12.31.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Linux Foundation has released a video highlighting some of the major accomplishments this year for the free and open source operating system.
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One of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time has been criticized for the fact that it may never deliver what it promises, but the bright minds behind the project are hitting each of the deadlines they originally promised — an incredible feat especially when considering the undertaking.
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Desktop
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When buying portable computers, I always went to computer stores. I could check several laptop or netbook brands, but I always had to buy Windows with the PC no matter if I intended not to use it.
Since my Toshiba Dynabook laptop (which I had bought back in 2003) is about to die on me (it still runs thanks to MEPIS 8), I decided to go hunting for a good replacement. Although netbooks are more convenient for my work-related purposes, I still can do with my little Toshiba NB100. Even if its specs are far from powerful, it is capable of running several Linux distros and has never failed me.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Look for a really great 2013 with many improvements and new features being planned to the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, and Phoromatic. It should be one hell of a great year with amazing milestones being planned as the open-source benchmarking software continues to be rapidly adopted across many industries. This, along with the overall progress of Linux, is another one of the reasons for my eventual departure from the editorial side of Phoronix to better focus upon these technical benchmarking areas with continuing to be the main developer behind these original software projects.
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Graphics Stack
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Vadim Girlin has published a new Mesa branch that integrates a shader disassembler and ISA information tables within the AMD R600 Gallium3D graphics driver.
For aiding in the debugging process and for improving the Radeon Gallium3D driver with regard to shader optimizations, Vadim Girlin is looking to have a shader disassembler within the driver itself.
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Over this weekend a new DRM pull request was submitted by David Airlie for the Linux 3.8 kernel.
While it’s past the Linux 3.8 merge window, besides this pull having fixes, it does have some changes that aren’t strictly regression fixes. In particular, on Nouveau for open-source NVIDIA support there is initial GK106 enablement. Furthermore, there’s FUC microcode fixes for the Fermi-based GF119 and for NVE0 there’s fixes as well as enabling acceleration on all known GeForce 600 “Kepler” chipsets.
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Applications
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Most components of a web application produce operational log files. Some logs are written by each application in a unique format. Other components generate out-of-the-box logs. Monitoring system logs is an essential activity for anyone charged with taking decisions. System administrators need to monitor logs to look out for unusual activity, to troubleshoot applications and websites that are under their control. By scanning logs, extracting and correlating data, system administrators can investigate and resolve problems, carry out capacity planning, help to detect vulnerabilities, ensure the smooth running of services and balancing capacity, and establish who has used services and when.
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Do you have problems getting to sleep after a late night computer session? Does the monitor brightness hurt your eyes? Several Linux tools are available that could help with these problems.
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ASCON Group revealed that it has developed a version of its C3D modeling kernel for the Linux operating system. ASCON welcomes 3D application developers who work with alternative operation systems to try out the beta version of the C3D kernel.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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While at the start of every year there’s always individuals making predictions about “the year of the Linux desktop”, for 2013 at least it looks like it will actually be the year of gaming on Linux. Everything is coming together quite nicely to make 2013 the most exciting year ever for Linux gaming.
In the past nearly nine years of running Phoronix, every year seems to get better in terms of advancements for Linux gaming. There’s been setbacks along the way like the Epic Games mess, id Software losing faith in Linux, and the fall of Linux Game Publishing, but every year seems to generally be better than the last.
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While 2013 is shaping up to be the best year for gaming on Linux with so many major milestones just ahead of us, it’s not without some unfortunate sore points still present for gaming and the Linux desktop.
There’s a lot to be happy about with everything going on in the Linux gaming space at the moment, but there’s some fundamental problems to be addressed for Linux to become a viable platform for gaming and to be widely embraced by commercial studios. Among the current Linux gaming issues that quickly come to mind include:
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The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.20.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA. Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page. This release brings a near-complete implementation of the dialoque system, visual player race changes in character creation, and many other fixes and improvements.
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Earlier this month the first Unreal Engine 3 game that’s native to Linux was released, thanks to the work of Ryan “Icculus” Gordon. Now with UE3 being “officially” ported to Linux in a released game, after Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux failed to be released, other UE3-based games have hope for a Linux debut.
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Software firm Sortasoft LLC, of Brooklyn, NY, aims to bring a fresh and innovative RPG to Linux, and it’s not too short of it’s financial backing goals; but it hasn’t reached them either. In order to accomplish its financial goals, Sortasoft has looked to engage its future audience using the Internet darling of the crowd-funding phenomenon, Kickstarter.
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Desktop Environments
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More than three years after its last major release, the developers of awesome have released version 3.5 of their dynamic tiling window manager. The new version, code-named “Last Christmas”, includes a large amount of changes, many of which are internal and will not be noticed by users.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has posted a road-map for Kwin on Qt 5. The release of Qt 5 has brought many system optimizations as well as 99% backwards compatibility. But applications that interacts with system needs to be ported on Qt 5. Kwin is one such application, it needs to be ported to Qt 5. To bring Kwin to Qt 5 developer needs to switch to XCB from Xlib.
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KDE dev team has posted some changes in the KDE during this week. In addition to switching to XCB from Xlib for porting Kwin to Qt 5, There are many tasks in todo list. Some critical bugs and crashes are fixed in this version.
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Krita developer Boudewijn Rempt has introduced a new feature to Krita, Flipbook. He was initially planning to work on implementing PSD export support, but vacations lead him to develop this feature instead. Surprisingly this is not some beta software, it’s ‘production’ ready.
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Well, it seems that after 2 decades –or probably 15 years– of headaches setting up multiple monitors in Linux, things are finally turning around in the user’s favor, or rather, KDE users favor. In the beginning, there was X. X allowed –and still allows for– WIMP interaction on the Linux platform. Then came the evolution into Xorg, which eventually led to –just a few short years ago– zero configuration single monitor setup. As great a Linux is, some of us still to this day toil away at our xorg.conf trying to make our unique setup work, manually setting monitor coordinates and defining refresh rates. KScreen is the next evolution in multi-monitor setup in Linux, that is, if you’re a KDE user.
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One of our KWin Effects hasn’t seen much love over the last years and is in fact more broken than working. It’s a pure eye-candy effect which means that it is not at all in the development focus of the KWin team. The truth is, that we are tempted to just delete the effect because we won’t fix it. But of course there are users who like it and would be sad if it gets deleted.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome development is on rise and developers have already pushed an unstable Gnome 3.7 update. While the major release of Gnome 3.8 will be published by the end of the first quarter next year, we quickly summarize the major changes in upcoming Gnome 3.8. Remember, all these are whiteboard images and show the plans and ideas of developers, and may or may not land in Gnome applications.
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The year 2012 has not been very good for Canonical and Ubuntu. The end of the year saw harsh criticism of Ubuntu from bodies like EFF and FSF which accused the operating system of ‘data leak’, ‘privacy invasion’ and adding ‘spyware’ features.
Ubuntu got quite a lot of bad press due to default shopping lens which was introduced and ‘turned on’ with 12.10. The Amazon shopping lens was criticized for various reasons; the most notable was zero control in the hands of a user, which is something contrary to the ‘free software’ approach where a user is in control.
[...]
Canonical has not yet officially responded to either EFF or FSF.
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After pessimistic views regarding the health of the GTK+ tool-kit project were recently shared on IRC, Alberto Ruiz took it upon himself to create some statistics about the development of this critical component to GNOME to show in fact things aren’t entirely bleak.
Shared in GTK+ Healthcheck from his blog, Alberto created some charts that show the number of unique contributors working towards each GTK+ release. In addition to contributors on the overall code-base, he also plotted the number of contributors working on translations each release.
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Broadway is a back-end to the mainline GTK+3 tool-kit that allows for GTK applications to be rendered within HTML5 web-browsers. It’s progressed a lot since originally being introduced in late 2010 and then being merged in 2011 for GTK+ 3.2, but still it’s mostly a toy for now. The multi-process support merged this week is notable in that multiple GTK applications can run within a single web-page, treated similar to an X11 session.
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It’s been a rough year for Linux on the desktop. More specifically, it’s been a rough year for GNOME-based Linux on the desktop. But a glimmer of hope may have appeared thanks to a Mint-flavoured distribution of the open-source operating system.
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Among many new features in GNOME 3, the most exciting one is the ability to build extensions. Here’s how it’s done…
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Why does everything want to become an operating system? First we had Firefox OS, and now Gnome OS is here.
The buzzword at the moment definitely seems to be “platform”, and the Gnome team aren’t happy just writing a bunch of libraries and programs sitting on top of a base system that they don’t control.
More specifically, they’re looking to have more control over the whole experience for Gnome users. Let’s ask some more questions.
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A while ago I had a discussion with Benjamin on IRC about the health of the GTK+ project, he seems pretty pessimistic about the state of GNOME in general and GTK+ in particular, and I showed my disagreement. Now don’t get me wrong, there are challenges and I do share some concerns. Mostly, the fact that programming and delivering GNOME apps these days is way too complicated compared to other development platforms, consuming and viewing large online datasets and the lack of a coherent set of widgets and guidelines for touch driven devices are among those. Some of these issues will be covered at the DX hackfest of course and I’m certain that we will find solutions in the long term.
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I kept hearing about Arch Linux from time to time. Every time I gathered courage to try Arch, I would be lost in the amazingly great Arch wiki. There is so much information there that at times it’s intimidating – it’s hard to find what you are looking for.
However, thanks to a guide from Life Hacker I was able to install Arch on my test machine. The system broke after two days, that was my mistake, and I almost gave up on it. But then decided to give it another try — I installed it again; it broke again. I installed again, and this time everything worked as expected. I was so impressed by Arch that I took a plunge and moved ahead to install it on my main PC (which I usually never touch, it runs openSUSE 12.2 and is extremely stable.) I did come across a few hurdles (I actually struggled to set-up Samba server for couple of hours before turning to the community for a solution), but the amazing Arch community on Google+ had answer to every single question that I raised. This experience with Arch encouraged me to share my experience with my readers.
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I reviewed the last two releases of Manjaro Linux (0.8 and 0.8.2) earlier this year and was quite impressed by the last release. There were some glitches of course, like high RAM usage, in spite of being based on Arch Linux. But Manjaro has its own advantages as well like rolling release. To be honest, I wasn’t using using Manjaro on a regular basis – relying more on Linux Mint and Archbang for productivity purposes. Hence, when the new updated release of Manjaro (0.8.3) came out, I had to do a fresh install to try it out. Manjaro 0.8.3 has now Cinnamon, Mate, KDE and XFCE versions – Gnome is left out for obvious reasons. Both 32 and 64 bit ISOs are available for download.
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KDE has always intrigued me a lot, though I never started using it on daily basis for production purposes, till last week. I liked Gnome 2 a lot, but with Gnome 3 and it’s resource hungriness, it is out of favor as far I am concerned. My interest these days is growing more and more on KDE – it is really user-friendly, plasma interface looks awesome, effects are subtle and KDE 4.9.* is quite stable with loads of KDE specific applications. Almost every popular distro now has a KDE edition for the users, an evidence of the growing popularity of KDE.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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…the domain name of the association OpenMandriva.
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Red Hat Family
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Virtualization start-up VMTurbo Inc. continues its path into the virtualized world with official support of Red Hat Inc.’s Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. VMTurbo’s integration with the fedora-clad OS comes with “performance and resource optimization” perks, which expand VMTurbo’s capabilities and strengthen the flexibility of its workload and infrastructure management solution.
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Till 2006, we were a single-product firm offering Red Hat Linux enterprise solution. After acquiring JBoss, open source application server in 2006, we got a whole set of middleware products. JBoss stands as the most popular middleware application available in market today. In 2008, we bought Qumranet, a software company offering desktop virtualisation kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology. In Virtualisation, KVM is a very important open standard-based choice for companies and enterprises. Last year, we acquired Gluster, which has Cloud storage and big data services. Recently, we took over FuseSource, a provider of open source integration and messaging from Progress Software Corporation and business process management (BPM) technology developed by Polymita Technologies. We have gone from a single-product solution provider from a broad portfolio to the middleware stack and to Cloud computing. We have been diversifying our portfolio for quite some time, working with the open source development community and through major acquisitions.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Klaus Knopper has released version 7.0.5 of his Knoppix Linux live distribution. It is based on Linux kernel version 3.6.11, which is relatively current and offers better hardware support than the version 3.4.11 kernel that was used in August’s release of Knoppix 7.0.4. The latest Knoppix release includes applications such as GIMP 2.8 and LibreOffice 3.5.4; however, a current release based on series 3.6 of LibreOffice did not make it into the Linux distribution. As usual, Knoppix is designed to start directly from CDs, DVDs and USB storage media without being installed on the target system.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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On the 21 of December Linux Mint 14 Xfce has been released, codename Nadia.
This release of Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and shipped with the XFCE desktop environemnt as my readers probably know I’ve installed Mint 13 XFCE on my new desktop and so I’ve decided to upgrade my installation to this new release.
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The credit card sized PC is now capable of doing more things than we had ever thought. A hacker by the name of baldandv has successfully compiled the newly released Qt5 on Raspberry Pi and has run it smoothly on $35 PC. This opens up room for more development and other applications that had been locked up till date.
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The Raspberry Pi, the $35 credit card-sized computer, has lived an interesting life despite being less than a year old. It has been used to teach programming and host servers, but above all it has provided a near-perfect platform for some of the most fun and interesting hobbyist projects in the computing world.
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Ever since the tiny $35 Raspberry Pi PC began shipping earlier this year, there’s been virtually no limit to the fresh uses and extensions that have been envisioned for it.
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Phones
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Samsung and Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile communication company, are joining forces to develop Tizen, an open source OS that supporters hope will cut into the 90% marketshare held by Google and Apple. The smartphones may be on the market by next year, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan’s three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.
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Ballnux
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Android
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In this day and age, there are quite a lot of people learning to code and develop. There is an open community such as XDA Developers who gathers these talented individuals who take up the challenge of making new phones more useful as well as reviving old phones that have been abandoned by the manufacturer.
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This week the ZTE Grand Era LTE has been revealed in Hong Kong with no less than the ability to connect to two different kinds of 4G LTE mobile data. This machine works with China Mobile Hong Kong’s first commercial converged TD-LTE / LTE FDD network – but there’s a hitch to this dual-connecting beast. Before we get to that though, it’s all about the specifications: a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM under a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel resolution display with Gorilla Glass up front for hardcore scratch resistance.
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Team Google – technically, Team Motorola within Team Google – is apparently working on a new smartphone that’s designed to up the ante against hotshot smartphone competitor Apple.
The problem? It’s apparently taking a bit longer than expected for Google to produce results, which might allegedly cost the rumored “X Phone” some of its more eye-catching features.
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We don’t know if Sony is deliberately letting details slip about the company’s future flagship devices or if it’s trying to keep things as contained as possible, but one thing is clear – the “Yuga” and “Odin” are two of the worst kept secrets in recent Android history.
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Sony today announced that it plans to issue Android updates to a number of its 2012 Xperia line. As you might expect, it’s a matter of newer and more robust devices getting preference over those that are not. Keep in mind that while Sony does have a general time frame, things can slip or move up. What’s more, your particular update will hinge upon you carrier’s willingness to play ball.
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Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., an affiliate of Hon Hai Group, has allegedly manufactured a new smartphone model for Amazon on an exclusive basis, according to industry sources.
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Unveiled by Huawei in a couple of Power Point slides during a conference held in Beijing in late October, as well as spotted on GLBenchmark website a month later, Android running smartphone — Ascend D2 shows up at TENAA (China’s FCC) giving us a glimpse of its looks and the whole list of hardware details.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It is said that it will feature a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 – not bad for a tablet with such price tag – and will be powered by a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. The tablet made its way to the FCC as well, which gives a hint that the tablet might land in USA as well.
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We are very happy to announce the first testing release of Plasma Active for Nexus 7. Plasma Active, in a nutshell, is a Linux distribution (based on Mer as a core) that is specifically optimized for tablet computers.
Tuomas Kulve and me had been working on the Mer “hardware-adaptation” for Nexus 7 that enables to run Mer-based distributions like Plasma Active on the Nexus 7. Based on this hardware-adaptation and the work from Plasma Active we created an installable “image” that can be used to “flash” the current Plasma Active 3 on the Nexus 7.
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Own a Nexus 7 tablet and are left bored with the default Android OS? Want to wipe it clean and install Linux? If so, you’re in luck, as a couple of developers behind the KDE-derived Plasma Active project have just issued the first release of their distro specifically designed for the tablet. “Wipe it clean” is mentioned specifically above, as using this guide appears to purge the entire Android OS. If you’re a skillful Android tablet user, you may be able to dual-boot, but those steps are not covered here.
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We’ve been hearing quite a bit about the next big budget tablet from the folks at ASUS, and possibly Google. Many are calling this a Nexus 7, and while that’s yet to be confirmed, we do know this will be a budget $99 tablet from ASUS running Android Jelly Bean. In what seems to be the norm as of late, the tablet has leaked in benchmarks, and now has appeared on Picasa — making this a legit device. More details below.
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The Aakash 3, the next generation of India’s ultra low-cost Aakash tablet, will come with a range of new and exciting features with an unchanged price. According to reports, researchers and professors at IIT Bombay are working hard to add newer applications and more open source software to the third-gen Aakash tablet .
The Aakash 3 will come with a faster processor, which will support both Linux and Android operating systems. The device may come with a SIM card slot, allowing people to use the device as a communication device.
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Any computer user today has a lot of digital photos, maybe in different social networks, Dropbox or cloud hosting services. Some he may store in his local hard-drive, or upload to a web-service to share with his friends or for backup. The problem with these services, though useful is that they make your photos scattered and keeping pace with them requires extra effort and care. OpenPhoto allows to overcome all these problems and merge your photos in a single place, so that you can see them all at once without much trouble.
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FreeDOS, the open-source DOS operating system, is still alive and seeing activity around the GPL-licensed project though the FreeDOS SVN code repository hasn’t seen any activity in nearly one year.
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The year 2012 was one of the most successful year for Linux and open source technologies with Red Hat scoring more than a billion dollars in revenues and Google’s Android became the dominant player in the mobile space. The year 2013 already seems promising for the free and open source technologies and it seems the world will see more and more open source technologies and standards dominating the IT landscape. Here is my take on the top 5 open source technologies to look out for in 2013.
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The Oak product family from Toradex is a range of USB interfaced sensors and actuators that can be connected to a wide variety of different USB host devices, extending capabilites to interface with the environment.
Over the last few years, the wide variety of different Oak products have found their way into a diverse range of applications. They have been used for all sorts of purposes, from professionals in laboratory automation to hobbyists interfacing them with the latest Android smartphones.
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Bangalore: Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of web application testing infrastructure, recently announced Sauce Free Open Source Software accounts (Open Sauce), a new program offering open source developers free unlimited use of the Sauce Labs cloud for testing web applications.
The new program represents another Sauce Labs’ contribution to the open source philosophy of providing code and services needed to develop and support projects that are free, openly available and community-driven. In keeping with that model, Open Sauce user test results will by default be publicly viewable on Sauce Labs.
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Using open source cloud technology boosts innovation, according a new report by Rackspace, itself an open cloud provider.
It said figures collected show that almost three quarters (74%) of those organizations using open source cloud technology said it makes their business more innovative.
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Open source can offer huge benefits, enabling faster innovation and reduced total cost of ownership. While moving from closed to open systems is no trivial task, unless businesses take this step, they risk being left behind as competitors take advantage of the new possibilities on offer.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Got your attention? Don’t hold your breath, we’re not there yet, but we’re a step closer: it’s now possible to build Firefox from the Iceweasel package, since version 17.0.1-2 in experimental as of writing, 18.0~b6-1 from the iceweasel-beta repository, or 19.0~a2+20121228042015-1 from the iceweasel-aurora repository.
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SaaS
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John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO, dropped by to provide an update on public clouds and openstack.
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Cloud services come with a new risk: terms of use that allow your supplier to pull the plug on your site with little warning
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Databases
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Eyeing greater use of the open source Postgres database in the cloud, hosting provider Open Hosting has launched a service that allows users to run an automated cluster of PostGres databases on the company’s own servers.
The company has released a package, Cloud Postgres, that streamlines the process of installing, configuring and monitoring a multiple-server Postgres (formally known as PostGreSQL) implementation on Open Hosting’s own servers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation had exciting and successful journey this year. With 2012 coming to an end, they have published a report which shows the state of affairs of LibreOffice suite. One of the most striking news of this report is that LibreOffice has been downloaded around 15 million times this year alone, and over 100 thousand people download it daily. The below graph shows the increase of usage of this office suite this year.
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As the year comes to an end there are plenty of accomplishments that the LibreOffice community can be proud of, and a week ago we added another success — the end of our 6 day testing marathon[1] against the upcoming release of LibreOffice Version 4.0 (scheduled for February of 2013). While the Quality Assurance (QA) team didn’t set any goals for the week other than to “get as many people as possible involved with testing LibreOffice Version 4.0 Beta 1″, the statistics speak a great deal about how great our growing community is and far exceed the results that I personally was expecting. Any time “Version 4″ is referenced it includes the master build, Beta 1 build as well as the Alpha build.
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CMS
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Australia’s multilingual broadcaster is preparing a staged rollout of Drupal across its online properties in early 2013. The roll out of the open source content management system (CMS) will be the culmination of a process that began in 2011 and represents a complete rearchitecture of SBS’s online systems.
“It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but I only got the resourcing and the budget to do it last year,” said Matt Costain, the broadcaster’s technical director for online and emerging platforms.
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Blue River Interactive Group announces the availablity of Mura CMS 6, featuring an entirely new editing and management experience focused on usability and productivity.
Mura CMS is an open-source Web Content Management System used by organizations like the U.S. Senate, European Commission, CSX Corporation, AT&T, and the City of Cincinnati to power their mission-critical websites and intranets.
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Education
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In the story, I reported that the Lawrence school district is about to start pilot-testing a new web-based learning platform called Canvas. One commenter, who goes by the screen name “repaste,” strongly urged the district to consider open-source software to run that system.
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Business
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OpenGamma has released version 1.2 of its open source financial analytic and risk management platform. Released as Apache 2.0 licensed open source in April, the Java-based platform offers an architecture for delivering real-time available trading and risk analytics for front-office-traders, quants, and risk managers.
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source has its share of challenges, but its biggest fans extol the platform as open, malleable, flexible and cost-effective.
Nowhere are these qualities more in demand — or lauded — than in the customer relationship management (CRM) market. In fact, open-source attributes not only play well into the small-but-growing CRM niche, theycould be the catalyst that drives its growth.
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Funding
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For much of its crowd-sourcing campaign, it seemed Peter Molyneux and 22cans’ Project Godus would fall short of its goal. Things really picked up in the final few days, however, and it wrapped up this afternoon a safe distance past the finish line. Good news, everyone! Peter Molyneux is making another god game.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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With the release of version 2.17, the GNU C Library (glibc) now supports the upcoming ARM 64-bit infrastructure (AArch64). The port was accomplished with help from developers at the Linaro engineering organisation. Glibc 2.17 also includes better support for cross-compilation and testing and a number of performance improvements.
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…freedom is the root of creativity and fulfilment.
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But a large part of my life is given to one or another form of political activity: reading, writing, organising, activism and so on. Which is worth doing, it’s necessary but it’s not really intellectually challenging. Regarding human affairs we either understand nothing, or it’s pretty superficial. It’s hard work to get the data and put it all together but it’s not terribly challenging intellectually. But I do it because it’s necessary. The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.
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Automake 1.13 was released on Friday with a number of major changes to this component of the GNU build system. With Automake 1.14, there’s already a number of additional changes being considered.
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Project Releases
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The developers of the CodeMirror, the JavaScript component for editing code in the browser, have released version 3.0 of the editor. The MIT licensed editor component can be embedded in any JavaScript enabled page and has been put to work in applications such as Adobe’s Brackets editor, CoDev, Light Table and various online playgrounds for SQL, Haxe, JavaScript and WebGL. The 3.0 update is the result of four months work and although the API is similar to the 2.0 version there are a number of incompatibilities detailed in the upgrade guide; most importantly, 3.0 drops support for Internet Explorer 7.
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The developers of the toolkit for developing concurrent, distributed event-driven applications in Java or Scala, Akka, have announced the release of Akka 2.1 which adds experimental cluster support to the toolkit.
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Public Services/Government
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is known for sending rockets through the clouds, and now its web services are headed there, too.
NASA awarded a $40 million blanket purchase agreement to Rockville, Md.-based InfoZen to create, maintain and support NASA’s 140 websites and 1,600 web assets and applications, which are used by the public, media, students, and private- and public-sector researchers all over the world.
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The team that manages Data.gov is well on its way to making the government data repository open source using a new back-end called the Open Government Platform, officials said during a Web discussion Wednesday.
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In a cost-cutting move, the Homeland Security Department wants to replace more than 500 brand-name systems that identify vehicle license plates at border stations with generic technology.
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The Ministries of Education and Training, Industry and Trade, Construction and the State Bank of Vietnam have been using open source software in their works.
Quach Tuan Ngoc, Director of the Information Technology Agency of the Ministry of Education and Training, has affirmed that a lot of products designed on open source software which have been operating effectively. The ministry’s information portal at www.moet.gov.vn, for example has been designed on PHP, Web server Apache and My SQL.
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Openness/Sharing
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Two Danish amateur engineers and entrepreneurs plan to create a homemade, manned spacecraft to launch into suborbital flight within the next few years.
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Self-Publishers often have to deal with complicated distribution methods and clunky software when creating their ebook. Pressbooks seeks to make your life a little bit easier with its online ebook creation tools going open source. This allows you to develop a book using the WordPress Interface and convert it over to an ebook friendly format.
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OSDD or Open Source Drug Discovery is a community of students, scientists, researchers, academicians, institutions, corporations and anyone who is committed to discovery of drugs in an open source mode. It promotes collaborative scientific developments through integration, open-sharing, taking up multifaceted approaches and accruing benefits from advances on different fronts of new drug discovery. Numerous academic and research institutions along with industries are partnering with CSIR in Open Source Drug Discovery Project to take the movement forward and spread the awareness that it rightly deserves.
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Open Access/Content
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The textbook industry and classrooms across the country could be due for a shake-up, thanks to the rise of open-source learning materials — digital media that can be distributed to students for free if used for classroom purposes.
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Open Hardware
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It’s being billed as “Lego for adults” and could mean your fondness for construction toys may no longer be just a guilty pleasure.
The new robotics kit created by China-based Makeblock provides all you need to relive your childhood, with nearly 100 Lego-compatible mechanical and electronic components.
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Programming
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The Clang segmentation faults have been common within the ARM Instruction Selection pass on this release that came out last week and has occurred for multiple test profiles on different functions. This A15 upset is sad to see with the ARM Cortex-A15 performance being a huge upgrade over the A9-based ARM SoCs.
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GitHub is a San Francisco company that started in 2008 as a way for open-source software writers in disparate locations to rapidly create new and better versions of their work. Work is stored, shared and discussed, based on the idea of a “pull request,” which is a suggestion to the group for some accretive element, like several lines of code, to be “pulled,” or added, to a project.
“The concept is based around change: what is the right thing to do, what is the wrong thing?” said Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder and chief executive. “The efficiency of large groups working together is very low in large enterprises. We want to change that.”
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Verizon has been trying to justify their blocking of Google Wallet on Verizon phones, insisting the app is blocked because Google Wallet uses the “secure element” on devices to store a user’s Google ID. In response to complaints filed with the FCC, Verizon insists the unending blockade has nothing to do with the fact Verizon (in conjunction with AT&T and T-Mobile) is working on their own competing mobile payment platform named Isis.
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Security
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More than 100 Queensland businesses may have fallen victim to hackers holding their computer files to ransom, police say.
Medical centres in Brisbane’s CBD and Chermside have been held to ransom over their financial data and patient records.
A Miami medical centre on the Gold Coast fell victim to “ransomware” hackers earlier this month, with Russian criminals demanding $4000 for the centre’s medical records to be decrypted.
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Cablegate
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The report warns that an entrenched system of extreme overclassification of government information ultimately invites leaking. It further concludes that the current system of classifying and declassifying secrets is so dysfunctional and “risk-averse” that democracy suffers in its need for timely information about the workings of government.
The board, composed of government veterans and academic specialist
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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On the high desert of northern Peru, the 5,000 people living in La Tortuga rely on fresh water shipped by lorry to meet their needs. They have electricity (from the grid), but they also have their own natural resources (lots of wind and sun), and want to develop these in a way that can benefit them and the communities nearby.
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Finance
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Mark Carney, Bank of Canada governor and surprise pick to replace Mervyn King as incoming governor of the Bank of England, dove straight into the monetarist looney bin today with policy proposals.
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Below are three videos from a talk at the 2009 Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, CA, where James Galbraith talks about the Hyman Minsky concept of the instability of stability. This concept is fundamental to the behavioural psychology behind capitalist systems. This is a case where stability invites greater risk-taking and eventually creates instability. He sees the latest episode of financial crisis as a Minsky moment predicated on ‘Ponzi’-style debt pyramiding that is the end game in the cycle of stability to instability as it was post-1929.
My view is that a lack of regulatory oversight allowed the system to veer away from macro-prudential finance. This is not a case of Madoff-style fraud with everyone in finance cooking up schemes to defraud homeowners. Yes, these cases of predatory lending existed. However, I see the systemic risk as more pertinent.
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The Departments of Justice and Treasury are pretending that criminally prosecuting criminal banksters will destabilize the economy.
The exact opposite is true.
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The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The past few years have been marked by unprecedented innovation and growth on the Internet. New digital platforms and rich content from voice-over-IP and video conferencing connect family and friends around the world at little or no cost, high quality video streams facilitate online learning and digital education along with new ways to view movies and TV shows, and a host of platforms and applications allow for the creation and sharing of original content and ideas through cloud based computing.
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DRM
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And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? Or put another way, why doesn’t Amazon care about eliminating DRM for books, when it did for music?
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I recently received the Android-based Noble Nook Simple Touch ebook reader as a gift, which I enjoyed very much except for one insanely annoying issue with it: the Nook comes with two “books” on how to operate the reader which apparently cannot be removed by normal means.
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Okay, so I made that last one up. But that the number of self-published books did continue to skyrocket. According to a report released on October 24 by Bowker (which owns the ISBN number franchise for books sold in the U.S.), there are now more than 235,000 self-published titles available in print or eBook format. Interestingly, and notwithstanding the proliferation of businesses vying for all this print on demand (POD) business, just four outfits dominate the market: Amazon’s CreateSpace rules in the print space, with 58,412 titles – a 39% marketshare, while Smashwords leads in eBook publishing, with 40,608 – an even more commanding 47% share (these are 2011 figures).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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2012 was, without a doubt, the most intense year to date in the fight for civil liberties and against the copyright monopoly. While much work remains to be done, we can see a light at the end of the tunnel.
While there have been nice flares of light in the past – every success of a Pirate Party comes to mind, where all other politicians suddenly compete in who’s the better critic of the copyright monopoly – those flares of 2009 and 2011 have still been flares of light, and not game-changing events. Not yet.
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12.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you have ever worked as a technical writer, you probably have an image of what writing documentation for free software would be like. You might imagine the writer as a lone figure in a corporate department, using proprietary software, and chasing down developers to plead for information, much like most technical writers anywhere. But while you might find a few positions like that, the chances are that every one of these pre-conceptions would be wrong in practice.
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As we noted last week, the Linux Foundation‘s list of major Linux-related accomplishments over the last year centered on advances in embedded and mobile platforms more than on traditional hardware. The Linux Foundation’s summary aside, however, there were plenty of openvsource achievements in other areas that are worth noting before the outgoing years passes us by.
Without a doubt, the progress Linux vendors made integrating open source solutions into platforms such as automotive computers, Android-based mobile devices and Chromebooks, all of which the Linux Foundation highlighted, were very notable. They represent key areas in which Linux is likely to enjoy continued momentum going into 2012.
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Desktop
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It’s still a FLOSS world on the client and lots of FLOSS is used on the servers but it’s not happening in Google’s data-centres. What’s the point of opening the code when none of us can compete on price/performance with Google? It comes down to trust. If you trust Google, you get cheaper/faster IT. If you don’t, you can still build your own infrastructure with lower performance and higher cost. In the past many trusted M$ and agreed to slavery. At least Google seems a benevolent monopolist in comparison. If that changes, the world can still make its own software and share but what about data-centres? Will society create shared data-centres, cutting out the likes of Google? I don’t see it in the short term.
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One such leak appeared this week, courtesy of Chinese-language site ChipHell. If it’s legitimate (and it does appear to line up with information we already knew), it points to Wayne being a powerful SoC best suited for high-end tablets, but also a good fit for small, inexpensive ARM-based laptops or desktops. What we know so far paints a remarkably complete picture of what Wayne looks like, what it will be good at, and just how much better it will be than Tegra 3.
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Here is a story about how Ubuntu could replace Windows as the main operating system on a non-tech-savvy user’s laptop. I think Linux, though perhaps lacking some essential software for business use is ready for every home.
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Kernel Space
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As we narrow in on the final weeks of our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series, we talk to Linux kernel developer and Btrfs maintainer Chris Mason. Chris details his desktop and productivity tools, his favorite all-time flame war and shares his advice for getting involved in kernel development.
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Just in time for Christmas, the 3.7 Linux kernel was released on December 10, 2012, and brings with it 64-bit ARM support plus a multitude of improvements and changes. The main changes are:
* ARM Multi-platform and 64-bit support
* TCP Fast Open Server Side support
* SMB2 protocol support
* NFS V4.1 support
* BtrFS updates
* VXLAN support
* perf trace
* Cryptographically-signed kernel modules
* Intel “Supervisor mode access prevention” (SMAP) support
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I’m announcing the release of the 3.6.11 kernel.
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As we say happy birthday to Linus Torvalds today, he should be a happy chap because Linux is now the dominating OS on consumer computing devices. According to IDC and Goldman Sachs, as reported by the Seattle Times, Android (which is based on Linux) runs on 42% of all consumer computing devices.
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Applications
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The PulseAudio developers have released version 3.0 of the open source audio framework. PulseAudio 3.0 includes support for Bluetooth sources out of the box, ALSA Use Case Manager (UCM) support, configurable device latency offset and several optimisations and infrastructure improvements. PulseAudio is used by the majority of Linux distributions to handle audio input and output and interface desktop software with the underlying stack that directly manages the hardware drivers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I am a recent Arch convert and am still playing with the bubble wrap on my test machine. The community is quite helpful on Google+ and helping me out with the minor issues I am facing. I won’t comment on my Arch experience unless I spend significant among on it.
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With the initial roll-out of the Steam Linux client being a success while primarily focusing upon supporting the Ubuntu distribution, Valve is now looking at improving the Steam support on non-Ubuntu Linux distributions.
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Photon Productions, the developers of the upcoming Forsaken Fortress game, announced a few days ago that the upcoming RPG title would be available for Linux-based operating systems.
Forsaken Fortress is a 3D survival role-playing game (RPG) in which the player needs to assemble a team, build and manage a base, collect resources, and survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
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Popular free and open source roguelike/RPG Tales of Maj’Eyal (ToME4) is almost ready for its first stable release after having as much as 43 beta releases.
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This is awesome, Legend of Grimrock is now available via the Ubuntu Software Centre! The game is really awesome and plays much like the old Dungeon Master game (if anyone besides me remembers that!).
It’s a first person dungeon crawler where you control 4 prisoners trying to escape to get their freedom. It can be purchased for $14.99.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Krita Sketch, a version of Krita for touch interfaces, has been released. Krita is a cross-platform sketching and painting application for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). It is a component of Calligra, KDE’s native Office and productivity suite. Krita has support for concept art, comics, and textures for rendering.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Foundation announced that they were planning to hold the 14th GUADEC Conference in Brno, Czech Republic. The announcement also mentions some details about the 15th GUADEC Conference, which will be held in Strasbourg, France, in 2014.
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I get on any other computer, any other OS (even Windows and Mac OS), or any other desktop environment, and I find myself mousing into the top-left (or “hot”) corner to get my application panel and search/launching dialog.
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Gauchito returns after 35 years! LinuxBBQ “Argentina78″ is featuring the brand-new MATE 1.4.2 desktop environment and kernel 3.7
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Earlier on in the year I wrote a review about Slacko Puppy . A new version of Slacko Puppy is now available (version 5.4).
You can download the latest version of Slacko Puppy from http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm.
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ROSA company is pleased to announce a new operating system for desktops – ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012. The product is targeted at enthusiasts who are likely to appreciate the wide choice of fresh software components. ROSA Fresh edition is a non-commercial product distributed free of charge.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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As we prepare to enter a new year, the big names that have dominated the Linux world for the past decade–Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Canonical/Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE–are unchanged. But they may be joined in 2013 by a newcomer to the open source channel, Mageia Linux, which has been enjoying staggering popularity since its creation barely two years ago. Where might it head next?
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development.
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Canonical announced a few days ago that they have updated the online ‘Photos’ feature of their Ubuntu One cloud storage service.
The update brings a dedicated tab for the Photos function, which is located on the Ubuntu One dashboard, giving users a proper album view that includes all their saved photos via Ubuntu One or Instagram.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 14 was recently released. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and offers the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments. This review covers the Cinnamon version, I will try to get a separate review up for the MATE version soon.
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In this day and age, all major platforms must have an app store. And thus today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled the Pi Store to act as the one-stop shop for users of the tiny computer.
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Earlier this month, Linus Torvalds was reminded that Linux 3.8 will not run on i386 computers, such the one he used to create Linux back in 1991. “I’m not sentimental,” Torvalds responded. “Good riddance.”
In that same future-looking spirit, we anticipate the progression of embedded Linux in 2013, a year in which forecasters expect PCs will continue to shed market share to mobile devices. In 2013, the Linux-based Android should continue to dominate smartphones, while drawing closer to matching Apple’s iPad on tablets. Meanwhile, three new mobile operating systems based on open source Linux are expected to launch on new smartphones.
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Phones
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That’s 80% of the population, folks. No longer is China a follower in IT. They are a trend-setter. The desktop/notebook/server universes are changing too. China is the single largest potential market for all of these and the whole world is seeking to supply the need for IT in China. With so many having experienced the joy of FLOSS on mobile devices, there is a huge potential for FLOSS on desktops and notebooks to grow in China. That’s where the new OEMs will go when the smartphone and tablet markets flatten out. Expect 2013 to be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop in China.
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We recently had the chance to spend time with David Greaves and Vesa-Matti Hartikainen of Jolla and take Sailfish OS for a spin. As you might recall, this open source mobile OS builds upon Mer (a fork of MeeGo that includes Qt) and uses the Nemo framework with a custom UI. Like any decent Linux-based OS, it supports both ARM and x86 devices. The company is also behind the Sailfish SDK which is in the process of being finalized but is still open to developer feedback (the source code is available). After seeing Jolla’s various demo videos and noting some UI similarities with MeeGo (swipes) and, strangely, with BB10 (peek gestures), we were eager to experience Sailfish OS for ourselves
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Android
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Officials in the Lone Star state have given Samsung the green light to expand chip production lines at an investment cost of $3.9 billion.
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The CyanogenMod team is making more images for the latest version of their open source custom ROM for Android devices available. CyanogenMod 10.1 is based on Android 4.2 “Jelly Bean” and has been in development since Google open sourced that version of the operating system last month. New nightly builds of CyanogenMod 10.1 are now available for the Samsung Galaxy S, S II, S III and tablets such as the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and both versions of the Galaxy Tab 2.
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Remember the Android PC (APC) mini mother board from VIA Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Taiwan? At the time it was released, it’s form-factor, known as Neo-ITX, did not fit any available computer case.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There’s a lot of interest out there with Nexus 7 owners turning their super sweet Android Jelly Bean tablet into an Ubuntu Linux tablet. The geek in me understands this a little bit. But ultimately, at least at this point in the Ubuntu / Nexus 7 game, you may be better off keeping Android running on your Nexus 7 and save yourself a ton of stress, headaches, and wasted time. The Nexus 7 is already an amazing tablet built for high end performance with the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
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The best way to fight an enemy is to start by learning everything you can about it, which is exactly what the team at Integreen are looking to do in the Italian city of Bolzano. By using the latest technology and banking on open source software, Integreen hopes to provide the city management with enough traffic and environmental data to help them more effectively implement environmentally conscience programs such as mass transit.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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When it comes to their Internet browsers, users can get quite picky about how much automatic updating they want to take place. For example, in an OStatic post at the end of last year on how the Mozilla Firefox browser would begin silently updating itself (in keeping with Google Chrome) our readers disagreed widely on whether they wanted Firefox to do so.
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SaaS
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We’ve written before many times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and as the Big Data trend grows, Hadoop training and support solutions are proliferating.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers of Oracle’s VirtualBox have announced a maintenance update to the lead version of their virtualisation platform. Version 4.2.6 is released along with maintenance releases of older branches of the software: 3.2.16., 4.0.18 and 4.1.24. The changes in 4.2.6 are focused on stability and on correcting a number of regressions – there are no new features. Fixes include ensuring that stale virtual machine events are not sent to resetting VMs, fixing the appearance of text in the GUI, corrections to the 3D support, fixing hangs with some storage and adding network rate and disk usage to the metrics.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Being “fed up with the existing open source CRM applications”, the team at Zurmo have released their own open source customer relationship management (CRM) software – Zurmo 1.0. The CRM software, which has been in development for two years, includes deal tracking features, contact and activity management, and has scores and badges that can be managed through a built-in gamification system.
Zurmo 1.0 has been translated into ten languages and features a RESTful API to further integration with other applications. Location data is provided by Google Maps and Geocode. The application’s permission system supports roles for individual users and groups, and allows administrators to create ad-hoc teams. The application is designed to be modern and easy to use and integrates social-network-like functionality at its centre, which functions to distribute tasks, solicit advice, and publish accomplishments.
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Funding
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Piwik is a Free Software Web analytics application. If you run a website, it is what you use when you do not want to use Google Analytics or any other third party solution.
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BSD
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Project Releases
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A few days after the intended release date, the LLVM developers have announced the availability of version 3.2 of the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The LLVM project encompasses a set of compiler tools such as the C/C++/Objective C compiler Clang, the runtime compiler library compiler-rt, the low-level debugger LLDB, a C++ standard library libc++ and the VMKit JVM which uses LLVM for static and JIT compilation.
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After initial stages of fundraising campaign, the developers have published a new release of MediaGoblin, the only full “free as in freedom” media sharing software. This software is a part of the GNU project and aims to give users full freedom to share, upload and use all kind of media on their servers without using some expensive services out there or losing their privacy, freedom or control over their data.
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In the latest update to the Java servlet container Tomcat, the TomEE development team has done a lot more than just fix a few bugs. TomEE 1.5.1 includes an option to improve classloader customisation and the ability to inject remote initial context into TomEE clients.
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Standards/Consortia
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Some iPhone users are complaining of a faster battery drain after applying the latest update, although others aren’t seeing any problems.
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The New York Post is reporting that relatively soon, possibly as early as next week, the FTC is scheduled to announce a settlement of its antitrust investigation and potential claims against Google.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Let’s unpack that misconception, shall we?
Over the last twelve years, there have been more than 320 drone strikes. Over 300 of those strikes were conducted under the auspices of the Obama Administration (the most recent 2 strikes in Yemen over Christmas not included). They have killed between 2600-3300 people, of which over 800 were civilians (these numbers require us to believe that 2600 people were terrorists). Around 176 were children.*
These are hardly “unintended” consequences. If 1 or 3—ok, 5–drone strikes are launched, and others besides the “intended” targets are killed, it is more plausible to believe that the consequences are “unintended.” It is easier to believe the position of former US Air Force drone pilot, Brandon Bryant, that by droning, he and his colleagues “were saving lives.” In fact, Bryant and his fellow drone pilots knew what they were trained to do: they were trained to kill—to “target” human beings, who were supposedly “terrorists.”
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In rural Yemen, a botched attack on a terror suspect kills 12 civilians and destroys a community.
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Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets.
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Cablegate
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Making political predictions is an inherently risky task, but 2013 provides one pretty safe bet: barring armed revolution or similar catastrophe we will have a federal election in Australia.
And if the concluding events of 2012 are any guide, it will be a pretty ugly affair, a nude mud wrestle between an unloved Prime Minister leading a widely disliked government and a positively loathed opposition leader who has nonetheless put his party on track for a win which very few really look forward to.
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This article reviews a) Sweden’s traditional culture among its rulers of spying on their own citizens – also a political culture of “Neutral” Sweden consisting of dealing in secrecy with (and on behalf of) NATO powers in matters of Intelligence; b) the allegations about a systematic cooperation between the Social Democratic Party and the country’s Security Police, c) the juridical context of this illegal violation of the citizens’ civil liberties and integrity – a context that has been characterised as “The Bodström Society”, and the veritable threat to those abusing powers represented by WikiLeaks and its founder and forerunner Julian Assange.
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Finance
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The Federal Action alleged that Goldman Sachs’ 2008 Proxy Statement violated the federal securities laws and Delaware law by undervaluing certain stock option awards and alleged that senior management received excessive compensation for 2007. The State Action alleged violations of Delaware statutory and common law based on substantively similar allegations regarding stock option awards from December 13, 2005 to December 17, 2008.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bain Capital Partners LLC are set to defend what they call legitimate private-equity practices against investor claims that buyout firms and their bankers colluded to rig bids on takeovers.
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The greedy, corrupting and wealth-accumulating culture of Goldman Sachs does not exist in a vacuum. The IMF and the World Bank (WB) knew exactly what they were doing (and surely support the role of Goldman in their scenario) and why they were doing it beginning before the 1970s. The IMF and the World Bank are creatures of the US government (which has been thoroughly corrupted by the financial sector, i.e., the banks) and both are helping to fulfill the US economic policies world-wide.
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A federal judge on Monday agreed the city of Reno could take Goldman Sachs into private arbitration, bypassing the federal court system, to continue fighting for a settlement from the bank potentially worth millions of dollars.
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Censorship
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Last week, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced a new porn filtering system that will go online sometime during the coming year. However, the blockades, which are intended to deal with porn, may end up developing into a backdoor ban on BitTorrent and other file-sharing related sites.
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Privacy
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Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.
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Civil Rights
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Last Tuesday, the Senate quietly altered a key privacy law, making it much easier for video streaming services like Netflix to share your viewing habits. How quietly? The Senate didn’t even hold a recorded vote: The bill was approved by unanimous consent. (Joe Mullin of Ars Technica was among the first to note the vote.)
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein has been presided over four days of committee debate over reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act with an iron fist and incredible subordination to the Obama Administration. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was set to expire, but President Obama has been pushing for its un-amended reauthorization.
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There’s nothing like a debate over warrantless wiretapping to clarify how the two parties really feel about government. On Friday, the Senate voted to reauthorize the government’s warrantless surveillance program, with hawkish Democrats joining with Republicans to block every effort to curtail the government’s sweeping spying powers.
As the Senate debated the renewal of the government’s warrantless wiretapping powers on Thursday, Republicans who have accused President Barack Obama of covering up his involvement in the death of an American ambassador urged that his administration be given sweeping spying powers. Democrats who accused George W. Bush of shredding the Constitution with warrantless wiretapping four years ago sung a different tune this week, with the administration itself quietly urging passage of the surveillance bill with no changes, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accusing her Democratic colleagues of not understanding the threat of terrorism.
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This week, as Congressional incompetence threatens to plunge the US into another recession, it’s comforting to know that Democrats and Republicans can still agree on at least one thing: that the US government should have the unquestionable authority to spy on its own citizens — in secret, without a warrant, and absent of any semblance of transparency.
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This tremendous expansion of whistleblower rights will help to safeguard approximately $1.9 trillion worth of government contracts, grants and reimbursements annually, and protect some 12 million federal contractor whistleblowers when they expose corruption, wrongdoing, waste, fraud, abuse, or threats to the public. By comparison, there are only (approximately) two million federal employees, many of which (national security and intelligence workers) do not enjoy rights under the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA), signed into law by President Obama late last month.
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President Obama ought to veto the bill but probably won’t. I’ve flagged in red the provisions that are actually a problem.
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To add insult to injury, another part of the provision appears to allow the military to take adverse personnel actions based solely on the beliefs held by service members, even when the individual’s beliefs have never been expressed, or never acted on. This sort of discrimination would amount to pure thought policing. If this is the case, the measure could impact personnel from across the political spectrum. Consider a company commander who learns that someone in his unit has moral objections to the mission, or harbors views critical of the government. The provision could permit disciplinary action by the commander or the denial of a promotion, among other adverse actions, based solely on those constitutionally protected beliefs of the individual unit member.
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The Senate passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act that was stripped of a prohibition of the indefinite military detention of US citizens on American soil by an 81-14 vote on Friday, but only after a furious dissent on the chamber’s floor by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who called it an “abomination.”
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It now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.
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12.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Taken as a whole, 2012 was a great year for Linux. The most popular stories, however, were more about the day-to-day happenings of Linux then the big picture.
2012′s top Linux story was The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. The title said it all. We’d long known that Google uses its own house-blend of Ubuntu on its PCs, but it wasn’t until this summer that Google finally revealed exactly how its workers use Ubuntu,
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The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive.
That doesn’t mean we won’t see Linux on a tablet, but you’ll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop – clinging to a tiny percentage of the market.
There is of course Android, which does use a Linux kernel somewhere under all that Java, but when Canonical or Red Hat talk about building Linux tablets, obviously Android is not what they have in mind.
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The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception.
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2012 was the year that the Linux desktop diversified.
Two years ago, users could choose between two or three desktop environments. But by the end of the first quarter of 2012, they had at least eight choices, with more on the way.
Similarly, the year started with LibreOffice as the main office suite. But halfway through the year, LibreOffice was joined by Apache OpenOffice as well as Calligra Suite.
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Many Phoronix readers have written in over the past few days about the new effort to bring the Torque 3D Game Engine to Linux. The desire for Torque 3D coming to Linux is because the engine developers believe Linux is turning into a commercially viable platform for gaming.
Torque 3D is the game engine out of Garage Games as the successor to the original Torgue Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) but with modern functionality like deferred lighting, NVIDIA PhysX, and modern shaders. The original Torque Game Engine had been originally developed in 2001 for the Tribes 2 game but it’s been developed much more extensively since its inception.
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Desktop
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Server
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We talk to Andreas Olofsson, founder and chief executive of Adapteva, about his company’s project to create a $99 many-core pocket-sized supercomputer: Parallella
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has announced the first pre-release version of Linux 3.8, releasing it on the “longest night of the year”. As previously reported, it includes support for the Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS), which has been designed for use on flash storage devices such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and internal storage in devices such as cameras, tablets and smartphones.
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While there’s a lot of features that are new to the Linux 3.8 kernel as covered in The Feature Overview For The Linux 3.8 Kernel, there’s also several promising new features and functionality that didn’t make the cut for this next kernel release.
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Linus Torvalds is one of the most influential people in the Linux world and among the most active figures that promote open source as a real alternative.
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When one says mechanical keyboard you think gamers, at least I did. Gamers prefer mechanical keyboards because the physical act of typing is more precise. That’s it in a nutshell, the feedback provided by mechanical keyboards gives gamers another edge over the game and opponents. So, one may think Windows, because gaming in Linux is rarely as competitive. But I’m here to tell you a Linux user, not even an avid gamer, can and does love her new CM Storm QuickFire TK.
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Applications
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I think it is fairly obvious at this point onwards that as a project in itself, its no longer viable to continue development of compiz. Lots of people still use it though, so its is worth maintaining for those that use it, but nothing more than that.
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Podcasts are usually the first media I consume when I wake up in the morning and the last media I consume before falling asleep. Sadly, some of my favorites have gone AWOL over the past few years, but I haven’t stopped discovering new ones to listen to. I’m now going to tell you about the top Linux – and open-source-related podcasts making the rounds in my media player.
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The REAPER digital audio workstation software may be coming to Linux per a statement by its developers.
REAPER, short for Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording, is one of the professional audio software solutions available on Windows and Mac OS X. While REAPER can work to some extent under WINE, the development studio behind this software, Cockos, is working towards a native Linux port.
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As you may know Dan Vrátil and I are working in a brand new screen manager that will solve most of the issues that we currently have on the desktop, making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple.
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Kraft developer Klaas Freitag has announced version 0.50 of the Kraft, a software for easy business document management. As per announcement on the official blog, Main change in Kraft 0.50 is support for multiple tax rate in a single document. For example one invoice items without tax, with reduced or full tax rate are supported.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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It’s Christmas time for Linux games, Humble Bundle has launched Humble Indie Bundle 7. This version includes many cross platform and DRM free games.
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The history of Linux in gaming is quite poor, but this year so many changes happened in this area that we might be able to review top commercial video games very soon. By commercial I mean those created by most significant gaming companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda, and not indie video games. Even though real gaming in Linux based operating systems got a boost this year, emulators were everywhere to be found, for most known video game consoles.
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Much hyped god game GODUS has been fully funded on Kickstarter. The game is being developed by Peter Molyneux, who created god games Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White.
GODUS blends the power, growth and scope of Populous with the detailed construction and multiplayer excitement of Dungeon Keeper and the intuitive interface and technical innovation of Black & White.
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The Unvanquished open-source game is preapring for a great year ahead and for kicking off the New Year they will soon be releasing Unvanquished Alpha 11.
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Lately there’s been an increasing number of open-source projects sprouting up to design open-source game engine implementations around older closed-source engines to handle certain game content. Another one of these projects is Prequengine, which is for Little Big Adventure.
Among the open-source game engines that re-implement closed-source game functionality and have been talked about recently on Phoronix include Xoreos, GemRB, and OpenMW. A Phoronix reader wrote in this weekend about another such game engine project, Prequengine.
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It’s been another successful Humble Indie Bundle so far with the latest pay-what-you-want, cross-platform, DRM-free game offering approaching the two million dollar mark.
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Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 12 Loucetios”, the twelfth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features diplomacy, packing siege engines, super fancy water and more!
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Desktop Environments
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A few years ago, my neighbors asked for help securing their computer. They were running Windows, so my knowledge was limited, but I did set up a separate administrative account and add passwords to their regular accounts. When I looked at their computer a month later, they had removed both — and were back to getting viruses and malware along with their movie downloads. Their explanation? That my simple safeguards were “too inconvenient.”
“Let me get this straight,” I wanted to say (but didn’t). “It’s too inconvenient to spend ten seconds typing a password, or twenty logging into a different account to install software. But it’s not too inconvenient to have your computer at the shop every few months to scrub it clean and to sometimes lose files because you haven’t bothered backing them up.”
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Awesome, the dynamic X window manager written in C and Lua that started off as a fork of dwm, is out with its version 3.5 “Last Christmas” release.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A new screen manager is being worked on for the KDE desktop to dramatically improve the multi-monitor experience by making it work “auto-magically” or at least be “super simple” to configure.
Dan Vrátil and Alex Fiestas have been working on writing a brand new screen manager for KDE to overcome the current configuration shortcomings of the current settings panel. As Fiestas wrote today on his blog, “We are trying be as smart as possible adapting the behavior of it to each use case making the configuration of monitors as simple as plugging them to your computer.”
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The Krita community has created Stichting Krita Foundation to support the development of Krita through funding. The foundation will also help the community by organizing creative and open content projects like, Comics with Krita DVD. The have done some funding before where Lukáš Tvrdý was sponsored before actual development work and currently they are sponsoring Dmitry Kazakov, who is working on Krita performance improvements.
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Qt is one of the most important projects for both commercial and non-commercial players, especially in the embedded space. Now RIM is trying to lure Qt developers for the success of BlackBerry. If you are a developer of Qt apps RIM is offering a great deal for your Qt applications under Blackberry Qt porting program.
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The Qt project and Digia, the company behind Qt framework, have released the most awaited C++ framework for developers, Qt 5.0. The company claims that it’s one of the best releases till date and has invested a significant amount of time behind this release. It’s an overhaul of the Qt 4.x series and makes Qt fit for the future.
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GNOME Desktop
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It seems fair to say that Linux users enjoy a degree of choice that’s unmatched by the proprietary players in the desktop computing world, what with the wide variety of both distributions and desktop environments from which they can choose.
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The last few years have been troubled for the Gnome Project. Once a premier desktop environment for Linux, it has seen its market share diminish amid user dissatisfaction over Gnome 3 and accusations that the project was ignoring users. Yet, over the last six months, something important has been happening: Slowly and quietly, the members of Gnome have started trying to turn the situation around.
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There is a nice Search in Calendar, by Reda, a support for two batteries and plugged devices in Power Panel, by Allan and some mockups in Gnome Maps, by Andreas.
Keep on mind that these are just early designs that may never arrive in GNOME the way they look now, or the may arrive at all!
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The goal that Gnome board of directors set for the upcoming year is to improve the safety features of our favorite desktop environment by implementing and integrating special tools and features.
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These were my 2 first GNU/Linux distros that I used on my home desktop (actually, I met with GNU/Linux a little earlier – the very first GNU/Linux distro that I saw, it was RedHat 9.0).
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Several familiar names cropped up in the news the last few days. The Mint team finishes out their lastest family tree and the Slax guys has rushed out a couple of bug-fix updates to the recently released 7.0. And KNOPPIX got an update too.
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You know how I like to rate distributions at the end of each year? Yes, you do. However, while I do try to make those articles be as impartial and fair as possible and encompass as broad spectrum of users as possible, they ultimately reflect one man’s experience, me. Not bad, given my awesomeness, but still.
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Between the new innovations that emerge practically every day and the fairly constant rate of change in general, things never stay the same for long in technology.
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Unlike many of the Linux distributions out there today that are little more than minor user-facing changes to Ubuntu or another tier-one Linux operating system, Slax for the past many years has followed its own dance. Slax, a LiveCD Linux distribution built around Slackware, is very lightweight and calls itself a “pocket operating system” as with the most recent release it can fit a full Linux OS with the KDE4 desktop in about 200MB. Slax is also intended to be quite easy for others to modify and create custom images via Slackware packages and Slax modules. The recent Slax 7.0 release was the first update for the open-source operating system in several years. For those interested in knowing how this very lightweight and customizable operating system can work so efficiently, Tomáš Matejícek, the Slax creator, has written an exclusive Phoronix article about the process.
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Presented in two formats based on two distros, which version of Puppy stays true to the commitment of being small and fast?
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New Releases
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Steven Shiau proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 18, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.
Being based on the Debian Sid repository as of December 17, 2012, the Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15 operating system is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.35 and incorporates various improvements, bug fixes and updated translations.
This release also blacklists the floppy module from the kernel, just because none really uses a floppy drive anymore. But, in case you’re one of those people who still use a floppy drive, you will be able to manually load it by running the “modprobe floppy” command in a terminal.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Finally here is Mageia 3 beta 1. This first beta release was a bit tricky as it comes with some major new features in installer. GRUB2 has been included as an option for now.
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Gentoo Family
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When you are running Gentoo with SELinux enabled, you will be running with a particular policy type, which you can devise from either /etc/selinux/config or from the output of the sestatus command. As a user on our IRC channel had some issues converting his strict-policy system to mcs, I thought about testing it out myself. Below are the steps I did and the reasoning why (and I will update the docs to reflect this accordingly).
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Red Hat Family
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Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says “the state of the union at Red Hat is strong.”
Whitehurst took a break from running the billion dollar company to blog about accomplishments over the past year, as well as to look ahead to what he called “massive” potential in 2013.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) is a success story for troubled times. The economy falters? No problem. Southern Europe on the brink of collective bankruptcy? Sure, but sales are growing there anyway. Corporate IT budgets trimming down? Hey, that’s actually a business opportunity!
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Big Blue has been talking about the Power7-based “Blue Waters” supercomputer nodes for so long that you might think they’re already available. But although IBM gave us a glimpse of the Power 775 machines way back in November 2009, they actually won’t start shipping commercially until next month – August 26, to be exact.
The feeds and speeds of the Power 775 server remain essentially what we told you nearly two years ago. Today’s news is that the Power 775 is nearly ready for sale, and the clock speed on the Power7 processors and system prices have – finally – been announced.
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What does it feel like to be the CEO of a super-hot company as it crests the billion-dollar-revenue mark and grows to 5,000 employees?
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says that it’s hard to notice the changes. Then something happens to make you realize you are the boss of a very big place.
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Fedora
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Fedorians have a nice sense of humor, and FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the new upgrading tool for Fedora 17->18 and beyond, that replaces PreUpgrader.
Earth survived from Mayan prophecy, end of days didn’t come, and Fedora 18 release will make it at Jan 8, 2013 -hopefully 
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After the 2 months delay and the 8 months release cycle of Spherical Cow, Fedora now will try to make a “Speedy Gonzales” release inside in just 4 months. This is the shortest release cycle that Fedora ever had from its day one – Nov 2003, Yarrow / GNOME 2.4 / Linux 2.4.19.
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One of the gripes of the Fedora users, and mine as well, was that it doesn’t come bundled with any office suite. Users have to manually install LibreOffice or Calligra to get some work done. This is changing now. The LiveCD of Fedora 18 Spherical Cow will be shipped with LibreOffice installed. This is a great step from Fedora developers towards usability. This change is pushed by Bill Nottingham to Fedora 18.
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Debian Family
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Welcome to this year’s twenty-fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Bits from the DPL
* Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests
* Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin
* Other news
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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It has been a while since I wrote about bitcoin, the decentralised peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the state of bitcoin in Debian again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package is now maintained by a team of people, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We owe a huge thank you to all these team members. 
But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt Corallo in a PPA for Ubuntu, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the Debian package.
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Derivatives
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Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD, made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by an automatic hardware detection and support for many video cards, SCSI and USB devices, is now at version 7.0.5.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Unity desktop environment is something which has intrigued me a lot over the past year or so. My interest has partly been in the strong reactions, for or against the environment, from Ubuntu users. The other key point of my interest has been that I’ve really only used the desktop in short bursts and, as a result, I don’t feel I’ve really got a feel for it. Once every six months I will install Ubuntu, play with Unity for a few days, not long enough to unlearn the habits I’ve picked up from using other desktop environments, and then I’m off to another distribution and another desktop. In these quick looks at Unity I’ve certainly encountered things which rubbed me the wrong way, but I’ve also caught sight of design features which struck me as being beneficial. Or they would be beneficial if one were to use them long enough to form new work patterns. At any rate, I wanted to find out how I would feel about Unity if I used it long enough to unlearn old habits, behaviour learned after over fifteen years of using desktops with approaches different from Unity’s. With that in mind I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on one of my machines and tried to use Unity as much as I could while still taking time to test other Linux distributions. Right upfront I want to say that it took about a week for the old habits to fade away and for using Unity’s controls to become reflex rather than considered actions. Little things like moving the mouse pointer to the right of the window instead of the left have long been actions performed automatically and they were hard to break. This led to several days of jerking the mouse right, then back left to close windows or minimize them. There was also some trial and error at first finding the best way to handle window organization, launch applications and deal with window grouping on the launch bar. Typically, I have found I am most comfortable with setting up multiple virtual work spaces, populating them with related applications and switching between the work spaces. This allows for a small number of open windows in each space and avoids programs grouping on the task switcher. Unity, on the other hand, while it does allow for multiple work spaces, the desktop appears to be much better suited to having few windows open at a time and I slowly came around to typically using one workspace and grouping program windows together, switching between windows rather than work spaces.
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Over the years, I’ve watched Ubuntu develop into quite the impressive Linux distro. While Ubuntu definitely has room for improvement, it does offer the casual user an outstanding experience overall. In this article, I’ll share the areas where I think Ubuntu is raising the bar on Linux for the masses.
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Thus going after someone like Canonical and calling what they doing spying actually hurts the promotion of free software. What they are doing is a huge step in the right direction.
Having run a business based on free and open source software for a decade, you can imagine that I am a big fan of it. Last year, for a variety of reasons, I decided to make the jump to using a desktop based on Linux. I tried a number of options, but the one that worked for me, the one that “stuck”, was Ubuntu. Using it just comes naturally, and I’ve been using it for so long now that other desktops seem foreign.
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‘Unredirect Fullscreen Windows’ option is finally enabled by default in Ubuntu 12.10. Compiz developer Daniel Van Vugt and his team has done lots of work in past few months to make sure that all the bugs related to this feature are fixed.
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Ubuntu may not quite be a religion, but it has its committed evangelists all the same. And now, Canonical has made their jobs easier with the release of an official “Ubuntu Advocacy Development Kit.” Will Ubuntu fans soon be showing up on your doorstep, asking you to convert? Probably not, but the move is an interesting endeavor nonetheless.
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Flavours and Variants
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All the Linux Mint Editions have arrived just in time for the holidays – Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce dekstops, and Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 6 with Cinnamon and MATE desktops.
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Linux Mint does it again! The thing I admire about Linux Mint is the ability to work on any type of system and refined interface that it brings on the table – every time! When I reviewed the Mint Maya KDE, I was wondering if I had seen any KDE distro more complete than this. With the Mint Nadia KDE release my impression has changed. This edition not only looks gorgeous but the KDE bloat-wares are gone to actually give the users a more functional set of applications.
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I now refrain from comparing Linux based distribution because what my needs are could be different from yours and what works for you may not work for me, but I am really impressed with Linux Mint in the ‘out-of-the-box’ experience department, it’s becoming one of my favourites along with openSUSE and Kubuntu.
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It is not far-fetched to say, open source and its poster child, Linux, is going through a golden period. The emergence of internet has a lot to do with the popularisation of open source way of thinking. But in the world of Windows and Macs, what makes Linux tick? Redhat was the first to explore Linux’s potential. But Redhat had a very enterprise centric approach. And in 2004, Ubuntu came along with the focus firmly back on end-users. This kick started a flurry of activity and a number of new Ubuntu based Linux distros started to sprung up. The latest one being elementary OS Luna. And this brand new OS has a lot going for it.
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A real, useful, open source computer, the $35 Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to use as a PBX. A DIY laptop is coming, too
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The Raspberry Pi now has an accompanying store where users can download software, raw code, tutorials, tools or games for the Linux computer.
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I decided to replace my aging Compaq mini desktop in the bedroom with the Raspberry Pi,
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[Jacken] loves his lossless audio and because of that he’s long been a fan of Squeezebox. It makes streaming the high-bitrate files possible. But after Logitech acquired the company he feels they’ve made some choices which has driven the platform into the ground. But there is hope. He figured out how to use a Raspberry Pi as a Squeezebox server so that he can keep on using his client devices and posted details about the RPi’s performance while serving high-quality audio.
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Phones
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Android
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HTC is preparing to launch an Android handset, codenamed M7, according to Unwired.com. This device, claimed to be the flagship phone, is expected to ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, skinned with the latest iteration of HTC’s love-it-or-hate-it UX enhancement, Sense 5. M7 will have 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal flash memory.
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Japanese bathrooms are about to become a little more interactive, thanks to a new smartphone-controlled toilet known as the Satis. Manufactured by Tokyo-based Lixil, this Bluetooth-enabled commode can be controlled with an Android app called “My Satis,” allowing users to flush, raise the toilet seat, and activate a bidet jet stream with the touch of a button. The app also lets you stream music through the toilet’s speakers and will automatically monitor “usage history,” giving you a better idea of how much electricity and water you’re consuming with each visit.
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A Brazilian company has risked inciting the rage of the world’s biggest technology firm by releasing its own ‘iphone’.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland has launched a new tool that allows Nexus 7 users to install the Bodhi Linux OS on their Google slates.
The new tool means that Ubuntu is no longer the only Linux-based operating system that can run on the popular Google Nexus 7 tablet. To offer this tool, Hoogland basically piggybacked on Canonica’s work with Ubuntu, and Nexus 7 owners can now install Bodhi on their tablets.
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Netbooks – those compact, underpowered, inexpensive notebook PCs once hailed as the future of mobile computing – are set to disappear from retailer shelves in 2013, as the last remaining manufacturers of the devices prepare to exit the market.
According to Taiwanese tech news site DigiTimes, Acer and Asus are the only two hardware makers still producing netbooks, and they are mainly doing so to sell them to emerging markets such as South America and Southeast Asia.
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Dell, what’s wrong with competing on price/performance like everyone else except M$? Others are making tons of money selling Android/Linux devices. So could Dell. If Dell’s business is making and selling hardware, just do it.
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Zanata is an open source translation platform written in Java that offers translation memory, an online translation editor, and workflow integration with REST APIs and command-line tools. For translators, it is a web browser-based translation environment where previous translations provide context for their work. For software developers, it’s an integration tool that provides a centralized localization repository along with translation tools that save time and resources.
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Given that now even some small open source projects are forming their own foundations, Glynn Moody thinks that perhaps open source foundations have come of age. He suggests that the time may now be right for the formation of an umbrella foundation to help share best practices, legal advice and other information and support.
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Open source used to be an aberration — now it is an imperative. If you’re not using or developing open source projects, you’re putting your business at risk. That’s the message from Black Duck Software and Forrester, as recently presented in a webinar describing Open Source software and innovation.
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DESPITE the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run to hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.
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I remember first meeting Jeffrey A. “Jam” McGuire in person at DrupalCon Denver. We talked about communities, music, and shared ways to show why open source is a better way. Even before meeting him, I could tell from my first interaction with him that he was passionate about Drupal and open source. He’s becoming an in-demand Keynote speaker and presenter at Drupal and other business and software events around the world. He’s already a staple for the Intro to DrupalCon session and always seems to incorporate music and singing as part of the performance.
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Think of all the photos and videos you’ve stored on various devices and social networks over the years. Enter: OpenPhoto, a new, open source platform all about gathering them into one place and never losing them. Their software imports your photos from Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram, and there’s an app for the iPhone (Android coming soon).
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At the same time, women make up an estimated 2% of the open source community, far lower than the percentage of women in computing overall, estimated at around 20%. Is it any wonder that women founders are so rare in Internet-related startups, when many of the founders come from a population that is 98% male?
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Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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The OpenStack open source cloud platform started out with only two components: Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Nova originally came from NASA and Swift came from Rackspace.
Over the course of the last two years, OpenStack has expanded beyond NASA and Rackspace and has been embraced by many large tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, AT&T, Cisco and Intel among others. As OpenStack participation has grown, new capabilities have been added, including most recently the Cinder block storage project and the Quantum networking project. Cinder and Quantum both debuted in the recent Folsom release.
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Databases
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For Gunnar Hellekson — a chief technology strategist at Red Hat who closely follows the government’s approach to open source software — this language posed a threat not only to Accumulo but to open source project across the government. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see that same ‘adequacy criteria’ applied to all open source software projects,” Hellekson wrote earlier this year. “Got a favorite open source project on your DoD program, but no commercial vendor? Inadequate. Only one vendor for the package? Lacks diversity. Proprietary software doesn’t have a burden like this.”
From where Hellekson was sitting, it was obvious that Accumulo was very different from the likes of Hbase and Cassandra. “When Accumulo was written, it was definitely doing new work,” he told us. “Some of its differentiating features are being handled by other pieces of software. But other core concepts are unique, including the cell-level security…. That’s an incredibly important feature, and to do it properly is incredibly complicated.”
But it appears the Senate has now backed down. In that joint House-Senate statement on the DoD bill, Accumulo is cited by name. “[The Department of Defense] has already determined that the Accumulo database that NSA developed using government and contract engineers is a successful open-source project that is supported by commercial companies,” the statement read. “[We] expect that future acquisitions of Accumulo would be executed through such commercial vendors.”
Those commercial vendors include Sqrrl. But Oren Falkowitz isn’t quite ready to celebrate. “Obama still has to sign it,” he says. “I wouldn’t jump for joy until it’s actually a law.”
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The MySQL relational database serves as a back end for millions of websites, and powers millions of non-Internet data-handling applications. In 2009 ownership of MySQL passed to Oracle when it bought Sun, which had acquired MySQL the previous year. Since then developers and IT managers have worried that Oracle would someday cease support for MySQL because it competes with the company’s profitable proprietary database products. This fear may be justified. In August, Alex Williams wrote at TechCrunch, “Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.” We tried to get Oracle to rebut that accusation, but multiple emails and phone calls did not get a response. Does this mean it’s time to move from MySQL to another open source database – and if so, which one?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Although there are many others, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are the two 800lb gorrillas of the open source office suite world. One or other comes bundled with pretty much every Linux distro out there.
Without OpenOffice.org, it’s fair to say that the OpenDocument format would never have stood a chance of becoming an open standard. Pretty impressive, when many open standards haven’t had anything like the same success (how many people – even hard core Linux users – commonly spurn mp3 files for ogg vorbis?). Because (nearly) everyone needs a word processor and spreadsheet, OpenOffice.org has long been one of the open source poster children to encourage take up – “Why pay $$$ for Microsoft Office when this is just as good and you can have it for free?”.
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Italo Vignoli today published lots of cool graphs and stats demonstating the growth and other accomplishments over the course of 2012. From the growth in number of contributors to high-profile roll-outs to increasing numbers of downloads, 2012 has been a banner year. He said, “Looking back, it has been amazing.”
Starting with the contributor list, LibreOffice had 379 contributors at the start of the year, but that number had grown to 567 by Christmas 2012. The Document Foundation also announced 14 LibreOffice releases in 2012 and the team is currently working on LibreOffice 4.0, which should be released in February 2012.
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The Oracle Java Development Kit 7 Update 10 (JDK 7u10) release provides new updating and control capabilities that go beyond what Java users have enjoyed in the past.
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Education
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Advocates of free and open source are warning that the Greek government is going to waste millions of euro on proprietary software licences for the country’s schools. They are calling on the Ministry of Education to cancel its latest procurement. “Favouring proprietary software while ignoring the potential of open source, constitutes a choking of the educational process.”
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Healthcare
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Open source in healthcare remains in its infancy. This year saw some great activity with open source in health. Our community covered medical devices with available source code, electronic patient records, open product design and 3D printing, crowdfunding, and big data. These big ideas and innovations, but I predict that as more people take personal responsibility for their health in 2013, the greater the demand will be for faster, more affordable solutions… read: open source.
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Business
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You can’t just expect a community to emerge
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Funding
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Ever since OStatic’s inception, we’ve been fans of the Piwik online analytics application, which is a free, open source alternative to tools like Google Analytics. For example, we discussed Piwik in our roundup of open source tools aimed at web developers. When it comes to doing web analytics, it’s beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with Google Analytics or on its own.
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BSD
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PC-BSD is a desktop based derivative of FreeBSD and typically PC-BSD releases follow FreeBSD releases. That’s not quite the case with the new PC-BSD 9.1 release which is actually coming out *before* the official release of FreeBSD 9.1
FreeBSD 9.1 was originally set for official release at the end of October but has been hit by some delays. Though an official announcement has not yet been made the primary FreeBSD mirror currently has FreeBSD release ISOs available (ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.1/)
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Work began on the Hurd, the true kernel of the GNU operating system, in May 1991, but it has yet to materialise as a production-ready kernel. Richard Hillesley tells the story…
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But sometimes all Stallman had to offer on the topic was “We still prefer C to C++, because C++ is so ugly”.
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The fight against DRM often pits us against some of the biggest companies and the most dominant ways of thinking in the technology business. What gives us the independence to speak out — and the power to make your voice heard –is the support of our members. Now, we need your help to keep Defective by Design strong in 2013.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) Open source software adoption by the U.S. Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or a designated country.
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The European Commission will postpone until early next year the publication of its guideline on how to make best use of ICT standards in tender specifications. Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, in a video speech on Friday said that the guideline should ensure that public authorities get the most value from open source and open standards. “And also that open source suppliers can compete fairly in tenders.”
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I wanted to share my notes with you all from this TED talk with Clay Shirky. You can watch the video—and I recommend that you do—but since I took notes I figured I’d share my textual summary as well!
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As the United States military marches further into the age of networked warfare, data networks and the mobile platforms to distribute and access them will become even more important.
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Licensing
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The European Union’s open source licence, EUPL, is to be revised, aiming to make it compatible with the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 and other licences. A public consultation begins today on Joinup, with the publication of a first draft and a background document on some of the proposed changes.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’ve seen an unbelievable interactive projection or a mind-blowing piece of generative video art, odds are you’ve come across openFrameworks, an accessible programming platform that has helped create projects like Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald’s Faces, a real-time face-substitution project, the EyeWriter graffiti headset from F.A.T. Labs, and Chris O’Shea’s playful, Monty Python-inspired Hand from Above, among many other works of technology-based art. What makes openFrameworks and similar coding tools like Processing so powerful in an artistic context is that they are open source, free for any artist to use and hack to their own ends, and are made by artists, for artists.
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Open Data
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The Commission has launched an Open Data Strategy for Europe, which is expected to deliver a €40 billion boost to the EU’s economy each year. Europe’s public administrations are sitting on a goldmine of unrealised economic potential: the large volumes of information collected by numerous public authorities and services. Member States such as the United Kingdom and France are already demonstrating this value. The strategy to lift performance EU-wide is three-fold: firstly the Commission will lead by example, opening its vaults of information to the public for free through a new data portal. Secondly, a level playing field for open data across the EU will be established. Finally, these new measures are backed by the €100 million which will be granted in 2011-2013 to fund research into improved data-handling technologies.
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Open Access/Content
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Instagram has undergone several big changes lately, most noteably taking away the ability to quickly view Instagram photos on Twitter. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom described this update during the LeWeb Internet conference in Paris as Instagram’s evolution, and explained that the company would naturally change as it grew.In an article from Business Insider on December 6, Alyson Shontell calls for Instagram to make a bolder move: to publish all photos under Creative Commons unless the photographer specifically changes their publishing license.
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Open Hardware
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Standards/Consortia
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Protecting sensitive electronic information in different situations requires different types of cryptographic algorithms, but ultimately they all depend on keys, the cryptographic equivalent of a password. A new publication* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aims to help people secure their data with good keys no matter which algorithm they choose.
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The W3C announced today that the HTML5 definition is now complete. This is a big deal for the web and all of us that work and use it…but it’s not end of the story.
The definition is not a final standard for HTML5, though it is an important milestone. HTML5 will not likely be a full bona-fide standard until mid 2014 according to what Jeff Jaffe told me during a conference call today to talk about HTML5.
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The problem on Reddit is the quality: They’re drowning in crap.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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…Paul Scott, who was a nationally syndicated columnist. He was illegally wiretapped by the agency in 1963…
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The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.
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Washington, Dec 27 (Prensa Latina) Investigations around the attack against the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, resulting in the killing of the US ambassador and another three officials, have exposed a secret CIA armed wing.
The CIA security force had been created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington and was so far an almost unknown defensive arsenal.
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The National Rifle Association and its allies would have us believe that the solution to this epidemic, itself but a sliver of America’s overall gun violence, is to put firearms in the hands of as many citizens as possible.
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In a potentially precedent-setting decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a Guild lawyer’s challenge to military spying on peace activists can proceed. The ruling marks the first time a court has affirmed people’s ability to sue the military for violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights.
“This has never been done before,” said NLG member attorney Larry Hildes, who is handling the case. “The U.S. government has spied on political dissidents throughout history and this particular plot lasted through two presidencies, but never before has a court said that we can challenge it the way we have.”
The ruling is the latest development in the lawsuit, Panagacos v. Towery, first brought by Hildes in 2009 on behalf of a group of Washington state antiwar activists who found themselves infiltrated by John Towery, an employee at a fusion center inside a local Army base. Fusion centers are multi-jurisdictional intelligence facilities which house federal and local law enforcement agencies alongside military units and private security companies. Their operations are largely secret and unregulated. There are currently 77 fusion centers in the United States.
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Cablegate
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The Swedish Pirate Party wants a probe of banks’ role in the blocking of donations by Visa, PayPal and others
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Julian Assange has said, he is willing to answer questions in the UK relating to accusations against him, or alternatively to go to Sweden provided the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the US where plans are ready for him to be tried for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuse to give such assurance. Mr. Assange is right to be concerned about the dangers of extradition to USA. American media has reported that the US Justice Department and the Pentagon have been conducting a criminal investigation into ‘whether wikileaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the groups release of government documents including possible charges under the espionage act’.
Mr. Assange’s only crime is that he embarrassed the USA and powerful governments with Wikileaks release of thousands of US state department cables and of the video footage from an apache helicopter of a 2007 incident in which the US military appears to have deliberately killed civilians, including two reuters employees, revealing USA’s Crimes against humanity. For this truth telling he has inherited the wrath of the US government, and has been targeted in a most vindictive way – as has American soldier, pt. Bradley Manning, currently undergoing a military Court hearing for allegedly leaking classified documents to wikileaks. Pt. Bradley Manning has been subjected, according to formal UN investigation, to ‘cruel and inhuman’ treatment whilst held in solitary confinement in US prison for nine months. The American government has admitted to the torture of Pt. Bradley Manning, one of their own soldiers.
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Two Swedish transparency sites that have supported WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been abruptly shut down at the request, seemingly, of the Swedish defence forces.
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Despite Crippling Financial Blockade And Other Efforts To Set Them Back, Publishers Of Biggest Leaks In Journalistic History Press On
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Many documents produced by the U.S. government are confidential and not released to the public for legitimate reasons of national security. Others, however, are kept secret for more questionable reasons. The fact that presidents and other government officials have the power to deem materials classified provides them with an opportunity to use national security as an excuse to suppress documents and reports that would reveal embarrassing or illegal activities.
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“Swedish (government) officials got the impression that they were working under direct orders of the CIA” – Mike Ölander’s reportage “CIA demanded that Sweden would expand cooperation”, Expressen, 6 December 2010
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In the third part of our recent interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson, Kristinn talks about a Russian measure to form an independent banking mechanism that was the subject of diplomatic cables from the US and was susequently killed, US spying and information mining and profiling, communications analysis, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Kristinn makes the revelation that the entire foreign apparatus of the US was activated by banking concerns to stop the Russian measure.
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The best way to arrive at the truth is to first figure out what the media are trying to sell you. The people at the top are aware of all the ongoing scams and revel in them. One must understand that people at the top don’t read the MSM or turn on the telly to find out what’s happening in the world – they have their friends for that. They read and they turn on tellies to find out what’s being sold to you.
It’s an informal setup. People who don’t perform are shut out. It’s a cruel game up that high. But they’re all in for a penny and a pound and they rarely go away willingly.
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Despite the pressures from the United States and other pro-western governments, the Republic of Ecuador has granted political asylum to Mr. Assange. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has hindered the free movement of Mr. Assange even though the same government blocked the extradition to Spain of the late Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Pinochet was wanted for the murder of 94 Spanish citizens and many other charges of torture and rape against his own people. Although Julian Assange is an Australian citizen, the Australian government has refused to protect him and has instead accommodated Swedish Ambassador Sven-Olof Petersson, who supports rendition and torture. This is unacceptable in a free, democratic and transparent society.
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Here is a man who has dedicated his life (possibly literally) to defend the right to expose corruption in high places…
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Finance
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A constant conservative charge against President Obama is that he is inherently anti-business. However, businesses keep defying the storyline by making larger and larger profits, rebounding nicely out of the Great Recession.
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If you are as cynical as I am, I know you are not surprised that Facebook paid Irish taxes (via Tax Justice Network) of about $4.64 million on its entire non-US profits of $1.344 billion for 2011.* This 0.3% tax rate is a bit below the normal, already low, Irish corporate income tax of 12.5%.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who became nationally known for severely limiting the union rights of teachers and other public employees, has indicated support for arming those same school officials who apparently cannot be trusted to collectively bargain.
As Americans search for answers and policy solutions in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Gov. Walker has apparently decided that the problem is not too many guns — it is that there are not enough.
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When George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February, Zimmerman — who considered himself a neighborhood watchman — almost certainly thought of himself as a “good guy.”
In November, 45-year-old Michael David Dunn likely thought he was playing the role of the “good guy” when he confronted a vanload of teenagers for playing their music too loud, then fired nine shots into their vehicle after claiming he saw a shotgun barrel. 17-year-old Jordan Russell David was killed, and neither Jordan nor anyone else in the van had a gun.
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Censorship
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…just in time for Christmas. In better news, the Government has decided against ‘default on’ internet blocking
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Five days ago, the Department for Education announced a very reasonable approach to child protection online. Their plan was to make sure parents are supported in making easier, more informed decisions about how to keep their children safe online.
This was based on a consultation that focused on evidence, engagement with stakeholders and soliciting to the views of parents and industry.
But today the Prime Minister is singing a different tune. His article in the Daily Mail today suggests he is taking a more restrictive line, and that he wants to see ‘default on’ filtering. This has created a lot of confusion, seemingly just to satisfy the Daily Mail’s editorial whims. Are they really to be the drivers of Internet policy?
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Privacy
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Current interception and surveillance laws are simply not built for a digital age which is seeing exponential growth in the production of personal information. More data than ever before is available.
The draft Communications Data Bill is a dangerous fudge of a solution that should not simply be redrafted and brought back to the table. A fundamental review of surveillance law is the only justifiable basis for any future legislation. This should examine how pervasive, personal and intrusive data now is and what powers over its collection, storage, and use would be proportionate and appropriate.
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Civil Rights
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FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.
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The US Senate has voted to approve the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, which will authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans for counter-terrorism purposes for another five years. The bill extends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008, which granted retroactive immunity for wiretaps and email monitoring under the Bush Administration and created a framework for future warrant-free surveillance as long as one party is located outside the US and terrorism is suspected.
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Nearly 12,000 people over the past five years have wrongly been branded criminals or seen irrelevant or inaccurate information disclosed during criminal record checks.
* 11,893 people successfully challenged CRB results in past five years
* £1.98m paid out in redress
* 4,196 people challenged information held by a local police force
* 3,519 people given the wrong person’s criminal record
* 4,088 found inaccurate information or potential wrong identity on police national computer
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Oregon resident Julie Keith was shocked when she opened her $29.99 Kmart Halloween graveyard decoration kit to find a letter, folded into eights, hidden between two Styrofoam tombstones.
Coming all the way from unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China, the letter written mostly in English read,
“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”
The letter went on to describe 15 hour work days, no days off, and pay at 10 yuan per month ($1.61 US Dollar) if any. It also described the 1-3 year average forced labor terms without trial, and the large amount of Falun Gong practitioners in forced labor, a banned spiritual group.
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Acting CIA director Michael Morell has publicly disputed the accuracy of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, Zero Dark Thirty.
The movie, which examines the 10-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, features scenes of torture and depicts actual CIA agents involved in the hunt for the founder of al-Qaeda.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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2012 was surprisingly good for Canada. The decade long revision of the Copyright Act was completed; most parties agree that it was a good compromise. Amendments included: expanding fair dealing to include parody, satire, and education; protecting consumer behavior that reflects the conduct of consumers in a digital age; maintaining the independence of ISPs and the privacy of subscribers; implementing a cap on damages for non-commercial infringement ($5,000 is the maximum but a judge can award as little as $100; this is intended to discourage file-sharing lawsuits); and, creating an exception for non-commercial user-generated content. To be sure, all the exceptions come with the expected provisos, and all are subject to the overarching ban on any circumvention of technological protection measures. It still strains credulity as to why Canada in 2012 adopted a prohibition first conceived in 1996; but, given the fierce opposition by rights-holders, the fact that the user allowances were not rolled back in committee speaks well. Michael Geist gives a good synopsis of the new Act here.
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Open Rights Group intervened in the case on behalf of the Internet users potentially affected by the Order. We were able to do so because of the extraordinary generosity of the supporters who donated to our appeal.
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PRQ, the infamous ISP created by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm of The Pirate Bay, has been nuked by PayPal. After a fruitful partnership lasting three years, PayPal decided to ruin their relationship with the so-called “bullet-proof” hoster by freezing the company’s funds for up to 180 days. On PayPal’s advice PRQ opened a second account to get by while the dispute was being sorted out, but then without warning PayPal seized those funds too.
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Yesterday the Government announced its plans to implement the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review – namely, how it will put in place various exceptions to copyright that permit more uses of copyrighted work. Here is the detail (pdf).
These were reforms recommended in the report by Professor Hargreaves in May 2011. (See our write up from the time in Comment is Free). After that, the Government announced its intention to implement his proposals and ran a three month consultation on the plans. You can read our response to the consultation here, and a full list of responses is available at the IPO website.
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Send this to a friend
12.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Some Windows users that I know (not power users in any sense) state that they do not migrate to Linux because, as they say, “the OS is different”. Of course, they never consider that they had to adapt from XP to Vista and then to 7…(One wonders what they will say after buying a computer with Windows 8).
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While my wife’s migration was very successful, mine was not a smooth process. But I know that is bound to happen when you change OSs.
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The term “naked PC” is used by Microsoft Corporation to refer to a personal computer that is sold without any operating system preinstalled on the hard disk. The term was coined for its dramatic value and as a means for creating the impression that it is evil to sell computers without operating systems because they might be used for so-called software piracy (i.e., copying or using software in violation of its license).
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“Canonical is kicking off the New Year with a bang, and launching a brand new Ubuntu product. We’ll be holding an exclusive event hosted by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, to give full details of what we believe is the next generation of cross platform operating system.”
Usually press releases get redirected to /dev/null, but a guy dropping off a brown envelope full of non-sequential £20 notes little bird told us that this is going to be interesting. However, we don’t know any more than this.
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Mandrake Linux was my best early experience with Linux, way back in the last millennium, back when literal floppy disks roamed the Earth and 4 megabytes of RAM was riches. Back then you could buy boxed sets of Red Hat Linux in stores, and Red Hat was popular as a desktop Linux. Red Hat had good printed manuals, but it had one difficulty: it did not support as much hardware as Mandrake, and I had a lot of trouble getting 3D acceleration on my video card. Red Hat didn’t support my fancy Promise 66 IDE controller, so I had to connect my hard drive directly to the poky old 33Mhz controller on the motherboard. It didn’t like my sound card either.
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And we are on the verge to cross yet another year and blog posts regarding the year-in-review have already started to pour in on the web. The blog post, one of that kind, round-up top Linux (and open source) stories of 2012.
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2012 was a very quiet, but very successful year for Linux. How successful? The most popular end-user operating system is now Linux.
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You can write shell scripts in mere seconds, hack the kernel in your sleep and perform other feats of Linux wizardry—but can you teach?
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One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about it, Linux is probably the only OS that has a unified code base. For example, Microsoft and Apple use different kernels for their desktop and mobile OS versions (Windows NT/Windows CE and OS X/iOS). Two of the reasons this is possible on Linux are that the kernel has many abstraction layers and levels of indirection and because its build system allows for creating highly customized kernel binary images.
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Desktop
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Bodhi can best be described as a lightweight Linux flavor coded to run across a wide range of hardware.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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In the first part of our three-part interview, Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds talked about how he got into computing, Raspberry Pi and the “free software” movement.
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Support for touch-enabled devices traditionally hasn’t been high on the list of Linux kernel developers, who tend to focus their energies on more traditional computing platforms. But if all goes according to plan, future versions of the open source operating system may come with significant touch support built in, according to developers. And if that happens, it could have major implications throughout the channel.
Linux, of course, already powers a lot of touch-enabled devices, from Android phones to the Ubuntu Nexus 7 tablet. But the software that makes touch work for those platforms was generally developed on a case-by-case basis, since the Linux kernel itself lacks integrated support for touch-ready hardware.
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The Linux Foundation has released a video of what it sees as the 2012 highlights for Linux – but the presence of decent video-creation and editing software running on Linux does not seem to be one of them.
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Linus Torvalds has integrated code to support the F2fs filesystem into the Linux kernel’s main development branch; this branch is currently used to prepare Linux 3.8 (1, 2, 3). Introduced in October, F2fs is a filesystem that was mainly developed by Samsung employees and is specially tailored for storage media that use flash memory chips and a rather simple Flash Translation Layer (FTL) – for example USB flash drives, memory cards (eMMC, SD cards, …) and the storage media that are included in cameras, tablets and smartphones.
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The two new features for Linux 3.8 with EXT4 are Inline Data and SEEK_HOLE/SEEK_DATA support. Ted Ts’o mentions that the inline data feature allows small files or directories to be stored within the in-inode extended attribute area. This inline data assumes that the file-system uses inodes that are 256 bytes or larger.
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Graphics Stack
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After yesterday publishing the 2012 AMD Catalyst Driver Year-In-Review, here is the recap of the NVIDIA Linux graphics driver progress made in 2012.
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Applications
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Besides the clean, well-organized interface, you get lots of nice features that make listening easy. One such nicety is an intuitively created playlist that retrieves information from Last.fm and what song titles from your collection that you most frequently play. I like the way the display shows me information about the currently playing song.
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Lightworks, a professional non-linear editing solution built by EditShare LLC and used for mastering videos, will be making an appearance on Linux, in the first quarter of 2013.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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THQ says it is evaluating the costs and benefits of Linux, following consumer feedback on the Humble THQ Bundle.
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Edmund McMillen, the developer of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, has shared some interesting information about Canonical’s practices, at least for his games.
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Desktop Environments
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A few weeks back, we talked about KDE and Gnome in daily life, and how they fared from the applications perspective, when you pit programs developed for one environment against those created for the other. We learned a valuable lesson that technology and practicality do not necessarily go hand in hand, nor that you can easily draw a clear line between the two. Finally, we discovered the joy of freedom, in that you can mix software, regardless of whichever desktop you choose, and get the best of all worlds. Now, the big question is, does the same set of conclusions apply when you try to administer your box? Well, to answer that, we will check how easy and intuitive it is to manage Linux when you choose KDE or Gnome as your platform.
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Normally, at the end of the year, I do my usual Linux distro showdown. But I have never really done a proper desktop environment comparison, regardless of which operating systems run them, even though in the Linux world, quite often, it is hard to separate the two. Well, it seems to me, this is a great opportunity to give you a comprehensive head-to-head clash between the leading desktop environments that bless our distros.
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Enlightenment 0.17 (a.k.a E17) is the next generation of graphical desktop shell from the Enlightenment project. When you first run it and get past the initial setup wizard, you should end up with a desktop not unlike the above. It is a very traditional UNIX/X11 style desktop, because that is what E primarily is and attempts to be, BUT with a bunch of bells, whistles and modernities that were never there, as well as a different core design philosophy. There seems to be some obsession with Window Manager vs. Desktop Environment debates. It doesn’t much matter what you call it. It manages windows. It does compositing. It manages files. It launches applications. It handles UI and system settings.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Fifteen years ago Matthias Ettrich started the KDE community. On 14th October 1996 he wrote his famous email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc group on Usenet. He called for other programmers to join him to create a free desktop environment for Linux targeted at end users. Many, many people joined. Thousands of developers wrote millions lines of code. We did 90 stable releases of our core set of applications alone, not counting all additional stuff and the thousands of 3rd party applications.
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Today the Krita project announced the formation of their new foundation Stichting Krita Foundation. Though officially part of the KDE project, KDE e.V. can not sponsor development. The new Krita foundation will help with development and more.
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This is the second part of the report on the joint Kate/KDevelop development sprint that took place in Vienna from the 23rd to 29th of October this year. It provides an overview of the changes in KDevelop. For more background and details about what happened with Kate during the sprint, make sure to read the first part of this report.
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Earlier Ubuntu developers managed to create a installer for Nexus 7, but those builds also showed that Unity, in its current form, is not ready for touch-based devices. KDE has an edge here as it has optimized versions for netbooks, desktops and touch-based devices so a user doesn’t have to make any compromises as one has to do with other DEs or shells which are focusing more in touch-based devices only.
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GNOME Desktop
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Our current login performance is pretty bad. We do way too much I/O and processing. If you write an application or service that automatically starts at login, please take a long hard look at how much extra work you’re doing on a cold start. It might seem small, but it all adds up very quickly with the rest of the applications competing for resources, as you can see in the bootcharts I made for that bug report:
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Like everybody in the Linux community, I have at last been dragged kicking and screaming onto Gnome 3. We had no choice; everything on our Linux desktops has been slowly failing from being so badly aged. My old Fedora release experience has so far been rescued by the graces of “fallback mode” on the laptop, while the desktops were still running old Ubuntus. So I had dodged being affected by Gnome3 so far.
At the same time, Gnome now has the entire Linux desktop world at gunpoint: The majority of software that runs on Linux requires Gnome and GTK. I’ve tried running everything on alternatives – Gnome has a desktop lock-in going on right now that is worse than anything imagined by Apple or Microsoft in their kinkiest dreams. Do without Gnome, and your printers will break, your Bluetooth will refuse to connect, none of the weather applets will talk to your desktop, your videos will freeze, and taxi cabs will suddenly pass you by in the snow without stopping for you.
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The core applications in GNOME version 3.7.3, which has now been released, now include gnome-shell-extensions. These have long been under development under the GNOME project umbrella and enable GNOME 3′s control centre to be modified so that it behaves more like a traditional desktop environment. ‘Alternate Tab’, for example, makes the alt+tab key combination switch between windows, rather than between applications, , whilst ‘Apps Menu’ adds a menu reminiscent of the old Gnome 2 menu. Extensions such as these mean that GNOME 3.8 will also have an built-in mode, selectable when logging in, to replace fallback mode. The fallback mode currently offers a “classic” interface, but will be dropped in version 3.8.
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When I last posted about Every Detail Matters, 27 detail bugs had been fixed by 9 contributors. About two and a half months later, 43 bugs have been fixed by a total of 12 contributors. We’ve made impressive progress, and the results are already making themselves felt. Testing the latest and greatest GNOME Shell, things definitely feel more polished and better executed.
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GTK+, a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that provide a complete set of widgets, suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites, is now at version 3.7.4.
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One of the plans I had during my vacation time was to try Chakra Linux. This latest release was named “Claire” to honor the memory of Claire Lotion, a KDE developer whose untimely passing away made the KDE community grieve.
I finally had the opportunity today. I really liked it. I also learned certain things, too.
Let’s see what happens when one boots the Chakra Live DVD. A screen asking you to select your language greets you. I had seen it before. Back then, I thought that the language selection was rather scarce.
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The Cinnarch distribution is an interesting mix of technology. It combines the Arch Linux distribution, which features a rolling release approach to package management, with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Cinnarch is a fairly young project, still in its beta stage of development, so it should be approached with a degree of caution. The distribution is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds and can be downloaded in two flavours: a full live CD (670 MB) with the Cinnamon desktop or a minimalist CD (190 MB). Whichever edition we select the installer will perform a net-install, downloading packages from an updated repository rather than from the CD. While this means we will be up to date right from the start, it also means a successful install depends on having a reliable Internet connection and any re-install will likely take longer than if we were installing from local media.
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Free and open source software didn’t invent Live Disks (external CDs, DVDs, or flash drives from which you can boot a computer). That honor, according to Wikipedia, goes to FM Towns OS in 1989.
However, no other segment of IT has made Live Disks so much a part of their culture as the open source community.
Most major Linux distributions use Live Disks for installation because they are a quick way to test-drive an operating system without changing a computer’s setup or endangering its contents. When using a Live Disk, at worst, you may need to reset the BIOS temporarily to boot from an external device, and users have to set about deliberately to alter files on the hard drive.
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With all the wide variety of free and open source software out there, it can sometimes feel like an insurmountable challenge to download and try each and every one that interests you.
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The lightweight Arch-based distro uses Openbox to help make it blazing fast without losing too much functionality
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First place: Linux Mint 13 Maya
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Mac OS X always deserves a special mention in the operating system world, for being the most attractive (arguably) distro around. It is kind of an aspiring product for almost everyone I know – they want to own a Mac at the end of the day! However, exorbitant price and seeking value for money at times limit our aspiration to own a Mac. But, don’t worry! Linux can help you create our own Mac! And those who don’t know how to customize Linux, there are three distros to help you out.
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If you’ve heard of Open Source software, and you’re thinking about giving it a try, you may be wondering why Dream Studio claims to be the best creative system available, when there are so many other options.
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This one is well overdue, but the time has finally come. In my defence, I installed CRUX 2.7.1 as far back as summer, but a hard drive failure wiped it all, and since then 2.8 was released. Just as well, so we’ll be testing the latest version 2.8. CRUX is a DIY distribution that is perhaps less known than others, but it is the inspiration behind the mighty Arch Linux as the distribution Judd Vinet was originally using. I would point to this dated interview if you want to know more about the origins of Arch.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I just found an interesting problem in the way Mageia 2 handles typing Asian languages with iBus, the Input Method Editor (IME) that is configured easily during the installation of the distro.
For work reasons, I need my computers to be able to handle Japanese (and for fun, Korean and Thai). You can do this with iBus (a more modern IME) or SCIM. I chose iBus because you can install it during the installation process of Mageia.
I had not seen this situation before because I have installed iBus only to computers that have an English keyboard. However, since my main desktop computer has a Spanish keyboard, when I opened LibreOffice, I discovered that iBus was preventing the keyboard to display the accents (“tildes”) of Spanish and those of French.
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This video has been shot at the OW2 Conference and shows Michel Catan (Innovation Cluster Manager at Mandriva) and Gaurav Parakh (Partners manager at Mandriva) discuss Mandriva’s general strategy and its research & development activities.
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Gentoo Family
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Back in mid-November I wrote about Gentoo developers looking at forking udev after being unhappy with its direction under systemd leadership. The Gentoo project has now announced eudev as their fork.
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Red Hat Family
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Bloomberg’s Dina Bass reported, “Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of Linux operating system software, rose in late trading after reporting third-quarter sales that exceeded analysts’ estimates and saying it plans to buy cloud software company ManageIQ Inc. Red Hat rose 3.8 percent after the company yesterday reported sales of $343.6 million in the period that ended Nov. 30. Analysts had on average projected sales of $338.1 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Excluding certain items, profit was 29 cents a share, meeting the average projection compiled by Bloomberg.”
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Gunnar Hellekson has many awesome-sounding job titles.
He’s the chief technology strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where he works with government departments to show them how open source can meet their needs, and with systems integrators to show them what they can do to provide the government with what it needs.
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Debian Family
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Paul’s got a great Debian setup across a lot of interesting hardware. I appreciated this interview, though, because Paul makes the argument that although software should be free (as in freedom), there are often technical limitations/complications with that free software that create a barrier-to-entry for less sophisticated users. Unfortunately, with Linux, the price of freedom is often technical ease. It’s nice to hear a Debian developer contemplating the issue. It’s not an easy fix, but it is a fixable problem. Especially with developers like Paul on the case.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’ll start off by making a few things clear. Firstly my family PC runs Ubuntu 12.04LTS its great. Ive had no problems whatsoever with the distro and from my young lad playing Tree Fu Tom on the CBBC’s website, to handling of all the tasks I put to it there are no complaints. None at all.
I’ve spoken to Jono Bacon (Canonical Community Manager) on a number of occasions, he’s open, friendly and above all makes time for people (he certainly made time for myself and Dr Schestowitz when he was a guest on the TechBytes show). I supported the integration of Amazon into the Ubuntu search, I personally had no privacy concerns, citing that myself and my wife are regular customers of Amazon and saw it as a feature that would be useful to us.
[...]
If you start dictating (or sorry, advising) people on how to advocate your product, then its not really advocacy any more is it?
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Spying was probably “not the idea behind the Unity tool,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. “I think they are struggling to become a nice ‘normal user’ OS, with some helping, commercial tools.” Nevertheless, “it’s mandatory for a GNU/Linux distribution to warn the user, and easily allow them to switch on/off such a tool. I hope Canonical rethinks that tool.”
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Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distro for desktop users, moves to the cloud with the new Ubuntu 12.10, codenamed Quantal Quetzal.
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Unity isn’t the only desktop environment that Ubuntu has. There are many and as they said, Unity is a shell for Gnome but it is not Gnome-Shell. I have been using Unity for a few years now and figured I would have a bit of a play with Gnome Shell for a bit. It is very easy to install, on Ubuntu clicking here: gnome-shell will with a bit of luck set it up for you. At the lightdm login screen you can then select gnome shell from the list of desktops and you are done.
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There will always be things that we differ on between ourselves, and those who want to define themselves by their differences to us on particular points. We can’t help them every time, or convince them of our integrity when it doesn’t suit their world view. What we can do is step back and look at that backdrop: the biggest community in free software, totally global, diverse in their needs and interests, but united in a desire to make it possible for anybody to get a high quality computing experience that is first class in every sense. Wow. Thank you. That’s why I’ll devote most of my time and energy to bringing that vision to fruition. Here’s to a great 2013.
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“Save the date: Jan 2 — Ubuntu set to disrupt a new ecosystem,” read the urgent message. “Ubuntu will announce a brand-new product.” All lips were maddeningly sealed at the Ubuntuplex, of course, but the same couldn’t be said of the blogger crowds camped outside in the hopes of learning more detail.
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s been just a few weeks since the launch of Linux Mint 14 “Nadia,” but already the project behind the popular distribution has been making plans for its next release.
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Linux Mint 14 was recently released. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and offers the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments. This review covers the Cinnamon version, I will try to get a separate review up for the MATE version soon.
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The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer board with a built-in processor, memory, and input and output. But if you want to use it as a full-fledged computer you need to connect some storage, a keyboard, display, and other peripherals.
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Phones
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A Finnish startup created by former Nokia executives is hoping to break through with their fledgling mobile operating system.
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The nice thing with a strongly-growing giant industry is, that all the numbers keep growing, eh? The unfortunate side effect is, that almost any number you bother to memorize, becomes obsolete within months… But lets do this again. All major mobile numbers, now updates for End of Year 2012:
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Android
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open-source community. Brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth and the Canonical team, Ubuntu for Android project has started getting a lot of attention lately. The main reason for this is that Canonical is attempting something unique by merging two of the most popular open-source platforms around. Hoping to provide a bridge between the desktop and mobile, Canonical is heavily banking on this project.
That said, there are many doubts and speculations whether this project will succeed or not. Ubuntu and Android are established brands; however, whether their marriage will be a triumph or a disaster remains to be seen. We know that you too are excited about this project as much as we are and hence we’ve come up with a list of features and expectations for the upcoming project.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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U.S. retailer Costco has slashed its prices for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 tablets. It’s not known whether the sale will be ongoing or if it’s just a short-term event; but at $280 and $170 respectively, these tablets are a “must have” for those who’ve been on the fence.
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Ten years ago, if you were working on an open-source project, you probably hosted it yourself. At the most, your team may have used SourceForge for storing your project code. But today, there is only one name in open-source software project repositories: GitHub.
Throughout 2012, GitHub consistently played host to the biggest, most complex and most useful open-source projects. Relative newcomers to the open-source scene, such as Twitter’s Bootstrap, Raphael and Phusion Passenger, are all gaining popularity with both users and developers adding to these projects. But what is it about GitHub that makes it different from SourceForge?
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It’s been a good year for Linux and open source. As we wind it all down, I wanted to take a moment to have a little bit of fun with traditional holiday song — “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” It’s a lighthearted way to wrap up some of the things open source (OS) has given us this year.
So, forget the partridges and lords leaping, here we go!
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Gabriella Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. She recently released a new book titled “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking” after having spent three years working and living with hackers in the San Francisco Bay area. The community she chose to study was the Debian Linux community. In this interview with Linux.com, Coleman shares her perspective on the role of Linux in hacker culture and what it really means today to be a hacker.
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I do my best to support the people that use my open source projects. I don’t always do things right, I don’t always respond in a timely manner. Sometimes I just have to walk away from an issue or request and let it die from lack of attention. But I do my best, and I take the time to provide meaningful answers whenever I can. I get a lot of “thank you!” notes from people because of this, and every now and then I get a comment like “best open source project leader, ever” or “you do so much more to help, than any other oss project leader i’ve dealt with.”
The first few times this happened, I was genuinely shocked. The next few times, I began to think “wow, I’m doing something great, here.” But then the last few times it happened, I started moving back in to “shocked”. I started wondering why people were reacting this way. Am I really doing something special? Am I going above & beyond? I don’t think I am… but maybe I am?
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The global economic slowdown has of course been mostly bad news for most people, business verticals and individual companies.
But it’s important to remember that recessions can also be good as they flush out the old dead wood and help us to re-position for leaner and more economically efficient times ahead.
Can we take this reality forward then and apply it to open source?
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Bryan Lunduke wrote a piece for Networkworld… or something like that. I’m NOT going to link to it because I don’t want to encourage more page hits for such lunacy. I heard the article when I listened to the latest Everyday Linux podcast. I strongly recommend that so check it out if you haven’t already. One of Montana guys is one of the hosts. They don’t always get it right, but they do make me think.
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If you run a website, or have build a software application, you’ll need to have a certain amount of interaction with your users. One of the best ways to facilitate that is through forums. Forums not only allow seamless communication between users and developers, they also let companies provide support for their users. On the Internet, you’ll find millions of forums dedicated to various issues. From teenage problems to geriatric care, forums bring people with similar tastes or issues together and let them communicate effortlessly.
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Events
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Organising Australia’s national Linux conference is hard work. At times, given the vagaries of the climate Down Under, the best laid plans of men go awry and there is double work – as there was in Brisbane 2011, when the floods hit and the event had to be be shifted from one venue to another.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Firefox outfit has published a round-up of its achievements this year, including what it says is proof that ‘there is a real user appetite for choice on issues of web privacy’.
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SaaS
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It used to take a warrant, a sheriff’s deputy, and an axe to chop down your door and stop your business dead. But the cloud makes it so much easier.
Today, if you rely heavily on a public cloud service provider, your entire business infrastructure could be taken offline without judicial review, useful explanation, or workable recourse, simply because a customer, a politician, or even a competitor claims there are issues with your — or your customers’ — activities.
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Databases
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For years, MySQL has been the dominant open-source database management system (DBMS). Recently, MariaDB, the MySQL fork created by MySQL’s founder, has been making in-roads and Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most popular Web site, is shifting over from MySQL to MariaDB.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It’s taken a strong political decision to overcome the lock-in inertia of ICT procurement in Bern. Will the policy succeed?
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CMS
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With more than 2650 reported active sites just since the August beta release, you’d be in good company giving Drupal Commerce Kickstart a try. And, now that the world isn’t going to end, what better time is there to launch that online store you’ve always wanted?
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BSD
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The developers of PC-BSD have released version 9.1 of their FreeBSD-based Unix distribution for desktop PCs. Version 9.1 of FreeBSD has yet to be officially released, but it appears that the ISO images for the FreeBSD release are queued up on the official server and may just be waiting for an announcement to be made.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Paolo Bonzini said in a message, in which he also announced the release of a new version of GNU sed, that he had decided to sever his links with the two software initiatives due to technical and administrative decisions with the Free Software Foundation and its head, Richard M. Stallman.
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Paolo Bonzini, the maintainer of GNU sed and GNUgrep, has announced the release of version 4.2.2 of the GNU sed and used the moment as an opportunity resign from his position on both projects. His decision to lay down the responsibility. after eight years of holding the post of GNU sed maintainer, and three on GNU grep, comes in the wake of a controversy over the control of the name and code base of the GnuTLS library, another member of the GNU Project.
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Activists representing the Free Software Foundation disrupted an event at the Microsoft retail store in Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, urging passers-by to shun the software giant’s Windows 8 operating system in favor of free software alternatives.
The demonstrators, wearing Santa Claus and elf hats in the spirit of the holiday season, arrived at Boston’s Prudential Center shops during a planned “TechTots” children’s event at the Microsoft Store, accompanied by a man dressed as a gnu, the FSF’s horned mascot.
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Thursday, December 20th, 2012 — Today, FSF activists visited a local Microsoft store during its “Tech for Tots” session to wish passersby happy holidays with copies of the Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8. The activists were accompanied by a gnu (free software’s buffalo-like mascot) and sported Santa hats in the spirit of the season. Their action drew smiles from mall-goers who had expected to see costumed people giving gifts, but not quite like this.
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The problem I am seeing, and it is a serious problem in my opinion, is the constant use of the term “free software” when “open source” should be used. This is obviously not a recent problem, and I really cannot recall when was the first time I noticed this happening. But maybe because I am much more involved with (real) free software movements now, I have the strong impression that this “confusion” is starting to grow out of control. So here I am, trying to convince some people to be a little more coherent.
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Project Releases
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Our campaign to stop Restricted Boot hit a big milestone this month.
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Public Services/Government
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I have been commenting few times the evolution of the Italian “Code for a Digital Administration” – Codice dell Amministrazione Digitale (CAD) in Italian – either on this blog or when interviewed by journalists, and to date nothing has really happened.
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Licensing
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The H talks with Bradley Kuhn, noted GPL compliance enforcer, about whether there should be more people patrolling the GPL perimeter and what tools and techniques a potential protector should take into battle.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang has announced he is planning to build a DIY laptop from openly documented hardware in an effort currently codenamed “Novena”. Open hardware means that there are no licensing fees for circuit diagrams and specifications. Whilst the open source movement has been well established in the software field for some years, open hardware is still something of a rarity in the PC component field. The project plans to make a system that works with both open source hardware and software.
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Programming
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In 1991, I’d just gotten my first real programming job for two reasons: nepotism, and a willingness to write code for $12/hour. I was working as a contractor to a blood testing laboratory, where the main development job was writing custom software to handle, process, and do statistical calculations on blood testing results, primarily for paternity testing.
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The PROSE team are developing a detailed specifications for an online software system that can support EC ICT teams to carry out open software development work. Better known as a software forge we here in PROSE want to understand teams’ intentions for using forge platforms and the types of new features that you think should be available via a forge.
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Every day 10,000 new users sign up for GitHub, an online repository for open source projects that already has 2.8 million members.
Those users create 25,000 new repositories each day, adding to the 4.6 million already on the site.
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Standards/Consortia
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For those who haven’t heard, Instagram is an online photo-sharing service, like Flickr. Some months ago Instagram was purchased by Facebook, and several days ago they announced that they would begin selling users’ photos to advertisers (with no compensation to the users). As many of their users are professional photographers, this caused a storm of outrage.
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Instagram now says it was all a huge mistake, that users own their pictures and there’s no way Facebook is going to sell them to anyone… but the company hasn’t yet revealed alternate legal language, which they should have been able to cobble up in an hour or two. The underlying problem of mean-spirited, self-serving, over-reaching terms of service is still with us at Instagram and almost everywhere else. Their revised terms of service were stupid and couldn’t stand. Let’s hope in their next attempt to grab rights (because that’s what this whole thing was about and probably still is) Instagram and Facebook treat their users fairly. Until they do, most of what’s below still stands.
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Dear businesses that post us marketing material through email,
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Health/Nutrition
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The details of that scandal are laid bare in a recent book by Frederick Kaufman, Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food. As it turns out, we are already acquainted with this story’s villain: Wall Street. There, bankers and investors are investing unprecedented amounts in commodities such as wheat. And when wheat speculation on Wall Street drives up the price of real wheat everywhere, people around the world can no longer afford to eat. Kaufman details exactly how this has happened in a story of traders, long-standing commodities markets meant to stabilize the price of food, and corruption.
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If the food movement really wants to improve the food supply, it needs to follow the money instead of wasting its time on labels.
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The Transportation Security Administration is deciding to determine, once and for all, whether the so-called “nude” body scanners being deployed at airports nationwide are nuking passengers at unacceptable radiation levels.
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Security
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The targets were on relatively modest connections (think SOHO grade), so their pipes were flooded by the traffic and the people who were relying on that connectivity were not getting much network-related done. The sites weren’t totally offline, but just about anything would time out without completing and life would be miserable. I’ve made a graph of the traffic available here, in a weekly view of that approximate period that nicely illustrates normal vs abnormal levels for those networks, generated by nfsen from pflow(4) data.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Since last year 2channel, Japan’s largest internet forum, has been subject to pressure from Tokyo police. According to a January 2012 post by Avery (2channel Fights Police Pressure, So-Called “Viral Marketers”), the whole police investigation began after Fuji TV aired a sensational news report about drug dealers making posts on the site. The news report was aired only a few days after 2channel users helped organize street protests condemning Fuji TV’s alleged anti-Japanese bias.
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As it turns out, the film as a political statement is worse than even its harshest early critics warned
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Cablegate
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This is the first time that citizens can offer their financial support to WikiLeaks, since donation processing for the organization was shut down by extra-judicial government pressure on Bank of America, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Amazon.
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In December 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing a selection of leaked U.S. State Department cables through the New York Times, the Guardian, and other traditional media, opening a deep crack in the thickening wall of secrecy that has been forming worldwide around the internal processes of democracy since 9/11. They helped catalyze the “Arab Spring.” They struck a blow for the right of citizens everywhere to know what is being done in our names. And they thoroughly freaked out the U.S. Government, sending it into a security spasm of Cold War proportions.
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Of course Exhibit A in the case against payment censorship has been the shameful economic blockade of Wikileaks, where the intermediaries that were assisting people in giving money to Wikileaks refused to do business with them, based in part on not-so-veiled threats from members of Congress.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This announcement has since led to the magical thinking that we can somehow take ownership of this future “extra oil” not 8 years from now, but rather…. today. In other words, the additional 3 mbpd (million barrels per day) of crude oil and the 1 mbpd of NGL (natural gas liquids) that the IEA forecasts for 2020 have suddenly been booked into the “readily-available” column and are already being factored into U.S. growth projections. That is premature, to say the very least.
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Finance
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NETWORK EQUIPMENT VENDOR Cisco reportedly has hired Barclays to find a buyer for its Linksys business.
Cisco bought Linksys back in 2003 to get into the consumer networking business and the firm has put out some good products, most notably the WRT54G wireless router that was a favourite with technology savvy punters. Now Cisco is looking to offload Linksys as it continues to pull back from the consumer networking market.
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The New York Stock Exchange called time on two centuries of independence on Thursday, agreeing to an $8.2bn takeover that will hand control of the icon of American capitalism to an Atlanta-based energy trader.
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But history is written by the victors, and the past generation has seen the banks and financial sector emerge victorious. Holding the bottom 99% in debt, the top 1% are now in the process of subsidizing a deceptive economic theory to persuade voters to pursue policies that benefit the financial sector at the expense of labor, industry, and democratic government as we know it.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Representative Tim Scott (R-SC), who was a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as a state legislator and was voted into Congress in the Tea Party wave of 2010, has been nominated to replace Jim DeMint in the U.S. Senate.
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You know you are not going to be seeing the brightest bulbs on TV defending America’s loose gun laws the weekend after the mass slaughter of children. Even the NRA had gone dark, taking down its Facebook and Twitter accounts and refusing to respond to reporters.
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Censorship
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On Friday (14 December), UK government announced that it will not force internet providers to block online pornography. Despite high-profile campaigns by Claire Perry MP and the Daily Mail newspaper to engineer a moral panic, sense has prevailed.
Index opposed the proposals on the basis they would have led to the filtering legal material by default; ergo censorship. Index also had serious concerns that child safety would be used as a criteria to filter a range of content beyond pornographic material. Under the Daily Mail’s proposal, only consumers over the age of 18 who had completed a “strict age verification check” would be able to remove such a block.
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Privacy
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The National Security Agency’s Perfect Citizen program hunts for vulnerabilities in “large-scale” utilities, including power grid and gas pipeline controllers, new documents from EPIC show.
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A loophole that permits software companies to sell cyberstalking apps that operate secretly on cellphones could soon be closed by Congress. The software is popular among jealous wives or husbands because it can continuously track the whereabouts of a spouse.
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In 1987, the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached Columbia University librarian Paula Kaufman with a request: Keep an eye out for commies.
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Civil Rights
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The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has published interim guidelines on when it is appropriate to prosecute people for communications they send on social media. If the objective was a return to common sense policing, issuing twenty-five pages of guidance has risked complicating the situation even more.
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The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.
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This is the second part in a series of posts about the importance of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). CDA 230 limits the liability of a number of Internet services that host user-generated content.
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Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on how a little-known government agency—the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)—got the keys to government databases full of detailed, personal information of millions of innocent Americans. Using the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with officials, the Journal obtained emails and other information detailing how the massive new spying program, which the Attorney General signed off on in March, was approved by the White House in secret—over strenuous objections from government privacy lawyers.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Web may be less permanent than we once thought. According to archivists, after two years, 27 percent of social media, pictures, video, and blog posts vanish. For many who regret oversharing, this may be welcome news. But for historians eager to document the tweets that inspired the Arab Spring or who want a snapshot of how the Web looked on September 9, 2001, the impermanence of the Internet presents a challenge.
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DRM
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The number of people who are reading printed books is declining. But reading isn’t. According to the Pew Research Center, we’re buying Kindles and Nooks and reading more e-books at a rapidly growing rate.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve talked in the past about patent system supporters’ somewhat blatant cluelessness to China’s clear recognition that its own growing patent system is the perfect tool for backdooring protectionism and trade barriers, without making it look like protectionism and trade barriers. I sometimes can’t tell if this is just because those system supporters are so focused on the narrow “more patents must be good” argument that they’re missing the big picture, or if they truly don’t understand what’s happening. Either way, we’ve got the latest example, as the folks at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a part of the UN, are celebrating the fact that China’s patent system has received more applications than any other patent system this year.
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Raft of measures announced by business secretary Vince Cable to tackle copyright infringement
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Copyrights
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One of the top executives of the US-based anti-piracy outfit Digital Rights Corp has submitted a patent application that promises to turn piracy into profit. The patent describes a system where Internet users caught downloading will receive a notice from their Internet provider along with a request to pay a small fee to the affected copyright holder. Pirates who refuse to pay risk the ultimate punishment of being disconnected from the Internet.
There are many ways copyright holders approach the “online piracy” problem. Some copyright holders prefer to do it through innovation, others prefer educational messages, warnings or even lawsuits. Another group is aiming for lots of small cash settlements.
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As a new session of the U.S. Congress convenes in early 2013, don’t expect lawmakers to rush out a new version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.16.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[I will be away until after Xmas]
Contents
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With barely two weeks left in 2012, the inundation of “year-in-review” blog posts, podcasts, videos and–if we’re really lucky–songs has begun. This week, the Linux Foundation did its part by releasing a video celebrating major accomplishments over the last year in the Linux channel. What did the Foundation think were the most important developments? Read on for a look.
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Kernel Space
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A new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel was announced on Saturday. This new scheduler is based upon the controversial “Brain Fuck Scheduler” scheduler but attempts to support multiple run-queues for better CPU scaling.
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Graphics Stack
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With the recent improvements to MSAA Gallium3D support, if you have been wanting to benefit from anti-aliasing with the open-source Gallium3D drivers but your game/application doesn’t have options to toggle the MSAA level, it’s now a bit easier to configure.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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NetGore is a free, open-source 2D online RPG engine written in C#. It is cross-platform and supports both top-down and sidescroller games. NetGore comes with a large amount of the fundamental MMORPG components built in which allows you to focus more on designing your game.
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The open-source GemRB engine is an open implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine to handle running the game assets from Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. GemRB is GPL-licensed and works on Windows, OS X, BSD, Android, iOS, and other platforms while being nearly feature-complete with the original closed-source engine. Various improvements over the original Infinity were also made like providing touch input support.
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THQ, the American game company responsible for a great deal of computer games and was the company behind the recent controversial Humble Bundle, is currently evaluating the market for bringing their titles to Linux.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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After finishing with all the work this term, including written reports, oral reports in meetings, and two rather risky academic presentations in a Congress (described here by Megatotoro), I can take some free time at last.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is stopping at nothing when it comes to promoting their latest operating system, Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), and the Windows platforms from Microsoft seem to be the perfect target.
When Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) launched, Canonical used Windows 8 as a target practice and actually asked the users to avoid the pain of owning a Windows 8 operating system.
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Raj Mathur (aka OldMonk), one of the leading figures of the Indian FOSS (free and open source software) community, passed away on 12.12.12. The cause of his death was a massive heart attack. This is the second major loss for the Indian FOSS world another notable figure, Kenneth Gonsalves passed away in August this year.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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2012 was an incredible year for Mozilla. We mobilized. We did a better job than I have ever seen us do identifying the places where we needed to have impact, and then we focused and delivered. There’s a lot for us all to be proud of in 2012; I’ve gathered up a few of my favourites.
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Project Releases
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The last several years have found us in the midst of more catastrophes than we could ever, in our worst nightmares, have dreamed of. We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political constitutional principles in place since the 17th century.
Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the new order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK our government’s lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War – the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention – have been deliberately avoided or ignored.
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Opponents of President Morsi say they were detained for hours and beaten while security forces chose not to intervene
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The captors of a journalist in Syria are threatening to execute her tomorrow (13 December) unless their demands for a $50m ransom are met.
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The head of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin resigned following an investigation that found conflicts of interest in a study on the risks of natural gas drilling.
Raymond Orbach, 78, resigned as director of the institute last month, the university said in a statement released today. The study’s lead investigator, Charles Groat, 72, also retired from his faculty position, according to the statement.
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Group says organised crime syndicates are ‘outgunning’ governments, leading to sharp rise in elephant and rhino deaths
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Throwing the nation over the climate cliff will make our current fiscal challenges look like a minor bump in the road.
As the highly scripted stagecraft of the presidential campaign fades from the headlines, there’s a new show in Washington. ”Fiscal Cliff” stars President Barack Obama, who urges Republicans and Democrats to agree on a ”grand bargain” that would soften the economic shock of the impending across-the-board tax and spending cuts. But that bipartisan handshake would be nothing to celebrate.
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The government has lifted restrictions on the controversial practice of fracking, a method of extracting gas from shale rock, giving a green light to drilling that could produce billions of pounds worth of gas.
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Finance
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You may have heard that Afghanistan has something of a corruption problem, with billions of dollars flowing out of the country annually even as the US and international community pour money into reconstruction efforts. Instead of curbing the exodus of illicit cash, however, the Afghan government is apparently making it easier to smuggle money out of the country, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
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The political friends of America’s rich aren’t aiming to convince us that higher taxes on the nation’s highest incomes make no sense. They’re just hoping to keep us distracted.
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The Federal Reserve made a big announcement today, promising to keep interest rates near zero until either the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent or the inflation rate rose above 2.5 percent. The Fed had already promised to keeping interest rates near zero until 2015, so why was this announcement important?
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Republican members of Congress expressed dismay on Wednesday about the prospect of reaching a deal with the White House to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis before Christmas.
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The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.
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Majority of ministers have not paid into national coffers beyond contribution taken from state salaries, alleges tax report
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The New York Times reports this morning: “State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system. … While the settlement with HSBC is a major victory for the government, the case raises questions about whether certain financial institutions, having grown so large and interconnected, are too big to indict.”
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A former UBS and Citigroup banker and two others had their homes raided early on Tuesday morning and were taken in for questioning as part of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the manipulation of Libor interest rates.
The intervention came amid mounting speculation that the Financial Services Authority is preparing to take action against a number of banks in relation to Libor setting.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Investigative Fund and The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.
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Censorship
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This TV program is a breakthrough. CNN IBN, a leading English-language channel, started a campaign for the freedom of Sanal Edamaruku. “Does a rationalist deserve to be jailed for questioning a religious miracle?”, asked firebrand moderator Sargarika Ghose on 4th December in CNN IBN’s flagship program Face the Nation, calling upon the public to take a stand. The response was impressive: people from all walks of life expressed unequivocal support for Sanal, on camera, on twitter and on facebook. The wave keeps running… And 87% of the viewers who participated in a public internet ballot answered the question “Are blasphemy laws out of place in a secular democracy?” with a clear Yes! The blasphemy law should go.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned that Israeli airstrikes targeted individual journalists and media facilities in the Gaza Strip between November 18 and 20. Journalists and media outlets are protected under international law in military conflict.
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Here’s a somewhat curious story: The Russian TV channel NTV showed a performance by the rock band “Leningrad”, which is famous for incorporating many Russian expletives in its lyrics. The expletives were censored by beeping, which is the usual and expected practice, comparable to beeping on words like “fuck” in American TV. The surprise in this performance, however, was that the names of president Putin and prime minister Medvedev, who were mentioned in the song, were censored the same way. The name of the the Church of Christ the Savior, which recently became famous as the stage of Pussy Riot’s notorious performance, was partly censored as well, although the name “Pussy Riot” itself was not censored.
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Security will be rigid at the African National Congress’s (ANC) elective conference in Mangaung. Most sessions are closed to the media and the party has said it will use phone-jamming technology to prevent interruptions. Journalists who stray where they shouldn’t will be given short shrift.
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Privacy
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A recent swell of digital-medical data collected on devices outside of a doctor’s office is raising some thorny questions: Who owns the rights to a patient’s digital footprint and who should control that information? WSJ’s Linda Blake reports.
The small box inside Amanda Hubbard’s chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.
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Depending which browser you’re using, you should see a little lock or some such in the address bar. On the right are readouts from (top down) Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You can click on that readout to get some information on the privacy/security settings.
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Civil Rights
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Computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the US was blocked, will not face charges in the UK, bringing to an end a 10-year legal battle.
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Action star says Hong Kong residents ‘scold China, scold leaders, scold anything’ and calls for regulations against dissent
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After the attempted Christmas Day bombing of 2009, a Senate investigation concluded that the National Counterterrorism Center had received information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be underwear bomber, but had failed to query other government agencies about him. This allowed him to board his flight to the U.S. and nearly detonate his bomb. President Obama responded by ordering all agencies to send their leads to NCTC, which was ordered to “pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads.”
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DRM
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DRM is becoming less and less prevalent these days as more companies are realizing that the backlash from crippling the purchases of paying customers far outweighs any perceived prevention of infringement. It’s not a wholesale conversion, but new DRM-free converts are appearing more frequently, including some surprising holdouts.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We’ve argued, for a long time, that just railing against “middlemen” misses the point. There are always middlemen. But not all middlemen are created equal. The distinction, that we’ve discussed multiple times, is the difference between enablers and gatekeepers. That is, historically, many middlemen came to power because they were gatekeepers. If you wanted to do something — be a musician, write a book, sell a new product — you effectively had to get “approval” and support from a gatekeeper who had access to those markets. Being a gatekeeper gave them enormous power, such that the gatekeepers often became central to the market, rather than the people/companies they were working with and it also allowed them to craft ridiculous deals that were incredibly favorable to themselves, at the expense of those they were working with. That, of course, is why there tends to be so much inherent antipathy towards traditional gatekeepers.
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Copyrights
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France’s Hadopi graduated response approach, also known as “three strikes”, occupies a special place in the annals of copyright enforcement. It pioneered the idea of punishing users accused of sharing unauthorized copies of files, largely thanks to pressure from the previous French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who seems to have hated most aspects of this new-fangled Internet thing. Sadly, other countries took up the idea, including the UK with its awful Digital Economy Act, New Zealand, Spain and, more recently, the US.
Hadopi hasn’t been going too well. Despite putting out some dodgy statistics, the Hadopi agency hasn’t really been able to show that the three-strike approach is doing anything to reduce the number of unauthorized downloads. In the two years that Hadopi has been running, only one person has been brought to court — and he was innocent, but fined anyway.
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I’m excited that my friend Jerry Brito has pulled together an edited collection of copyright reform essays by libertarians (and one from a pair of libertarian-leaning conservatives) called Copyright Unbalanced. Several recent developments have suggested growing sympathy for copyright reform on the political right. Jerry’s book promises to be a handbook for free-market copyright reformers, pointing to some of the most serious problems with the present system and explaining how Republicans could capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties.
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12.15.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With barely two weeks left in 2012, the inundation of “year-in-review” blog posts, podcasts, videos and–if we’re really lucky–songs has begun. This week, the Linux Foundation did its part by releasing a video celebrating major accomplishments over the last year in the Linux channel. What did the Foundation think were the most important developments? Read on for a look.
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Linux Rising. As The Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson notes, this was the year that Red Hat achieved $1 billion in revenues, and Android adoption outpaced the iPhone. You can watch The Linux Foundation’s “What a Year for Linux” video here.
Top Linux Trends. Datamation has a good look back at some of the top trends in Linux for 2012. These included the rise of crowdsourcing, diversity in desktop environments, Ubuntu’s “Corporation vs. Community” schizophrenia, and interfaces that adjusted for multiple device form factors.
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With the year coming to an end, here’s a look again at the prominent Linux news from last year (2011) and whether the milestones reached then still have an impact today.
Effectively this comes down to a redux of the most popular Linux news from last year and an update on each of the topics as it stands today. The most popular Linux stories on Phoronix from 2012 will be shared at the end of December.
The two most popular Phoronix news stories last year came down to the same topic: ending of the Linux 2.6 kernel and moving to Linux 3.0 (Say Hello To Linux 3.0; Linus Just Tagged 3.0-rc1 and Linus Talks Of Linux 2.8 Or Linux 3.0; Ending Linux 2.6). Well, there isn’t too much to add to this particular topic for 2012. Linus Torvalds continues releasing new Linux 3.x major kernel releases and after enough of them in a few years time he’ll move to Linux 4.x. This is just much cleaner than sticking to Linux 2.6.x as was done for so many years.
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Server
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Microsoft haters, Apple haters, Linux Haters, time for you to put all this nonsense to end once and for all with regards the real world of business!!
So, here’s the scenario, and it’s up to YOU to provide the solution… if you can of course…..
A small office, with 5 computers all running the same desktop operating system.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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With word this week that there’s some performance improvements for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver to be found with the Linux 3.8 kernel as a result of the a-synchronous DMA engine support, some very early benchmarks of the “drm-next” code were done from five different AMD Radeon graphics cards. In extreme cases, the open-source graphics driver can deliver 10x higher OpenGL frame-rates with the experimental kernel.
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Are you an Android kernel developer? If yes then we have got great news for you. Those who develop kernels for Android devices know how frustrating porting a kernel to a new device has always been. Well if you share that notion and would like this process to get easier than it is right now, you will be pleased to know that Linus Torvalds has announced ARM support in Linux.
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During the last couple of weeks I took some time to try out the next step in virtualization tech: nested virtualization. I set the target to add to our research infrastructure a server that was capable of managing multiple layered virtualization with the aim to learn something about the current status of KVM development regarding this particular feature, while checking out the relative performance levels and finding out if managing a host such as this and its virtual siblings through our own oVirt implementation was a viable option.
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The PowerPC feature pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel is significant in that it’s the first release beginning to introduce support for IBM’s next-generation POWER8 processors.
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The FUSE module, which allows for file-systems to be run from user-space, can now process direct I/O a-synchronously. This a-synchronous direct I/O can lead to very noticeable performance improvements for FUSE-based file-systems like ZFS.
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Graphics Stack
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A new Gallium3D driver is in the works, supporting the integrated graphics chips of the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge generation in Linux-based operating systems. Older integrated video chips won’t be compatible with the new driver.
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While the Intel 830GM and 845G chipsets were first introduced more than one decade ago, their graphics driver support has been botched for much of the time. As of today though, Intel Linux driver developers think they have taken care of the longstanding stability issues with this now ancient hardware.
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Applications
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Lightworks, the professional-grade non-linear video editor from EditShare that’s been ported to Linux, will have a public beta release before the end of the next quarter.
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Mobile application development is the process by which software is created for handheld devices. This article focuses on tools which help developers create applications for mobile phones. The purpose of application frameworks and libraries is to enable developers to spend their time on the creative and interesting part of development, alleviating the repetitive overhead associated with common development patterns.
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Proprietary
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Novosoft LLC, an international software developer, announced the release of an update to their flagship product Handy Backup. The new version expands the list of cloud storage options and moves toward a cross-platform solution for Windows and Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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War For the Overworld is the Spiritual Successor of Dungeon Keeper series, Made by dedicated Dungeon Keeper fans from Keeper Klan. They Formed Subterranean games a team formed of professionals, Modders and Enthusiastic individuals, to recreate and improve on the old and beloved DK formula!
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Linux is no longer the red-headed stepchild of PC gaming.
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I like it. I like it a lot.
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It seems that the Humble Botanical Bundle was originally referred to as “Humble Indie Bundle 7“. The games mentioned in this article are not accurate, rather the result of a drunken Google session and a “Jump To Conclusions” mat. Our apologies.
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Valve’s been talking about implementing its digital distribution platform, Steam, onto Linux for quite some time. It looks like the organization is finally realizing those plans.
Today, through a closed mailing list, Steam announced that Steam for Linux is ready to go into beta, and it will go live for beta testers next week. At launch, Steam for Linux will include a library of over 40 games, includingSerious Sam 3, Team Fortress 2, and Killing Floor.
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Desktop Environments
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This beta release of E17, LUCKY RUBBER DUCKY, has a much better name than what was originally proposed.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Amarok team has released the beta version of Amarok 2.7 which is available for testing. The team has invited all users to test this beta so the final release should be available before 25th December. With this version Amarok is introducing two brand new features.
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More than a year ago I started an experiment: to bring KDE Education to the kids in Kindergarten.
Now my son was starting exactly at the same time his own adventure in Kindergarten, so I jump at the opportunity and suggest to the educators to have a period of testing. They accepted and I installed a Kubuntu 11.10 on an old PC, the Kindergarten bought a 22″ Touchscreen, and I also installed the first alfa version of Pairs (selfcompiled) that I was working on.
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ownCloud, the free and open source cloud solution, will be getting a client especially for the KDE Plasma Desktop soon. Sebastian Kügler, one of the KDE developers, announced the development of the KDE client on his blog recently.
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Ubuntu this, Fedora that, Mint the newest Linux darling– it’s as though all those other hundreds of Linux distributions don’t exist. Let’s throw caution to the winds and seek out new distros, and boldly go where we have not gone before. Here are three I’m thinking of installing on my test machine and torture-testing this weekend.
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There’s no denying 2012 has been a fruitful year for Linux distributions in general, but something about it has also seemed to favor the rebirth of distros we hadn’t heard from in years.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Deep down, I was hoping that PCLinuxOS 2012.08 might rise again…
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Ever since the month of September, Mandriva is renewing its entire products and solutions portfolio. The next product to be unveiled this month is the Mandriva Business Server. A few words were hinted in the press as well as to our strategic partners and customers.
Today we would like to lift the curtain on some aspects of the upcoming Mandriva Business Server. In a few words, Mandriva Business Server is complete Linux-based server platform aimed primarily at the SMB and public sector market. Mandriva Business Server is however not just another Linux server distribution. From the first moment in the installation to the regular maintenance and management tasks Mandriva Business Server offers its users with easy and beautiful management interfaces allowing them to configure and deploy services from the Mandriva Business Server in a seamless and fast way.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has added new photo functions to its Ubuntu One cloud storage service. After users log in, the Ubuntu One web site now automatically displays thumbnails of all photos found in their cloud storage in a new “Photos” section. Users can browse the photos or display them as a slideshow.
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Our LoCo Teams are a wonderful part of the Ubuntu community. They provide a fantastic place for Ubuntu users to meet other users locally and enjoy Ubuntu together either online or in person.
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Ubuntu 13.04, scheduled to be released April next year is in high pace of development currently. While a alpha release has been published for most other Ubuntu based distros, Ubuntu will only release a single beta before the final release.
This release is targeted to improve integration in various mobile devices and will also run on some tablets like Nexus 7. Also, for developers, this will be the first release that will be shipped with an Ubuntu SDK.
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The enterprise desktop is ripe for change. With support for Windows XP coming to an end, it’s time to find a better way.
This ebook is about that better way. It’s a short, easy-to-read guide to why Ubuntu is a better choice than Windows for the majority of enterprise desktops today.
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Next generation Pis could come in at $20 price point, but existing devices to be shipping until 2020.
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One of the classic dilemmas in embedded Linux development has been whether to do it yourself (DIY), rolling your own distribution, or invest in a soup-to-nuts solution from a commercial supplier like Wind River or MontaVista. The DIY approach, which involves cherry-picking and aligning kernels and components from open source repositories, has been eased over the years with an increasing number of board support packages (BSPs) and more up-to-date components provided by semiconductor vendors and open board projects.
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Phones
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Android
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Reportedly, the Yuga will employ a Samsung Exynos 5 quad-core processor, 3GB RAM, 128 GB storage, a 16-megapixel camera, and a 3,000 mAh battery. Oh, and let’s not forget that this one has been tied to a 5-inch 1080p HD display as well. Still not sold? It’s allegedly dust-proof and waterproof.
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Munich finally migrated its 12000th PC. We are so relieved that the trolls no longer pronounce Limux a failure and there’s a little matter of profit, besides.
Dell has expanded its relationship with Canonical selling GNU/Linux in more than 1000 stores in China and India and Walmart in Brazil sells more GNU/Linux desktop PCs than that other OS.
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The pursuit of business sustainability and innovative change does not have to originate from any one, single source. It can generate from within your own company at the ground level, from the customers you service to your suppliers. Often the least recognized resources can be the greatest source of information, which can make a significant difference.
[...]
Evidence supports the need for executives to step outside the confines of traditional business methods and leverage the creativity of its key business stakeholders. Supporting an open innovation approach to business sustainability offers stakeholders the opportunity to become engaged in the future of a business. By recognizing that key stakeholders have a vested interest the success of the company, sustainable leadership can create openness to new ideas that promote business success and innovative ideas.
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One of the pillars of the Indian FOSS Community passed away this week. Known for his humor, his uncompromising honesty and his generosity in sharing FOSS knowledge with like-minded individuals. His sudden passing after a massive heart attack has shocked and saddened his friends across the FOSS World.
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Events
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Magnolia, creator of the open source content management system (CMS) has announced its first ever “Magnolia Amplify” active learning event to be held March 6th-8th at the Mondrian South Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It’s already abundantly clear that 2013 will witness a rise in prominence for open source gaming, what with players like Valve and Ouya poised to leverage new open source platforms. Now, Mozilla is stirring the pot with a hackathon taking place simultaneously in London and New York this weekend, a part of the company’s Game Jam hackathon series.
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SaaS
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The OpenStack open source cloud platform started out with only two components: Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Nova originally came from NASA and Swift came from Rackspace.
Over the course of the last two years, OpenStack has expanded beyond NASA and Rackspace and has been embraced by many large tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, AT&T, Cisco and Intel among others. As OpenStack participation has grown, new capabilities have been added, including most recently the Cinder block storage project and the Quantum networking project. Cinder and Quantum both debuted in the recent Folsom release.
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Databases
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Back when Sun Microsystems was setting, some of the programmers who had been involved with the popular and well-known open source MySQL database started a fork of the project called MariaDB.
The new project was led and named by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the original developer of MySQL and one of the founders of the eponymous company that Sun acquired. After leaving Sun, he formed a company in his native Finland — Monty Program AB — to host development of MariaDB and made an open offer of employment to any MySQL committer. As a result, a formidable corps of developers gathered at Monty Program.
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Couchbase has been working on a new type of NoSQL database the melds both key-value and document data models.
It’s an effort that began with the merger of CouchOne and Membase back in 2011 as the two companies combined to build a new joint product. Couchbase has since moved beyond its core Apache CouchDB roots though it still benefits from them.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Make a one-time donation to help us make your voice for software freedom heard. Please support us at whatever amount feels right to you. Every dollar helps us raise your voices one more decibel.
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Project Releases
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Suricata from the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), which is an Open Source Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Engine, has been updated to version 1.4.
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Programming
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he soon-to-be-released LLVM 3.2 compiler infrastructure will expand upon its coverage of processor support and CPU capabilities.
Some of the noteworthy improvements to the LLVM 3.2 processor/hardware support includes:
- Minor code-generation improvements for x86 and x86_64.
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Science
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Security
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Japanese police are looking for an individual who can code in C#, uses a “Syberian Post Office” to make anonymous posts online, and knows how to surf the web without leaving any digital tracks — and they’re willing to pay.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Nearly half of Britain’s top-secret military drones deployed in Afghanistan have crashed
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Suit over domestic surveillance will reveal state secrets, say DOJ lawyers.
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But a senior administration official tells CNN that Rice will not be chosen for the position.
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In a letter to President Barack Obama, Rice voiced concern over an unnecessary and prolonged vetting due to the incessant criticism she experienced over the Benghazi, Libya, incident…
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The European Court of Human Rights has issued an historic judgement on the case of Khaled el-Masri, the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a militant named Khalid al-Masri.
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The CIA is having trouble keeping its secret agents off the internet. First, it allowed the White House to publish a photograph of the man behind the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. And now the identity of the woman who runs its “Global Jihad Unit”—and who has a long (if pseudonymous) history of being associated with some of the agency’s most disastrous boondoggles—has been published online by two documentary filmmakers who sussed it out with the help of some “savvy internet research.”
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The subtitle for the collection, of course, could be Propping Up The Peacock Throne, as the events described herein deal with the U.S. support for the Shah, and for the government of Iraq, within which Saddam Hussein was gathering power in preparation for his formal takeover in 1979. These events led to, among other things, the Iranian Revolution that got dropped on Jimmy Carter’s head, and the incredibly savage Iran-Iraq War in which the U.S. backed both sides in some of the bloodiest realpolitik in the nation’s history. Just a cursory glance through the 978 pages reveals how tight the alliance between the U.S. and the Shah’s government, and how important Iranian oil was to the U,S, as a counterweight to the rising power of OPEC among the other oil-producing states in the region. One telegram from Washington concerning the Shah’s ambitious energy policy rings a little ironic, given what’s going on today.
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Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released the following statement on the NDAA:
“Today, this House will send the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to conference. Contrary to its title, the bill does not provide for the protection of the American people. It expands war. It further indebts our nation. It encroaches on basic rights with regards to indefinite detention. It eliminates the basic tenet that due process rights apply to everyone in this country – not just American citizens…”
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) angered many of his father’s supporters…
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Executives of US airplane manufacturing companies producing unmanned planes (drones) press the US White House to eliminate restrictions preventing to fly these devices in monitoring missions on the national airspace.
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Some of the most pressing air safety, security, cybersecurity, and privacy policy questions that must be addressed, policy questions that must be addressed, in order to allow for widespread domestic UAS operation under FMRA.
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Lawmakers across the United States will soon be eyeing the use of drones — unmanned aerial devices — for state and local police work. In the enthusiasm to deploy such devices, state lawmakers need to carefully consider the proper uses of drones in police work, firefighting, disaster relief and counter-terrorism.
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Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
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Cablegate
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The British have abandoned the idea of going into the embassy to take JAssange by force, a silly thing that would have dishonored them. More, this would have been a dangerous precedent for all the other embassies in the world. Mr Mélenchon explains that he is here to support the Ecuadorians, who have to withstand a big shock, while those who pretend usually protect human rights and freedom of press remain this time indifferent. The Ecuadorian are on a reasonable position, and don’t seek the arm wrestling at the contrary of the other.
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…former government analyst Daniel Ellsberg…
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Finance
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This is one of several, very interesting revelations from the GAI report on corruption within the Obama Justice Department. And remember, in our bought and paid for system, what you will read is completely legal.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) appears to be anticipating an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit, after multiple complaints challenging the “corporate bill mill’s” charitable status, based on documents recently obtained by Bloomberg News.
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“Meaningful action” has been thwarted, largely because of the power and wealth of the National Rifle Association (NRA). One of the key avenues it has used to exert its influence is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). For decades, the NRA has helped bankroll ALEC operations and even co-chaired ALEC’s “Public Safety and Elections Task Force,” where it secretly voted on bills alongside elected representatives. At ALEC’s annual meeting this summer, the NRA had the biggest booth at the convention in Salt Lake City and also underwrote a shooting event along with one of the largest sellers of assault weapons in the world.
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Censorship
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Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group welcomed the Department for Education response to their consultation on parental controls.
The response says that default filters and pre-filled forms encouraging filtering will not be pursued. Instead, parents will be asked to install filters and be given help to choose age appropriate settings.
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Google on Wednesday tweaked its SafeSearch setting and images search algorithm, significantly altering its search results: previously explicit searches have stopped returning explicit results. The ICM Registry contacted TNW to let us know that Search.xxx, the porn-only search engine, has seen a 50 percent increase in traffic during the last 24 hours.
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As online freedom comes under attack from big business and governments alike, Jennifer Granick assesses the legal landscape
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Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by any Palestinian resistance groups.
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Civil Rights
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With the post 9/11 rise of the leviathan national security state, the rule of law in the United States under the Constitution is increasingly rule by secrecy, surveillance and executive fiat.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Music industry group the BPI has threatened legal action against six members of the UK Pirate Party, after the party refused to take its Pirate Bay proxy offline. BPI seems to want to hold the individual members of the party responsible for copyright infringements that may occurs via the proxy, which puts them at risk of personal bankruptcy. Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye criticized the latest music industry threats and reiterated that blocking The Pirate Bay is a disproportionate measure.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.14.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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On Android you don’t bother which bootloader to load – grub or lilo, which DE to choose from – KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Blackbox (there’re a dozen others), how to set system initiation – systemd, sysvinit, innserv… how the sound and audio subsystems talk to the rest of the system, bla..bla..bla… Here these ugly system software work under the hood, users are unaware of it for a lot of good reasons. This is how the big G establishes order in an otherwise chaotic open source model of software development.
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LAMP-powered Light project needs $700,000 kickstart.
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The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will be the fourth keynote speaker at the 14th annual Australian national Linux conference, the organisers announced today.
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Kernel Space
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They look pretty nice, costing around $20 for a pair. Unfortunately, there is no way to order them online. Anyone from Poland can hunt for them at a Auchan hypermarket though.
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While there were some initial problems with Thunderbolt support on Linux, most of the early problems with the new technology have been worked out with recent kernel updates. Unfortunately, some problems remain with this high-speed I/O interface.
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The audio/sound pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel has been sent in and it features audio driver improvements, new capabilities, clean-ups, and more.
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Graphics Stack
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After being in development for the past year, AMD’s Radeon R600 LLVM back-end has been merged into the upstream LLVM code-base.
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It was just days ago that the R300 Gallium3D driver got HyperZ support fixed-up and was finally enabled by default for bettering the OpenGL gaming performance with the open-source Linux graphics driver. Now it looks like the newer R600g driver is getting into shape for properly handling ATI/AMD HyperZ.
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Applications
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While publishing this morning was a large Ubuntu 13.04 OpenGL desktop performance comparison using six desktop environments and five different GPU/driver configurations, to result in 30 different data points for multiple Linux games, also announced today were forthcoming Compiz performance improvements. To land soon will be a number of performance enhancements for the Compiz compositing window manager.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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RuneSoft, a company that specializes in porting games to Linux platform, has released Cultures: Northland real time strategy game on Desura.
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Clarification — It seems that the Humble Botanical Bundle was originally referred to as “Humble Indie Bundle 7“. The games mentioned in this article are not accurate, rather the result of a drunken Google session and a “Jump To Conclusions” mat. Our apologies.
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Much awaited role playing game Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition will be coming to Linux platform.
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Considering that it also has Steam Workshop support it will be easy to keep your games alive by easily accessing new mods, maps, game modes etc. I have already personally tested the “Aliens” mod for Killing Floor (based on the James Cameron film Aliens) and it’s pretty awesome give it a look here.
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Desktop Environments
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The Cinnamon Desktop is becoming more impressive with every passing update. This release is the product of over 600 changes. Linux Mint 14 is the first distribution to ship with 1.6. Cinnamon 1.6 gives users a more convenient workspace management interface.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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SpaceFM depends directly on bash, rather than just a general shell, so that custom commands and plugins are running in a well-defined, consistent environment. You can always use other kinds of script in SpaceFM, but the initial data integration is done with true bash.
SpaceFM Dialog, a built-in feature of SpaceFM which allows custom commands to integrate dialogs into it (along the lines of zenity or yad), is also designed to have a predictable usage. Same for the socket commands which allow you to tap into and alter the GUI as its running.
So overall, while SpaceFM may grow, or even its GUI toolkit or other key components may someday change, the goal is to provide a continuity to the user experience, and to honor the customizations the user has added. One big reason for this is that I am one of those users, and I don’t like having my stuff broken!
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My interest on Arch Linux is increasing with every passing Arch based distro review. Last week I used Bridge Linux and was fascinated by it. This week I spent considerable time in learning as well as using Archbang, another Arch Linux based operating system with Openbox window manager. It gave me performance comparable to Puppy Linux and I replaced my Lubuntu 12.10 installation with Archbang on my HP Pentium 4, 2.4 Ghz, 1.5 GB DDR RAM desktop. To say the least I am more than fascinated by its speed, versatility and ease of use.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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RPM fusion is a unofficial RPM repository which hosts some of the restricted software that Fedora developers dont want to ship. Also, it contains some non-free software like Flash which are not available in Fedora official repos. Fedora is available for ARM devices, but unfortunately, there was no RPM fusion repo for ARM, so users couldnt listen to MP3 and other restricted formats. But from now on, you can add the repo to get non free codecs.
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Having worked as operations chief for Delta Airlines (NYSE: DAL), Jim Whitehurst came to his role as CEO of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) with the belief that he’d give directions and they’d be followed. That’s the take Whitehurst himself shared in a recent forum.
But when he got to the open source company, he found that some of his orders were followed while others were not. “He joked that he told his wife that he thought he might have to fire many senior leaders due to insubordination,” writes Forbes blogger Peter High.
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Fedora
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Máirín Duffy blog today of a new Fedora magazine in the works for Fedora users and developers. The idea sprang from marketing brainstorming and a desire to revive Fedora Weekly News, or revamp it as a new online publication to promote Fedora. Two guesses what it run on…
Actually, Duffy said that the new magazine has been set up on WordPress blogging software on top of an OpenShift server. OpenShift is a platform as a service by Red Hat. She then explained briefly the mechanics of that for those interested. The skeleton is currently located at http://wp-fedoramag.rhcloud.com, but one could safely bet they’ll secure a better addy than that soon enough.
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Debian Family
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There’s no doubt that the Raspberry Pi is an amazing little PC, but its users continue to make up new ways to show the device’s might.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Single Board computers like Raspberry pi and BeagleBoard have found wide range of applications among DIYers. This post tells you how to install Ubuntu headless server on a BeagleBoard single board computer and then configure it as a File Server using Samba (almost like a NAS). BeagleBoard XM is an OMAP3 board and works very well an ultra low power file server for my LAN and serves all types of media to my HTPCs running XBMC and my Raspberry Pi powered digital picture frame. So here is how to do it.
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Flavours and Variants
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Nemo (the target version for Linux Mint 15 is Nemo 1.8), the default Cinnamon file manager should get some new features as well, like an Actions API, disk management (with Mintdisk integration), a file preview feature and UI improvements (which include sidebar selection, independent path bar, better looking breadcrumbs and more).
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Phones
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Android
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There’s a new crop of Android phones out there — and a new set of hidden shortcuts to make using your phone even easier. And even if you have an older model, I’ll share my favorite tools to get you the same functionality you would get with a brand-new device.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google recently introduced its first 10-inch Nexus branded tablet, the Nexus 10, which boasts a stunning 2560×1600 (300ppi) IPS display and a slim/light/comfortable design. This in-depth review examines the Nexus 10′s hardware and user interface, and compares the Nexus 10 both to its smaller sibling, the Nexus 7, and to its 10-inch Android tablet competition.
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Goldman Sachs reported late last week that Windows has gone from dominating 97% of the computing market to 20%.
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The city of Limerick, located in mid-west Ireland and, which at a population of about 110,000, is that country’s third largest city, has chosen Zentyal to migrate to an open source email solution.
Zentyal is an open source solutions provider based in Zaragoza, Spain. Zentyal is the company’s main software offering, a server platform based on Ubuntu.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla corporation has organized the Game on competition for web based games. The goal of this competition is to demonstrate the web as a platform for game development.
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Mozilla on Tuesday revealed that it is killing support for animated themes starting with Firefox 18. The company is blaming performance issues as the reason for the decision.
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Mozilla’s in-browser Firefox OS simulator has hit version 1.0, an important milestone in the race to launch day. The foundation and its partners are expected to start offering low-cost smartphones in select markets in the coming months.
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Back in November I ran a story that Mozilla added support for H.264 video to Firefox Nightly versions. Turned out that this was not the case after all, but a case of the NoScript plugin blocking the detection on YouTube’s HTML5 player site.
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SaaS
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OpenStack is a collection of open source software for building public and private Clouds. It can be used either by providers that want to deliver infrastructure as a service to customers or enterprises that want a private Cloud for on-demand, self-service provisioning of compute services for departments. The roots of the project, which launched mid-2010, lie in collaboration between NASA and Rackspace. Tristan Goode is the CEO of Aptira and the only Australian on the board of the OpenStack Foundation.
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Databases
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Oracle’s enhanced open source database will be ready for general availability in early 2013 and the company is working on a future version with a pluggable UI, more NoSQL options and revamped architecture for web and cloud computing,
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CMS
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Funding
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We have heard about crowd funding sites for software, games and sometimes hardware ventures too. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc are leading croud funding sites in the world today. However, the world missed a site just for Free Software. This is where BountyOSS fills the gap.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In this installment, I interviewed Kovid Goyal, the creator and lead developer of calibre, via email.
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Keep cozy this winter in our navy blue beanies with GNU embroidered in white on the side. They are 100% cotton, and the embroidered GNU logo is 2.16″H x 2.6″W. Pair the beanie with our hoodies in either the Free Software Free Society or GPLv3 designs, and you’ll stay warm this winter while representing free software!
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Licensing
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I have been a critic as well as an admirer of Creative Commons. Last year, here on opensource.com, I noted that the CC license suite, though inspired by open source licensing, was at odds with norms of libre culture licensing by embracing, under a single legal brand, form licenses that prohibit commercal use and creation of derivative works. The result, I complained, was “a general confusing dilution of the meaning of ‘openness’ in the context of cultural works” and confusion on the part of both authors and users of CC-licensed material. Creative Commons has recognized at least some aspects of this problem in the course of its work on the 4.0 license series. (For example, there has been an interesting recent proposal to relabel the controversial NC licenses with “Commercal Rights Reserved.”)
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The Open Streets Project should be your first stop if you’re interested in entering the open streets game. This collaborative project aims to help document Open Streets projects (so add yours to the map!), connect activists working on these projects, and provide them with the tools, resources, and facts to make projects a success. Check out their guide, click through examples of projects in communities everywhere, and reach out to learn about best practices and get help with challenges.
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Science
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ust copy its DNA. Specialized proteins unzip the intertwined DNA strands while others follow and build new strands, using the originals as templates. Whenever these proteins encounter a break — and there are many — they stop and retreat, allowing a new cast of molecular players to enter the scene.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi (above) and his family have been paid a settlement of more than £2m by the British government after they were abducted and flown back to Tripoli – allegedly with the help of MI6 – where he was imprisoned and tortured by the regime of Colonel Gaddafi.
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He was “beaten severely” by masked men, stripped, “sodomised with an object” and placed in a “nappy”…
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After a contentious closed-door vote, the Senate intelligence committee approved a long-awaited report Thursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.
The 6,000-page document, which was not released to the public, was adopted by Democrats over the objections of most of the committee’s Republicans. The outcome reflects the level of partisan friction that continues to surround the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques four years after they were banned.
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Thirteen anti-drone protesters were convicted of trespassing Thursday night, and five were sentenced to two weeks in jail.
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I’m amazed that so few Americans – most notably, so few liberals – have protested his secretive remote-control assassination program. Drones have killed roughly 3,000 people in Yemen and Pakistan, including collateral-damage civilians, but the actual numbers are secret. So is the process. We don’t know anything about the rules of engagement, how people wind up on Obama’s hit list, who reviews the evidence, and what criteria are applied to that evidence.
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Cablegate
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Some thoughts about Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing, which concluded this week.
Manning, of course, is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks and, at his trial in March, will be pleading guilty to certain charges while rejecting the military’s contention that he “aided the enemy” in doing so.
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The leaked cables released minutes of meetings held by political leaders with US government officials where they divulged sensitive information about the country and their respective parties.
Turning to another issue, Tomana vowed to continue prosecuting people arrested for allegedly insulting Mugabe saying the President was different from any ordinary citizen.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This is the case with the recent American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting in Washington, DC. Leaked documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal that ALEC’s anti-environmental jamboree was inundated with coal money and featured an Indiana regulator advising coal utilities on delaying US Environmental Protection Agency rules to control greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous air pollution.
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Censorship
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The countries had objected to calls for all states to have equal rights to the governance of the internet.
But the breaking point was the addition of text relating to “human rights”.
It marks a setback for the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which had said it was sure it could deliver consensus.
“It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must communicate that it’s not able to sign the agreement in the current form,” said Terry Kramer the US ambassador to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Wcit).
“The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years.”
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Civil Rights
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(NDAA), which would have allowed for the indefinite detention of Americans without charge or trial…
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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As we’ve been reporting, there’s been a movement underway in many countries to argue that something like Google News — which displays headlines, brief snippets and links to full news stories on newspapers’ own websites — somehow violates newspaper copyrights. This makes no sense logically, especially given just how much those same sites likely spend on “search engine optimization” to try to get better ranked in search engines. The only explanation for it that makes sense is the most obvious one: the newspapers are struggling to find ways to make money these days, and they see that Google is making a lot. Hence: come up with a plan to force Google to fork over some of that revenue. Of course, the very first to do this — years before Germany and France and others got into the game — was a group of Belgian newspapers who sued Google for sending them traffic. Amazingly, a local court agreed with the newspapers and told Google to pay up. Following this, Google removed those newspapers from its index, leading the newspapers to freak out and demand to be put back in.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.13.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sorry for the lack of updates. We’re manically trying to finish 1.5 issues before Christmas. But we just wanted to let you know that, to coincide with the launch of Google Magazines in the UK, Linux Format is now available on Google’s magazine store – £4.99 per issue, £3.99 with a rolling subscription or £44.99 for the year. As always, DVD images are freely downloadable from http://www.linuxformat.com/archives. Issue 166 (the zombie one) should also be available on the Ubuntu Software Centre.
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It’s also hard to ignore that this holiday season’s most popular gifts, like the Chromebook and Amazon’s Kindle HD, are all powered by Linux.
Part of the reason Linux is experiencing so much success is because of the network effect created by its collaborative development enviornment: Embedded engineers work on power savings for their devices; that same code is then used in the data center to lower power bills. The defense industry improves the real time capabilities of the Linux kernel and automakers benefit and add to it. Also, because Linux has no branding restrictions, Android (of the Kindle or a Chromebook) can be Linux without you knowing its Linux. This freedom allows companies to innovate at a pace that is simply unmatched.
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Desktop
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When we reviewed Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook, we didn’t think it was perfect, but we were willing to overlook many minor flaws in the face of its $199 asking price. Today, Slashgear unearthed an upgraded model—there’s an Acer product page that lists a $299 version of the C7 with a larger battery, 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB, and a 500GB hard drive instead of a 320GB model.
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Kernel Space
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On Wednesday, he severed a final tie with that box. He accepted a patch from developer Ingo Molnar that dropped support for Intel’s old 386 microprocessors, the brains of the DX33 system that Torvalds had purchased all those years ago. After a 15-year run, Intel stopped shipping 386 processors in late 2007.
In his notes explaining the patch, Molnar said that the patch “zaps quite a bit of complexity from the kernel” and that it has caused extra work for Linux kernel developers over the years.
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While the Loongson MIPS64 CPUs have been available for a while now as a Linux-friendly chip, they are still tough to find in the western countries. New benchmarks reveal that the ARM SoCs are becoming a much more compelling offer for those caring about performance.
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The ACPI and power management updates targeting the Linux 3.8 kernel were already submitted to Linus Torvalds this morning. There’s a whole lot of new work to look forward to when it comes to power management in this next kernel.
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Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. If this process is successful, the writeback to the swap device is deferred and, in many cases, avoided completely. This results in a significant I/O reduction and performance gains for systems that are swapping. The results of a kernel building benchmark indicate a runtime reduction of 53% and an I/O reduction 76% with zswap vs normal swapping with a kernel build under heavy memory pressure (see Performance section for more).
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Graphics Stack
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In prior years there was the i965g driver that was developed independent of Intel and was targeting an open-source Gallium3D driver for Intel’s newer chipsets. But unlike the i915g that was developed similar in nature, the i965g driver really never reached a working state and was ultimately removed. There is now a brand new “i965g” Gallium3D driver that is targeting support for Intel Sandy Bridge “Gen6″ graphics and newer.
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NVIDIA has released their first binary Linux graphics driver beta in the 313.xx series. The NVIDIA 313.09 Beta has bug-fixes plus new features to make for an exciting Linux gaming experience.
The release highlights for the just-released NVIDIA 313.09 Linux beta include display reprobing upon VT switching to X, unofficial GLX protocol support for new extensions, cursor bug-fixes, support for the GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension, improving the performance of glDrawPixels() command by up to 450%, a libnvidia-encode.so library fix, improving the performance of OpenGL frame-buffer object binds with Xinerama by up to 2000~3000%, and fixing performance issues when using some versions of HyperMesh with Quadro GPUs.
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As written about last week, X Input 2.3 is being worked on for hopeful inclusion into X.Org Server 1.14.
The big features to the X Input 2.3 update are pointer barrier events and barrier releases. This X Input update once again was largely developed by Peter Hutterer at Red Hat. For going through these new input features for the X.Org Server, he’s written a blog post describing pointer barrier events and barrier releases.
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With a patch sent to the Mesa development list on Monday, Marek Olšák has made another significant performance improvement to the commonly used R600 Gallium3D driver for AMD Radeon graphics cards.
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Applications
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Linux on the desktop is making great progress. However, the real beauty of Linux and Unix like operating system lies beneath the surface at the command prompt. nixCraft picks his best open source terminal applications of 2012.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released
CrossOver 12 for both Mac OS X and Linux.
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Today, the software company CodeWeavers has released a new version of the Windows emulation software CrossOver for Linux and Mac OS X. The new version is based on Wine 1.5.15 and now has a better integration with the desktop systems Unity and Gnome 3 and has a better support for transparent windows with an activated compositing manager.
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Games
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Perhaps someone is old enough to remember the original Lemmings game, a puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991. Originally developed for the Amiga, Lemmings was one of the most popular video games of its era, the basic objective of the game is to guide a group of humanoid lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In order to save the required number of lemmings to win, one must determine how to assign a limited number of eight different skills to specific lemmings that allow the selected lemming to alter the landscape, to affect the behavior of other lemmings, or to clear obstacles in order to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings.
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Back in August I wrote that a Linux port of the Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition game was being considered. There’s now word that a native Linux port of this game is indeed coming.
The year 2013 is looking to be the year of Linux gaming and Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition of Overhaul Games will be among the native Linux titles. Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition is a remake of the original Baldur’s Gate role-playing game and its Baldur’s Gate Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. The game was released last month for Windows while the Mac OS X port is expected this month.
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Valve is becoming quite comfortable with the state of their Linux activities so beginning next week will be a more “open” beta program. If you’re a Linux gamer who wasn’t yet selected to be part of the beta program, you should be able to gain access in time for the holidays. Help them test out their Linux ports to ensure the Valve Linux-based game console will be a great success.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kolab Groupware has a strong focus on security, and data integrity – not just your own mailbox but the flow of traffic between you and your peers as well.
Please allow me to take the opportunity to explain to you some of the background of what Kolab Groupware does, and why. In this blog post, I’m zooming in on our use of the submission port (587).
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As reported here two weeks ago, KDE e.V. has grown up since it was founded 15 years ago on November 27, 1997. From a body handling a few thousand euros for the yearly KDE meetings governed by a dozen members, it has evolved into a lean execution machine supporting many large and small events each year, taking care of legal matters, promotion, community management and more. KDE e.V. now has a dedicated employee and many members. Today, we take you on a virtual tour around Blue Gear Headquarters, to show you what’s going on at the German registered non-profit association and how it affects the KDE community world wide.
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We are happy to announce that the second release candidate for Qt 5.0 has just been released.
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“By taking Linux away from the devs and instituting real quality control and making it truly UI-centric and consistent, Google has managed to do in a couple of years what dozens of distros absolutely failed to do in a couple of decades,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet, “and that was bring a Linux-based OS out of the nerds’ basements and into the home of Joe and Sally Average.”
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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In the post I made last week about some of the system requirements Valve has been applying to select Linux titles on Steam, I mentioned that I’ve been curious to know how running the official Steam client would fare on other distros. After all, Linux is Linux at the core, so where there’s a will, there should be a way.
Well, sitting around with a bit of time on my hands late last night, I decided to fool around and see if I couldn’t get the client to run under Gentoo. Believe it or not, a guide exists on making it happen, and it’s a good one. However, the one thing to bear in mind is that because few Gentoo installs are exactly alike, you may have immediate luck getting Steam to work or none at all. You’re likely to need updated packages, and you’re even more likely to run into some trial and error. C’est la Gentoo.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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This is far from the first time doing benchmarking of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the port of the Debian operating system that pairs the GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel. The last time doing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks extensively was back in July so new tests were warranted of 6.0.6 Squeeze and using the latest Debian testing bi-weekly images. The Debian testing ISOs used of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were dated from 3 December 2012. This testing not only shows how the Linux versus FreeBSD kernel performance compares with a similar user-land but how the Debian performance has progressed in moving from 6.0 Squeeze to 7.0 Wheezy.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A post on the official blog of Canonical, the compnay behind the GNU/Linux distribution, said that version 12.10 had taken “another important step towards fulfilling its intended purpose of being an online, global search tool that helps users find anything, instantly, right from their home environment”.
This would be extended in 13.04 with the use of “smart scopes” – daemons capable of presenting local or remote information within the Dash (seen above with theresults of a search for the word Beatles) which is the search window for Ubuntu’s Unity interface. These “scopes” would be category-wise; depending on the search term a particular “scope” would be triggered.
“For example, a search for “The Beatles” is likely to trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that will contain local and online sources – with the online sources querying your personal cloud as well as other free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, etc,” said the post, written by Cristian Parrino, vice-president for online services at Canonical.
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In this article are benchmarks of six different desktops (Unity, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and LXDE) on five different GPU/driver configurations (Radeon, Catalyst, Intel, NVIDIA, and Nouveau) running the very latest Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” development packages to look at the latest state of the Ubuntu Linux gaming OpenGL performance.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung‘s stylus-enabled “phablets” are set to get even bigger, sources in South Korea claim, with the Galaxy Note III tipped to have a whopping 6.3-inch display when it arrives in 2013. The growing smartphone stepped up to a 5.5-inch display in its second-generation, from the 5.3-inches of the original Galaxy Note, but according to whispers to the Korea Times, Samsung plans to maximize display real-estate with a new OLED model for the new year.
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Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android is extending its lead over Apple Inc. (AAPL) in the mobile-software market at a rate that compares with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s expansion in desktop software in the 1990s, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said.
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The problem that Apple is facing right now has nothing to do with their designs being copied. There is a long history of copying in the tech industry; patents being deployed in lawsuits by giants often signify desperation more than anything else. Rather, the problem that Apple faces is that it now is going up against at least one competitor that has been a beneficiary of the scale that Apple has achieved on the business side. Samsung has clearly demonstrated that, like Asus, it was not satisfied being a low-margin ODM — of doing all the menial work while somebody else made the big bucks. Suing Samsung over Android patents isn’t going to change that — if Google’s operating system gets too expensive to use, there’ll be a switch made to Microsoft. Or to another operating system altogether. It doesn’t really matter, because design in the smartphone space has been commoditized. It’s good enough. Manufacturers are now creating performance that most consumers aren’t able to absorb. Instead, as we’ve moved into a world where performance is now “good enough”, the world has flipped into one where it’s the business side — operational scale — that matters most.
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onwCloud is one of the most important open source projects today, considering the invasion of ‘storage/data syncing’ cloud in our day-to-day life. This invasion is also posing a new threat to our privacy and ownership of our data, especially when there are players like Microsoft. It was quite shocking when Microsoft blocked access to a user’s account on finding some nude/semi-nude images in his SkyDrive folder. What was Microsoft doing in a ‘private’ as the user claims folder? Don’t confuse SkyDrive as your ‘private’ cloud where you can store whatever data you want. It’s not like a bank. The last think I would want is Microsoft peeping inside my SkyDrive folders. So, I would strongly recommend not to touch the SkyDrive even with a stick.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I recently spent a month using Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, running Android 4.0. Let’s find out what the tablet’s “Note” rather than “Tab” designation means, and how it compares to its less-expensive sibling, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and to Google’s Nexus 10.
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The term open source (OS) arose in late 90’s; although, much of modern internet infrastructure predated and evolved from active code sharing between researchers after the dawn of modern computing age. It is difficult to trace its origins due to space constraints, but suffice to say that it arose out of ambiguity in “fair use doctrines”, with significant access barriers for community to examine source code or modify it. Interestingly, these ideas have spawned crowd sourcing for open source hardware, notably robotics and influenced scientific publishing for open access traditionally encumbered by copyright protection. Over the time, several unique and hybrid models of licensing have evolved for implementation.
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At my public library job, all day long I help people use the library’s public access computers. At the end of a long day’s work, I enjoy kicking back and listening to some YouTube music videos. One way I do this is to search YouTube for new Bob Dylan cover songs. I search YouTube for: Bob Dylan cover, this week.
Imagine my happy surprise to come across this fabulous multitrack video of Knockin on Heaven’s Door. But wait a second, is that a Tux penguin poster hanging on the wall behind this musician? Indeed it is. Hmmm, was that poster placed there intentionally, or was it just an accident?
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is readying itself for the 25th outing of its ApacheCon North America official conference, training and expo event.
The foundation describes its remit and status as a group of “all-volunteer developers, stewards and incubators” of what amounts to nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives inside Apache.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today, we’re proud to invite game designers, developers and enthusiasts everywhere to take part in this year’s Game On competition. We’re looking for your ideas and playable protoypes for gaming experiences that push the limits of what open Web technologies can do.
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A new Firefox feature is being added to the Nightly Builds, with oft requested private browsing mode used by many other browsers to eventually reach the release version
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SaaS
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It seems that nearly every tech titan under the sun is throwing its support at OpenStack. EMC is the latest giant to do so, now that it is an official, corporate-level sponsor of OpenStack. Since it owns most of VMware, when VMware recently joined OpenStack it became obvious that EMC would become a sponsor, too. In commenting on the arrangement, EMC officials are likening OpenStack development to Linux development. That’s an apt analogy, and it also tells us how important support and proper documentation and training are going to become in the future of OpenStack.
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Databases
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CMS
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That’s right I called WordPress a CMS (Content Management System) and not a blogging platform. With WordPress 3.5, officially released on Tuesday, the CMS moves forward with some incremental features.
I’m a user of both self-hosted as well WordPress.com sites so I’ve noticed some of the WordPress 3.5 changes roll out over the last several weeks. WordPress tends to dogfood releases on the hosted WordPress.com platform first before making the full release generally available.
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Business
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To prepare for software selection and to put all of the pieces together in terms of business and technical open source business intelligence implementation requirements, the following checklists will help you identify the tasks and considerations involved in planning your OSBI implementation.
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BSD
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Originally the plan for FreeBSD 9.1 was to release it in mid-September, but the first release candidate was one month late along with the RC2 and RC3 releases. The plan was then updated to release FreeBSD 9.1 at the end of October, but that too passed. The latest schedule set the RELEASE announcement as going out on 12 November, but that clearly didn’t work either.
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Project Releases
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The first milestone in the development of the browser-based IDE Eclipse Orion 2.0 has been released. A major focus in the development of Orion 2.0 is to bring node.js support to the IDE and while these are described as “large scale efforts” for future builds, the developers have decided to share a prototype of a node-based Orion server. Orionode, the prototype server, is a single user deployment of Orion running on node.js. “Having all the client and server tools written in the same language also raises some new possibilities and makes the Orion architecture very flexible” say the developers, but they note that the project is not ready for prime time yet.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Jasen Wang once bought a home robotics kit. He had studied aircraft design in college and spent years at an electrics engineering outfit, but he still found the instructions completely incomprehensible. And the pieces were flimsy. And after he broke two of them, he gave up entirely.
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Programming
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The latest version of Carl Sassenrath’s REBOL language has been published as open source, marking a major change in how the novel language is made available to the public. REBOL, a previously proprietary language developed by Sassenrath, the primary developer of AmigaOS, was first released in 1997 and is oriented towards task-specific language dialects or domain-specific languages to be used in processing. It has a number of “dialects” for purposes such as data exchange (load), programming (do), pattern matching (parse), function and object definition (make), and GUIs (layout or display). These dialects work together with a free-form syntax to provide an intriguing language, but one which has never become mainstream.
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Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of web application testing infrastructure for software developers, today announced Sauce Free Open Source Software accounts (Open Sauce), a new program offering open source developers free unlimited use of the Sauce Labs cloud for testing web applications.
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Science
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Scientific software tools have long lived in the conflict zone between open source ideals and proprietary exploitation. The values of science (openness, transparency, and free exchange) are at odds with the desires of individuals and organizations to transition scientific tools to a commercial product. This has been a problem in neuropsychology and neuroscience for decades, and extends outside the bounds of software.
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Security
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The company that made headlines in October for publicizing zero day holes in SCADA products now says it has uncovered a remotely exploitable security hole in Samsung Smart TVs. If left unpatched, the vulnerability could allow hackers to make off with owners’ social media credentials and even to spy on those watching the TV using compatible video cameras and microphones.
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More or less recently, an interesting line of attacks against software has been revisited, namely Hash-DoS, or, in a nutshell, exploiting weak hash functions used in a hash table implementation to trigger a denial-of-service.
To the best of my knowledge, this problematic has been exposed as early as in 1998 in Phrack by Solar Designer, then variants have been discussed by Crosby and Wallach at USENIX 2003, formally defining algorithmic complexity attacks, by Klink and Wälde during 28c3 in 2011, applying the idea on PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, etc. and more recently by Aumasson, Bernstein and Bosslet (see their slides at Appsec Forum 2012, and their upcoming talk at 29c3), showing that the proposed solutions, essentially randomizing the hash function, were not always as effective as expected.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Dr. Frank Olson’s death is one of the more sordid events of those days when many then-Camp Detrick decisions were made by a Special Operations Division that joined with the CIA on biowarfare. The small Frederick group had the highest security clearance.
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An autopsy revealed visible bruises caused by blunt force but few cuts.
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Berkeley City Council is expected to vote Tuesday on a recommendation to adopt a resolution proclaiming Berkeley a “No Drone Zone.”
If approved, the resolution, drafted by the city’s Peace and Justice Commission, will attempt to ban the unmanned aerial vehicles from Berkeley airspace and prevent city agencies from purchasing, borrowing, leasing, testing or otherwise using drones over the city. However, the resolution provides certain exemptions, including for some hobbyist use.
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The demented suspect accused of gunning down three Brooklyn shopkeepers execution-style told cops he was a CIA operative ordered to kills Jews by Arab men, according to court documents.
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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is asking all Americans who value civil liberties to urge President Obama to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA), which restricts his authority to transfer or prosecute detainees held at Guantanamo or to close the facility.
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Saturday, Rep. Tom McMillin discussed his joy that his bill led to the Michigan House of Representatives unanimously voting Saturday in favor of House bill 5768, a bill opposing NDAA indefinite detention, denial of due process, and prohibiting the state government from participating.
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In February, lawmakers on Capitol Hill passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which instructs the Federal Aviation Administration to compile rules allowing more drones to take to the skies, including for commercial purposes. The agency has forecast there could be as many as 30,000 airborne spies by 2020. The devices frequently carry high-resolution cameras capable of reading license plates, which, in combination with facial-recognition software, could recognize and track individuals, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.
[...]
The agency has forecast there could be as many as 30,000 airborne spies by 2020.
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What is worse? Locking somebody up for years, without trial, while you try to find proof he is a terrorist? Or killing somebody whose name you don’t even know because his pattern of behaviour suggests to you that he is a terrorist?
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The CIA or military drone “double tap” does more than ensure targeted militants or terrorists in Pakistan or Afghanistan end up dead — much evidence suggests that the practice also kills civilians who rush to help after the first strike. Such casualties become very apparent in a personal project by NYU student Josh Begley to tweet every reported U.S. drone strike since 2002.
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Drones are used by our military to spy on or even kill terrorists, but one Republican Florida lawmaker says we need to be careful on how we use them here in the United States.
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The firm is among the defense procurement companies owned by the Emirates Advanced Investments group, which is close to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. But unlike the other companies in the network, such as Abu Dhabi-based C4 Advanced Solutions, Knowledge International is incorporated in the United States.
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Cablegate
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Manning turns 25, in prison, Dec. 17, which is also the second anniversary of the day a young Tunisian set himself on fire in protest of his country’s corrupt government, sparking the Arab Spring. A year ago, as Time magazine named the protester as the “Person of the Year,” legendary Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg offered praise that rings true today: “The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as ‘Person of the Year,’ but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of ‘Person of the Year.’ And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning.”
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Finance
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Capitalism’s cyclical convulsions into recession/depression provoke three alternative government policy responses. The first, say Plan A, has the government do little or nothing. Corporations and the rich mostly prefer it. They believe government intervention to be counterproductive and unnecessary because private capitalism best heals itself. They also fear universal suffrage. Majorities might vote for politicians to undo the unequal income and wealth distributions produced by capitalist economies. By minimizing government interventions, Plan A protects private capitalist systems. Thus, Bush repeated in 2007-2008: The downturn was limited, would be shallow and short and would “self-correct.” European business and political leaders agreed. They were all wrong.
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A gang of brazen CEOs has joined forces to promote economically disastrous and socially irresponsible austerity policies. Many of those same CEOs were bailed out by the American taxpayer after a Wall Street-driven financial crash. Instead of a thank-you, they are showing their appreciation in the form of a coordinated effort to rob Americans of hard-earned retirements, decent medical care and relief for the poorest.
Using the excuse of a phony, manufactured crisis known as the “fiscal cliff” – which isn’t a crisis at all, as economist James K. Galbraith has succinctly explained — they are gearing up to pull the wool over the public’s eyes by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The CEOs are part of the Fix the Debt campaign run by the
-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to unleash tens of millions pushing for a deficit reduction deal that favors the rich.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) took to the floor of the House of Representatives Wednesday night to criticize the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for pushing “Right to Work” in Michigan, describing it as politically motivated “crush-the-union legislation” and noting the identical language between the ALEC model and Michigan’s law.
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Privacy
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Here at Techdirt, we’re used to seeing national security agencies make overly broad requests for personal data, often under the premise that the crime (or crimes) committed justifies these fishing expeditions that are as “targeted” as dropping a nuke into the ocean and keeping everything that floats to the surface. Vague assurances are usually given that any data not considered “relevant” will be discarded or ignored and, as such, couldn’t possibly be considered a violation of privacy.
The Lebanese Internal Security Force looks like it might take the prize for Most Overreaching Data Request.
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Civil Rights
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EFF has been calling since July for the immediate release of open source software engineer and Creative Commons volunteer Bassel Khartabil, detained in Syria since March of this year. Many other groups and thousands of individuals have professed support for Bassel, expressing deep concerns to the Syrian authorities and signing onto a letter of support.
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Worldwide tally reaches highest point since CPJ began surveys in 1990. Governments use charges of terrorism, other anti-state offenses to silence critical voices. Turkey is the world’s worst jailer. A CPJ special report
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As Baroness Smith of Basildon noted: “it is nearly a year since the Government launched their consultation on public order policing and whether the word “insulting” should be removed from Section 5 of the Public Order Act. In the Committee on this Bill-a good five months after the close of the consultation-the Minister said that he hoped that at Report stage, the Government “will be able to put forward the Government’s considered view to the House”. Since then, the Government had a further five months to come to a decision, and yet-unless the Minister is going to make an announcement this evening-even at this stage, we still have not had a public announcement from the Government about their position, or about the findings and evidence from the consultation which your Lordships’ House has asked for.”
However, Lord Taylor responded for the Government: “the Government strongly holds the view that the word “insulting” should be retained in Section 5 of the Public Order Act. The Government have a responsibility to protect the public so that communities and law-abiding citizens can live in peace and security. The police must have the powers they need to meet this responsibility.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In its editorial last week, European Voice asked me to identify myself and what I stand for. I am delighted to have that opportunity.
My goal is to get every European digital: improving the lives of young and old. Europe must be equipped with the right legal frameworks and broadband networks to enable huge new digital opportunities, and give us a much-needed growth boost.
A modernised copyright system is indeed one essential element, benefiting both creators and consumers. So I am delighted that over the coming year, Michel Barnier, Androulla Vassilliou and I will be working hand in hand on the most urgent issues.
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DRM
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The new Nintendo Network ID system that debuted on the Wii U is a sign of progress for a company that has, historically, not shown a lot of savvy in setting up its online systems. The Wii U lets users connect up to 12 separate Nintendo Network IDs to a single system and use those IDs to easily connect with online friends and strangers. The new Wii U eShop includes many retail games for download on the same day they reach stores, and does away with the “Wii Points” virtual currency that characterized Nintendo’s previous console. The company has even promised to roll out a cloud save feature sometime next year.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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Back when we first launched the Insider Shop, we made two PDF ebooks available at any price you choose: Mike’s Approaching Infinity (on new business models and the economics of abundance) and our Sky Is Rising report on the state of the entertainment industries. More recently, we launched three fiction titles by our own Tim Geigner—Digilife, Echelon and Midwasteland—also available on a pay-what-you-want basis. They were an instant hit, and we’re in the process of preparing new ePub versions.
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You may recall Voltage Pictures not because it once made a movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture (Hurt Locker), but because it was basically the first Hollywood studio to embrace copyright trolling. This is the company whose boss, Nicolas Chartier, once said that anyone who criticizes his company for copyright trolling is a moron and a thief (and that was in response to a rather friendly and polite email to Chartier suggesting that copyright trolling might hurt the company’s reputation in the long run). While some of its earlier efforts to sue thousands of people at once (in once case it sued nearly 25,000 people in one shot) have run into difficulties, Voltage just won’t quit. A quick check of the records shows that it’s still been filing new lawsuits in the US (among smaller groups) and trying to make the case for proper joinder by using the “swarm” theory: that if all the IP addresses are a part of the same swarm, they’re all connected in the legal issue (of course, they miss the fact that this would likely also mean that the total sum that could be collected would be split among all defendants).
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Prenda Law, the ethically challenged law firm that specializes in mass pornographic copyright lawsuits, is facing growing pressure to answer questions about allegations of identity theft. Last week, we reported on a Minnesota federal court filing by Alan Cooper, a former caretaker for Prenda’s John Steele. Cooper has accused Prenda of naming him as the CEO, without his knowledge or consent, of two shell companies that have been filing mass copyright lawsuits around the country.
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they were receiving approximately 250,000 DMCA takedowns a week. Today, it’s up to 2.5 million per week. That’s in just six months. Because that’s insane, I’m going to repeat it: in just six months, the number of DMCA takedowns that Google receives has increased by a factor of 10 from 250,000 per week to 2.5 million.
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It’s now apparent that Verizon is fed up with the avalanche of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits and is determined to put an end to copyright trolls’ extortion-like practices. The Internet provider is asking a Texas court to grant discovery so it can expose how these companies operate. According to Verizon, copyright trolling practices don’t belong in court and the ISP equates the companies involved with “schoolyard bullies who push and shove until firm opposition is met when they shrink away.”
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