01.14.14
Posted in GNU/Linux at 1:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A new release of Kali Linux facilitates users’ need to remotely wipe a disk, e.g. in case it falls into the wrong hands
IN A “BRAVE NEW WORLD” hounded by the NSA and its espionage-happy partners we need tools to protect ourselves. One is disk encryption, which helps prevent disk access upon confiscation of devices like laptops (in the US it is now legal to do laptop/tablet/phone searches without even suspicion [1,2]) and another may be remote nuking of data on one’s lost (or ‘detained’) laptop.
Kali Linux 1.0.6 has just been released [3-7], boasting a feature that can “nuke” an encrypted disk (assuming, for example, that the oppressor can make bit-by-bit copy of disk surface for code-breaking on a supercomputer at a later time).
This is a fantastic example of how GNU/Linux development advances to foil Orwellian regimes and forensics as a tool of oppression.
The NSA would of course tell us that only pedophiles and terrorists seek privacy. It could not be further from the truth. █
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A federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy people’s laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion. An appeal is being considered. Government documents show that thousands of innocent American citizens are searched when they return from trips abroad.
“We’re disappointed in today’s decision, which allows the government to conduct intrusive searches of Americans’ laptops and other electronics at the border without any suspicion that those devices contain evidence of wrongdoing,” said Catherine Crump, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued the case in July 2011. “Suspicionless searches of devices containing vast amounts of personal information cannot meet the standard set by the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Unfortunately, these searches are part of a broader pattern of aggressive government surveillance that collects information on too many innocent people, under lax standards, and without adequate oversight.”
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Kali Linux 1.0.6 is the first release to introduce an amazing feature called “emergency self-destruction of LUKS,” which allows users to quickly nuke the entire installation in case of an emergency.
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Kali Linux is an open-source operating system based on the popular BackTrack Linux suite, but backed and funded by Offensive Security. It can be set up to use full-disk encryption using a combination of Logical Volume Management (LVM) and Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS).
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 1:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The contributions of Fedora to GNU/Linux put in some proper perspective
WHILE it is possible that Korora is better than Fedora, no project other than Debian contributes so much to GNU/Linux. Fedora is a contributions leader and its steward, Red Hat, employs a huge number of GNU/Linux developers.
A GTK3 version of Firefox is now coming through Fedora [1], a the aforementioned UX designer for GNOME is said to be working for Red Hat/Fedora [2], Fedora targets/tackles System z 64-bit [3] (kernel feature), and Fedora 21 has a lot of promise [4] (it is scheduled to be released later than expected [5,6]). Fedora is strong when it comes to hardware [7,8], software/repositories [9,10], and of course package/software management [11,12]. Fedora/Red Hat employed the inventor of Yum until he died and Yum got renamed.
To speak negatively about Fedora is to basically forget who it is that puts a lot of effort (and investment) into GNU/Linux development. Ubuntu (of Canonical), by contrast, mostly gets credit for gaining market share. █
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It’s taking a long time of the GTK3 port of Mozilla Firefox to be completed, but it’s now been made a bit easier for those wanting to test out GTK3 Firefox on Fedora Linux.
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Allan Day, UX Designer on GNOME for Red Hat, has given an interview to Steven Ovadia over at My Linux Rig. Fedora’s Program Manager blogged on the upcoming Fedora 21 release cycle.
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Dan Horák has announced on January 8 that the Fedora 20 (Heisenbug) Linux operating system is now available for download for the IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems.
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Typically, Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution has two colorfully named releases a year, but that likely won’t be the case in 2014. However, that’s no reason for concern.
The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux community recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, capping off a decade of releases and evolution. In 2014, Fedora could be in store for its biggest evolution since the project’s creation, with fewer releases and even a new naming strategy.
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Is Fedora 21 going to be released in the old model way, or new one? Hard to answer right now. But there’s one date – F21 is not going to be released earlier than in August (and I’d say late August). See FESCo ticket. What’s the reason? As otherwise we would try to hit May timeframe? Short answe: we want to give the opportunity to the teams that are smashed by release windmills to work on tooling.
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A week ago I’ve bough MSI Radeon R9 270 GAMING 2G. It’s an upper mid-range card and most new games should run on it reasonably well on high details. In Fedora there are two choices – you can either use the default open-source radeonsi driver, or you can install proprietary catalyst driver. I have tried general system functionality and also a lot of games (through Steam) on both drivers.
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I was a happy Ubuntu user, until Gnome Shell arrived! It was new, it was shiny. And it provided all those things that I needed. I mostly used the compiz expo plugin to switch between tasks. I would set-up my top-left corner as a hot corner to trigger expo and use docky for my favourite apps. When I tried Gnome Shell 3.2, it was quite similar, expect the dock was on left. But that didn’t hamper my experience. I initially used docky and awn, but finally got rid of it.
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DNF, the next-generation yum package manager spearheaded by the Fedora project, is now ready for end-user testing ahead of its expected use out-of-the-box by Fedora 22.
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While DNF isn’t the default package manager on Fedora Linux installations until at least Fedora 22, there’s still many mixed reservations about this intended replacement to Yum.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 12:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A promising Fedora derivative releases a GNU/Linux distribution just weeks after Red Hat
Korora 20 was recently released [1], following the promising footsteps of Fedora 20. Some say that Korora is better than Fedora [2], not just because of the new fantastic Web site [3] but also technical merit in the distribution itself [4]. Techrights has not tested Korora, but the founder and principal developer of Korora (there are now two, plus one who is a tester and support administrator) is a longtime supporter and at times contributor of ours. He is a man of principles and his site uses encryption (SSL) by default, diverting all unencrypted requests to HTTPS. █
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Korora, a Fedora Remix distribution with tweaks and extras to make the system “just work” out of the box, which aims to provide a complete and easy-to-use system for general computing, is now at version 20.
Korora 20 has been dubbed “Peach” and is based on Fedora 20 “Heisenbug.” The developers followed closely the Fedora 20 cycle, so it’s only natural that Korora is a stable version.
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This release brings with it a significant amount of work by the team and community to bring not two but ”five desktops” that have been shaped for a genuine Korora experience. The additions of Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce represent the growth of our community and their contributions. Thank you to all who have contributed to make this possible.
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Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux at 12:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Back are the claims that we need just one “universal” GNU/Linux
GNOME is a very active project that involves hundreds if even thousands of developers (GNOME is a set of applications, not just a desktop environment/shell). The project’s Bugzilla statistics (not for 2013 alone) reveal about 46,000 open bug reports [1]. In 2013 many bugs are carried on from prior years (including duplicates) and resources for managing them are pooled because several environments are derived from GNOME and they share code (bug fixes can be pushed upstream). Now that 3.11.3 is available for testing [2] and bugs are being squashed [3], new features are added [4], and the underlying framework improves [5] we can expect a good, diverse future for the GNOME family (with about half a dozen branches/forks). Allan Day, a GNOME designer, recently gave an interview [6] and to quote the interviewer, Day’s “design workflow is also wonderfully straightforward and helps to address the concern that good design work can’t be done on Linux.”
GNOME is a simple environment to use. Some try to simplify it further to improve the overall experience (same thing Android backers are doing on phones, desktops, and tablets). GNOME cannot be treated a one-size-fits-all solution because it runs on many different types of devices. It is possibly even simpler to use than Mac OS X and Windows (depending on how they are judged). The GNOME Activity Journal, an important component that simplifies operations and logging, is now approaching version 1.0 [7] (stable) and one pundit asserts [8] that GNOME is the “key to Linux desktop unification”. He makes the common mistake of assuming that lack of diversity would be pleasing to more users and attract more people to GNU/Linux. It’s not so-called ‘fragmentation’ that weakens GNU/Linux on the desktop (in terms of adoption). People typically fail to explore GNU/Linux due to biased information in the corporate media, or complete lack of information. There are other aspects too, including anti-competitive practices.
Uniformity is important within a particular desktop environment (that’s what developer guidelines are for), but it’s not the same across desktop environments, which can vary in order to accommodate the requirements of different types of users (e.g. advanced users as opposed to beginners). Beware those who try to convince everyone in the Free Desktop world that having one “universal” GNU/Linux distribution (with one kernel, one desktop environment, one set of application) is what’s needed. What makes GNU/Linux strong and attractive to developers is diversity, not authority. █
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Earlier this week Andre Klapper shared the annual GNOME Bugzilla statistics for 2013. The GNOME project ended out 2013 with 46,130 open bug reports, compared to 43k bug reports at the end of 2012 or 44k bug reports at the end of 2011. Of the 46k bug reports open at the end of 2013, 25k of them were opened in 2013 while 22k were closed in 2013.
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The third development release towards the highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment has been made available for download, bringing many updated core applications, libraries, and updated translations.
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These improvements landed for the GTK+ 3.11 development series and will form the basis of the GTK+ 3.12 stable release in March. Overall GNOME 3.12 is shaping up to be an interesting GNOME update with GNOME Shell and Mutter improvements, greater Facebook integration, the GNOME Terminal finally has text rewrap on resizing, and there will be much better support for Wayland.
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Part of the reason GNOME is such a successful project is the focus and dedication of its members. I’ve interviewed a few of them and common strands always emerge — ideas like GNOME as an operating system, GNOME staying out of the user’s way, and GNOME as a way to enhance Linux. Allan, a designer for the project, touches on a lot of these points. His design workflow is also wonderfully straightforward and helps to address the concern that good design work can’t be done on Linux.
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The Zeigeist framework that is responsible for much of the logging responsibilities in the GNOME world and powers the GNOME Activity Journal is finally nearing version 1.0. The 1.0 milestone comes after landing a number of improvements recently and after nearly a half-decade of development work.
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One of the greatest differences between an open source operating systems and those that maintain a proprietary code structure is the flexibility in customizing each one.
While Windows and OS X offer a set-in-stone desktop environment, Linux enjoys a robust number of desktop environments from which to choose from – including the highly popular GNOME. Some may even argue that having a limited number of desktop environments would allow those distributions to hone in on gaining a larger market share. And perhaps that’s true, though I believe that most Linux enthusiasts chose Linux because of its diversity. In this article, I’ll look at where GNOME came from, where it is now and the end goal I think it’ll reach within the next couple of years.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about KDE and and its gradual movement towards Qt5 and Wayland
KDE, the world’s most powerful desktop, has released version 4.11.5 [1] as well as some updates to Plasma workspaces, applications, and the platform itself [2]. There is even a Frameworks 5 Tech Preview [3] (Qt5 is coming to the core of KDE). Qt is a major component in KDE [4,5] and it’s what truly distinguishes it (in a good way) from GTK/GNOME [6] (both are heading towards full Wayland support [7]). Qt is no longer the proprietary trap it used to be when GNOME was born, so saying that one is freer than the other is unfair. Because of the GNU in GNOME, Richard Stallman recently insinuated to me that he favours GNOME (which he uses on his computer), but given the activity (face to face [8,9] and development [10-12]) it would be unfair to neglect KDE. The following image (uploaded 2 weeks) can’t be true, can it? The source is unknown, but it claims a gradual decline in development in 2012 but not in 2013. █
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The KDE Community is proud to announce a Tech Preview of KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks 5 is the result of almost three years of work to plan, modularize, review and port the set of libraries previously known as KDElibs or KDE Platform 4 into a set of Qt Addons with well-defined dependencies and abilities, ready for Qt 5. This gives the Qt ecosystem a powerful set of drop-in libraries providing additional functionality for a wide variety of tasks and platforms, based on over 15 years of KDE experience in building applications. Today, all the Frameworks are available in Tech Preview mode; a final release is planned for the first half of 2014. Some Tech Preview addons (notably KArchive and Threadweaver) are more mature than others at this time.
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we (some of us at Digia) have been working on Enginio – a convenient cloud storage for Qt applications. Since the library is actively maintained we would like to integrate it into the official Qt release for Qt 5.3.
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Dirk Hohndel of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has talked at length on his experiences in the GTK and Qt tool-kits, including what he views as the biggest problem with GTK.
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There will be a a panel discussion with the governing bodies of the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. (the association that supports KDE), a presentation about KDE Frameworks 5, and a personal account of challenges and triumphs—”Do you have to be brain damaged to care about desktop Linux?.
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The second edition of India’s KDE conference – conf.kde will be held in February in Gandhinagar. The event will start at 2pm on Feb 21 and end at 5pm on Feb 23. The organizers have opted to hold the conference at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) which also hosted the KDE Meetup last year. Registrations are open with early bird discounts on offer till Jan 15.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Space
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The Allwinner A10 ARM SoC is now supported by Coreboot along with the A10-based Cubieboard.
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Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 3.13-rc7 noting that even though the things are calming down, he will release rc8 before releasing the final one.
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Chris Mason intends to update the btrfs-progs user-space utilities for the Btrfs file-system in conjunction with new stable Linux kernel releases.
The lead Btrfs developer, who is now being employed by Facebook along with other Btrfs developers, quietly announced the release policy change a few weeks ago on the developers’ mailing list.
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With the addition just last week of the Google-led Open Automotive Alliance, nearly every automaker in the world is choosing Linux for technology integration and innovation in the car. This reminds me a lot of the early days of Linux in the enterprise or Linux in mobile. Is starts small and accelerates at an exponential rate. It’s one of the unique attributes of Linux.
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The Volatile Ranges feature for the Linux kernel is now in its third year of being developed and a new set of sixteen patches were published today but there’s still no sign that the code is ready for merging in the near-term.
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AnthraX, a kernel used by some for their mobile Android devices as an alternative to the stock kernels or those from other open-source Android projects for reportedly offering better performance and functionality, is still refusing to release the kernel’s source-code even though it’s based on the Linux kernel and subject to the terms of the GPL.
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The last 3.13 release candidate for 2013 came out on December 29th. This 3.13-rc6 is small with just 81 commits to infiniband, gpu, cpufreq, libata, and block drivers in addition to a few small filesystem fixes, and ARM SoC related changes. Please read the 3.13-rc6 release announcement.
Right before Christmas on December 22nd, 3.13-rc5 came out. Changes in this rc include drivers, architecture, filesystems, scheduler, and mm (numa) fixes. One important news in this release announcement is about the 3.14 merge window will start after Linus Torvalds gets back from attending the Linux Conference in Australia. Please find the full text for the 3.13-rc5 release announcement.
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Thomas Hellstrom of VMware sent in their first pull request today of “vmwgfx” driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel, but it looks like the best is yet to come.
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In continuation from last month’s Intel Haswell Linux Performance Improved A Lot In 2013, here are benchmarks of Intel “Ivy Bridge” HD Graphics 4000 when comparing the performance over the past year.
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Subsurface is a diving log software written by none other than Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. Linus is also the creator of version control system Git which is the most popular version control system of the world.
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Graphics Stack
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Sysadmins have a few days to patch libXfont to remove a newly discovered, 22-year-old privilege-escalation bug in the code before any tiresome users whip out an exploit. The flaw allows someone logged into a vulnerable machine to crash the X server, or possibly execute injected code as a superuser.
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The Tegra changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel are rather large with 121 commits in this latest pull just for the open-source graphics driver. There’s initial DRM panel support, initial support for registering DSI hosts and peripherals, Tegra114 DSI host support, host1x/display support for the Tegra124 (Tegra 4), and there’s a very simple PRIME implementation.
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Besides publishing their Haswell hardware documentation, coming out of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center today is the latest Intel 3.0 X.Org driver development release.
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The Ozone-Wayland sub-project for Google Chromium support on the next-generation Linux display server continues to be pushed ahead with improved and new features by Intel open-source developers.
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Benchmarks
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For some quick benchmarks to start off another week of open-source and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix are new results comparing the Linux 3.13-rc7 kernel against the latest stable 3.11/3.12 kernels: 3.11.10 and 3.12.6, respectively. These benchmarks were done from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32 Intel ultrabook that’s been featured in several Phoronix articles in recent weeks.
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Posted in Debian, GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 10:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GNU/Linux distributions, even zero-cost distributions such as CentOS, are becoming the de facto standard for servers
THE NUMBERS don’t lie. A lot of companies move to distributions like Debian and CentOS, not necessarily paying for their migration to GNU/Linux (Gartner and IDC only count revenue, not installed base). Hosts statistics [1] show just how massive GNU/Linux has become, physically and virtually (a lot if GNU/Linux servers are hosted jointly under hypervisors [2]), and many systems maintainers or administrators increasingly adapt to a UNIX- or Linux-dominated world, where desired skills relate to operation of GNU/Linux [3] for the most part (command line for performance and debugging). It’s not just about Red Hat. Recently, Zimbabwe had Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS mirrors set up [4] and Red Hat saw itself having to embrace CentOS, which is a free clone of RHEL [5-11]. Both sides were happy, based on their announcements [12-13], and the biggest loser was probably Microsoft, which at one point wanted to coopt CentOS and use it against Red Hat (without success and without much publicity, either).
By some estimates, CentOS is the most widely used distribution of GNU/Linux (other estimates say that Debian is the most widely used, but it’s hard to verify).
Generally speaking, Red Hat’s embrace of CentOS, only weeks after announcing surging revenue, is an indicator of the fact that GNU/Linux is attaining world domination on servers and there’s no monopoly by Red Hat or by paid (subscription) distributions. █
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This is how hosting providers monitored by Netcraft see the operating system universe. The majority use GNU/Linux when it counts, not just because someone offers them that other OS. GNU/Linux offers great price/performance/reliability. You can get that kind of performance on your desktop too from Debian.
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Ah, a new year, with old systems. If you recently took time off to relax with friends and family and ring in 2014, perhaps you’re feeling rejuvenated and ready to break bad old habits and develop good new ones
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As we step into a new year, I can’t help but look back on the current year and wonder that there has been a lot of talk in the broadband/internet side of things locally but not a great amount actually done about it.
Now I know that sounds very negative, ISP’s have innovated quite a bit this past year, from uMax starting things by changing the game somewhat with fixed (non 3g) internet with their 20gigs for $75 plan and free modem, then ZOL blew that out of the park by saying that all their packages would no longer have a bandwidth caps forcing other providers like YoAfrica to follow suit. I’m still waiting for TelOne to also do similar across there packages as the last “big” ISP in Zimbabwe that’s yet to update/improve their packages (unlikely I know).
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Put this one in the strange bedfellows department: Red Hat, the company known for its supported enterprise Linux, is now working with its chief clone, CentOS. Since CentOS is seen as a free option to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in many businesses and Red Hat threatened legal action against CentOS in the past, last week’s news raised some eyebrows.
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Red Hat’s CTO explains why the Linux giant is now working with the community group that has been cloning its flagship enterprise Linux platform.
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For almost a decade, expert Linux users who didn’t need the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support used its clone CentOS instead. Now, Red Hat has adopted this community Linux. Don’t panic!
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With great excitement I’d like to announce that we are joining the Red Hat family. The CentOS Project ( http://www.centos.org ) is joining forces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standards team ( http://community.redhat.com/ ) to foster rapid innovation beyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies. Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to further expand on the community offerings by providing a platform that is easily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while we maintain the established base.
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Posted in DRM at 10:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: DRM is destroying decades of technological advancement and even the biggest tool of communication, data sharing, and perhaps multimedia (competing with broadcast)
CORY from BoingBoing spent many years of his life fighting DRM. He is seemingly depressed, and claims to be unable to sleep, over what the World Wide Web Consortium is doing these days [1-3], noting additionally that DRM is now spreading to hardware [4,5]. GNU/Linux has already come under attack from Sony [6] because of DRM [7]. Steam, a DRM-loving rival of Sony, is also deleting games remotely right now, using DRM [8-9]. Some Linux-based ebook readers only support DRM ebooks that are also being deleted remotely, and the same goes for DRM-free ebooks [10], which can also be deleted remotely over the Internet. This makes DRM virtually a back door. It shows that Linux without freedom is not enough. DRM is a serious threat. It’s turning computing devices, not just data on them, into some kind of rented facilities, controlled remotely by some other party. How utterly disgusting. Amazon, which deleted books remotely (several times, even against the law), is now remotely deleting movies too [11,12]. The FOSS community is trying to fight back [13], but it cannot keep up with attacks on coding itself. The concept of ‘authorised’ programming/code (like DRM) is being introduced also [14], exceeding legal restriction and imposing them technically.
DRM is destroying our world. It is destroying our culture, it is ruining the Web, it burns books, it harms software development, and it also enables remote ‘bricking’ of machines. Devices become jails for their users, not just instruments of surveillance, and the very little useful function that remains in them can be removed or turned against the owners (remotely, with no indication of of it happening).
Those who still don’t understand why DRM is a very bad thing probably just don’t fully grasp DRM. DRM is in many way like a back door and now that the MPAA is part of the World Wide Web Consortium we expect future Web browsers — even FOSS browsers — to contain blobs and perhaps back doors. The MPAA spent many years lobbying to put back doors in every PC, not in order to target terrorists but in order to support an antiquated business model (protectionism, monopoly, and profit). █
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The work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on adding DRM to HTML5 is one of the most disturbing developments in the recent history of technology. The W3C’s mailing lists have been full of controversy about this ever since the decision was announced.
Most recently, a thread in the restricted media list asked about whether the requirements for DRM from the studios — who have pushed for DRM, largely through their partner Netflix — demonstrated that these requirements are secret.
It’s hard to overstate how weird this is.
Standardization is the process by which all the parties in a technical subject agree on how things should be done. It starts with a gathering of requirements — literally, “What is the standard required to do?” Without these requirements, it’s hard to see how standardization can take place. If you don’t know what you’re standardizing for, how can you standardize at all?
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Last week, we wrote about the MPAA joining the W3C almost certainly as part of its ongoing effort to push for DRM to be built into HTML5. Cory Doctorow has a beautifully titled blog post about all of this, saying that “we are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.”
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As near as I can work out, there’s no one poised to do anything about this. Google, Apple and Microsoft have all built proprietary DRM silos that backed the WC3 into accepting standardization work on DRM (and now the W3C have admitted the MPAA as a member – an organization that expressly believes that all technology should be designed for remote, covert control by someone other than its owner, and that it should be illegal to subvert this control).
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As the Boing Boing article quoted above explains, this seems to be a requirement of the US government, and is designed to prevent machines being sent to Iran in violation of the embargo placed on that country.
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What’s particularly troubling is that the cost of adding GPS capabilities is already low, and will inevitably become lower. That raises the possibility of a wider range of devices being locked down by geolocation — and of their owners’ rights being eroded down even more.
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A Ninth Circuit panel on Monday partially reversed a lower court decision squashing a putative class action accusing Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC of reneging on its promise to let users run alternative operating systems on their PlayStation 3s.
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I get a fair amount of e-mail from readers asking how a person could do “questionable” things due to limitations imposed by DRM. Whether it’s how to strip DRM from ebooks, how to connect to Usenet or how to decrypt video, I do my best to point folks in the right direction with lots of warnings and disclaimers. The most frustrating DRM by far has been with Blu-ray discs.
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Lot of games have been taken down from Steam store in the past years, but for the very first time Steam has removed games from user libraries. Yes, the very game that the users had purchased with their money. The game in question is Order of War: Challenge, a World war II strategy game developed by Wargaming.net and published by Square Enix in 2009.
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So you can quite easily add your own existing ebooks to the Aura HD; however you can also, if you wish, take advantage of Kobo’s online ebook store. If you purchase ebooks from the store or even just wish to sample a preview, it will be added to your Kobo account and automatically synced to your device, which is nice. But if you wish to only buy and use DRM-free ebooks, you can do so and avoid the Kobo store altogether.
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Disney has decided to pull access to several purchased Christmas videos from Amazon during the holiday season, as the movie studio wants its TV-channel to have the content exclusively. Affected customers have seen their videos disappear from their online libraries, showing once again that not everything you buy is actually yours to keep.
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At the recent GStreamer Conference 2013 there was a presentation on “Taking Gstreamer to the Next Level” and in there some interesting features were brought up.
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We just had an article mentioning that Germany has a ridiculous (and dangerously anti-innovation) view towards secondary liability, in which the country’s courts often default to making third parties liable for actions they did not do. We noted that a court in Stuttgart had decided that the Wikimedia Foundation could be held liable for content submitted by a community member on the site, though only after the organization was alerted to the content (which still has significant problems for what are hopefully obvious reasons).
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