04.14.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
KVM
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KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) is a leading open source virtualization technology and an important tool in any Linux administrator’s handbook, especially with the increased adoption of cloud technologies such as OpenStack and the need for hypervisors to better manage compute, network and storage resources. The “potential” of KVM for enterprises is incredibly valuable far beyond its origins – just like Linux. After a year of contributing patches to the KVM community, IBM is announcing today that a Power Systems version of KVM, PowerKVM, will be available on IBM’s next generation Power Systems servers tuned for Linux before the end of the quarter.
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ElasticHosts
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Cloud could finally prove cheaper than on-premise thanks to a new Linux-based technology that renders cloud hosting half the price of Amazon Web Services (AWS), it is claimed.
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Cloud-hosting firm ElasticHosts has launched Elastic Containers, an Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that claims to save companies money by charging them only for consumption rather than capacity.
Misc.
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Since Facebook’s Carlos Bueno wrote the canonical article about the full stack, there has been no shortage of posts trying to define it. For a time, Facebook allegedly only hired “full-stack developers.” That probably wasn’t quite true, even if they thought it was. And some posts really push “full-stack” developer into Unicorn territory: Laurence Gellert writes that it “goes beyond being a senior engineer,” and details everything he thinks a full-stack developer should be familiar with, most of which doesn’t involve coding.
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LAMP dates back to the days when HTML was trivial, and all computation was done on the server. JavaScript was a toy language that helped to glue things together in the browser, but that was all. JavaScript has evolved into a serious, fully capable programming language in its own right, and CSS is almost there. If you are going to be a full-stack programmer, you certainly need to understand the platform on which the real front end of your application is running. The MEAN stack, Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node, a more up-to-date take on LAMP, shows how JavaScript has evolved into a platform of its own.
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Intel, Broadcom, Mellanox, and Cumulus Networks jumped on board last November, contributing specifications and software that will bring the project closer to a finished design. They weren’t alone, though: Software-defined networking vendor Big Switch Networks in January donated what it calls Open Network Linux (ONL) to the project.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
ARM
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ARM Compiler 6 is beginning to use the LLVM/Clang compiler.
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Velocity of open source Clang and LLVM combined with the stability of commercial products improve code quality, performance and power efficiency on ARM processors
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With the release of Compiler 6 today, ARM moves from a proprietary architecture to one based on open sourced Clang/LLVM. Although there is going to be a lot contributed back the greater DS-5 Ultimate Edition are initially not going to be as fully open as SemiAccurate would like.
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UK microprocessor-design company ARM has decided to move to an open-source compiler for the latest release of its software development tools, moving away from its own technology.
Raspberry Pi
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Seven tutorials for seven days as we take you from Pi beginner to Raspberry Pro, and we also show you how to develop Android apps with Python in Linux User issue 138
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Soon, there could be Pi in just about any device that needs embedded computing power. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new version of the Raspberry Pi platform that is aimed at a whole new class of devices and applications. Called the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, the new product puts all of the Pi’s core functionality onto a small board the size of a laptop memory module, allowing it to be plugged in to custom-built hardware.
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As we’ve reported many times, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi has emerged as one of the biggest open source stories anywhere over the past couple of years. It’s attracted all kinds of developers and tinkerers, is now running many different flavors of Linux, and there is even now a supercomputer consisting of many Pi devices lashed together with Lego pieces. In some of the more exotic new applications for Raspberry Pi, it’s being used in music, robotics and security scenarios.
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The compute module contains the guts of a Raspberry Pi (the BCM2835 processor and 512Mbyte of RAM) as well as a 4Gbyte eMMC Flash device (which is the equivalent of the SD card in the Pi). This is all integrated on to a small 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector (the same type of connector as used for laptop memory*). The Flash memory is connected directly to the processor on the board, but the remaining processor interfaces are available to the user via the connector pins. You get the full flexibility of the BCM2835 SoC (which means that many more GPIOs and interfaces are available as compared to the Raspberry Pi), and designing the module into a custom system should be relatively straightforward as we’ve put all the tricky bits onto the module itself.
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With the new Compute Module, the Foundation manages to pack the Raspberry Pi’s SoC with 512MB of memory and 4GB of storage onto a board the size of your standard DDR2 laptop memory. The Compute Module is seen above to the left of the standard PI unit. It’s not entirely a size thing here though, the company is looking to offer a more universal version of the system, stuffing it on a board with a much more standard connector. This will allow developers to implement the system in whatever way they want as opposed to being tied to the traditional Pi I/O.
Qualcomm
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Qualcomm revealed 20nm, 64-bit Snapdragon SoCs featuring Cortex-A57 and –A53 CPU cores, 4K video encoding, LTE Advanced, DDR4 RAM, and more.
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Qualcomm announced this morning their next-generation 64-bit processors for what they hope yields “the ultimate connected mobile computing experiences” with a ton of new features and capabilities.
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This is all done at 20nm compared to Beast’s 45nm and about 100 watts less power waste. I probably wouldn’t even have a fan to annoy me, not on the PSU, and not on the CPU. Beast’s replacement will likely be just big enough to hold a few hard drives or SSDs. Qualcomm will ship in 2014, probably just in time for Christmas.
Development
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Embedded Linux Pioneer Launches Yocto Project-Based Linux BSPs for Boards in the Freescale Vybrid Controller Solutions Ecosystem
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Habey unveiled a tiny, open-spec, Freescale i.MX6-based SBC that runs Ubuntu and Android, and features stackable daughter boards, PoE, and wing extensions.
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Mainline Linux kernel support enables ease of migration by providing consistent access to new devices and the latest features
Open Hardware
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For more advanced robots, there will be other available parts such as an infrared distance sensor. TinkerBots’ use of the Arduino-compatible micro-controller platform enables older enthusiasts to dabble in programming (C) for their TinkerBots creations.
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I bought an Arduino Mega and started putting together the custom electronics in the form of a daughter board (Arduino calls them “shields”). However, it needed to be a standalone unit, so what could I do for user interfacing to the Mega that was flexible? Touch screens.
Novena
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At 8-years old, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang appreciated the fact that his Apple II came with schematics and source code because it allowed him to figure out how it worked.
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Andrew “Bunnie” Huang lists a bunch of reasons why you’ll want his open-source laptop, the Novena. You can modify it yourself so that its battery will last however long you want it to. You can inspect the software to see if there’s any present from the National Security Agency. And you don’t have to pay a tax to any big corporation just because you want to do some computing.
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In a post-Edward Snowden’s disclosure world, where people and companies are seriously exploring options to keep their digital data and communication secure from NSA (or other illegitimate) snooping, here’s some good news.
Project Novena is alive and kicking, promising to bring you the world’s “almost” fully open source laptop. And it doesn’t just have open source software, but open source hardware. Hardware with open designs for anyone to manufacture and implement as they deem fit.
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Hackers Bunnie Huang and Sean “xobs” Cross have launched a fundraiser for their open source laptop, the Novena. It looks very different from its prototype, but the idea behind it remains the same: a computer with transparent and easily modifiable hardware and software.
Mods
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The last time I wrote about the best hacks available for a board, I had so much to choice between; now instead, writing about Arduino Yún and all of its best hacks, it was difficult to me to find really good projects, because the platform is so young. While Raspberry Pi had a strong community, Arduino Yún is still growing up.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
High End
Old Computers
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The Zorin developers have always marketed their products as the perfect Windows alternatives and they’ve had some success with this strategy. Their operating systems are regarded as good replacements, with familiar interfaces that can help people running away from Windows OSes to better adjust to a Linux distribution.
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Single-purpose
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GParted Live, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, is now at version 0.18.0-2.
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“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of April 7, 2014,” reads the official changelog.
The Linux kernel has remained the same, 3.13.6, and this is one of the most recent ones available. It’s very likely that the next development version will feature Linux kernel 3.14.
Distrohopping
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Various distro spin makers have made two unwritten laws that I very much disagree with:
A) A distro spin of desktop blah should have only programs built with the same widget library that desktop blah uses
B) A distro spin should only ship / pre-install one program for each application category
I mention this because I’m a big KDE fan but KDE-only distro spins do not include my preferred browser (Firefox) nor my preferred office suite (LibreOffice, not that I use an office suite much) because they aren’t QT-native applications. While LibreOffice does a better job of integrating with KDE than Firefox does, both drag with them quite a bit of GTK baggage… which is considered “bloat” by many spin makers.
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CAELinux
SparkyLinux
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I think it started when I installed the same Linux distribution with the same set of applications, configuration and layout as mine, to my wife’s and then to my colleague’s computers. Then somebody asked me why should I not try to share my point of view with more people.
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The SparkyLinux 3.3 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie,” just like the previous versions. The developer usually releases versions with various desktop environments, but this is just the Base, which means that it’s only for command-line fans.
AVLinux
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The really interesting and important thing about the AVLinux distribution, of course, is the Multimedia capability included in it. The Audio menu is shown to the right, above. Well, at least part of it is; it has so much in this category that it doesn’t even fit on one screen! Audio players, mixers, editors, synthesizers, analyzers, and pretty much anything and everything you can think of in this category are included.
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Arch Family
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Starting with the 32-bit ISO labeled 2014.04i (“i” as in infinite) this is our first version of a Rolling Release and based on the excellent Manjaro/(Arch).
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Manjaro 0.8.9, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has just received its third update pack.
Fedora
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Another round of features have been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee for this year’s Fedora 21 release.
Debian Family
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Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, APT (Advanced Package Tool) is the default command-line package manager for Debian, Ubuntu and their derivative systems. Recently, APT has reached version 1.0, after 16 years since it was recently developed. Ubuntu’s Synaptic and Ubuntu Software Center run both apt in the background, for managing deb packages.
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MakuluLinux 6 MATE, a Linux distribution based on the Debian testing branch, Jessie, that provides stability, speed, and a modern desktop, is the first in the series and it will be available for download on April 14.
Ubuntu and Derivatives
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Numix Icon Packs is a small project developed by Numix project team focused to create high quality GTK themes and icons for Linux desktop. Their goal is to make a “difference” in theming and to present you a modern and stylish desktop without damaging its usability while at it, and quite frankly, up until now they seem to have done a pretty great job.
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After wiring into the car’s communications system, forum user “nlc” was able to find a number of ports and tap into the data flowing to the center console and navigation screens. Others soon joined in the fun and amongst the slightly esoteric bits of information the “hackers” eventually discovered was that the sub-system runs on a version of Ubuntu operating system, which is a Linux variant.
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With Ubuntu 14.04 closing in to the release date, which is set for April 17th, I took Lubuntu for a spin from the daily live ISO image. Lubuntu is the most lightweight distribution in the Ubuntu family (the other one being Xubuntu which uses Xfce), using LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), as well as a set of applications intended to be low on resources.
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Okay, I have two socket 939 machines with XP collecting dust. Nevertheless they are quite stable and more than meets the requirements to run any version of Linux.
One has four gigs of RAM and the other two and both processors are AMD. I was wondering what you think of Mint and if there is another version of Linux you would recommend for the beginner.
Gentoo Family
PCLinuxOS
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I will have to migrate it to a newer version of PCLOS. But I will do that during Easter. The thing is, I am not sure if I want to do it. The current install of PCLOS has everything I need to work and play (it even runs the game Braid on Desura), so… why fixing it if it is not broken?
Slackware Family
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“We include Xfce4, the gimp, firefox, cups, exaile, popular multimedia plugins, and many other programs to maximize the desktop experience. Also new is an update to our very own installer, this was written from scratch and is a major improvement from previous installers. This is a RC release so final is soon to follow after initial peer testing,” notes the developer in the official announcement.
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Salix MATE 14.1 Beta 1, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on the MATE desktop environment, is ready for testing and download.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Karen Sandler
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The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems and as a result is freezing non-essential expenses. The GNOME Foundation has eliminated their cash reserves leading to this dire situation, but should be recoverable in the months ahead. The GNOME Foundation got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women (OPW) and managing the program (and funds) for a number of other participating organizations. The GNOME Foundation staff and board fell behind in their processes with being overwhelmed by administering OPW. GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women is explained as “The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software.” They’ve had around 30 interns for their most recent cycle.
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Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Karen M. Sandler is the Conservancy’s new Executive Director. “Bradley M. Kuhn, outgoing Executive Director, gratefully passes the torch to his long-time colleague Karen Sandler. While Kuhn’s work as Conservancy’s President and on its Board of Directors remain unchanged, Kuhn’s new full-time staff role is titled “Distinguished Technologist”.”
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Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity based in New York, announced today the addition of a talented new member of its management team. Karen M. Sandler, formerly Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, begins today as Conservancy’s new Executive Director.
Mutter-Wayland
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GNOME’s Mutter-Wayland compositor requires EGL/KMS rendering back-end support and this currently isn’t supported by software-based drivers that aren’t backed by an actual GPU with hardware acceleration. However, developers are working to allow the swrast driver and LLVMpipe to work with this back-end rather than adding any FBdev/Pixman support to Mutter-Wayland. The primary use-case is to get Mutter-Wayland running in virtual machines where there is no accelerated GPU driver with DRM/KMS support (i.e. mainly outside of VMware’s VMWgfx world).
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Wayland branch is now (yesterday) merged into Mutter master and that also brought some small changes to GNOME Shell, i.e, changes in build, changes on checking when Wayland is the compositor.
Software
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The GNOME EasyTAG application is a simple, open-source way for editing audio tags within popular audio file formats. The much-revamped EasyTAG 2.2.0 is now available.
West Coast Summit
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This being last day of the hackfest, people started to disappear in the afternoon. Before that, we had a planning session for Wayland in GNOME 3.14, and came up with a number of concrete tasks and goals.
Participation
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With 3.12 out the door, it’s time to think about what we want to be doing for 3.14. I have a long list of design projects that I want to work on for the next release, but I also want to spend some time on how the GNOME project is working and how we can improve it.
One of my reoccurring interests is how we, as a project, can ensure that each module is in a healthy state. We want modules to have active developer teams around them, and we want it to be easy for people to get involved – not just because it is good for our software, but also because openness is an important part of our mission.
This interest in helping people to contribute isn’t just reserved for new, inexperienced contributors. There are experienced coders out there who are interested in GNOME but haven’t found a way in. Even members of the GNOME project itself don’t always know how to contribute to different apps and modules.
Misc. GStreamer Developments
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Previously there were a few sinks based on OpenGL (osxvideosink for Mac OS X and eglglessink for Android and iOS), but they all only allowed rendering to a window. They did not allow rendering of a video into a custom texture that is then composited inside the application into an OpenGL scene. And then there was gst-plugins-gl, which allowed more flexible handling of OpenGL inside GStreamer pipelines, including uploading and downloading of video frames to the GPU, provided various filters and base classes to easily implement shader-based filters, provided infrastructure for sharing OpenGL contexts between different elements (even if they run in different threads) and also provided a video sink. The latter was now improved a lot, ported to all the new features for hardware integration and finally merged into gst-plugins-bad. Starting with GStreamer 1.4 in a few weeks, OpenGL will be a first-class citizen in GStreamer pipelines.
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The GStreamer 1.4 release that will happen in a few weeks time is officially making OpenGL a “first class citizen” and can be used by all platforms / operating systems supporting this open-source multimedia framework.
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Kubuntu
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Kubuntu versions usually ship with a pretty standard set up of KDE, and Trusty makes no exception. You will find the clean, default and usual KDE interface, but fear not, for it is highly configurable and you can practically make it look and behave in any way you like it. Kubuntu Trusty will ship in four days with one of the latest and bleeding edge versions of KDE, 4.13.0.
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Windows XP has officially died today as Microsoft pulls the plugs that leaves millions of users as juicy targets for crackers and cyber criminals and there will be massive attacks on these systems so it’s extremely important for Windows XP users to move away from this dead OS. There are two options for such users – either they upgrade to heavily criticized Windows 8 (which may not even work on their current hardware) or they simply move to Linux.
KDE Applications
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In 2005, a friend told me about Ubuntu, and since then I discover it. I love the open source philosophy, I think it’s a great project and all those who participate are awesome people!
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As I probably already mentioned somewhere there is currently quite some energy going into the work of bringing more and better KDE applications to the Mac platform.
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The project plugin works by automatically reading a simple json file and providing the information found there to various parts and plugins in Kate.
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Thanks to Georgiy Syptchenko from Krita Russian Community [0] Krita’s translations into Russian got significantly improved recently!
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For a long time now we have had kmymoney.org, and used that in all our documentation. That has made it easy to change now. After migrating all useful content from the Sourceforge site, all we had to was change the IP address in the DNS and, voilá! the new site is online.
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04.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Snowden and Journalists
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Two reporters central to revealing the massive U.S. government surveillance effort returned to the United States on Friday for the first time since the story broke and used the occasion to praise their exiled source: Edward Snowden.
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Reform
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With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it’s time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren’t they doing more to stop it?
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Revelations about the National Security Agency’s most controversial surveillance program, which centers on the bulk collection of hundreds of billions of records of Americans’ phone conversations, were quickly greeted with calls for reform by major internet powerhouses like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo last year. But all four companies, along with dozens of other major tech firms, are actively opposing an initiative to prevent NSA spying known as the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, leaning on secretive industry lobbying groups while they profess outrage in official statements.
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The recent ruling by the Obama administration that telecom carriers, rather than the National Security Agency, would be responsible for warehousing telephone metadata is a complete joke.
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One of Obama’s NSA reforms just makes the problem worse.
Obama
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But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.
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Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Barack Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.
Cost Analysis
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This past Monday, I had the honor of moderating a panel organized by students at the American University Washington College of Law’s National Security Law Brief, on Understanding the Global Implications of the NSA Disclosures on the U.S. Technology Industry. The panel (Elizabeth Banker (ZwillGen), David Fagan (Covington), Joseph Moreno (Cadwalader), Gerard Stegmaier (Wilson Sonsoni) and Lawrence Greenberg (Motley Fool)) was stacked with practitioners who are navigating, on a daily basis, issues related to data privacy, transparency, and cooperation with law enforcement/government requests, among other related issues. As we explored during the discussion, there are a number of recent media and other reports describing the “fallout” for U.S. industry as a result of the disclosures. So, at least two questions arise: first, are the reports to be believed, and second, if so, will there be a lasting impact, or is this only temporary?
Japan
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Last December the ruling Liberal Democratic Party rammed one of the most controversial bills in Japan’s postwar history through the Diet, or parliament, with an uncharacteristic lack of debate. The “Protection of Specially Designated Secrets Act” passed even as opposition politicians knocked over desks, chairs, and one another while trying to reach the podium to block it. Outside, nearly 10,000 protesters formed a human chain around the government building and chanted, “No Return to Fascism!”
Germany/Europe
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In a testimony delivered by video-link from Moscow, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed to EU parliamentarians that the US NSA is actively spying on human rights organizations such as UNICEF and Amnesty International.
Deception
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The NSA engages in this fear-mongering not only publicly but also privately. As part of its efforts to persuade news organizations not to publish newsworthy stories from Snowden materials, its representatives constantly say the same thing: If you publish what we’re doing, it will endanger lives, including NSA personnel, by making people angry about what we’re doing in their countries and want to attack us.
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Last week, National Intelligence Director Gen. James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans’ emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of their telephone conversations that have been stored in NSA computers, without warrants obtained pursuant to the Constitution. That the NSA is doing this is not newsworthy — Edward Snowden has told the world of this during the past 10 months. What is newsworthy is that the NSA has admitted this, and those admissions have far-reaching consequences.
Since the Snowden revelations first came to light last June, the NSA has steadfastly denied them. Clapper has denied them. The recently retired head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, has denied them. Even President Obama has stated repeatedly words to the effect that “no one is reading your emails or listening to your phone calls.”
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It was recently revealed that the NSA’s top-secret offensive security unit, a specially designed hacking group, can infiltrate systems at the speed of light through everything from satellite and fiber-optic connections
Data ‘Leaks’
Turkey
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Turkey’s largest military eavesdropping base, which is run under the country’s national intelligence agency, has been named the Signal Intelligence Directorate (SİB), in efforts to remodel the agency, inspired by the functioning of the NSA and the CIA in the United States.
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World View: New claims say Ankara worked with the US and Britain to smuggle Gaddafi’s guns to rebel groups
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The CIA has been training more than 1,000 rebels in Jordan in a program financed by Saudi Arabia. The rebels, blocked by Islamist militias in southern Syria, failed in two operations to establish strongholds in Syria.
PRISM CCTV
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Google is trying hard to register ‘Glass’ as a trademark for its wearable computer glasses. However, the search giant hasn’t been able to get through its bid with the US trademark office.
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Google is about to make its biggest push yet to get Glass in the hands of as many people as possible. The Verge has obtained documents indicating that the company will open up its “Explorer Program” and make Glass available to anyone who wants to purchase a pair, possibly as soon as next week. It’ll be a limited-time offer, only available for about a day, and only US residents will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 device. Google will also include a free sunglass shade or one of its newly-introduced prescription glasses frames along with any purchase. An internal Google slide shows that the promotion may be announced on April 15th, though all the details of this program have yet to be finalized.
Ukraine
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Arseniy Yatsenyuk promises devolution to local government in hope of staving off demands for their independence from Kiev
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World attention has focused on Ukraine recently. With President Victor Yanukovych making his exit and a new government formed, events shifted to Crimea, with accusations that the Russian military took over the region.
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The US has also come under attack from human rights groups for its use of drones against suspected terrorists but which has also killed many civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Recently, the UN Human Rights Council published a Special Rapporteur’s report which detailed the deaths of civilians caused by US drone attacks, and raised many questions of possible violations of international human rights law.
Torture
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Senate committee found CIA interrogations and detentions to be ‘brutal’ and urges administration to release report as quickly as possible
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The lengthy report took four years to complete and still remains largely shrouded from public view. The treatment of 100 detainees was addressed — this, even though the official administrative line has long been that far fewer suspects were interrogated at CIA black sites. The report expressly states that the CIA misled the media and the public about the effectiveness of cruel and unusual interrogation. “The CIA manipulated the media by co-ordinating the leak of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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We finally have been favored with the most inevitable leak in the history of the republic. Somebody’s sent the Senate committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program, and its description of what was done in our name, out into the world. This will light a fire under some asses in the Executive branch, I’m thinking. It ought to get people thrown in jail. (h/t to Martin Longman for the PDF.)…
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A classified U.S. Senate report found that the CIA’s legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation techniques that critics say amount to torture was based on faulty legal reasoning, McClatchy news service reported on Thursday.
The Central Intelligence Agency also issued erroneous claims about how many people it subjected to techniques such as simulated drowning, or “water boarding,” according to the news service, citing conclusions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report obtained by McClatchy.
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A controversial torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee paints a pattern of CIA deception about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods used on terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to leaked findings. The committee said it will ask the Justice Department to investigate how the material was published.
The McClatchy news service late Thursday published what it said are the voluminous, still-classified review’s 20 findings. It concludes that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” failed to produce valuable intelligence; the CIA misled the Bush administration, Congress and the public about the value of the harsh treatment; the agency employed unauthorized techniques on detainees and improperly detained others; and it never properly evaluated its own actions.
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Congressman Keith Ellison is among 40 House Democrats calling on President Obama to quickly declassify portions of a report on the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques.
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One U.S. interrogator, speaking to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity, explained the “enhanced interrogation” program as being “the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.”
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CIA operatives called things like waterboarding “enhanced interrogation methods.” But the only adequate word to describe them is “torture.”
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Fresh claims emerge of high-level British government involvement in the programme
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Drones
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Schiff is co-sponsoring the drones report bill with an unlikely ally, Rep. Walter Jones. The North Carolina Republican is a mostly staunch conservative and Schiff a reliable Democratic vote on contentious issues. But Jones has broken with Republicans sharply in recent years over civil liberties issues and foreign policy generally.
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The Freedom of Information Act is a critical law for making sure the public has a fighting chance to get copies of records the government might not want it to see. For more than 40 years, people have used the FOIA to uncover evidence of government waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. More benignly, FOIA has been used to better understand the development and effects — positive and negative — of the federal government’s policies.
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Because Arab Americans and American Muslims have been waiting to see when the Obama administration would finally act to end Bush-era ethnic and religious profiling guidelines and practices, I was troubled to read press accounts this week indicating that US attorney general Eric Holder may be proposing to keep in place many of the programmes that have so compromised our rights. American Arabs have been waiting for five years for the administration to end these practices. Now we fear that they may not.
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…United States’ earliest days, the country tried to win the respect of the world by faithfully adhering to international law.
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Mohamed Sakr and Bilal al-Berjawi had been friends since childhood, and they were both stripped of their citizenship within months of each other. After losing their citizenship, both were targeted for drone strikes. It took two separate attempts to kill al-Berjawi, while Sakr was successfully killed with one bombing. American officials, who supplied the drones, and British officials have denied the accusation that the governments are attempting to skirt due process laws by removing citizenship prior to assassination, though they did admit that the same intelligence may have led to both actions.
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On April 4, a federal court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s killing of three American citizens in two drone strikes in 2011.
The complaint was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the families of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son.
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Relatives of victims of US drone strikes in Yemen have come together and formed the National Organisation for Drones Victims aimed at crusading against the controversial US programme and bringing justice to victims.
[...]
Al Gawili said that he lost two of his relatives in a drone strikes in Khawalan, northern Yemen in January last year. He said that his relatives had nothing to do with Al Qaida and were hit by drones when they were dropping unidentified passengers off another area”.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Jolla
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The fifth update of Sailfish OS, called Sailfish OS 1.0.5.16 Paarlampi has been released, coming with both interesting new features and bug-fixes.
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Hello Jolla Enthusiasts. As you may know, Jolla is a project developed by former Nokia employees. The first Jolla smartphone is running on Sailfish OS, a modified Megoo Linux system, which is Android compatible, uses Wayland as the default display server , uses Nokia N9′s Maliit touchscreen keyboard and impressive hardware specifications.
WebOS
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It is a known fact that Palm’s mobile operating system dubbed webOS never really took off commercially. However, that is no indication that the team behind the OS did not have great ideas. In the latest, the team is rolling out its interesting (read: exciting) user interface ideas to the community. Known as Mochi, the project aims at the community to further work on it as the team was working on some intriguing ideas before HP decided to stall its plan for the same.
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A class action lawsuit filed in the wake of that decision in 2011 has now been settled by HP at the cost of $57 million. The plaintiffs are primarily pension funds and other institutional investors, whose anger stems from the dissonance between what HP was saying publicly and planning privately. Citing employees from within HP, the lawsuit alleges that the company didn’t have plans to build webOS PCs or printers until at least the beginning of 2013, which would have contradicted its bold claims about flooding the market with webOS hardware.
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It’s been almost three years since HP decided to scrap all of its webOS hardware and in that time some of the software has been released as an open source project, and much of the the webOS team has moved to LG to work on televisions.
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Firefox OS
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Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla’s continued relevance.
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The images display a new lockscreen, as well as new SMS interfaces and other features. It’s a flatter look, with more transparencies, among other changes. There’s also a view of the EverythingMe-based context-sensitive search function.
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Despite the fact that the newest Firefox OS version available on devices is Firefox OS 1.3, a preview of Firefox OS 2.0 is already available and it looks quite awesome, for an OS targeting low-range and mid-range devices.
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There have been a lot of interesting developments surrounding Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Mozilla made clear at the recent Mobile World Congress conference that it wants to seed a market for $25 phones based on the platform, putting smartphones in the hands of many people who haven’t owned mobile phones before. And, a while back, I covered Geeksphone’s concept for a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that would purportedly run both Mozilla’s platform and Android. Now, the Geeksphone Revolution, an Android smartphone on which it is easy to install Firefox OS, has gone on sale in France, Germany and the U.K. Some reports say that it will also go on sale in Italy.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Swisscom
FireTV
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It’s interesting to note that, according to Koush, the APK is the “regular Android APK,” and can be used to mirror your Android phone with any other suitable Android device. As we all know, the Fire TV does run on Android and although, on the surface, it may not be immediately familiar to most Android users, its roots are the same and have allowed the app to work seamlessly.
Android TV
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Rumors of the impending sunsetting of Google TV have been around at least since September when Sony, Google’s most stalwart partner for its struggling, Android-based Google TV, announced a Bravia Smart Stick media player. Sony noted “Google services” but never mentioned Google TV. The trend was confirmed by several unnamed Google TV partners in an October report by GigaOM that cited the “Android TV” name. In December, when Marvell announced an Android 4.2.2-ready, Armada 1500 Plus SoC update to the official SoC of Google TV — the Armada 1500 — the Android TV term was used again.
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Leaked images of Google’s new Android TV user interface show a more streamlined and intuitive approach to the big screen than Google TV.
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The Verge reports that Google is getting ready to launch Android TV, a set top box based on Android that comes complete with apps and games. The new device is said to have an entertainment-focused interface, and it will be geared toward getting content in front of the user with three clicks or less. Such a product could prove to be a very tough competitor for Amazon’s Fire TV and the Apple TV. It looks like Google is declaring war on Apple and Amazon for control of the living room.
Android in Home-centric Form Factors
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Photographs serve as our best memories. Through good times and some great times, photographs stay with us etching our emotions deftly onto a little piece of paper. Over the years, photographs have gone a major transformation. Few years ago, taking a photo meant that you had some memory that you thought would be worth sharing. You took a picture and then kept it with you for the rest of your life. These days, taking a picture is all about getting the maximum likes on Facebook or Instagram. Oh, and there’s the bizarre trend of “selfies” that well, isn’t that cool as you might think.
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Laptops
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So the question is, what would Android need to do to make it a great laptop operating system? The biggest thing missing, in my opinion, is bringing great desktop apps to this OS through the same Play Store. Just like you install Chrome for smartphones, there should be an option to install Chrome Desktop for the same touchscreen devices—this app, however, would need to be made for keyboard usage.
Tablets
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If you want to be totally up-to-date, HP has the answer for you — though it will cost you a little bit. The company has stealthily launched the Slate 8 Pro Business edition, which is similar to the non-Business version save for one key difference: It runs the latest version of Android — 4.4, or KitKat.
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Nikon (Microsoft-taxed)
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Nikon has launched the Coolpix S810, which packs in all the technology Nikon is famous for along with the most popular operating for smart devices – Android. It is a simple point and shoot camera powered by Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.
Samsung (Microsoft-taxed)
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Samsung Electronics will add two safeguards to its latest smartphone in an effort to deter rampant theft of the mobile devices nationwide, the company said Friday.
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Samsung Galaxy S5 is the fastest smartphone available in the market right now. Galaxy S5 has top of the line Qualcomm 2.5 GHz quad core Snapdragon 800 chipset along with 2GB of RAM. The internal storage include options for 16GB or 32GB expandable up to 64GB using microSD. It features a 5.1 inch Super AMOLED display with FULL HD resolution of 1920×1080. The smartphone is running the latest Android KitKat 4.4. Special features include fingerprint sensor, heart-rate monitor, health-centric apps and water- as well as dust-resistant body. The device is powered by a 3,000 mAh battery.
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The Gear Fit is the first wearable device from a major manufacturer to truly look like it’s come from the future, though its warm reception was colored by one universal complaint: the orientation of the screen. Displaying the time, messages, and all your health data horizontally makes the wrist-worn device somewhat awkward to read, but Samsung hasn’t been deaf to the criticism. The company’s issued a patch to enable vertical display orientation, making for a more familiar reading experience when consulting the fitness band. This could be a great boon in Korea — where the updated UI first appeared on Samsung’s official store blog — but the narrowness of the screen may pose a challenge when displaying longer pieces of text in the Latin alphabet.
Project Ara
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Just days before its first Project Ara Developer Conference is scheduled to begin, Google has released the device’s Module Developers Kit (MDK), a set of plans and documentation designed to get hardware hackers started building modules for the componentized, mix-and-match experimental smartphone.
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Google’s Project Ara is an effort to create a modular smartphone that’s cheap and ridiculously customizable. Want a new processor? Just pop out the old one and pop in a module with a new chip. Need long battery life but don’t care about removable storage? Just replace the microSD card module with an extra battery module.
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Security
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Disturbing reports about fake Android apps are nothing new, but the latest one involves an app called Virus Shield. It sold for $3.99 and promised to improve the security of Android devices. Unfortunately, as Android Police discovered, it actually did nothing at all except to fleece users of their hard earned money. The app has since been pulled from the Google Play store, but the damage has already been done.
Misc.
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Android 4.4.3, also known as KitKat MR2 (Android 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 are known as KitKat MR1), has entered the dogfooding stage and has started rolling out to 1% of Google employees outside of the Android team. Currently, the dogfooding rollout is limited to the supported Nexus line (Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2012, Nexus 7 2013, and Nexus 10), with GPE and Moto X updates to follow.
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It isn’t easy being an Android smartphone maker these days. Your flagship handsets are scrutinised for cutting-edge features, yet they’re criticised if these features seem to be unnecessary, or are unnecessarily complicated.
Ever faster multicore processors are sometimes deemed by reviewers to be faster than needed, with the trade-off between power consumption and responsiveness often cited. Higher-resolution screens can be dismissed, as there comes a point where pixel count goes beyond being a factor in smooth text and graphics rendition. What’s a manufacturer to do in the face of such criticism?
Chrome OS
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Chromebooks are also getting support for folders in launcher. What it means is that now, like Android, you can create folders and club your apps in a much organzied manner. Google has also implemented the “OK Google” search feature with the launcher and the voice search can be triggered with hotword “Ok Google”. Google has also implemented support for ‘Captive Portal’ which makes it easier for users when they try to connect to the wireless of cafes, hotels, airports, and other locations which requiers them to go to an authentication page.
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As Chromebooks–portable computers based on Google’s Chrome OS platform–continue to carve out a healthy niche for themselves, there are strong signs that we are soon going to see Chrome OS tablets. This, of course, has been in the rumor mill for some time. Last October, I reported on a developer-focused version of Chrome OS that included an on-screen keyboard, which of course would be ideal for use on a tablet. Now, the Chrome OS team has confirmed that the latest Stable Channel version of Chrome OS has such a keyboard, and it’s likely we’ll see tablets based on Google’s operating system soon.
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What I am trying to highlight from this post is that if you use a Chromebook you have given yourself a great chance to remain safe from viruses but it doesn’t mean you should go gung-ho and believe that you are invincible online.
Chrome
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It is unclear what they mean by ‘technical issue’ and how come Google has blocked the website. At the time of the writing, visitors are still presented with the malware warning message. Wired says it is waiting for Google chrome to remove the warning.
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Today’s Chrome Beta channel release includes a slew of new developer features to help you make richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
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Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been upgraded yet again, has just received a new update, promoting the 35 development branch to Beta.
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Google today released Chrome version 34 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes support for responsive images, an unprefixed version of the Web Audio API, and importing supervised users. You can update to the latest release now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.
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According to a lucky reader of ours, Google opened up a beta test for its Chrome Remote Desktop app on Android within the last few days. The beta is invite only at this time, with invites rolling out to those who “expressed interest” in helping Chrome improve their remote desktop client. Like the Chrome extension, this app does indeed give you remote access to your desktop computers, only this time through Android devices (both phones and tablets).
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Google officially released the Chrome 34 web-browser this afternoon and with it comes new features.
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The Google Chrome 35 development branch, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been upgraded yet again, but this time it’s only a very small update.
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