02.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Afternoon and evening news picks about an apparatus of indiscriminate surveillance and merciless assassination
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I’ve already written one piece about Cory Doctorow’s incredible column at the Guardian concerning digital rights management and anti-circumvention, in which I focused on how the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws allows companies to make up their own copyright laws in a way that removes the rights of the public. Those rights are fairly important, and the reason we have them encoded within our copyright laws is to make sure that copyright isn’t abused to stifle speech. But, anti-circumvention laws combined with DRM allow the industry to route around that entirely.
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A decade and a half later, and given the recent Edward Snowden-fueled brouhaha over the National Security Agency’s snooping on Americans, I wondered how much had changed. Today, about 250 million Americans are on the Internet, and spend an average of 23 hours a week online and texting, with 27 percent of that engaged in social media. Like most people, I’m on the Internet, in some fashion, most of my waking hours, if not through a computer then via a tablet or smart phone.
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The fall of the United States in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index seems attributable mostly to the war on whistleblowers. “The whistleblower is the enemy,” the report states, singling out the harsh treatment of Barrett Brown, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
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A number of media organizations have published stories based on a leaked National Security Agency memo that suggests NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “swiped” the password of a co-worker, a civilian NSA employee, who has been forced to resign for sharing his password. The forced resignation by the civilian NSA employee is being reported as part of disciplining people for allowing breaches of security to happen, not as a part of the NSA’s effort to find people to take the fall for something the agency did not prevent from happening.
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BitTorrent has no more control over how others use the code its founder developed than Google has over what people search for, but it has spent the past few years struggling to shake off the stigma of its technology being used by pirates.
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I am used to very polite answers from Huawei executives about how they want to be more open, transparent and gain the trust of the wider community outside of its home market, and Dr Li didn’t disappoint. However, as he continued, it dawned on me there had been at least one winner following the revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013…
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“Let us be very clear: Millennial Media has not and does not work with, nor pass information to, the NSA, GCHQ, or any other such agencies,” stated a Millennial spokesperson who said the company did not want to be interviewed for this story.
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Michael Hayden, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA), used a lecture at Oxford University Monday to candidly praise the Obama administration for constructing and exponentially strengthening the NSA’s illegal spying apparatus.
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After an ambitious year marked by an explosion of privacy and accountability legislation nationwide, the drone war marches on in 2014.
But has another, more urgent privacy battle — the global snooping assault by the U.S. National Security Agency — taken some of the fire out of the anti-drone movement?
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As reported previously, Mask was discovered recently by Kaspersky Lab as hitting targets in more than 30 countries and infecting at least 380 separate organisations. The malware uses several techniques to compromise PCs and servers, reportedly tapping various undocumented vulnerabilities in software to ensure success.
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Obama asked Holder and Clapper to develop additional possible reforms by the time the NSA’s phone records programs needs to be reauthorized in March.
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The key is finding a way to reap the benefits of self-reflection and letting your guard down outside the walls of the dorm. In other words, replicating the effects of “privacy” without literal privacy. It could be in a library, coffee shop, Chipotle, Bascom (when it isn’t an arctic precipice), a friend’s apartment, the handicap stall or during a long walk or run.
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Senior Obama administration officials say our government is sharply scaling back its drone strikes in Pakistan. That’s a step in the right direction. It would be even better if the entire U.S. program of targeted killings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia were scrapped.
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A target that emerges from electronic surveillance cannot be assumed to align with a body on the ground to kill
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The World Council of Churches (WCC) today issued a statement condemning the use of drones which indiscriminately target civilian populations, injuring and killing innocent civilians in complete violation of international human right law
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The Los Angeles Times had a great story today that helps explain why few Americans — including the ones who make the country’s laws — know much about the drone program that is the vanguard of the endless war against terror. The basic reason, of course, is that the Obama administration wants to keep everyone in the dark, but the lengths to which officials will go can sometimes be surprising.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another set of new links (from yesterday’s and today’s news) covering a very disturbing trend that exploits technology for imposition of power
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In 2010 the American Petroleum Institute (API) paid the global intelligence firm Stratfor more than $13,000 a month for weekly intelligence bulletins profiling activist organizations and their campaigns on everything from energy and climate change to tax policy and human rights, according to documents published by WikiLeaks in 2012.
The weekly reports provided details on a wide range of environmental organizations including Greenpeace, NRDC, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. API was interested in anticipating which groups might be out to “attack” them.
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Step aside, Rand Paul: the NSA has a new enemy. While the Kentucky senator announced his own class-action lawsuit against the NSA on Wednesday, Marc Roberts, a first-term Republican lawmaker in Utah, is planning to introduce legislation that will choke the water supply at the NSA data center under construction in the state.
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Local protesters joined the National Day of Action against government surveillance by rallying outside the Federal Building on Exchange Street in Kennedy Plaza.
About 20 people held up signs and a large banner that said: “Dear U.S. Government: Stop Spying On Us!!” Organized jointly by Rhode Island MoveOn.org and the R.I. Coalition to Defend Human and Civil Rights, the protest was part of a national effort called The Day We Fight Back.
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It is instructive to note that all of this will be done by the same government that operates under an explicit constitutional directive purportedly protecting people from “unreasonable searches and seizures” and specifying that “… no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause … and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”[3] Indeed, one of the most instructive aspects of the NSA scandal is the way the agency has succeeded, for an extensive period of time, in warding off legal challenges to the constitutionality of its surveillance programs. This is instructive from the point of view of libertarian theory, since it illustrates the degree to which the much-vaunted “checks and balances” within the State apparatus, highlighted in the recent Obama speech, are really illusory. In practice, the judicial and executive branches of government tend to act as a legitimizing mechanism for the actions of government agencies, with rare “checks and balances” and“reforms” coming only when the legitimacy of the system is under potent attack from some outside source.
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The European parliament is to ditch demands on Wednesday that EU governments give guarantees of asylum and security to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower.
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Never underestimate the newfound digital power of advocacy groups to lobby lawmakers. Tuesday’s protest against government surveillance, dubbed The Day We Fight Back, generated more than 85,000 phone calls and 175,000 emails to members of Congress, thanks to more than 6,000 websites that agreed to host a banner to direct voters to act.
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Panel says program is illegal and ineffective
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Deputy Attorney General James Cole may have misled Congress earlier this month when he said the National Security Agency doesn’t look at phone data it collects from members of Congress, three lawmakers wrote in a letter on Wednesday.
Because the NSA could track even phone numbers only distantly related to a suspected source believed to be involved in terrorism, it’s entirely possible that a member of Congress‘ records were tracked, said Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Republican author of the Patriot Act, and two other congressmen, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York.
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And it looks like they’re going to remain convinced of that no matter what.
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Sensenbrenner, Issa and Nadler wrote to Cole on Wednesday for a public clarification of the statement, which they described as “not entirely accurate” – and in doing so drew attention to a little-noticed procedure used by the NSA.
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The EC called for reform today in the way which the internet is run, saying it needs to be more transparent and accountable. Specifically, the EC wants to ensure that one country, specifically the US, doesn’t maintain a dominating influence.
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EU vice president Neelie Kroes wants the US to slacken its grip on how the internet is managed in the aftermath of revelations about mass surveillance of innocent citizens.
She said today that reform was needed to make internet governance more inclusive, transparent and accountable around the globe, with particular emphasis unsurprisingly placed on the role the European Union could play in reshaping that control.
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Agency’s dragnet of communications data threatens to destroy the confidence between reporter and source on which most investigations depend, Committee to Protect Journalists said
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DUTCH houses are famous for having large front parlour windows that look directly onto the pavement, affording passersby a clear view of everything happening inside. It is commonplace to associate these windows with the Calvinist Dutch enthusiasm for transparency, a moral imperative to display that one has nothing to hide. One might think that such a compulsively transparent nation would be less upset than others to learn that its electronic communications were being monitored, but in fact Dutch citizens reacted with fury last August to documents released by Edward Snowden, showing that America’s National Security Agency had apparently collected huge amounts of information on Dutch phone calls and other communications—1.8m of them in December 2012 alone. The interior minister, Ronald Plasterk, issued a report in October denying any Dutch government complicity, and in television appearances accused the Americans of carrying out unauthorised surveillance in the Netherlands and promised to call them to account.
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A vocal proponent among US Senate liberals for controversial National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance efforts says the program could be shut down, and experts are unsure how many Americans’ phone numbers have been gathered.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, one of the few proponents of the NSA data-collection programs among Democratic progressives, said Wednesday he is “not assuming” that lawmakers will opt to “keep the bulk collection.”
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Many of the new privacy protections and surveillance reforms ordered by President Obama will probably not harm the National Security Agency’s ability to do its job, the agency’s deputy said.
“They’re not putting us out of business,” Deputy Director Rick Ledgett said in a recent interview at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. “They’re not putting an unbearable burden on us. There is a cost to implementing those procedures. But the cost is reasonable, and the effects are not hurting our mission in a significant way.”
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Press freedom in the United States has suffered “one of the most significant declines” in the last year after sacrificing information to national security, with the NSA surveillance scandal topping the list of wrongdoing.
That’s according to The World Press Freedom Index for 2014 from Reporters Without Borders (RWB), which put the US in 46th place out of 180 countries, a 13-place drop from last year.
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Obama heads an administration Murder, Inc. agenda. He appointed himself judge, jury and executioner.
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After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error.
FBI agent Kevin Kelley was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list.
What happened next was the real shame.
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An anti-drone activist and journalist has gone missing in Pakistan just days before he was due to travel to Europe to speak with Parliament members about the impact of the U.S. drone wars. The legal charity Reprieve says Karim Khan was seized in the early hours of February 5 by up to 20 men, some wearing police uniforms. He has not been seen since. Khan’s brother and son were both killed in a drone strike. In addition to public activism, Khan was also engaged in legal proceedings against the Pakistani government for their failure to investigate the killings of his loved ones. We are joined by filmmaker Madiha Tahir, who interviewed Khan for her documentary, “Wounds of Waziristan.”
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A judge in Onondaga County found 13 anti-drone-aircraft activists guilty of disorderly conduct for protesting at a Syracuse-area military base where airmen with the New York Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing remotely fire missiles from unmanned aircraft flying in Afghanistan.
DeWitt Town Judge David Gideon on Friday sentenced 12 of the 13 peace activists for blocking entrances to the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base on Oct. 25, 2012, according to a De Witt court clerk. The dozen protesters each received 15 days in jail, $375 fines and two-year restraining orders prohibiting them from being near Col. Earl A. Evans, a commander at the base, the clerk said. Gideon is expected to sentence the remaining activist, Vietnam veteran Elliott Adams, on Feb. 25. The 67-year-old from Sharon Springs, Schoharie County, received permission from the judge to miss Friday’s court appearance because he was out of the state.
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Every time you think the war on terror can’t get any weirder, it does.
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All this helps explain why the Obama administration apparently feels it cannot kill an American citizen without first taking the political temperature in the U.S. When a government program has the odor of illegality, no one wants to use it unless the use will not be heavily criticized. That’s no way to run national security and it’s no way to run a constitutional democracy, either.
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- Looking at the way the White House has handled requests from (ACLU) America’s Civil Liberties Union and other rights activist groups demanding more clarification and more transparency on the drone program, what do you think the White House is afraid of if the information comes out in the open?
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The Intercept, the new startup title funded handsomely by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, debuted Monday and created buzz both for simply showing up and for its content: An article examining the use of drones to kill government-selected targets abroad, plus a collection of aerial images of the United States’ national security campuses.
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Just last month, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it facilitated the largest Ponzi scheme in history, looking the other way as Bernie Madoff brazenly turned his business bank account at JPMorgan Chase into an unprecedented money laundering operation that would have set off bells, whistles and sirens at any other bank.
The U.S. Justice Department allowed JPMorgan to pay $1.7 billion and sign a deferred prosecution agreement, meaning no one goes to jail at JPMorgan — again. The largest question that no one can or will answer is how the compliance, legal and anti-money laundering personnel at JPMorgan ignored for years hundreds of transfers and billions of dollars in round trip maneuvers between Madoff and the account of Norman Levy. Even one such maneuver should set off an investigation. (Levy is now deceased and the Trustee for Madoff’s victims has settled with his estate.)
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President Obama is now considering whether to order the Central Intelligence Agency to kill a U.S. citizen in Pakistan. That’s big news this week. But hidden in plain sight is the fact that Amazon would be an accessory to the assassination.
Amazon has a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide the agency with “cloud” computing services. After final confirmation of the deal several months ago, Amazon declared: “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”
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The program, writes Jacobsen, evolved into Project MKUltra, a secret US program studying mind and behavior control techniques, complete with experiments on human subjects. MKUltra also enjoyed the help of ex-Nazi scientists.
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An effort by a powerful U.S. senator to broaden congressional oversight of lethal drone strikes overseas fell apart last week after the White House refused to expand the number of lawmakers briefed on covert CIA operations, according to senior U.S. officials.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the Armed Services Committee, held a joint classified hearing Thursday with the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA and military drone strikes against suspected terrorists.
But the White House did not allow CIA officials to attend, so military counter-terrorism commanders testified on their own.
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02.11.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The steep decline to lawlessness and elimination of dissent
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The value of privacy is something that most people can appreciate but there are those that wish to systematically dismantle this basic human right. Today, however, in a battle to mirror and celebrate the fight against SOPA and its inspiration Aaron Swartz, the Internet will tell the NSA and their mass surveillance partners that erosion of freedoms will never be accepted.
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Over the last year the public across the globe was made aware of massive global surveillance conducted by the NSA and its partners or counterparts, but also by private tech companies. In response, and in celebration of the victory against SOPA, PIPA and ACTA two years ago and in memory of one of its key architects, Aaron Swartz, La Quadrature du Net joins this day of mobilisation The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance, which will mark actions by civil rights groups from all over the world. This day is a perfect occasion for all citizens to get informed, and to act to defend our privacy against private and public surveillance. Below are actions carried out by La Quadrature and its supporters today.
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Thanks to the generosity of supporters who helped crowd-fund it, and of Benoît Musereau who volunteered to direct it, La Quadrature du Net publishes ”Reclaim Our Privacy”, a three-minute movie that explains the threat to, the importance of protecting, and the tools to reclaim our privacy online. If you want to contribute to the funding of this movie, it is still possible to do so here. Any funds received above the target amount will be shared between Benoît Musereau and La Quadrature du Net. The movie is released under CC BY-SA, so feel free to share or remix it!
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If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. If convicted of fighting abroad with a “political, ideological, religious or racial motive” – a charge they would find hard to contest – they would face a maximum sentence of life in prison. That they were fighting to defend an elected government against a fascist rebellion would have no bearing on the case. They would go down as terrorists.
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Interception communications commissioner Sir Anthony May says requests amount to 570,000 a year
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The Day We Fight Back deserves truth amidst the administration’s half-truths and trolling. From thwarted attacks (zero) to President Obama’s new rules (not good enough), this is what you need to know to make real reform happen
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Analysis: U.S. knows about citizens’ phone calls and emails and spies on allied foreign governments and companies
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Legislators in Maryland want to turn the lights out on the NSA — literally. A bill introduced last Thursday to its House of Delegates would bar state agencies, utilities, and pretty much anything that receives state funds from providing assistance to federal agencies that collect electronic data or metadata without a specific warrant to do so. Namely, the delegates are thinking of the National Security Agency, which is headquartered just outside their state’s capital.
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The campaign to shut off the NSA’s water and electricity actually stems from the Tenth Amendment Center, which drafted model legislation on which Maryland’s proposal is based. In particular, the Tenth Amendment Center is also hoping to see the NSA’s water supply turned off in Utah, where the agency operates another large data center. Though it’s a roundabout way of dealing with the NSA and unlikely to be a widely supported measure, Smigiel thinks it’s fitting: “I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.’”
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Machon talked about the Courage Foundation last December at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (30C3) in Hamburg, Germany; it is one of the most important annual meetings for hackers around the globe. There, Machon won the audience’s admiration with her talk on what she calls, “the war on whistleblowers.” She believes that these wars are mainly used as a pretext to erode civil liberties worldwide and intervene in other countries’ affairs.
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International payments, banking and credit card transactions are flagged and monitored by the NSA. It has specifically targeted big credit card companies like VISA.
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Two weeks ago, we called your attention to the forthcoming “Day We Fight Back,” an Internet movement designed to fight back against the NSA’s data collection program. Guess what? The day is finally here. Watch out, government.
Today, as planned, dozens of participating websites like Upworthy and Piwik are posting banners on their home pages, encouraging viewers to call up and email their local legislators and complain about the NSA.
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Hammarskjöld died during the night of September 17th, 1961 in a plane crash in what is now Zambia, where he was headed to mediate in the ongoing conflict in neighbouring The Congo in his role as then UN Secretary General.
The diplomat’s death has been the subject of numerous rumours and conspiracy theories over the past five decades centred around whether the crash was an accident, or if Hammarskjöld was killed.
Evidence available has left investigators puzzled, with pilot error deemed unlikely after witnesses claimed to have seen the plane going down on fire.
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Two Dutch ministers faced a grilling in Parliament Tuesday after revealing the country’s intelligence services grabbed metadata from some 1.8 million intercepted telephone calls.
Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk and Defence Minister Jeanine Hennis are fending off calls for their resignations after revealing last week that the Dutch secret services intercepted the data — an act previously attributed to the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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As the European Union and the Commission drive efforts to conclude the most ambitious overhaul of the continent’s data protection legislation since 1995 in advance of European Parliament elections this spring, Business Cloud News sat down with European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx to discuss the law’s development, its implications for cloud service providers once in place, and the revelations surrounding the NSA and GCHQ’s widespread digital surveillance activities.
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A bill that would exempt the National Security Agency’s data center in Bluffdale from paying taxes on its massive electric consumption met some resistance from legislators Tuesday, but remained on track.
The bill would codify a commitment made by former Gov. Jon Huntsman not to tax the utilities for the data center in an attempt to lure the massive NSA operation to Utah.
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Last week I wrote about an inquiry being conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament into the laws that govern the UK’s intelligence agencies (now closed, I’m afraid.) That’s just one sign of the tectonic shift that has taken place in this area in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive, global surveillance being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ.
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One year after the tragic death of the campaigning hacker, a global campaign against surveillance is building the Don’t Spy On Us campaign in his spirit
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Coming off the latest (not so surprising) revelations of the misuse of NSA data, Happiness Brussels has launched “Spy on the NSA,” a site which gives the the NSA a taste of its own medicine in support of www.thedaywefightback.org, “a massive digital protest against mass surveillance taking place across the internet today.” Among those participating today as well are Reddit, Amnesty International, Tumblr, Upworthy and Greenpeace.
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On Monday, the new publication First Look reported that electronically obtained metadata controls who, how, and when U.S. drones kill abroad. Journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill write that that kind of information doesn’t only determine who is killed: Metadata on phone SIM cards determines how victims of the strikes are found.
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The administration of President Barack Obama leaked sensitive information about the possibility of using a drone to kill an American who joined al-Qaida in order to position themselves as politically “deliberative,” Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday.
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A thought experiment to get assassination advocates back on the right side of the law
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For British MPs, the issue has taken on fresh significance after it emerged that intelligence operatives at GCHQ have been providing targeting information to their US counterparts.
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Notice those words: “legally” and “policy.” No longer does U.S. media make a distinction between the two.
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Human rights need to have a home. Presently in both the United States and much of the world it has taken a back seat to right and left. In a world that cares about people, human rights shouldn’t take a back seat to any political party. Universal human rights should drive.
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Torture, secrecy, military adventurism. Dick Cheney, more than anyone else, set the course for America after 9/11
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Poland’s criminal investigation into secret CIA prisons located on its territory has been in progress since 2008. Now run from the Prosecutor’s Office in Krakow, the process has recently been extended, once again, to February 2014.
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“It is significant that the ECHR was the first court to conduct a public hearing on al-Nashiri’s claims of torture and secret detention. The Polish authorities have failed to conduct an effective investigation, and US courts have also failed to deliver justice to date”, added Singh, who also represented al-Nashiri in Strasbourg.
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At a secret black site in the years after the end of WWII, CIA and US intelligence operatives tested LSD and other interrogation techniques on captured Soviet spies—all with the help of former Nazi doctors. An excerpt from Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip, published this week.
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The worst kept secret in Washington national security circles is no more. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper publicly acknowledged for the first time at a Senate hearing Tuesday that the Central Intelligence Agency has a drone program.
The CIA’s drone program, which operates in Pakistan and Yemen, has been the subject of news reports for years. But U.S. officials have continued to steer clear of publicly acknowledging the program, glossing over CIA’s role, because it has remained officially covert. That covert status allows the CIA to operate in countries where local governments don’t support the strikes.
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That has got to be one of the silliest statements of the new year. If Woolsey honestly believes the U.S. government is anti-Semitic, that it is driven by anti-Jewish sentiments, he needs to explain why the U.S. has generously made Israel, the spiritual and geographical homeland of the Jewish people, a virtual client-state, having given/lent/made available billions upon billions of dollars over the years.
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Posted in News Roundup, Ubuntu at 7:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ubuntu 12.04.4, Mobile, Tips, File Manager, CLA, and Decoupling
12.04.4
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Canonical has just announced that Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been officially released for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.
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The benchmarks in this article are some straightforward tests done on the same HP EliteBook (Intel Core i5 2520M, 4GB RAM, Intel 160GB SSD, HD Graphics 3000) when comparing clean installs of Ubuntu 12.04.2, 12.04.3, and 12.04.4. Unfortunately the mirrors of the original Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release and the first point release have vanished, so the testing was limited to these three past point releases for the Linux distribution that originally shipped in 2012 and will be maintained through 2017.
Mobile
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Ubuntu Touch devices might be some time away yet, but its parent company Canonical is gradually building carrier support with Vodafone becoming its latest addition supporter.
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Vodafone Group became the latest member of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisor Group, although there has been no further detail on when smartphones powered by the platform will reach the market.
According to a statement from Ubuntu: “Vodafone Group will join national and multi-national carriers in decisions that influence the development of Ubuntu for smartphones.
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Canonical’s carrier advisory group allows operators to have a say in Ubuntu’s development on mobile.
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Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical has confirmed that they will be at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona at the end of next month to show off the Ubuntu OS in all its glory. Last year Canonical used MWC as a springboard to launch Ubuntu for tablets and smartphones so they’re no stranger to announcing big things at the event.
Tips
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With Windows XP – arguably the longest-lasting Microsoft operating system in widespread use – running out of support in April 2014 it is definitely time for business and home users alike to consider what they will transition to.
Windows XP was well-received when it launched, despite some initial concerns over its changed graphical style from predecessors Windows 95, 98 and 2000. XP enjoyed a stay of execution with Windows Vista turning many users off upgrading, and being an operating system Microsoft perhaps would prefer forgotten – along with Windows ME.
File Manager
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For the past year, Ubuntu and Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth has been talking about full convergence i.e., the same OS and its applications can be run on desktops, servers and mobile devices. Canonical plans to start the converge from its Ubuntu 14.10 release cycle. However, no activity has been seen on the development front, until now.
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Ubuntu is planning to develop its own file manager which will be introduced with their QT5 powered Unity8 desktop environment from Ubuntu 14.10 onwards. Ubuntu is currently using Nautilus File manager (also known as ‘Files’), developed by GNOME developers.Ubuntu users & developers are growing increasingly unhappy with the direction at which Nautilus file manager is leading. There are many necessary features which are missing in latest Nautilus, forcing users to replace Nautilus with their favourite file manager like feature-rich nautilus fork, Nemo or the popular Thunar – which is inarguably one of the best file managers.
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“With the planned switch to unity8 in 14.10 it is most likely that we will also start using the converged QML apps that are developed today. With all the complaints and unhappiness about Nautilus upstream ripping out things like dual pane and other beloved and helpful features I expect we can do better,” said Ubuntu developer, Oliver Grawert.
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The latest piece of the desktop Linux stack that Ubuntu developers are planning to replace with their own home grown solution is a file manager.
CLA
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Contributor License Agreements (“CLAs”) are a mechanism for an upstream software developer to insist that contributors grant the upstream developer some additional set of rights. These range in extent – some CLAs require that the contributor reassign their copyright over the contribution to the upstream developer, some merely provide the upstream developer with a grant of rights that aren’t explicit in the software license (such as an explicit patent grant for a contribution licensed under a BSD-style license).
Decoupling
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Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux already does many things differently from other leading open source operating systems. And it may soon diverge in yet another respect, with Ubuntu developers in the midst of discussions over replacing Nautilus—the file browser that has long been a core part of many Linux distributions—with something home-grown.
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We are growing a world-class community and app developer eco-system, fuelled by Open Source and open collaboration. We are putting the core pieces in place and I am delighted to be working with such a wonderful team:
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Game developers Rebellion Developments are seemingly looking into supporting Linux and thus perhaps even develop for the platform.
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This will excite any developer and gamer who actually has their hands on some VR kit, Valve has updated the Steamworks API to officially include their VR API. This is course supports Linux.
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The writer raises a good point about the appeal of native Windows games, and the much larger library of games for that platform. However, he assumes that that will be enough to keep people using the Windows version of Steam.
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I had a chance to talk to Rebellion on the possibility of them supporting Linux in the future, and the reply was actually quite encouraging.
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Another batch of titles have been greenlit to be on Steam, we give you the run-down on what ones you can expect to see on Linux.
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This is mighty interesting for Linux gamers, Oniken an action platformer has released itself onto Steam and it states it uses Wine for Linux & Mac.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Docker’s open source “container” approach to virtualization—which is very different from the hypervisor model behind leading enterprise virtualization solutions such as VMware, KVM and Xen—has taken another big step toward maturity with the release of Docker version 0.8. Apple (AAPL) Mac OS X support, major performance improvements and more are now available in the platform that could become a major part of the virtualization ecosystem in the not-too-distant future.
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Music on Console aka MOC is perhaps the most lightweight and easy-to-install music player for Linux I have ever tested. And don’t be intimidated by the fact that MOC is a console only player. Once you spend enough time with MOC, it becomes as easy to use as any other alternative music players for Linux. Moreover, if you’re a fan of MPD plus NCMPC combination who doesn’t like to jump through hoops just for installing and setting it up, MOC might be the alternative you have been looking for. It’s right there in Ubuntu repositories by default.
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Lightworks is a professional-grade nonlinear video editor now available for Linux. It is a cross-platform editor from a well-known player in the media market, so this first-time Linux release could be a big thing.
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The latest bi-weekly Wine development release is now available and it brings with it some noteworthy changes.
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MATLAB [1] has to be one of the all time greats for analyzing nearly any sort of data, just like a spreadsheet is for making a plot of data. Alas, these programs while powerful do have a limitation – they are costly and rightly so: They do a job, have great depth and are actively supported, and we all know that this takes some overhead dollars to maintain. For spreadsheets we have some really well done GNU options like Libre Office.[2] But what about our design programs?
The GNU design software tends to be somewhat usable but unpolished in many cases; the same could be said about the many MATLAB-like GNU options. This one does that well, that one is a little different there, etc., but none of them “Hits a home run” on all counts, until now.
GNU Octave [3] is the closest MATLAB-compatible program, with all the same language syntax, etc. In fact many basic MATLAB scripts will run without an issue in Octave. The biggest thing that held Octave back was the command line interface.
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GStreamer 1.4 is under heavy development ahead of its next release that’s due out in March or April. Here’s a look at some of the new features coming to this open-source multimedia framework relied upon by many Linux desktop applications. Among the best additions to GStreamer 1.4 is support for H.265, VP9, and Daala. Wayland is also now supported.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: LXLE, gNewSense, Debian, Zorin OS, Chakra, Toutou, and SparkyLinux
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