because it has previously been dropping Hellfire missiles on suspected terrorists in various countries. Those strikes, though they have killed hundreds of civilians and were questionable in their legality and success in bringing about “security,” were part of a “strategy.”
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‘Covert Operations’ exhibition brings FOIA requests and dogged investigative fieldwork into museum setting
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When the soul-crushingly simple, single-serving messaging app Yo hit the App Store earlier this year, people couldn’t say enough about the app that said barely anything at all. But given our pseudo-surveillance state and similar apps’ privacy concerns, we wondered — could the government be spying on (or even just talking about) Yo?
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Walker died on August 30.
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“The United States of Barack Obama will have great affinity with Marina Silva’s Brazil,” predicts one of Marina Silva’s campaign coordinators, Mauricio Rands.
Rands, a former federal deputy for the PT [Labor Party] who changed parties and went to the PSB [Brazilian Socialist Party], is one of Marina’s government plan advisers, along with sociologist Neca Setúbal, a Banco Itaú heiress.
According to Rands, a focus of her program will be to take a new approach to relations with the United States, which are now being affected by the espionage scandal exposed by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.
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Not a day goes by without news reports on how large corporate entities and the government are collecting ever-increasing amounts of personal information about us. While consumers voluntarily give away personal information to various websites in exchange for their services, more worrisome is the collection of personal information without our knowledge or consent. When our government is doing the collecting, those concerns intensify. We ought to pause and ask what the appropriate place for the government is in this brave new “big data” world.
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Carlyle Group used ‘smart chips’ implanted in name badges to track limited partners at its annual meeting earlier this month, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
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When Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, a war-weary American public finally had its eyes opened to the profound expansions of executive power that occurred after 9/11. But in the week since President Barack Obama announced a new open-ended campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the jihadi group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), one can’t help worrying that the lessons of the past decade will fade from our collective memory.
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Considered a mistake and now shrouded in secrecy, the document detailed a 175,000 euro contract from the interior ministry, responsible for the domestic security services, for the purchase of forensic equipment from a company named as Onerecovery, which are allegedly used for tracing data and smartphone analysis, much in the same way that the American NSA got into hot water for spying on people.
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Former US spy agency contractor, Edward Snowden, has been declared one of the winners of a Swedish human rights award-also known as the “alternative Nobel”- for exposing top secret state surveillance programs.
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The Right of Privacy has become deeply embedded in our culture and is part of our everyday conversations as a result of NSA’s eavesdropping, drones flying overhead taking pictures, and the data mining of everything we do on the Internet. Let us not forget the surreptitious pens filming us in public, Google glasses capturing our every move, or celebrities claiming violation of their Right of Publicity (an offshoot of the Right of Privacy). Today, the Right of Privacy and Right of Publicity are governed by statutes in most jurisdictions and those that do not have specific statutes use the common law.
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Edward Snowden, who remains the most wanted man in the United States and of almost every global hegemon in the world, was honored with an ‘alternative Nobel’. He, together with Alans Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian received the 2014 Right Livelihood Honorary Award. This recognized his contribution of information on surveillance programs made by the American government.
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For an illuminating glimpse of government power in action, it’s hard to beat the fines the US Justice Department threatened to level against Yahoo if it didn’t comply with a secret and sweeping surveillance request in 2008.
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The National Security Agency has hired its first “chief risk officer” in an attempt to quell public fear that it operates outside the rule of law.
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The National Security Agency (NSA), which develops surveillance tools that are both dazzling and terrifying, has been making money on the side by licensing its technology to private businesses for more than two decades.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that Canadian security agencies don’t collect “metadata” has some cybersecurity experts scratching their heads.
That’s because the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) is not only legally mandated to collect metadata — data that details the circumstances around electronic communications — but has repeatedly confirmed that they do.
“Unfortunately we live in a ‘black hole’ around CSEC’s activities,” Ron Diebert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said in an email.
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Knowing all this does not give me confidence in my government, but it does tend to vindicate Snowden’s actions. Maybe he did betray the government’s trust, but the government has been betraying the people’s trust to a far greater degree.
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German opposition members have appealed to the country’s highest court to allow former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to testify at a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin.
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Opposition lawmakers have asked Germany’s highest court to rule on whether former NSA contractor Edward Snowden can come to Berlin to testify about the agency’s activities.
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A recent report in the Globe and Mail reveals that Canada’s signals intelligence agency has developed and field-tested software that can secretly hijack a computer and then use it as a springboard to hack into other computers.
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High schools in the district of Huntsville, Alabama, have been monitoring their students’ activities on social media for the past 18 months after receiving a tip from the National Security Agency (NSA) about violent threats being made on Facebook.
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He said, “Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you’re being a rat. You’re being a narc.”
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The public square that the internet and social media offers Russian activists may soon be compromised. The Moscow Times reported Friday that the Kremlin’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, this week notified Google, Facebook, and Twitter that they would need to register as “organizers of information distribution” under the country’s so-called blogger law.
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Surprised? Probably not. According to recent documents from Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency is spending $79.7 million on a research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets”. This project involves building a quantum computer that would be able to break most types of encryption. At the moment, the agency is nowhere near completion of the project, so no need to worry yet. However, the NSA is already pretty good at breaking encryption and bribes companies to promote flawed encryption, so with this much power and money, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that the NSA will successfully build this computer.
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Combine government bad behaviour and an employee with a conscience and you get a whistleblower. Add a journalist into the mix and you have a recipe for government accountability.
In the technological age, the link between journalist and insider source is very often digital communication. Knowing this, governments all over the world are working hard to track the communications of leakers and the journalists who can make those leaks public.
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There are reports that American Muslims are sometimes coerced into becoming informants for the security agencies.
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A third civil liberties organization is asking a federal appeals court for time to defend the only federal court ruling challenging the legality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of information on U.S. telephone calls.
The Center for National Security Studies, a D.C.-based group which advocates for individual liberties and government transparency, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Friday to allow the group time to argue that U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the counterterrorism program appeared to be illegal was correct, albeit on different grounds than Leon identified.
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In the last few days three stories have broken that make the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel appear more insidious and threatening than ever.
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Private information stored online by British computer users could be scrutinised by American law enforcement agencies under a wide-ranging new right-to-snoop being pursued by the US government.
Federal authorities in the US are using the courts to try to force American-owned technology companies to disclose emails and other data held in the “Cloud” – the vast network of servers where data is stored for customers.
The claim would require companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google to open up all their electronic records to agencies – such as the CIA, the NSA and the FBI – even if it is stored in Europe rather than on US soil.
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Civil Rights
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Imagine the United States without independent reporters. Where would the news come from? Press releases and corporate statements? Government-run media? And more importantly, what would we have missed over the last century? Watergate, COINTELPRO, the CIA’s manipulation of politics in Vietnam—none of these things would be common knowledge without courageous reporters, who were willing to publish stories on scandals that rocked the entire country.
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President Obama made some commendable speeches at the United Nations last week, but his self-serving remarks to a panel on open government won’t win any plaudits from supporters of an independent news media. They were an astonishing example of saying one thing while doing just the opposite.
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However, we’ve had profound disagreements with the Attorney General on national security issues. During his tenure, DOJ approved the drone killing of an American far away from any battlefield, approved the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, failed to prosecute any of the Bush administration torturers, and presided over more leak prosecutions than all previous Justice Departments combined. We acknowledge, nonetheless, that he fought, albeit unsuccessfully, to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal criminal courts rather than in flawed military commissions.
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Holder’s work on civil liberties has been far less inspiring.
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Thursday President Obama announced Eric Holder will be leaving as Attorney General of the United States as soon as his yet to be named replacement is confirmed.
Holder is the fist African-American and the 4th-longest serving U.S. Attorney General. He has served in Department of Justice under six Presidents of both parties. But his last five and half years as A.G. were the most eventful, as he confronted issues that were both controversial and historic.
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On Thursday night’s broadcast, however, he suggested that otherwise nonjudgmental liberals, multi-culturalists, and others who express outrage when Jonah Hill, Donald Sterling, Rush Limbaugh, or Mel Gibson say stupid or offensive things, or when a baker refuses to make gay wedding cakes, remain silent “while gross atrocities are ignored across the world.” He also called attention to the fact that a group of Yale students recently tried to prevent Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali from speaking on campus.
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Large-scale violations of electronic privacy, many of which were exposed by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, also occurred on Holder’s watch. Holder didn’t initiate the bulk collection of phone or e-mail records; nor did he run the N.S.A. But Holder, as the Administration’s top lawyer for half a dozen years, nonetheless bears responsibility for these gross and repeated violations of Constitutional principles. It is ultimately the Justice Department’s duty to stand up for the Constitution when other parts of government want to abandon it, and this Holder failed to do. (During the Bush Administration, Justice Department lawyers, like Jack Goldsmith and then Acting Attorney General James Comey, fought the White House’s excessive surveillance of American citizens at a key moment.) We don’t know what he knew, but Holder’s Justice Department does not seem to have put a real brake on the program.
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This month, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery hosted a “terror training” for law enforcement led by someone we consider a notorious Islamophobe, John Guandolo. As Muslim leaders of Arizona, we are deeply disappointed that Mr. Montgomery ignored our repeated calls to invite reputable trainers to address this important topic and chose individuals who advocate extreme anti-Muslim views.
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The Nazis and the Japanese resurrected the institution of slavery, and the Nazis even industrialized slavery and genocide in the Holocaust. Allied victory in World War II destroyed slavery based on anti-Semitism. Harry Truman followed up FDR’s work by laying the foundation for confronting the Stalinist brand of slavery, and Ronald Reagan played the major role in bringing down the Soviet Union some 40 years later without a shot being fired.
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Mliswa had been challenged over allegations he took US embassy staffer, Eric Little, on a tour of Hurungwe West in June to meet local government officials.
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While Agee was in West Germany, he campaigned traitorously against the CIA. He revealed the identities of several CIA officers, and put their lives in danger. For the domestic purpose of making it difficult for Agee to continue his anti-CIA campaign, the State Department revoked his passport.
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Roger Stone’s new book Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth About The President, Watergate, and The Pardon is a Washington thriller that hinges on a shocking revelation: that the CIA once planned to assassinate President Richard Nixon.
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One panelist, John Newman, who gave a presentation on CIA pseudonyms used by agents connected with the Kennedys, said the Warren Report “was not just wrong. The longer we have to study the case, the wronger its conclusions become.”
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In 1996 — as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it — the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media’s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.
Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page report describes the CIA’s damage control after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.
Although the CIA’s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration’s cover-up, the mainstream media’s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.
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The preceding paragraphs will come as no surprise to anyone who has researched or read about the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program. But if I held a security clearance, I could lose my career or face prosecution for publishing them.
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The release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program appears to have slipped further, judging by filings Thursday afternoon in a pair of related court cases.
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The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on “enhanced interrogation” techniques has been delayed again, this time until late October, according to an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
The Department of Justice was due to release a summary of the report that details the committee’s investigation of a CIA interrogations program under former President George W. Bush in late September. The report was requested via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Feinstein intervened, requesting a one-month extension, so that the Intelligence Committee she leads, and the White House, could reduce heavy redactions made to the summary by the CIA, the aide said.
This is Feinstein’s second request for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to delay the summary’s release under the FOIA request.
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The non-denial denial is an art that takes many forms in official Washington.
The basic idea is that when you or your organization are accused of doing something that you did in fact do, you respond with what sounds like a denial, but really isn’t.
You issue a very narrowly-crafted denial involving a lot of hairsplitting, while avoiding the central claim. Or you dismiss the accusation as unworthy of response. Or you deny something else: You raise a straw man accusation and deny that; or – possibly best yet — you take advantage of a poorly worded question.
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Gen. Augusto Pinochet and his minions overthrew Allende’s democratic election in 1973 with the full connivance of President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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Less than two weeks later, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the two political leaders in San Francisco, where most of the Jonestown victims came from, most likely to undertake an independent investigation of the covert CIA involvement in Jonestown were also murdered.
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If you don’t know Ray McGovern yet, you probably should.
You see, Ray just beat down, in court, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and a small part of Post-Constitutional America.
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Now this CISPA bill, which is yet again pushed by congressional support of the executive, deals with pre-emptively “defending” against cyber terrorism. What this bill actually does is allow, under law, for private corporations and businesses to give detailed information about our lives such as our search, text, email, online store accounts, word and endless other technological privacies, including complete “cloud” access of each U.S. citizen to the federal government.
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On Oct. 2, 2013, Gov. Brown signed the Donnelly-introduced Assembly Bill 351 into law. Coined The California Liberty Preservation Act, the law opposes the indefinite military detention of persons without charge or trial and prohibits state cooperation with federal officials in enacting the provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Agreement.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California lauded the bill as signaling that NDAA was “contrary to the common values of all Americans.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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A senior Chinese internet regulator has been sacked and expelled him from the ruling Communist Party for accepting huge bribes.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux — the free open source operating system for enterprise, small business and home computing use — is not used everywhere yet. However, its user base crosses nearly every industry.
Linux is in many places today. It’s in consumer products like TVs and computer networking gear. Linux drives services that users do not even know run Linux. Think in terms of servers, Big Data farms and cloud storage facilities. The analytics and Big Data marketplaces host and run platforms and applications on top of Linux in data centers and in the cloud.
The Linux OS certainly is evolving in the connected car space, for example. Linux also is embedded in many appliances. It often controls the sensors in industrial machines, navigational gear and medical instruments.
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Kernel Space
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If all goes well, the Linux 3.17 kernel might be released this weekend. For those not closely following the kernel’s development over the past two months, here’s a recap of some of the most interesting changes found in this new version of the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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To the dismay of open-source fans, NVIDIA is tightening the belt so to speak around their GPU hardware: with Maxwell and future hardware, certain aspects of the NVIDIA graphics processor chip will only be available to the “Falcon” (a.k.a. “FUC”) firmware images that have been signed by NVIDIA. While this will throw a wrench at Nouveau’s open-source effort, NVIDIA at least informed Nouveau and are jointly working towards an adequate solution.
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Earlier this year I delivered the exclusive news how AMD was looking at a new Linux driver strategy for Catalyst that involved leveraging the open-source Radeon DRM kernel driver. The strategy at the time effectively meant just making Catalyst a user-space blob and riding off the open-source Radeon kernel driver to share more common code and hopefully lead to a better experience. It looks like this driver strategy is moving forward.
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AMD is soliciting feedback on the Catalyst driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Interstellar Marines developers have been very busy and this new update is bloody huge. It includes the first co-op level and it’s quite big.
It adds “The NeuroGen Incident” which is the first ever co-op experience for the game, but it’s not limited to that. It also includes their first pass at a revival system for downed marines as well like many other co-op games have.
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It took longer than we ever hoped, but Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is finally in opt-in beta for Linux. It may have taken over a year and a half, but they really are about to deliver on their promise. Better late than never right?
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AMD is expected to release an updated Catalyst Linux driver in due time that will improve the frame rates for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Yesterday, Dmitry finished another part of his work on the transform tool. He added cage tranform and improved the anti-aliasing. Only liquify is still on the transform tool todo list!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I have spent the last few months of spare time working on the user interface. The purpose is to adapt the UI and use the great GTK+3 features when adequate. There is still much left to do, but here are before and after screenshots.
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New Releases
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The OpenELEC team is proud to announce OpenELEC 4.2.0.
OpenELEC-4.2 is the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-4.0.
Since OpenELEC 4.0 we have reworked many parts of the underlying OS. This release is the result of 6 months of development and testing and will be the basis for the upcoming OpenELEC-5.0 release series which is planned to release with Kodi-14 later this year.
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A new release of OpenELEC is out for the Linux distribution designed around XBMC (now known as Kodi) for carrying out multimedia tasks with an easy-to-setup operating system.
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We are releasing this maintenance shortly after our initial 2014.09 release to fix problems with the nvidia driver, and include a first fix for the bash shell vulnerability.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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OpenMandriva is proud to announce the release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, that aims fixing lots of bugs and improving the overall performance of the distro.
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The OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 release features the Linux 3.15.10 kernel, KDE 4.13.3 desktop, Firefox 32, Mesa 10.2.6, X.Org Server 1.15.2, and other updated but not too bleeding-edge packages.
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Red Hat Family
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The first release candidate to the RHEL7-based Scientific Linux 7.0 is finally available.
While the Scientific 7 Alpha came not too long after the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 release, today we’re finally seeing the release candidate — long after CentOS 7.0 was released as the other popular community-based RHEL alternative.
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Do you have SELinux enabled on your Web Server?
Lots of people are asking me about SELinux and the Bash Exploit.
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Fedora
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Builder is an in-development IDE that we reported on a few months ago as part of our GUADEC coverage. Builder aims to be an IDE that will focus purely on GNOME applications, with a goal of making it “Dead Simple”. The lead Builder developer Christian Hergert recently reported on his blog that there are now Fedora 21 COPR builds of the Builder master available for use and testing.
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Of course, this week’s big news is the release of Fedora 21 Alpha — the first formal test release on the way to an early-December final release. This will be our first release with distinct Cloud, Server, and Workstation products — a first phase of Fedora.next. Read the F21 Alpha release announcement, and download the flavor you’re interested in (or launch the cloud image in EC2).
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next version of Ubuntu Linux is set to launch October 23rd. But you can take the first (and last) beta of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn for a spin today.
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The Ubuntu developers have announced the release of the final beta of Ubuntu 14.10 (also known as Utopic Unicorn). This final beta also includes each of the usual Ubuntu spins. So you can check out Lubuntu, Xubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME as well as the main version of Ubuntu. Download links to each version are included below.
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Flavours and Variants
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In today’s newsfeeds the elementary OS beta is getting good reviews. The Register says don’t be disappointed that Ubuntu 14.10 is bring precious few new goodies. Both Bash bugs are now patched. Charles-H. Schulz blogs about reuniting LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice and Valve is giving Linux users 75% off all games.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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On the Android 4.4.4 KitKat front, a Sprint Galaxy S5 file has emerged.
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Android
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Netherlands based e-reader company Icarus has just revamped their wildly successful 9.7 inch Excel e-reader with Android 4.0. This will allow users to not only have a very large screen display to take notes but also install their own e-reading apps.
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Google products and services have always been one of the most useful things about Android. But until now the company has not had particularly stringent requirements for how they are included in Android devices. Droid Life reports that that is about to change with a new contract Google has provided to Android manufacturers.
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This hands-on review examines the Probox2 EX media streaming box, featuring Android 4.4, a quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC, 4k video, Miracast, and an air-mouse.
W2Comp began shipping the Android 4.4-based Probox2 EX media streaming mini-PC last month. Compared to the company’s earlier media streaming products, the $150 Probox2 EX uses a faster Amlogic quad-core processor and runs Android 4.4 (“KitKat”). On the wireless side it advances from Bluetooth 2.0 to 4.0, and features dual-band 802.11 b/g/n support that uses 5.8GHz instead of 5GHz as its upper band, resulting in reduced interference, according to W2Comp. (More hardware details appear farther below.)
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SaaS/Big Data
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This is the third part in a series of three articles surveying automation projects within OpenStack, explaining what they do, how they do it, and where they stand in development readiness and field usage. Previously, in part one, I covered cloud deployment tools that enable you to install/update OpenStack cloud on bare metal. In part two, I covered workload deployment tools. Today, we’ll look at tools for day two operations.
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CMS
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It’s Friday morning and marketing tells you they need a WordPress blog up and running by Monday and they want a theme like this and features like that and, and, and … you’ve not got much time if you plan to have a weekend off so the last thing you’re going to want to do is work with a remote server. If you did you’d be loading themes one after another, testing them with various plugins, and generally beating the application into submission while dealing with the delays inherent in using a machine that’s somewhere out on the Internet. That would mean you’d be waiting just that little bit longer (or quite possibly, a lot longer) to do everything than you’d prefer.
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Project Releases
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Xfce4-power-manager has now been updated to the latest version on my xfce411 COPR repo.One nice thing about this update for me is that it seems to fix the lid closing actions!
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I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Catholic Church in Germany has even forbidden those who do not pay their church taxes from receiving communion.
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The married dad-of-five exchanged X-rated pictures with an undercover reporter posing as a young female activist
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“Today I am leaving the Conservative party and joining Ukip,” Tory MP Mark Reckless announced today in a second shock defection to the Eurosceptic party in recent weeks.
Mr Reckless, the MP for Rochester and Strood, made the announcement that he is quitting the party this afternoon at the Ukip party conference in Doncaster.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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When parliament voted to invade Iraq in 2003, it was based on what we later found out to be disinformation and deceit. We were misled. The countless thousands who opposed the war were vocal in their opposition – but they were not listened to, they were ignored. And the UK went to war.
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Before we move forward against ISIL in Iraq, we have to learn from our past mistakes, or we will be doomed to repeat them.
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So yes, we need to do something. But that “something” is not more violence and war. Answering violence and war, with more violence and war, is always part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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All pretense ended Monday night, when President Barack Obama became Commander-in-Chief at a time of war. He has never been reluctant to kill terrorists with unmanned drones, but now the United States military is bombing ISIS targets inside Syria. The president has authorized strikes by fighter planes, bombers, and Tomahawk missiles, the same weapons brandished by President Bush a decade ago.
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The author of a new book on the U.S. drone program reveals an early attempt to pilot drones out of Germany, without the German government’s knowledge.
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Professor Christof Heyns asked Norway on Thursday to challenge its allies on the US’s use of armed drones which Heyns states violates international law and will, in the long run, make the world become a more dangerous place, reported NTB.
Heyns, who normally investigates and reports to the UN on extra-judicial and illegal executions, said: “The world listens to the voice of Norway for it is often the voice of reason.”
The professor thinks Norway should bring the case to a human rights council of the UN and the general assembly.
The issue of the US’s drone attacks was the subject of a seminar in the Norwegian parliament on Thursday. The debate was raised by spokesperson for foreign affairs, Bård Vegar Solhjell.
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Every vote I cast in Parliament weighs heavily on my mind, especially as, unlike most other MPs, I have no whip telling me what to do – I consider the evidence, reflect on the principles I was elected to stand up for, listen to my constituents in Brighton Pavilion.
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As the US, Britain and France are maneuvering to escalate military action in Iraq and Syria against the ‘Islamic State’ in an operation slated to last “years,” authorities are simultaneously calling for new measures to tighten security at home to fend off the danger of jihadists targeting western homelands. Intervention abroad, policymakers are arguing, must be tied to increased domestic surveillance and vigilance. But US and British military experts warn that officials have overlooked the extent to which western policies in the region have not just stoked the rise of IS, but will continue to inflame the current crisis. The consequences could be dire – while governments exploit the turmoil in the Middle East to justify an effective re-invasion of Iraq along with intensified powers of surveillance and control – the end result could well be accelerated regional violence and increasing criminalization of Muslims and activists.
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US President Barack Obama pointed to “successful” campaigns in Yemen and Somalia as models for his strategy to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). But in both countries, US military action has only worked to embolden extremist groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Shabaab.
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A US government Twitter account tasked with countering jihadist propaganda triumphantly posted pictures of dead Islamic State fighters only to delete them a short while later.
The US State Department runs a number of social media accounts to push back against Isil and al-Qaeda and convince young Muslims not to enslist with the jihadists.
The “Think Again Turn Away” Twitter account posted pictures of the corpses of four jihadist fighters reportedly killed in US air strikes in an apparent warning to those thinking of taking up arms.
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The use of the US military in this operation should raise red flags for the American public as well. After all, if the military truly is the governmental institution best equipped to handle this outbreak, it speaks worlds about the neglect of civilian programs at home as well as abroad.
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The current commentary about Australia’s latest Middle East military adventure ignores the obvious, says Dr Geoff Davies — oil and its impact on U.S. foreign policy.
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U.S.-led warplanes are bombarding oil-producing facilities in eastern Syria for a second day in a row in a bid to cut off key revenue from Islamic State militants. According to U.S. Central Command, the refineries net about $2 million per day. On Thursday, the Pentagon rejected accounts that up to 24 civilians have been killed by U.S.-led strikes in Syria, saying there are no “credible” reports of civilian deaths. U.S. planes are also continuing to bomb Iraq with at least 11 airstrikes on Thursday. Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby acknowledged the Islamic State remains strong.
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It is hard to imagine that a campaign of aerial bombardment in Syria will make that dire situation any better.
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A drone crashed into a mountain in Shabwa governorate, southeast of Sana’a, on Tuesday morning, eyewitnesses told the Yemen Times.
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Administration officials say there has been has no dropoff in backing for Hadi, days after Shia minorities, who have endured a brutal crackdown, took hold of government and military installations in the capital of Sana’a. Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism chief, a critical manager of the relationship with Yemen, passed along the US president’s “strong support” for Hadi in a phone call to him earlier this week.
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IF today, with remote in hand, you randomly flip through channels on your TV, or browse through nearly two dozen online newspapers, you will see video clips or photos of Pakistan Air Force jets pounding targets in North Waziristan, artillery firing into the mountains, or, perhaps, some other celebration of Operation Zarb-i-Azb. But hang on! You rub your eyes. Our jets bombing Islamic fighters within the territory of this Islamic republic?
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Since his early days as a correspondent covering the wars in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, documentary filmmaker and journalist John Pilger has been an ardent critic of Western foreign policy. Following in the footsteps of Martha Gellhorn, Pilger set out to cover the Vietnam War from the perspective of those most affected by it – the Vietnamese people and US draftees. In 1979, he filmed Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which depicted the humanitarian catastrophe following the ousting of the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh. He would go on to make three more films about Cambodia and become an outspoken critic of the United States’ intervention in the country and the West’s support of Pol Pot.
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The incessant drumbeat of war, accompanied by the harsh propaganda of “barbarism” and “brutality” directed at individuals in Syria and Iraq, is as wearily familiar as that used to demonize the German “Hun” a century ago and dozens of other “enemies” in the interim. The PR industry, which is the landing pad for many politicos from the Conservatives to the NDP, is having a field day, from allegations that “Islamic militants” are murdering seniors in hospital rooms (perhaps an update of the Hill & Knowlton-created falsehood that Iraqis ripped babies from incubators after the 1991 invasion of Kuwait) to claims that a group with no air force, weapons of mass destruction, overseas military bases, aircraft carriers, and hundreds of billions in other war infrastructure presents the greatest threat known to our generation.
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Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad today shrugged off criticism over his use of the now-defunct Internal Security Act (ISA), saying it does not compare to the atrocities committed by the United States in the use of unmanned drones to kill suspected terrorists.
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Hersh further explains the clandestine unit masqueraded as “a civilian aerial photography operation.” He is referring, of course, to the units that ultimately found Pablo Escobar, in an age predating drones. Manhunting is a core competency of the United States, and the last thirteen years have seen no shortage of attempts to not only reinvent the wheel but form an octagon for no logical reason.
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A suspected U.S. drone fired four missiles at a vehicle carrying Uzbek and local militants in the country’s northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing 10 of them, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.
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President Barack Obama’s blunt words on Islamic terrorism marked a striking shift for his annual address to United Nations, as he moved away from the language of accommodation to rhetoric reminiscent of predecessor President George W. Bush.
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US drones on Wednesday fired missiles at a compound and vehicle and killed at least eight militants in a restive tribal area bordering Afghanistan, officials said.
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A British teenager fighting with Islamist militia Al-Nusra Front in Syria has reportedly been killed in US airstrikes, with his mother finding only finding out via social media.
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A day after Prime Minister David Cameron pledged British support for the American-led air campaign in Iraq, the counterterrorism police in Britain rounded up nine men suspected of having links to a banned Islamist group and searched 18 buildings across the capital and in the English Midlands.
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In the propaganda video, Cantlie is again seated at a table wearing an orange jumpsuit, in a reference to the outfits worn by Muslim prisoners at U.S. detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He reads from a prepared script, explaining how the United States’ involvement in the Syrian conflict will mirror its misadventures in Vietnam.
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Man identified as British journalist criticises Obama preparations for US-led attacks on militant group in five-minute clip
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So, the other day, he hipped me to some recently declassified CIA material, specifically National Intelligence Estimates dated April 17, 1963 and titled “Prospects In South Vietnam.” These concerned, among other things, the CIA’s assessment of the relative strength of the Viet Cong in our adopted Indochinese client state.
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Our CIA and German BND triggered a coup in Kiev because independent Ukraine elected Victor Yanukovich president of Ukraine. He is the legal Ukrainian president. When the BND took over the government in Kiev, NATO and the European Union offered membership to Ukraine and Russia, detached Crimea and annexed it into Russian rule for its strategic importance, as well as its economic importance.
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The number of shootings in which a gunman wounds or kills multiple people has increased dramatically in recent years, with the majority of attacks in the past decade occurring at a business or a school, according to an FBI report released Wednesday.
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In the first case, federal prosecutors said Omar Gonzalez, 42, jumped the White House fence and raced into the front door before he was apprehended. He was carrying a small pocket knife and, apparently a message for the president about global warming. Later, authorities said they found two hatchets, a machete and 800 rounds of ammunition in his car.
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The strikes killed 14 fighters and at least five civilians, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian conflict.
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Quick: Which U.S. president has authorized wars of various kinds in seven Muslim countries?
If you guessed Barack Hussein Obama, you are correct.
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About two dozen anti-war activists rallied near the White House Tuesday against U.S. airstrikes in Syria, which began Monday.
Five of the mostly gray-haired protesters were arrested for blocking a White House gate after insisting they meet with President Barack Obama or a senior official to discuss their concerns.
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Here we go again, I thought. This is how modern America goes to war. When superpower Goliath is challenged by sudden savagery, it has no choice but to respond with brute force. Or so we are told. Otherwise, America would no longer be a convincing Goliath. When war bells clang, politicians of every stripe find it very difficult to resist, lest they look weak or unpatriotic. And the American people, as usual, rally around the flag, as they always do when the country seems threatened. Citizens and members of the uniformed military are tired of war, but both in a sense are prisoners of the media-hyped hysteria that is the usual political reflex. Shoot first, ask questions later.
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On Sept. 19, Benghazi witnessed a string of assassinations that seemed to be coordinated. The assassins targeted military and security personnel as well as civilians. Among those killed were two teenage civil society activists, Sami al-Kawafi and Tawfik Bensaud. They were 17 and 18 years old respectively. Their murders have capped off more than two years of extremist attacks on peace activists and journalists, killings that are endangering any remaining freedoms Libyans still have.
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US and coalition planes pounded Islamic State positions in Syria again on Wednesday, but the strikes did not halt the fighters’ advance in a Kurdish area where fleeing refugees told of villages burnt and captives beheaded.
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Hours after the last airstrike, fighters with the group gathered on Tuesday in public areas of the city where the corpses of those executed by Islamic State are put on display. They told residents that Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which took part in the airstrikes, were attacking them, resident Abu Muhammad said. The militants threatened the Arab countries with car bombings in retaliation for cooperating with the West, he said.
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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also warns about jumping head-first into funding Syria’s rebels.
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With congressional authorization in his back pocket, U.S. president Barack Obama stepped up American military aggression against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) this week.
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While AP’s source claimed ten were killed in the strike, Reuters cited “intelligence officials” who said five to eight militants perished in the blast.According to AFP, eight suspected fighters died.
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Many government supporters were worried about where events might lead because some of the countries in the coalition, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have called for Assad to step down or actively supported his enemies with money and arms.
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Obama’s intention to bring his air war against IS to Syria may result in a serious violation of international law. The Damascus government has said it will allow the U.S. to act but Washington must first ask permission to bomb its territory. The White House indicated it has no desire to ask for authorization. In addition, the Russian government, which supports and supplies arms to both Iran and Syria, pointed out that any such strike against Syria would need backing from the UN Security Council. Otherwise, it “would constitute an act of aggression.”
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The insurgency in Iraq, Syria and beyond is a fight for natural resources as much as political control. Why are we so busy giving leverage to terrorists?
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CEP lists among its goals the compilation of the world’s most exhaustive database on extremist groups and their networks, and places unmasking the funding sources for IS high on its list of immediate priorities.
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We are excited to announce the first four recipients of our next crowd-funding campaign, all of whom may now start receiving donations intended to cover the costs of installing SecureDrop, our open-source whistleblower submission system. The first round includes BalkanLeaks, the Government Accountability Project, Cryptome and Firedoglake.
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Failure of the British government to inform Parliament of its intention to redeploy armed unmanned air vehicles outside recognised warzones may result in legal action, a charity and law firm have warned.
Following a notification by the UK’s minister of state for the armed forces, Mark Francois, in July that claimed it was not necessary for Parliament to approve UAV strikes, charity Reprieve and law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn notified the government that action will be taken if it is not clear on where armed UAVs are being used.
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As we just heard, so far there is no coalition behind U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. There is more support, however, for operations in northern Iraq, where France and Germany are actively involved. Peter Wittig is German Ambassador to the U.S. I spoke with him earlier this week and asked him to describe Germany’s current strategy against ISIS.
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Heeding the call to do something about ISIL, Congress passed and Barack Obama signed a measure approving weapons and training for “moderate” Syrian rebels. These moderates are ostensibly fighting against the new Islamic upstarts but are also sworn to overthrow Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Obama has repeatedly assured Americans that no boots would be on the ground in Syria (or Iraq, for that matter), sending out National Security Advisor Susan Rice to state, “This program will be hosted outside of Syria in partnership with neighboring countries.” Rice added the process would take “many months,” which the administration hopes will be enough time to sort out all of the various regional players.
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We in the ANSWER Coalition oppose this war and are calling for demonstrations to oppose the bombing of Syria and Iraq from September 23 through September 28. This war, like the earlier ones, is being sold on the basis of misinformation and fear. The United States is a major part of the problem and cannot be the solution to the current crisis in Syria and Iraq.
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Having expanded its air war against Islamic State jihadists into Syria, the US military can draw on a vast arsenal of aircraft, troops and hardware across the Middle East.
Here are the basic facts on the American military presence in the region and the strikes carried out so far, according to the Pentagon and defense analysts:
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If the latest polls are accurate, most voters believe that Republican politicians deserve greater trust on matters of national security. At a moment when Americans feel threatened by rising terrorist movements and authoritarian regimes, that finding is politically salient—and proves that amnesia is the most durable affliction of our democracy.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Robert Murray, CEO of Ohio-based Murray Energy, kicked off a gathering of coal interests Monday presenting a gloomy picture of an industry in irreversible decline, a political administration out to get him, and a patient on an operating table waiting for electricity that’s bound to be cut off due to impending coal plant retirements.
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How America abandoned its role as leader of the fight to save the planet — and killed a movement.
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The controversial plans have been billed as a battle between a small brown bird and homes for 11,000 local people but environmental groups say what is really at stake is the robustness of the entire conservation regime: this is the biggest attempt to build on an SSSI in England since the wildlife protection legislation of 1981.
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The market-based mechanism received the endorsement of the U.N. Secretary-General and World Bank president at Tuesday’s gathering in New York.
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23 September 2014 – We are not here to talk, we are here to make history, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today told world leaders at an “unprecedented and important gathering” that aims to raise ambition, mobilize resources, and generate action towards a universal climate deal.
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Finance
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Barely a year removed from the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York faced a crossroads. Congress had set its sights on reform. The biggest banks in the nation had shown that their failure could threaten the entire financial system. Lawmakers wanted new safeguards.
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Don’t forget that much of this murder hardware is designed and conjured up by the best and brightest at our Western colleges. Lawyers abound in this industry. Unions love good Boeing missile making jobs. This is the legacy of killing, empire, a black president who isn’t and is, fabricated by the same shit schools and teachers who also advance murder, economic hits or direct hits with drones and napalm or guided bunker busters.
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The Buenos Aires province’s tax agency says it has used drones to identify around 200 mansions and 100 swimming pools that have not been declared by their owners.
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It seems like ages ago that Americans spent 13 days wondering if we were on the brink of nuclear war as the Soviet Union and Cuban government engaged the Kennedy Administration in the tumultuous Cuban Missile Crisis. Or even longer ago when American CIA agents stormed the shores of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in a failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. Cuba’s allegiance to the Soviets and their admiration for communism encouraged the US to go on the defense and place a trade embargo and severed diplomatic relations with our neighbors 90 miles to the south.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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And now Mr. Amazon owns a newspaper that helps shape the debate on virtually every topic of public importance—including those that affect his grand ambitions. Bezos didn’t buy a newspaper. He bought power.
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Weeks after appearing at a VIP dinner for the Koch brothers-backed political group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), George Will devoted his Washington Post column to promoting one of the Kochs’ favored political candidates without disclosing the conflict of interest.
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Censorship
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The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union and industry advocate for Australia’s journalists, has described the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill No 1 which been passed by the parliament an outrageous attack on press freedom in Australia.
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Russian proposals on protecting Internet users against threats from the West could be a Kremlin ploy to crack down on critical voices inside Russia, a representative of Europe’s main rights and democracy watchdog said.
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Privacy
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A German citizen who crashed a drone into a lake in Yellowstone National Park this summer has been banned from the park for a year and was ordered to pay $1,600 in fines and restitution.
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A Nevada-based security technology company says it has discovered proof of as many as 15 cellphone interception devices secretly operating in the nation’s capital, capable of illicitly identifying the movements of prominent people, recording audio from mobile phones, listening to calls and reading email.
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The commercial use of drones in American skies took a leap forward on Thursday with the help of Hollywood. The US Federal Aviation Administration, responding to applications from seven filmmaking companies and pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, said six of those companies could use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets. Until now, the FAA had not permitted commercial drone use except for extremely limited circumstances in wilderness areas of Alaska.
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FBI Director James Comey on Thursday strongly criticized Apple and Google for hardening information stored in smartphones by encrypting data, making it inaccessible to law enforcement even with a court order.
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Civil Rights
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Describing someone as a “conspiracy theorist” is usually meant as an insult, suggesting tin-foil hats and babbling rants on late-night radio talk shows. But when it comes to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the list of important, seemingly credible public figures who count themselves as conspiracy theorists is long and impressive.
Fifty years ago this coming week, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the panel led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and better known as the Warren Commission, published an 888-page final report that identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman in Dealey Plaza and said there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.
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Demonstrations continued in Greene County Tuesday as a grand jury spent a second day deciding whether Officer Sean Williams and Sgt. David Darkow will face charges for shooting and killing John Crawford III when they said he would not drop a BB gun at a Beavercreek Walmart.
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The establishment media has seized on the killing to whip up an atmosphere of suspicion and fear over further “lone wolf” terrorist attacks, as well as outright anti-Muslim xenophobia, based on gross distortion, unsubstantiated speculation and outright fabrication. The lack of any regard for elementary journalistic standards was highlighted by the publication in the Fairfax press yesterday of a photo, allegedly of a well-dressed version of Haider, alongside an image from Haider’s Facebook page, showing him in military camouflage, wearing a balaclava and holding an Islamist flag. In fact, the well-dressed young man was not Haider, but another 18-year-old who told the media last night that he now fears going out in public.
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A bill introduced Sept. 18 would make clear that consumers actually owned the electronic devices, and any accompanying software on that device, that they purchased, according to sponsor Rep. Blake Farenthold’s (R-Texas).
The You Own Devices Act (H.R. 5586) would amend the Copyright Act “to provide that the first sale doctrine applies to any computer program that enables a machine or other product to operate.”
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Attorney General Eric Holder announced he would resign yesterday, after serving as the nation’s top law enforcement official since President Obama came into office in 2009. Holder will leave behind a complex and hotly debated legacy at the Justice Department on many issues, but one thing is clear: he was the worst Attorney General on press freedom issues in a generation, possibly since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell pioneered the subpoenaing of reporters and attempted to censor the Pentagon Papers.
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From gay rights to voter-ID laws, this attorney general became the man to fight the way the president couldn’t. Yet his liberal voice was too often silenced on War on Terror issues.
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But, it goes beyond that. As Trevor Timm highlights over at The Guardian, pretty much the entire drone bombing (drones, by the way, are also apparently “authorized” by the AUMF) of Syria involves the administration conveniently redefining basic English to suit its purposes.
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Egyptian security forces stepped up security on Saturday ahead of the verdict in the murder trial of former president Hosni Mubarak and top security officials.
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Eric Holder’s tenure as attorney general will be remembered for the failure to prosecute any leading bankers who were responsible for the collapse of the economy. While the SEC negotiated large fines, the DOJ prosecuted none of those who were guilty of crimes that robbed the wealth of tens of millions of Americans. The failure to prosecute bankers was one example of many where corporate power dominated the DOJ on finance, environmental, labor and other issues. This should have been an era of aggressive enforcement of corporate crime, instead corporate criminals were rarely investigated.
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It wasn’t difficult for Barack Obama and Eric Holder to be in the same orbit. Both were sons of immigrants, Columbia Ivy Leaguers, basketball fans and prominent African-American political figures.
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…failed to prosecute any Bush administration officials for torture…
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Senator Ron Wyden points our attention to a declaration from Neal Higgins, director of the CIA’s “Office of Congressional Affairs” in a FOIA lawsuit brought by the ACLU demanding the CIA release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s terror report. In that declaration, Higgins insists that the works on those computers are not the CIA’s and the CIA cannot access them, contradicting the new story from Brennan’s latest spin attempt. In fact, Higgins confirms Feinstein’s claim that there was a clear agreement between the Senate and the CIA concerning these computers.
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MoD and Foreign Office claim UK-US relations would be harmed if high court allows Yunus Rahmatullah’s case to go ahead
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In a press release, the Glasgow Palestine Action Network (GPAN) said it decided to take action in protest against “the UK economy’s ever growing military industrial cooperation with governments that flout international law.”
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The SEC this week promised an overseas whistleblower $30m – but others who have uncovered wrongdoing haven’t been so lucky
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Investigative reporter and author Francisco Marín has written extensively about the case, with his research being published in a 2012 book titled “El Doble Asesinato de Neruda” (“The Double Murder of Neruda”). Based on extensive testimony offered by Araya, forensic evidence, and the circumstances surrounding the upholding of the official version despite the dissonance, Marín has managed to present a compelling case that the poet had indeed been murdered by the dictatorship.
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Did the public remember nothing about the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua? Of the dictatorships the U.S. backed? The Honduran coup blessed by Saint Obama? The U.S. invasion of Panama? Didn’t they have a clue where their 60 cents-a-pound bananas came from and at what cost? Apparently not.
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Activision said its portrayal of Noriega, in which the former drug peddler and CIA operative aids the game’s main villain during the Cold War, is protected under free speech laws. “Call of Duty” games have also portrayed historical characters such as President John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro, as well as semi-historical characters such as Nazi zombies.
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PUBLIC Protector Thuli Madonsela on Monday fielded hostile questions from members of public accounts committees in the provinces and municipalities, prompting her to reveal for the first time that attacks on her office had assumed a “bizarre” level, including the emergence of a controversial intelligence report claiming to provide evidence that she was a spy for the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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Deputy Defence Minister Kebby Maphatsoe recently accused Ms Madonsela of being a CIA spy after she wrote a letter to President Jacob Zuma warning that Mr Zuma had not sufficiently responded to her findings in a report on Nkandla. Mr Maphatsoe later withdrew the allegations.
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Mind you, their sacrifices had been made to preserve a political system free from the nonsense which is the recent exercise in democracy. They might have given an indulgent chuckle when told there was a party advocating liberalisation of marijuana use, but what would they have made of this Dotcom stuff?
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Last month, we wrote about a troubling decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to give control over the new .pharmacy domain to big pharma — thus allowing it to lock out sites around the world that threaten its generous profit margins.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Techdirt has written about Spain’s new copyright law a couple of times. There, we concentrated on the “Google tax” that threatens the digital commons and open access in that country. But alongside this extremely foolish idea, there was another good one: getting rid of the anachronistic levy on recording devices that was supposed to “compensate” for private copying (as if any such compensation were needed), and paying collecting societies directly out of Spain’s state budget. Needless to say, it is such a good idea that the collecting societies hate it, and have appealed against the new system.
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Send this to a friend
09.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Plasma 5 gets into our desktop guide as we also tell you how to put Linux on Android.
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Desktop
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However, Samsung’s decision to end its Chromebook efforts in Europe could signal problems, especially with the holidays approaching. Chromebooks have been top holiday sellers. It will be worth watching whether other Chromebook providers adjust or end their European businesses as well.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Historically, I used to write a blog post for each episode of the audcast, Free as in Freedom that Karen Sandler and I released. However, since I currently do my work on FaiF exclusively as a volunteer, I often found it difficult to budget time for a blog post about each show.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s Alex Deucher sent in another Radeon drm-next patch series this week with some more last-minute tweaks for the Linux kernel’s next merge window.
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While AMD just released its first OpenCL 2.0 Linux driver, which is marked fglrx 14.41, the next driver that’s currently in testing is fglrx 14.50… This should be more interesting.
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Released yesterday was AMD’s first OpenCL 2.0 Catalyst driver but we also learned privately about what’s coming next in the pipeline with the fglrx 14.50 update. There’s Linux support for the Heterogeneous System Architecture coming in this driver along with VCE video encoding support for GCN GPUs — to match the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in its video encoding capabilities.
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With Intel Skylake Linux hardware enablement being worked on in steadfast by the Intel Open-Source Technology Center, earlier this month we saw the initial Skylake DRM kernel patches, earlier this week we saw the Skylake Mesa support patches, and then today we have the Intel X.Org driver getting patched for this next-generation hardware succeeding Broadwell.
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The GeForce GTX 980 is NVIDIA’s most advanced graphics card to date and is running brilliantly on Linux — assuming you’re okay with binary blobs.
One week ago NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 970/980 graphics cards as their top-end, next-generation hardware built on their Maxwell architecture. Given the successes I’ve had with their mid-range but very power efficient GTX 750 series hardware that were the first on this new architecture, I’ve been incredibly anxious to see these high-end NVIDIA GeForce 900 series GPUs running on Linux… Fortunately, today the GTX 980 arrived.
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A new AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver has been released today that finally delivers OpenCL 2.0 to Catalyst.
Released today was AMD’s OpenCL 2.0 Catalyst driver for both Windows and Linux. The Linux distributions AMD is officially supporting for this driver are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but of course the other usual distributions should work to
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Benchmarks
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Within this article from an updated Fedora 21 stack, I ran some Linux gaming tests under its stock X.Org Server 1.16 environment and then rebooted and logged into the GNOME on Wayland session. From there the Phoronix Test Suite ran and I used the variety of graphics tests at my disposal to push the limits of XWayland.
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Applications
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The multi-platform BitTorrent client qBittorrent developed by Christophe Dumez has reached version 3.1.10 bringing many new features and other improvements.
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gdrive (not to be confused with Grive!) is a simple command line Google Drive client written in Go, available for Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Just like our first 5 command line tips for Raspberry Pi, all these tips and techniques work on the command prompt (when you first start your Raspberry Pi) and in the LXTerminal window (once you’ve logged in to your desktop by typing startx). That said, these tips will work on just about any Linux PC on Earth (and most of the ones in orbit too).
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Games
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Making the rounds at the moment is the fact that Wasteland 2 is selling very well. Well that’s a shocker isn’t it!
Reports from our caster Samsai are that it’s very good and I think he has a bit of an addiction to it brewing.
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I Can’t Escape: Darkness is a new horror game coming to Linux from US developers Fancy Fish Games. It is the follow-up to a game created at a game-jam called I Can’t Escape which can be checked out on Newgrounds although it kept saying I needed 3D Hardware Rendering you might have better luck than me.
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Skyforge a rather interesting looking free to play MMO has addressed questions relating to the possibility of a Linux port.
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Steam has become an indispensable part of every gamer’s life. With a version for every major platform, if you are a gamer, chances are you have a Steam account. The latest Update to the Steam client from Valve makes Steam a completely new experience. The new update is dubbed as the Discovery update, and just like the namesake, the new features does make for quite an interesting discovery of the Steam.
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Valve kept its word, and the entire collection of games developed by their own people is available for Linux. Now, Linux users can buy all the games from the catalog with a huge 75% price cut.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Calligra 2.8.6, an integrated suite of applications for office, creative, and management needs, has been released and packs quite a few changes for numerous packages under its umbrella.
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Videos of all of the Akademy Talks are now available online to watch in your own time.
You can access them from the Akademy schedule. Follow the schedule to the talks for the links to the videos and the slides.
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KDE Frameworks 5.2.0 Has been released to Utopic archive!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME development team has announced that the final version of its latest GNOME desktop environment, 3.14, has been released and all the new packages are now available for download.
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It looks like for GNOME 3.16 one of the early changes will be better keyboard support for switching tabs.
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Each time a new GNOME version is released, users point to the Ubuntu GNOME devs and blame them for not integrating the latest packages in the distribution. Also, each time, the Ubuntu GNOME developers have to explain why this is impossible.
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Even with only 19 responses the picture has started getting pretty informative and helpful, already. There is still quite a large error estimate on the result, my hand waves a relative error of around +/-16% on it. But with all that in mind, since I said I would publish the results in September, I may as well go ahead and do that 
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The Ubuntu GNOME developers have released the second and final Beta version of the 14.10 branch, and they are getting closer to the stable version of the distribution.
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Xubuntu 14.10 Beta 2, the Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and using the Xfce desktop environment, has been released and is now ready for testing. The developers have prepared a surprise for users, in the form of a small visual change.
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The best distro is $MY_DISTRO: Zealots come and zealots go, but they seem to always overstay their welcome in the FOSS realm. You would think that someone who has more than two IQ points to rub together would realize that perhaps his or her distro may not be best for someone else. Sadly, that’s not the case. It’s My Distro Uber Alles for them, and if you’re not using the distro they use, then you must be an idiot.
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New Releases
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SparkyLinux 3.5 “Annagerman” MATE, Xfce and Base Openbox & JWM is out.
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SparkyLinux, a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian and featuring custom MATE, Xfce Openbox, and JWM desktops, has reached version 3.5 and is now ready for download.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux 0.8.10 Ascella KDE Edition is the latest version of manjaro linux distribution with KDE desktop environment. Manjaro Linux is a lightweight, user-friendly, desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. Key features include intuitive installation process, automatic hardware detection, stable rolling-release model, ability to install multiple kernels, special Bash scripts for managing graphics drivers and extensive desktop configurability.
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Red Hat Family
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All Fedora/CentOS/RHEL patches that were in the DKMS build in Fedora/EPEL are now merged upstream; along with additional patches from Debian and Ubuntu.
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The federal government will spend more than $3 billion on cloud services this year, and cloud vendors have taken notice. Red Hat Inc. became the latest industry heavyweight to take aim at that opportunity on Tuesday with the introduction of a consultancy on-ramp aimed at paving the way for government agencies to pay as they go.
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Fedora
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One application I came across while testing an installation of the main edition Fedora 21 alpha is DevAssistant.
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Last time I blogged about AppStream I announced that over 25% of applications in Fedora 21 were shipping the AppData files we needed. I’m pleased to say in the last two months we’ve gone up to 45% of applications in Fedora 22. This is thanks to a lot of work from Ryan and his friends, writing descriptions, taking screenshots and then including them in the fedora-appstream staging repo.
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Yes, you are reading correctly: I decided to buy a freacking Chromebook. I really needed a lightweight notebook with me for my daily hackings while waiting for my subway station, and this one seemed to be the best option available when comparing models and prices. To be fair, and before you throw me rocks, I visited the LibreBoot X60′s website for some time, because I was strongly considering buying one (even considering its weight); however, they did not have it in stock, and I did not want to wait anymore, so…
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Continuing in this week’s alpha coverage of Fedora 21 are some performance benchmarks comparing it to Fedora 20 and the recent openSUSE 13.2 beta.
I’ve been very impressed by Fedora 21 in its alpha state and after running GNOME Wayland OpenGL gaming benchmarks with XWayland, I ran a simple performance comparison.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux, has advanced to version 2.3.6 Beta and is available for download and testing.
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Tails, a Live operating system that is built with the sole purpose of keeping users safe and anonymous while going online, has been updated to version 1.1.2.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Linux kernel is one of the most important packages in a distribution, so everyone is paying attention to what the Ubuntu developers will decide to implemented. It’s been already established the branch of the kernel that will be used in Ubuntu 14.10, but it remains to be seen what specific version will be used.
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After Mozilla released the latest Firefox 32.0.3 Internet browser, the Ubuntu maintainers were quick to make the new version available to the supported OSes.
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Canonical released last week a new RTM branch for Ubuntu Touch, and now the developers have managed to push a new major update that brings more fixes, updated packages, and a nice, new keyboard.
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The official RTM of Ubuntu Touch has been recently release, and as Softpedia informs, it has already received its very first update. Let’s take a look at what the RTM brings and as well as what the first update consists in.
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Canonical only releases a single Beta version during the entire six-month development cycle, four weeks before the final version is made available. This has been the case for a while now, but not all flavors follow the same trend.
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The Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign never reached its lofty $32m goal , but the more than $12m in pledges it received was record-breaking—and Canonical hasn’t given up. Ubuntu Touch for phones just hit “release to manufacturing” status. The first official version is done, bugfix’d, and ready to go. It’s coming on real phones, too, with the first phone with Ubuntu Touch shipping this December.
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Ubuntu Touch for phones is now at manufacturing status, a major milestone for many people who wondered if Ubuntu phones would ever become market realities. Several months ago, rumors swirled that the first Ubuntu phones were delayed and wouldn’t appear until 2015, if at all, but this week news broke that we’re likely to see phones by year’s end.
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A number of Ubuntu flavours – Kubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Xubuntu and the brand new Ubuntu Mate (yes, it’s official now) – this month participated in the first beta release of the next Ubuntu – 14.10, or Utopic Unicorn.
The main Unity Desktop was absent, meaning what’s called the second beta (and is now available) is the first and only beta for the main Ubuntu 14.10.
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Adam Conrad on the behalf of the Ubuntu development community has announced the final beta release of the upcoming Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” and its derivatives.
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Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn final beta was released today, this being the first and only milestone for Ubuntu Utopic (while for the Ubuntu flavors, this is Beta 2). Let’s take a look at what’s new.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu MATE 14.10 Beta 2, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses the MATE desktop environment, has been released and is now ready for testing.
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MATE is an open-source, lightweight, desktop environment started by the Arch Linux team and used a lot on Linux Mint systems, providing an experience similar to GNOME 2. This project created as an alternative for GNOME 3, which was not very appreciated by a lot of users.
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You’ll find all the updated hardware support in Ubuntu 14.04, but Elementary replaces GTK 3.10 with the more cutting edge GTK 3.12, which gets Elementary a nice combined window bar/title bar that saves a bit of space and looks great with the rest of Elementary’s very polished desktop theme.
You’d be forgiven for thinking Elementary is based on GNOME Shell. It looks a bit like GNOME Shell, with a clock in the middle of the top bar, an Applications menu to the left and some indicator apps to the right. In Luna the top bar was black by default, which made it look even more like GNOME Shell.
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Kubuntu Developers have finally announced the release of second beta for 14.10 aka Utopic Unicorn. The beta shows the progress Kubuntu team has made towards the final release scheduled for October.
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Kubuntu 14.10 beta 2 is out now for testing by early adopters. This release comes with the stable Plasma 4 we know and love. It also adds another flavour – Kubuntu Plasma 5 Tech Preview. Try Kubuntu Plasma 5 to see the future of desktop software but expect some more bugs as we iron out the integration.
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The Kubuntu devs are a little late to the party, but they have finally published the details for the latest and final release in this development cycle. The 14.10 Beta 2 release is not very different from the previous one, with the exception of the implementation of KDE 4.14, which reached a stable stage in the meantime.
Users will also be able to take advantage of a new Kubuntu release to get familiar with the latest Plasma 5 desktop that can be tested right now. It’s still far from a stable version, but the overall design won’t change much more than this.
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Pi-Top, a Raspberry Pi Model B+ powered build-your-own-laptop kit, soon could enable users to learn computer programming, designing and 3D-printing skills.
The Pi-Top team recently released details on its construction of a prototype computer in a Reddit post.
The developers plan to use the model in a Kickstarter campaign to generate funding for the project. They printed the prototype in four parts with a Rostock Max V2 printer.
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Rikomagic launched a new TV box with a Rockchip RK3288 processor and Google Android software this summer. It’s called the MK902 II and I’ve got one sitting on my desk waiting for me to find the time to put it through the paces.
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Spreadtrum made news in February, when it joined Mozilla in announcing plans to release a chipset that would enable $25 Firefox OS smartphones. In August, Indian manufacturers Intex and Spice each announced Firefox OS phones based on the Spreadtrum chipset costing $33 (Intex Cloud FX) and $38 (Spice Fire One Mi-FX 1).
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Phones
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India has suddenly become the hot ticket in the race to expand smartphones beyond saturated markets in the North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Following the late August introduction of Firefox OS phones from Intex and Spice selling for an unprecedented $35, Google announced the launch of its Nexus-like Android One smartphone program in India. This week, Jolla began selling its Sailfish OS based phone in India, and Samsung revealed plans for a November release of a Tizen phone in the country.
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Ballnux
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The openSUSE board recently appointed Richard Brown as their chairman. The position became vacant after Vincent Untz decided to step down. Here is the interview with the chairman.
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Samsung Electronics have decided to move 500 Software Engineers out of their mobile phone development unit into other consumer electronics parts such as TVs, network, printer and its corporate software R&D divisions, according to various reports on the net.
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The Tizen Smartphone that is expected to launch in India this November has had a few of its details passed to Sammobile this morning. This budget Smartphone is aimed at developing markets and hopes to take on Android One, FireFox OS, Microsoft (Nokia) and potentially BlackBerry in the less crowded new budget Smartphone category, a potentially lucrative area that everyone wants to be king of.
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Android
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This small guide assumes that you know how to create a public repository with git (or other version control system). Maybe some projects use other VCS, Subversion or whatever; the process would be similar although the commands will be different of course.
If you don’t want to use any VCS, you can just download the corresponding file, translate it, and send it by email or to the BTS of the project, but the commands required are very easy and you’ll see soon that using git (or any VCS) is quite comfortable and less scary than what it seems.
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Arbor Solution has launched a rugged, Android-based “Gladius 5″ handheld with a quad-core SoC, 5.5-inch touchscreen, dual SIMs, NFC, and barcode scanning.
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Autumn is one of those games that stretches the term game a little bit. There isn’t a lot of interaction required, and it’s more about relaxing and watching what happens.
It’s interesting to see more and more of these experimental games appear, but Autumn to me feels a little lifeless. Sure that’s part of the point, but it’s not really all that relaxing either apart from the nice music.
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Jams Music Player is an Android app for… playing music. It’s got a few nifty features including a 9-band equalizer, the ability to download album art from the internet, unofficial support for streaming music from Google Play Music, and a rather attractive user interface that seems inspired by Google’s new Android L Material design language.
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Android L is Google’s next big update to its mobile operating system. Much has been said in the media about Android L, and many users have been looking forward to it. Android Authority reports that Google might release Android L on November 1st.
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Just last week Paul O’ Brien mentioned a possible release date for the rumored HTC Nexus 9, October 16th. While he admitted the information came from an anonymous tipster, the Android developer is well respected and likely not to post up a date unless he has good reason to believe it. In short, his statement lended quite a bit of credence to the idea of a mid-October unveiling.
Looking for more details on the matter? Thanks to two different sources familiar with Google’s plans, we have learned that the HTC Nexus 9 will be unveiled on either October 15th or the 16th. Additionally there is mention of new phone hardware (possibly the rumored Moto Nexus?) and the unveiling of “a new software initiative”, which likely refers to Android L’s final release.
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Self publishing a book has never been easier. There are numerous open source tools that you can use to create a book.
Having published three ebooks, and being in the process of putting together another one, I’ve learned that after writing a book there are a few more things that you need to do before sharing your book with the world.
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Continuuity Inc., whose software makes it easier for developers to build applications that run on the big-data storage and analysis system Hadoop, has changed its name to Cask and will put its technology into open source.
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The Joint Staff currently uses Oracle and PeopleSoft for strategic planning software through a contract managed by a division of the Naval Sea Systems Command.
The Joint Staff runs the software on the Joint Organization Server and a server covering the Office of Secretary of Defense.
NAVSEA said in a contract notice it plans to issue a new contract to MYMIC LLC of Portsmouth, Virginia, for open source planning software to “reduce the high cost of licenses, technical support and custom modifications” with Oracle and PeopleSoft.
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The only solution is self-hosted, fully open source email services. Kolab is one such service and now ownCloud team is also working on offering mail to users.
ownCloud is actually more aggressive and is working on a replacement for Google Map, called ownCloud Maps. It is built on Leaflet, using Open Street Map data says an ownCloud blog. The project has just started and you can test and contribute on GitHub.
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In the olden days the topic of software freedom was central to Linux and free/open source software. Software freedom needs to remain front and center. Remember Richard Stallman’s Four Freedoms?
“Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have:
the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
the freedom to share the changes you make.”
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There is a way for open source to actually win. We simply have to put the power of choice and control back in the hands of the consumer. I say simply because it’s an easy thing to say, and an easy concept to understand, however we all know full well that implementation is much, much harder. We can start by not giving up on the Linux desktop. We can take the next step by investing in an open mobile platform that respects our privacy. Finally, we can continue building the free, open, and distributed Internet that the world needs.
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Benjamin Hindman, the co-founder of open-source cluster manager Mesos – which runs at large web properties including Twitter and Airbnb – has joined VC-backed Mesosphere. The startup was founded in 2013 to drive a paying business around the cluster manager he built as a student.
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Events
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Historically, the computer industry has been impressed with big things. In the early decades, the mainframes and supercomputers were all the rage. Even as the technology began to shrink, big rollouts supplanted the big machines. And now you can find powerful technology which easily fits in the palm of your hand — but you’ve probably only heard of the brands which sell in huge numbers.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firejail is a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications. The core technology behind Firejail is Linux Namespaces, a virtualization technology available in Linux kernel. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table, IPC space.
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Much of the good stuff about Pale Moon is under the hood. Taken together, all of it contributes to a more efficient performance. For example, Pale Moon is optimized for modern processors such as SSE2. A lot of the built-in bloat of the Firefox code is removed. That gets rid of things like accessibility features and WebRTC. The social API code is disabled by default.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The open-source OpenStack cloud platform only has major milestone releases every six months, but that doesn’t mean there are aren’t incremental updates. One of the leading vendors in the OpenStack community is privately-held Mirantis, which updated its OpenStack Distribution to version 5.1 this week.
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Rackspace has announced the release of its latest Rackspace Private Cloud offering, built on OpenStack and designed for enterprises. The platform now includes a 99.99 percent OpenStack API uptime guarantee, and is more scalable. Customers can deploy Rackspace Private Cloud in their own data centers, or have their deployments run at Rackspace or run in both locations. The Private Cloud platform also includes Rackspace’s “fanatical support.”
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When the open-source OpenStack cloud platform first got started back in 2010, there were only two components, with Rackspace bringing in the Swift storage project and NASA contributing the Nova compute piece. Over the last four years, OpenStack has expanded significantly beyond its initial two core contributors and two primary components. OpenStack now counts many of the world’s leading technology vendors—including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Cisco, Intel, Dell, VMware, AT&T and Comcast—among its many supporters.
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This is the third part in a series of three articles surveying automation projects within OpenStack, explaining what they do, how they do it, and where they stand in development readiness and field usage. Previously, in part one, I covered cloud deployment tools that enable you to install/update OpenStack cloud on bare metal. In part two, I covered workload deployment tools. Today, we’ll look at tools for day two operations.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced that the final version of LibreOffice 4.3.2 is now available for download.
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LibreOffice 4.3.2 hits the marketplace just before the fourth anniversary of the project on Sunday, September 28, 2014. The community has been growing for the past 48 months, attracting at least three new developers per month plus a larger number of volunteers active in localization, QA and other areas such as marketing and development of local communities.
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The Document Foundation was formed back in 2010, when a team of OpenOffice developers forked the project and created LibreOffice. Since then while Oracle unloaded the OOo burden on The Apache Foundation and the project continued its decline, LibreOffice experienced a steep growth.
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The LibreOffice team has analyzed more than 9 million lines of code to find and fix 10,000-plus defects of all types, including some with the potential to impact security and many that affected stability and memory use. The team working through the Coverity results is led by Caolán McNamara of Red Hat and includes Stephan Bergmann, Noel Grandin, Norbert Thiebaud, Julien Nabet, and others.
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LibreOffice is thriving, and trying something bold
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As we are approaching the 4th anniversary of the LibreOffice project in just a few days, an old theme has been reappearing on the Internet: Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice should reunite. I would like to share my perceptions on this topic although I think it is not a really important one, at least as long as the LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice do not officially call for such a reunion. Before I start, let me remind everyone that what follows is my own opinion and neither the one of the Document Foundation, nor the one of the Democratic Party, the one of my Government, nor, at last, the one of Bob’s Shipping and Handling Company.
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In case you thought the OpenStack cloud computing race wasn’t crowded enough, Oracle has just made its Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution generally available. Based on the OpenStack Icehouse release, it allows users to control Oracle Linux and Oracle VM through OpenStack in production environments. It can support any guest operating system (OS) that is supported with Oracle VM, including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Microsoft Windows,and other Linux distributions.
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Nuage is also pitching the integration as a win for open source within the cloud and SDN ecosystems. “We’re pleased to work with Oracle on this Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux integration. It provides choice in an open cloud solution, optimized for enterprise workloads to mutual customers worldwide,” said Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks. “This is great news for the OpenStack community as we continue to show momentum with OpenStack in enterprise and cloud provider deployments.”
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The new Oracle Linux update is probably the last one in the series. This operating system is based on Red Hat and the company has just pushed out the last update for the RHEL 5x branch, which means that this is the end of the line for the Oracle version as well.
Oracle Linux also comes with a series of features that make it very interesting, like zero-downtime kernel updates with the help of a tool called Ksplice that was originally developed for OpenSUSE, inclusion of the Oracle Database and Oracle Applications, and it’s used in all x86-based Oracle Engineered Systems.
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Education
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Youth Digital just moved into their new offices, tucked away in a nondescript office park in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It’s a big step up from their humble beginnings, when company founder and director Justin Richards hauled a laptop to his students’ houses, tutoring them on web and graphic design. Their first office was barely more than a closet, and now they have an expansive space complete with conference rooms, recording studio space, and their own 3D printer.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation has issued their response to this week’s news of the “Shellshock” bug that affects Bash.
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A major security vulnerability has been discovered in the free software shell GNU Bash. The most serious issues have already been fixed, and a complete fix is well underway. GNU/Linux distributions are working quickly to release updated packages for their users. All Bash users should upgrade immediately, and audit the list of remote network services running on their systems.
[...]
Proprietary, (aka nonfree) software relies on an unjust development model that denies users the basic freedom to control their computers. When software’s code is kept hidden, it is vulnerable not only to bugs that go undetected, but to the easier deliberate addition and maintenance of malicious features. Companies can use the obscurity of their code to hide serious problems, and it has been documented that Microsoft provides intelligence agencies with information about security vulnerabilities before fixing them.
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Today in Linux news, The Document Foundation celebrates four years with the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2. Bash exploit “Shellshock” is making more headlines today as servers and devices are under attack. Bruce Byfield looks at the thankless job of community managers and Jack Germain test drives the Pale Moon Web browser. And finally today, Jack Wallen explains the difference between LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
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On Friday morning we went to the VAIP office and had a Fedora APAC ambassador meetup the whole day. The meetup was set up for APAC ambassadors to discuss critical tasks. EMEA has had a lot of similar meetups, but for APAC, it was the first to my knowledge. (It was at least the first in this year.)
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The Software Freedom Day was celebrated in the capital city last week at an event organised by Zyxware Technologies, a Thiruvananthapuram based IT services company, in association with the International Centre for Free & Open Source Software (ICFOSS) and the Free Software Users Group (FSUG-Tvm).
The theme for the day was ‘Government Organisations and Free Software in Kerala’, in the light of the government order asking all departments to migrate to Free Software. At the event, experiences of government organisations who have successfully migrated to Free Software was showcased.
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Project Releases
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hardlink 0.3 now features support for xattr support, contributed by Tom Keel at Intel. If this does not work correctly, please blame him.
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Licensing
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The makers of the open-sourced emulation software program, RetroArch are the latest to say that video games accessories company Hyperkin is using its program in violation of the GPL license. RetroArch uses a development interface called “libretro” that allows for the “easy creation of emulators and games that can plug straight into this program called RetroArch.” It supports 15 different hardware platforms including Android.
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Openness/Sharing
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That open source philosophy will benefit Stefannuti Stocks in the long run, because other companies may devise some improvements. Then, if the demand increases, the units could be built more cheaply in bulk rather than individually crafted.
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Open Data
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There is definitely something different about the Code for America Summit this year. It’s still got the family feeling and warm welcome that I’ve come to expect each year, but the tone is a little more serious. The civic projects being worked on are having a bigger impact on society. The projects highlighted during the first day of the conference are saving people time and improving our experience with government. The tide is on the rise and so is the impact of open government and open data.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s hardly a secret that the price of new college textbooks has risen 82% in the last decade, forcing students to find cheaper alternatives or forego course materials altogether.
Rentals, buybacks and used textbooks are part of the solution, but they still involve textbooks from the three major publishers that control the market. Experts say the next disruptive force in the textbook market could cut out these “big three” altogether.
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Programming
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Industry leaders say open source is the backbone of the software infrastructure required to fuel the API economy. At APIcon UK, Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative, explained why open source licensing will enable the API and Internet of Things economies to grow.
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A few days ago the Facebook developers working on the HipHop Virtual Machine — that serves as a faster implementation of PHP and it also serves as the basis of their Hack language — released HHVM 3.3.0.
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Apple
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The all-new iPhones and Apple Watch can be easily avoided but there’s no escaping iOS 8
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Craig Hockenberry, one of the developers behind Twitterriffic, has written a blog post warning iOS users about in-app browsers, which he says are “considered harmful.” According to Hockenberry, and as outlined in a video, an in-app browser has the ability to record what’s being typed, even at a secure login screen.
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A platform upgrade always comes with its fair share of bugs, and per Apple Forums, one of the issues popping up with iOS 8 is slow Wi-Fi. But fear not, apparently there’s an easy fix.
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Apple is pitching iOS 8 as one of the most security-focused versions of its mobile platform to date. But there are still questions about just how effective those security measures really are — and how honest the company was with the promotional page it published earlier this month.
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Apple Inc broke its silence on complaints about bending iPhones, hours after withdrawing a glitch-ridden software update as the company struggles to restore momentum to the rollout of its latest phones.
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Today Apple released iOS 8.0.1, but the update was pulled due to complaints about dropped calls. The update caused some iOS users to lose their cellular service and it disabled the Touch ID fingerprint sensor on certain devices.
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Apple knew about an iCloud security flaw six months before it was utilized to hack celebrity accounts on the service, reports The Daily Dot. The company was notified of the exploit by independent security researcher Ibrahim Balic, who shared emails between himself and members of Apple’s product security team.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Between 4 and 20 August the Saudi Arabian government beheaded 19 people. Saudi Arabia, which has funded and armed ISIS from inception (initially with CIA support), is now bombing alongside the USA in Iraq and Syria.
Forget the war technology porn regularly being broadcast by western media, with those spectacular photos of missiles erupting from ships into the night sky. Those missiles and bombs eviscerate and maim innocents as well as combatants, children as well as terrorists. The West always first denies, then regrets, “collateral damage”. The propaganda can be laughable. During the invasion of Iraq I remember a news propaganda item about how a cruise missile can enter a specific window, being followed by the next item – the US had apologised to Syria for two missiles aimed at Iraq which had hit Syria by accident.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Alan Reiner, core developer of Bitcoin Armory, a bitcoin wallet focused on security. Bitcoin Armory is licensed under the terms of GNU Affero General Public License version 3, or (at your option) any later version.
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Finance
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It’s no secret that the Washington Post editorial page was quite alarmed by Venezuela’s shift to the left under former President Hugo Chavez. The Post–like the rest of elite US media (Extra!, 11/05)–was an unrelenting critic of Chavez’s policies.
Some things haven’t changed.
In a scathing editorial (9/20/14), the Post went after Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro, calling him an “economically illiterate former bus driver” because he “rejected the advice of pragmatists” and will continue to pursue policies that are ruining what was “once Latin America’s richest country.”
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Now, that’s a rotten thing to do–taking away large sums of money that you promised people for their retirement after years of service. Where could Bezos have gotten the idea that it was OK to act that way?
Well, maybe he reads the paper he just bought.
The Washington Post has a long tradition–in its news reports and its editorials–of calling on politicians to treat public employees and their pensions the way that Bezos is treating the Post’s.
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Professor Wolff joins host of RT America Thom Hartmann. Sweden has said good riddance to austerity. On Sunday – the country’s voters chose a group of left-wing and center-left parties -led by the Social Democrat party – to head a new government. In total – left wing parties won 43.7 percent of the vote and 159 seats in parliament. When all is said and done and the Social Democrats have formed a government – it will mark the end of Sweden’s short-lived experiment with austerity. In the eight years since outgoing prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s right-leaning Moderate Party took control of parliament – Sweden has seen huge tax cuts and a flurry of so-called “pro-market reforms” – a change that many in the country saw as a a betrayal of a decades-long tradition of social democracy. With Sunday’s elections – though – it looks like the Scandinavian Model is back in business – and will be for quite some time.
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An alliance of tea party activists and some misled progressive liberals has united to defeat affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a concerted effort to protect property values and a perceived quality of life, the Koch Brothers’ libertarian think tanks have developed strategies, talking points, and tactics to repel any efforts to provide affordable housing.
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board defended the corporate bill mill American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in an editorial whitewashing the organization’s climate change denial and vindicating their one-sided attacks on renewable energy, without mentioning that the Journal’s parent company News Corp. is an ALEC member.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A federal appellate court has shut down Judge Rudolph Randa’s decision halting the criminal probe into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and allied groups, rejecting Randa’s interpretation of campaign finance law and declaring the investigation best resolved by state courts.
The investigation remains halted by a state court decision from January, and the probe’s future now rests with Wisconsin appellate courts. However, some justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court could have a conflict of interest: the four-justice Republican majority was elected by millions in spending from the same groups under investigation in the coordination probe, calling into question whether they can be impartial.
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Censorship
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The question before the Court is whether the owner of a trade mark can obtain an injunction – not against an alleged counterfeiter, or even against the owners and operators of the websites on which counterfeiters sell their items. The Court is instead being asked to grant an injunction against the internet service providers (ISPs), so that websites alleged to be infringing the trade marks are blocked to ISP subscribers.
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For the first time ISPs are being asked to block websites on the basis of alleged trade mark (rather than copyright) infringement. Whilst ORG takes no view on the merits of the trade mark claims in the current case, we believe the outcome of this case will have implications for future trade mark blocking applications, which could potentially threaten the legitimate interests of third parties.
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Civil Rights
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Attorney General Eric Holder, who has addressed questions about drones, cybersecurity, marijuana legalization, and other issues during his time in the Obama administration, is stepping down. NPR first reported the news today, saying that Holder would leave as soon as the Senate confirmed a successor, which could happen as late as next year; the White House has since confirmed the news in a statement. Holder took office in 2009, appointed by President Barack Obama in his first term. NPR quotes a former official as saying that Holder wanted to leave before being committed to staying the rest of Obama’s second term; he’s already one of the longest-serving US attorneys general. This spring, he said he would stay “well into 2014,” but declined to be more specific.
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Fox News hyped fears that an influx of immigrants from the Middle East could pose a terrorism threat for the U.S., advocating for greater immigration from English-speaking countries. But Fox’s report parrots a study released by the anti-immigration group, the Center for Immigration Studies, and ignored the fact that the growth of Middle East immigrants in the U.S. was modest when compared to other regions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has now spoken out strongly in favor of net neutrality in an interview with the Washington Post. The headline and much of the attention are going to his quip that what the big broadband providers are doing is a form of “bribery” in trying to set up toll booths to reach their users. And that is, indeed, the money quote, but it’s not the most interesting part of what he’s really saying. It’s in the context that he gets to that, where he’s countering the bogus arguments from folks who insist that we don’t need net neutrality rules because that would mess with “the free market.” That’s wrong for a whole number of reasons that we’ve discussed previously, but Berners-Lee points out that to have a free market, you do need some basic accepted rules, and that’s where some basic regulations are useful: regulations to keep the market free and open. And that’s true of most “free markets.”
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I was very pleased to meet Tom Wheeler, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Tom and I had a very fruitful exchange, particularly on “Net Neutrality”. We are on the same line about preventing blocking and throttling of Internet access; but it’s clear that our approach to specialised services is quite different; in Europe we have been clear that they must not slow down or hinder the quality of access to the open Internet. I was also struck that the FCC received almost four million comments on its own proposed net neutrality rules: and in a way that is unsurprising, as our own consultations and analyses for the Connected Continent proposal show just how important this topic is to citizens, businesses and governments alike.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We just wrote about an audio equipment manufacturer trying to argue that it was criminal for someone to resell their products. While this was obviously crazy, never underestimate the lengths that some companies will go through these days to try to block people from selling products they (thought they had) legally bought. And guess what tool they’re using to block you from actually owning the products you bought? Why copyright, of course. It’s yet another example of how copyright is often used to block property rights rather than to create them.
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Starting from Monday, September 29th, the nominees intended to constitute the future College of Claude Junker’s Commission, will face a full parliamentary hearing, in view of the definitive confirmation of their appointment. La Quadrature du Net invites any Members of the European Parliament to question the candidates on their views and positions on the protection of European citizens’ digital rights. In particular, the set of questions, that La Quadrature du Net provides, covers a broad range of issues that are essential to guarantee people’s rights to access a free and open Internet, as well as to protect their personal data. Most of the questions directly relate to the portfolio of Andrus Ansip, Vice-President for Digital Single Market. Other Commissioners designate, whose Directorate-General is competent for specific issues, are indicated below.
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09.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Instead of moving to Windows 8 or waiting for Windows 9, enterprises might consider Linux because of the open source operating system’s flexibility.
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Kernel Space
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I was drawn to the stability of the platform and the vast array of GNU FOSS software available coupled with the fantastic community surrounding so many software projects.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month Intel published initial Skylake Linux graphics support for their DRM kernel driver. Today they have released the Mesa 3D driver support for Skylake, their next-generation architecture coming out by the end of 2015 to succeed Broadwell.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Beyond Gravity has been on Linux for quite a while now on Itch.io, but now it joins the many Linux games on Steam. It’s a casual high score fest platformer.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Yesterday Kexi 2.8.6 has been released within Calligra. Click the link for a list of changes, and a mention of pretty unusual addition to Kexi – it proposes direct donations on its Welcome screen. It turned out to be convenient and hopefully not too annoying given what the benefits might be. It’s best explained by the screen shot.
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If all goes well, KDE Applications 14.12 will be released on 17 December. The current release schedule that was published on Wednesday has an API/feature/dependency/message/artwork freeze on 29 October, a beta release on 5 November, a second beta on 12 November, and beta 3 on 19 November. The KDE Applications 14.12 release candidate is due out on 26 November and then if all goes well the official release will come on 17 December. KDE Applications 14.12.x point releases will come monthly just like we saw with the conventional KDE 4 Software Compilation releases.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In a nutshell I like Gnome 3.14 a lot. It’s a really nice release. Though I am a hard core Plasma user, I see myself spending some time with Gnome, enjoying things like online integration, easy-to-set-up Evolution and many more features which I can’t find in KDE’s Plasma. That said, both are my favorite. They both excel in their focus areas. If you have not tried Gnome yet, do give it a try.
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With yesterday’s GNOME 3.14 release the Wayland support is considered sufficient for day-to-day use running the GNOME stack on Wayland rather than an X11 Server on Linux. However, the GNOME developers don’t consider this to be “100% complete” yet and there’s still some more work needed to be cleared up on the Wayland side.
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In today’s Linux news the Linux Journal has the story of a firehouse that saved time, money, and hair by using Tiny Core Linux. GNOME 3.14 is “lazier” than ever and Fedora 21 is getting lots of kudos. Red Hat is on its way to Mars and Bash has been found to be vulnerable to attack.
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From a budgetary standpoint, I was encouraged to keep costs down. The first decision and the easiest decision was to use Linux. I just shaved off the cost of the Windows license.
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To foster the idea of sharing installable distros for specific hardware or purposes, I created distroshare.com. An example purpose may be to mimic Windows or Mac OS X for users comfortable with those user interfaces. Anyone can submit a distro to share and each one will be reviewed for security issues or functionality problems. Submissions can be uploaded directly to distroshare.com or a link to the file/project can be provided in the submission form. The submission form also accepts an optional PayPal or Bitcoin address for users to donate to. Currently there are nine distributions listed and only three for a specific machine (the Acer C720 chromebook). As the number of distributions grow, we should see more desktop Linux users and perhaps even cause OEMs to pay more attention.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Today, the GNOME Project announced the availability of their latest stable release, GNOME 3.14. This version of GNOME is what will be available as the basis of the Fedora 21 Workstation, and features a wide range of amazing new features and enhancements. This new version contains major updates to the weather application, the evince document viewer, maps, and games. The default theme has been given a lot of care and attention, including new transition animations. Additionally, GNOME 3.14 now also has support for “Captive Authentication”, so when logging into a wifi hotspot, the login screen is automatically pops up.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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This new version includes:
Configured network connections are now persistent on reboot for USB Images.
Improved USB bootable Image by creating a separate partition, this fixes the issue with USB images not booting on some rare computers
Elive now boots with an amazing Splash theme
Improved the listing of kernels on the boot screen
Added memtest to the boot screen
SSH between Elive computers is now much faster
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Ok, enough about tarnished acronyms. Let’s get back to elementary OS Freya beta, which was released in early August. As with any distribution that I review, there are stuff that I like about elementary OS Freya and stuff that I don’t like. A particular issue that I don’t like is the same one I drew attention to in my review of the Luna edition.
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Toradex is adding a Freescale i.MX6-based model to its SODIMM-style Colibri family, with up 4GB eMMC flash, industrial temperature range, and Linux support.
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Our readers in the US will be relieved to hear that the upcoming Samsung Gear S will making its way to the United States this fall. Samsung have announced that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless will all be offering the mobile 3G Tizen Smartwatch. There is no information regarding pricing or exact release dates at the moment, but we expect further Information to come soon as per announcement.
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ARM has had a look at the fridges, speakers and robots that use its Cortex-M series processor cores and decided they need a few maths lessons.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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With this week’s openSUSE 13.2 Beta release I decided to run some benchmarks to see how the performance compares to that of Fedora Linux.
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Android
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Dan Allen: I can understand the programmer’s dilemma in having to write documentation. It can be a long and painful process. Documentation in open source is often a missing link. There are four major pillars of developing open source software. Each one has it own elements of problem-solving associated with it. These are design, code writing, testing and documentation.
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Kanies, who is the original author of Puppet, said the Puppet Server has been re-engineered for increased efficiency, greater flexibility, and improved stability and scalability. The new version, which is now available in Puppet 3.7, improves improved performance by 300 per cent, he said.
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack is on a six-month release cycle, with each release given a code name starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet. On October 16th, OpenStack Juno will be released, with several new projects, and lots of new features. Here’s a few of the things you can expect in the next release of OpenStack. This isn’t intended to be comprehensive—just a taste of some of the things that are coming.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Penguinistas now have another reason not to adopt Ubuntu as their operating system of choice. Canonical and Oracle have each announced, in separate blog posts, that the two companies are working together to insure the compatibility of each company’s Linux offering on the other’s OpenStack cloud implementation.
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Italian cities Todi and Terni have decided to drop the proprietary office solution used by the city’s administration and to adopt LibreOffice.
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Public Services/Government
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This week, Code for America is thrilled to announce new partnerships with seven local governments for the 2015 Code for America Fellowship Program. The official announcement was shared with more than 750 attendees at the annual Code for America Summit on September 23, and in this press release.
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Openness/Sharing
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Isaac Yonemoto is a chemist, but he’s been writing software code since he was a kid. He calls himself a “semi-recreational” programmer, and now, he’s running an experiment that combines this sideline with his day job. In short, he’s using open source software techniques to kickstart the world of cancer research.
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We’ve seen examples of low-cost 3D printed houses (and an unrelated castle), and while they’re all interesting, they are out of the reach of most prospective home buyers. That could change with WikiHouse, a project that aims to provide the public with plans for cheap homes that can be built in a matter of days.
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Open Access/Content
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For university students enrolled in Scott Roberts’ PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology class since fall of 2010, the idea of a college course that doesn’t require spending hundreds on a textbook isn’t foreign, it’s reality.
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A new documentary about the life of Aaron Swartz was released in June this year. It recounts the story of one of the most impactful young talents of the Internet age, and the tragic saga of his quest to make the world a better place.
Directed by Brian Knappenberger, the film was funded through Kickstarter and backed by 1,531 supporters who collectively pledged $93,741, surpassing the initial funding goal of $75,000.
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Security
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The story of LulzSec is one of trust and betrayal, justice and lawlessness, authority and subversion. In the winter of 2010, six geographically disparate people came together online to form a hacking group that delighted some, infuriated others and quickly came to the attention of law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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I was once a pair of “boots on the ground,” so I know a little about what the phrase means. And I can tell you that, listening to the back-and-forth between the White House and the Pentagon over who exactly we’re sending to Iraq (and now possibly Syria), neither side is giving the American people the whole story. First of all, you know those boots on the ground everybody’s still discussing whether we should deploy? Well, they’re already there. We are already effectively engaged in combat in Iraq, in direct contradiction of what President Obama said when he announced he was taking action against the Islamic State terrorists, telling the American people in an address from the White House that the mission “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” He said pretty much the same when he told troops at MacDill Air Force Base: “The American forces do not and will not have a combat mission.”
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President Obama vows not to involve U.S. troops in another land war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He refers to this as not having “boots on the ground.”
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It is official: US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama is at war again. After toppling Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi and bombing targets in Somalia and Yemen, Obama has initiated airstrikes in northern Iraq, effectively declaring war on the Islamic State – a decision that will involve infringing on the sovereign, if disintegrating, state of Syria.
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On Tuesday, Obama attacked another country lawlessly. Syria poses no threat to America.
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It’s unannounced. It’s no secret. Israel is heavily involved. It’s been so all along. It wants Assad ousted.
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Barack Obama, the man many hoped would be the ‘peace President’ when he entered office, has bombed seven countries during his six years in office.
The President oversaw the first US air strikes launched in Syria this week, in a huge escalation of America’s military campaign against Isis (also known as Islamic State).
Mr Obama was elected partly of his opposition to the Iraq war and was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
The arguably optimistic decision taken by the Norwegian Nobel Committee was taken just nine months into his Presidency and came as he was trying to manage the war in Afghanistan.
His famous speech in Cairo saw the President declare he was seeking “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”, sparking hopes he would be the antidote to George W. Bush’s controversial term.
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Multiple stories of heroism, indecision and guilt converge in a riveting documentary
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One of the film’s less affable talking heads is Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who negotiated the Paris Peace Accord two years earlier. I’ll leave it to viewers to evaluate his input here.
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It’s very hard to watch the vile vampire Kissinger in hornrims smiling as he mimics a human being.
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Once again the West has found a way to use the Kurds as cannon fodder for its own purposes. Once more, however, the biggest losers will be the ordinary Kurdish people.
The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq comprises two rival armed groups — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — which have a history of killing each other’s supporters in their mutual drive for absolute power. The PUK began as a faction inside the KDP. In 1964 the KDP militia literally pushed the dissident faction into Iran.
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Just when we thought the jokes and lies couldn’t get any sicker and thicker, we get, via CBS, a new figurative, yet also polysemously literal, present: “Khorasan.” Of course, the “new”, to be sure, is also by now rather old. Do have a look; we’ve got yet another recycling of the bin Laden/Emmanuel Goldstein image, this time associated with the out-of-thin-air Khorasan group. CBS kindly informs us that “an expert on Al-Qaeda” (who is undoubtedly also expert in the knowledge of Eurasia, Eastasia, and telescreens) “says they [Khorasan] are following bin Laden’s vision.”
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Contradictions beset the U.S. war over Iraq and Syria. The principal target ISIS wouldn’t even exist but for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria have benefited from defections of U.S.-backed “moderates.” But now warplanes and missiles are supposed to fix things, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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>Last week, the House and Senate voted to rubber stamp President Obama’s war plans for the Middle East. Both bodies, on a bipartisan basis, authorized the U.S. to begin openly training and arming the rebels who have been fighting for three years to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.
Although the Syrian government also has been fighting ISIS and related extremist groups for three years, the U.S. refuses to speak to the Syrians and has warned Assad not to interfere with the U.S. attack on sovereign Syrian territory
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Tucked inside the continuing resolution the United States Congress passed late last week was a provision to authorize the training and equipping of “moderate, vetted” elements of the Syrian opposition. The CIA has been carrying out a covert, small-scale version of this program, according to media reports. However, the rapid territorial gains and brutality of ISIS tipped the scales and encouraged the administration to go bigger – and go public — with a $500 million Pentagon-run, train-and-equip program, said U.S. President Barack Obama in a Sept. 10 speech.
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Communiqué encouraged media assets to counter notions of “political conspiracy”
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Censorship
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What Board Chairman Ken Witt probably didn’t expect is what happened next. Yesterday, hundreds of students from five high schools marched out of their classrooms and into the streets to reject the conservative board’s proposal. Carrying signs such as “people didn’t die so we could erase them,” the students demanded that the proposal be withdrawn.
To get a sense of the size of the protests, the local CBS station reported that 500 students walked out at a single high school, Arvada West High. That is about a third of the students at the school.
In addition to the mass student protests, teachers have been leading actions as well. Last week, as many as 50 teachers at Standley Lake and Conifer high schools staged a sickout to protest the new standards, forcing classes to be canceled.
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Privacy
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It took awhile, but Washington now has done the responsible thing and ceased spying on friendly governments.
That information comes from current and former U.S. officials, reports The Associated Press, although the CIA has declined to comment.
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Civil Rights
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In the new Cuestra film, Renner portrays investigative reporter Gary Webb, who became the target of a vicious smear campaign that drove him to the point of suicide after exposing the CIA’s role in arming Contra rebels.
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Nearly two decades after the reporter exposed a connection between the CIA and crack cocaine in America, Hollywood chimes in with a major movie
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“Kill the Messenger” is a political thriller about real-life journalist Gary Webb who documented the link between drug dealers, contra rebels in Nicaragua and the C.I.A. He wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury Times called the “Dark Alliance” series in 1996. His work received critical praise and attention from the media, who later turned on him and discredited his work.
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These authors also assert that President Ford had not made a deal with the president who appointed him vice president and then stood aside to elevate him to the presidency, trading a pardon for the country’s two national offices over ten months. Many pundits as well as the dense ranks of Nixon’s opponents (they almost completely overlapped for a long time), screamed this at the time, including relatively sober commentators such as Joseph Alsop, but there was never a shred of evidence of it and such a thought arose only in the perfervidly malignant atmosphere confected by the anti-Nixon media, with, it must be admitted, what amounted to the cooperation of Nixon himself in his incompetent handling of the issues from the Watergate intrusion of June 1972, right up to his resignation in August 1974. Of course there was no such arrangement, the suggestion of it was always scurrilous and defamatory of both presidents, and to proclaim triumphantly 40 years later that they are now free of that suspicion is fatuous.
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Does US care about violating international laws? Nope. Is there any entity that can take action against US and Allies if they violate international laws? Nope. So what is the use in an UN and its Secretary General or the UN Human Rights head? They simply take home lavish salaries, remunerations and travel VIP and issue statements at all states the US and Allies are against. If so, is there a point in continuing with the UN? That’s a question that the public of the member nations must pose to their governments and decide to walk out of the UN as the current double standards and ugly precedents being created has reached beyond the level of tolerance. Since independence in 1776, the U.S. has been engaged in over 53 military invasions and expeditions and nothing is being done against such illegal actions.
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Ex-CIA analyst joins Chico State profs in discussion of Fourth Amendment, government power over Americans
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A Pakistani citizen who says he was tortured over a period of 10 years after being captured by UK special forces in Iraq and handed over to US troops will on Wednesday contest the government’s claim that he cannot pursue his case on the grounds that it would damage Britain’s relations with America, The Guardian reported.
Yunus Rahmatullah was seized in Iraq in 2004 in an incident that was kept secret from ministers and only disclosed to MPs five years later. Rahmatullah, now 31, was released by the US without charge in May and is seeking to sue the ministry of defence (MoD) and the foreign office, accusing them of responsibility for his subjection to torture and abuse.
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Mr. Maduro Moros urged United States President Barack Obama to end the embargo in Cuba and called on the General Assembly to draft a document that would defend poor countries against “vulture funds” that sought to plunder economies and impose detrimental finance systems. He expressed solidarity with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and Argentina in particular. A decolonization plan for Puerto Rico was critical so that the island could join its neighbours in CELAC.
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Back here at home, the dispute over the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture, a hot button issue earlier this year, has also benefited, largely disappearing from sight. The meticulously researched Senate report, covering 6000 pages and including 35,000 footnotes, apparently concluded that torturing terrorist suspects was not only illegal under the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which Washington is a signatory, it was also ineffective, producing no intelligence that was otherwise unobtainable.
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AP’s Washington Bureau Chief, a reporter who has been illegally spied upon by the Obama regime, has just given a talk about the ways the president is trampling press freedom.
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But there are reasons Mr. Mohammed should not be executed, irrespective of how one feels about capital punishment. He was the victim of blatantly illegal treatment — the C.I.A. waterboarded him 183 times in March 2003, and threatened to kill his children while imprisoning him in a secret jail — at the hands of the government.
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Last week, a nearly empty French lower house (National Assembly) voted with a large majority in favour of the “bill strengthening provisions on the fight against terrorism”. In an atmosphere heavy with “apocalyptic” anxiety and speeches on the terrorist threat – particularly online –, interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and rapporteur Sébastien Pietrasanta wore down all opposition, blocking any further thought on the serious breaches of the Rule of Law contained in this bill.
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