11.24.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education once hoped storage systems supporting the long-promised parallel Network File System technology would be the answer to its bandwidth woes. But, in April 2011, the Institute gave up the wait and purchased a proprietary system from Panasas Inc. to give its distributed scientific applications running on clustered servers the direct, parallel access to storage they needed.
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After having a few more days to run and benchmark the Samsung Chromebook, it continues to be a very interesting notebook computer. For $250 USD this notebook packs a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, which bears a dual-core 1.7GHz ARMv7 Cortex-A15 processor and delivers rather good performance results. Here’s some more performance numbers when loading up the Chromebook with Ubuntu Linux.
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Server
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But in an interview James Gudeli, vice-president of business development, said future versions will come only on Linux.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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I try to use GNU/Linux solutions whenever I can. However, one exception to this rule is the printing process in my home. I have one printer, and it is connected to my Windows 7 machine. As GNU/Linux becomes more popular in homes and businesses, it is becoming more common to see mixed GNU/Linux-Windows environments. Printing from GNU/Linux to Windows 7 using Samba did NOT work for me reliably, but I have found a method that works 100% of the time. In The Linux Week in Review 49, I’ll explain how to set up a 100% dependable GNU/Linux-to-Windows 7 printing network. The video at the end of TLWIR 49 demonstrates the entire setup process from beginning to end.
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Kernel Space
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Another season, another Linux kernel. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes as kernel developers churn out new releases every two or three months. Within the next few weeks, Linux 3.7, the latest version of the code at the core of most mainstream open source operating systems — on Android phones as well as PCs and servers — will likely see its official release. And unlike some kernel updates, it will introduce a host of new features that end users may want to know about.
We don’t cover Linux kernel development too frequently on The VAR Guy because it’s not something most end users are likely to care about or understand. Unless you’re deeply interested in how your computer works “under the hood” — and kudos to you if you are — chances are you don’t want to read about the latest innovations in Linux memory management or file systems.
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Graphics Stack
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The Gdev open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time implementation is still being actively developed while PathScale’s “PSCNV” fork of the Nouveau driver hasn’t seen new commit activity in months.
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For those wanting to bring Wayland to proprietary/embedded platforms, Pekka Paalanen has written a long and detailed technical post about doing so.
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More code was pushed to Nouveau’s Linux kernel repository for their open-source DRM graphics driver. There’s improvements to NVE0/Kepler, a new Falcon engine base class, and a number of other changes that have piled up.
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It’s been nearly one year since AMD began rolling out their Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” graphics cards and while there is AMD Catalyst Linux driver support, the open-source driver support for this latest-generation AMD graphics hardware is still a disappointing mess.
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Pinchart — the developer who earlier this year called for deprecating the Linux frame-buffer — has been working on Renesas Mobile SoC display controller support when coming to realize that the Linux kernel already has several driver-based panel support solutions. In talking with other driver developers, he conceived the Generic Panel Framework for display devices. He didn’t want to use the kernel’s LCD framework because it’s tied to FBDEV and he wants this framework to be agnostic towards any subsystem whether it be DRM, FBDEV, or other areas.
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Released last week was NVIDIA’s Linux 4 Tegra R16.2, even after the R16.1 release barely got any publicity at all. The NVIDIA downloads area is still reflecting the old L4T R15 release from June, but while stumbling across the page today after wanting to load up new software on the NVIDIA Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet, I was pleased to see R16 is actually available.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Frank let everyone know via the Steam For Linux group that the Steam Beta has been expanded!
“We’re making good progress finding and fixing issues that our users have reported so we’re expanding the beta by 5000 before the long holiday (US) weekend kicks in. New limited beta testers will have an email notification in their inbox.
Have a great weekend everyone!”
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Earlier this month it was decided that GNOME 3.8 would get rid of the GNOME Shell Fallback mode used for running the desktop environment in a way similar to the GNOME 2 “classic” environment while also not requiring any 3D GPU/driver configuration. Earlier today there was basically a call for forking the GNOME Classic/Fallback code so it could live on, but now it’s been announced that some of the user-interface/experience elements will be brought to the GNOME 3.x world in a manner that’s more easy for users to optionally enable.
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With fallback mode due to be scrapped in the forthcoming GNOME 3.8 release, the development team wants to allow users to easily recreate the classic desktop using an included set of extensions. The existing fallback mode, which is used on systems without 3D acceleration, provides a GNOME 2-like interface with a task bar and application menu.
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It would be difficult to imagine a more vivid testament to many Linux users’ dislike of the new-style GNOME 3 desktop than the many alternative options that have sprung up in response.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Red Hat has announced that they’ve initiated a new project to bootstrap Fedora on the ARMv8 64-bit low-power architecture.
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The Fedora Project held a Thanksgiving Day Go/No-Go meeting for the long-delayed Fedora 18 Beta. The developers decided that the beta is finally in a condition where it’s ready to ship.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Jolla, the Finnish company that was formed by many ex-Nokia employees that were responsible for their MeeGo work and the Nokia N9 smart-phone until Nokia jumped in bed with Microsoft for the Windows Phone, finally showcased its Linux OS today: Sailfish, a fork of MeeGo Linux.
Sailfish uses the core distribution of Mer, implements the MeeGo API, its own in-house interface, and heavily promotes the use of HTML5 along with Qt and QML.
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Jolla, the mobile operating system start-up founded by Nokia refugees, has finally unveiled Sailfish, the smartphone operating system based on Linux.
The company had been in “stealth mode” for almost a year before it launched in the summer, and has finally demonstrated a working prototype of Sailfish at the Slush start-up event in Helsinki, Finland today.
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Android
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Replicant, a fully free version of the Android OS has released images 4.0 to give users the Ice Cream Sandwich experience. Also they have added support new devices i.e. the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S2. The new image also improves the hardware support on older devices that it already supported. Also improvements have been made to the telephony system which has become more stable and reliable.
For those of you who are not familiar with Replicant, it is a project to provide totally free version of the Android OS. Android is a free Operating System but there are several components on the software stack like the device drivers that are proprietary. The Replicant project aims to replace these and provide a complete free Android Operating System.
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Web Browsers
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Open Access/Content
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I recently had lunch with as staunch an advocate for open access as you’ll ever meet (I won’t name him, because it would be rude to attribute casual remarks to him without permission). We were talking about plans to mandate free and open publication of publicly funded scientific research. In the USA, there’s the Federal Public Research Act, and in the UK, there’s the coalition government’s announcement that publicly funded research should be made available at no cost, under a Creative Commons licence that permits unlimited copying.
We’d been talking about Ben Goldacre’s excellent new book, Bad Pharma, in which Goldacre documents the problem of “missing data” in pharmaceutical research (he says about half of the clinical trials undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry are never published). The unpublished trials are, of course, the trials that show the pharma companies’ new products in unflattering lights – trials that suggest that their drugs don’t
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Programming
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The benchmarks in this article are of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS loaded up on the Samsung Chromebook with the Linux 3.4 kernel. The GCC 4.6.3 compiler was compared to GCC 4.7.2 with a number of C, C++, and Fortran benchmarks. The same compiler flags were maintained within the test profiles during the benchmarking process. In a future article will be LLVM/Clang compiler benchmarks as well as performance results from the Cortex-A15 compiler tuning.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Overall, Gordon stated that the criticism of the West Bank courts goes overboard and that the system tries hard to treat Palestinians decently and to give them a fair trial.
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The use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by armed forces and non-state armed groups during wartime endangers students and their education around the world, said the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack in a study released today.
The 77-page study, “Lessons In War: Military Use of Schools and Other Education Institutions during Conflict”, examines the use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by government armed forces and opposition or pro-government armed groups during times of armed conflict or insecurity. Schools are used for barracks, logistics bases, operational headquarters, weapons and ammunition caches, detention and interrogation centers, firing and observation positions, and recruitment grounds.
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PIX11 viewer and parade-goer found that confetti that fell on him and friends had detectives’ social security numbers, bank info and unveiled undercover officers’ identities
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President Obama began his first term with a dramatic change of course for the CIA, issuing orders on his second day in office to close the agency’s secret prisons and ban harsh interrogation techniques.
As Obama approaches a second term with an unexpected opening for CIA director, agency officials are watching to see whether the president’s pick signals even a modest adjustment in the main counterterrorism program he kept: the use of armed drones to kill suspected extremists.
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Just like it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA and U.S. military act on bad intel when designating targets for drone attacks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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More than 1,000 coal-fired power plants are being planned worldwide, new research has revealed.
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The decision to reuse or recycle an old desktop computer takes some consideration, but letting an old PC turn to electronic waste should never be an alternative.
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Blogging about climate change, or anything, can get repetitive fast. The reports come out and the news is tweaked, maybe, but familiar—the Arctic is still melting, average global temperatures are still rising, the oceans are still acidifying. This was the warmest month record ever recorded. No, this one was. No this. This.
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After the 1992 super-hurricane Andrew, South Florida was in a state of shock, similar to coastal New Jersey and New York today. Andrew was a compact, category five hurricane. In South Dade where the impact was strongest, the morning after the storm, sun and blue skies prevailed. The strike zone looked like a bomb had gone off.
Civic leaders quickly rallied under the proud banner, “We Will Rebuild”. How would South Florida rebuild? the blue ribbon panel asked. Twenty years later, the coastal areas of New Jersey and New York are facing a similar question after Superstorm Sandy. This time, the answers may be very different.
Twenty years ago in Florida, talk of sea level rise and climate change was in the margins. The subject had a place in the corner, where Chicken Little’s nursed their wounds, far from sight and off the political radar.
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Finance
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Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Several opinion columns praising Russia and published in the last two years on CNBC’s web site and the Huffington Post were written by seemingly independent professionals but were placed on behalf of the Russian government by its public-relations firm, Ketchum.
The columns, written by two businessmen, a lawyer, and an academic, heap praise on the Russian government for its “ambitious modernization strategy” and “enforcement of laws designed to better protect business and reduce corruption.” One of the CNBC opinion pieces, authored by an executive at a Moscow-based investment bank, concludes that “Russia may well be the most dynamic place on the continent.”
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Censorship
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The arrest of two women on Monday over a comment on Facebook has sparked off widespread anger in India.
One of the women had criticised the shutdown of Mumbai in her post, after the death of politician Bal Thackeray, while the other “liked” the comment.
The women, accused of “promoting enmity between classes”, were released on bail after appearing in court.
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Privacy
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After a student protested a pilot RFID tracking system in San Antonio, lawyers are now moving to stop expulsion.
John Jay High School sophomore Andrea Hernandez was expelled from her high school after protesting against a new pilot program which tracks the precise location of all attending 4,200 students at Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School, according to Infowars.
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Students learn how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.
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GMO
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A second species of worm has evolved to withstand pesticides in genetically modified crops, the latest escalation of the natural arms race spurred on by GMOs. “Armyworms” — so called because their infestation of fields resembles a military onslaught — were able to eat DuPont-Dow corn containing a pesticide protein without adverse effects, according to a field trial conducted in Florida this year.
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It has come to our attention that Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed healthcare organization in the United States, has advised its members against GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in food.
In its Northwest Fall 2012 newsletter, Kaiser suggested membership limit exposure to genetically modified organisms.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Distracted”? Uh, no. Consumers have little need of a over-powered/huge/clumsy/expensive big box PC or a burdensome notebook either. They can do it all with a smart phone running */Linux. The fall of 29% includes the end of a government procurement (of notebooks running “7″). This is not just a shift to less Wintel but a shift to more GNU/Linux and more Android/Linux. It puts the lie to the saying that folks “choose” Wintel when that’s all that was on retail shelves. There’s more choice on retail shelves today and more real choices are being made. This is not a blip but the new way of IT. Get used to it.
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Desktop
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It’s so-called “Black Friday” today, an annual US event in which adults gather en-mass at retail stores to fight each other for discounted electric whisks, George Foreman grills, and plasma TVs.
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If you plan to upgrade your Linux desktop hardware in the near future or will be shopping for new PC hardware this holiday season, here’s a few words of advice on recommended components and manufacturers to go with for the best Linux hardware experience.
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Last month Google and Samsung released the first commercially available product using the ARM® Cortex™-A15 SoC design: the new Series 3 Chromebook. Not only does the Chromebook have the new Samsung Exynos 5250 providing the core compute power, but it also has the new ARM Mali™-T604 providing the power to move all those pixels around. As with previous Chromebooks, it uses a custom operating system known as ChromeOS (which is based loosely on Gentoo Linux). If you’ve ever used either the Chrome or Chromium browser from Google you’ll have no issues, as everything is orientated around the browser.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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A new version of systemd was released today by Lennart Poettering. The systemd 196 release brings many new features.
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Linux 3.7 can use signatures to verify the integrity of kernel modules, while the new integrity appraisal extension helps to detect malicious software from a third party. The new kernel loads firmware files without udev and includes important container improvements.
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The Intel DRM graphics driver in the Linux 3.8 kernel will feature a number of user-facing changes.
We’re still a few days out from the Linux 3.7 kernel but already we know a lot of what to expect from the Linux 3.8 kernel, including the open-source GPU driver improvements for Linux 3.8.
Among the Intel DRM driver work you will find merged during the Linux 3.8 merge window when it’s open around early December include:
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Graphics Stack
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Last week marked the release of a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver beta that was intended to improve the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance. AMD said this updated closed-source Linux graphics driver would bring “significant performance improvements” for Valve’s recently ported Left 4 Dead 2 Linux game. Curious about AMD Linux OpenGL performance improvements elsewhere, I ran some benchmarks of this new driver on several different graphics cards. Unfortunately, the performance improvements aren’t too widespread and there’s other problems making this beta driver not appealing.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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It’s time for another bi-weekly Wine development release. This time around there’s scattered changes from Windows Codecs to Wine’s built-in web-browser.
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Games
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The Real Texas is an action RPG game that plays like a mashup of Zelda: Link to the Past and Ultima VI.
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Steam Autumn Sale has kicked off with massive discounts on games. Out of total 27 games currently verified on Linux, 23 games are on sale.
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The year of 2012 is almost over and the number of games released has grown slowly, but exponentially. Here are the best games released for the Linux platform, so far.
Before Valve became interested in Linux and before any other major developer took an interest in the Linux platform, the developers of Bastion, Supergiant Games, decided that they should port their game.
It was released with Humble Bundle V and made quite an impact, showing that major games can sell really well on a free open source platform.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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While i was messing around with the tool i noticed two check boxes at the top right hand side. One is labelled “New Headlines” and other “Forecast”. The Headlines check box is turned ON by default and the tool seems to try and correlate news headlines with search trends. I at once thought that this feature has a lot of hidden potential. I noticed that when i turn ON the other check box the graph extrapolates into the future along x axis(years) probably based on past data of searches made in Google search engine. Future trends are plotted in dotted lines whereas past data is in the form of a contiguous line.
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GNOME Desktop
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I was very optimistic about the potential of Gnome3 since the beginning ..but I couldn’t never imagine all these things that are happening in 3.8. Gnome 3.8 is above any expectation and that has mostly to do with the refreshed Shell and Gnome Control Center we will get.
If Gnome Shell 3.6 was a good release, Gnome Shell 3.8 will be more than amazing!
There is a number of huge changes like the integrated search or the re-worked notification API (and maybe a Privacy Section – work in progress), but I’ ll just go with the visuals for the moment. And not all of them. This is just the second release of Gnome Shell (3.7.2) towards the stable 3.8 (next March), many many patches are under review and they’ll be pushed in master in next releases.
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GNOME’s Vincent Untz has written about the recent decision to remove the GNOME3 fall-back mode with the forthcoming GNOME 3.8 release. He thinks the situation will improve but he basically calls for the community to fork and maintain the GNOME fall-back (gnome-panel, Metacity, etc) components assuming there is enough interest.
GNOME developers decided to drop the fallback mode rather than maintain it since it was already a burden to take care of and not always well tested. For those without the GPU/driver support to handle GNOME Shell with Mutter, LLVMpipe will now be used instead for running the heavy GNOME desktop. However, LLVMpipe doesn’t work for everyone.
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Salix, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware, that is simple, fast, easy to use, and relying on XFCE desktop environment, is now at version 14.0 RC3.
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Cinnarch is a new project coupling Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop with the popular Arch Linux. Like Arch, it’s technically a rolling release distribution, but with periodic snapshot releases. A new update, considered “in beta stage” by founder Alex Filgueira, was just released and it sounded ripe for a test drive.
Cinnarch is an installable live system for i686 or x86_64 and offers your choice of several languages upon boot. The first stop is a selection dialog asking if you’d like to run as a live system or install Cinnarch. The installer is a console menu-based installer, but developers are working on a graphical version.
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A reader of my blog recently made a comment about Arch’s lack of package signing, and this got me looking into the issue more carefully. What I found has left me deeply concerned with a number of aspects of Arch.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its cloud OpenStack cloud platform distribution in a new preview release.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s not just Windows 8 that’s been criticised for expecting users to swallow an unpopular and ill-suited new interface. When Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, moved its default desktop OS interface to Unity in April 2012, it also alienated many loyal followers.
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Flavours and Variants
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It seems like the shiny new Linux releases are coming fast and furious this fall, and this week has been no exception.
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Kubuntu is almost like Ubuntu, and then not at all. It is amazing how much difference there can be between two operating system releasing sharing so much DNA. As you probably recall, I was utterly disappointed with Quetzal, on two occasions. The first time, on a generic laptop with SSD and Intel graphics, where it blossomed with bugs and glitches. And then, the second time around, when it utterly failed me on my high-end laptop with its Nvidia card.
For this very reason, I will be testing Kubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal on the said laptop first, to see whether the Nvidia issues are strictly related to Ubuntu and its unity desktop and who knows what else, or perhaps a much bigger, more serious phenomenon. So we will begin with a dandy setup, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GT 320M 1GB VRAM card, with two operating systems installed on the internal disk, and booting a handsome new bunch from an external USB disk. Sounds glorious, and as real as it gets.
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Ubuntu users with a hankering for Gnome can take comfort: the latest version of Linux distro Mint has been released.
Mint 14, codenamed Nadia, is based on Ubuntu 12.10 comes with Mate 1.4, an updated version of the Mint user interface with greater stability and bug fixes.
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Phones
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Breaking into the smartphone market with a new platform may seem to be a tall order, but Finnish company Jolla think it can be done and has demonstrated the user interface of its upcoming operating system Sailfish.
Jolla, which means dinghy in Finnish, was founded last year by a group of former Nokia employees who wanted to continue the development work the Finnish phone maker had done on the MeeGo operating system. The company’s newly appointed CEO Marc Dillon worked at Nokia for almost 11 years.
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Android/Ballnux
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What happens when you combine two of Samsung’s 2012 flagship devices in order to create a totally new handset? You get a 5-inch Galaxy Grand apparently, which will reportedly launch by the end of the month and offer buyers the best of the two worlds.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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…nothing but Android/Linux on dozens of choices.
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UK security services have begun bridging the gap that has stopped open source software getting security clearance for use in government systems.
The initiative has come too late to stop the first big contract wins delivered under the government’s flagship G-Cloud procurement vehicle going to a supplier that shunned open source products because they did not have security accreditation.
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Dreamworks Animation has released a new version of its OpenVDB library. The animation production company open sourced the project in August and has now released version 0.99.0. OpenVDB has been used for some time within Dreamworks for features such as Puss in Boots, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted and the just released Rise of the Guardians.
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The rise of social enterprise tools intended to facilitate workplace collaboration have naturally impacted the software application development function in terms of user interconnectivity and integration.
Specifically here we see the popularised term “DevOps” coming to the fore. Used to express the orchestration of both the ‘developer’ and the ‘operations’ functions responsible for the building and subsequent deployment of software as it is.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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This week, Mozilla released version 17 of the Firefox browser, and if you’ve been increasingly married to Google Chrome or another browser, there are some new features in the latest Firefox to take note of. They include new integration with Facebook, and more protection from Firefox extensions that may cause performance problems. Here are the details.
Firefox 17 is available for the Mac, Windows and Linux, and you can find system requirements for it here. There is also an updated post from Mozilla on extensions and their compatibility with the new version.
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Plans for 64-bit Firefox for Windows have been put on hold by Mozilla in a bid to concentrate more on the 32-bit versions it has been found.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Bjoern Michaelsen from Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, who works on LibreOffice has announced the alpha1 of LibreOffice 4.0. Michaelsen writes on his blog, “Its a pre-release, an alpha — essentially just a named daily build — and will kill your dog and eat your children.”
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BSD
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Unix as a whole predates Linux by many years, and even the rather younger BSD variant was well into its teens by the time Linus released his first kernel. BSD networking defined and enabled the Internet. This illustrious history notwithstanding, BSD has long since ceded the spotlight to Linux in most settings. As Linux has come to dominate the free software development world, the result has been some occasional pain for other operating system distributions. Now, as a recent discussion on an OpenBSD mailing list shows, BSD developers are feeling that pain in a heightened manner. This situation has some serious implications.
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Public Services/Government
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So which is “dog bites man” and which is “man bites dog”? A look at the press coverage tells us:
* Leipzig OpenOffice coverage == 2 hits
* Freiburg OpenOffice coverage == 1150 hits
The larger migration away from Microsoft Office in Leipzig was barely covered in the press. But the Freiburg story has had enormous press uptake. By this I take it that moving from Microsoft Office to open source alternatives like OpenOffice is normal, the expected, the non-newsworthy common occurrence. It is “dog bites man”. Moving in the opposite direction, from free software to proprietary is newsworthy because it is so rare. It is “man bites dog”.
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Isn’t it the truth? There was a wave of huge migrations to FLOSS in the period of 2003-2005 which made headlines but far larger migrations recently barely are noticed in the noise. We now have several governments of large nations moving to GNU/Linux and FLOSS, huge corporations like Google too and countless millions of individuals. It’s not news any longer but I still enjoy reading about it when it does break through.
M$ has some tenets about mindshare for technology. One of them is that you only win when the status quo becomes thinking the competing technology works is a mental defect. Conversely, M$ must know it is losing because no one now believes using FLOSS (GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, FLOSS applications…) is irrational. FLOSS works for everyone who tries it. The few exceptions I have read are quite unusual, involving some constraint other than price/performance, like inability to run application X. When people consider “doing task X” instead of some lock-in they suddenly find themselves doing IT the right way, the way that works for them.
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Licensing
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I first met the original group of VLC developers at the Solutions GNU/Linux conference in 2001. I had been an employee of FSF for about a year at the time, and I recall they were excited to tell the FSF about the project, and very proud that they’d used FSF’s premier and preferred license (at the time): GPLv2-or-later.
What a difference a decade makes. I’m admittedly sad that VLC has (mostly) finished its process of relicensing under LGPLv2.1-or-later. While I have occasionally supported relicensing from GPL to LGPL, every situation is different and I think it should be analyzed carefully. In this case, I don’t support VLC’s decision to relicense.
[...]
So, I’m left baffled: do the VLC community actually believes the LGPL would solve that problem?
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Openness/Sharing
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The functional application of open source designs,
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Programming
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The first beta of version 2.0 of PyPy has been released with support for ARM CPUs and CFFI compatibility. PyPy is an alternative Python 2.x implementation with a just-in-time compiler, a stackless mode and a sandbox for untrusted code. It is described by its developers as faster and “almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7.3″. The new version of the “very compliant” Python interpreter is the first version to officially support the ARM processor architecture. The software will work on soft-float ARM/Linux builds on ARMv7 or later CPUs that have a floating-point unit.
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A group of Ruby on Rails developers has announced Rails::API, a derivative of the original Rails project that provides a slimmed-down set of functions which are useful for developers using Rails to write applications that use a backend API-only server or servers. This new subset of the Ruby on Rails feature set has had ActionView and other rendering features removed; this makes it easier and quicker to use for developers who are not concerned with writing frontends of web services and also makes the platform more lightweight. Work on Rails::API has been ongoing for several months, but the developers have now decided to go public with the framework, which is currently at version 0.0.2.
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Standards/Consortia
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Back in October, we wrote about a report that the FTC was preparing to file antitrust charges against Google. In trying to find out more, the story kept shifting. First, we heard it was all about “search manipulation” in putting Google-related info on top of search results (i.e., search for a location and a Google Map shows at the top of the page). Then, there was some talk about how it was going to focus on how recently-purchased-by-Google Motorola Mobility was abusing standards-essential patents. If it was the latter, that seemed like a weird way to go, since it was so unrelated to Google’s main business. Similarly, the whole “search manipulation” claim seemed odd. What kind of “harm” is it when someone searching on Google for an address is shown a Google map. It seems like it actually benefits consumers.
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This time last year, Brown’s factory was buzzing, with his employees working overtime to fulfill holiday orders. With the help of Sears, Brown’s company sold more than 200,000 wrenches at Christmas alone.
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You may recall that, earlier this year, we wrote about a very troubling ruling in the UK against the founder of SurfTheChannel, Anton Vickerman. STC was a linking site, no different than others that had been found perfectly legal in the UK. After the conviction, which resulted in Vickerman being put in jail for four years, some additional info came out that was really horrifying. First, there was the fact that this criminal case, including the investigation, was driven entirely by a private anti-piracy organization, FACT, which is financed by the Hollywood studios. Yes, a criminal case that was run by private interests. Actual law enforcement had refused to proceed with the case, saying that there wasn’t evidence of direct infringement. Furthermore, some “anonymous” notes from the court room suggested a judge was on a mission to put Vickerman away.
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Health/Nutrition
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IT’S A SWELTERING LATE FEBRUARY afternoon when I pull into the Esso gas station in the tiny town of Bukit Merah, Malaysia. My guide, a local butcher named Hew Yun Tat, warns me that the owner is known for his stinginess. “He’s going to ask you to buy him tea,” Hew says. “Even though he owns many businesses around here, he still can’t resist pinching pennies.”
An older man emerges from the station office. His face and hands are mottled with white patches, his English broken.
“I’ll talk to you,” the man says, “but only if you buy me tea.” He grins.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” says Hew, laughing. “A rich man like you.”
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Ireland has opened a new investigation into the death of a woman denied an abortion of her dying fetus, as the government scrambled to stem criticism of its handling of an incident that polarized the overwhelmingly Catholic country.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The world recently celebrated Malala Day in honor of the young Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, an innocent victim of political violence perpetrated by the Taliban. She is rightfully honored as a hero for her willingness to speak up for her right to an education and against religious extremism.
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“Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for Al-Qaeda,” one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana, the capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.”
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The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf leader, Imran Khan, led a successful anti-drone march to Waziristan on October 7, raising global awareness regarding the devastation and miseries inflicted in the tribal region by the US drone attacks.
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This week marks the beginning of the busiest travel time of the year. For millions of Americans, the misery of holiday travel is made considerably worse by a government agency ostensibly designed to make our journeys more secure. Created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Transportation Security Administration has largely outlived its usefulness, as the threat of a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland continues to recede. These days, the TSA’s major role appears to be to make plane trips more unpleasant. And by doing so, it’s encouraging people to take the considerably more dangerous option of traveling by road.
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Why? Israel’s government has declared that the aim of the current strikes against Gaza is to rebuild deterrence so that no rockets will be fired on Israel. Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders in the past sent the Hamas leadership underground and prevented rocket attacks on Israel temporarily. According to Israeli leaders, deterrence will be achieved once again by targeting and killing military and political leaders in Gaza and hitting hard at Hamas’s military infrastructure. But this policy has never been effective in the long term, even when the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed by Israel. Hamas didn’t lay down its guns then, and it won’t stop firing rockets at Israel now without a cease-fire agreement.
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Here’s what this poster says: 1. The IDF promotes extra-judicial killing as punishment for crimes committed with no due process (past terror attacks and kidnapping) 2. The IDF thinks that portraying Israel as the Terminator is a GOOD thing, showing fundamental disconnect with the language of modern diplomacy and current political sensibilities about the conflict. 3. The killing is absurdly divorced from the larger picture: the conflict, the Gaza policy, the occupation, actually it landed on us ex nihilo, or from the moon. 4. The whole conflict can be reduced to a big joke: if we present a Hollywood poster, preferably bathed in scary blood red, we’ll win! But personal commentary aside, what the poster is really trying to say is: we had no choice. This was our only option.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Still disbelieving the FBI/DOJ responses, a FOIA request was submitted to the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy for its records regarding the aforementioned appeal. The DOJ OIP responded and reveals that not only does the FBI have WikiLeaks records, but the FBI/DOJ lied about having records. WikiLeaks’ records are tucked away in other files, thus are considered for cross-references and not responsive because the request was for “all records” and didn’t use the magic words “cross-references.”
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Finance
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A RETIRED painter and decorator died while living in his garden shed after being kicked out of his house by a landlord.
Malcolm Frost was left begging for food after he was evicted from his home in Ashmores Lane, Alsager, where he had failed to pay rent.
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In These Times has exclusively obtained a leaked internal Honeywell document outlining an anti-union strategy that includes leveraging Obama administration connections. The documents suggest that the megacorporation is deeply concerned about recent union activity at its factories and the bad press that has resulted (one example cited is a Working In These Times op-ed).
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A new report came out from the Fraser Institute this week looking at income mobility. It certainly doesn’t intend to make this conclusion, but a thorough look at their data shows that the rich stay rich as everyone else fights for entrance to this exclusive club.
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The National Audit Office’s report said that between 2004 and 2011, about 2,300 avoidance schemes were disclosed to the tax authorities, with more than 100 new schemes emerging in each of the past four years.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The new round of criminal charges brought in the UK against former senior News International editors has once again raised the prospect that Rupert Murdoch’s New York-based parent company may be prosecuted under US anti-bribery laws, and complicates the rehabilitation of his son James as a possible successor to lead the global media empire.
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Privacy
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Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has famously stated that his vision is to make the world more open, and that’s precisely what is happening. Through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter people are opening up to each other and the world more than ever. Everybody has something about themselves to say, and they seem quite eager to put it out there.
[...]
This is also the reason why the value of privacy is relative. An individual should be free to reveal or conceal as much or as little about themselves as they wish. If more people voluntarily share more about themselves, this fact alone doesn’t then necessarily represent any kind of a social problem. Of course, it is still possible for people to make arguably bad choices, but those are still their choices to make.The important thing is to promote personal responsibility, without demanding that some be responsible for the choices of others.
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Civil Rights
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STATEMENT FROM THE FREE JEREMY HAMMOND SUPPORT NETWORK (https://www.facebook.com/supporthammond) This is what we know for certain surrounding the unfortunate circumstances of Jeremy Hammond’s ongoing prosecution. A time line published only days after Jeremy’s arrest suggests that Operation AntiSec was orchestrated by the FBI through the agency of FBI informant Hector Monsegur; http://www.scribd.com/doc/85351496/Timeline-of-ANTISEC-as-Created-and-Operated-Under-FBI-Supervision. As if this were not unfortunate enough, new evidence suggests that Loretta A. Preska, the federal judge currently presiding over Jeremy’s case, has an undisclosed conflict which could potentially influence her decisions regarding Jeremy’s trial. Loretta A. Preska is the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and a former nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Preska is married to Thomas J. Kavaler, with whom she attended law school. Information leaked from the very hack Jeremy is being prosecuted for having committed show that Thomas J. Kavaler is affiliated with Stratfor; http://archive.org/details/Stratfor. Sensitive information belonging to Kavaler was leaked along with the sensitive information of more than eight hundred thousand other Stratfor users and millions of internal emails. We demand that Loretta A. Preska, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, excuse herself from Jeremy case immediately. We demand that all previous rulings made by Chief Judge Preska be dismissed. We demand an investigation into the tactics used by law enforcement officials to entrap hacktivists. We demand an investigation into the circumstances which allowed for Chief Judge Preska to preside over Jeremy’s case. We demand a fair trial for Jeremy Hammond! We will not be silent in the presence of such great injustices. If those prosecuting Jeremy deny him a voice, they will hear ours!
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And I’m not alone. A group of activists who are concerned about the so-called “advanced” imaging technology are also urging air travelers to just say “no” next week.
Opting out means agents will either give you an “enhanced” pat-down or wave you through the screening area (and when there’s a long line, it’s a safe bet it’ll be the latter). But the peaceful protest will also slow screenings to the point where the agency will have to reconsider the way it checks air travelers, as it did during a successful opt-out action two years ago.
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I have to admit, there are times when I find South Korea immensely confusing when it comes to technology. They appear to embrace the hell out of the more modern view of the music business. They’re heavily invested in their population’s internet connectivity. Yet they can also get goofy when it comes to intellectual property, such as when they decided patenting their military uniforms was a surefire way of keeping the North Korean military from dressing alike. They’ve also put in place a mildly enforced version of 3 strikes legislation to appease American entertainment companies.
Admitting all that, however, my surprise has boiled over upon learning that a South Korean man was found guilty of “praising, encouraging or propagandizing” North Korea under their “National Security Law” for tweets associated with his account. His crime? Well, mostly retweeting North Korea’s official Twitter account, tweeting out a couple of links to North Korean propaganda songs, and tweeting nonsensical nonsense (is there any other kind?) about their neighbors to the north. Oh, and he also mercilessly mocked the hell out of this country he’s accused of supporting as well.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Euro MPs have opposed the idea of a UN organisation taking control of the internet away from US bodies, saying it would hurt the free flow of information online.
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That’s because I did not explicitly authorize you to access this site…
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We’ve been covering how the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been moving forward with its plans next month to consider a number of proposals to takeover aspects of internet regulation and governance. There are, of course, a number of different proposals being submitted by different countries. The problem, of course, is that the setup of the ITU is not open to the public, and there are some special interests involved — mainly by countries with oppressive governments looking to use this as a way to gain control over the internet for the sake of censorship, as well as local (often state-run or state-associated) telcos using the process to see if they can divert money from successful internet companies to their own bank accounts. While the ITU likes to present itself as merely a neutral meeting place for all of these proposals, what’s been clear for a while is that the ITU leadership has taken an active role in encouraging, cultivating and supporting some of the more egregious proposals.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It seems extraordinary that in the area of copyright it is only recently that people have started to consider the evidence before formulating policy. Even now, there is still resistance to this idea in some quarters. Elsewhere, though, there is a growing recognition that policy-makers must have access to the data they need when considering how to achieve given goals.
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Copyrights
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Reacting to Ofcom’s new research into online copyright infringement, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:
“Only 16% of respondents said they would stop unlawful file sharing if sent a letter by their ISP…”
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A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.
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Since the GOP decided to chicken out on holding the very necessary debate on copyright reform, let’s keep the debate going without them, and hope they join in. As we’ve discussed, the Republican Study Committee released a fantastic report from staffer Derek Khanna, and then retracted it under lobbyist pressure. The RSC wants to claim that the paper didn’t go through its full review process, but we’ve heard from multiple sources that this is simply not true, and that the RSC is pushing this story to appease angry lobbyists (apparently the US Chamber of Commerce has taken over as the leader of the cause on this one, following the initial complaints from the MPAA and RIAA). Either way, all this has done is draw much more attention to the report, which you can still read here.
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On Friday, we wrote about the unsealed seizure warrants against Megaupload, and noted that they showed how Megaupload had assisted in a criminal investigation, in which they were told not to interfere with the files, but then those very files were used as evidence against Megaupload itself. It’s now come out that this was part of the case against NinjaVideo, which we wrote about a few times.
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Somewhere deep down, we’re sure Seattle-based conceptual artist and serious Prince obsessive Troy Gua expected he’d someday have to face saying goodbye to the much-lauded miniature doll that was at the center of his art series, Le Petit Prince. This was no small project — Gua literally recreated many famous Prince moments with the little guy and even included detailed props like the Purple Rain motorcycle. Ironically, we were recently emailing with Gua to do a piece about the new calendar he was putting out featuring some of these photographs, but this week Gua sadly informed us the dream is over. He received a cease and desist letter from the real Prince’s people on Monday.
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Last month we wrote about an interesting case in which a judge effectively called the bluff of Malibu Media, a copyright trolling operation that has filed 365 lawsuits, targeting about 6,000 people. And, of course, it’s never taken a single one to an actual trial, because that does not appear to be the goal. Instead, it’s all about getting people to settle, and it sounds like Malibu has been successful on that front. In the case we mentioned last month, the judge made it clear that he wanted Malibu Media to actually go through a trial, and highlighted four defendants who had claimed innocence, and wanted to use those as a “bellwether” trial, to effectively test Malibu’s theories. The judge, Michael Baylson, was pretty clear that he would not be happy if Malibu Media tried to squeeze out of the case.
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In retrospect, it is now clear that the pivotal moment in the campaign against ACTA was last January, when thousands of people took to the streets in Poland despite the sub-zero temperatures there. A few weeks later, similar protests took place across the continent, especially in Eastern Europe, which then influenced politicians at all levels, culminating in the rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament on July 4.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’ve always presented myself as a Linux geek to my neighbours and it has been nice seeing how the Linux word evolved (with funny and surprising quotes) during the past ten years in their minds. A friend of mine (Aretha Battistutta) made a little comic strip out of the topic and the result is simply amazing.
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Desktop
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With the recent introduction of upgraded and lower priced Chromebooks from Samsung ($249) and Acer ($199), the platform may finally live up to its potential, especially now that netbooks have fallen by the wayside. Some (us included) would argue that these are the price points Chromebooks should have been selling at all along. But what about performance?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Linux Mint 14 has been released. Planet KDE does awesome work. There’s an OpenStreetMap map-a-thon. Australia’s government is TLD-shy. Red Hat invests in MongoDB, there may be life on Mars, Apple will have to reveal how much HTC is paying it, and the UEFI saga is turning nasty. Hear our non-audio related discoveries, and your own brains and opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Proprietary
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While there are some limited exceptions, most proprietary software titles coming to Ubuntu are centered around recreating experiences we might have from other operating systems. Skype is one of my favorite examples, as it’s now more than ever the de facto video conferencing application for all three major computing platforms.
Another area where smooth software migration is being sought after is with gaming. And as luck would have it, new proprietary games are beginning to float into the Ubuntu Software Center. Regardless of what your view might happen to be on proprietary software or games, one must ask oneself – what about the other distros out there?
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Team Fortress 2, a free to play first-person shooter (FPS) multiplayer game, is now available for everyone using the Linux Steam client, and not just those who have received a beta invitation, so non-beta users shouldn’t see the “server is too busy” error when trying to download the game any more.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE project has announced the release of first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform 4.10.
Post this release the team will now focus on bug fixing and further polishing new and old functionality as the API, dependency and feature freezes is already in place.
So, what’s new in KDE SC 4.10?
With this release KDE is introducing a brand new Screen Locker, a new screen locking mechanism, which is based on QtQuick brings and offers more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop. It also introduces a new print manager which makes improves setting up of printers and monitoring jobs.
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My browser of choice on the desktop has been Firefox for many years. Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine. As a backup Web browser I use Konqueror but configured to use WebKit, rather than KHTML, as the rendering engine. I’ve tried Chromium, Opera, Midori, rekonq, SeaMonkey and a bunch of others, but always found them lacking in some way in comparison to Firefox (I find Opera Mobile better than Firefox for Android on my mobile phone, though).
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GNOME Desktop
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It was recently announced that GNOME 3.8 would not be including the GNOME 2 fallback mode. This had a lot of folks a bit concerned. Apparently it was used more than GNOME developers figured. Not wanting to go backwards, Matthias Clasen has thought of a way that may pacify users of the departing fallback mode.
Clasen posted to a GNOME mailing list today that he thinks using some community extensions to bring back GNOME 2-like features is the answer. He said exactly, “we have a pretty awesome extension mechanism in gnome-shell (extensions.gnome.org), and there are a ton of extensions out there which allow users to bring back many of the ‘classic’ UX elements.”
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I’m referring, of course, to Matthias Clasen’s announcement that, having dropped fallback mode, GNOME will support a core of extensions that will recreate the GNOME 2 interface.
This announcement marks a major reversal of GNOME’s policy. For the past two years, the project has officially defended the radical redesign introduced by GNOME 3, making few — if any — acknowledgments of users’ complaints.
In fact, eighteen months ago, influential members of GNOME were arguing against encouraging extensions for GNOME Shell at all. For instance, Allan Day, one of the leading designers of the GNOME 3, wrote in a discussion on the gnome-shell list:
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I can’t say much more than whats in the title just yet, but I thought I’d give everyone a heads up – forums for GNOME users, developers, etc are in the works! Hopefully soon we’ll be building a community of users, contributors and other interested folks to make GNOME better than ever! Stay tuned!
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MEPIS Linux is celebrating its 10th anniversary today! WOW! This small distro actually reached 10 years!
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Linux distributor and middleware maker Red Hat has extended its online training services to Europe. Red Hat Virtual Training, which was previously only available in North America, currently offers 21 different courses to help participants hone their skills and receive certificates in a range of Linux and JBoss-related areas.
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Fedora
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Good news for patient Fedora users, they will get to test the beta of Fedora 18 on November 27, 2012 (not 2013).
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Fedora 18 Spherical CowFedora 18 Spherical CowI’ve been remixing Fedora 18 pre-release for quite a while now. As you may recall The Fedora Project has delayed the release of Fedora 18 Beta several times now… mainly due to blocker bugs in their new installer and Fedora Updater (fedup). I think the rest of the distribution has benefited from the delays because I’ve been running it a while and it has been very solid for me… as or more solid than Fedora 17. In fact, Fedora 17 and Fedora 18 share a lot in common… because a Fedora release, during its lifecycle, gets a lot of updates and upgrades.
I started by putting Fedora 18 on my netbook. Then I put it on my home desktop system. I ran it for more than a month… oh, and by the way, I disable the updates-testing repository. Since it has been so solid on my hardware at home I finally decided, perhaps being a little haphazard, to put it on my workstation at work. When did I decide to do that? Well… I picked the day before Thanksgiving about 1 hour before it was time to go home. Care to follow me on my journey?
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) brought a lot of new features to the users. From an improved Unity to the brand new web apps feature that blended the web and the desktop, this release makes Ubuntu a strong contender to the contentious Windows 8.
One of the best things about Ubuntu is that it allows users to search the web as well as the desktop right from the dash. You can look up your recently used file the same way you can look up the latest videos from the videos lenses. However, the searching experience is not limited to the pre-installed lenses and scopes. You can, with a couple of clicks, install some great new lenses that will make your Ubuntu the best desktop ever.
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The Unity cross-platform development tool version 4 has been released from beta into the growing world of Ubuntu game development. Every Unity developer is now only a few clicks away from publishing in the Ubuntu Software Center with Unity 4.0’s new Linux Deployment Preview. You can download a 30-day preview of all the Pro features, Linux export will always be in the free version.
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Ubuntu 1304′s default wallpaper has been unveiled – some 5-ish months ahead of schedule!
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The Sputnik is Dell’s cleverly code-named latest laptop endeavour. It’s a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook that has a line up of hardware that Dell feels will lure developers away from competing vendors.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Jolla – the startup built by the team behind the smartphone OS that Nokia abandoned in favor of Windows Phone — revealed its first big smartphone customer deal today, the mobile operator DNA of Finland. Jolla also gave a first look at the UI of Sailfish, the mobile operating system they’ve created from the remnants of Nokia’s MeeGo project, and released an SDK.
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Android
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Several months of work have culminated in the release of Replicant 4.0 0001, the latest version of the completely open source distribution of Android. The new version is based on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and introduces support for the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S2. On the Galaxy S, the camera is now supported and improvements to the telephony stack benefit all supported devices.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I prefer the smaller tablets because I find them to simply fit me better. For me, tablets are primarily for consuming data. I watch videos on them, I read books on them, I use them for Web-browsing, and I use them for e-mail. If you want to use a tablet for a work, you really want a full-sized tablet such as the iPad 4, Nexus 10, or a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. Me? I’ll use a laptop. For sheer enjoyment though give me a mini-tablet any day of the week.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. No one is really offering “deals” on any of the top 7″ tablets except for the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. For all the rest, expect to pay full price. That said, you should look for bargains on such accessories as the microSD cards for more storage and cases.
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The Nook HD and the HD+ can now be brought in the UK with prices starting at 159 English pounds. People who have pre-ordered can expect theirs any day now through the post.
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Catalyst IT has taken over fellow open source developer, Christchurch-based Egressive.
Egressive will formally become Catalyst’s South Island branch from the end of this month (November).
The takeover is friendly, says Egressive director Dave Lane. “In fact it would be fair to say we initiated the process.” The company had grown its business to the point where its small staff had as much work as they could handle, he says, and it was limited by its location.
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Yesterday DreamWorks released its latest animated feature with the holiday-themed Rise of the Guardians. But for animators who watch the film and wish they could do something similar, there’s good news — one of the tools used on the project is free and open source. Called OpenVDB, the tool is used to create volumetric 3D effects like smoke, and DreamWorks previously used it on both Puss in Boots and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The studio’s hope is that by making OpenVDB free, it will eventually become an industry standard. “That ends up benefiting us,” DreamWorks’ David Prescott told the Wall Street Journal.
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Events
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SaaS
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Databases
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In a recent post, I introduced an initiative, along with Dima Kassab, for teaching open source NoSQL databases. We collaborated to prepare course materials for three NoSQL databases to 22 students at the Informatics Department of SUNY Albany, and we made all those material available under a Creative Commons by Attribution License.
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Funding
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BSD
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A senior OpenBSD developer has complained on a mailing list that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change.
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Public Services/Government
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Over €10 million (approximately £8 million or $12.8 million) has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city’s own Linux platform. The calculation of savings follows a question by the city council’s independent Free Voters (Freie Wähler) group, which led to Munich’s municipal LiMux project presenting a comparative budget calculation at the meeting of the city council’s IT committee on Wednesday. The calculation compares the current overall cost of the LiMux migration with that of two technologically equivalent Windows scenarios: Windows with Microsoft Office and Windows with OpenOffice. Reportedly, savings amount to over €10 million.
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Openness/Sharing
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Collaboration is changing. Gone are the days of excuses for not collaborating, like “we work better in person,” or “we’re in different time zones.” Technology makes it easy to work together. It’s simple and it’s free (assuming you have a computer, webcam, and internet connection).
The editors of Make Magazine are a good example of 21st century collaboration. They recently held their first public “editor hangout” using Google Hangout. The Make editors are scattered across the country, yet this Google Hangout brings all of them together. Google Hangouts are really cool because you can see all of the members at the bottom, and the person speaking is automatically highlighted in a larger video screen.
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Open Access/Content
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Dr. Douglas Fields penned an article at Huffington Post on open access. There are so many factual errors, false analogies and misleading statements in this article, that I need to highlight just few of the ‘wrongest’ statements
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Did you know how many times you use some open source software in a day? No clue? Each time you access a Web site, use an app (application) or play a game, you use one or more open source software.
How about creating one? Google, the digital media and search engine company, has announced Google Code-in contest for students in the age group of 13 and 17 years.
Beginning November 26, contests can work on 10 different open source organisations, taking part in certain online tasks to win prizes.
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The Federal Trade Commission may not have enough evidence of harm to consumers to proceed with an antitrust claim against the heart of Google’s business, search, Bloomberg reported.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Drone strikes look like the perfect solution: clean, low risk, inexpensive, and only the target, and possibly the weapon, gets hurt. At first glance it looks like the absolute perfect military device. And of course in many ways it is the perfect military device. It strikes from afar, it’s highly accurate, there is little or no risk of life on our side, and it’s extremely effective.
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17,000 formal complaints have been filed about TSA “enhanced” pat-downs since 2009, according to a news report by Scott MacFarlane of WSBTV Channel 2, Atlanta. This is after a Congressman, Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, reported that his 17-year-old niece was exposed during a pat-down. Since this is a Congressman, there is now a federal investigation underway. Once again, it pays to have friends in high places.
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Cablegate
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The movement behind WikiLeaks may lead to an even bigger digital exposé
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Uzbekistan’s former chief mufti Sheikh Muhammad Sodiq Muhammad Yusuf is still regarded as a major Islamic authority in Uzbekistan, but US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show different sides of his personality.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It is unacceptable to shield a nuclear project from Freedom of Information says Access Info Europe
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Finance
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…due to growing copyright infringement concerns which have resulted in an extremely strict and in some cases privacy-violating set of requirements being laid down by the payment processing company.
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Leading City analyst says both banks had access to research about alleged banking irregularities at UK software firm
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There’s a painful subtext to yesterday’s public finance figures. While most of us are paying more tax, many big companies are paying less
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“Some recent developments have come to our attention, though, and departing together is the best alternative we can take,” Consiglio continued before the team wrapped up the newscaster equivalent of flipping the bird at the big bosses.
Though the collaborative offense wasn’t exactly keyed into the teleprompter, station vice-president and general manager Mike Palmer told the Associated Press that the pair simply quit before they could be fired.
“Sometimes people leave before they’re officially told to leave,” he said. “There are things that they know.”
That development appeared to be… well, news to Michaels, who told the AP she had “no clue” her job was in jeopardy and felt that their actions fell on the proper side of the respect spectrum.
“We wanted to be able to say a thoughtful, heartfelt goodbye to our viewers and to the many communities we served over the years. We did not defame the company in any way over the air. The goodbye was cordial, sincere and done with integrity,” she wrote in an email to the news agency.
The AP notes that Michaels expressed concern over the way political stories were presented and believed the station focused too much on unimportant news.
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Stripped to essentials, the fiscal cliff is a device constructed to force a rollback of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as the price of avoiding tax increases and disruptive cuts in federal civilian programs and in the military. It was policy-making by hostage-taking, timed for the lame duck session, a contrived crisis, the plain idea now unfolding was to force a stampede.
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Censorship
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Since the GOP decided to chicken out on holding the very necessary debate on copyright reform, let’s keep the debate going without them, and hope they join in. As we’ve discussed, the Republican Study Committee released a fantastic report from staffer Derek Khanna, and then retracted it under lobbyist pressure. The RSC wants to claim that the paper didn’t go through its full review process, but we’ve heard from multiple sources that this is simply not true, and that the RSC is pushing this story to appease angry lobbyists (apparently the US Chamber of Commerce has taken over as the leader of the cause on this one, following the initial complaints from the MPAA and RIAA). Either way, all this has done is draw much more attention to the report, which you can still read here.
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Privacy
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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An anti-piracy company has found itself in the middle of a huge controversy. CIAPC, the company that had The Pirate Bay blocked by ISPs in Finland, tracked an alleged file-sharer and demanded a cash settlement. However, the Internet account holder refused to pay which escalated things to an unprecedented level. In response, this week police raided the home of the 9-year-old suspect and confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop.
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Rap star Coolio has launched a savage attack on the music industry, accusing record labels of engineering a cover-up of decent music.
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11.21.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A couple of years ago I helped a small business convert their old virus infected Windows XP computer into a Linux Mint 11 (Katya) Xfce. This was done after a long time of trying to help them keep that machine running at a half-decent speed – the virus being the last straw that finally had them make the switch to Linux. Amazingly, well maybe not to the Linux faithful but to most people, this transition not only went smoothly but was actually extremely well received. Outside of a question or two every couple of months I have heard of no issues whatsoever. Sadly Linux Mint 11 has recently reached its end of life stage and so the time has come to find a replacement.
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Desktop
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Google has pushed an update for its dev channel brining it to version, 25.0.1324.1, (Platform versions 3196.1.0 for most platforms and 3196.2.0 for Samsung Chromeboxes) for all Chrome OS devices.
This build brings numerous improved features to Chrombooks including support for extended desktop and mirrored displays.
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Server
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An advanced Linux malware strain can automatically hijack websites hosted on compromised servers to attack web surfers with drive-by-downloads.
The software nasty targets machines running 64-bit GNU/Linux and a web server, and acts like a rootkit by hiding itself from administrators. A browser fetching a website served by the compromised system will be quietly directed via an HTML iframe to malicious sites loaded with malware to attack the web visitor’s machine.
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Kernel Space
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Choosing the right filesystem for a particular job can be a difficult task. We tested seven candidates and found some interesting results to make an administrator’s choice easier.
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Graphics Stack
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Various improvements to the major open-source Linux graphics drivers will be landing with the Linux 3.8 kernel in the months ahead.
David Airlie updated his “drm-next” Git repository last night with all of the latest code bits ready to be merged for the Linux 3.8 kernel when its merge window opens in the next few weeks following the Linux 3.7 release. He also sent out an email confirmation.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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While this week marks one year since the Doom 3 (id Tech 4) game engine was open-sourced under the GPL, there still isn’t too much adoption by open-source game developers. The few forks of the id Tech 4 code-base also aren’t seeing frequent activity.
The ioDoom3 project was announced by the ioquake3 developers immediately following id Software’s announcement of the Doom 3 source-code drop. While backed by developers of ioquake3 and on Icculus.org where the the ioq3 engine continues to be wildly-used and deployed in various open-source titles, the ioDoom3 project hasn’t taken off nearly as much.
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Earlier today I was exchanging tweets with Terry Cavanagh (creator of VVVVVV) about his new game Super Hexagon, which has just had Windows and MacOS versions announced.
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Desktop Environments
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WMO figures show levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a new record last year, at 390.9 parts per million
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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ven if you have no prior experience with this type of software, KMyMoney is a win-win solution. The interfaces used in most of those other Linux finance and banking tools are much more cumbersome. KMyMoney has a much lower learning curve. Finance and banking apps each have their diverse purposes, and one size definitely does not fit all users.
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Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.
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GNOME Desktop
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In my test of the Fedora 18 Alpha release, I was left thinking the “connect to server” feature in the Nautilus file manager disappeared in versions 3.5.x and 3.6.x of the GNOME desktop environment.
Thanks to readers, I learned that “connect to server” has moved to a separate application that you call from the shell with the not-so-friendly name Nautilus-connect-server, as seen in the image above.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is moving ahead with its OpenStack-centric cloud computing plans. The company has been steadily working on an enterprise-class version of the OpenStack platform. It will arrive in a fully supported version early next year, but you can already get a preview edition, based on the “Essex” OpenStack release. And now, Red Hat has announced the availability of its new OpenStack Technical Preview based on “Folsom.”
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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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The Linux Mint team today announced the release of version 14, codenamed “Nadia.” Today’s release ships in MATE and Cinnamon desktop varieties for 32 and 64-bit architectures. “After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience.”
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Phones
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Finnish startup reveals Sailfish OS UI for the first time and announces deal with ST-Ericsson
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Jolla has signed a deal with Finland’s 3rd largest mobile operator DNA to market the MeeGo based smartphones in the Finnish market. According to Mobile Business Briefings, “The firm has struck a deal with Finland’s number-three mobile operator DNA, which has agreed to market Jolla smartphones based on its MeeGo-based ‘Sailfish’ platform in Finland “as soon as they enter the market.””
Jolla has also partnered with ST-Ericsson for its chipsets. Sailfish OS already supports multiple chipset and further support is continuously being built for all the major chipsets. The company already has a deal with Chinese D.Phone to distribute Jolla powered devices in China.
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Android
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The 32GB version of Google Nexus 10 is now in stock. I just ordered mine. The tablets (and Nexus 4) were sold out within a few minutes of going on sale. It did leave bruised experience for those who were waiting for these devices.
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Smartphones and tablets powered by Google’s Android software are devouring the mobile gadget market, eating into Apple’s turf by feeding appetites for innovation and low prices, analysts say.
The Android operating system powered nearly three out of four smartphones shipped worldwide in the recently ended quarter as the mobile platform dominated the market, according to industry trackers at IDC.
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A thorn in the side of many free software loving Android users, the Chinese MIUI ROM has long been accused of riding on the success of Android without fully complying with the free and open source licenses which it’s based on. MIUI’s developer, Xiaomi, has managed to cultivate a considerable fanbase for their ROM, adding insult to injury for many opponents. Xioami has even been so bold as to put their own phone into production, running (naturally) their license-violating software.
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Motorola Mobility has announced a new Intel Atom smartphone for the Chinsese market, the MT788.
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OSSEC is Free Software, a GPL-licensed, host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) that operates on a client-server model. Its development is sponsored by Trend Micro, a software security outfit based in Tokyo, Japan.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is currently preparing the release of Firefox 17.0 stable which will be later out today if no last minute issues emerge that delay the roll out of the update to all users of the stable version of the browser. We look at what’s new in Firefox 17 back when the Aurora channel got updated to the version, and the majority of features mentioned in that initial article made their way into the stable version as well. Aurora releases are about 12 weeks ahead of stable releases so that some things can change along the way.
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Mozilla is out today with the Firefox 17 open source browser release, providing new user-facing features as well as improved security.
Among the key highlights of the release is the SocialAPI that Mozilla first began testing at the end of October. The SocialAPI provides a new type of integration capability for Firefox, enabling a very vibrant user experience for social networking services.
The first social network that Firefox is integrating with is Facebook, with more to come in the future. The initial beta period for the SocialAPI was a critical part of the development process.
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CMS
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Open source Learning Management Systems have become extremely popular in recent years, but what does open source mean? Open Source technology is technology where the source code is “open”, that is, the code is available to the public and free to be modified. Improvements can be made by developers and it can be spread or sold to the wider community. So, why should an organization choose an open source Learning Management System as opposed to a homegrown or proprietary Learning Management System?
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Public Services/Government
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They’ve done it. Freiburg, Germany, has voted 25 to 20 with 2 abstentions to upgrade M$’s office suite rather than OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice. The twits were using M$ Office 2K and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, both obsolete versions… The vote could have been closer because 2 of the “yes” votes were Greens. It could have been 24 to 23 against…
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The German city of Freiburg will end its use of open source suite OpenOffice and is switching back to using a proprietary alternative The city also abandon’s its default use of the Open Document Format, confirms Green Party city council member Timothy Simms.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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ARM’s AArch64 back-end for LLVM to handle the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture is working, but there’s still more work ahead of the hardware’s general availability in about one year’s time.
There’s AArch64 in GCC’s code-base with version 4.8 following months of development and its approval by the steering committee. Initial AArch64 architecture support was also merged into the Linux 3.7 kernel. However, on the LLVM/Clang side there hasn’t been much public-facing news.
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Hardware
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This year’s Black Friday is expected to be the catalyst for tablets to pass notebook shipments for the first time in North America, a trend which we expect to continue for the foreseeable future
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Health/Nutrition
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Every year for the past 13 years, biotechnology giant Monsanto Company has sued about 11 farmers per year for patent infringement of their genetically modified corn and soybean seeds. Many of these farmers have had to pay a settlement to the corporation even when their fields were accidentally contaminated with GM seeds from a neighboring farm. Monsanto simply outspends the defendants, dedicating $10 million a year and 75 staffers for the sole purpose of investigating and prosecuting farmers. Farmers who have sued Monsanto back have been soundly defeated.
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Security
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Greek police have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing the personal data of roughly two thirds of the country’s population, police officials in Athens said on Tuesday.
The 35-year old computer programmer was also suspected of attempting to sell the 9 million files containing identification card data, addresses, tax ID numbers and license plate numbers. Some files contained duplicate entries, police said.
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The United States used U.S.-Israeli spy software to hack into the French presidential office earlier this year, the French cyber-warfare agency has concluded, according to the newsmagazine l’Express.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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What we learned on the eve of the AUSMIN talks is that a document I have asked about at Senate Estimates and in Senate question time does in fact exist. This document outlines the roles and rights and responsibilities of the United States forces to be stationed in Australia, and it is not being made public, according to the government, and will not be made public. We know this thanks to a freedom of information request made by Fairfax journalist Dylan Welch, a request that was of course denied. That means that everything we know about the formal legal mechanics of the most significant deployment of foreign troops and equipment on Australian soil since the Second World War is instead contained in the Status of Forces Agreement signed with the US government in May 1963. I have asked a number of times in Defence estimates whether this document would be reviewed or amended, figuring that basing US Air Force fighters and bombers at Tindal, a Marine Corps contingent at Robertson, increased access to ports and air weapons ranges all over the country would surely require amendments to a document that went to press in the middle of the Cold War effectively to cover intelligence facilities only. With a straight face I was told the document would not be reviewed, and now we know why-an entirely new document has been drafted. At least the ambiguities in the Status of Forces Agreement are right out in the open; this current 2012 legal agreement is secret. The government has no intention of releasing it, apparently by request of the United States. My observation on this, apart from the evident insult to Australian sovereignty that our government is uncritically accommodating, is that this is the age of the leak.
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As representatives of the people, members of the cabinet have no duty to present their vision for the futures of the country, and they can continue with this bloody cycle, with no end in sight. But we, as citizens and human beings, have a moral duty to refuse to participate in this cynical game. That is why I have decided to refuse to be inducted into the Israeli Army on the date of my call-up order, November 19, 2012.
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Analysis shows full extent of climate sceptic’s financial interests in oil industry and places committee role under further scrutiny
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Cablegate
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Finance
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“We pay our taxes!” independent booksellers are telling customers across the country in the latest fightback against Amazon.
A new high-street campaign from the Booksellers Association refers, tongue in cheek, to MPs’ quizzing last week of executives from Amazon, Starbucks and Google over their tax affairs. The companies were accused of diverting hundreds of millions of pounds of profit to tax havens – Amazon was alleged by MPs to avoid UK taxes by reporting its European sales through a unit based in Luxembourg.
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Former prime minister sentenced to 10 years in prison for graft as Croatia attempts to root out corruption ahead of EU entry
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Fashion brands are deploying mannequins equipped with technology used to identify criminals at airports to watch over shoppers in their stores. Retailers are introducing the EyeSee, sold by Italian mannequin maker Almax SpA, to glean data on customers much as online merchants are able to do.
Five companies are using a total of “a few dozen” of the mannequins with orders for at least that many more, Almax Chief Executive Officer Max Catanese said. The 4,000-euro ($5,130) device has spurred shops to adjust window displays, store layouts and promotions to keep consumers walking in the door and spending.
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Civil Rights
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Charges dropped against Rimsha Masih, who was accused of burning pages of the Qur’an, after protests from Islamic clerics
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With more and more WalMart workers joining protests and threatening to join a nationwide walkout on Black Friday, the company has filed a complaint with the National Relations Board arguing that workers seeking a decent wage and reasonable working conditions have “created an uncomfortable environment and undue stress on Walmart’s customers, including families with children.” So if the lousy syntax wasn’t bad enough, the company that by some estimates pays its CEO more in one hour than it pays its retail employees in a year – a wage so low that most of its employees with kids live below the poverty line – is saying they’re worried about families with children? R-i-g-h-t. They also threaten to hold those uppity workers “accountable.” Accountable?! Now there’s an idea. More on why this strike matters. And a reminder: If you’re shopping, go local.
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Sen. Patrick Leahy has abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power — including warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail accounts — than they possess under current law.
The Vermont Democrat said today on Twitter that he would “not support such an exception” for warrantless access. The remarks came a few hours after a CNET article was published this morning that disclosed the existence of the measure.
A vote on the proposal in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Leahy chairs, is scheduled for next Thursday. The amendments were due to be glued onto a substitute (PDF) to H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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DRM
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“3. Complete control by device owners
Device owners must be in complete control of (able to manage and monitor) all the trusted computing security systems of their devices. As part of exercising control over their devices, device owners must be able to decide how much of this control to delegate to their users or administrators. Delegating this control to third parties (to the device manufacturer or to hard- or software components of the device) requires conscious and informed consent by the device owner (i.e., also with full awareness of possible limits on availability due to measures taken by the third party to whom control options were delegated).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Supreme Court of Canada this morning shocked the pharmaceutical industry by voiding Pfizer’s patent in Canada for Viagra. The unanimous decision provides a strong reaffirmation of the policy behind patent law, namely that patents represent a quid pro quo bargain of public disclosure of inventions in return for a time limited monopoly in the invention. The Supreme Court describes it in this way:
The patent system is based on a “bargain”, or quid pro quo: the inventor is granted exclusive rights in a new and useful invention for a limited period in exchange for disclosure of the invention so that society can benefit from this knowledge. This is the basic policy rationale underlying the Act. The patent bargain encourages innovation and advances science and technology.
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Copyrights
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While the Canadian Minister of trade is in Brussels this week to finalize CETA, and as Ministers just answered to the letter sent to the French government by La Quadrature du Net, still no evidence confirm that repressive measures were removed from the current text.
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11.20.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Years ago, when I was a GNU/Linux newbie, I found LinuxQuestions.org to be the site where I could find out just about anything about GNU/Linux in a rapidly growing on-line community. It’s still going strong so many years later.
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Wouldn’t you like the cost of IT to drop 80%? You can have that with GNU/Linux. It is a cooperative project of the world to provide IT at minimal cost and it works for you and not for some supplier converting monopoly into a licence to print money. It’s not magic. If your software is designed to work for you instead of to generate licensing revenue, you have lower costs all around.
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It’s that time of year again — when all of the pundits, bloggers, and Max Headroom-like “voices of the future” spout off their thanks for all things tech and nerdy. Not one to jump on every bandwagon that comes along — I wanted to point out the things that the open source and Linux community have to be thankful for.
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It’s been about 3 years since I left Windows XP and became a full-time Linux user.
In this time, I can proudly say that I’ve learned more than during my 15+ years of using Windows…all the way from 3.11 to XP.
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A few years ago, Brazilian developer Daniel Neis Araujo couldn’t imagine building open source health care equipment that could compete with traditional and respected proprietary solutions. But recent advances in Linux and the open hardware movement have allowed a faster development pace and a lower cost of entry for startups in the telemedicine field, in particular, he said.
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Desktop
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The document sent on October 14th 2011 by the Italian National Police to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other national security forces, such as the Carabinieri, Polizia Stradale and Polizia Ferroviaria, reveals the organization of a task-force to control and inhibit the massive demonstration that was going to take place one day after in Rome.
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Recently, we’ve been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Interestingly, noted open source advocate Simon Phipps, writing for InfoWorld, says he has ditched his MacBook for a Samsung Chromebook.
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Ubuntu is known for many things: ease of use, regular updates, widespread community support, and more. One thing it is not known for is gaming. This is changing, however, with Steam heading to Linux in the near future. System76′s new Bonobo Extreme is Ubuntu-powered and aimed at gamers, boasting some impressive hardware and a hefty price tag.
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Selling PCs with Linux preinstalled is hard enough. Doing it without paying attention to the latest hardware trends makes it nigh impossible. That’s probably why two major Linux OEMs, ZaReason and System76, have debuted “all-in-one” (AIO) desktop PCs powered by open source operating systems. Will their initiatives pay off?
In a sense, AIO computers — the kind where the monitor and central hardware are integrated into a single case — go back quite a long time. Many of the old, old Macintoshes used this format, as did machines such as the Commodore PET 2001 (which, despite its name, first debuted in 1977). But the contemporary implementation of the all-in-one PC, exemplified by the modern iMac, is a newer idea.
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Ubuntu hardware re-sellers System76 have today unveiled their product: the Bonobo Extreme laptop.
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Google recently launched the Samsung Chromebook that for $249 USD features an 11-inch display, a 16GB SSD, a promise of 6.5-hour battery life, and is backed by a Samsung Exynos 5 SoC. The Samsung Exynos 5 packs a 1.7GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor with ARM Mali-T604 graphics. With using this new ARM Cortex-A15 chip plus the Samsung Chromebook not being locked down so it can be loaded up with a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or openSUSE, it was a must-buy for carrying out some interesting Cortex-A15 Linux benchmarks. The Exynos 5 Dual in this affordable laptop packs an impressive performance punch.
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It may still be a bit early for the ubiquitous end-of-year story looking back at 2012, but even now, it seems safe to say that the “Linux preloaded” trend will surely go down in history as a big part of what has characterized this year in desktop computing.
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Server
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Meraki builds cloud managed wireless and wired access points as well as providing network acceleration and security capabilities. Meraki’s hardware appliances are based on a hardened Linux operating system and includes a subscription based service for cloud management.
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Kernel Space
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A recently introduced systemd enhancement allows programs to add a unique identifier to log messages sent to systemd’s Journal, which lets it retrieve extra information about the logged event from a message catalogue. Developers could, for example, add some further details and internet links concerning an error message to the information in the catalogue; the information could also explain the log data in a user’s local language if a suitable translation exists.
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Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all Torvalds has given the internet.
He’s also started some serious flame wars.
Over the past few years, Torvalds has emerged as one of the most articulate and engaging critics of the technology industry. His funny and plainspoken posts to Google+ routinely generate more comments and attention than most stories on The New York Times — or even Wired.
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From an SSD-backed Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU and a 160GB Intel SSD, the XFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems were benchmarked. For reference, the Linux 3.5 kernel was also benchmarked on the same system with the three Linux file-systems. Unfortunately, the Linux 3.6.x kernels failed to properly boot on this particular system so there are only Linux 3.5 and 3.7 Git results.
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Oh boy! It’s good to see someone with his eye on the road at the wheel sometimes… We all make the mistake of thinking too locally or not considering consequences of our actions but Linus whips such failings back into shape. Good for him.
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Security researchers have discovered what appears to be an experimental Linux rootkit designed to infect its highly select victims during a classic drive-by website attack.
Posted anonymously to Full Disclosure on 13 November by an annoyed website owner, the rootkit has since been confirmed by CrowdStrike and Kaspersky Lab as being distributed to would-be victims via an unusual form of iFrame injection attack.
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A new Linux rootkit has emerged and researchers who have analyzed its code and operation say that the malware appears to be a custom-written tool designed to inject iframes into Web sites and drive traffic to malicious sites for drive-by download attacks. The rootkit is designed specifically for 64-bit Linux systems, and while it has some interesting features, it does not appear to be the work of high-level programmer or be meant for use in targeted attacks.
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Linux now supports network address translation (NAT) for IPv6. Other new features include server-side support for Google’s TCP Fast Open (TFO) acceleration trick and a tethering driver for the iPhone 5.
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Another season, another Linux kernel. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes as kernel developers churn out new releases every two or three months. Within the next few weeks, Linux 3.7, the latest version of the code at the core of most mainstream open source operating systems — on Android phones as well as PCs and servers — will likely see its official release. And unlike some kernel updates, it will introduce a host of new features that end users may want to know about.
We don’t cover Linux kernel development too frequently on The VAR Guy because it’s not something most end users are likely to care about or understand. Unless you’re deeply interested in how your computer works “under the hood” — and kudos to you if you are — chances are you don’t want to read about the latest innovations in Linux memory management or file systems.
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Graphics Stack
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The first point release of Wayland 1.0 is now available for those interested in this next-generation display server environment.
Kristian Høgsberg announced the Wayland 1.0.1 release on Monday. It’s been just shy of one month since the release of Wayland 1.0 while today’s update provides some fixes for the recent release that marked the point of API/protocol stability and a guarantee on backwards compatibility with future releases.
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Applications
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Improvements to Twitter and IRC support are the highlights of the latest update to the open source Instantbird instant messaging (IM) client. When using Twitter in Instantbird 1.3, the user’s own description is now displayed above the timeline and can be easily edited. All users mentioned in a Tweet when replying are now included in the reply, making Instantbird work in the same way as the Twitter web site.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Game developer and distributor Valve has ramped up Steam for Linux by adding three more game titles. Steam for Linux was originally released with 24 titles and now the count stands at 27. You can see all the games supported in Linux platform in this page.
The company is also inviting more and more beta testers to test their software and report bugs. Steam is currently in closed beta phase now and only few selected individuals will be able to test it. Despite amazing response of 60,000+ users, Valve is keeping the beta limited and inviting people based on hardware configuration and graphics card on a daily basis.
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Today, the always innovative Humble Bundle launched yet another great new project. This time they’ve teamed up with Tim Schafer, whom some may remember as the founder of Double Fine and the creator of their insanely successful Kickstarter campaign (and others may remember him as the creator of several classic adventure games). The project is a twist on the standard Humble Bundle system: instead of paying what you want for a collection of existing games, contributors get to vote on various game ideas from the Double Fine team to decide which ones get prototyped. The whole development process will then be live-streamed, and contributors will be able to download the prototypes at the end. The ideas themselves come from a feverous internal brainstorming process called the Amnesia Fortnight, the secrets of which are being revealed to the public, as best (and most entertainingly) explained in the video:
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KING Art and Nordic Games have announced that The Critter Chronicles, the prequel to The Book of Unwritten Tales (BoUT), will be released in December for Linux, PC, and Mac.
The Critter Chronicles is the first chapter in the journey that actually started before the beginning of The Book of Unwritten Tales.
The original game was released initially in 2009, but it was promoted again in July 2012. This is a beautiful tale that allows players to travel back to the very beginning when Nate Bonnett first met his hairy sidekick Critter and the adventurers can assume the role of either character.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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The much hyped Gnome’s file manager Nautilus 3.6 has made its way to the upcoming version of Ubuntu, Raring Ringtail. This version was earlier not adopted in Quantal due to many of its controversial changes. The whole desktop was upgraded to Gnome 3.6 while the file manager remained of 3.4 branch. Linux Mint developers on the other hand made their own fork of file manager called Nemo. This is similar to the earlier attitude taken by the developers, i.e. bring their own fork of Gnome as they did for Cinnamon.
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With computers and applications becoming more and more smarter everyday, one is coming more close to security breeches and loopholes. Security issues today are more complex and harder to detect than they were five years ago. Developers are becoming more and more aware of this situation and they are finding out way to make computing more secure, fast and relaible.
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A new version of the Gnome Desktop, Gnone 3.7.2 is out. This version includes several stability and performance improvements along with bug fixes theta will make the Gnome desktop more stable, secure and reliable. Among the many changes in this release, the most important is the support for remote search providers. Now not only you will be able to search Wikipedia and Google from Gnome, but also will be able to search files, folders and documents from the single Gnome search bar.
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New Releases
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For the first time since Linux Mint 11, the development team was able to capitalize on upstream technology which works and fits its goals. After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience. We’re very proud of MATE, Cinnamon, MDM and all the components used in this release, and we’re very excited to show you how they all fit together in Linux Mint 14.
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Red Hat Family
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Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and engineering services for customers with high-security requirements, today announced that the company has updated CLIP to support RHEL 6.2. The new release will be used by developers leveraging Linux to build appliances or systems with confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability requirements for U.S Intelligence and Department of Defense (DoD) agencies as well as for critical infrastructure and other communities that manage sensitive or classified information. The enhancements to the platform enrich integration features available in previous releases and include adding DCID (Director of Central Intelligence Directive) 6/3 Protection Level 4 (PL4) high-availability and high-integrity requirements support, a custom SELinux policy, and a new build system for generating installable media.
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Today, there’s a lot of cloud choices, and at their core, all major cloud platforms can provide the same kind of functionality with a vendor’s personal flavor. But when it comes down to mission-critical business applications that measure effectiveness down to the second, making a cloud choice may be a more difficult task when important variables are in play.
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Fedora
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Fedora 18 is still at least two months away from hitting a download mirror near you, but if you have read the articles on pre-stable versions that have been published on this website, you’d know that Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, will be a completely different beast on Fedora 18.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For those curious about the state of Ubuntu 13.04′s development, there is a convenient status page to reflect the overall condition of this forthcoming Ubuntu Linux that is codenamed the Raring Ringtail.
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The Ubuntu development team have published a nice status page where you can readily monitor the development of upcoming versions of Ubuntu. From that status page, we learned that around 13% of the proposed work for Raring Ringtail is complete. One of the chief aims of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, i.e. porting it to embedded and mobile devices is complete. However, only 1% of work is complete for Kubuntu 13.04.
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Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical’s six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company’s current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it’s a bit of a rocky ride.
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Flavours and Variants
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Welcome to the third part of my Xubuntu 12.10 review. The purpose of this set of articles is to take the base Xubuntu installation and show how easily it can be improved to make the best Linux operating system of them all.
In the first part of the Xubuntu 12.10 review I reviewed the base install. In the second part of the Xubuntu 12.10 review I looked at how it is possible to customise all the aspects of the XFCE desktop to make it look the way you want it to look.
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For years I’ve been dreaming of a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television. Since XBMC has been far and away my favorite set-top box software, I’ve closely monitored hardware developments that can run that package. Now I think it’s time to declare that the Raspberry Pi has achieved the base specifications to be branded the XBMC device that rules them all.
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Phones
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Global smartphone shipments are expected to grow 30% to 865 million units in 2013, accounting for 43.9% of total handset shipments in the year, Digitimes Research has estimated.
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Android 4.2 is now part of Google’s AOSP, making the source code available to everyone
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Android
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Sony has launched an indie-focused portal for developers that includes access to the now-out-of-beta PlayStation Mobile software development kit.
The PlayStation Mobile SDK has been available in beta form for quite some time, but Sony has now officially given it the green light and slapped on a $99 (£62) annual usage fee.
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After months of working hard to bring Replicant to the next upstream release, we are proud to announce the release of the Replicant 4.0 0001 images. This new release comes with support for both new devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus or the Galaxy S2 and devices that were already there in Replicant 2.3, like the Nexus S and the Galaxy S.
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A teardown by iFixit reveals that Google’s flagship phone Nexus 4, manufactured by LG does have an LTE chip in it. It’s a Qualcomm 7-band LTE chip also found on LG’s Optimus phone, which is in some ways identical to this device.
It’s unclear why the phone doesn’t support LTE service despite the presence of the hardware. There can be many wild guesses — one is that the chip is there only due to ease of assembly as it is the same board used in LG Optimus G and LG wants to cut down the cost by using the same assembly for this device.
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Google’s release of Android Jelly Bean 4.2 has come at a time when somewhere around 50 manufacturers now support the open source mobile-focused operating system.
Looking across the market there are now thought to be over 500 types of Android device and this of course now includes both tablets and smartphones.
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Google eventually plans to roll-out the service on a cross-platform basis with multiple hardware partners, according to reports.
The search giant introduced the first phase of this new technology on YouTube last week, enabling users to Beam content from their Android smartphones to Google TV-connected HDTVs. But this is just the first step along the road to a bespoke open-source wireless streaming client.
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Google’s Android mobile software platform, as we know, has caused quite a conflict with Oracle, given Oracle’s failed lawsuit that claimed Java-like Android infringed on Java patents and copyrights. But now, might Oracle and Google, or even just one of them, decide to formally develop an open source implementation of Java especially for Android?
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It was appropriate then that several Valley players took part in Silicon Valley Comes To The UK events last week. But Musk was not there to sing their praises, but merely to expand on his general worldview. Interviewed by Number 10 special adviser Rohan Silva, Musk opened up on a number of issues, some he’s touched on in the past, and others he expanded upon more fully.
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The Nexus 7 from Google and the iPad mini from Apple are two of the hottest small tablets. Here are both of these capable tablets in a photo spread showing how they compare in size and with popular apps running.
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Remember when mobile hardware manufacturers like HTC and Motorola promised to help customers unlock the bootloaders on their Android devices, paving the way to the promised land of rooting, mods, and custom firmware? Here’s a quick update: it’s not going so well.
In the past year, we’ve seen HTC, Motorola, Sony, and others come out in support of unlocking, setting up special websites dedicated to safely open devices for custom ROMs and other “unofficial” uses. But those efforts have been sabotaged at nearly every turn as one flagship phone after another is sealed shut under the mandates of major carriers like Verizon and AT&T.
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Music, film, gaming or sports nut? Xperia Lounge has something for everyone, with exclusive content from Sony and our partners added every week – videos, imagery, competitions and VIP offers.
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Ballnux
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As if it were any surprise, HTC looks to be readying an international version of the recently announced Droid DNA. A tweet from often-accurate @evleaks tells us the 5-inch smartphone will be released as a global edition and will be called the HTC Deluxe.
If the Deluxe name sounds familiar it is because that was one of the code names tossed around in the months leading up to last week’s announcement. Some readers may recall recently hearing the phone tied to rumors of a HTC DLX moniker.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We have heard dual-booting in PCs, Macs and Laptops. The amazing technology allows one to oot into two OSes in a single computer. User has to specify different partitions for the OSes he wants to boot and is provides with options during booting. Dual booting was unknown in tablets and mobile phones until lately. Innovators have come out with PengPod, that will be able to boot Android as well as Linux in a single tablet.
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With its little brother having already spilled its guts, it was always going to be interesting to see how the new 9-inch Fire compared. Turns out it owes an awful lot to Samsung.
Powerbook Medic has torn the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 apart for the world to peer inside. It seems Samsung has done well out of the tablet, as it’s supplying—at the very least—the display, RAM, and flash memory. The processor is courtesy of Texas Instruments, though.
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It’s a general matter of course in any given year that as Thanksgiving draws ever closer here in the land of stars and stripes, more than a few Linux bloggers begin to wax sentimental about their favorite operating system, often recounting all the many reasons they’re thankful it exists.
It is the start of the season of thankfulness, after all.
Well, perhaps it’s the recent presidential elections or — even more so — perhaps it’s the fact that a sizable part of the country is preoccupied by a desire to divorce Uncle Sam. In any case, this year, the usual pattern doesn’t seem to have happened.
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Identity management specialist ForgeRock has launched a 100% open source software stack intended to secure applications and services across enterprise, cloud, social and mobile environments.
Boasting claims of more than 250,000 downloads in less than 24 months, the ForgeRock Open Identity Stack is positioned (in theory) as a community of global companies working to deploy identity management infrastructures more economically via the open model.
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After Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, its lack of interest in maintaining OpenSolaris as an open source operating system drove a group of dedicated developers to pick up where Sun left off. The Illumos Foundation has created a new distro that builds off of OpenSolaris, but calling it a form might not exactly be accurate.
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The latest release of the RabbitMQ messaging platform, RabbitMQ 3.0, includes plugins that support Web-STOMP, which allows the text-oriented STOMP protocol to run over WebSockets, and MQTT, the machine-to-machine/”Internet of Things” connection protocol.
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Events
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The Open World Forum is the best place to meet and talk about the present and the future of open source forges, as seen back in 2010 at the first Open Forges Summit, and again in 2011 to talk about interoperability among forges.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla released its annual report last week, with a PDF available at the bottom of this page, and the organization’s finances are clearly in order as it moves toward the next chapter in its story: the delivery of Firefox OS. It’s become clear that the next frontier for Firefox is on smartphones, especially in emerging markets. Even though the operating system hasn’t arrived in a version for smartphones and tablets just yet, it is available as a prototype module that you can run on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. You can try it here.
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Mozilla on Monday announced it has made Firefox for Android available to “millions” of more phones by adding support for ARMv6 processors. While the open source browser has been out for Android 2.2 and up for a while now, it only worked on phones equipped with ARMv7 processors. You can download the latest version now from the Google Play Store.
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Back in September Mozilla included a experimental build in its Firefox for Android beta to support more Android devices and called in people to help them test the new beta release. Now, after two months Firefox for Android supports devices running on the older ARMv6 processors. This will mean that the browser will now be available for download in millions of many more devices.
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Mozilla Firefox 17.0 was released today and it provides the first stable implementation of their Social API along with the Facebook Messenger.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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When people evaluate software for their own need and run X vs. Y checks, they always do it from their own perspective, placing their own needs at the forefront. They are of course doing the one sensible thing, but they are wrong. When you test software, you must ask yourselves how many people will be affected by that use?
If the answer is one, then you can proceed with your own evaluation. If the answer is more than one, then the scale changes instantly and completely, and it’s no longer a question what everyone needs or things, it’s the simple of matter what the weakest link in your user pool needs. Let me elaborate.
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CMS
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Acquia is expanding globally in its support of the open-source web content platform, Drupal. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company said the expansion means it is the first Drupal hosting provider offering high-performance hosting on four continents — Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
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Business
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Funding
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Kaltura provides a framework for building enterprise level video applications. Developers can peruse a marketplace of “off-the-shelf” video apps, select the type of deployment and delivery, and include features such as sharing, rating, commenting, and integrations with social networks. The open source platform includes hundreds of APIs, and has a global developer community of more than 40,000 members.
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BSD
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GhostBSD is a FreeBSD derivative that aims to make BSDs easier and bring GNOME to BSD users, although LXDE and OpenBox are also available. The third and last release candidate for upcoming 3.0 was recemtly released for final testing.
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Breaches occur. That’s reality.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One month on and the GCC sources are now in a lot better shape. The cause for most of the problems last month was that a new register allocator pass has been brought in to GCC. This pass – LRA or Local Register Allocator – is meant to be simpler, easier to debug, and provide a better job of register allocation. It is still rather new however, which is why there were so many problems last month. A lot of these have been sorted out now, which is good news as the 4.8 branch will be happening soon.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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A study is to be jointly conducted by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Trivandrum, and the Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore on the use of free and open source software in e-governance.
The study, set to be completed in 18 months, will cover the states of Kerala, Karnataka, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
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Openness/Sharing
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I am a technology practitioner and promoter of open source software (OSS). It ismy job to speak about the open source model in order to facilitate its adoption, to discuss its relevance and viability with regards to the strategic and economic needs of our time.
When I began my career, I spent several years working with closed source and proprietary software. It was then that I was first introduced to open source software. At first, it seemed rebellious, but I soon realized it was just the tip of iceberg. I could sense this was a revolutionary idea capable of a paradigm shift, representing deep topics: sustainable innovation, broader collaboration, and sharing of intellectual outcomes.
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The participatory ethic of open source software has become so widespread these days that it is migrating into some unexpected places… like musical instruments, tractors and ecological technology.
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Open Data
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Are you an academic, scientist, health policy junkie… or just a person who goes to see your doctor every now and then? Well, listen up: a new project by Fred Trotter and Not Only Development was recently granted protection under the Freedom of Information Act and met it’s crowdfunding effort on MedStartr to move ahead with plans to generate an open data set that promises to alter the healthcare landscape and have drastic implications on how we navigate it.
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Wikidata is one of the biggest technical overhauls of Wikipedia in its history and the ripples of change will reach far beyond its own shores. Dr Karl Beecher investigates…
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Programming
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You know your programming language is a hit when it becomes the subject of a children’s book — or, at least, a book written for kids. Python, the popular open source programming platform, can now claim that title, with the recent release by No Starch Press of Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming. Will the book assure your kid’s success as the next prodigy of the computer world?
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While the LLVM compiler infrastructure is primarily developed around Subversion, a poll was recently conducted that found LLVM developers overwhelmingly prefer Git over SVN for version control.
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Secret trials and withholding evidence are reminiscent of “repressive regimes and undemocratic societies”, the legal profession warns in a letter opposing the government’s justice and security bill.
Ken Clarke’s plans will erode core principles of justice and “fatally undermine the courtroom as an independent and objective forum”, according to the organisations representing solicitors and barristers. The UK’s international reputation for “fair justice” will be significantly damaged, they say.
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Nobody believes more fervently than the Mail in the importance of protecting members of the security services who risk their lives for our country.
Nor is anyone more appalled to see terrorist suspects granted huge
compensation payments, agreed out of court because the Government believes contesting their claims in public would put witnesses or their contacts in danger.
But as this paper has passionately argued, security considerations can be no justification for the draconian clampdown on open court hearings proposed in a Bill now going through the Lords.
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The folks at Denver’s ABC-affiliated 7News last night ran a story about the David Petraeus sex scandal, his “mistress,” Paula Broadwell, and her biography of Patraeus, All In.
Except instead of pulling an actual copy of the book cover, somebody just ran a Google search and pulled in the first thing they found. Which, unfortunately for 7News, was an altered copy of the book cover.
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It’s a well known fact that many people mistake Google’s image search for a license-free stock photo repository. Of course, many people are unaware (or simply uninterested) in the nuances of copyright law, making liberal borrowing of images the norm, rather than the exception.
On the other hand, members of industries that rely on the protection of copyright laws shouldn’t have to be reminded that “running an image search” is not even in the same neighborhood as “properly sourcing a photo.” This distinction is even more important if you’re in a business that relies on integrity, along with various IP laws. Having a staffer just grab an image from “The Internet” for use during a news broadcast could, at the very least, put you in the situation of having to pay up and apologize publicly for using someone else’s photo without permission. At worst, you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
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David Cameron has axed standard assessments used to gauge how policies affect different social groups as part of a drive to get rid of the “bureaucratic rubbish” that gets in the way of British business.
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Hardware
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Intel CEO Paul Otellini Will Retire This May After 40 Year TenureAt this point, there aren’t that many people who’ve worked at Intel as long as CEO Paul Otellini has. But after 40 years at the 45-year old chip maker—the last eight of them as CEO—he’s hanging up his stirrups this May. His timing couldn’t be better.
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Paul Otellini this week resigned his position as CEO of Intel as I’m sure you’ve already heard or read. Analysts and pundits are weighing-in on the matter, generally attributing Otellini’s failure to Intel’s late and flawed effort to gain traction in the mobile processor space. While I tend to agree with this assessment, it doesn’t go far enough to explain Otellini’s fall, which is not only his fault but also the fault of Intel’s board of directors. Yes, Otellini was forced out by the board, but the better action would have been for the board to have fired itself, too.
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Health/Nutrition
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Living in areas of high air pollution can lead to decreased cognitive function in older adults, according to new research presented in San Diego at The Gerontological Society of America’s (GSA) 65th Annual Scientific Meeting.
This finding is based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Health and Retirement Study. The analysis was conducted by Jennifer Ailshire, PhD, a National Institute on Aging postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Biodemography and Population Health and the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California.
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THE RED Cross was nowhere to be found after Hurricane Sandy hit on October 29 and New Yorkers most needed the best-known private humanitarian and disaster relief organization.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Republicans have accused her of making misleading statements by referring to the assault as a “spontaneous” demonstration by extremists. Some have suggested she used the terminology she did for political reasons.
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This actually seems to me to be one the central lessons of the disaster in Benghazi.
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This argument seems persuasive enough to me. Its soundness, however, depends on the validity of that estimate: that collateral damage ranges from seven per cent to 15 per cent, and that that US military authorities really are seriously attempting to minimise civilian casualties. I would like to know a little more about the figures, though: how do we actually know that “these strikes have killed 1,618 to 2,769 combatants, about 153 to 192 civilians and another 130 to 268 persons whose identities were unknown”? Who says that so many of those killed were in fact combatants?
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A few months ago, MuckRock and the EFF teamed up to start a drone watch effort, in which they send Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — or the local equivalent — requests to local governments and police departments, seeking to find out information on local law enforcement using drones. At last count, over 200 such requests have been made. You can track them here. As you might imagine, they’re getting very varied responses, with some saying that there are no responsive documents. In many cases, it’s likely that this is true.
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Later this week will see the start of a legal action against police chiefs who have been accused of attempting to hide away their embarrassing secrets.
Eight women who say that they were duped into having long-term relationships with undercover police officers are suing police chiefs. Two other women and one man have also launched a similar legal action.
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…a new report questioning the morality of drones against the backdrop of another Israel-Palestine war.
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In a new report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” they outline concerns that these Killer Robots would lack the human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. Also the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.
Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch, said. “Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far. Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimizing civilian deaths and injuries.”
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In the summer of 2011, Cameron Munter, the US ambassador to Pakistan, met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington and asked her to intercede with the White House to give him greater control over the CIA’s use of drones along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and to let him speak openly to the Pakistani people – who viewed drone warfare as a gross violation of national sovereignty – about the rationale for the strikes.
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MPs are to conduct an inquiry into Britain’s deployment of drones to target militants.
Scrutiny of the use of the unmanned weapons could shed light on the “secret war” being waged remotely by the US against terror suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, it is thought.
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America’s former ambassador to Pakistan talks about his battle with the CIA over drones.
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A MAN has told judges that he heard his friend screaming on a daily basis as he was being abused in police custody.
He was testifying in the trial of two National Security Agency (NSA) officers accused of causing the death of businessman Abdulkarim Fakhrawi, 49, in April last year.
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Cablegate
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Obama’s use of drone warfare is a key conflict in any progressive support for the president
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago. The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public.
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François Hollande has slammed the door on the exploitation of France’s big oil and shale gas deposits using “hydraulic fracking”, risking further tensions with business leaders anxious not to lose access to what they see as a potentially vital energy asset.
Mr Hollande said he had ordered the rejection of seven applications to open up the country’s shale deposits, citing “the heavy risk to health and the environment” of fracking, which injects water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into rock to release oil and gas.
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There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement. It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life.
In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. And yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice on the nightly news. Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York. There, a loose network of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and petitions.
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Finance
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Americans always feel charitable around the holiday season, giving some $300 billion to a diverse array of charities in 2011 alone. Now there is new way Americans can help their neighbors in need, by purchasing and forgiving their debt.
This is the idea behind the “Rolling Jubilee” being organized by “Strike Debt”, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since November 15, 2012, they have raised over $350,000, enough to abolish over $7 million in debt.
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The only real crises is one of a failing economy and growing economic inequality in which only the needs of the few are served, and also one of lack of political desire or will to solve these real problems. MMT policies can help to bring an end to the first economic crisis; but not if progressives, and others continue to believe in false ideas about fiscal sustainability and responsibility, and the similarity of their Government to a household. To begin to solve our problems, we need to reject the neoliberal narrative and embrace the MMT narrative about the meaning of fiscal responsibility. That will lead us to the political action we need to solve the political crisis and eventually toward fiscal policies that achieve public purpose and away from policies that prolong economic stagnation and the ravages of austerity.
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And yet, we are now supposed to believe that many things that went wrong leading up to the financial crisis were caused by a handful of junior bankers and traders supposedly acting on their own. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and the Securities and Exchange Commission continue to blame Fabrice Tourre, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, for the botched manufacturing and selling of the Abacus 2007-AC1 synthetic collateralized debt obligation.
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oday, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet dessert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production.
But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.
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The numbers reveal the deadening effects of inequality in our country, and confirm that tax avoidance, rather than a lack of middle-class initiative, is the cause.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Gates Foundation continues to fund Teach For America, Stand For Children, The Media Bullpen, the National Council for Teacher Quality, Teach Plus, The New Teacher Project, and literally scores of other groups which carry on campaigns to undermine due process for teachers, and actively lobby for coercive legislation that forces public schools to use faulty test scores for the purposes of teacher evaluation, against the best judgment of administrators and academic experts.
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Contraception will not help reduce deaths in childbirth or infant mortality: it is just a population control tool.
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“Security is a function of the resources your adversary is willing to commit,” said Julian Sanchez, a policy expert with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
“If you’ve been flagged as a high-priority target by the NSA [National Security Agency] and are under active observation,” Sanchez said, “then no, you can probably never have ‘total confidence’ that your communications won’t be traced.”
But for the rest of us, it’s definitely a possibility. With the right tools, some vigilance and a little bit of Web savvy, you, too, can best General Petraeus, Hamas, al-Qaida and the Taliban with communiqués so virtually untraceable that they would make James Bond blush.
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Americans are still reeling from the cacophony of secret money and negative ads that was the 2012 election. Much of the money spent on the congressional and presidential campaigns came from undisclosed sources, underscoring the continued need to fight for reforms to promote transparency in elections.
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Censorship
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The Hungarian government was forced to awkwardly rebuff some rare international praise this weekend, following some approving comments about the country on Friday by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. According to a report from Belarusian state news agency Belta entitled “Lukashenko: Western society changes views on democracy and market economy”, the Belarusian president – who has often been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” – said the following during the appointment of new Belarusian envoys to Hungary and France:
“Hungary used to be a socialist country. We used to be good friends with them. We used to have very close relations. After they became fed up with ‘democracy’ and market economy… they got sober.”
Lukashenko then went on to say that Belarus needs to build relations with Hungary, as it “cannot lose this country.”
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Quite a week for random governmental retractions. Back in February, when we first warned about the upcoming “World Conference on International Telecommunications” (WCIT) meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU), we noted that the thing to be most afraid of was countries like Russia and China using the process to take over control of aspects of the internet, in part to allow greater control for the sake of censorship, but also to set up questionable “tariffs” on internet traffic, designed to basically divert money to state owned or “closely associated” telcos. While much of the focus over the past few months was on the EU telcos proposal, you had to know that even worse was coming.
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A year and a half ago, we wrote about a lawsuit from a lawyer in Texas, John Gibson, who is an expert in workers’ comp issues in the state. He — quite reasonably — set up a blog at the URL TexasWorkersCompLaw.com. Shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Wrong. It seems that Texas has a law that you can’t use the words “Texas” and “Workers’ Comp” together. Seriously. The law explicitly says that anyone advertising Texas Workers’ Comp law help “may not knowingly use or cause to be used… any term using both ‘Texas’ and ‘Workers’ Compensation’ or any term using both ‘Texas’ and ‘Workers’ Comp’;”
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Privacy
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WSJ: Google Planted Cookies on iPhones Without Anyone’s Permission (Updated)A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Google has been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of Safari users by installing cookies that could track the browsing habits of people—even if they thought they had blocked them.
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Throw Away All Your Electronics Because They’re All Turning Into NarcsWe already know that Microsoft’s been looking at ways to turn Kinect into a snitch, but now, Big Brother is taking his talents to the nation’s students with a shiny new line of merciless, whistle-blowing e-books.
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The FBI gained access to Broadwell’s anonymous e-mail account. Inside, they found evidence that Broadwell and Petraeus had exchanged racy messages by storing them in Gmail’s “drafts” folder.
[...]
To conceal her identity, Broadwell avoided accessing the account from her home Internet account. Instead, she accessed it from publicly available WiFi connections.
Yet these steps proved insufficient to hide her identity. A source told NBC that it “took agents a while to figure out the source. They did that by finding out where the messages were sent from—which cities, which Wi-Fi locations in hotels.
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This week we’ve all read how General Petraeus was forced out of his position because the FBI was able to read his emails. I’ll leave the moral question about affairs for you to determine on your own, however, from a technology perspective, he did many things wrong.
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FOIA seeks details of agency’s ‘authority to invade civilian Internet networks’
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Civil Rights
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Back in September, we wrote about how Senator Patrick Leahy had introduced a really good bill for ECPA reform. ECPA (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) is an incredibly outdated bill concerning (as it says) the privacy of electronic messages. It was written in a time (the mid-1980s) before everyone had email, let alone everyone used web-based, cloud-stored email. And thus, it has weird provisions, such as considering that messages stored on a server for more than 180 days are “abandonded” and thus subject to very little privacy protections. And that’s just one of many, many problems with ECPA, which treats all kinds of messages differently.
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At least two activists died in custody before or during China’s Communist Party congress and tens of thousands had their movements restricted, rights groups said Monday.
The action was part of the government’s “maintenance stability” campaign aimed at preventing any sign of unrest during the party gathering in Beijing, which ended last week, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) said.
The congress ushered in a once-a-decade leadership change, with President Hu Jintao stepping down from his top party post to make way for Xi Jinping, who is due to be named state president in March.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve pointed out that while we’re told that intellectual property is supposed to be about the incentive to create, the reality is that it tends to be a protectionist tool to attack the competition. If you want to see an amazing example of this and how some companies will use any and all possible IP claims, look no further than the ongoing legal battle between the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the International Securities Exchange. Now, you might think that financial markets wouldn’t need “intellectual property protection” in order to incentivize their creation and continued innovation. And you’d be right. But, if you wanted to use those tools to annoy the hell out of competitors, well, you’ve stepped up to the right window.
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Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.
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Copyrights
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Very soon the six strikes anti-piracy program will kick off in the United States but the RIAA isn’t just sitting back and presuming that it will be an anti-piracy cure-all. Since early November the recording industry group has massively upped the number of DMCA notices it issues to make content harder to find. From an average of between 200,000 and 240,000 URL requests sent every week to Google, the RIAA has just posted 463,000 and 666,000 in successive weeks.
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Back in October, we noted that in the latest triennial DMCA exemption review, the Copyright Office/Librarian of Congress refused to say it was legal for you to rip your own legally purchased DVDs so that you could watch them on a computer or tablet. That seems fairly ridiculous, especially given that similarly ripping your CDs is recognized as legal. Rep. Darrell Issa has apparently recognized how silly this and is planning a bill to fix the Copyright Office’s mistake.
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I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for DRM in my heart, mostly because it makes me laugh. If you think about it, it’s generally rather funny in its uselessness. Pirates don’t care about it as they simply route around any DRM. Customers can certainly be annoyed, but they always end up with the same tools the pirates use to break the DRM on their purchased products. There’s a question of legality in doing so, obviously, but generally nobody really seems to care all that much and software developers just end up in a DRM arms race against nobody, which is inherently funny. All the while, we get wonderful gems like Ubisoft’s vuvuzela DRM, which was hysterical. Now, don’t get me wrong, DRM sucks, but upon reading stories about its effects my range of emotions tends to be anywhere between annoyance and raucous laughter.
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Neelie Kroes has emerged as perhaps the most Net-savvy politician in the European Commission, with her repeated calls for a new approach to copyright in Europe that takes cognizance of the shift to a digital world. That’s one measure of how mainstream the idea has become. Another is the fact that even copyright hardliners like Michel Barnier, the Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market in Europe, are starting to frame the discussion in a similar way.
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The Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives has issued an extremely interesting (though rather clumsily written and clumsily titled) Report on “Three Myths About Copyright Law, and Where to Start to Fix it.”
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Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who has been one of the few leaders in Congress when it comes to pushing for real copyright reform and pushing back against the bad proposals of Hollywood, is apparently looking to use Reddit to crowdsource a new bill concerning internet freedom. Earlier this year, we noted that Lofgren had introduced two good bills — one on ECPA reform (pushing for more privacy for your communications) and one called the Global Internet Freedom Act to create a task force designed to ensure internet freedom. It will be interesting to see how well this works.
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Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is taking to the social news website Reddit on Monday to crowd source ideas for legislation that would provide new protections for websites accused of copyright theft.
Lofgren wants to craft a bill that would stop the government from shutting down a website accused of copyright violations until the owners are given notice and a chance to defend themselves.
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In this bold era of copyright trolling, calmly (ir)rational takedown bots, baseless legal threats and ridiculous statutory damages, it’s a true rarity to see a copyright holder deal with infringement, especially non-commercial infringement, with a reaction that’s actually in line with the “crime” committed.
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A few years ago, people always referred to the Beatles as the biggest holdouts in terms of releasing their music for sale as MP3s online (mainly iTunes). However, the Beatles finally came around in November of 2010. After that, people started putting together lists of who was left and AC/DC and Kid Rock seemed to top most of those lists.
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In 2009, I attended Midem for the first time. It’s an event that the music industry has put on for decades. Over the past few years, they’ve really embraced the idea that the music industry needs to adapt and modernize and have continuously brought in a stream of speakers and participants showing that there are ways for the industry to thrive. In 2009, they invited me to present a case study on Trent Reznor, which remains one of the most popular presentations I’ve ever given. Four years later I still get at least an email a week about it, and sometimes more.
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While there’s been plenty of attention paid over the weekend to the fact that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus of House Republicans, pulled its report on copyright reform after some entertainment industry lobbyists hit the phones/emails late Friday/early Saturday (and, no, it wasn’t directly to RSC, for the most part, but to “friendly” members asking them to express their “displeasure” with the report to the RSC leadership). But we shouldn’t let that distract from the simple fact that the report was brilliant — perhaps the most insightful and thoughtful piece of scholarship on copyright to come out of a government body in decades. You can still read the whole thing as uploaded to Archive.org.
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As you likely know by now, the Republican Study Committee published a briefing paper critical of copyright, but then later pulled it down claiming the memo had not received adequate review. Some have suggested that IP-industry pressure may have led to the reversal. I hope we will find out in due time whether the paper was indeed reviewed and approved (as I suspect it was), and why it was removed. That said, I think what this take-down likely shows is a generational gap between the old, captured, and pro-business parts of the Republican Party and its pro-market and pro-dynamism future.
I also hope that this dust-up sparks a debate within the “right” about our bloated copyright system, and so it’s propitious that in a couple of weeks the Mercatus Center will be publishing a new book I’ve edited making the case that libertarians and conservatives should be skeptical of our current copyright system. It’s called Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, and it is not a moral case for or against copyright; it is a pragmatic look at the excesses of the present copyright regime and of proposals to further expand it. The book features:
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Jared Leto is perhaps best known to the general public for his work as a film actor, most notably in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). However, in recent years he has devoted his attention to the world of music, as the lead singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars.
Artifact, directed by Leto himself, under the pseudonym Bartholomew Cubbins (of Dr. Seuss fame), revolves around major record label EMI’s decision to sue the band for $30 million in August 2008. The film was screened November 8 as part of the New York City documentary festival DOC NYC and previously, in September, at the Toronto film festival.
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11.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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Open source video and home theater PC software XBMC has hit another beta and this version ships with some cool features, stability enhancements and bug fixes. Also, this version, which is codenamed “Frodo” ships for some new platforms like Raspberry Pi and Android.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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There are some users who often wonder whether they should switch to Chromebook since all they need the computer for is the web. More and more people use the PC for nothing but browsing the Internet thus lessening the dependence on the core operating system. Though Google spotted a huge market there, it never really reached the popularity it expected of that endeavor. Thankfully, though, Ubuntu too spotted this hole and started integrating more and more web services into its desktop. In fact, the latest version of Ubuntu (Quantal Quetzal) also comes with tight integration with web services.
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Games
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I’m not a great fan of this genre but I’ve played some of them and they have great graphics, and you’ll not miss what you can find on a Windows Computer.
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In part due to Steam now being available on Linux, Egosoft wants to hire a Linux game developer to continue bringing their X3 games to the penguin platform.
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Desktop Environments
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The Enlightenment desktop is a different kind of desktop environment, which aims to be lightweight, efficient, configurable as well as attractive. The desktop has been in active development for over a decade, and was in alpha stages till now. The first stable release is expected to be on 21st of December this year.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I was digging through some old backups on Friday looking to see if I had any old versions of the Qt source code lying around after Eirik mentioned during his devdays talk that the release tar balls for lots of the early releases including Qt 1.0 had got lost… I didn’t find those, but I found some gems I didn’t know I had.
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GNOME Desktop
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Okay, this is a typical reaction for new comers, but Gnome will try to make things better starting by 3.8 release that will arrive next March. Three projects are currently under development towards to make Gnome more friendly to new users. Initial Setup, a Getting Started quick documentation and an improved Yelp (aka Gnome Help).
This is how Getting Started works inside Yelp. By the way I noticed that Getting Started documents don’t work in Fedora 18 (yelp 3.6.2) as intended. For example there isn’t pop-up for videos. However by installing Yelp with JHBuild everything works fine -even if there aren’t any changes between 3.6.2 and Git Versions. Anyway I didn’t dig at all into this.
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Well, that “two-week backlog” of email turned out to be a four-week backlog of work; and it didn’t help that I was gone for a week in late October, too. But I’m back, and resuming activity on this site.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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This wednesday, the Gentoo Hardened team held its monthly online meeting, discussing the things that have been done the last few weeks and the ideas that are being worked out for the next. As I did with the last few meetings, allow me to summarize it for all interested parties…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Main Compiz developer Sam Spilsbury has left Canonical. In a new blog post, he said that it is becoming difficult for him to allot reasonable time to both work and University studies at the same time.
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Ubuntu, which is more inclined to be a OS for desktops is gaining more popularity as a server OS. Lately, statistics done by W3Techs show that Ubuntu is installed on 7% of servers world wide. Thats a huge number given the popularity of the web and more and more websites and servers coming out everyday.
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In a statement issued here Monday, ICFOSS said the study would bring out the extent to which free and open source software is used in government projects, and assess the economics of its use.
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Business
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A few months ago, I joined Red Hat as a marketing apprentice (intern) in Paris, France—where I am also continuing my studies at France Business School—and it became clear to me that my vision of what open source is and what it means to be part of the community has changed. This evolution has significantly altered the way I am participating in projects and communiticating with peers.
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BSD
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While FreeBSD 9.1 is running behind schedule, one of the exciting additions to this forthcoming BSD operating system is finally debuting Intel kernel mode-setting on FreeBSD support.
The most exciting feature in this release is undoubtedly the availability of Kernel Modesetting and new drivers for intel chipsets. The drivers are not perfectly up-to-date (xf86-video-intel is at 2.17 and mesa is at 7.11) but it is a significant improvement over what was previously available (2.7 and 7.6, respectively).
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The FreeBSD project has announced that an intrusion was detected on two of the machines within its project cluster on November 11.
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Licensing
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VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf has completed relicensing most of the popular open source VLC media player from GPLv2 to LGPL. In a blog post, Kempf explains the reasoning for the relicensing: the project is trying to attract more developers, especially for app store versions of the application. VLC was removed from the iOS App Store back in January 2011 because it was licensed under the GPL. By the end of the year, the developers had already relicensed libVLC, the core library of the media player.
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Openness/Sharing
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In other words, should they release their recipes under a license like Creative Commons or the GPL that would allow people to use, modify, and enhance the recipes?
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Singularity University, on the grounds of the NASA Research Center at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley, abounds in optimism, and, as Singularity’s vice president of innovation and research, I have understandably caught the bug. I have written about why I believe this will be the most innovative decade in human history, how we are headed for an era of abundant and affordable health care, and how robotics, artificial intelligence and 3D printing will lead to an era of local manufacturing in which the creative class flourishes.
But deep down I also worry about the dark side of advancing technology; specifically, how we could create doomsday viruses, be in ethical gray zones, and impact employment with new technologies. So my exchanges with Singularity University founders Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis often turn into lengthy debates. While we agree on the positives, we never quite reach an agreement on the risks and downsides. I usually run out of arguments, and their optimism always wins me over — until it wears off.
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Open Hardware
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The inventor of the Chumby, Dr Andrew “bunnie” Huang, has been named as the first of four keynote speakers at the Australian national Linux conference next year.
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The Denver Post reports that a woman who faked mental illness to get out of jury duty, and then bragged about it on a talk-radio show, has pleaded guilty to perjury and “attempting to influence a public servant.” The “public servant” in question was the judge who had presided over jury selection, and who excused the woman after she claimed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress. But this potential juror went the extra mile: she “sold her act” by dressing crazy, with “heavy makeup smeared on her face while her hair hung askew in curlers, with shoes and reindeer socks mismatched.” She also spoke “disjointedly.”
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A headline from the Denver Post this week read: “Colorado Drug Force Disbanding.” Another from the Seattle Times announced, “220 Marijuana Cases Dismissed In King, Pierce Counties.”
Just 15 or 20 years ago, headlines like these were unimaginable. But marijuana legalization didn’t just win in Washington and Coloardo, it won big.
In Colorado, it outpolled President Barack Obama. In Washington, Obama beat pot by less than half a percentage point. Medical marijuana also won in Massachusetts, and nearly won in Arkansas. (Legalization of pot lost in Oregon, but drug law reformers contend that was due to a poorly written ballot initiative that would basically have made the state a vendor.)
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The lesson for decoding media messages on Israel/Palestine: Take note of when reporters tell you that the latest violence “started.” They’re picking a starting point for a reason.
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A homeless man spent the night in jail Sunday after police arrested him for charging his cellphone in a public picnic shelter at Gillespie Park.
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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There is no debate on climate change in Germany. The temperature for the past 10 months has been three degrees above average and we’re again on course for the warmest year on record. There’s no dispute among Germans as to whether this change is man-made, or that we contribute to it and need to stop accelerating the process.
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Finance
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rior to the 2008 when Wall Street was laying on big bets on the housing market, mortgage servicing was the equivalent of blackjack; the odds for a player who knew the rules were very good and having a company that collected monthly mortgage payments from homeowners provided a reliable revenue stream. Even better were the companies that operated in the sub-prime space — “default servicers” — because if you couldn’t shake the shekels out of the homeowners pocket, you could always seize the property in foreclosure and make back your nut and then some. In the colorful vernacular of the industry these mortgage loans are referred to as “S&D” (scratch and dent).
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On the heels of a presidential election in which hundreds of preachers publicly promised to flout Internal Revenue Service rules by endorsing candidates from the pulpit, the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation filed suit against the IRS for failing to enforce electioneering restrictions against churches and religious organizations.
Filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, the lawsuit charges that Douglas Shulman, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, “has violated, continues to violate and will continue to violate in the future, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States by failing to enforce the electioneering restrictions of 501(c)(3) of the Tax Code against churches and religious organizations.”
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Monday that if the lame-duck Congress can’t agree on a tax deal by the end of the year, briefly going over the “fiscal cliff” is preferable to accepting a bad deal.
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Censorship
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WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has described re-elected President Barack Obama as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and says he expects the US government to keep attacking the anti-secrecy website.
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ON NOVEMBER 11th Russian internet-users began to notice that Lurkmore, a sometimes funny, often vulgar website with a cult following, was no longer accessible. Lurkmore (pictured) is a user-generated encyclopedia, a Russian-language wiki Wikipedia focusing on obscure internet jokes and memes, or what its co-founder, Dmitry Homak, calls “the kind of stuff said by the characters on SouthPark”. Although no one had officially told Mr Homak anything, it soon became clear that the site had fallen into the Russian government’s “Single Register” of web content to be banned under a law passed by the Duma in June.
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Privacy
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It didn’t matter. His computer had already told all. “They knew everything about me,” he says. “The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account.” At one point during the interrogation, Karim was presented with a stack of more than 1,000 pages of printouts, data from his Skype chats and files his torturers had downloaded remotely using a malicious computer program to penetrate his hard drive. “My computer was arrested before me,” he says.
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Civil Rights
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The court says that the fact this type of information “exists in cyberspace . . . is a logistical and, perhaps, financial problem, but not a circumstance that removes the information from accessibility by a party opponent in litigation.” Based on the evidence cited by the employer, the court says it’s satisfied that there’s no fishing expedition. Accordingly, it orders “each class member’s social media content . . . produced.” The court proposes to use a special master, and orders the parties to collaborate and work out the specific instructions to the special master. The special master will produce information which the court will then review for relevance, and then allow the EEOC (or plaintiffs) to designate privileged material. The remaining items will be turned over to the employer.
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The right to peacefully assemble, enshrined both in the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law, is an intrinsic element of the democratic fabric of the United States. Yet according to a report released Friday by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an international organization of which the U.S. is a member, America is failing to uphold this fundamental right. The report is the first comprehensive OSCE report on violation of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly that covers the U.S.
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Copyrights
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Two decades ago, old VCRs were in disproportionately high demand. Newer ones were unable to copy movies as they were distorted by a special signal. Hollywood is fighting for this war on equipment owners to carry over to general-purpose computers. Will they succeed?
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11.18.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds announced last evening, November 16, that the sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel is now available for download and testing.
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Automatic NUMA Balancing has been quick to advance as it prepares for eventually merging into the mainline Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Weeks after NVIDIA released a new Linux driver to massively improve its OpenGL performance in large part to make the Source Engine and Valve’s games run better on Linux, AMD is out with a similar Catalyst update. The latest Catalyst Linux beta is said to bring “significant performance improvements” for Left 4 Dead 2.
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Intel is planning to soon begin merging the OpenGL ES 3.0 support patches into mainline Mesa.
Since the unveiling of the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification in early August, Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have had a “GLES3″ branch of Mesa where they have been working to enable this next version of OpenGL targeted towards mobile and embedded devices.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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While there exists bypasses so individuals can launch the Steam Linux client without their account being one of the ~1,000 beta testers, you need to be part of the selected group to access the Source Engine games that have been ported over to Linux. The beta began last week but Valve Software’s Linux developers say they have been regularly adding more people to participate. “We are adding more participants on a regular basis.”
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Linux Game Publishing recently lost the license they had for selling the X-series of games. Now, we know why. The developer Egosoft is taking care of the porting themselves and aims to sell X3 with all the expansions (some of which were not previously released on Linux) on Steam.
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With Valve now officially working on Steam for Linux many game developers have decided that it is time to port their games to Linux. One of those is the German developer Egosoft. According to recent forum post in the Egosoft forums they have decided to hire C and C++ programmers with OpenGL experience and SDL skills. They have mentioned that they would want to port their X series games to Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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At last, it seems, a new source of energy might liberate us from this conflict – fossil fuels trapped within dense rock for millennia that we are now able to free, thanks to advances in engineering unthinkable a decade ago, and that are available in countries from Britain to Australia. But those same fossil fuels, much higher in carbon than their conventional counterparts, are likely to unleash runaway climate change that could put paid to any hopes of a low-cost – and low-risk – energy future.
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Cameron’s failure to discipline either Hayes or Heaton-Harris is not just about politics – it’s about avoiding climate catastrophe
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It was just a few days ago that Enlightenment E17 Alpha 2 was released but there’s already a third alpha of this window manager expected to finally debut next month after more than one decade of development.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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Debian Family
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Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email. After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of the people behind the German “IT-Zukunft Schule” project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm welcome to Angela Fuß. 
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Depending on your understanding of the time-space continuum, several days or several minutes ago, I reviewed Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal on my SSD-ed laptop. For the lack of a better word, the distro sucked. There were too many issues, and it’s hardly the worthy successor to Pangolin. The only question remaining is, can it redeem itself on some proper high-end hardware, not that a dual-core, 2GB, Intel graphics, SSD laptop is a weakling either.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Here’s how it works: If you are an Indian Resident who is 13 years or above, you can help Samsung break the world record for the most artists contributing to a single art piece. The current world record holder is Great Britain with 201,958 contributions. The initiative is being overseen by the Guinness Book of World Records.
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Kobo Arc, the 7″ Android tablet has hit the shelves across Canada and the United Kingdom and will be heading to France on Monday.
It features Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and a 1.5GHz OMAP 4470 dual-core processor, with a choice of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions. You’ll get 10 hours on a single charge, has a 1.3 MegaPixel front-facing camera, built-in microphone, and 802.11 WiFi.
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Events
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BSD
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On Sunday 11th of November, an intrusion was detected on two machines within the FreeBSD.org cluster. The affected machines were taken offline for analysis. Additionally, a large portion of the remaining infrastructure machines were also taken offline as a precaution.
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At the beginning of this month there was the release of DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 that claimed a battle for speed against Linux with major improvements for the multi-threaded application performance against Linux. PostgreSQL was the only benchmark cited by the DragonFly camp with the new performance results, so a couple Phoronix tests were carried out.
Being interested in seeing what changes DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 has for performance against the earlier DragonFlyBSD 3.0 release and Linux distributions, I ran a couple quick and informal benchmarks. For the available hardware, an Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition CPU was used, which has six physical cores plus Hyper Threading. Intel HT plus the individual cores can be easily toggled from the BIOS of the motherboard.
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The team behind the FreeBSD operating system reported that an intrusion into two of its servers was detected on 11 November. The security team says that the two affected servers were taken offline immediately and that investigations show that the first unauthorised access probably took place on 19 September. Apparently, the intruders didn’t exploit any security holes in FreeBSD; instead, they stole the SSH key of a developer with regular access privileges.
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Project Releases
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Programming
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Aside from why LLVM/Clang was ported to one of the fastest super computer’s in the world and using Clang to implement Microsoft’s C++ AMP, another interesting session at this month’s LLVM Developers’ Conference in San Jose was about using Clang to analyze code comments.
By having Clang parse documentation comments, Clang could be enhanced to do additional semantic checking, ensure the code comments remain relevant to the actual code, and code completion APIs could take advantage of the documentation within the code. Ultimately, a Doxygen-like tool could be created based upon Clang for generating proper documentation out of the code itself and the associated comments. Further out, automatic comment re-factoring could be done to update names referenced within the inline code comments so that the resulting documentation is always up-to-date.
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Earlier this week when writing about the state of the Tiny C Compiler, I learned more about QCC. QCC is a new initiative to pair a forked version of the Tiny C Compiler (TCC) with QEMU’s code generator.
The QCC compiler is being worked on by Rob Landley, a developer with much compiler development experience that previously worked on early 64-bit TCC support. The QEMU CPU emulator has a code generator named TCG, which is short for Tiny Code Generator. The TCG generator translates code fragments from any target code supported by QEMU into a code representation that can be then executed on the host.
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Oops: They’re doing it again: Another Supreme Court Justice flouts ethical standards
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Science
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After Hurricane Sandy, survivors needed, in addition to safety and power, the ability to communicate. Yet in parts of New York City, mobile communications services were knocked out for days.
The problem? The companies that provide them had successfully resisted Federal Communications Commission calls to make emergency preparations, leaving New Yorkers to rely on the carriers’ voluntary efforts.
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Security
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OpenSSL maintainer and Google cryptographer Ben Laurie and I collaborated on an article for Nature magazine on technical systems for finding untrustworthy Certificate Authorities. We focused on Certificate Transparency, the solution that will shortly be integrated into Chrome, and also discuss Sovereign Keys, a related proposal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both make clever use of cryptographic hashes, arranged in Merkle trees, to produce “untrusted, provable logs.”
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When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week began taking military action in the Gaza strip against Hamas (as the IDF announced on Twitter), Anonymous declared its own war as part of #OpIsrael. Among the casualties are thousands of email addresses and passwords, hundreds of Israeli Web sites, government-owned as well as privately owned pages, as well as databases belonging to Bank Jerusalem and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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South Yorkshire police are to be investigated for possible assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office over the infamous “battle of Orgreave” during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
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Cablegate
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Thanks to WikiLeaks, US citizens are better informed about wars prosecuted in their name. We owe Manning honour, not jail time
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Today we talk of geopolitics and the freedom of information. But what is happening today technically (ie politically) began on 12 December 2008, though some say September of that year, but it took four years for the shock waves to reach Europe and America.
The issue relates to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the Republic of Ecuador.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Today, BP agreed to a $4.5 billion settlement to resolve felony and misdemeanor charges related to the Gulf oil spill, but taxpayers may end up indirectly covering up to 35 percent of that amount if the company is allowed to take the settlement as a tax write-off.
“The judge shouldn’t approve this settlement if BP could pass off much of this settlement cost onto taxpayers,” said Phineas Baxandall, the Senior Tax and Budget Policy Analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG). “Especially in the context of pressing budget shortfalls, every dollar BP writes off means an additional dollar Americans will pay in the form of higher taxes, budget cuts, or more national debt.”
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Fish from the waters around the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan could be too radioactive to eat for a decade to come, as samples show that radioactivity levels remain elevated and show little sign of coming down, a marine scientist has warned.
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An explosion Friday on a rig in the Gulf owned by Houston-based Black Elk Energy has reportedly injured several workers, with four missing, two possibly killed. This latest incident – just a day after the US department of justice’s historic settlement with BP over the Deepwater Horizon disaster – highlights the risks of offshore oil-drilling, and the need for tougher regulations on one of America’s most hazardous industries.
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Finance
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As wages remain stagnant since 2002, the past ten years have been effectively been a “lost decade for workers,” says writer Kevin G. Hall.
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Slovenia, the first post-communist nation to introduce the euro in 2007, is struggling to avoid the need for a bailout from international lenders as political gridlock grips the nation of 2 million people. The government of Prime Minister Janez Jansa is pushing ahead with an overhaul of the economy with some measures threatened by a possible referendum.
Labor unions and opposition leaders have filed a motion for a people’s vote on government plans to recapitalize state-owned lenders like Nova Ljubljanska Banka d.d. and the creation of a wealth fund.
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In today’s ever-perplexing world of personal finance, there’s no question consumers could benefit from a little clarity.
Just don’t expect to find any in the pages of Occupy Wall Street’s new manifesto on consumer debt.
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Censorship
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Yesterday we had the story of how an 18-month-old Yelp review for Casey Movers in Massachusetts spurred the company to send a legal threat to the author, Kristen Buckley, leading her husband, Phil Buckley to do some research and uncover questionable “positive” reviews of the company, and to call the company out for its legal threat. That story has been getting a lot of attention from a variety of sources, and some have noticed that the original review is gone. Yes, gone. If you go there, you can now see Kristen’s followup comment about the legal threat, and Casey Movers’ response to the original review — but not the original review itself.
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A Christian who was demoted for posting his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook has won a legal case against his employer.
Adrian Smith lost his managerial position, had his salary cut by 40%, and was given a final written warning by Trafford Housing Trust (THT) after posting in February last year that gay weddings in churches were “an equality too far”.
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According to reports this Saturday in the Daily Mail and Telegraph, David Cameron will be asking ISPs to ask customers if they have children, and if so, help them install filtering technology.
While the Daily Mail cite this as a “victory” for their campaign to switch porn off in every household, and allow people to “opt in to porn”, in fact it would be a humiliating climb down.
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The US quite regularly rebukes Russia for putting a leash on the freedom of speech. This May, the US State Department focused on the Russian media in its annual human rights report.
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The situation raises an interesting debate about the right to free speech and protecting people from unjustified attacks.
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Privacy
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The UK government has repeated its threat to legislate if businesses do not voluntarily release data gathered on customers who ask to see it.
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Forget texting while driving. German police say they nabbed a driver who had wired his Ford station wagon with an entire mobile office.
Saarland state police said Friday the 35-year-old man was pulled over for doing 130 kph (80 mph) in a 100 kph zone while passing a truck Monday.
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Civil Rights
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Somewhere out there, Mullah Omar must be shaking his head.
In a Dilbert-esque faux pax, a Taliban spokesperson sent out a routine email last week with one notable difference.He publicly CC’d the names of everyone on his mailing list.
The names were disclosed in an email by Qari Yousuf Ahmedi, an official Taliban spokesperson, on Saturday. The email was a press release he received from the account of Zabihullah Mujahid, another Taliban spokesperson. Ahmedi then forwarded Mujahid’s email to the full Taliban mailing list, but rather than using the BCC function, or blind carbon copy which keeps email addresses private, Ahmedi made the addresses public.
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US generals Petraeus and Allen had to bow to what feels close to mob rule. Is this how we do accountability now?
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Petraeus is smart: He graduated in the top 5% of his class at West Point and went on to earn a Ph.D.
Petraeus has self-control: His self-discipline was “legendary,” according to Time Magazine.
And Petraeus knows what he’s doing: During his time as a four-star general and as director of the CIA, he acquired an intimate knowledge of how easily email can be hacked.
And that’s why it’s so incredible that even Petraeus did the dumbest thing imaginable when it came to his email: He trusted it with his secrets.
Allegedly.
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In the past, a spymaster might have placed a flower pot with a red flag on his balcony or drawn a mark on page 20 of his mistress’s newspaper. Instead, Mr. Petraeus used Gmail. And he got caught.
Granted, most people don’t have the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through their personal e-mails, but privacy experts say people grossly underestimate how transparent their digital communications have become.
[...]
Google reported that United States law enforcement agencies requested data for 16,281 accounts from January to June of this year, and it complied in 90 percent of cases.
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One teenager made offensive comments about a murdered child on Twitter. Another young man wrote on Facebook that British soldiers should “go to hell.” A third posted a picture of a burning paper poppy, symbol of remembrance of war dead.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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ISPreview UK: “Ofcom used this report to keep a close eye (sic) on the issue of Net Neutrality and Traffic Management, although they found that “there are currently no substantive concerns in relation to the traffic management practices used by fixed ISPs“. The regulator noted some “concern” with how some mobile operators block Skype (VoIP) but not enough to take any action against.” The traffic management section starts on p49 and includes this choice example of how ISPs are largely ignoring Ofcom’s evidence-gathering:
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Leaked document from upcoming treaty negotiations reveals Russia wants transfer of authority over Net to national governments. The U.N.’s increasingly shrill denials are ringing ever more hollow.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Fall armyworms in southern Florida survived a pesticide engineered into corn by Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) and DuPont Co., the second insect to show signs of resistance to genetically modified crops in the U.S., according to a study.
Fall armyworms ate the leaves of corn engineered to produce an insecticidal protein and lived, according to 2012 field trial data presented Nov. 13 at a conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. The protein is marketed by Dow and DuPont as Herculex.
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The study by the biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini (University of Caen), conducted over two years on rats fed diets containing genetically modified maize (NK603 variety), with and without the Roundup herbicide, as well as with Roundup alone, the results of which were published on September 19 in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, has reignited the debate about the possible risks associated with the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and the reliability of the 90-day toxicology studies previously used to justify their approval.
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Copyrights
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Last month, we wrote about how the EFF, representing Kyle Goodwin, had asked the US district court handling the Megaupload case to unseal the warrants for the seizures of Megauploads domains and servers. The court has now ordered the documents unsealed. To be honest, there isn’t too much surprising in them. There are some huge leaps to assume that hosting a cloud service somehow makes you criminally liable for what people do on that service. In fact, part of it ridiculously argues that the “proof” of criminality is the fact that the DOJ had alerted Megaupload to some infringing files, and those files had not been taken down. However, as Megaupload’s lawyer points out, the “alert” was in the form of asking for cooperation, which Megaupload granted, and not to “interfere” in the investigation. Taking down the videos would be interfering.
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The documents had been under seal since January, when the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia charged the company and managers, including founder Kim DotCom, with criminal copyright violations, money laundering, and wire fraud.
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Right after the Presidential election last week, Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala penned an opinion piece suggesting that one way the Republicans could “reset”, and actually attract the youth vote, would be to become the party of copyright reform. We had actually wondered if that was going to happen back during the SOPA fight, when it was the Republicans who bailed on the bill, while most of those who kept supporting it were Democrats. Since then, however, there hadn’t been much movement. Until now. Late on Friday, the Republican Study Committee, which is the caucus for the House Republicans, released an amazing document debunking various myths about copyright law and suggesting key reforms.
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So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that post to see the details. The report had been fully vetted and reviewed by the RSC before it was released. However, as soon as it was published, the MPAA and RIAA apparently went ballistic and hit the phones hard, demanding that the RSC take down the report.
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11.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Unquestionably Linux is still struggling to claim a respectable share in desktop market. The trend does not seem to vary drastically in enterprises too. However in contrast to Linux share in desktop operating system, Linux claims a considerably larger market share when it comes to operating system used by enterprises. The post presents some latest stats depicting where does a Linux stand as an operating system for business. The post also details some enterprises that rely on Linux for their everyday computation.
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Kernel Space
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Following last month’s Btrfs file-system tuning benchmarks, in this article are a similar set of tests when stressing the EXT4 file-system with its various performance-related mount options. Here are a number of EXT4 benchmarks from Ubuntu 12.10 with different mount option configurations.
Aside from testing the EXT4 file-system at its defaults on the Linux 3.5 kernel with Ubuntu 12.10, the common Linux file-system was tested with nobarrier, data=journal, data=writeback, nodelalloc, and discard. Here’s the documentation on each mount option per the EXT4 documentation:
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Two newer filesystems of importance to Linux are exFAT and Btrfs. exFAT is the controversial Microsoft filesystem for Flash memory devices, and Btrfs is for “big data”. Once upon a time there was much sound and fury around these, but lately it’s been quiet, so let’s see what’s been happening.
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The Linux kernel is what everything else runs on top of, so it’s the key to everything that a Linux device can do.
It’s in your Android phone. It’s in the computers that run the servers at Google, Amazon and all the other web services that we take for granted.
It powers the database that US immigration uses to decide if you are who you say you are, it’s deep under the Alps searching for new particles at CERN, and it’s even on unmanned drones searching for drugs traffickers in the Caribbean.
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Graphics Stack
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A few minutes ago, November 16, Nvidia released version 310.19 of its graphics driver for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD operating systems.
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Applications
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The first beta release of XBMC 12.0 “Frodo” is now available. This beta to the popular home theater PC (HTPC) software packs exciting changes for end-users interested in the best open-source multimedia playback experience.
With more than one half-year since the release of XBMC 11, XBMC 12 is nearly ready to take flight. This release, which was developed under the codename “Frodo”, has the prominent new features of:
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Nate Thomas from the XBMC development team proudly informed us, on November 15, that the first Beta release of the upcoming XBMC 12.0 open source media center project is available for download and testing.
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Proprietary
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Ubuntu is without a doubt one of the most popular flavors of Linux, as the operating system is fully capable of running smoothly even on outdated or anemic hardware.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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With Valve’s Source Engine now on Linux, Unigine Corp finally has greater competition for the spot of the most demanding and visually impressive game engine native to Linux. At this point it really comes down to a fight between the Source Engine and Unigine Engine with id Tech 5 and Unreal Engine 3 not being natively available.
As of this week, there’s also Unity 4.0 for Linux and other game engines coming to Linux, but for the top-spot it’s largely a battle between Unigine and Source. Valve at the same time is also working on a new game engine to succeed Source. While the Unigine Engine isn’t as widely adopted as the Source Engine nor is the company as well-staffed with as many resources as Valve Software, the Russian-based company is continuing to move forward. A new round of improvements to the Unigine Engine were shared this morning.
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“Too slow. Restart needed all the time. Poor graphics. Slow to select pull-downs. Lost instrument panel. Not on list of “view” pull-down. Nothing was right. Worst sim ever!” This review was rated the “most helpful” for FlightGear, which is, we’re assured, a “free and highly sophisticated flight simulator”.
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Maybe there is such a thing as happy endings in real life? …nah. Anyway, on an unrelated note Blizzard is acknowledging that sometimes mistakes are made and that if you’re a Linux user who had your account banned and you feel you were on the receiving end of a false-positive from the automated security service Warden, they’re encouraging you to contact them for a re-review of your account.
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Desktop Environments
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Interfaces for traditional computers and mobile devices have become increasingly inventive in the last few years. So far, however, none have solved a basic design challenge: designing an efficient menu.
The challenge rarely exists within applications. An application usually has half a dozen or more top level menus, each with less than a dozen items, so a drop-down system is usually good enough.
But on the desktop environment, the norm has always been to have a single menu that lists all applications, and often shut-down commands, a list of favorites, and a few other items.
To function well, each variation needs to make items quick to find and to distract minimally from whatever else the user is doing. Unfortunately, while a solution may do one of these things, none of the available alternatives manages to do both at the same time.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (this year on the 2nd & 3rd of February). It’s one of the few community-centered conferences in Europe, and the largest volunteer-run Free Software event in Europe as well. Proposals are now invited for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics. KDE will be in the Cross Desktop Developer Room (devroom), along with Enlightenment, Gnome, Razor, Unity and XFCE. This is a unique opportunity to share KDE with a wide audience of developers.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME logo The second update to the 3.6.x series of GNOME has been released by the project’s developers to further improve the stability of the popular open source Linux and Unix desktop environment. As expected at this stage, the maintenance update has only minor changes including bug fixes and module and translation updates.
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Fancy giving Linux a whirl? Here are all the factors that you should look for when choosing from the wide range of available Linux distributions.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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The udev code-base has been forked by Gentoo Linux developers after they — and other parties — have been unhappy with the future direction of udev as set by systemd developers.
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Debian Family
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With several other distributions effectively based on the Debian system, it’s fair to say that it’s an important distro. In fact, as Linux distributions go, it’s positively stately; a grandaddy among open source upstarts.
As you might expect from such an elderly, respected relative, it’s awash with hardware support – as well as the common Intel x86 processors, it will work with a number of other architectures, including PowerPC. Plus, there’s a huge 29,000 software packages included on the full DVD-based ISO, a download that runs to 4.4GB. In many respects, Debian’s tagline – “the universal OS” – is well earned.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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On November 15, Francesco Muriana has the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu Builder 2.3.1 open source application.
Ubuntu Builder 2.3.1 is here to fix two annoying bugs in Ubuntu 12.10′s installer form, Ubiquity, that didn’t allow users to customize the slideshow.
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Shuttleworth also pointed to what he called the “DevOps magic” that can arise when the community comes together. “You can have one group using Chef, and another group using Puppet, and with JuJu, they can easily connect and use each other’s knowledge, leveraging the unique skills that they both bring to table,” he explained. “It’s a complete buffet of all the goodness that open source offers.”
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung Galaxy Nexus has received Linux-on-Android Project support. Linux-on-Android lets users to install several Linux distros on their supported device, according to a post on the XDA Developers’ forum.
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Great news! 5 games have been added to the Humble Bundle for Android #4!
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Why Would You Root Stock Android?Google’s flagship phone, the Nexus 4, has already been rooted according to a post over at XDA Developers. But we’re genuinely curious: why would anybody choose to root a phone that comes loaded with stock Android?
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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3Scale3Scale, a leading Plug and Play SaaS API Management platform and services provider, has just announced the launch of a new Open Source API Proxy that provides Enterprises API traffic management on-premises and in the cloud.
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The health informatics software i2b2 — Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside — was started in 2006, and has become something of a building block for several health information networks and research projects in genomics, pharmaceuticals and population health.
Developed at the Partners HealthCare System as a federally-funded biomedical computing center, the open source software is letting biomedical researchers combine genomic and molecular research with data and observations from electronic health records, and its code set is also being used to link with claims databases and health information exchanges.
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Leave it to him to prove me wrong, and I can tell you how he’ll respond: He’ll just chalk it up to my being a liberal. Honest. Then we’ll laugh about that — the tree-hugging Californian and the rock-ribbed conservative Texan — and we’ll move on to the next FOSS issue we’ll be addressing together.
Thanks for getting the better of your disease, Ken. I know I speak for a multitude of folks who would echo that sentiment, and I know an army of folks who are glad you’re on our side in fighting proprietary software.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has just released its annual report, with a PDF available at the bottom of this page, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is that Mozilla’s search revenue climbed a very healthy 31 percent for the year. Many people don’t realize that Mozilla gets most of its revenues from Google, as we’ve reported before, but even more may not realize that Mozilla also has deals with Microsoft, Yahoo and other search players. Mozilla’s royalties, mostly from search deals, came to $161.9 million for 2011, up from the previous year’s $123.2 million.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Sophie Gautier, one of the founders of the Document Foundation and currently a member of our membership committee has recently published a series of articles on how to become a contributor to the LibreOffice projects. Her blog posts do not cover the development side of the story, but they discuss an often less understood and perhaps less documented aspect of our community and contribution process. As I find myself sending her articles by email several times a week, I thought it would be just easier to list them and link them here for more convenience.
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Education
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Around 1 month ago Jason posted an article related to Educational software that run on Linux (or even Linux distributions done with that goal), today he return on that topic with another roundup of software useful for schools.
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Openness/Sharing
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A bike share program that was supposed to be launched last summer in New York City has come to a halt due to software related issues. I can’t help but think that if the software was open source, these problems would have been easily resolved, elimating worrisome delays.
This past August, Mayor Bloomburg said “The software doesn’t work,” responding to questions about why the bike-share program is on hold. Now, according to a post in the New York Times, flooding and damage from Hurricane Sandy has caused further setbacks.
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Open Data
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The OpenStreetMap community has announced that it will host its second global “mapathon” during the weekend of 23–25 November; this time, the event is code-named “Operation Cowboy” and will focus on the US. Concentrating on “armchair mapping”, aerial images will be surveyed at local meetings, as well as from home. Based on these surveys, the project will then complement its map material for the US. The campaign has its own official Twitter account and hash tag: #OPC2012.
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Open Hardware
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All you need is an Arduino, a SimpleVR voice recognition shield, and something to control the voltage. Drop Pieters’ code on both of the microcontrollers, and you’ll have a cool, retro-future voice controlled lighting system. Check out the YouTube video above for a full guide, and grab the Arduino code and the SimpleVR code to get started.
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Programming
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The release of a first alpha of PHP 5.5 marks the official beginning of the 5.5.0 release cycle for the scripting language’s next major version. PHP 5.5 also marks the end of support for Windows XP and Windows 2003.
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Most often whenever writing about LLVM and its Clang C/C++ compiler front-end on Phoronix, within the forums is a flurry of comments from those in support of and against this modular compiler infrastructure. Some are against LLVM/Clang simply because its BSD-licensed and sponsored by Apple rather than the GPLv3-licensed GCC backed by the FSF. Others, meanwhile, see LLVM as presenting unique advantages and benefits. What reasons would a leading US national laboratory have for deploying LLVM/Clang to their leading super-computer? Here’s an explanation from them.
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Security
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A hacker demonstrates that code can be hidden inside a new computer to put it forever under remote control, even after upgrades to the hard drive or operating system.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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An Iowa farmer headed to federal prison at the end of the month after protesting at a Missouri Air Force base warned William Woods University students yesterday that the military’s use of predator drones will bring combat into the United States.
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OSI Systems Inc. (OSIS)’s Rapiscan unit, one of two suppliers of body-scanning machines in U.S. airports, may have falsified tests of software intended to stop the machines from recording graphic images of travelers, a U.S. lawmaker said.
The company “may have attempted to defraud the government by knowingly manipulating an operational test,” Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Transportation Security Subcommittee, said in a letter to Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole Nov. 13. Rogers said his committee received a tip about the faked tests.
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Stanhope’s coarse, unapologetic and shockingly candid brand of comedy has won him rabid fans, as well as a few foes. Ricky Gervais said Stanhope “might be the most important standup working today.” Jón Gnarr, the comedian-mayor of Reykjavik, recently welcomed Stanhope to Iceland so he could perform in the country’s only maximum-security prison. (For this, Stanhope invented the “Stanhope Defense,” the legal argument that you committed a crime just to see the show.)
At the same time, Stanhope’s cracks about the attractiveness of Irish women and the redundancy of the royal family have incensed an impressively large fraction of the British Isles.
Whether you love or hate him, there’s more to Stanhope than just his drunken, in-your-face comedy routines. That’s clear from his critically lauded portrayal of a suicidal comic in the hit show Louie, not to mention his media-savvy web ventures, including Doug Stanhope’s Celebrity Death Pool. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s release of his new live CD/DVD, Before Turning the Gun on Himself, Wired caught up with Stanhope and tried to temper his raging comedy fury with cold, hard science. The results were far less messy than expected.
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Should Mexico have the ability to send drones over U.S. soil to follow the gunrunners and kill them?
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Britain announced a doubling of its drone fleet in Afghanistan while France said it is sending drones to Mali.
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Other members of the consortium include the Boeing Company, Galois and the University of Minnesota.
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Finance
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The rot comes from predators posing as conservatives and mouthing the rhetoric of “free markets.” They are not actually interested in free markets. Their goal is to use the government to build monopolies, to control resources, to block regulation, to crush unions, to divert as much as possible from taxpayers into private pockets. They have a reckless attitude toward war-making and they put the financial system in peril by failing to enforce standards of ethics and transparency. As a result, they imperil the country’s credit in the world. True conservatives recognize this, which is why they defected from Bush and McCain long ago.
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Censorship
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Principals in Kentucky may soon have to worry about reading students their rights in addition to ensuring that the students know how to read and write.
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This exchange prompted Brian Fung at The Atlantic to wonder if the war of words between Israel and Hamas violated Twitter’s of terms of service, which prohibits “direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Fung eventually concluded that the exchange did not constitute a violation of Twitter’s TOS, but Matthew Ingram took the opportunity to point out the extraordinary amount of power social media companies have in scenarios such as this one. YouTube has refused to take down the assassination video, even though it appears to violate the site’s community guidelines, which state “if your video shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don’t post it.” Wired goes on to quote an anonymous YouTube employee saying that the guidelines are just that—guidelines, and not hard-and-fast rules. YouTube’s decision to leave the assassination video up comes just weeks after the company decided to break from its long-standing policies and take down an anti-Muslim video “The Innocence of Muslims” in Egypt and Libya, even though they explicitly admitted that the video did not violate any aspect of their terms of service and they had not received a court order requiring them to do so.
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Back in July, we covered Verizon’s argument that network neutrality regulations violated the firm’s First Amendment rights. In Verizon’s view, slowing or blocking packets on a broadband network is little different from a newspaper editor choosing which articles to publish, and should enjoy the same constitutional protection.
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Privacy
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E-mail — even anonymous e-mail — is not as secure as you think: E-mails don’t just carry a subject line and whatever you type into them. These digital missives also tote along with them packets of information called “metadata” or “headers,” which may contain information about where the message was sent from. That can help investigators corroborate who sent an e-mail, even if it comes from an anonymous account.
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Civil Rights
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That day, German Nazis wanted to organize demonstration against Polish immigrants. The counter demonstration is supported both by workers, leftists and religious groups. Even the mayor of the town gave “support” to the demonstration. But the true about this “support” is a bit different.
Near the German-Polish border there was an organized group which was going to join. Posters were put in the streets of the town of Kostrzyn. People also could join contacting the group via internet.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how far the US has fallen behind other countries when it comes to high speed broadband. And many are taking it for granted that high speed broadband is important to economic growth and viability. Yet Tim Worstall, over at Forbes, argues that “High Speed Broadband Doesn’t Matter A Darn” because a UK study showed that people don’t use super high speeds. He quotes a report (pdf) from Booz & Co.
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Ever since ICANN announced plans to allow tons of new top level domains to enter the market, many have recognized that this was nothing more than a money grab — as companies would feel compelled to buy up “their” names to keep them out of the hands of others. What’s amazing is that TLD operators are barely even hiding this in their marketing material. Lauren Weinstein recently received a “pitch” from the operators of the new .sx domain. .sx isn’t one of the new “generic” TLDs from ICANN, but rather is a newish TLD from Sint Maarten (an “autonomous country” from within the Netherlands) similar to various other “new” TLDs built off of lucky country codes (such as .tv, .ly and .co). However, the marketing message for .sx is really quite incredible. Basically, they’re saying .sx is quite similar to “sex” and, gee, you wouldn’t want your brand associated with sex, would you?
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You’re probably aware of our targets on broadband. To get every European with basic broadband coverage by 2013; and, by 2020, fast coverage (30 Megabits+) for all, with 50% of households having subscriptions at 100 Megabits or more. Those targets are central to Europe’s digital agenda – and essential to ensuring new products and services can come online.
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When discussing the history of the internet in Canada we must first look at the pre-internet era: A confusing time with many emerging technologies and incompatible network protocols.
In the early 1980s we had BBSes or Bulletin Board Services where individuals could run BBS software such as C-net, Opus and PCBoard (or even their own custom software) on a home computer. The computers were connected via modems using regular telephone lines, and users could log in one at a time. Some of the bigger BBSes could handle more than one user at a time but were generally a paid service, not free like most of the hobbyist services.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This week Greenpeace has linked European farmers, decision makers and consumers with American famers and an agricultural scientist to give a picture of what we could expect if we follow the path of US and Argentinean agriculture.
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Copyrights
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One of the many problems with the “guilty until proven innocent” approach to tackling unauthorized filesharing is that it’s not clear exactly who should get the punishment. For example, in France, we saw someone convicted not for infringement that he had committed, but something his then-wife had done and even admitted.
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