• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Making Linux Feel at Home

Hiring Tux is a smart move for both small and large businesses. Linux once was considered a hobbyist’s operating system, but it has come a long way and now is considered enterprise class. It is considered very stable and secure. Linux can easily be customized, and there is a huge community eager to help out. Those are just some of the reasons to migrate to the Linux desktop.

Desktop

• New Intel powered Chromebooks to feature Bay Trail chipset

  A plethora of new Intel-powered Chrome OS devices were announces at a press conference hosted Wednesday by tech giant Google and chip manufacturer Intel. The event, which featured Caesar Sengupta from Google, and Navin Shenoy, vice president and general manager of mobile computing at Intel, announced, among other things, Chromebooks powered by Intel’s low-energy Bay Trail chipset, which will enable the lightweight computers running the Linux-based, web-centric operating system from Google to reportedly have 11 hours of battery life. Other devices announced include Intel’s Haswell and Core i3 chips.

• LG Chromebase will be available May 26th

  The LG Chromebase, the first all-in-one Chrome OS PC, has been announced to be made available to US customers on May 26. With 2 GB of memory, a 16GB SSD (solid state drive), and a dual-core Intel Haswell CPU, LG has followed the usual specifications found on most Chromebooks. For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, these specifications would probably be seem insufficient. However, what makes Chromebooks and the Chromebase stand out, is that they run Google‘s Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based upon Linux, so is very light and does not need many resources. In addition, since it only runs internet applications, it does not need many resources.

• LG Chromebase will be available May 26th

  The LG Chromebase, the first all-in-one Chrome OS PC, has been announced to be made available to US customers on May 26. With 2 GB of memory, a 16GB SSD (solid state drive), and a dual-core Intel Haswell CPU, LG has followed the usual specifications found on most Chromebooks. For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, these specifications would probably be seem insufficient. However, what makes Chromebooks and the Chromebase stand out, is that they run Google‘s Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based upon Linux, so is very light and does not need many resources. In addition, since it only runs internet applications, it does not need many resources.

• Chromebooks Gain Important Features, Appear to Be Here to Stay

  Part of what’s driving Chromebooks forward is that Google is on a rapid release cycle with Chrome OS. And, very importantly, Google has relaxed the fiercely cloud-centric vision it originally had for Chrome OS, so that applications for Chromebooks can be used offline.

• Chromebooks looking to replace PCs by going offline

  Google is adding more features to Chromebook applications so that they can be used without accessing the Web, addressing a common complaint among users who want the laptops to function more like traditional PCs.

  Although Web use remains a central feature of Chromebooks, Google recently added the ability to edit videos and watch full movies offline, for instance. A shorter update cycle means that the company can be more responsive to user demand.

• OEMs Flee Low-margin PCs

• Weekend Apocalypse in Ethiopia

  While the share of page-views from Ethiopia that StatCounter sees for GNU/Linux has been impressive lately, take a look at the peaks:

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.15 SSD File-System Benchmarks

  Now that kernel development activity is settling down for the Linux 3.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks of the EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems compared to the stable Linux 3.14 kernel performance.

• Graphics Stack

  • The State Of The Intel Kernel DRM Driver

    Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center is presenting this week at LinuxTag 2014 about the state of their Linux kernel graphics driver.

  • Wayland 1.5 Appears To Be In Great Shape

    While there’s many changes to Wayland 1.5, it doesn’t look like there should be much fallout from the many new features. When releasing the Wayland 1.5 RC, Kristian Høgsberg mentioned they’re at “a historic low in terms of open bug” with just 15 open bugs covering Wayland/Weston. The overall state of Wayland appears to be very good.

  • SteamOS Update 105 Lands New AMD Linux Driver

    The SteamOS Update 105 includes the AMD Catalyst 14.4 Linux driver, updates to the Iceweasel web browser, upstream Debian 7.5 package updates, new packages included in the SteamOS repository, and support for newer network adapters. The new network hardware supported is the Realtek R8168 and handling for more Intel WiFi chipsets.

Applications

• Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim

  1976 was a good year for text editors. At MIT, Richard Stallman and Guy Steele wrote the first version of Emacs. And over at Berkeley, Bill Joy wrote vi (though it wouldn’t be called that for a few years yet).

• Folder Color : Make Your Folder Icon in Nautilus and Nemo Colorful

  Want to coloring your folder in nautilus or nemo file manager? here’s the simple way to make you folder have different color in nautilus and nemo file manager using folder color .

• Timekpr — Easy To Use Parental Control App for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  If I added up all of the hours I’ve lost at my desktop simply by doing nothing of note I’d likely be eligible for honorary Time Lord status from Gallifrey.

• 7 open source tools and free resources for writing

  Most of us encounter parts of our workday where we must write or document something. Whether for building out the plan of a project, for the documentation of a project, or for the creation of the project itself, like an article or blog post, writing is a part of many of our daily lives regardless of industry or field.

  Open source tools can be used to get writing done, and freely available resources can be used to supplement and enhance that work. As a content manager here at Opensource.com, there are seven open source tools and resources that I use everyday.

• Popular Download Manager flareGet 3.1-36 Arrives with Massive Improvements

  flareGet 3.1-36, a full-featured, advanced, multi-threaded, multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux, has been released and is now available for download.

• ClamTk 5.06 Is the Most Friendly Antivirus Software on Linux

• spark: Itty bitty graphs for your terminal emulator

• sandy: An extremely svelte editor

• script: That terminal session recorder you always wanted

• speedtest-cli: Not the answers I wanted

• split: And the curse of the asinine defaults

• splitvt: Under the most dire of circumstances

• sqlite3: I won’t begin to try and explain

• Proprietary

  • Google announces new Play Movies and TV app for Chromebook

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Implementing SSL Perfect Forward Secrecy in NGINX Web-Server

  • How to run Docker containers on CentOS or Fedora

  • UbuntuTrusty&&Cirros Cloud Instances (RDO IceHouse) without floating IP working on the Net

  • Arch Linux 2014.05.01 Released – Installation and Configuration Guide with Screenshots

  • Install Atom Text Editor In Ubuntu Via PPA

  • How To Install CodeLite 5.4 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17 Qiana And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Viber On Both 32 Bit (Via Wine) And 64 Bit Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17 And Their Derivative Systems

• Games

  • New Steam for Linux Beta Update released: Features Performance fixes for Big Picture

    Following hot on the footsteps on the last update, Valve just released another Beta update for Steam. This time however it is targeted towards Linux. This beta update brings a slew of much needed updates and most importantly various performance fixes for Linux.

  • Starry Expanse, A Fan Remake Of ‘Riven: The Sequel To Myst’ Announces A Linux Version

  • GRID Autosport Will Support Linux, But Not At Launch

  • Unreal Engine 4 Roadmap Published

  • A Developer’s Perspective On Porting Games To Linux

    Leszek Godlewski, the former developer at The Farm 51 who has ported games like Painkiller Hell and Damnation and Deadfall Adventures to Linux / SteamOS, has given another presentation on porting games to Linux.

  • Retro 2D 8BitMMO to Arrive on Steam for Linux Soon

    8BitMMO, a retro-style 2D massively multiplayer game developed and published by Archive Entertainment, will get a Linux version soon.

  • DosBox 0.1.4 – For ChromeOS!

    Over the years I’ve looked at DosBox many times, I’ve covered it when it was included as part of the Puppy Arcade distro and I’ve covered it as a package in its own right.

    To say the package is impressive is to grossly understate this piece of software.

  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown appears to be in testing on Steam for Linux now

  • Stranded and Spirit to be published on Linux, Mac and PC courtesy of Curve Digital

    Indie exploration titles Stranded and Spirit will be released on Steam courtesy of Curve Digital, it has been announced.

  • Unreal Tournament 2014 announced, is 100% free for PC, Mac and Linux

    Something that Epic Games teased earlier in the week has now come true – Unreal Tournament is back, and is completely free. Unreal Tournament 2014 is a sequel to the famous first-person shooter, and is not just free-to-play, but is completely free. It is being built for PC and Mac only, with Linux support also making it in. This ain’t no console dumbed down first-person shooter, folks!

  • A Post-mortem On Porting Two Titles To Linux, One Year Of Porting

    Leszek Godlewski is the man behind porting Deadfall Adventures and Painkiller Hell & Damnation to Linux, he now works for Nordic Games on an unannounced project that should hopefully see Linux support.

  • Killing Floor 2 FPS Announced With SteamOS Linux Support Right In

    I knew Tripwire weren’t stupid! Killing Floor 2 was a given when you look at how popular it is, it needs a refresh and I am glad to say it will be on Linux.

  • Epic Games Roadmap For Unreal Engine Now Available, Linux Native Editor Is On It

    Remember when we got confirmation for you that Unreal Engine will have all the tools native on Linux? Well their roadmap is now public and it’s on it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• How To Install LXQT On Ubuntu 14.04 And Ubuntu 13.10

• LXQt 0.7.0 released

• LXQt 0.7.0 – Next Generation Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment Has Been Released

  The LXDE and Razor-qt teams are proud to announce LXQt 0.7.0, the first release of LXQt, the Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment. This beta release is considered a stable continuation of the Razor desktop. It has been almost a year since the Razor-qt project and the LXDE-Qt project decided to merge. Since then, the LXQt desktop has been under active development by 13 developers and dozens of contributors and translators.

• New DE LXQt Released, Linux Drones, and Deploying Linux

  Today in Linux news a new desktop environment saw its first release. A joint effort from the LXDE and Razor-qt clans brings LXQt 0.7.0. In other news, several outlets are covering the US Navy’s plans to move drones from Solaris to Linux. And finally today, Jack Germain covers the ins and outs of deploying Linux.

• Linux desktop environment LXQt achieves first release

  Besides being stable and versatile, Linux-based operating systems are very customizable too. You see, most distributions allow you to customize the UI by selecting different environments. While GNOME, KDE and Unity are a few of the popular environments, there are many others as well.

• LXDE, Razor-Qt merge to create awesome LXQt project

  ‘May the fork be with you’ is a term we often hear in the free software community as it’s extremely easy to take the code and fork it to scratch your etch. What’s really difficult (and that’s something really counts) is to actually come together, collaborate and merge code-base to create something which helps more people, which is not just about scratching your own itch, but to do something which benefits more and more people.

• Linux Has Too Few Distributions and Desktop Environments

  The Linux platform is actually the base for a multitude of operating systems, but a part of the community feels that there are too many distributions. The truth is that there are probably too few of them.

  One of the points of contention that usually arise in the Linux community is the fact that there seem to be too many Linux distributions and too many desktop environments. If we were to compare Linux with any other platform that would be true, but such a comparison would be incorrect.

  Linux is the only platform that allows this kind of freedom, so making a comparison with other operating systems is actually incorrect because they do not incorporate the same kind of philosophy and openness.

  My point is that even if Linux seems to be the home of many operating systems and desktop environments, the reality is that, in fact, there aren’t actually enough. The reason why I pick OSes and desktop environments is because they are the most visible, but the same is true for any other component.

• Does Linux need more distributions and desktop environments?

  One of the best things about Linux is that there’s literally a distribution for everybody. Linux offers users the greatest range of choices of any desktop operating system. But do we need even more options? Softpedia thinks that we do and explains the advantages of having more desktop environments and distros.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • RESULTS OF CARD SORTING THE KDE SYSTEM SETTINGS

    KDE tries to be as much customizable as possible: All freedom to the user! This leads to an extended configuration that might be confusing to new users. Additionally, modules from different sources are aggregated in a way that not necessarily fits the mental representation of users. For instance, the distinction between ‘workspace appearance’ and ‘window appearance’ is not common in other desktop environments.

  • KDE kicks off wallpaper contest for the next Plasma

    Here’s your chance to see your favorite snap beautifying the next release of KDE Plasma! KDE’s Visual Design Group (VDG) announced a wallpaper competition for its next release of Plasma and submissions are live for the entire month of May 2014.

  • KDE Network Manager: Details sorted

    More than 800 people participated in our online sorting of the KDE Network Manager details. In this article we present the results.

    [...]

    To achieve this we doubled some information into a tool-tip. This will of course only be an advantage for non-touch-users. We replaced the ‘connected’-statement in the current interface by the IP address and information about the current connection speed. Also, seeing the large amount of different information available for a single wireless connection we propose to split this information up into the sections ‘My computer’, ‘Speedgraph’, ‘Connection’ and ‘Router’.

  • Last week in Krita — week 19

  • Moka Icon Theme Ported to Plasma!

    One of the first things people think of when talking visual design is icons. Now as “design” this is a very tight definition since a large chunk of it is so much bigger. But icons is a part of it all and it is something that is the most obvious change visually. Icons are also something very very difficult to do well as there is not only several very strict rules and concepts to consider while doing them, there is also a very large amount of work involved (thousands of icons for starters). Beyond that there are issues that make it even trickier.
    As icons are very direct visually – they are often victim of harsh criticism (or downright harassment) but further than that the BASE theme of a distro have to follow even stricter rules if it want to be accessible to as many as possible.

    Now we using Plasma do not have the huge wealth of icon themes as the boys and girls over at GTK, but we are getting there ever so slowly and today I would like to present one of the latest icon themes to get ported to KDE – Moka by Sam Hewitt.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Wayland Is Approved For Fedora 21

    The Wayland change for Fedora 21 is about better supporting GNOME Wayland sessions. Fedora 20 already brought experimental GNOME Shell Wayland support while Fedora 21 is building upon more polished support thanks to upstream improvements landing with GNOME 3.14 due out in September.

  • Among Other New Apps, The New GNOME Books Will Be Part Of The GNOME 3.14 Desktop Environment

    The GNOME developers are presenting at the Google Summer of Code their new ebook management application, called intuitively GNOME Books, which will be part of GNOME 3.14, the first desktop environment with official support for Wayland, Red Hat’s new system compositor.

Distributions

• Robolinux VM Allows You To Run Windows In Linux

• Robolinux turns your C Drive into a virtual Windows machine you can run in Linux

  Say you want to move from Windows to Linux… but there are a few Windows apps that you can’t give up, and they don’t work well under WINE. The developer of Robolinux offers a Debian-based GNU/Linux operating system designed to let you run Windows XP or Windows 7 in a virtual machine.

  But the latest version of Robolinux goes a step further: It includes a tool that lets you create a virtual machine by cloning your Windows C: Drive, which means it takes just minutes to create a version of Windows that you can run in virtualization in Linux, and it will already have all of your existing programs and data.

• AV Linux Dazzles Both Eyes and Ears

  With audio and video applications, you often need more than one package, and the assembled collection of multimedia packages in AV Linux is huge. The range of software offerings is a bonus. You do not get lightweight ware that leaves you yearning for more powerful features. The audio-visual tools are mature. Many of the productive apps are custom builds that enhance what you can do with them.

• GoboLinux 015

  Six years after its last release, GoboLinux is back, with the 015 release of the distribution that is best-known for a total rearrangement of the traditional Linux filesystem hierarchy. More information about the distribution is available, as are release notes for 015.

• Screenshots

  • Ubuntu Privacy Remix 12.04r1

  • Robolinux 7.5.1

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Want to Install OpenMandriva Lx 2014? Some Things You Need to Know

    I guess that the main question is: after seeing those problems, do I intend to keep OpenMandriva Lx 2014?

    The answer is yes. I find the distro responsive, beautiful, and functional for pretty much all I need (except printing or typing in Japanese so far ).

    Those, however, are very specific problems that other users should not expect to find, I suppose, and I can live with them.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat opens door to Open Stack at Red Hat Summit 2014

    Red Hat is one of the top contributors to Open Stack development, so it was no surprise to see Open Stack was a popular topic of discussion at this year’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The CUBE hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman sat down with Red Hat’s GM of Virtualization and Open Stack, Radhesh Balakrishnan, to discuss the future of Red Hat and Open Stack in the cloud.

  • Tesora Announces OpenStack Collaborations With Open Source Leaders, Red Hat and MongoDB

  • SEDESOL Oportunidades Named 2014 Red Hat Innovator of the Year

  • Fedora

    • It’s Official. Fedora 21, Using GNOME 3.14 Will Run On Wayland As The Default Display Server

      It’s official. Fedora 21, using GNOME 3.14 (scheduled for release on September 2014) will be the first Linux system to use the Wayland system compositor as default, instead of the good old X11 server. The Fedora developers have approved the change yesterday at their FESCo meeting.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 8.0 Jessie To Likely Target The Linux 3.16 Kernel

    Ben Hutchings began extrapolating data of stable kernel releases and around the time of the Debian Jessie freeze will likely be the Linux 3.17 release, but that might be too close for comfort. However, at the same time, the earlier the Jessie kernel is frozen the more hardware enablement back-porting and other fixes that will need to queue up for this next major Debian GNU/Linux release.

  • APT Reaches Version 1.0.3

  • Debian 7.5 “Wheezy” Live CD Now Available for Download

    When a new point release of Debian is made available, the Live CD version of that distro is not accessible to users right away. It usually takes about a week for the Debian Live CD team to put together the new releases.

  • Debian 8.0 Jessie Will Be Using Either Kernel 3.16 Or Kernel 3.17, As Default

    As you may know, Debian 8.0 Jessie will be the first Debian system that will be using Red Hat’s systemd as the default init event manager. While it is in it’s early development stages, only the first Alpha version being available until now, new information about the future generation Debian system has been released.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Three Reasons Why You Should Upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

        One of the best reasons to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is by far the new Linux kernel stack that comes with the new version. Ubuntu 14.04 includes the 3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the v3.13.9 upstream stable Linux kernel, which is one of the newest ones made available.

      • Ubuntu AIO DVD Has All Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Flavors on One Disk

        Ubuntu AIO DVD (all-in-one), a collection of the most important Ubuntu 14.04 LTS flavors made available on April 17, 2014, is now ready for download.

        Canonical released its latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS distribution back in April, and along with it all the other famous flavors were also offered. There is a single problem with this launch, namely that the distros come as separate operating systems and you will have to download five ISOs, including the original, if you want to have all of them.

      • Canonical Releases New Ubuntu Touch Images Based on Ubuntu 14.10

        Ubuntu for phones and tablets was announced more than a year and a half ago and the developers are working hard to make that October deadline when the first Ubuntu powered phones are supposed to arrive, although this is not a date set in stone.

      • Canonical Has Updated The Kernels Of All The Supported Ubuntu Systems, For Security Reasons. Update Your Ubuntu System’s Kernel Now!

        As you may know, Canonical has updated the kernels of all the supported Ubuntu systems: Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, due to the fact that it had some security issues, allowing unprivileged users to cause denial of service to the system and get root access.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

          Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that uses the popular KDE desktop environment. According to information from the development team, this version offers more stability and also brings the latest apps for KDE.

          As Xubuntu 14.04 and Lubuntu 14.04, Kubuntu 14.04 come with long term support. The long term support means it comes with the promise of at least 5 years of support, including patches and bug fixes.

        • Secure Ubuntu Privacy Remix 12.04r1 (Protected Pangolin) Officially Released

          With all the security and anonymity issues that are now affecting the online community, a Linux distribution that promises to keep users secure is not something out of the ordinary. In fact, there already is a number of OSes that seem to fit into this category, like Tails for example, and Ubuntu Privacy Remix is just one of them.

Devices/Embedded

• Rate your favorite hacker SBCs, win prizes

  Together with Linux.com, the Linux Foundation’s community website, we have set up a survey on SurveyMonkey with 32 open spec single-board computers. Pick your favorite three boards and answer a few questions about what you’re looking for in an open, hacker SBC and enter the optional drawing for a chance to win cool Tux, embedded Linux, and Android gear. Five randomly selected winners will receive a T-shirt, sweatshirt, hat, mug, or USB drive.

• Choose Your Favorite Open Source SBC, Enter to Win Prizes

• 10 nerdiest Linux gadgets

  Of all the nerdy Linux gadgets out there, these take the cake.

• Navy giving its helicopter drones a Linux upgrade

  The systems used to fly the MQ-8 Fire Scout, the robotic helicopter developed by Northrop Grumman for the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships, are about to get an upgrade—one that’s based on the Linux operating system. Raytheon has been awarded a $15.8 million contract to deploy a new version of the Vertical Takeoff and Landing Unmanned Air Vehicle Tactical Control System (VTUAV TCS) that takes the operator’s console off its legacy Sun Microsystems Solaris 8 platform and brings it in line with military standards for drone control platforms—allowing it to be used with other compatible unmanned aircraft.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung replaces mobile design boss following Galaxy S5 backlash

      Amid criticism of the latest Galaxy S smartphone, South Korean firm Samsung Electronics has replaced Chang Dong-hoon, the head of its mobile design team, by vice president of mobile design Lee Min-Hyuk. According to Reuters, “Chang, a former professor who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will continue to lead Samsung’s design center which overseas its overall design strategy.”

  • Android

    • Secret Back Doors in Android

      Following the latest Google update (which I was given no option to reject) I noticed that Google had added a remote kill switch as an opition. It was enabed by default. “Allow remote lock and erase” is what Google calls it and it is essentially working like a back door. Google and its partners in government are gaining a lot of power not over a smartphone but over a tablet.

    • How Google’s Android Silver could become ‘Wintel for phones’

      Analysis In the 1990s, Intel and Microsoft dominated the “open” PC standard – and it appears that Google now wants to do the same for its Android system, via its Silver programme.

    • Chromebooks to go offline as Intel moves inside

      Intel has finally joined the Chrome OS bandwagon ensuring it won’t become obsolete in the post PC (Windows) era. The two companies hosted a joint press event on May 6 where they announced quite a lot of Chromebooks powered by Intel chips. Intel enjoyed a monopolistic position during the Windows era and the partnership between Intel & Windows was known as Wintel, which unfortunately was bad for the industry as it lead to some anti-competitive business practices which heavily damaged (and almost destroyed AMD).

    • Huawei launches ultra-slim Ascend P7 Android phone

      Huawei’s new 4G LTE smartphone, the Ascend P7, is finally here. A significant upgrade from last year’s Ascend P6, the new smartphone offers an updated Emotion UI interface on top of Android 4.4.2 Kitkat mobile operating system. It also provides users with updated cameras, and a 5-inch 1920×1080 resolution 441ppi IPS display. At 6.5mm slim, Ascend P7 is being touted as one of the slimmest 4G LTE smartphones in the market. The phone packs dual 13MP and 8MP cameras.

    • Is CryptoLocker Ransomware arriving on Android?

      ThreatPost reports that the Reveton cyber-crime gang is advertising an Android version of CryptoLocker. This program seems to have no way to actively infect an Android smartphone or tablet. To get it you have to actually download the APK file.

Hashover: A free-software alternative to Disqus and other hosted-commenting services

I’ve been waiting for this: Hashover is a free-software project that aims to replace hosted-comments services like Disqus and those offered by Facebook and others that keep your comments in their database.

Atom, GitHub’s next-gen text editor, is now open source

Nathan Sobo announced that GitHub is contributing its text editor for programmers, Atom, to the open source community under the MIT license. While GitHub will continue to have its dedicated team working on Atom, they are also looking for a thriving and long-lasting community around Atom, just like Emacs and Vim.

Atom has been powered by open source packages from its Beta phase. The current announcement takes it to the next level by open sourcing the rest of Atom including the core application, Atom’s package manager and Atom’s Chromium-based desktop application framework, Atom Shell.

Google Open-Sources Their AutoFDO Profile Toolchain

Google has open-sourced their toolchain for providing automatic feedback-directed optimizations from perf data profiles to what can be used by GCC and LLVM.

Events

• Want to learn how to develop a Linux desktop application?

• The Opensource.com guide to OpenStack Summit

  OpenStack Summit is just around the corner, taking place May 12 – 16 in Atlanta, Georgia! Opensource.com is excited to be providing coverage of what’s new in the ecosystem of the open source cloud. Whether you’re planning on attending or watching from afar, we’ve provided a few key resources for you to get the most out of OpenStack Summit 2014, to compliment the top sessions we’re excited about attending

• OpenStack Summit Atlanta is Days Away

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 30 Beta 2 Brings Better Integration with Social Networks, Australis Stays Put

    According to the changelog, support has finally been added to GStreamer 1.0. We say finally because most applications that use GStreamer switched to the new 1.0 branch a long time ago. The latest GStreamer available right now is 1.3.1, so you can imagine how far behind Firefox is.

    Also, the Mac OS X command-E will now set the “find” term to the selected text, a new sidebar button will provide easier access to social, bookmark, and history sidebars, it’s no longer possible to call WebIDL constructors as functions on the web, box-shadow and other visual overflow issues have been fixed, mute and volume will now be available per window when using WebAudio, background-blend-mode is now enabled by default, and ES6 array and generator comprehensions have been implemented…

  • Death of net neutrality: Is Mozilla barking up the wrong tree?

    Net Neutrality has been quite the conversation during the last several months. Without the free flow of information, the topology of the entire Internet would be defeated in its entirety. So when Mozilla recently proposed that the FCC categorize remote delivery services as telecommunications services, I personally sympathized with the members of the well known non-profit.

SaaS/Big Data

• Eucalyptus Debuts Version 4.0 of Open Source Private/Hybrid Cloud Solution

  Scalable object storage, refined deployment tools and high availability highlight the feature list in Eucalyptus 4.0, the latest version of the open source platform from Eucalyptus Systems for building private and hybrid clouds.

Databases

• phpMyAdmin 4.2.0 Now Available for Download

  The final iteration of phpMyAdmin 4.2.0 has been released and comes with a large number of changes and improvements. It’s been a while since the previous major update and, after a few RC versions, it was time for more important fixes.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation Officially Releases LibreOffice 4.2.4

  The Document Foundation has announced that the final version for LibreOffice 4.2.4 is now available for all platforms, including Linux.

  This is just a maintenance release for the 4.2.x branch and features a moderate number of fixes and changes, but users who have this office suite installed should upgrade as soon as possible…

• LibreOffice Calc – Reintroducing Spreadsheets

  Today I would like to discuss a boring subject: Spreadsheets. Actually it’s not that boring when you come to think of it. At least I’m going to try not to make it boring. Let me set something straight first: Spreadsheets are not just about numbers; they are about data. You may have already read Michael Meeks’ article on LibreOffice’s major rewrite of its spreadsheet engine (the much famed Ixion engine that was alluded to first in 2010) and indeed this is a major development for LibreOffice and ultimately for office suites in general – I’ll come back to that later- but this post is not an appreciation article for Michael and Kohei, it’s about how we think of spreadsheets, why we tend to think of them in a very limited way, and how we could redefine the uses of LibreOffice Calc. 256px-LibreOffice_4.0_Calc_Icon.svg

Education

• Tackling the challenges of open source adoption in education

  In our recent survey on free and open source software in the UK education sectors, we asked colleges and universities for their main reasons for not selecting an open source solution according to 12 criteria. Below you can see how important each of the criteria were rated for software running on servers:

Funding

• HP Invests $1B in OpenStack Cloud, Rebrands Cloud OS as Helion

BSD

• bsdtalk240 – About Time with George Neville-Neil

  An interview with George Neville-Neil about the network time protocol and the precision time protocol.

Programming

• Is devops killing the developer?

  At many companies, ‘devops’ has been twisted to mean that developers get conscripted to do myriad non-development tasks

Wind River accelerated virtual switch software delivers breakthrough performance

Wind River has announced that it has achieved industry-leading performance with its accelerated virtual switch (vSwitch) integrated within Wind River Carrier Grade Communications Server, which is designed for network functions virtualization (NFV). The accelerated vSwitch can deliver 12 million packets per second to guest virtual machines (VMs) using only two processor cores on an industry-standard server platform, in a real-world use case involving bidirectional traffic.

Washington State files lawsuit against fraudulent Kickstarter campaign

According to the lawsuit, Edward J. Polchlepek III (aka Ed Nash) of the company, Altius Management, has failed to make good on a successful Kickstarter campaign for Asylum Playing Cards. The said campaign had a Kickstarter goal of $15,000, which they exceeded with a closing funding of $25,146 back in October 2012. The Attorney General’s office alleges Polchlepek’s company had collected the money but never made good on their promise of delivering the cards or the other backer rewards that were promised by them during the campaign. Since some of the backers were residents of the state of Washington, legal team of the state were able to get involved. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson stated in a press release, “Consumers need to be aware that crowd funding is not without risk. “This lawsuit sends a clear message to people seeking the public’s money: Washington State will not tolerate crowd funding theft. The Attorney General’s Office will hold those accountable who don’t play by the rules.”

Science

• EU leadership and an EU digital President

Hardware

• ARM exec: Forget eight-core smartphone chips, just enjoy a SIX-PACK

  The last person that you’d expect to tell you that eight-core smartphone SoCs are overkill would be a man whose company licenses and gets royalties from those cores – but that’s exactly what ARM’s director of mobile solutions James Bruce told attendees at last week’s ARM Tech Day.

Health/Nutrition

• 5 Ways US Medical Billing Is Way More F#@ked Than You Think

  If you’re not from America, or you’re young and healthy enough to have avoided doctors up to now, you may not have been exposed to the delights of this country’s high medical costs. So here’s a demonstration, in the form of a $243K bill for a three-night hospital stay…

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes – not just judged by history

  Boris Johnson is right, Blair is ‘eel-like’ – but if the Chilcot inquiry is published soon, he might not wriggle off the hook

Finance

• Why Aren’t North American Workers More Militant? (1/2)

  May 1 is the day of international working class solidarity. It was born or created at a time of great working class militancy, a fight for the eight-hour working day and more. Over the years, there have been many peaks of working class struggle, just some of them, for example, the 1877 railroad strike, which went national and started right here in Baltimore; 1919, a general strike in Winnipeg, Canada; in 1930s, industrial unions were organized in both countries, both the United States and Canada; after World War II, in 1946, there were more strikes organized in the United States than there’d ever been before or have been organized since; and in the 1960s, another peak in working-class struggle.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Judicial Hijinks in Effort to Kill Walker Criminal Probe and Destroy Evidence

  On May 6, federal Judge Rudolph Randa ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s long-running “John Doe” criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between political campaigns (including Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign) and the non-profit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth and its allies that spent millions during the state’s recall elections. Randa, who was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush and is a board member of the Milwaukee Federalist Society, compared limits on money-in-politics to “the guillotine and the gulag.”

Censorship

• Lawyers threaten redditor over negative router review on Amazon

  Lawyers for Mediabridge Products, a wireless network device manufacturer, sent a scathing letter to a redditor on Monday, threatening to sue him unless he deletes his negative review of one of the company’s products on Amazon.com.

• Google Blocks Demonoid for Spreading Malicious Software

  In one of the harshest moves a search engine can take against a site, during the past few hours Google flagged torrent site Demonoid as likely to harm users’ computers. After arriving at the conclusion that malicious third-party ads had caused the problem, Demonoid responded by disabling every single advert on its site until further notice.

Privacy

• Freedom Online Coalition Basically Ignores Surveillance: Makes A Mockery Of Its Name

  We already wrote about how US Secretary of State John Kerry made some tone deaf remarks about “online freedom” and transparency during his appearance at the Freedom Online Coalition meeting in Estonia last week. However, it appears that his remarks fit in well with the theme of the event, which appeared to be “big governments ignoring that whole state surveillance online thing.” The Freedom Online Coalition is a group of 23 governments, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France and many others — and you’d think they’d pay some attention to the very vocal concerns about how those governments are engaged in lots of online spying. In fact, a bunch of public interest groups sent a letter asking the FOC to live up to their state commitments, and respond to claims of human rights violations against journalists and others via state surveillance online.

• House Committee axes NSA bulk phone metadata collection

  A House committee on Wednesday unanimously voted to end the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program.

  The vote by the House Judiciary Committee was 32-0. The measure moves to the full House, where its passage is uncertain.

  “Today’s strong, bipartisan vote by the House Judiciary Committee takes us one step closer to ending bulk collection once and for all and safeguards Americans’ civil liberties as our intelligence community keeps us safe from foreign enemies who wish us harm,” committee lawmakers said in a joint statement.

• USA Freedom Act unanimously clears House Judiciary Committee

  Six months after it was written to restrain the National Security Agency’s sweeping domestic surveillance, a privacy bill cleared a major legislative obstacle on Wednesday, even as its advocates worried that the compromises made to advance the bill have weakened its constraints on mass data collection.

• Legal Guidelines Say Apple Can Extract Data From Locked iOS Devices

Civil Rights

• Saudi blogger Raif Badawi gets 10 year jail sentence

  A Saudi court has imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi for 10 years for “insulting Islam” and setting up a liberal web forum, local media report.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• How Comcast Is Trying To Turn The Internet Into The Old, Broken Phone System

  Each day, the open internet/net neutrality battle gets a bit more interesting. We just covered Tim Lee’s excellent look at how Comcast and other big telcos were effectively using interconnection disputes to get the same result as violating net neutrality, without technically violating the basic concept of what most people believe is net neutrality. And he’s back with an even more important explanation of how Comcast’s ultimate goal is to effectively make the internet more like the old phone system, post AT&T breakup, in which everyone had to pay to access the end points of the network. Ironically, they’re trying to recreate the internet in the form of the old telephone network, while at the same time doing everything to resist being classified as a telephone network by the FCC.

• The end of the open Internet is un-American: Take action now!

  As you know from my last post, I was recently in Thailand. On my way back, I learned that after much strife, Thailand had decided to oust its prime minister. And when I arrived back in the U.S., I learned that the FCC seemed to have decided to oust the notion of an open Internet.

• Tech giants urge rethink of net neutrality changes

  More than 100 technology companies have written to the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC), opposing potential changes to net neutrality rules.

  The FCC is considering allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to charge content providers to prioritise their traffic.

  Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon warn that such a move represents a “grave threat to the internet”.

• FCC’s new net neutrality rules opposed by 100+ internet companies (update: vote still on schedule)

  Despite FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s insistence that he is on the side of an open internet, the controversy over proposed net neutrality rules continues to expand. Resistance to the new rules is now coming from voices within the FCC and major internet companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Yahoo and more. The plan was for the five commissioners to vote on their approval next Thursday, but today one of them, Jessica Rosenworcel, called to push back that vote by a month (update: an FCC spokesman says the vote will go forward as scheduled). Citing “real concerns” with Wheeler’s proposal and a need for time to consider the “torrent of public response” received, she wants the delay so public conversation can continue. That would mean putting the agency’s legal staff out front to explain the measures and answer questions in ways that are accessible to the public, instead of starting a Sunshine Period that would end the ability to accept public comment.

DRM

• Publisher ‘DRMs’ Physical Legal Textbook About ‘Property,’ Undermines Property And First Sale Concepts

  We’ve talked in the past about just how badly certain industries would love to expand the restrictions created by DRM onto physical goods. And that’s because, unlike what copyright system defenders like to claim, DRM allows companies to put restrictions on content that go way beyond what kind of restrictions can be placed on physical goods. For example: the right to resell something. In the copyright space, we’ve long had the first sale doctrine, which makes it possible for you to resell a physical book you own, without having to first get permission from the copyright holder. Of course, first sale has long been under attack, especially by academic publishers who absolutely hate the idea of a resale market. That’s because they are monopoly providers — professors assign the textbooks, and students need to buy them, leading to ridiculously inflated prices. Of course, what publishers still don’t seem to grasp is that a healthy used market actually increases the value of the primary market, since buyers are more comfortable knowing they can at least make back some of the money at the other end.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Why Mr Wales is dreadfully wrong about the Internet Party

    Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that the Pirate Party simply must change its name to the Internet Party, to be more conformant with MegaUpload owner Kim Dotcoms vision for the future of the digital space in New Zealand. Far be it from me to arrogantly dismiss the ideas and opinions of my internet policy elders, but in this case Mr Wales misses a big point and additionally generates harm to a healthy future debate about internet policy.

  • Lobby tries to kill private copying with demand for iPod tax

    For well over ten years we have been arguing about a private copying exception, to legalise everyday consumer behaviour of copying music to computer disks. Despite the fact that copyright industry groups have always said they’d never sue anyone, they claim that an exception would cause substantial damage that requires compensation.

  • Is iPod tax on cards as government delays right to copy your music?

    Open Rights Group is concerned that groups representing rightsholders are seeking compensation for consumers potentially copying music they have bought onto different devices, for example from a CD to their iPod. Last year, UK Music, which represents the live music sector, said that “the exception cannot lawfully be made without fair compensation”.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Chromebook space heating up: Asus launches two models

  Another day, another two new Chromebooks get unwrapped. Hot on the heals of Lenovo’s announcement of the N20 and N20p Chromebooks, Asus unveils the C200 and C300. The new Chromebooks come in two sizes and promise battery life of 10 hours.

• For Better and for Worse, Chromebooks Have Become PCs

  Chromebooks are no longer a small, focused selection of purpose-built machines, but a sprawling array of increasingly meaningless choices.

• Lenovo announces N20p Chromebook with touchscreen and 300-degree hinge

• Depending on Who’s Counting, Chromebooks Are Either an Enormous Hit or Totally Irrelevant

  If Chrome OS use is growing rapidly, and continues to do so, I’d expect the picture to be clearer in the months and years to come. But for now, all I know for sure is that both Chrome skeptics and Chrome boosters can point to stats that seem to back up their respective stances. Convenient, isn’t it?

Server

• Why ARM Servers, And Why Now?

  Red Hat and Canonical are doing a lot of the work to get the KVM hypervisor running properly on 64-bit ARM and Citrix Systems is also working to get the Xen hypervisor, which is the preferred virtualizer on Linux-based public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting, and IBM SoftLayer all use a variant of Xen; it is not clear what Google uses and Microsoft clearly uses Hyper-V). Stephano Stabellini, senior principal software engineer at Citrix, explained that Xenon ARM was a “lean and simple architecture” that “removed all of the cruft accumulated over the years” in the X86 implementation of Xen. The ARM variant of Xen has no emulation and does not make use of QEMU, and it only provides one type of guest, which combines the two options available on X86 machinery. (That would be the full virtualization of a Hardware Virtual Machine and the partial virtualization available through Para-Virtualization).

• How babies are like Unix

• In the cloud, Linux will win the OS war

  A recent article in Fortune magazine entitled “The Dawn of the Chrome Age” highlights the success of the Linux-based OS in the low-cost laptop market. According to the article, “Over the holidays in 2013, two Chromebook models were the No. 1 and No.3 bestselling laptops on Amazon.com, and they’re being adopted in schools and business around the world.” Simply put, Chrome OS represents Web apps on top of Linux, and given that the Web has become the leading application development platform – this is significant.

Kernel Space

• KernelCare: a Linux kernel patching system sans reboot

• Linux Care, Testing, and Feeding

• ZFS on Linux

  How ZFS on Linux compares to ZFS on Illumos or FreeBSD

• Linux Kernel 3.14.3 Has Been Released

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Linux Developers Working On DRM Color Manager

    The focus of Intel’s DRM Color Manager work is to have a common interface for all color correction / enhancement properties for different hardware, the color manager one be one umbrella DRM property, and DRM drivers can register the color correction properties of its hardware during initialization time.

  • Intel P-State Driver Might Still Be Causing Wonky Linux Performance

  • It Looks Unlikely The Improv ARM Mer-Running Board Will Ship

    Back in the middle of April I wrote about the Improv ARM development board not yet shipping and many of the early pre-order customers being frustrated that the open-source-friendly hardware still isn’t shipping months past its original ship date. Since then, there’s still been no official update and it looks like one of their suppliers isn’t even working with them anymore.

  • Mesa 10.1.2 Features More AMD Improvements

    Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.1.2.

    Mesa 10.1.2 is the next iteration in the series and implements the OpenGL 3.1 API. This means that some drivers might not support the specifications for the latest Mesa. This latest iteration of the Mesa library comes with a large number of changes and fixes, so it’s a good idea to update as soon as possible.

• Benchmarks

  • Radeon: Mesa 10.1 vs. Mesa Git On Ubuntu 14.04

    Most of the performance changes to be found between Mesa 10.1 stable and the current Mesa Git code just past the 10.2 branching was around the HD 7850 graphics card that uses the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver while the other three graphics cards used the R600g driver. With R600g and our assortment of Linux gaming and OpenGL benchmark tests run, we didn’t see any better performance in the code beyond where it’s at with Mesa 10.1.

Applications

• Ubuntu AppIndicator That Displays Bash Scripts Output On The Panel: Sysmonitor Indicator

  Sysmonitor Indicator is an Ubuntu AppIndicator that can display the CPU, memory, swap, filesystem and network usage as well as various temperature sensors as values on the panel.

• Proprietary

  • Kingsoft Office Is Still Being Ported To Linux

    The Kingsoft Office suite uses a Qt-based GUI and is known for its high compatibility with modern Microsoft Office document files but it has no support for ODF. According to multiple user reports, Kingsoft Office does deal better with handling some document elements than LibreOffice/OpenOffice. The Kingsoft Office/WPS software for Linux has been under development since 2012 and was released in June of last year while up through today is still considered in an alpha state. There’s also been official communication about Kingsoft Office for FreeBSD, but its state appears even more premature.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Running Clojure on the BeagleBone Black

  • Fix low resolution grub and splash screen with Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 14.04

  • How To Install Typhon 0.8.9 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Elementary OS 0.3 And Pinguy OS 14.04

  • How To Install Up Clock 5.4 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Elementary OS 0.3 And Pinguy OS 14.04

  • Install Ubuntu 14.04 alongside Windows 8.1 in 10 easy steps

  • Building Docker Containers With KIWI

  • How to use LVM in Linux

  • How To Delay Startup Applications In GNOME / Unity [Quick Tip]

  • The Perfect Server – Ubuntu 14.04 (nginx, BIND, MySQL, PHP, Postfix, Dovecot and ISPConfig 3)

  • How to tune your Oracle database’s performance

  • How to make spreadsheets in a Linux terminal

  • Pushbullet Indicator: Send Files, Links And Notes To Your Android or iOS Device From Your Ubuntu Desktop

  • SciPY for Scientists

  • How to use LVM in Linux

  • Embedded Linux – Kernel modules and device drivers, Part 6

  • Nuvola Player 2.3.3 Is an Application for Cloud Music Service

• Games

  • Possible Linux version for GRID Autosport: Codemasters

  • Another Star, A Very Retro RPG Will Come To Linux With Version 2

  • Full Bore now available on Steam, 10% off during launch window

  • Steam Client Beta Update – May 6

  • Valve Releases New Steam Client Update with Performance Fixes for Linux

    Between stable builds, the developers launch a large number of Beta versions that integrate a lot of new features. Some of the updates are pretty large, if we take into account the first one in the new series, but more intermediary releases only feature a small number of changes.

    According to the changelog, the performance of the Steam client in some cases with the Big Picture window out-of-focus or in-game has been improved, especially on the Linux platform.

  • You Have To Win The Game, A True Retro Linux Game Available Free On Steam

  • Crytek Open-Sources Their Renderdoc Graphics Debugger

    Right out of the gate, Renderdoc isn’t as useful to Linux users as is Valve’s VOGL or other utilities like APITrace. Because, as it stands right now, Renderdoc only targets the Microsoft Direct3D 10/11 graphics API, but support for OpenGL is planned under this open-source Renderdoc. While still targeting D3D11 right now, there is basic build support for Linux of Renderdoc. I imagine in the months ahead it will get much more interesting once there’s OpenGL API support and open-source contributors have had their hand at improving the Renderdoc Linux support.

  • Kerbal Space Program Space Sim Now Available with 40% Discount on Steam for Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gets Screen-Locking Improvements In Plasma Next

  • Monday Report #14 – LazyIT edition

  • Memories of conf.kde.in 2014

    Oh you might think I’m just rambling, and that this is trivial because I don’t mention any talks? You might be right in some way, I am kind of rambling. If you find that trivial on the other hand, you are very mistaken! KDE is people, conf.kde.in is even more about people: the KDE India crew, the other foreign speakers trying to learn of the Indian culture and failing, the students hungry for knowledge.

  • Road to Providence: a new game being made with Krita

    Remember Playkot’s Supercity? Game artist Paul Geraskin liked has just started a crowdfunding campaign to support working on a new indie game, inspired by Howard Lovecraft: Road to Providence. As with Supercity, Road to Providence will be created with open source tools: Krita, Blender, and jMonkeyEngine.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Stop Complaining, Gedit Is Better Than Ever

    I fail to see what everyone is complaining about. gEdit 3.12 looks fabulous! Better than any previous version. It’s useful, minimalistic in design, allows you better focus on what you’re writing (as intended), and it saves vertical screen space which is honestly welcomed on my laptop’s wide-screen.

Distributions

• OpenELEC 4.0 released

• OpenELEC 4 offers simple XBMC install for standalone devices

• OpenELEC 4.0.0 (64-bit)

  If you’re looking to add a reliable, popular and free media center app to your computer, then XBMC is one of the best to go for. Want to go even further? You can press an older computer or small form-factor PC into service as a dedicated media server and center using XBMC at its core via a number of specially constructed Linux builds. And if space is tight – or you’d like to run XBMC directly off a USB flash drive or SD card – then OpenELEC is the build to go for.

• Screenshots

  • Pinguy 14.04 RC

• Debian Family

  • APT (Advanced Package Tool) 1.0.3 Is Ou

    Advanced Package Tool was launched back in 1998, and 16 years later it finally reached version 1.0. Now we already have version 1.0.3, which means that the developers intend to pick up the pace a little with the new builds.

  • Tails, Edward Snowden’s Linux distro of choice, leaves beta

Devices/Embedded

• AMD surprise: pin-compatible ARM and x86 CPUs

  In conjunction with its Project Skybridge and K2 announcement, AMD said that today it “demonstrated for the first time its 64-bit ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor, codenamed ‘Seattle,’ running a Linux environment derived from the Fedora Project.” The Fedora-based Linux environment is said to enable development — and migration between — applications based on both x86- and ARM-based processors using common tools.

• U.S. Military Drones Are Going to Start Running on Linux

• Solaris deposed as US drone-ware, replaced by Linux administration

  Hey, Linux fans: a high-profile, colossal, global outfit is about to dump a proprietary operating system and replace it with Linux in a very, very, demanding application that literally involves life and death situations.

  We’ve known this for a while actually, since 2012 to be precise, as that is when the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland first announced it was keen on Linux-powered software to control the Northrop Grumman MQ-8. The “Fire Scout”, as it is also known, is an unmanned helicopter said to offer “unprecedented situation awareness and precision targeting support” and capable of carrying Hellfire and/or laser-guided missiles..

• US Navy Is Switching from Solaris to Linux for Its UAV Program

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google and Intel team up to give Chromebooks more power

      Probably the biggest thing missing from Intel’s announcements today were any Chromebooks that have a larger or higher-quality screen — most Chromebooks remain stuck with 11-inch screens and relatively low resolutions. Samsung’s new Chromebook may run the less powerful Exynos processor, but it also features a 13-inch, 1080p screen — it seems that Chrome consumers will still need to choose between power and a quality screen for the time being. As always, Intel, Google, and its OEM partners said they’ll continue to innovate on the hardware front, even though these Chromebooks are pretty similar design-wise to earlier models. “As users do more with Chrome, they’ll expect more from the hardware that surrounds it,” said Google VP Caesar Sengupta.

GitHub’s ‘Atom’ text editor is now public, free, and fully open source

Now, the company is opening it up to the public after an apparently successful invite-only phase. Atom is now available for Mac users and is open source, naturally. The company plans on releasing Linux and Windows versions very soon.

GitHub Unleashes Atom Into Open Source Realm

How a hacker slumber party gets girls into code

When I walked into Carroll Hall, for a moment I felt like I was back in college… and at the World’s Best Slumber Party. There were tables full of salty snacks, stacks of sleeping bags, and the chatter of excited young women. But, unlike the sleepovers of my youth, talk was about Python, HTML, and Ruby. These were young women interested in learning to code.

5 steps for tackling bugs and fixes for an open source project

I do a lot of work on open source, but my most valuable contributions haven’t been code. Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks. Here’s some things I’ve learned along the way.

Henri Bergius: Flowhub public beta: a better interface for Flow-Based Programming

Today I’m happy to announce the public beta of the Flowhub interface for Flow-Based Programming. This is the latest step in the adventure that started with some UI sketching early last year, went through our successful Kickstarter — and now — thanks to our 1 205 backers, it is available to the public.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome security increases with changes in security warnings

    Over the past few months, users have seen a change in the way Chrome displays security warnings. Adrienne Porter Felt, one of the people who work on the Chrome security team, did a presentation showing the effect that warnings on Chrome affect people’s browsing experience. In the presentation, she uses data that they have collected to show the CTR (click through rate, or the rate at which users ignore warnings and continue to a webpage). She describes some of the challenges they face, and the solutions they have implemented to prevent users from downloading malicious files, and the effect these solutions have had.

• Mozilla

  • Easily Fix Firefox 29

    Just as a meaningless addendum, I actually don’t use Firefox itself, but rather Debian Linux’s “Iceweasel”, which is exactly the same, the only difference being the logo. Debian has insanely high standards for what constitutes “free”, which is in fact laudable but leads to things like this renaming because Firefox’s logo isn’t as completely free as it could be. It causes a lot of confusion for Debian neophytes in the help forums, that’s for sure. I kinda like being an Iceweasel user. Cool name. There’s also Icedove (renamed Thunderbird email program) and my favorite, Iceape (renamed SeaMonkey internet suite). Speaking of SeaMonkey, did you know this even existed? Yes, it’s still possible to use a full featured “internet suite” that includes a web browser, email and newsgroups client, and HTML editor all in one package. Pretty cool, and free of course, and maybe even useful for some folks. All of these things are from the aforementioned fine folks at Mozilla, which is what rose out of the ashes of Netscape years ago. I loved Netscape!

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenDaylight Developer Spotlight: David Goldberg

  David Goldberg is ConteXtream’s lead software engineer and was the first software developer to join the next generation SDN product team. David is also leading ConteXtream’s contribution to the OpenDaylight project and is one of the top commiters to the LISP Flow Mapping project. Prior to Contextream, David was responsible for the development of network analysis tools during his army service in an elite technological group in the IDF Intelligence Corps. David holds a BA in Computer Science and Management (cum laude).

• Open-source cloud players prep for Structure debate, and maybe a group hug

  How has the open-source cloud landscape changed in the last two years? There’s certainly been a lot of moving and shaking, but how much traction has there been in terms of corporate deployment?

• VMware Embraces Pivotal PaaS for Hybrid Cloud

  VMware today announced that it is supporting the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (CF) Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) on the vCloud Hybrid Service (VCHS).

• Hadoop Vendor MapR Announces Record Growth in Big Data Market

  There’s no question that Big Data is now a huge market, but what may surprise some observers is just how rapidly it continues to expand. That growth is evident in reports such as the announcement this week from MapR, which delivers Big Data solutions based on the open source Apache Hadoop platform, that first-quarter growth has tripled over last year.

• Eucalyptus Systems releases Eucalyptus 4.0

  Eucalyptus 4.0 targets the needs of IT and DevOps who are deploying and managing large-scale hybrid AWS-compatible cloud computing environments.

Databases

• Dish Looks to Open Source Software after Database Failure

  Satellite-TV provider Dish Network Corp. turned to open source database software in 2012 when its first foray into Big Data crippled its conventional database. Dish wants to capitalize on data it collects in its interactions with customers to be able to better market new products and services.

CMS

• Open-Source vs. Proprietary: It’s Not Always About the Money

  So which CMS is better? Again, it’s not that simple. The first thing you need to know is what you want. Once you’ve figured that out, it’s just a matter of seeing which system can give it to you.

Funding

• HP to invest over $1 billion in open-source cloud computing

  Hewlett-Packard Co said it plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years to develop and offer cloud-computing products and services.

  The company said it will make its OpenStack-based public cloud services available in 20 data centers over the next 18 months.

  OpenStack, a cloud computing project that HP co-founded, provides a free and open-source cloud computing platform for public and private cloud services.

• HP commits $1bn to help customers build Openstack powered clouds

• HP Bets $1 Billion On Helion-Branded OpenStack Services and Tools

• Metacloud Gets $15 Million in Funding to Drive its OpenStack Efforts

  There is still healthy venture capital flowing into the OpenStack pool. Metacloud, which offers OpenStack services and support for several large companies, announced it has closed a $15 million Series B round of funding featuring new investors Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and UMC Capital, as well as prior investors AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures.

Openness/Sharing

• When innovation goes open source — Tom Kelshaw

  When you have a problem or opportunity, in business or government, it is typical to call on two groups of people to work on it: Your own staff or external consultants. A third group is emerging as a promising source of innovation and improvement: Everyone.

• Singapore Government drives community-powered innovation through open source

  Through this partnership, IDA and Red Hat have also agreed to jointly drive the Red Hat Challenge, a regional technology challenge that provides a platform for students to pit their ideas around and use cases for open source.

• Open Hardware

  • 3D-Printed Smart Watch Wins Our Arduino Challenge, Heading to Maker Faire Rome

    With an Arduino-compatible brain, Bluetooth LE connectivity, 3D-printed case, and open-source approach, Jonathan Cook’s BLE smart watch is the winner of our Arduino Challenge, and will be headed to Maker Faire Rome this Fall.

  • 10 Fun Open Source 3D Printer Designs

    Though still nowhere near as ubiquitous as FOSS, open hardware is gaining ground rapidly with the booming popularity of open source 3D printing. There are now hundreds of thousands of free open source designs for products you can download and print on your own printer. Here are 10 of our favorites.

  • 3D Printing’s Success Points to a Rosy Future for Open Hardware

    It’s no secret that open source has shaken up the software world, not least for the savings it’s brought both organizations and consumers. Now it’s starting to look like open source hardware could have a similar, game-changing effect.

  • Open Source Watch: Time Consuming Timepiece

Programming

• Changes So Far For LLVM 3.5

  LLVM 3.4 was released in January and since then LLVM 3.5 has been under heavy development and will be released this summer.

Security

• In his words: How a whitehat hacked a university and became an FBI target

  David Helkowski stood waiting outside a restaurant in Towson, Maryland, fresh from a visit to the unemployment office. Recently let go from his computer consulting job after engaging in some “freelance hacking” of a client’s network, Helkowski was still insistent on one point: his hack, designed to draw attention to security flaws, had been a noble act.

• The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source

  A project’s choice of a license will have significant effects on its ability to sustain itself.

• OpenSSL Gets Patch for 4-Year-Old Flaw

• Symantec calls antivirus ‘doomed’ as security giants fight for survival

  The traditional antivirus is “dead” and “doomed to failure,” Symantec’s information security chief declares. Quelle surprise, considering Norton is fading into oblivion. But what next?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Dysfunction in Nigeria

  The media now have a new cartoon figure of hate in the bearded, bobble-hatted leader of Boko Haram, and in truth he is a very bad person. But armed rebellions of thousands of people do not just happen. It is not a simple and spontaneous outbreak of evil, still less a sign that we must wage Tony Blair’s war on Muslims everywhere.

• All countries will have drone kill technology in 10 years – report

  Despite a track record that is stained with the blood of innocent victims, drone technology is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for militaries around the globe, and it’s too late for the United States – presently the leader in UAV technologies – to stop the rush, according to Defense One, a site devoted to security issues.

• Malcolm Fraser’s criticism of drone operations ‘ridiculous’, says ex-Army drone pioneer

  The man who established the Australian Army’s first drone unit has hit out at former prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s criticism of Australian involvement in US military drone operations.

• Drones: Obama’s Invisible War

  The story of the CIA-led killer drones which are killing women and children on a daily basis is a tale accorded inexcusably scant attention in media. Indeed it is being ignored.

• Why you should take Rand Paul’s latest stand on drones seriously

  It remains the most memorable moment of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) young career in Congress: a 13-hour talking filibuster in 2013 to stall the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA. But it was more publicity stunt than a principled stand of much purpose; Paul was merely seeking the answer to a narrowly crafted question about the use of drones in the United States, and Brennan easily won confirmation anyway.

• Drone Secrets

  Secrecy in a democracy is highly problematic (as is the question of whether the United States remains a democracy). Arguably, there have been a few cases where Washington was right to keep the American public in the dark. The Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb and the timing and location of the Allied D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe were the two most closely guarded secrets of World War Two. But more frequently, secrecy’s only purpose is to protect the rulers (Pentagon Papers, anyone?).

• ‘Obama, why did you ruin my paradise?’- US drone victim in Pakistan

  Pakistan is in a perilous, decapitating state, thanks to US drones. A man who lost his family to a US drone attack begs for President Barack Obama to answer his question, “Why did you ruin my paradise?” The Voice of Russia, in joint cooperation with a local Pakistani journalist, interviewed 35-year-old electrician Haji Gul, whose entire family was wiped out from an American drone strike, revealed that his young daughter and wife died due to the US’ erratic actions and unjust drone practices.

• Science fiction may become reality with ‘killer robots’

  The US, China, Israel, Russia, South Korea, and the UK are all reported to be pursuing autonomous weapons

• In ongoing protest: Anti-drone demonstrators continue monthly campaign

  For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.

  The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.

  “You can’t bomb the world to peace.”

  “Kill the drones, not innocent people.”

  Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”

• Senators given access to doc authorizing drone killing of American

• White House to provide lawmakers access to drone memo authorizing killing of American

  The White House pledged Tuesday to give lawmakers expanded access to memos on the legality of killing American citizens in drone strikes, a concession aimed at heading off Senate opposition to a judicial nominee involved in drafting those secret documents.

• Drone memo author endorsed call for transparency

  Before he authored legal memos related to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, David Barron joined a group of left-leaning legal scholars and endorsed a statement of principles urging more transparency from the very office now withholding his work from the public.

• Post-Nuclear Senate: Rand Paul Can’t Slow Nomination Tied to Drone Policy (Updated)

  If Harvard Law Professor David J. Barron fails to win confirmation as a federal appeals court judge, it won’t be because he was “blocked” by Sen. Rand Paul.

  If Barron doesn’t make it to the bench, it will likely be because Democrats have unease about the legal justifications for drone strikes. In a post-nuclear-option world, Republicans can send letters talking about blocking or delaying nominees but their practical impact is nil.

  White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday that the Obama administration will allow senators to access classified materials related to the drone program before voting on the Barron nomination.

  “I can confirm that the Administration is working to ensure that any remaining questions members of the Senate have about Barron’s legal work at the Department of Justice are addressed, including making available in a classified setting a copy of the al-Awlaki opinion to any Senator who wishes to review it prior to Barron’s confirmation vote. Last year, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had access to the memo, and I would note that in his Committee vote, Barron received unanimous Democratic support,” Schultz said in a statement. “We are confident Barron will be confirmed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and that he will serve with distinction.”

• What Rand Paul and Drones Have To Do with Juliette Kayyem

  Barron, back when he worked for Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel, apparently helped author one or two of the memos providing authorization for the September 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with al-Qaeda in Yemen. Those memos are among several documents that the Obama administration has been ordered to release; it has not done so, claiming that it might still appeal the court ruling.

• Court seeks reply from police over refuting to file FIR against drone attacks

  Mirza Shahzad Akbar pleaded to the court to lodge case against CIA officials.

• Protester chooses jail over fine

  A Milwaukee woman Monday became the second of five protesters convicted at trial of trespassing for walking onto the Volk Field military base at Camp Douglas in 2013.

  Joyce E. Ellwanger, 77, told Juneau County Circuit Judge Paul Curran she preferred to serve jail time rather than pay the $232 fine for trespassing during a protest of U.S. drone warfare.

  “I can’t in good conscience pay it, judge,” Ellwanger told the court.

  Curran sentenced Ellwanger to five days in the Juneau County jail on the trespassing violation but found her not guilty of a charge of disorderly conduct.

• Al Qaeda seems to be resurging in Yemen – Middle East expert

  At least 37 al Qaeda militants have been killed in southern Yemen. The area is one of the country’s most impenetrable ones, and the army has recently intensified an offensive to root out foreign and local Islamist fighters there. The number of attacks against Yemen’s US-backed army and security forces in the south has risen since the launch of an anti al-Qaeda offensive. The Voice of Russia talked to Dr. Lina Khatib, Director of Carnegie Middle East Center.

• Obama Announces Federal Review After “Deeply Troubling” Botched Execution

• There’s a top secret CIA weapons facility just north of San Antonio

• Secret CIA Weapons Depot Linked With Two Texas Locations

• CIA’s secret weapons cache found in Texas

• Is Texas Home to a Secret CIA Weapons Facility? Camp Stanley Orders Over Two Million Rounds of AK-47 Ammunition

• What Happened to CIA Torture Report? Senate in the Dark Too

  The Senate’s high-profile summary of a 6,600-page CIA torture report was supposed to be released by now, at least in a redacted form. It hasn’t been, and no one in the Senate seems sure why.

• Dems Angry Over Delay in Releasing CIA Interrogations Report

• Senate Dems antsy over W.H. release of CIA report

• Obama administration proves why we need someone to leak CIA Torture Report

  Despite both the White House and CIA promising a quick declassification review, Politico reported this week that the White House and CIA are now refusing to even answer questions as to when the report will be sent back to the Intelligence Committee for release. Senator Dianne Feinstein said, “I would hope that it would be short and quick. That may be a vain [effort].” Senator Dick Durbin said, “I don’t know what the reason is [for the delay].”

  Sadly, it was quite predictable that the White House and CIA would delay the release of a report, which is reportedly devestating in its criticism of the CIA, and will remind the public that the Obama administration refused to hold anyone at the CIA accountable for its crimes. Disturbingly, the CIA itself—the same agency the report accuses of years of prisoner abuse and systematic lying—is in charge of the redaction process for the report, despite the fact that it has already dragged its feet for over a year, has been accused of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even allegedly spied on its staffers all in an apparent attempt to prevent the report from seeing light.

• CIA-Backed Militias Disband in Afghanistan

  The CIA has released thousands of Afghan fighters from its payroll, leaving a major security vacuum.

• CIA financed and trained paramilitaries disbanded in Afghanistan

• Djibouti call: US leases African drone base, alleged CIA jail for 20 years

  The US has signed a deal with Djibouti, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa, extending by decades the presence of America’s largest military base in Eastern Africa. The site serves as a hub for drone strikes in Yemen and is a suspected CIA secret prison.

• Yemeni sues African country for torture at US black site

• Terrorists, Dictators, and the CIA Are Helping Polio Make a Comeback

  The Taliban portrays vaccination drives as a western plot to sterilize Muslim children or as a cover for spies. The CIA unfortunately lent credence to the latter claim by using a phony vaccination campaign as a ruse to collect DNA evidence from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Stanford to divest its endowment from coal stocks

  Stanford University has announced that it is pulling its endowment out of investments in any of 100 publicly traded companies that are focused on extracting coal. No future investments will be made in any of those companies, and the university will instruct the managers that run its non-endowment investments to avoid these stocks as well.

• Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

  That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

  The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, — with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama — was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

  The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

• Climate Change Is Already Here, Says Massive Government Report

  Climate change is no longer a distant threat, but a real and present danger in the United States, according to a government report issued Tuesday.

Finance

• In Greece, Austerity Kills

  A string of academic reports documenting in detail the impacts of austerity on health care and health outcomes in Greece have recently been released [1]. They show how European authorities, IMF and Greek government policies implemented in response to the economic crisis have led to deaths and attacks on the health of ordinary people. But there was nothing inevitable about those consequences. As the medical journal the Lancet stated: “Experience elsewhere in Europe shows that those countries which prioritise social protection (including health) in the midst of austerity, and favour fiscal stimulation, secure better outcomes for their populations.”

• Time to bail students out of $1 trillion debt

  We may as well call it “edu-pay-tion,” as far as many prospective students are concerned. The cost of a college degree has risen 1,120 percent since 1978, but wages have increased a mere 6 percent during that same period. The national collective college debt is more than $1 trillion! We have college grads mired in $29,000 of debt, on average, while they are looking for jobs that do not exist. Parents and grandparents of those grads are also saddled with much of that debt, which is immune to bankruptcy, and they will have to make the payments until they die.

  What have we gotten ourselves into? The greed that accompanied those easy-to-obtain, just-sign-here college tuition loans, borders on immoral. Financial institutions were like Black Friday crowds, trampling one another to get in on the act. New lending operations cropped up every day, and new proprietary colleges and universities opened their doors throughout the nation, advertising their degrees and easy to get loans for tuition. What would happen if students and parents just stop paying on that $1 trillion debt? Who would pay then? Bingo! I can see another bailout coming, and this time it will be for student loans.

• Russia demands $3.8bn security deposit from Visa and Mastercard

  International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC Struggles in Kansas City

  Hundreds of lobbyists and state legislators gathered in downtown Kansas City last week for ALEC’s Spring 2014 task force summit, where a task force led by a tobacco lobbyist discussed education, corporate interests plotted ways to thwart shareholder activism, and legislators took a trip to a coal-fired power plant.

• MayDay Citizens’ Super PAC Aims to Rewrite the Rules of U.S. Campaign Finance

  At least so believes famed political activist and Harvard ethics and law professor Lawrence Lessig and other co-founders of MayOne.US. The KickStarter fundraising campaign aims to ignite fundamental U.S. campaign finance reform by crowdfunding an initial $1 million to create a super PAC (short for political action committee) to rival those created by public figures, big corporate donors, powerful lobbyist and special interest groups.

Privacy

• Edward Snowden being manipulated by Russian intelligence agencies: Ex-NSA chief

• Tim Berners-Lee warns Facebook against web takeover

  The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, warned the web is ‘in the balance’ as technology giants against closing parts of the web to new users.

• Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

  Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

• Emails shed light on Google’s work with NSA

  Exchanges between NSA director and Google execs suggest cooperation on data security

• Report: Google’s NSA dealings not as bad as you thought – THEY WERE WORSE

• Kicking Trust in the Pants: NSA had Close Relationship with Apple, Google

  The idea that Apple, Google, and other tech companies have always distanced themselves from the NSA may not be accurate thanks to emails that recently surfaced. The emails show communication between Google executives and the NSA, plus they mention other companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and HP, undermining the trust companies have been working so hard to maintain after the NSA’s wide spread surveillance tactics were uncovered.

• Emails suggest that Google was a willing partner with the NSA

  Recently, a NSA lawyer made it clear that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others were fully aware of the levels of data collection that were being performed. This flies in the face of the earlier claims that these firms were completely ignorant of what was happening. You might have thought that such mass surveillance would be illegal, but no, this was absolutely fine according to a federal judge.

• Emails Show Google Secretly Met With The NSA

• Emails between Google execs, NSA chief show prior relationship

• Google, Apple and Microsoft worked closely with NSA on spying, says report

  These emails showing a very close relationship between Google and the NSA are internal Google emails, which essentially catches Google red-handed. The emails also mention cooperation from Apple and Microsoft, but there is no direct proof of this. There is simply mention that Google, Apple and Microsoft “came to agreement on a set of core security principles” with the NSA.

• NSA spy praises Huawei ban

  The recently retired director of the United States National Security Agency says Australia was correct to exclude Chinese telecommunications manufacturer Huawei from helping build the national broadband network because of evidence of Chinese espionage against the nation.

• Yahoo to Facebook Press Lawmakers as Votes Near on NSA Spy Bills

  A group representing Facebook Inc. (FB:US), Apple Inc. (AAPL:US) and other technology companies is lobbying Congress today as lawmakers prepare to vote on limits to U.S. National Security Agency spying, said a person familiar with the matter.

• Is the NSA Trying to Frighten Americans Into Dropping Lawsuits Against Dragnet Surveillance?

  The National Security Agency appears to have devised a process to discourage lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance.

  NSA Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) director Theresa M. Shea submitted a “top secret” declaration to the court in two lawsuits brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The declaration was in response to concerns that the NSA was about to destroy evidence relevant to their cases.

  NSA data is supposed to “age off” and no longer remain in the agency’s system after five years, but that data being “aged off” could help the EFF win its cases, which is what led attorneys to file a motion to prevent destruction of evidence in March.

• House Committee to Study USA Freedom Act to End NSA Surveillance

  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (shown, R-Va.) announced May 5 that on May 7 the committee will mark up the USA Freedom Act (H.R. 3361). The legislation was introduced last October 29 by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), chairman of Judiciary’s Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations Subcommittee, to reform the federal government’s intelligence-gathering programs — especially those conducted by the National Security Agency, or NSA — operated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

• USA Freedom Act Moves Forward, but Don’t Get Excited About This NSA Reform

• CIR raises funds for investigation into ‘neighborhood NSA’

  The Center for Investigative Reporting hopes to raise $25,000 to report on surveillance by local authorities, a practice speeded by technological improvements and federal money. Subscribers get benefits on a sliding scale — from a tote bag and a tour of CIR’s newsroom if you donate $350 to email alerts when new stories go up if you pledge $5 per month.

• Released Emails Show the Cozy Relationship Between Google and the NSA

• “Reset the Net” to fight NSA spies, says rights group

• Groups want to ‘reset the ‘Net’ to resist NSA surveillance

  Web users and developers should take new steps to avoid surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and other spy organizations, a group of privacy and digital rights advocates said Monday.

  The 30-plus groups, including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Reddit, Free Press and the Libertarian Party, have set June 5 as the day to “reset the ‘Net” by deploying new privacy tools. June 5 is the anniversary of the first news stories about NSA surveillance based on leaks by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

• NSA and British counterpart GCHQ seek ways of monitoring airplane passenger communication: Greenwald

  The NSA’s “collect it all” ethos has led the agency to try to fill in gaps in its vast surveillance dragnet, including e-mails, texts and phone calls made on commercial airplanes. Because the the communications are routed through independent satellite systems, they are hard to track, Glenn Greenwald reveals in “No Place To Hide.”

• oRouter Linux box offers secure Wi-Fi via Tor network

  Privacy and security are on everybody’s minds these days, given the NSA spying scandal. Many people are looking for quick and easy ways to secure their online activities. Enter the oRouter, a tiny computer powered by Linux that protects your privacy and secures your Internet connection by connecting via the Tor network.

• ProPublica On Privacy Tools: Encrypt What You Can

  “Encryption does work,” Snowden said, via a remote connection at the SXSW tech conference. “It is a defense against the dark arts for the digital realm.”

  ProPublica has written about the NSA’s attempts to break encryption, but we don’t know for sure how successful the spy agency has been, and security experts still recommend using these techniques.

  And besides, who doesn’t want to defend against the dark arts? But getting started with encryption can be daunting. Here are a few techniques that most people can use.

  Encrypt the data you store. This protects your data from being read by people with access to your computer.

• Privacy Tools: Encrypt What You Can

Civil Rights

• Theresa May wins vote for power to strip Brits of citizenship

  The Commons looked set for a game of ping pong with the Lords today, after MPs voted to give Theresa May tthe power to strip Brits of their citizenship.

• Theresa May’s citizenship-stripping proposal is worse than medieval banishment

  The Home Secretary should remember the US Supreme Court’s description of making someone stateless: “a form of punishment more primitive than torture”.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Internet ‘close to three billion users’, says UN

  The internet is closing in on three billion users, according to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union

• Interconnection: Or How Big Broadband Kills Net Neutrality Without Violating ‘Net Neutrality’

  For years now, every time the net neutrality debate starts getting really confusing, Tim Lee comes along and puts it all into useful perspective. Six years ago, there was his exceptionally useful position paper on net neutrality for the Cato Institute. A couple years ago, he wrote another great piece for National Affairs magazine that deftly explained why the internet wasn’t competitive and why that’s a problem. Now working for Vox, he’s put together a great piece that explains the technical difference between the interconnection fights and the net neutrality battle — but also explains how the end result is basically the same.

Intellectual Monopolies

• re:publica 2014 – TTIP – Closed shop agreement in times…

• Copyrights

  • Dotcom Heads to Supreme Court to Appeal Raid Decision

    The argument over whether or not the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion back in January 2012 was legal is heading to the highest court in New Zealand. Yesterday the Supreme Court gave Dotcom permission to appeal a February Court of Appeal ruling that overturned an earlier High Court decision that the raid was unlawful.

  • RightsCorp Wants To Bring Its Copyright Protection Methods To The UK

    The US company is forcing ISPs to participate in the copyright crusade, but will this approach work in Europe?

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Hewlett-Packard’s Radical New Laptop Doesn’t Run Microsoft’s Windows

  Earlier this week, various press outlets noted that Hewlett-Packard had put up a video on its website showcasing the Slatebook 14 — a revolutionary new laptop unlike anything Hewlett-Packard has ever released before. In fact, nothing quite like the Slatebook 14 has ever been released by any company.

  The Slatebook 14 is a standard, 14-inch laptop, complete with non-detachable keyboard, trackpad, and various ports. But unlike the other 14-inch laptops Hewlett-Packard sells, this one doesn’t run Microsoft’s Windows but rather Google’s Android operating system.

• Linux viewed as XP replacement

  Computer users on the defunct Windows XP do not have to buy costly upgrades to bolster their security but can download an alternative program for free, a computer expert has said.

  Microsoft retired the Windows XP operating system last month which made the software unsupported and open to viruses and cyber attacks.

  St Luke’s Church Reverend Derek Harding, who has more than 30 years experience working in the IT industry in Europe, said the Linux program was free and proved to be more secure than Windows 7.

  However, BP Computers operational manager Brad Clark said Linux was not mainstream and would frustrate computer users that weren’t technically savvy.

• What’s the best PDF viewer for Chromebook?

  Chrome and Chrome OS (the operating system running on Chromebooks) both come with a built in PDF viewer provided by Google. However, it is very simple, and does not allow you to edit documents. If you are on Windows or Mac, there are other PDF viewers and editors you can use, but on Chromebooks you have to search the Chrome Web Store for one (click here for my article on using the Chrome Web Store to enhance your Chrome browser).

• Lenovo Doubles Down with Consumer-Focused Chromebooks

  While Lenovo is pitching its new Chromebooks at consumers, it’s likely that they’ll be popular in school systems–especially the less expensive N20 model. School systems around the U.S. are purchasing Chromebooks for students, a trend that Google could subsidize and one that is reminiscent of Apple’s strong focus on the education market from years ago. Westwood High School in Massachussetts is buying Chromebooks to issue to students who will return them once they graduate. The Bell-Chatham school board has approved Chromebook purchases for students, as has the Sumner School District.

• Tango pocket-sized desktop supports Windows and Linux (crowdfunding)

  Ever wish your PC was more portable? Like tuck it in your pocket portable? If you owned a Tango PC, that’s exactly what you’d be able to do with it. There would, however, be a few tradeoffs.

• Linux FTW: Lenovo launches two Chromebooks

  The world’s leading PC maker Lenovo has also joined the Linux band-wagon and launched its first Linux-powered Chromebook for consumers space – earlier Lenovo offered Chromebooks for education. Lenovo has announced two Chromebooks – N20 and N20p. While both Chromebooks are identical, N20p offers a touchscreen display and its keyboard can flex 300° backward to convert from Laptop mode to Stand mode. So users can use the 10-finger touchscreen to consume content. It’s definitely a great device for both content consumption as well as content creation.

• The world’s largest PC maker now wants to sell you a Chromebook

Audiocasts/Shows

• Heartland Institute Reluctantly Stands by Denial of Cigarette Smoking Risks

  Before the Heartland Institute became famous for its leading role in climate change denial, the group spent many years working to defend the tobacco industry. Just as the group is now known for its over the top attacks on climate scientists, Heartland once played a large role in criticizing public health experts and others calling attention to the dangers of cigarette smoking.

Kernel Space

• BFS Scheduler Updated For Linux 3.14

  It’s taken several weeks but Con Kolivas has put out the latest version of his Brain Fuck Scheduler patch. BFS v447 brings Linux 3.14 kernel compatibility.

• Reiser4 Updated With Transaction Models, Linux 3.14

• SD Times Blog: Linus, the developer’s security blankey

  The Linux kernel is the culmination of a single vision, modified by the advice and work of the most qualified and intelligent OS people on the planet. The kernel leads and their ancillaries over the years—Alan Cox, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Wright, and a host of others—have succeeded in keeping the project pure, on target, and relatively free of drama.

• Linux Kernel 3.15 RC4 Is Out Now

  Linus Torvalds has just released the forth Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch, has been released and is now ready for testing.

  The Linux kernel development seems to be going on without any issues and all the commotion that was present at the begging of the cycle seems to have settled down. The new release follow the normal pattern and it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

• Linus Torvalds announces Linux Kernel 3.15 RC4

  The fourth Release Candidate of the Linux kernel 3.15 branch is out now and available for testing. As Linus reflects, there is nothing out of the ordinary in this release – “Nothing particularly unusual going on. 45% drivers (drm, sound, md, pin-control, acpi etc), 40% arch (mainly powerpc/powernv, but x86 and arm too), 15% misc (perf tooling, documentation updates, core code). The appended shortlog gives some kind of overview of the details without being _too_ big.”

• KernelCare Promises Linux Security Updates Without the Reboots

• KernelCare: New no-reboot Linux patching system

  On a well-maintained Linux system, months can go by without needing to reboot. Sooner or later, however, a security patch to the Linux kernel will require you to reboot your machine. That’s not a real problem on a desktop, but when you’re talking hundreds of servers it can be a real pain. That’s where CloudLinux’s new program KernelCare comes in.

• Better Intel “Bay Trail” Support Lands In Coreboot

  Chrome OS developers at Google have landed improvements within Coreboot for Bay Trail given Chromebooks starting to ship with this low-power Intel hardware.

• Intel Is Working On A Linux Networking Stack For Small Systems

  Andi Kleen at Intel announced their work on a smaller networking stack to fit on systems like the Quark where there might only be a few megabytes of RAM and flash storage. Andi wrote, “There has been a lot of interest recently to run Linux on very small systems, like Quark systems. These may have only 2-4MB memory. They are also limited by flash space. One problem on these small system is the size of the network stack. Currently enabling IPv4 costs about 400k in text, which is prohibitive on a 2MB system, and very expensive with 4MB.”

• Graphics Stack

  • Freedreno 1.1 Driver Runs With XA Acceleration

  • NVIDIA Tegra K1 Compared To AMD AM1 APUs Review

  • Open-Source ATI Rage 128 Driver Gets Revived

    The xf86-video-r128 driver supports all of the old ATI Rage 128 graphics cards including the Rage Fury AGP, XPERT 128 AGP, and XPERT 99. The Rage 128 was ATI’s best graphics processor back in 1998 and fabbed on a 250nm processor, supporting 32MB and 64MB video memory configurations, and its core was clocked around 100MHz… Its OpenGL compliance stands at version 1.2. While it’s hard to believe the Rage 128 is still being used in any production capacity, especially with modern Linux environments, the open-source X.Org driver for it has been revived.

  • The Valve-Sponsored Mesa Patches Make Dota 2 And CS:GO Start A Lot Faster On Linux Systems

  • Linux games will load much faster thanks to Valve sponsorship

    Valve has a vested interest in not only getting as many games working under Linux as possible, but also making them look as good and run as fast as their Windows equivalents. In order to do that, Valve has seen fit to fund projects that improve the underlying tech those games run on.

  • Valve-Sponsored Mesa Work Makes Games Load A Lot Faster

    Improvements to Mesa done by LunarG and sponsored by Valve in a new open-source patch-set means that popular Linux games should take significantly less time to load — including titles like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — by speeding up the shader compilation process.

  • Mesa 10.1.2

    Mesa 10.1.2 has been released. Mesa 10.1.2 is a bug fix release which
    fixes bugs fixed since the 10.1.1 release, (see below for a list of
    changes).

  • Mesa 10.1.2 Released

    For those living on the Mesa 10.1 stable release train rather than Mesa 10.2 that is already in pretty great shape and will be released as stable in the coming weeks, the 10.1.2 stop has arrived.

  • NVIDIA 337.19 Beta Linux GPU Driver Released

    The NVIDIA 337.19 Beta was released today and it features a bug-fix for HDMI at 4K resolutions in certain configurations, nvidia-settings command-line controls for over/under-clocking support, several cosmetic fixes for the NVIDIA Settings GUI for clock controls, support for the GLX_EXT_stereo_tree extension in certain configurations, and Unified Back Buffer (UBB) and 3D Stereo support with the composite extension for Quadro graphics cards.

  • NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 337.19 Beta for Linux Fixes 4K Resolutions

Applications

• RAR 5.10 Beta 4 Brings Decompressing Fixes

• PeaZip 5.3.1 Has Been Released

• sort: Deserves better attention

• Install Webogram, a client for Telegram in Ubuntu 14.04

  Telegram is a messaging application similar to WhatsApp and uses the internet to send and receive messages between its clients. We, Linux users, love open source products and Telegram founders claim that they will eventually open source the code. More on this can be read from “Why not open source everything? . Apart from the open source affinity, a few more reasons to use Telegram are :

• P2P File Sharing Software Vuze Receives New WebUI Plugin

  Vuze is a relatively lightweight BitTorrent client that can be used to download torrents and even acts as a search engine. There are multiple Linux clients in development and the competition is fierce. This is one of the reasons why Vuze receives so many updates.

• soma.cli: An alternative solution

• linux-dash: Monitors “Linux Server Performance” Remotely Using Web Browser

  If you are looking for a low resource, speedy server statistics monitoring script, look no further than linux-dash. Linux Dash’s claim to popular is its slick and responsive web dashboard that works better on large and small screens.

• AutoSSH, for All Your CONNECTION LOST

• qBittorrent Fixes The Heartbleed Bug

• GlusterFS 3.5 Unveiled

  We are pleased to announce that GlusterFS 3.5 is now available. The latest release includes several long-awaited features such as improved logging, file snapshotting, on-wire compression, and at-rest encryption.

• Pandora Linux Client `Pithos` 1.0 Released, Install It In Ubuntu 14.04

  Pithos, a Pandora.com Linux client, was updated to version 1.0 recently. With this release, Pithos was ported to Python 3, GTK3 and GStreamer 1.0 but that’s not all that’s new – there are also some new features as well as a new app icon.

• XBMC 13.0 `Gotham` Released

• OpenELEC 4.0 Is an Embedded Linux OS Based on the Excellent XBMC 13.0 “Gotham”

  “The team has made a huge effort to make this one of our best releases yet. Since the OpenELEC 3.0 and 3.2.x releases, we have worked hard to improve OpenELEC in a number of areas. Some of these are visible changes, others are backend changes that aren’t as visible to every user but are certainly worth mentioning. OpenELEC-4.0 is now the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-3.2 and older.”

• XBMC 13.0 “Gotham” Officially Rises as the Biggest Update So Far

• Archive Manager PeaZip 5.3.1 Released

• FFmpeg 2.2.2 “Muybridge” Now Up for Grabs

  FFmpeg 2.2 is the latest major release, and it was launched only a short while ago. It comes with a lot of new features, such as HNM version 4 demuxer and video decoder, Live HDS muxer, a complete Voxware MetaSound decoder, WebP encoding via libwebp, VP8 in Ogg demuxing, libx265 encoder, and more.

• Apper 0.9.0 released

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Fedora 20

  • Install Nuvola Player 2.3.3 in Linux Mint 16

  • Testing your full software stack with cwrap

  • How to record and replay a terminal session on Linux

  • How To Install TagSpaces 1.8 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pinguy OS, Debian And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kernel 3.15 RC 4 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Entangle 0.6.0 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Easily Add Your Username On The Top Of Your Fedora GNOME Panel

  • Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn Will Adopt Kernel 3.15 Soon

  • Mir 0.2.0 Is Getting Ready For Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn

  • How To Install SeaMonkey 2.26 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pinguy OS, Debian And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Peazip 5.3.1 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Elementary OS 0.3 And Pinguy OS 14.04

  • Free yourself from the command line with these 10 GUI tools for Linux

  • How to upgrade Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  • How To Install XBMC 13.0 “Gotham” On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS And Elementary OS

  • How To Install The Pithon 1.0 (Pandora Client) On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 And Fedora 20

  • How To Play Video Files Directly From Torrent Files, On Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install FFmpeg 2.2.2 “Muybridge” On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Linux Mint 17

  • How To Easily Upgrade To OpenMandriva Lx 2014 Via Command-Line

  • [Short Tip] dnsmasq and /etc/hosts

  • How To Install Converseen 0.7 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS And Pinguy OS

  • How To Install The Nvidia 337.19 Beta Drivers On Linux Systems

  • How to make spreadsheets in a Linux terminal

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 14.04LTS)

  • Why I (sometimes) love regular expressions

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.7.18 Brings More Fixes

• Games

  • Full Bore 2D Puzzle Platformer Arrives on Steam for Linux

  • Rust Rules Steam for Linux Best-Selling List 1-6 May

    The Steam for Linux platform is now big enough that new titles manage to surprise users all the time and the top selling list of games is changing on a regular basis.

  • SuperTuxKart Is Driving A More Advanced Graphics Engine

    The SuperTuxKart open-source Mario Kart inspired racing game will soon be presenting a brand new graphics engine to power the game.

  • SuperTuxKart Open Source Racer Is Going Graphical With A New Engine

  • Awesome Unvanquished Free Multiplayer FPS Now Comes with Jetpacks

  • Get Trine 2: Complete Story for Linux with a 90% Discount

  • The Walking Dead Season One comes to Android

  • Torque 2D 3.0 Has Full Linux Support

    The Torque 2D game engine now has full support for Linux along with Android and web support.

  • Codemasters Will Eventually Port Games To Linux

  • Codemasters Says Linux Support Is a Matter of When, Not If

    When it comes to supporting the Linux platform, not many of the large studios out there are even considering investing the time and the resources to make this happen. From time to time we get some news about one small studio that is willing to port its games, but there are very few major ones that are openly talking about it.

    Codemasters is one of the largest studios that deal exclusively with racing titles. This is a more recent reorientation, but they had great success with games like Dirt 3, F1 2013, and the Grid series.

    A user asked around on the Steam forums if the studio had any plans to release Linux ports, and he got lucky. One of the developers said that Codemasters was looking into it and it’s a matter of when, not if.

  • Warsow Reaches Version 1.5

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Fix Baloo on KDE using the same trick as onced used with Nepomuk

  • KDE HIG: The Search Pattern

    For search and filter operations various solutions exist in KDE applications. We propose a new guideline for the search pattern to make UX consistent and reliable.

  • KF5 Sprint in Barcelona

    I arrived in the early evening of the first day, happening to reach the door of the Blue Systems office at about the same time as Kai Uwe Broulik. This was after the discussion about what tasks needed completing had happened, so we both were greeted with a board full of post-it notes. I snuck a few more onto the board when Kévin Ottens wasn’t looking, as there were some failing autotests that needed fixing before another release happened, and I felt we needed to have a proper discussion about where we were installing things (having seen that Kubuntu were patching the KDEInstallDirs module of Extra CMake Modules).

  • Screenlocker architecture in Plasma Next

    The 14.04 release of Unity unfortunately shipped with a few security vulnerabilities in the newly introduced screenlocker. As we will also ship a reworked screenlocker in Plasma Next I started to do another code audit, add more unit tests and try to make the code easier to understand and maintain. Furthermore I think it’s a good reason to explain how screenlockers work in general on X11 (and why it is easy to introduce security vulnerabilities) and the screenlocker in Plasma Next in particular. To make one thing clear: this post is not meant to shame Ubuntu for the issues. Some of these whoopies would have been possible in Plasma, too, and that’s the reason why I looked at the code again in more detail. On the other hand I think that our screenlocker in Plasma Next could be a solution for Unity’s use cases and I would appreciate if Ubuntu would adpot our solution.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • gEdit shows that GNOME wants to drive users away

    Great stuff. The GNOME project is almost 17 years old. When will we see some signs of maturity, some signs of stability? It shows that the people at GNOME just want change. Like the good folks at Microsoft who want to change, change, change, until the software becomes utterly unusable, the GNOME developers want to keep changing things too.

  • Sam Varghese Rants On GNOME; So Do I

    Change for the sake of change has fired up Sam again…“The GNOME project is almost 17 years old. When will we see some signs of maturity, some signs of stability? It shows that the people at GNOME just want change. Like the good folks at Microsoft who want to change, change, change, until the software becomes utterly unusable, the GNOME developers want to keep changing things too.” I disagree with Sam as often as I agree. He must be close to right most of the time… This time, he is right. When an application is good enough to collect a solid following, why jerk users around with random changes of user-interface?

Distributions

• Black Lab Linux 5.0 Is Out and Wants to Rival Windows and Mac OS X

  Black Lab Linux 5.0, a distribution that aims to rival Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, has been released and is now available for purchase.

  Black Lab Linux is a distribution designed for general desktop and power users and comes with a lot of applications and features. It is based on the Xfce desktop, which is not a surprise considering that the previous Betas in the series also used the same desktop experience.

• Black Lab Linux 5.0 Released

  Today the Black Lab Linux team is pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0, our most exciting and innovative release yet. Black Lab Linux 5.0 reiterates our commitment to a functional, stable and intuitive desktop Linux distribution.

• Evolve OS Might Just Be the Most Beautiful Traditional OS with Modern Technology

  Users can test the operating system even if it’s still in the pre-Alpha stages, but it’s not really usable right now, unless you want to help with the testing on various hardware configurations. The first complete version with a desktop environment and other packages will be ready in a couple of weeks.

• Screenshots

  • Chakra 2014.05 RC 1

  • Linuxfx Ghost 7

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • A quick tour of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 (Phosphorus)

    This is a quick test of the OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 (Phosphorus), focusing mostly on desktop and (my) hardware support.

  • Review: OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0

    It has been a while since I’ve done a review, and I apologize for that. This week isn’t actually getting any less busy for me; last night I finished my undergraduate thesis and submitted it to my thesis advisor, and hopefully there aren’t too many major revisions that I would need to make. Beyond that, though, I still have problem sets, a midterm exam, and final projects to finish. I’m just doing this review now because finishing the thesis was exhausting, and I need a short break before I can get back to work. In that time, I’m reviewing OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro 0.8.9 Gets Its Fourth Update Pack with Fix for the Heartbleed Bug

    Manjaro developers usually launch several update packs for the latest stable release of their distribution, bringing new packages and some new Linux kernels. This is very common for Manjaro operating systems and the developers are careful to keep the distributions up to date.

    Just like most of the Linux variants that incorporated OpenSSL into their structure, Manjaro was also exposed to the Heartbleed bug, and its developers had to update it with the latest OpenSSL package.

  • Manjaro 0.8.9 Receives Its Fourth Update Pack, Fixes The Heartbleed Bug

• Red Hat Family

  • Whitehurst Interview, Linus Reflections, and OpenMandriva Screenshots

  • Fedora

    • Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-05-06)

• Debian Family

  • Linux Top 3: Tails 1.0, OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 and Debian 7.5

    One of the most talked about new Linux releases in some time was the Tails 1.0 milestone that debuted last week. Tails gained notoriety after being identified as the Linux distribution used by National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu for Android not coming anytime soon

      • Gutted; Canonical Kills Ubuntu for Android..

      • 10 Changes that Make Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) Better Than Its Predecessor

        Ubuntu 14.04 has now been released. It is one of the biggest milestones for Canonical before it moves towards full-fledged convergence. Being an LTS release, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr focuses on security, stability, and performance. It builds on all the previous Ubuntu releases and makes sure that it makes up for as much technical debt as possible.

        Ubuntu fanboys and fangirls are definitely impressed about this release. After all, Trusty Tahr is probably the most trustworthy release coming out of Canonical. We too are excited about the new changes. That’s why, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most compelling reasons that make Trusty Tahr better than previous versions of Ubuntu.

      • First Linux Kernel Update Arrives for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Upgrade Now

        Every now and then, Canonical issues Linux kernel updates for all the operating systems that are being supported at that time. In this case, there are five distributions that have received this new upgrade, but it’s interesting to note that not all the OSes share the same kernel, which means that it was a problem common to all, regardless of the version.

      • Should You Upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04?

        Linux distributions like Ubuntu are release based, which means when a new version rolls out, everyone rushes to upgrade. Many folks do this without a care in the world, believing that if the previous version worked great then the latest version should also be free of bugs.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Pear OS 8 Still Going Strong Despite Being Officially Dead

          Pear OS has had a very troubled history and the developer had to change the name of the OS a couple of times, not to mention the logo. For some reason, the guys at Apple and their community didn’t think that someone redoing the entire Mac OS X system based on Linux was actually a compliment.

Devices/Embedded

• U.S. military UAVs migrate to Linux

  dEarlier this month Raytheon entered into a $15.8 million contract with the U.S. Navy to upgrade Raytheon’s control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to a May 2 Avionics Intelligence report. The overhaul, which involves a switch from Solaris to Linux, is designed to implement more modern controls to help ground-based personnel control UAVs.

• Wolfson Audio Card for Raspberry Pi Review

  Can a compact and low-cost circuit board piggybacked onto the Raspberry Pi microcomputer’s GPIO header turn it into a high-quality audio powerhouse?

• Program your Arduino with Raspberry Pi

• Phones

  • Start Experimenting with Tizen Says Mobile Developer Leon Anavi

    The Linux-based Tizen mobile platform gained momentum earlier this year with Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy Gear and Gear 2 smartwatches. The platform’s expansion beyond mobile phones into wearables won’t stop there, either, with developers now discussing applications for TVs, cars, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

  • Android

    • CyanogenMod 11.0 M6 Release

      May the Fourth, and M6 builds are Community Distribution channel. The changelog is further down this page, but first, let’s have a chat.

    • CyanogenMod 11.06 M6 is here, no stable build coming

      CyanogenMod has announced the release of CyanogenMod 11.06 M6 and with this, the team has also said that the users should not expect a build labelled ‘stable’. They wrote, “The ‘M’ builds have supplanted our need for such a release. This also means you will not being seeing ‘RC’ builds.”

    • Android KitKat Sees its Market Share Surge

      Google has just released very detailed data on Android growth rates by version and which versions are running on which kinds of devices. The data reflects devices running the latest Google Play Store app, which is compatible with Android 2.2 and higher, and the data is captured by measuring the devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 7 days. Among other things, it shows that the latest KitKat Android version has grown its market share significantly. Month over month, adoption of KitKat is up by 37 percent.

    • No, Android doesn’t stink

      The Android bashers over at TheStreet.com are at it again. This time they are claiming that Android stinks and that Apple is going to prove it when the iPhone 6 is released. This of course is quite silly, and I’ll point out why in this column.

    • AOC delivers pair of mySmart All-in-One Android PCs

      Best known for its computer monitors, AOC didn’t have to stretch too far for its two mySmart machines, which merely add a lower-power computer to 22-inch and 24-inch displays. Because Android is a mobile OS, after all, it doesn’t require top-end specs to function — and mySmart clearly doesn’t offer them. Instead, you get an Nvidia Tegra T33 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB of built-in storage to handle Android 4.2 Ice Cream Sandwich. Either version features 1,920×1,080 (full HD) resolution and is obviously touchscreen-enabled to make use of the OS.

Open-Source Software Specialist Selected as Executive Director of Wikipedia

The foundation that runs Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has named a new executive director, Lila Tretikov, a software engineer in Silicon Valley.

OpenProject features adaptive timeline reports for project management

Who doesn’t know the challenges in complex project teams and organizations? Multiple projects need to be managed, often with various dependencies to other teams, partners, external suppliers or other parties. Different stakeholders require a different level of information. Questions arise and often cannot be answered satisfactory in many project teams: What is the timeline of our project? What needs to be done to reach the next milestone? How can we track dependencies to other parties in the project plan? Surprisingly, even with the existing OSS tool environment for project management, teams are often still not able to manage complexity.

Square reaffirms open source commitment with latest release

Now the payments platform is gearing up to push out another 250,000 lines of code from one unit alone.

ZeGo Open Source Multifunctional Delta Linear Robot

ZeGo happens to be an opensource multifunctional delta linear robot that relies on magnetic-based attachments to get the job done. In other words, this is a special kind of 3D printer of sorts that arrives at the same destination, albeit taking a slightly different route from what we are more or less used to. The brainchild of a certain Daniel Goncharov (who is one of the co-developer of ZeGo), the ZeGo will be able to transform into a 3D printer, engraver, entry level pick and place machine – and much more, in a twinkling of an eye.

Out in the Open: An Open Source Website That Gives Voters a Platform to Influence Politicians

Argentine political scientist Pia Mancini says we’re caught in a “crisis of representation.” Most of these protests have popped up in countries that are at least nominally democratic, but so many people are still unhappy with their elected leaders. The problem, Mancini says, is that elected officials have drifted so far from the people they represent, that it’s too hard for the average person to be heard.

Open Source ‘Eating’ Software World: Samsung

Samsung Electronics is ramping up its contributions to various open source projects as the company depends more on open source software in its products. The company sees open source software as a faster path to innovation.

Open source failure is its greatest success

Open source is all about experimentation and iteration, which is why a 98% failure rate may well be the best sign of its success.

10 steps to migrate your closed software to open source

Difio is a Django based application that keeps track of packages and tells you when they change. It provides multiple change analytics so you can make an informed decision on when or what to upgrade. Difio was created as closed software, then I decided to migrate it to open source to allow for in-house deployments and attract a larger community around the project.

Atom, GitHub’s code editor based on web tech, goes open source

Code-sharing site GitHub has announced that Atom, its highly customizable code editor, has left beta and its full source code is now available to world+dog under the MIT open source license.

Why another text editor? In an interview, GitHub developer Nathan Sobo told The Reg that he and the other developers wanted a powerful editor that was fully customizable using JavaScript, which Sobo argued is now the most popular scripting language in the world.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla offers FCC a net neutrality plan—with a twist

    The Mozilla Foundation today is filing a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to declare that ISPs are common carriers, but there’s a twist.

  • Mozilla Issues Proposal for Protecting Net Neutrality

    For as long as the commercial web has been part of our lives, debates over Net neutrality have been with us as well. We got a reminder of this back in January, when a federal Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order that prevented Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from blocking and discriminating against edge providers, including any website operator, application developer or cloud service provider.

  • All-in-One Internet Application Suite SeaMonkey 2.26 Is Based on Firefox 29

    The project borrows a number of features straight from Mozilla Firefox, but some options can be found only in SeaMonkey. For example, the delimiter for forwarded messages can now be configured, an option to not strip signatures on reply has been added to prevent top signatures from deleting the body, and an OK button has been added to the RSS Subscription dialog.

SaaS/Big Data

• Updated DevStack OpenDaylight VM Image for OpenStack IceHouse

  Here is an updated Fedora 20 image for building OpenStack Icehouse and OpenDaylight. ODL is now merged into the upcoming OpenStack Icehouse release so now you can install ODL directly from OpenStack trunk. The updated image comes from Kyle Mestery who was primarily responsible for getting the OpenStack/OpenDaylight merge and navigating the process. Thanks also to Andrew Grimberg from the Linux Foundation with assisting with getting testing setup and all the code contributors from the community.

• Deploying OpenStack made easy with Puppet

• IT Departments are Buying Into the Cloud, But Have Security Concerns

  New data from cloud computing researchers is arriving, and it’s clear that enterprises everywhere are poised to boost their spending in the cloud, even as concerns over security may hamper adoption of open cloud platforms.

CMS

• Drupal 8′s accessibility advantage

  When it was released in 2011, Drupal 7 was the most accessible open source content management system (CMS) available. I expect that this will be true until the release of Drupal 8. Web accessibility requires constant vigilance and will be something that will always need attention in any piece of software striving to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 guidelines.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • AT&T’s open-source nanocube for data analytics wins accolade

    AT&T (NYSE: T) Labs won gold in the 2014 Edison Awards’ research and business optimization category for its nanocube, which provides visualization technology to help users interpret massive datasets in real time.

BSD

• When Porting LibreSSL, Don’t Assume Your OS Is As Sane As OpenBSD

• EuroBSDcon 2014: Call for papers

  EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place September 25 to 28 at InterExpo Congress Center in Sofia (see http://iec.bg/en/). Tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday, while the shorter talks and papers program is on Saturday and Sunday.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions

  A few of the questions asked about “open source software” in such a way that, responding to them directly, I’d be classifying programs as “open” or “closed”. That I will not do, because those terms presuppose a different philosophy based on different values.

  Rather than give no answer to those questions, I modified them to say “free software” instead, and answered them that way. (Square brackets show these changes.) I hope the answers to these modified questions are of interest to readers. They are rather different from what an open source supporter would say.

• GNU Xnee 3.19 (‘Lucia’) released

  We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.19

• GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 30 new GNU releases!

Public Services/Government

• 40% Italian public administrations uses open source

  Just over 40 per cent of Italy’s public administrations is using open source software solutions, reports the country’s National Statistical Institute, Istat. According to its ‘Public institutions’ 2011 Census’ report, published on 31 March, it is especially state, regional and provincial administrations.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Build your own open source cargo bike (or buy it from XYZ Cycle)

    April says cargo bikes are better than cars but they are expensive. Over at Low Tech Magazine, Kris de Decker shows an alternative built out of open source technology, the XYZ Nodule designed by N55. You could build this bike yourself; it is all creative commons licenced. The system is so simple that you don’t need complicated or expensive tools; really, not much more than a drill and a hand saw.

Programming

• Revolution Analytics Expands Open Source R Technical Support with AdviseR

• Revolution Analytics launches open source R support

Cisco

• Cisco Opflex Protocol Moves Forward at OpenStack and OpenDaylight

  A month ago, Cisco announced a new approach to define network policy with the OpFlex protocol. The OpFlex control protocol was submitted as an Internet Engineering Task Force draft on April 2.

  A key promise that Cisco made during its OpFlex release is that the protocol and its associated group policy construct would be contributed to open-source development communities to help foster an open standard.

• Cisco to Open Source Service Provider Routing Software

  At The Cable Show 2014 in Los Angeles Cisco (CSCO) announced that it will make its service provider customer premise equipment (CPE) routing software available in open-source format, and highlighted the extension of Cisco’s Service Provider architecture for cable operators to deliver more bandwidth, higher service tiers and greater agility in deploying new applications..

• Little-known Cisco open source project among contributors to OpenStack Neutron policy blueprint

  Multiple vendors, including an open source project within Cisco, have had a policy blueprint approved for the OpenStack cloud platform’s Neutron networking component.

  The blueprint is intended to allow for an application-centric interface to Neutron that complements its existing network-centric interface. Application awareness will take Neutron beyond basic connectivity to network service enablement, such as service chaining, QoS, access control, path properties, and others.

UKIP forced to cancel Freepost address after being sent FAECES in the post

UKIP have cancelled their Freepost address after disgruntled members of the public sent them FAECES in the post.

Science

• Guy Builds Digital Computers Using Strings, Weights And A Chessboard

Health/Nutrition

• Obama Administration Puts in an Order for 1,430 Pounds of Marijuana

  The Obama Administration needs hundreds and hundreds of pounds of marijuana this year, more than 30 times the amount of pot it originally ordered for 2014.

Security

• Serious security flaw in OAuth, OpenID discovered

  Attackers can use the “Covert Redirect” vulnerability in both open-source log-in systems to steal your data and redirect you to unsafe sites.

• New OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Rediscovered and Fixed Four Years After Initial Report

  OpenSSL seems to be the source of numerous problems, especially now that people have started to look a lot more closely at the source. Yet another bug has been discovered in the OpenSSL package and, to make things worse, it’s a four-year-old problem that has remained unsolved until now.

• Heartbleed-Like Security Flaws Far-Reaching but Rare

  The Oauth “covert redirect” isn’t another Heartbleed, but researchers are racing to find the next big security exploit. It’s smart to do so.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Will Ukraine Be NYT’s Waterloo?

  As Ukrainian soldiers from the coup regime in Kiev tighten the noose around anti-coup rebels in eastern Ukraine, the New York Times continues its cheerleading for the coup regime and its contempt for the rebels, raising grave questions about the Times’ credibility

• How the thugs killed Odessa inhabitants in the Trade Unions House – the details of bloody scenario

• Kiev and Right Sector Kristallnacht Odessa…Extreme Graphics

  With full backing from Washington at the moment, the Pravy Sektor apparently feels it has carte blanche to wage their terror and criminal beastiality.

• UPS Just Delivered a $400,000 Drone to Some Dude by Mistake

  No one’s perfect, least of all UPS. But as far as mistakes go, this is just about as bad—and expensive—as it gets. Thanks to one hell of a mixup, Reddit user Seventy_Seven just got a $400,000 unmanned aerial vehicle delivered straight to his doorstep. Talk about service.

Finance

• Railroaded

  It was sad therefore to see Ed Miliband squirming on television yesterday as he struggled to reassure various neo-con mouthpieces that he did not share the good sense of his backbenchers. The present system was not working, he said, and we needed to explore new forms of ownership model. What these were he did not say, but plainly they did not include taking anything back into public ownership. The most he offered was a tepid concern about the reprivatisation of East Coast, but then he did not exactly not want it to be reprivatized either.

• U.S. attorney general says banks may face criminal cases soon

  The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations of financial institutions that could result in action in the coming weeks and months, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a video, adding that no company was “too big to jail.”

• The ugly truth of offshore outsourcing surfaces at last

  We can deny it no longer. Even the recruitment industry is now saying it. Offshoring has killed the local ICT jobs market.

  Surprisingly, the latest confirmation that Australia is contributing to its own skilled jobs demise comes from a source that has in the past been accused of hyping the fictitious ICT skills shortage.

  Listed recruiter Clarius, which owns the Candle ICT recruitment firm, in its latest Skills Indicator report, states that in the March quarter there was an oversupply of 1800 ICT professionals.

• Larry Lessig’s Anti-SuperPAC SuperPAC Already Halfway To $1 Million Initial Target

  Last Thursday, we wrote about Larry Lessig launching the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC, an attempted “moonshot” to crowdfund a SuperPAC with the long term goal to elect politicians to Congress who will be dedicated to ending the power of money in politics. It is, as we noted, the SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. The structure of the plan is interesting in that it’s a staged approach explained on the Mayone website. The first two “test” stages happen this year, with the first goal being to raise $1 million by the end of May, at which point Lessig will get someone (who almost certainly is already lined up) to donate another $1 million. Then they launch stage 2 for June, which is an attempt to the same, but at $5 million (with a further matching $5 million). If both of those work out, the SuperPAC will then have $12 million, which it will use in 5 races for the mid-term elections this year. And, with that in place, the goal will be to launch a much bigger crowdfunding effort for 2016. Many people seemed to misunderstand the original plan, thinking that this $12 million part was the moonshot. It’s not. It’s a test flight.

Privacy

• Web round up – Free stuff, NSA Jobs & new packages!

  As is usual, if you were looking to employ people, you wouldn’t go the traditional route of CV’s, interviews and recruitment days….no, you’d go straight to Twitter. Apparently there’s some tweets to “crack” if you want a job. You can read more about it here. For those people who find that code breaking “isn’t their thing”, maybe they can walk around their neighbourhood recording people’s phone-calls and snooping in on their private lives. I’m sure the NSA will snap them up. And if you fail there, you can always apply for the British “Intelligence” service who, as in everything these days, are a pale imitation of their American cousins.

• Cops Must Swear Silence to Access Vehicle Tracking System

  It’s no secret that police departments around the country are deploying automated license plate readers to build massive databases to identify the location of vehicles. But one company behind this Orwellian tracking system is determined to stay out of the news.

• Dropbox and Box users are leaking personal data

  CLOUD FILE STORAGE users are inadvertently exposing their personal data to all and sundry due to a security flaw in public link URLs.

  Enterprise collaboration company Intralinks has gleefully reported the discovery made by its team during a “routine analysis of Google Adwords and Google Analytics data”.

• Pensioners withdraw lawsuit against IBM over China sales

• IBM Shareholder Drops Suit Over Cooperation With NSA

  An International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) shareholder withdrew a lawsuit claiming the company’s cooperation with a National Security Agency eavesdropping program caused a drop in its China sales.

• Be careful what you send through email on iOS 7

  You might want to hold off on sending sensitive attachments through your iPhone or iPad if it runs on iOS 7 or higher. 9to5Mac draws our attention to a recent post from German security researcher Andreas Kurtz, who claims that encryption for email attachments has been disabled on iOS versions 7 and higher, even the recently released iOS 7.1.1 that was issued specifically to fix security flaws. Kurtz says that he reported the problem to Apple, which supposedly acknowledged it but didn’t give a timeline for when a fix would be released.

• Chairman of key House committee agrees to proceed with NSA reform bill

  The chairman of a key committee in the House of Representatives agreed to move on a major surveillance overhaul on Monday, after months of delay.

• ​Dueling NSA reform bills set for showdown in the House

• Bill to end NSA’s mass surveillance moves closer to a vote

  In an effort to get it through committee with its teeth intact a slew of nonprofits and major companies, including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, DropBox, Mozilla and Reddit have signed a letter to its members stating their support. Plus there are 140 co-sponsors in the House and a sister bill working its way through the Senate with the support of Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Civil Rights

• Concerned City Resident Pays $15K to Bail Homeless Advocate Out of Jail

• Here’s the Image From Obama’s Trip to the Philippines That He Doesn’t Want You to See

  That’s the reception he got when he visited Manila’s presidential palace on Monday. Some 800 activists gathered to protest his signing of a new agreement that grants U.S. forces comprehensive access to Filipino military bases.

• Arrests, fines as anti-capitalist protest in Montreal declared illegal

  Montreal police arrested five people and handed out more than 130 fines on Thursday as they clamped down on anti-capitalist protesters during the annual May Day demonstration for workers’ rights.

  The demonstrators took to the streets to voice their opposition to the “ravages” of capitalism, with this year’s theme focused on government austerity, environmental damage inflicted by the mining industry and the financial sector that supports it.

  But the group barely made it two city blocks before riot police cornered them.

• First Nations Education Act 101: A settler’s guide

  You may not be aware of this, but there is an important and heated debate going on among Indigenous communities right now. The issue at hand is a federal bill designed, ostensibly, to return control of First Nations education to the First Nations themselves.

• Occupy Wall Street Activist Cecily McMillan Found Guilty of Assault on Police Officer

• Cecily McMillan’s guilty verdict reveals our mass acceptance of police violence

• Cecily McMillan’s Guilt: Injustice at Its Most Basic

  Cecily McMillan’s guilty verdict in Manhattan district court on Monday delivered a gut punch to the last vestiges of Occupy Wall Street. Above all, the decision highlights the workings of a criminal justice system bent on chilling dissent and defending the status quo.

  According to the jury, McMillan, a 25-year-old New School student known in Occupy circles for her moderate views, is guilty of second-degree felony assault on a police officer during an Occupy Wall Street protest on March 17, 2012. Denied bail and taken away in handcuffs, she will await her sentencing in a cell. She faces up to seven years in prison.

• The Crime of Peaceful Protest

  Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

  The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

• Imprisoned Al Jazeera Journalist Details Abu Ghraib Torture & Why He’s Suing U.S. Contractor CACI

  Ten years after the first publication of photos from inside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, we speak to Al Jazeera journalist Salah Hassan about his torture by U.S. forces inside the facility. To date, no high-ranking U.S. official has been held accountable for the torture at Abu Ghraib, but Hassan and other former prisoners are attempting to sue one of the private companies, CACI International, that helped run the prison.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Thanks to Tom Wheeler, the end of the open Internet is nigh

  The very fate of a free society rests on enshrining the open Internet — and the FCC chairman seems determined to do the opposite

• Is Net Neutrality Dead?

  For years, the government has upheld the principle of “Net neutrality,” the belief that everyone should have equal access to the web without preferential treatment.

• FSF joins more than twenty other organizations in plan to “Reset the Net”

  Today, a coalition of thousands of Internet users, companies and organizations launched a campaign for a day of action to “Reset The Net” on June 5th, 2014, the anniversary of the first NSA surveillance story revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Tens of thousands of internet activists, companies, and organizations committed to preserving free speech and basic rights on the Internet by taking steps to shutting off the government’s mass surveillance capabilities.

• Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

  Network provider doesn’t name and shame ISPs guilty of “permanent congestion.”

DRM

• Mark the Day Against DRM with discounts on books and videos; join the EFF live video panel

  Today is the Day Against DRM, organized by the Free Software Foundation through their Defective by Design campaign against digital rights management (DRM), which they refer to instead with the more accurate moniker “digital restrictions management.”

• Amazon Started the Day Against DRM Festivities a Week Early by Intentionally Breaking My Kindle eBooks

  Early this morning I got an email with an ebook I have been waiting for. It was Mytro by John Biggs, which I had backed in the Kickstarter campaign, and the email delivered the DRM-free ebooks I had bought. I’m not one to wait, so i immediately downloaded the ebook and tried to open it in the Kindle app on my PC.

• Global community rallies for International Day Against DRM

  Today a wide variety of community groups, activist organizations and businesses are taking part in the 8th International Day Against DRM (DayAgainstDRM.org). The groups are united in envisioning a world without Digital Restrictions Management, technology that places arbitrary restrictions on what people can do with digital media, often by spying on them. As the largest anti-DRM event in the world, the International Day Against DRM is an important counterpoint to the pro-DRM message broadcast by powerful media and software companies. The Day is coordinated by Defective by Design (DefectiveByDesign.org), the anti-DRM campaign of the Free Software Foundation.

• Internet Day Against DRM: Limit the use of DRM technologies

  On International Day Against DRM, the Open Rights Group is calling for limits on the use of DRM technologies, which restrict the ways that we access and control digital content.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Asus Chromebox with Core i3 Haswell now available

Asus started selling its first Chrome OS desktop computers in March with the launch of the $179 Asus Chromebox M005U. The tiny desktop is small enough to hold in one hand, packs an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and Google’s Chrome operating system.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.15-rc4

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel HD Graphics On Linux 3.15 Brings Few Changes

    Overall these results aren’t too interesting for the Linux 3.15 kernel when it comes to Haswell graphics, but in a few cases there were some slight performance changes as illustrated above. At least Linux 3.15 betters off the Broadwell support, there’s now per-process address space support for better security, and a variety of fixes and other improvements that landed for this kernel cycle.

  • Eight Months Later, Intel X.Org 3.0 Driver Still In Development

  • Mesa Now Supports Intel’s Performance Query Extension

Applications

• smartmontools: A hard drive’s best friend

• XBMC 13.0 Gotham rises

• sntop: A simple, network kind of top

  For as many *top programs as there are, it shouldn’t surprise me that there’s an sntop. It should surprise me that sntop is a little … different.

• sniffit: Makes sense to me

• qBittorrent 3.1.9.2 Arrives with a Fix for the Heartbleed Bug

  qBittorrent, a multi-platform BitTorrent client developed in C++/Qt4 by Christophe Dumez, designed to run on all major platforms, is now at version 3.1.9.2.

• socat: You want it? socat’s got it

• soma: Done perfectly, in so many ways

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Install gImageReader 2.93 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS And Pinguy OS

  • Testing grouped environment support for supernova

  • Disabling Baloo, the Arch way

  • How To Install CutePad 0.1 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • Using mpv to escape start and end of videos (like in anime, tv shows etc)

  • The 9 Best Free Fortran Books

  • Install Android Studio in Ubuntu 14.04

  • Start Practising Linux ip command and Avoid the Habit of Using ifconfig

  • How To Install TextAdept 7.2 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS And Pinguy OS

  • How To Install Warsow 1.5 On Your Linux System

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.7.18 Arrives with More Fixes for Modern Games

• Games

  • Torque 2D 3.0 COMPLETE!

    On February 5th, 2013, Torque 2D 2.0 was released to the world for the first time under an open source MIT license. Between then and now, over a year has passed with a lot of learning and adjusting to an open source development model. Slowly but surely, feature after feature was added to the engine, bugs were fixed, and documentation was written. Today we can proudly present to everyone Torque 2D 3.0.

  • Steam Hardware Survey For April 2014, Linux Rises From The Ashes

    We already know Steam’s stats system is a bit odd, sometimes things just don’t add up. It’s clear Steam is hiding plenty of distro’s since the ones they show don’t add up to the full figure they give, not even close to it.

  • New Unreal Tournament In The Works, Will It See A Native Linux Version?

  • Codemasters Looking At Supporting Linux, GRID Autosport Possible

  • Sir, You Are Being Hunted FPS Stealth Game Hits The Big Release For Linux

  • Next Unreal Tournament in the works, possibly with a Linux version

  • Steam client beta update released: In-home streaming for all enabled

  • Unvanquished Alpha 27 Has Shared Texture Packages

  • Steam In-Home Streaming Enters Open Beta For All

    Last week Steam announced that their new Steam In-Home Streaming is now available in open beta, and is available to anyone who opts into the Steam Client Beta and downloads the latest update, which was released last month and is dated April 30th.

  • League of Geeks surpasses $200K Kickstarter goal to fund digital board game Armello

    League of Geeks is also developing the game for Linux, Mac and Windows PC

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Yay I’m a GSoCer

    I got selected for GSoC 2014. Thanks to my mentor and KDE team for giving me an opportunity to work on Marble Game project. My mentors are Torsten Rahn and Albert Astals Cid.

  • Translated AppStream metadata for KDE!

    AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create an AppStream XML file from it, which is then – directly or via a Xapian cache – read by software-center-like applications such as GNOME-Software or KDEs Apper.

  • KDE forums and Baloo discussion

    In a recent blog post, I have criticized the events around the inclusion of Baloo in KDE 4.13.0. Since then, I have removed the blog post again, since a nice person convinced me it would not bring any good.

  • GSoC 2014 in Plasma Media Center

    I am selected in GSoC 2014 \o/ , and what makes it even better is the organisation, KDE and my mentors Shantanu Tushar and Peter Grasch. My project is “Integrate Plasma Media Center with Simon”. The result of which will allow users to interact with PMC (Plasma Media Center) using voice commands.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Summit 2014 DevOps Round Up: The role of open source in converging business needs

    With the growth of the cloud market, developers choose PaaS because of its flexibility and speed. Red Hat often paves the way for enterprises to use to create applications and to use an open cloud application platform that best fit their business needs. At this year Red Hat Summit, Red Hat addresses the current DevOps challenges facing the adoption of enterprise and provides a cloud application platform with built-in secure and scalable multi-tenancy, proven enterprise-grade application containers, middleware services and the latest technologies.

  • Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst doubles as a cloud computing evangelist and entrepreneur advisor

    Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of open-source software developer Red Hat, is more than the guy who brought a tech giant to downtown Raleigh.

    He’s an entrepreneur-advising, cloud-computing evangelist who once aspired to be a pro football player.

    Whitehurst, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education enthusiast, took the time to give us our own education into what makes him tick.

• Debian Family

  • KDE team looking for Debian contributors

    On behalf of the KDE team, Maximiliano Curia has recently called on the Debian contributors for supporting them with integrating KDE into Debian. Citing the main reason behind the request as shortage of enough people to contribute to all the necessary areas, the KDE team points out that they are overloaded with the many packages they maintain and the kinds of bugs they have to deal with. They do have automation tools but that is simply not enough. And hence the pledge to the Debian developers to work in collaboration with KDE and help them shape up KDE for Debian.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Numix GTK Flat Theme Looks Amazing on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

        Now, the Numix GTK theme has been updated to work with the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and it seems to integrate very well with the system. As usual, it’s not enough to just download the theme, you will also have to activate it. This means that you also need another application, such as Unity Tweak.

      • Canonical stops ‘Ubuntu for Android’ development

      • Ubuntu for Android is dead

        Every now and then a company comes up with a scheme that sounds great at first, but then it dies a slow death once the company realizes that the project just doesn’t make sense. It looks like Ubuntu for Android has become one of those dead products, according to Muktware.

      • Solar Powered Ubuntu Laptop Readies US Release

Devices/Embedded

• The oRouter Is A Tor-Powered Linux Box That Secures Your Internet Connection

  Longtime TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon participants, Kay Anar and Gilad Shai showed off their hardware hack today called the “oRouter” – a Linux-powered, Raspberry Pi-like computer offering secure Wi-Fi access via the Tor network. The idea is to offer an affordable alternative to downloading the Tor software to your computer, as well as a way to more easily connect to Tor over mobile devices like an iPhone.

• Enea Signs 1.8 MUSD Bridged Services Deal with US Medtech Company

• Raspberry Pi Case Created Using An Old Cassette Tape

  Raspberry Pi owners who are looking for a more unique case to protect their $35 mini PC, might be interested in this unique Raspberry Pi cassette tape case.

  Michele Alessandrini is responsible for the idea to adapt an old cassette tape to fit the Raspberry Pi which provides a very unique casing for the awesome mini PC, and if like me you have plenty of cassettes in the attic allows you to put them to use.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • HTC One Mini 2 press render leaked

      HTC launched their much anticipated flagship HTC One M8, and it has already gained praise from the critics just like its predecessor, for brilliant design, innovative features, beautiful UI and lot of power under the hood. As expected, the ‘mini’ version of the flagship is due for release and @evleaks has revealed a press render of the ‘HTC One Mini 2.’

  • Android

    • Best Android Phones of the season [May 2014]

      The first quarter of this year has seen many new top end Android smartphones being launched. Currently, with so many flagship phones in the market consumers are spoilt for choice. We will try to figure out what are the best smartphones that your money can buy right now. We will just not focus on the costliest and carrying the latest hardware, but also consider their performance and value for money.

    • Put portable pwning power in your pocket with the Pwn Phone

      Mobile technology has made it possible for people to do an amazing amount with tablets and smartphones within the workplace—including hacking the living daylights out of the corporate network and other people’s devices. Pwnie Express is preparing to release a tool that will do just that. Its Pwn Phone aims to help IT departments and security professionals quickly get a handle on how vulnerable their networks are in an instant. All someone needs to do is walk around the office with a smartphone.

      Pwnie Express’ Kevin Reilly gave Ars a personal walk-through of the latest Pwn Phone, the second generation of the company’s mobile penetration testing platform. While the 2012 first-generation Pwn Phone was based on the Nokia N900 and its Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system, the new phone is based on LG Nexus 5 phone hardware. However, it doesn’t exactly use Google’s vanilla Android.

More Mainstream Businesses Depend on Open Source

More than 1,200 industry influencers took this year’s survey, answering questions about OSS trends, opportunities, key drivers of open source adoption, community engagement and the business problems OSS solves — both now and in the foreseeable future.

Famo.us, AngularJS pairing brings out the best of JavaScript

JavaScript developers soon will have a way to blend the organizational tools of AngularJS and the cross-platform, animation-rich rendering capabilities of Famo.us.

Famo.us JavaScript Library Goes Open Source to Public, Brings Free Lessons to Community

Orion Client Portal Goes Open Source

Smart, Ateneo make SHINE open-source platform

SMART Communications, Inc. (Smart) has forged an alliance with the Ateneo Java Wireless Competency Center (AJWCC) to enhance and make Secured Health Information Network and Exchange (SHINE) an open-source platform next year, allowing users to contribute modules and plug-ins.

Launched in 2011 in consultation with the Department of Health (DOH) and various stakeholders, SHINE is the first cloud-based electronic medical record and e-referral system in the country, readily deployable in any area with Internet coverage.

Open Source for an Open Publishing Ecosystem: Readium.org Turns One

Indian Railways online services more reliable and scalable with open source and open standards

The Indian Railways’ online ticketing system has reached a record number of ticket bookings during peak hours with help from open source platforms. Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) – the Railways’ IT arm – was awarded for this project in the Infrastructure category at the Red Hat Innovation Awards last month.

Open Source’s Cult Of Personality Is Dying—Thankfully

Well, community did, for starters. I realize I’m making a somewhat subjective assertion here, but over the roughly 15 years I’ve been involved in open source, I’ve seen a gradual shift away from tightly-controlled free software projects to more loosely joined open-source communities, often with significant corporate interest.

SHMsoft, Inc. Offers FreeEed as Pre-packaged Open Source Software for eDiscovery

7 cool free open source projects you need to check out

How to ratify & audit open source security

Project Management Framework Goes Open Source with the Praxis Framework

What is the best social structure for an open source project?

The detail and scope of reviews decrease and increase, respectively, as they travel up the hierarchy. A famous example is the Linux kernel, where Linus Torvalds delegates to lieutenants for the various sub-systems of the kernel.

Events

• Open Source Monitoring Conference 2014 – Call for Papers and Registration Now Open

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome to ditch long URL?

• Mozilla

  • Unboxing The First Firefox OS Tablet

    Want to play with this? Find me at one of the many conferences I’m attending or speaking at this summer.

  • Mozilla launches ‘The Web We Want’—an open letter video featuring kids seeking a safer World Wide Web

    As we enter an era of the digital age, the internet helps us in work related to everything from education and travel to healthcare and surveillance. With so much of online human existence at stake and numerous threats to online security and safety, experts and crusaders have been fighting for ‘internet security and cyber safety’.

    According to Wikipedia, Internet safety, or online safety, is the knowledge of maximising the user’s personal safety and security risks on private information and property associated with using the internet, and the self-protection from computer crime in general.

  • Is Firefox’s Free Download on Android worth a shot?

    Mozilla Firefox has been around for over a decade, providing users with a worthy replacement for the default Internet Explorer, and establishing itself as one of the best browsers both on Linux and on Windows. That being said, the days of desktop exclusivity are long gone. Mozilla Firefox is available as a free download on Android-based devices, through the Play-store. Just how good is this mobile browser, and should you bother with it at all?

    Read more: http://www.gamerheadlines.com/2014/05/is-firefoxs-free-download-on-android-worth-a-shot/#ixzz30queeL1u

Databases

• Open season: is open source really the best approach for NoSQL?

CMS

• David Fout: Aquilent Aims to Help Agencies Go Open Source With New Drupal Tool

  Aquilent has unveiled a new Drupal-based architecture to help government organizations manage and deliver online content in a cloud environment.

  The Drupal Platform works to help agencies use open-source technology to secure digital communications and engage with the public, Aquilent said Thursday.

• What’s New in May for Open Source CMS

  Joomla kept its promise to release the latest version of its open source content management system (CMS) in April with yesterday’s launch of Joomla 3.3.

• A year after its Kickstarter debut, Ghost reveals what’s in store for its open-source blogging platform

Business

• Open Source Docker Project Announces Open Governance Advisory Board

Foundry

• ActiveState to Sponsor Growing Foundation Set to Govern Cloud Foundry Open Source Project

• Intel, GE and Verizon among new batch of Cloud Foundry Foundation members

  Software provider Pivotal and its open-source PaaS platform the Cloud Foundry announced the addition of eight new members to the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

• Cloud Foundry is turning into an open source platform that’s worth watching

Bitcoin

• Bountysource Now Lets You Fund Open-Source Projects with Bitcoin

  Bountysource, a funding platform for open-source software, has finally integrated bitcoin payments.

  The site allows open-source developers to earn money by completing jobs posted by ‘backers’ who offer ‘bounties’ – payments, in effect.

• Department of Defense to study bitcoin as possible terrorist threat

  A division within the Department of Defense is investigating whether the digital currency bitcoin is a possible terrorist threat.

  The Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office is spearheading a program that will help the military understand how modern technologies could pose threats to national security, including bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the International Business Times reported.

  A memo detailing some of the CTTSO projects states, “The introduction of virtual currency will likely shape threat finance by increasing the opaqueness, transactional velocity, and overall efficiencies of terrorist attacks,” as reported by Bitcoin Magazine, according to IBTimes.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nominate a free software initiative for the Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize!

  The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has established the Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize, which recognizes initiatives that are making it easy for people to start using free software. The prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make free software accessible to ordinary computer users.

• ProjectCenter build parser fixes

  I was long plagued GNUstep’s IDE ProjectCenter had problems with parsing the compiler’s output. This made “clicking” on the warning or error often impossible. I never dug into the details, but it happened more and more often and was worse on different systems than others.

Openness/Sharing

• Accelerating development of mpayment apps with open source

  One area that new software providers are all too familiar with, and one which legacy organisations are starting to embrace to help accelerate software development, is the use of open source. Indeed, a recent study carried out by IT analyst firm Forrester of 542 developers suggested that as many as 92% of banks have been using open source software (OSS) to develop mobile apps.

• Open-source Banking Emerging at a Rapid Pace

  It was KB Kookmin Bank that adopted open-source banking for the first time in Korea. It introduced the system in H2, 2011, followed by Woori Bank in April last year.

• Open Source Seed Initiative: ‘Free The Seed!’

  Last year we wrote about the idea of open-sourcing DNA for use in GMOs that were not subject to patent control — a key problem with the technology, leaving aside other concerns about its application. The newly-launched Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) avoids the controversy surrounding GMOs by using traditional plant breeding, but still makes the results freely available.

• Open sourcing agriculture one seed at a time

• Open Hardware

  • Open Source RhinoBOT DIY Robot Powered By Arduino UNO (video)

    If you fancy building your very own robot you might be interested in the PrintBot RHINO which is an educational robot that has been designed to be able to push objects with this 3D printed dozer attachment as well as take part in “sumobots fights”.

Standards/Consortia

• Cisco adds to RDK with open-source routing technology

  Cisco announced that it will make its service provider customer premise equipment (CPE) routing software available in open-source format.

• Cisco to Provide Foundation for New Open-Source Framework for Broadband Services

• Cable Show 2014: Cisco goes open-source for RDK integration

Acrobats Fall 40 Feet During Circus Show

A platform collapsed during an aerial hair-hanging stunt at a circus performance Sunday, sending eight acrobats plummeting to the ground. Nine performers were seriously injured in the fall, including a dancer below, while an unknown number of others suffered less serious injuries.

Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter speaks on modern ethics of journalism

As 21st century reporters become increasingly confronted by issues regarding journalistic ethics, the newest generation of workers in this field will need to establish ways to face obstacles like WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, NSA surveillance and data mining.

Hardware

• Sony Crams 3,700 Blu-Rays’ Worth of Storage in a Single Cassette Tape

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Day U.S.-Supported Fascists began Murdering Civilians A Day that will Live in Infamy

  Those of us who grew up in the west after WWII believed that supporting anything resembling fascism was unthinkable.

  The moral degeneration of the U.S. state and its Nato allies since that time is almost beyond belief. So too is the degeneration of the Washington Post, New York Times, and other corporate media which have helped to delude large numbers of Americans into believing that Russia, which has killed or attacked no one, is somehow the aggressor in Ukraine.

  In reality, and on the ground, the U.S. government – with no mandate from the American people – is supporting a fascist/oligarch unelected Ukrainian ‘government’ installed in a coup spear-headed by two openly fascist parties, Svoboda and Right sector.

• CIA and FBI specialists assisting Ukrainian government in Kiev, report says

• The US Failed Plan for Ukraine is to Incite Russia to Intervene. The Kiev Coup Government is Already a Dying Entity

  Two days ago a mob, supported by the fascists Right Sektor, killed over 30 federalist Ukrainians in Odessa by pushing them from their camp into a building and then setting fire to it. Those who escaped the massacre, not the perpetrators, were rounded up by police. Today pro-federalism people besieged the police headquarter in Odessa until the police released those it had earlier arrested.

• Putin Should Send Troops Into Ukraine

• Can Ukraine be pulled back from the brink?

• Another NYT ‘Sort of’ Retraction on Ukraine

  The mainstream U.S. media likes to talk about Ukraine as an “information war,” meaning that the Russians are making stuff up. But the false narratives are actually being hatched more on the U.S. side, as a new New York Times story acknowledges, writes Robert Parry.

• America Backed Ukraine Neo-Nazis In the Immediate Wake of World War II

  American Government Backed Ukrainian Nazis … Same Group Supported By the Leader of the Protests which Toppled the Ukrainian Government In February

• Ukraine Crisis Accelerating the Restructuring of the World

  The Ukrainian crisis has not radically changed the international situation but it has precipitated ongoing developments. Western propaganda, which has never been stronger, especially hides the reality of Western decline to the populations of NATO, but has no further effect on political reality. Inexorably, Russia and China, assisted by the other BRICS, occupy their rightful place in international relations.

• F35 deal a gift to world’s biggest arms dealer

  Serious concerns about spiralling costs and design faults have been voiced by its chief customers — the governments of the US, Canada and Denmark — the company that is still developing the F35, Lockheed Martin, reported a 23% increase for its first quarter profits this year.

• In ongoing protest: Anti-drone demonstrators continue monthly campaign

  For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.

  The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.

  “You can’t bomb the world to peace.”

  “Kill the drones, not innocent people.”

  Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”

• Obama doesn’t deserve deference on drone deaths

  Killing American citizens and foreign nationals without procedural and substantive protection runs contrary to our bedrock legal and democratic principles. Worse, the justifications for doing so are shrouded in secrecy, and the intellectual authors of those policies are shielded from accountability. The executive branch has repeatedly proved it cannot be entrusted with unbridled power to secure the nation without violating human and constitutional rights.

• Paul starts new drone war

  Rand Paul has warned Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he will place a hold on one of President Obama’s appellate court nominees because of his role in crafting the legal basis for Obama’s drone policy.

  Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, has informed Reid he will object to David Barron’s nomination to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals unless the Justice Department makes public the memos he authored justifying the killing of an American citizen in Yemen.

• Activists Re-enact Yemen Wedding Bombed by U.S. Drones

  Activists gathered in front of the White House on Sunday to stage a re-enactment of a wedding in Yemen attacked by U.S. drones. Twelve civilians died when U.S. aircraft bombed their wedding procession in December. The killings sparked a ban on U.S. military drone strikes in Yemen, but they continue under the CIA.

• Israeli pr attempts aside, drones deadly weapon

  Major S., deputy commander of Israel’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone) squadron, began his military career at the Israeli Army Computer Center, but was looking for “action” and transferred to the air force. In 2007 S. joined the training course to operate drones. 99% of course participants are those who dropped out of the air force’s pilot training course.

• Why it is hypocritical to boycott Israel

  We’re not normally called upon to justify a decision to travel abroad. Few people would challenge me if I were visiting China, despite that country’s appalling human rights record, repression of free speech, and colonisation of Tibet. If I was travelling to America, even though Predator drones kill thousands of innocent people each year, and even though Guantanamo Bay still holds 154 detainees, nobody would complain.

• Secret CIA arms cache most likely kept in Texas

• CIA’s Secret ‘Midwest Depot’ Arms Cache Really in … Texas?

  Thomson, who says he wasn’t privy to information on the depot’s location during his CIA career, says the facility’s history should be examined. “I have worried about the extent to which the US has spread small arms around over the decades to various parties it supported,” he says. “Such weapons are pretty durable and, after the cause du jour passed, where did they go? To be a little dramatic about it, how many of those AK-47s and RPG-7s we see Islamists waving around today passed through the Midwest Depot on their way to freedom fighters in past decades?” His research can be found on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. Unsurprisingly, the CIA and Pentagon declined to comment on the matter but whatever the camp’s true purpose, documents reveal that there have been quite a few new warehouses built at the site in recent years, the NYT notes.

• Venezuela: Wealthy stir violence while poor build new society

  Before Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela in 1999, the barrios of Caracas, built provisionally on the hills surrounding the capital, did not even appear on the city map.

  Officially they did not exist, so neither the city nor the state maintained their infrastructure. The poor inhabitants of these neighbourhoods obtained water and electricity by tapping pipes and cables themselves. They lacked access to services such as garbage collection, health care and education.

  Today, residents of the same barrios are organising their communities through directly democratic assemblies known as communal councils ― of which Venezuela has more than 40,000.

• White feather or bowler hat? Charlie Chaplin and the first world war

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Drones banned at Yosemite National Park

  Park Service says drones are noisy and “can impact the natural landscape.”

• Selling Hydraulic Fracking: The Myth Of Energy Independence Used To Hoodwink The American People

• Shrimper Catches Rare Goblin Shark

  Goblin sharks do resemble some prehistoric species, and Carlson said Moore made a “pretty important find.” They’re not seen anywhere all that often, though the coast of Japan boasts the shark’s share of recorded sightings.

  “We don’t know a lot about deep water fauna,” Carlson said. “We know little about (goblin sharks), how long they live, how fast they grow.” One thing that’s fairly certain: At their size, goblin sharks have few natural predators, according to Carlson.

Finance

• Jacob Zuma’s palatial folly sparks anger and resentment amid poverty

  Nicholas Ngonyama gazes across the valley and his eye settles on a palatial cluster of sand-coloured buildings whose thatched roofs glow in the autumn sunshine. “I’m not happy,” mutters the homeless, jobless man. “The country is not happy. Too much money was spent on one man’s home. That money could have been spent improving the lives of the people. It feels like he is spitting in our face.”

  President Jacob Zuma’s personal Xanadu, complete with stately pleasure-dome, has imposed itself on the landscape of one of South Africa’s poorest areas, Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal. It covers the equivalent of eight and a half football pitches and has swallowed 246m rand (£13.7m) of taxpayers’ money. “Nkandlagate” has become the defining scandal of Zuma’s five-year reign and left him fighting for his political life in this week’s elections.

• Welcome to Plutocrat-geddon! Obama and Thomas Friedman flatter our new billionaire overlords

  With the children of today’s baby boomers scheduled to inherit $30 trillion in the next several decades, politicians and the press are hard at work flattering plutocrats of all ages by portraying them as paragons of wisdom.

• Too Big to Jail Continues: DOJ May Charge Two Banks with Criminal Acts, But Not Hold Them Criminally Accountable

  In a recent breathlessly written “we have the inside scoop” article, The New York Times would have you believe that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is finally getting serious about filing criminal charges against a couple of banks.

  Technically, the Times may prove to be right, but on a practical level, the actions it is predicting would be more of the same kid-glove treatment of too-big-to-fail banks we’ve seen in the past. As BuzzFlash at Truthout noted in commentaries last year, Attorney General Holder has officially stated his concern that prosecuting the largest banks would have adverse affects on our economy.

• ABC funding: Protesters call on Abbott government not to cut money

  Hundreds have attended rallies in Melbourne and Sydney to call on the Abbott government not to cut funding to the public broadcaster ABC.

  There are fears that funding cuts will be made to the nation’s public broadcaster in the May budget after the Abbott government announced an efficiency review of the ABC and SBS

• A letter to fans of Workfare

  It doesn’t matter how much reactionary rhetoric the right-wing press spew about the unemployed, nor how often government ministers and DWP employees call people without jobs “idle” or “scrounger” and complain that they are getting “handouts” – thier bile doesn’t make mandatory labour confiscation schemes any less wrong or any less economically illiterate.

  The tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the “blame the symptom, not the cause” propaganda strategy.

• Bring rail under state’s control to win back power, Ed Miliband told

  Ed Miliband has come under pressure to bring the rail network back into national ownership if Labour wins the next election, as more than 30 of his party’s parliamentary candidates call for a bold new policy to improve services and control train fares.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Bill Clinton’s Critics Are…Who, Exactly?

  The Times is obviously aware of the existence of critics to Clinton’s left. Chozick mentions that some argue that Clinton’s policies “might have exacerbated the current inequality,” and writes that “some policy experts argue that the era of centrist Clinton economics may have expired.” But instead of quoting them, the Times goes back to Bill Clinton, one more time, for a challenge to that argument.

• A letter to fans of Workfare

Censorship

• Freedom House survey: Only one in seven people live in a country with a free press

  According to US-based watchdog Freedom House global press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in a decade with just one in seven people around the world living in a country which has a free press.

• WPFD 2014 focuses on importance of ‘independent media’

  The media in The Gambia, led by the Gambia Press Union in collaboration with UNESCO and TANGO, over the week-end held the annual symposium to mark World Press Freedom Day 2014.

• EU Supporting Development Of Community Radio Stations In Mozambique

Privacy

• Can the Police Seize Your Cellphone?

  Think about your smartphone for a minute. Imagine all of the information about your life that’s available on that one small device.

  Now imagine the police having access to all of that information – without a warrant. It’s a scary thought, considering how intertwined our private lives and our phones have become.

• John Kerry Claims US Is On The ‘Right Side Of History’ When It Comes To Online Freedom And Transparency

  Once you’ve ceded the high ground, it’s very difficult to reclaim it. At this time last year, the Secretary of State could have gotten away with the following remarks, but just barely. The NSA documents had not yet been revealed, but the US government had been giving up chunks of free speech high ground for quite some time.

• Obama Seeks Immunity for Telecom Companies in NSA Data Sweeps

  The Obama White House is seeking immunity for telecommunications companies that have complied with government orders to hand over customers’ data. However, there may be more than meets the eye with the president’s proposed reform.

• California lawmakers look to pull plug on NSA snooping

  A new bipartisan bill would prohibit California’s cooperation with warrantless snooping by the National Security Agency.

  Senate Bill 828 is by state Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach. Invoking the Bill of Rights’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, SB828 would affect the state, its employees, its governmental subdivisions and even corporations providing services for the state.

• Michael Hayden’s Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

  The former head of the NSA asserted that one can’t know whether spying is legitimate or not unless one knows all the details about it.

• Germany to thwart internal NSA probe – reports

  The German government plans to limit their level of cooperation with a recently formed parliamentary panel investigating mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency, Der Spiegel reports.

• Tracking People from Smartphone Accelerometers

• The Web’s newest anti-tracking tool is backed by its fiercest privacy advocate

• Everyone is under surveillance now, says ex-NSA tech Snowden

  Privacy of the masses is being violated no matter whether there are chances of any suspicious activities or not, says the former contractor of NSA.

  The former contractor and the famously known whistleblower Edward Snowden has given a warning to the whole of the masses rather than the individuals that they are under continuous surveillance for no reason.

• Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Boost Data Request Disclosure Rules

• Major tech firms will be sending user notifications about subpoenas

• The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing

  Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing.

• Green politicians launch legal challenge over GCHQ surveillance

  Two politicians have launched a legal action to challenge the government’s ability to spy on parliamentarians.

  The pair allege that GCHQ is violating a long-established rule that bans intelligence agencies from eavesdropping on MPs and peers. They say their communications are likely to have been intercepted by GCHQ, which gathers and stores data on millions of people “on a blanket basis”.

• Editorial: Clapper’s U.S. intelligence directive is the opposite of trust-building

  Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wants complete control over all Intelligence Community contact with the media, even as he has his own history of “least untruthful” sworn answers to Congress.

Civil Rights

• Homeless Grandmother Arrested 59 Times for Sitting on Sidewalk

  Here’s an interesting use of public resources: as part of a decade-long effort to “clean up” Skid Row in Los Angeles (i.e. run the homeless out of the area to ease development), the city of LA has spent at least a quarter of a million dollars arresting, prosecuting and jailing just one homeless woman, 59-year-old Ann Moody, mostly for sitting on a public sidewalk.

• OIL, GAS AND SPY GAMES IN THE TIMOR SEA

  Gusmão was also told of a simultaneous raid on the Canberra home of Timor-Leste’s key secret witness in the dispute. This former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agent had reportedly provided an affidavit alleging that Australian spies bugged the Timor-Leste government’s cabinet room in order to secure a commercial advantage for Australia during treaty negotiations in 2004. His passport had been confiscated in the raid, preventing him from travelling to The Hague, where the Permanent Court of Arbitration was due to hear Timor-Leste’s application to overturn the treaty.

• The violence of the State & the crime of peaceful protest

  The .01% (the very very rich) keep their place and assert their will through capture of the political process — payments to their retainers in the three branches of government via money and other goods (judges are bribed by “other goods,” as you’ll read below). The NSA and other agencies of the Deep State (FBI, CIA, Homeland Security) spy on your every move in order to “keep order,” a nicely theoretical phrase.

• “Disappearing” What Irks You — College Rape, Iraq, Spying

  Today, we “disappear” issues.* They are rendered non-issues through a related process of collective sublimation. It does leave traces, physical ones in archives and psychic ones at some level of mind among the few who have motive to maintain conscious awareness. However, so far as public discourse or political action is concerned, they have been reduced to a zombie status that renders them innocuous. This is a subtle process requiring the tacit cooperation of politicos, pundits, media types, and intellectuals whose complicity takes shape despite diverse purposes and diverse professional roles. The permissive factor is a public that prefers to have these matters swept out of sight and out of mind.

• Protests Force Condoleezza Rice to Cancel $35K Rutgers Speech

  Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Saturday that she is backing out of delivering the 2014 graduation commencement address at Rutgers University after protests by Rutgers faculty and students over her role in the Iraq War and torture. Rice was a leading hawk in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

• Campus Activists Shut Down Condoleezza Rice Speech At Rutgers

  As a reminder of her central role, this first video is Condoleezza Rice openly defending the torture tactics implemented under George W. Bush, who himself stated to a British newspaper that it was “damn right” that he had authorized them.

• “I’ll never apologize for my white privilege” guy is basically most of white America

  A college student who doesn’t believe in the existence of structural racism or white supremacy wrote an essay about why he would “never apologize” for his white privilege, and Time magazine thought it would be a really cool idea to publish it. Probably because Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang speaks for many white Americans when he says that racism and white privilege aren’t real.

  Tired of being told to “check his privilege” by others at his college, Fortgang goes through his family’s history and concludes that he deserves to go to an Ivy League school and live in a wealthy suburb of New York City and share his ridiculous baby tantrum thoughts on a national news site because his family made smarter and better choices than other families.

• How a Fatal Disaster at Mt. Everest Has Turned Into a Full-Blown Labor Struggle

  Mount Everest is known as a place that defies gravity, but it’s also a place for upturning social order. To the climber, it’s the pinnacle of a glorious trekking experience. To the anonymous laborer who supports the Westerners’ ascent, it’s a precarious front in a Global South class struggle.

  A fatal disaster on April 18 turned the underlying tensions into a full-blown stand-off: an avalanche near the Base Camp in the perilous Khumbu Ice Fall swallowed sixteen local guides and workers, mostly ethnic sherpas. Since then, the trauma has set off the collapse of the climbing season.

  The labor relations of Everest expose the ethical twists of the international adventure industry. Sherpas, who identify as an ethnic group as well as a professional community of guides and porters, do make a relatively good living, pulling in several thousand dollars each season (much more than what they’d earn farming). But the risks tend to be higher than the rewards. Statistically speaking, the fatality rate of sherpas is roughly twelve times higher than that of Iraq war soldiers, and avalanche is a leading cause of sherpas’ deaths.

• 93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

  The 2013 USGLP report includes a caveat that Europe and other areas were surveyed in early 2013, soon after Obama’s reelection and before revelations of NSA wire-tapping, so the improved 2013 figures may reflect a fleeting revival of hope rather than a favorable response to U.S. policy.

  A closer look at the U.S.-Global Leadership Project report reveals an erosion of approval for U.S. leadership in countries all over the world since 2009. The specific question Gallup asks is, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?” Large numbers in some countries refuse to answer or express no opinion, masking unvoiced disapproval behind fear, deference or politeness. I don’t believe that 71 percent of Vietnamese really have no opinion of U.S. global leadership. But the approval figures are probably not as flawed as the disapproval ones.

• Senate Dems antsy over W.H. release of CIA report

  Wondering what happened to the controversial CIA interrogation report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify a month ago? So are many Senate Democrats.

• Working the Dark Side

  A. The U.S. prison system. “The physical, mental, and sexual abuse glimpsed at Abu Ghraib is part of the daily experience for two million people caged in American prisons,” she writes. For example, here in Chicago, where I live, a police commander was convicted in 1991 of presiding over the torture of several hundred criminal suspects.

  B. Vietnam. During that disastrous war, the U.S. government “imprisoned those Vietnamese it considered ‘the enemy’ in tiger cages, subjected them to physical abuses, deprived them of food and water, and, as if all that was not bad enough, poured lye on them to burn and scar them,” Power writes.

  C. Latin America. Our involvement in our “backyard” over the decades has included collusion with and training of torturers in both military and police forces in many of the countries south of our border. The notorious School of the Americas has long stood as a symbol of such involvement.

  D. Slavery. Remember that? It was a way of life in the United States for a long time, and even after it ended, the dehumanization and repression of African-Americans continued. Lynchings were so common in the South they inspired a song, “Strange Fruit,” which Billie Holiday turned into a soul-haunting hit.

• Afghanistan’s ‘Torturer In Chief’ Now Lives Comfortably In The LA Suburbs – And No One Knows How He Got There

• After Failed Peace Talks, Pushing to Label Israel as Occupier of Palestine

  More than a year after Palestine was upgraded to become a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, the attributes of statehood exist mainly on official Palestinian letterhead.

  Now, with the collapse of the American-brokered Middle East negotiations, the Palestinian leadership is focusing on its diplomatic and legal struggle for international recognition of Palestine as a state under occupation and for Israel to be held accountable as the occupier.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Free Culture Activist Begins One Year ‘Net Fast’

  Daniel Strypey Bruce is a writer, performer, activist, GNU/Linux user, permaculturist, Occupier, facilitator, and community developer based in Ōtepoti/ Dunedin. A student of Te Reo Māori and tikanga Māori, he acknowledges the mana whenua of hapū and iwi in Aotearoa. An early advocate of online activism, he was a founder of Aotearoa.Indymedia.org, and CreativeCommons.org.nz, and has been blogging on free culture in all its form at Disintermedia.net.nz for over 5 years. Over the last two years he has served as Co-Director of Circulation Festival, a Council member for Permaculture in NZ, and Communications Offer for the Pirate Party of NZ, for whom he is now Orientation Officer.

• Save the Internet! Prevent Mega-corporations from Destroying Internet Freedom

  To ensure the Internet is open to all on an equal basis we must act now to prevent mega-corporations from destroying Internet Freedom

  Update: Actions every day starting on Wednesday, May 7th, at noon and 5 pm. To Save The Internet, we are building a People’s Firewall against the FCC’s proposed rule that will create a ‘pay to play’ Internet by ending net neutrality. The FCC is located at 445 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20554.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Obama Blasted for Lumping Critics of Trade Deal Secrecy with ‘Conspiracy Theorists’

  ‘If the president is concerned that people don’t know what’s going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.’

• Copyrights

  • Kim Dotcom: RIAA, MPAA, DOJ deserve some thanks for Mega’s explosive growth

    Kim Dotcom’s latest venture, MEGA, has seen explosive growth in the last six months, with uploads tripling and now totaling 500 million per month.

  • HOW TO CRACK THE FACADE IN ANY COPYRIGHT MONOPOLY DISCUSSION

    In my last column, I explained how the copyright monopoly is fundamentally incompatible with private communications as a concept, and how we must weigh a silly distribution monopoly for one of many entertainment industries against such vital functions of society as whistleblower protection, freedom of the press, and the ability to hold a private conversation in the first place. While this argument is strong, it does require a bit of intelligence and the ability to see how two ideas conflict, so it can be hard to get across to copyright monopoly pundits.

    The threat against private communications isn’t the only thing wrong with the copyright monopoly, of course. I have previously argued here on TorrentFreak that there’s really nothing defensible about the monopoly at all. But in order to break the spell of “publishers have always told me that the copyright monopoly is good and I have never had any reason to question their self-interest in the matter”, there are other tricks of honest, effective argumentation.

  • Court Tells Ex-Wife Of Husband Who Killed Himself To Use Copyright To Delete Anything He Ever Wrote Online

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 10.2 release candidate 1

  • Mesa 10.2 Release Candidate 1 Is Out

  • Nouveau Graphics On Linux 3.15

    The Linux 3.15 kernel with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver update brings initial NVIDIA Maxwell GPU support but it’s still an early work-in-progress and the Nouveau Gallium3D support for Maxwell is still in early stages.

  • DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport Starts Working On Linux

    David has now posted working patches for his DP MST code on the DRI-devel mailing list. Right now his code has just been tested on a Lenovo Ultrabook boasting Intel “Haswell” graphics and it’s working when connected to external hubs. There’s still code that’s a work in progress but overall it seems to be working fine. Right now this initial “preview code” works for Intel Haswell hardware with certain DP MST hubs.

Applications

• snake: Before there was snake, there was snake

• XBMC 13 “Gotham” media center is ready to rise

  After months of development, the team behind popular media center software XBMC have released XBMC 13 “Gotham.” The software provides a full-screen experience for navigating media on a Windows, Linux, Mac. or Android system.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Great Free Guides for Open Source Applications

  • Getting started with ocPortal

  • Preannouncing My Ruby Performance Book

  • How To Install Birdie 1.1 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Install TypeCatcher 0.2 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Install Grive-Tools 1.10 On Ubuntu And Linux Mint

  • How To Install VirtualBox 4.3.10 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Install Wine 1.7.18 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS And Elementary OS

  • KDE 4.13 Is Now Available Via PPA | How To Install It On Kubuntu 13.10 And Kubuntu 12.04

  • How To Install Wine 1.7.18 On Fedora, CentOS And RHEL

  • How To Install App Grid 0.1.100 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Install qBittorrent 3.1.9.2 on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS And Elementary OS

  • Setup Horizon Dashboard-2014.1 on F20 Havana Controller (firefox upgrade up to 29.0-5)

• Games

  • Valve Has Released A Steam Client Beta

  • Steam Client Beta Group

  • Steam’s In-Home Streaming Now For Everyone, Other Improvements

  • Ku: Shroud Of The Morrigan Continues To Sell Well On Linux

    Another success story to share with you guys today. The kind folks at bitSmith Games kindly let us know how well Ku: Shroud of the Morrigan is selling on Linux.

  • Quest For Infamy Classic Point & Click Adventure Game Arrives On Linux Soon

  • Warsow 1.5 released

    There are many cool things happening in the world of Linux gaming, and Warsow 1.5 is one of them. We have taken great care to make our latest release run smoothly on the open source radeon drivers, the input code utilizes XInput2, and our shipped binaries are fully compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian Wheezy.

    Server hosts will be happy to hear that 1.5 features a built-in HTTP server that significantly simplifies map downloads by removing the need to serve downloadable files through mirrors.

  • Major Steam Client Beta Update, In-Home Streaming Available To All

    Valve have delivered big with the latest Steam beta-client update with enabling in-home streaming for one and all! Masses of fixes everywhere on this one.

  • Kickstarter campaign conceived for Exogenesis: Perils of Rebirth

  • Evil power-fantasy begins as Nekro is released on Steam

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Last week in Krita — week 18

    It’s been a busy week at Krita development headquarters. And with so much work being done I feel proud to share all the great stuff that’s happening on the main development branch (Future 2.9).

  • Last month (April) in Red Hat KDE

  • Akademy-es 2014: Visit Málaga and learn about KDE

    From May 16th to 18th, Málaga is hosting Akademy-es 2014 in Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieria de Telecomunicación of Universidad de Málaga. This event is organized by KDE España, Linux Málaga and Bitvalley, and represents the return of a KDE event to Málaga 9 years after it hosted Akademy 2005.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME’s Mutter On Wayland Gets HiDPI Support

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The May 2014 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Debian Family

  • Tails Operating System Reaches Version 1.0

  • Debian: Call for help from KDE Team

    For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don’t have enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us automate the update to new upstream releases, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.

  • Janine Gibson: The Guardian Trusts Tails OS, Not Google

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Mir 0.2.0 Under Development For Ubuntu 14.10

        Mir 0.2.0 is the new, work-in-progress version of this open-source display server for Ubuntu Linux. The version was bumped for reflecting early development of Ubuntu 14.10, the Utopic Unicorn.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Lubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr: Video Review and Screnshot Tour

          Lubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS based on the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). On this release, as the Xubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Lubuntu 14.04 also come with LTS version, it mean will be supported for 3 years.

Devices/Embedded

• Preview: NVIDIA Tegra K1 Compared To Various x86, ARM Linux Systems

  For those anxious to see some NVIDIA Tegra K1 performance numbers, hopefully this puts the four-plus-one Cortex-A15 performance a bit into perspective… Again, in the coming days will be clean results from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS throughout, power numbers, other GPU/GPGPU benchmarks, and other interesting data from this Jetson TK1 ARM development board. Stay tuned!

• Allied serves up Raspberry Pi to robotics competition

  Allied Electronics, Fort Worth TX, will provide a Model A Raspberry Pi computer board to each one of the more than 130 high school-age Dean’s List Award finalists who participated in the 2014 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) season. The Dean’s List Award began in 2010 to recognize the leadership and dedication of the most outstanding FRC students.

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Android 4.4.2 KitKat update for Samsung Galaxy S3: All devices expected next week; Europe first up

  • Android

    • 8 Things We Expect from the Rumored Google Nexus 8

      The Nexus tablet range is once again in need of an overhaul. Nexus 7 and the now almost obsolete Nexus 10 are about to be replaced by newer models. What Google has in store for us, we don’t know. However, rumors are hinting at a possible new segment of devices called Nexus 8. The 8.9-inch tablet will reportedly replace the popular Nexus 7 series of devices. As to how true the rumors are, it’s too early to tell, but the word on the street is Google has indeed killed off both Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. This will be a huge step forward for Google as it would be directly competing with Apple’s hugely popular iPad.

Vantrix Launches f265.org for Open Source HEVC Encoder

Events

• GCI 2013 and Grand Prize Trip

  How does one become a contributor of Open Source development? Some start with the wish to fix that certain annoying bug in their favorite software. Others want to extend it by a new feature. However you arrive, the path to go to get that seemingly easy task done is often not clear. Where’s the source for that button? How do I make my changes take effect in the software that is run? Finding the right path can be a frustrating journey many are not willing to endure. Google Code-In (or GCI for short) aims to help out: Pairing prospective contributors with mentors from established open source organizations builds a path to successful contributions. KDE has participated in GCI as a mentoring organization since its start in 2010, and did so again in the most recent 2013 edition.

Standards/Consortia

• Possible Features To Find In OpenGL 5.0

  There’s a big belief that OpenGL 5 will be about optimizing this cross-platform, widely-used graphics API. All of the major hardware companies are working towards reducing OpenGL driver overhead and making other OpenGL improvements as a result of AMD’s Mantle API. Mantle is still Windows-only and used by just a handful of games for now with AMD’s Catlayst driver on GCN GPUs, but it’s ignited a conversation about increasing the performance potential out of OpenGL. DirectX 12.0 is also going to be optimizing the performance potential of Microsoft’s 3D graphics API.

Banksy condemns ‘disgusting’ Stealing Banksy exhibition on opening day

As press and street art fans were allowed in to take a first look at an exhibition claiming to be “the most expensive collection of Banksy artworks ever assembled”, the artist posted a statement on his website condemning it.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Those Military Observers

  If you think you get the truth on CNN and BBC you are not paying attention.

• World Domination

  Add together the cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Lugansk and you don’t reach the economic output of Dundee. World domination it isn’t. Unfortunately both in the Kremlin and on Capitol Hill they, and their satraps, think it is. Neither side cares at all about the millions of ordinary people in the zone of potential conflict.

• Iraqi army strikes ‘jihadist convoy’ in Syria

  Iraqi army helicopters have hit what they believe was a jihadist convoy in eastern Syria, killing at least eight people, in a show of strength days before the country’s first national elections since 2010.

• Worse than Iran-Contra? Why the White House is Desperate to Bury Benghazi

  Cover-up is about shielding details of arms smuggling to terrorists in Syria

• US ships 300,000 MREs to Ukraine military

  The United States delivered 300,000 meals ready to eat to the Ukranian military, the first delivery of American aid to the former Soviet republic, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

• Chomsky: US Leaders’ Panic Over Crimea Is About Fear of Losing Global Dominance

  The current Ukraine crisis is serious and threatening, so much so that some commentators even compare it to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

  Columnist Thanassis Cambanis summarizes the core issue succinctly in The Boston Globe: “[President Vladimir V.] Putin’s annexation of the Crimea is a break in the order that America and its allies have come to rely on since the end of the Cold War—namely, one in which major powers only intervene militarily when they have an international consensus on their side, or failing that, when they’re not crossing a rival power’s red lines.”

• David Ignatius: Putin steals CIA playbook on anti-Soviet covert operations

  The West has made NATO’s military alliance the heart of its response to Russia’s power grab in Ukraine. But we may be fighting the wrong battle: The weapons President Vladimir Putin has used in Crimea and eastern Ukraine look more like paramilitary “covert action” than conventional military force.

• Is the Western narrative obscuring what’s really going on in Ukraine?

  Washington and Brussels are the heroes of the Ukrainian saga, if you believe the Western media. Russian President Vladimir Putin is cast as the Big Bad Russian Bear, US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are the Democratic A-Team. Russia is supposedly using dirty KGB-inspired tactics: secret agitators backed by masked paratroopers. The West makes the same tired claims to back democracy and freedom and denounces Putin’s foul play.

  The hyperbole is extraordinary. Is it really appropriate to invoke the memory of Anschluss, or compare Putin to Saddam Hussein? Kerry has called Ukraine an “incredible act of aggression”, conveniently ignoring drone strikes, the Iraq War, and the numerous illegal coups the US has pulled off since World War II.

• Condoleezza Rice Backs Out of Rutgers Commencement After Student Protests

  Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has decided not to participate as the speaker for Rutgers University’s commencement ceremony after students began protesting the invitation earlier this year based on Rice’s involvement with the Iraq War.

  It’s no secret that Americans today tend to be less supportive of the war in Iraq than they were back in 2003, and that decline in support has caused some serious negative backlash for Rice.

• Condoleezza Rice declines to speak at Rutgers after student protests

• Obama’s new Ukraine – a Russophobic failed state ruled by fascists

  The chaos, terror and civil war in Ukraine is the deliberate creation of the Washington war machine, writes Mike Whitney. It is just step one of an offensive aimed at Russia – and that should raise loud alarms among all who care about our Earth’s future.

• Camp X Was the Basis for the CIA ‘Farm’

  Between 1941 and 1944, Americans and Canadians trained as secret agents at Camp X in Whitby, Ontario learning from the finest intelligence specialists the arts of espionage, sabotage, subversion, unarmed combat, silent killing, weapons training and various forms of communications. Employing the finest intelligence specialists, Camp X turned highly qualified recruits into covert operatives trained for clandestine Allied missions, and in so doing played an integral role in the development of international and domestic intelligence training.

• Troops on the Ground: U.S. and NATO Plan PSYOPS Teams in Ukraine

  Effort reminiscent of CIA’s Radio Free Europe during Cold War

• Washington responsible for fascist massacre in Odessa

  In what can only be described as a massacre, 38 anti-government activists were killed Friday after fascist-led forces set fire to Odessa’s Trade Unions House, which had been sheltering opponents of the US- and European-backed regime in Ukraine.

  According to eye-witnesses, those who jumped from the burning building and survived were surrounded and beaten by thugs from the neo-Nazi Right Sector. Video footage shows bloodied and wounded survivors being attacked.

  The atrocity underscores both the brutal character of the right-wing government installed in Kiev by the Western powers and the encouragement by the US and its allies of a bloody crackdown by the regime to suppress popular opposition, centered in the mainly Russian-speaking south and east of Ukraine.

  As the Odessa outrage occurred, US President Barack Obama, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, explicitly endorsed the military offensive being carried out by the unelected Kiev government against protesters occupying official buildings in eastern Ukraine.

  Despite Western media attempts to cover up what happened in Odessa—with multiple reports stating that “the exact sequence of events is still unclear”—there is no doubt that the killings in the southern port city were instigated by thugs wearing the insignia of the Right Sector, which holds positions in the Kiev regime, along with the like-minded Svoboda party.

• Israel police challenge US ‘terror’ findings

  Israeli police on Thursday challenged Washington’s inclusion of Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians in a global terror report, saying such incidents could not be likened to militant attacks.

  For the first time, the State Department’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism, published Wednesday, included a reference to a growing wave of racist anti-Palestinian vandalism, euphemistically known as “price tag” attacks.

• Tony Blair: to bomb or not to bomb people we don’t like in the Middle East

  Blair urges the world to “intervene” more in the Middle East, just as he and Bush “intervened” in Iraq. Trouble is, he admits, public opinion opposes his addiction to war

• The Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Always Your Friend

  The next time you’re influenced by a facebook meme or a heart-wrenching youtube video about human rights violations by an “enemy” of the West, think about the atrocities by the pro-Western side that we are not seeing. Study the history of the country to learn what parts of the so-called democratic opposition might draw their lineage to militant groups (such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) that have massacred ethnic, religious, or political minorities in past decades. If the U.S. continues to back these crazies just because they attack the West’s enemies, blowback is again going to be inevitable.

• The ‘Hook’ and Awlaki: a tale of two imams

  As the latest trial opened, his US lawyer, Joshua Dratel, noted that western governments, including the US, and his client were once on the same side, fighting in defence of Muslims in Afghanistan and in Bosnia against the Serbians. Dratel, who is Jewish, would not be defending Hamza if he was promoting anti-Jewish hatred, which he was accused of during his UK trial. While Hamza’s views were extreme, Dratel said, it was not illegal to hold them. At one point, he likened Hamza to Nelson Mandela, who was “once considered a terrorist. Now he’s an icon.”

• Dozens of FBI, CIA agents in Kiev ‘assisting Ukraine security’

  Numerous US agents are helping the coup-appointed government in Ukraine to “fight organized crime” in the south east of the country, the German newspaper Bild revealed.

  According to the daily, the CIA and FBI are advising the government in Kiev on how to deal with the ‘fight against organized crime’ and stop the violence in the country’s restive eastern regions.

• CIA, FBI consulting Kiev government, says German weekly

• CIA, FBI agents advising Ukraine government: Report

Transparency Reporting

• Leaked US Cable Notes ex-BPK Chief’s ‘Notoriety’ for Corruption

  Hadi, recently named a suspect by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in a decade-old tax case, served as the director general for taxation at Indonesia’s Ministry of Finance between 2001 and 2006.

  The 2006 diplomatic cable, published by Wikileaks on its website, commented on his replacement as the tax director general by Darmin Nasution.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Being cute ‘won’t save the penguins’

  Campaigners dressed as penguins marked World Penguin Day outside Norway’s parliament. They called on Norway and other nations active in the Antarctic to do more to save the world penguin population from a rapid decline.

• Biodiversity offsetting is a license to trash

  A proposal in the UK to destroy ancient woodland to make way for a £40 million motorway service station clearly reveals the flaws of biodiversity offsets.

• DAVID VS. GOLIATH: A TINY TRIBE TAKES ON BIG ENERGY

  Coal ash is the waste material left over after coal is burned. It’s often laced with pollutants, but it isn’t covered by any federal rules. In fact, no one paid much attention to coal ash until 1 billion gallons of it poured into the rivers around the Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Plant in 2008 and blanketed more than 300 acres of land. The tragic spill ignited a debate over whether to regulate coal ash and how.

• The Aussie Big Four, Third World Land Grabs and Ethical Capitalism

  Oxfam Australia has released a report showing that the big four Australian banks have financial connections with agri-business interests that are involved in major land grabs and exploitation.

• Koch brothers decline invitation to debate climate change

  A group supporting the political views of retired billionaire investor Tom Steyer bought a full-page color advertisement Friday in The Wichita Eagle — the Koch brothers’ hometown newspaper — inviting the brothers to a public debate on climate change.

Finance

• Justice Puts Banks in a Choke Hold

  When you become a banker, no one issues you a badge, nor are you fitted for a judicial robe. So why is the Justice Department telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges? Justice’s new probe, known as “Operation Choke Point,” is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like. Banks must then “choke off” those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.

  Justice launched the effort in early 2013…

• Activists decry lack of affordable rooms in Vancouver

• Report: More Than 92 Million Americans Remain Out Of Labor Force

  Despite the unemployment rate plummeting, more than 92 million Americans remain out of the labor force.
  The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent in April from 6.7 percent in March, the lowest it has been since September 2008 when it was 6.1 percent. The sharp drop, though, occurred because the number of people working or seeking work fell. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count people not looking for a job as unemployed.

• Crossrail managers accused of ‘culture of spying and fear’

  Leaked documents reveal that workers on new rail link are too scared of being sacked to report injuries

• Seattle’s $15 Wage Plan Proves Power of Radical Pressure

  City’s watered-down version, embraced by political elites and business class, a ‘testament to how working people can push back against the status quo of poverty, inequality, and injustice’

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Why the Alex Jones industrial complex must be dismantled

  I went after Jones specifically because almost all of his propaganda plays into the hands of the extreme right wing in the United States. He dismisses feminism and gay rights as part of a New Word Order plot to reduce the population. He dismisses climate change as a hoax, and backs it up by giving weather reports on Mars. He attacks non-existent, nameless, faceless organizations like the Illuminati but ignores the evils being done by right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers.

  His supporters are certified experts on the Bilderberg Group, but they seem to know nothing about the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that literally writes laws for corporations and passes them into law. Who needs the Illuminati when you have people like that? What if we just do away with the word “Illuminati” and start talking about capitalism and the state?

  You will never hear conspiracy theorists talk about class war; they are far more concerned with preserving their own status in this economic system. Like missionaries and populist demagogues of the past, they prey on the young and downtrodden, give them an all-encompassing worldview, call it “truth, and and label everyone who doesn’t believe it a “sheep” who needs to “wake up.”

  I attack Infowars because it is not a revolutionary movement. It is chasing a mirage. It imagines the good ol’ days of ‘merica, when white slave-owners wrote a constitution for other property owners, before they pushed west, killed multitudes of Native Americans (historical estimates range between 30-100 million) and stole their land. Those are the glory days of 1776 that the right-wing conspiracy crowd holds up as an ideal that we need to return to.

• How Presidents and the Public Have Ignored Right Wing Terrorism

• Book Buzz: ‘Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt’

  Two books about computer shenanigans this week. Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” takes on the high-frequency traders who have made ghost “towns” of stock exchange floors and created a market that is impenetrable to common understanding.

  In high-frequency trading, milliseconds count (if you could count that fast) so Wall Street traders now jockey for fiber-optic proximity to exchanges in order to execute trades and change pricing within one/one-thousandth or some such of the blink of an eye, so as to ensure that traders made a profit regardless of what happened to their customers. Nothing new there, right? Except now it’s being done at light-like speeds.

Privacy

• What Edward Snowden didn’t disclose

  For one thing, Snowden did not have access to any specific ECIs (Extremely Classified Information compartments) that protect specific sources of information, including the identities of companies that partner with the NSA. The larger ones can be inferred, but the details of their cooperation, along with the details of hundreds of other relationships, are ECI-controlled.

• ​Everyone is under government surveillance now – Snowden

  Government surveillance no longer targets individuals, but entire populations, former CIA contractor Edward Snowden has said. The whistleblower appeared via video link in a Toronto debate over the NSA intelligence gathering programs.

  Commenting on the antics of the National Security Agency, which have been described in the past as “Orwellian in nature,” Snowden said every citizen is affected by intelligence gathering programs

  “It’s no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” Snowden said in the brief video. “It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.”

• Want to stop creepy online tracking? Help the EFF test Privacy Badger

  Privacy Badger is a new tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation designed to stop creepy online tracking.

  It’s an extension for Firefox and Chrome that “automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them.”

• Google Glass – Why I’m not interested.

  Its reported that Google Glass advocates are coming to your town and that was the catalyst for writing this article. I am quite happy for Google Glass users to love their devices, however I don’t want them ranting on at me about it and I certainly don’t want their camera’s pointed at me.

  There’s something very strange about Google Glass “advocates” and its something akin to Justin Beiber fans.

  Hopefully the novelty of Google Glass will wear off, or at-least be limited to their own forums and fan pages.

  For the record, I am not a Google “hater” (its one of the ways a Google Glass Advocate rationalizes someone not interested in their toy) infact quite the opposite, I’m currently writing this on a Chromebook and am a very heavy user of many Google services – Doc’s, Drive, Groups, G+, Google, Gmail. I was also an early adopter of the ill fated GoogleWave and certainly no “hater” of Google products and my smartphones are Android, as are the tablets that I use.

• Digital arms makers follow money for NSA arsenal

  On Florida’s Atlantic coast, cyber arms makers working for U.S. spy agencies are bombarding billions of lines of computer code with random data that can expose software flaws the U.S. might exploit.

• Technology law will soon be reshaped by people who don’t use email

  There’s been much discussion – and derision – of the US supreme court’s recent forays into cellphones and the internet, but as more and more of these cases bubble up to the high chamber, including surveillance reform, we won’t be laughing for long: the future of technology and privacy law will undoubtedly be written over the next few years by nine individuals who haven’t “really ‘gotten to’ email” and find Facebook and Twitter “a challenge” .

  A pair of cases that went before the court this week raise the issue of whether police can search someone’s cellphone after an arrest but without a warrant. The court’s decisions will inevitably affect millions. As the New York Times editorial board explained on the eve of the arguments, “There are 12 million arrests in America each year, most for misdemeanors that can be as minor as jaywalking.” Over 90% of Americans have cellphones, and as the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a briefing to the court, our mobile devices “are in effect, our new homes”.

• Merkel not ready to say trust restored after NSA spying affair

  On a day when she spent more than four hours face-to-face with Barack Obama at the White House, Merkel last Friday listened to the US president in his own verdant Rose Garden tell the world how important their relationship is.

• North Korea Invokes the NSA, Zimmerman to Call U.S. a ‘Living Hell’

  You would think North Korea wouldn’t be in any place to lecture the United States about human rights abuses, right? Well, think again, because according to The Washington Post, a North Korean state news agency has responded to accusations leveled against them of human rights abuses by flipping the script by calling the United States a “living hell”, citing the NSA, prison privatization, and, for some reason, George Zimmerman.

• Captain America, step aside: Justices are on the case

  In the real world, who are our superheroes? People such as Assange or Edward Snowden seem candidates but actually are more akin to prophets, warning of misfortune but without the authority to stop it. Our elected officials? Some perhaps, but not those now in power. Indeed, it is the Obama administration — the same one that has so greatly stepped up the use of drones — that supports searching smartphones without warrants. We’re left with an improbable bunch: the nine justices of the Supreme Court.

• Facial recognition: is the technology taking away your identity?

  Although the use of facial recognition tools is still relatively new in the consumer sector, that is where much of the visible innovation will take place over the coming years. “The stakes are lower, so companies are free to take more risks,” says Kelly Gates, professor in communication and science studies at UC San Diego and author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. “As a result, there are a lot of experiments in the commercial domain. So what if you identify the wrong person by accident when you’re targeting an ad? It’s not that big a deal. It happens all the time in other forms of advertising.”

• DC Thinks It Can Silence a New Snowden, But the Anti-Leak Hypocrisy is Backfiring

  After Edward Snowden caught the US government with its pants down, you would think the keepers of this country’s secrets might stand up for a little more transparency, not bend over backwards trying to control the message.

  Instead, this week we found out the Most Transparent Administration in American History™ has implemented a new anti-press policy that would make Richard Nixon blush. National intelligence director James Clapper, the man caught lying to Congress from an “unauthorized” leak by Snowden, issued a directive to the employees of all 17 intelligence agencies barring all employees from any “unauthorized” contact with the press.

Civil Rights

• Shocking Kids into Compliance

  The Judge Rotenberg Center, a residential school in northern Massachusetts, prides itself on teaching students with disabilities who have the most challenging behavioral issues. The school takes kids with severe intellectual disabilities – autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a range of psychiatric disabilities – and then its employees attach electrodes to their arms, legs, and stomach, and shock them into submission.

• Wonder Girl’s head-sized breasts illustrate the sexism problem in comics

  It’s Free Comic Book Day today – the North American comic book industry’s annual push to bring in more readers by distributing popular all-ages comics for free through thousands of retailers. Unfortunately, while comics may be for everyone, the culture around them has a lot of growing up left to do.

• Segregation Now

  Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

• Shabak Torture Drives Israeli Palestinian Lawyer to Suicide

  Amjad al-Safadi was an East Jerusalem defense attorney whose clients were Palestinian security prisoners. Two months ago, he himself was arrested by the Shabak and detained for 45 days. He was charged with aiding Palestinian militant groups and their detainees. During his detention he was tortured by Shabak interrogator goons. Among his claims were that electric shocks were used against him. He was released from prison and placed under house arrest (the same process used in the case of Majd Kayyal). Yesterday, five days after his release, he hung himself at his home and died.

• Egypt court jails 102 Morsi supporters for 10 years: Report

  An Egyptian court sentenced 102 supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to 10 years in prison on Saturday over protest violence, state television reported.

  The army-installed government has rounded up thousands of Morsi supporters and put them on mass trials since overthrowing him in July.

• Why Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy Are Not the Problem

  In her heartfelt dissent in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which upheld a Michigan ballot initiative forbidding schools from considering race as one factor in admitting students, Justice Sandra Sotomayor wrote “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.”

• Report on CIA provides evidence Djibouti was a ‘black site’

• Three Presidents Who Ordered Mass Torture of Prisoners And Two Who Failed to Stop Torture

  For most of US history, torture was something the enemy did, and their doing so was widely regarded as a sure sign of their evil. US troops might be ordered into unjust wars of aggression. They even carried out massacres. But torture of prisoners was something beheld as evil.

  American Indians were often massacred, but not tortured, and the claim that some of them tortured was seen as evidence of their barbarism. Mexican civilians were also massacred, but not tortured. Union soldiers did not torture Confederate prisoners. In fact, the Civil War saw the first rules of war, formulated by Lincoln. Confederates did massacre Union troops if they were Black, but even these traitors never tortured. Germans, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese were all killed in great numbers, but never tortured. In fact, the torture of US POWs by North Koreans was held up as a great evil.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• What Inefficient Airline Boarding Procedures Have To Do With Net Neutrality

  Search the internet and there are tons of articles about more efficient ways to board airplanes. Many will point to the work of astrophysicist Jason Steffen who algorithmically tested a variety of boarding methods to come up with his optimized version. The best demonstration of this particular method is in this YouTube video where the Steffen method was tested.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Google, Intel to make Chromebook announcement on May 6

  One theory is that a new Chromebook Pixel will be announced, as the current model utilizes a Intel Core i5, the most powerful of any Chromebook. The Pixel hasn’t been changed since its release last February, and it could be time for Google to refresh its crown jewel, high-end Chromebook. Another collaboration with Intel could bring more power to the Chromebook line and make Chromebooks more appealing for resource-hungry users.

Server

• A Cool Project for Microsoft: Adopt Linux

  Demand for Linux talent is high and getting higher.

Kernel Space

• No, ARM Didn’t Open-Source Their Full Mali Linux Driver

  A few links have been sent in to our news tip box with this page, which reads, “Open Source Mali-200/300/400/450 GPU Kernel Device Drivers.” While the page mentions open-source drivers, it’s only about the kernel portion of the driver and it’s always been that way with ARM — and most other ARM-based graphics vendors. The kernel portion is open, the user-space components are closed. Without an open user-space, having an open kernel driver is only of limited use, and will not be accepted into the upstream Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Has A New Radeon DRM Performance Patch

    AMD has a new Radeon DRM kernel driver patch pending that is able to offer Linux gaming performance improvements by improving the video memory bandwidth performance by the open-source graphics driver.

  • Wayland 1.5 RC Released with a Historic Low in Bugs

    Wayland, a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol, which can be used as a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, has reached version 1.5 RC.

  • OpenGL 4.4 ARB_buffer_storage Added To Nouveau

    Support for the ARB_buffer_storage extension mandated by the OpenGL 4.4 specification is now supported by Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

    This GL 4.4 extension was added to the open-source Radeon drivers and then in March for supporting the Intel Mesa driver. Ilia Mirkin has now wired-up the ARB_buffer_storage support for the Nouveau Gallium3D drivers: NV30, NV50, and NVC0.

  • AMD Mullins Support Added To Radeon Gallium3D

Applications

• XBMC 13.0 Gotham – Release Candidate 1

• Entangle Photo App Has Out A New Release

  The Entangle open-source application for tethered camera control and capturing is out with a major release.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Install Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the Same Computer

  • 6 cPanel Tips For Absolute Linux Hosting Newbies

  • The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)

  • Install Android Studio in Linux Mint 16

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.7.18 Has Bug-Fixes, New Functions

  • Wine Announcement

• Games

  • CrossOver Linux Update Brings Support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Blizzard’s Battle.net

  • Steam For Linux Last Month Showed A Slight Rise In Usage

    The Steam Hardware Survey has been updated to reflect the April 2014 numbers. Last month, there were slightly more reported Linux users running Steam to obtain the latest Linux games.

  • Battleblock Theatre Will See Same-day Linux Support At Release This May

  • Battleblock Theater releases on PC & Linux on May 15

    The Behemoth’s long-awaited follow-up to Castle Crashers was BattleBlock Theater–a game that our review says “may have bitten off more than it can comfortably chew.” Still, the ambitious platformer is large enough that players can “enjoy its likable, zany sensibilities throughout.” After a beta test on PC two months ago, the studio has announced the Steam version will be available to purchase on May 15th.

  • Full Bore Part 2 coming to PC and Linux this month

    The second part of Wholehog Games’ block puzzler featuring a digging boar, Full Bore: The First Dig, will launch this month for Windows PC and Linux, the developers told Polygon.

  • Beat ‘em up Mother Russia Bleeds coming to PC in 2015

    Mother Russia Bleeds, an “unrelenting, ultra-violent” beat ‘em up set in an alternate 1980s USSR, will launch for Linux, Mac and Windows PC in 2015, developer Le Cartel recently announced.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • New OpenMandriva, Updated KDE, and Ubuntu EOL

    Our top story tonight is the release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014 with new features and updates. KDE saw an update release this week as well and Ubuntu 12.10 approaches end-of-life. In other news “Firefox 29 sucks” says one, but another tests it against Konqueror and finds not so much. And Bryan Lunduke is back with more on why “Linux sucks!”

  • KDE PIM 2014 Spring Sprint

    We continue the tradition of having the PIM sprint in a place that starts with a “B”. The last 3 PIM sprints were in Berlin (twice) and Brno. The Spring edition of this year took place in Barcelona, continuing the tradition. Add to this the name of the company hosting us which conveniently starts with a “B” as well (BlueSystems).

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.13.1 Officially Released

  • Calibre 1.35 eBook Management Software Gets Better Book Editing and Spell Check Features

    eBook reader, editor, and library management software Calibre 1.35 has been released and comes with more book editing and spell checking features and fixes.

  • Profiles in Devhelp

    I’m at the GNOME Development Experience Hackfest in Berlin, and one of the things that I wanted to target during these days was to keep on looking at how we can enable different profiles in Devhelp.

Distributions

• NixOS 14.04 Is a Unique Operating System That Uses KDE 4.2

  NixOS is not your average cup of tea, as it employs a rather different approach to the building of an operating system. It uses its own package manager, called Nix, which ensures that users can make an upgrade to one package that cannot break others, that they can always roll back to previous version, and so on.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva Lx 2014 Has Been Released

    OpenMandriva Lx 2014 has been officially released with many new features, improvements and major changes.

    This second release of the OpenMandriva operating system under the community of the OpenMandriva Association is a major update from the previous version of OpenMandriva Lx and it comes with a better desktop system performance and responsiveness due to the implementation of the 3.13.11 nrjQL stock kernel.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • DNF 0.5.1 Improves Its CLI Output

      DNF 0.5.1′s main feature is its less verbose with its text output during the dependency-resolving process. Up to this point it would spew dozens or even hundreds of lines of text about dependency processing. DNF 0.5.1 also now reports about bandwidth savings when using delta RPMs.

    • Temporary Problem with DevConf CZ Videos

      There’s a problem with Red Hat Czech’s YouTube channel, where the DevConf videos about Fedora.next are hosted. This should be fixed soon, at which point my series of articles about those videos will continue.

• Debian Family

  • Tails v1.0: One Linux Distro Among Many for Secure Communications

    Tails, short for “The Amnesic Incognito Live System,” came to the world’s attention last month when the Freedom of the Press Foundation revealed that Edward Snowden used a beta version of the Linux distribution to securely communicate with reporters. Now, the same highly secure distro used by Snowden to leak NSA materials has been released as version 1.0 under an open GPLv3 license.

  • Unmasking the Tails Linux Distro

    Many different Linux distributions are freely available for users. For National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Linux distribution of choice is Tails, which hit its 1.0 release April 29. Tails stands for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, a reasonably accurate description of what the Tails Linux distribution is all about. As a Live Linux distribution, Tails can run from a USB stick and does not need to be directly installed onto a physical computer. The promise of Tails is that, as a Live Linux distribution, with a focus on privacy, when a user removes the Tails USB from the computer, there is no trace of it left in system memory. Tails goes much further than just leaving no trace in memory in its goal to be an incognito system. The Tor anonymous network routing technology is integrated into Tails to help hide a user’s actual location and IP address on the Internet. For secure email, Tails includes the Claws Mail email client with encryption support. Tails enables users to have secure instant messaging conversations with Pidgin, which is preconfigured with the Off The Record (OTR) plug-in. There is even an option in Tails to enable the desktop to look like a Windows XP desktop to help avoid suspicion from people who might be walking by a Tails user. In this slide show, eWEEK examines key features of the Tails 1.0 release.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • The Ubuntu Unity Launcher gets a facelift with Unity Drawers

        For the longest time, Ubuntu Unity users have wanted a bit more leverage from the Unity Launcher. As it stands, it’s a means to launch applications and get to the Unity Dash. But with the creation of a new tool, Drawers, you can easily organize related items (files, applications, websites, folders, etc.) using “mini dashes” and “quick lists” — similar to the Stacks feature in OS X. Drawers allows you to organize files together onto the Launcher and even create a Dash-like app menu for quick access to your applications.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Interested in Tizen? You need to be here.

  • Ballnux

    • Will Android Silver split Google and Samsung apart?

      The media is rife with reports that Google is working on a program called Android Silver that is designed to force Android manufacturers into strict adherence to Google’s specifications. This is really an attempt by Google to regain control of the Android platform and to provide a more iPhone-like experience for Android users. While such goals are not bad in and of themselves, they do have the potential for some serious consequences for Google and its partners.

    • Android 4.4.2 KitKat update for Samsung Galaxy S3 releases on Sprint day after kernel source code released

  • Android

    • Ubuntu for Android (not to be confused with Ubuntu Touch) is pretty much dead

    • Meet the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1

      Mumbai: Meet the HTC Dream, aka T-mobile G1. It is the first Android based smartphone which was marketed by T-Mobile and manufactured by HTC. The product is known as HTC Dream when referring, but highly known as the T-Mobile G1 in the US and Era G1 in Poland.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Firefox 29 Lands in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and All Other Supported Ubuntu Distro

    Canonical has published details about a number of Firefox vulnerabilities for its Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, and it has released a new version in the official repositories that should take care of the problems

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSF seeks full-time senior GNU/Linux systems administrator

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a full-time senior systems administrator.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • AMAKER says it’s first Dual ARM Open Source 3D Printer

    AMAKER is designed from scratch to include next generation controller boards. Just as humans have a left and right brain, we designed our controller to mirror two sides of the brain. The left side of the controller uses one ARM chip to control all motion calculations, thermal control and sensors. The right side uses another ARM chip to handle the user interface. This allows simultaneous processing of both motion control and the user interface during printing.

Health/Nutrition

• Chicken Nuggets, With a Side of Respiratory Distress

  Think you have it tough at work? Imagine taking a post at a factory-scale poultry slaughterhouse. Chicken carcasses whiz by at the rate of 140 per minute, requiring repetitive hand motions with sharp knives. Then there’s the caustic odor of chemical sprays and washes—practices the industry has resorted to in recent years as a way to control bacterial pathogens like salmonella.

Security

• British National Party’s Twitter account hacked by ‘Anonymous’

  Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party and MEP, has had his Twitter account hacked by campaigners claiming to be part of the hacking group, Anonymous.

  Someone claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous hacked into the party’s official account late on Friday night.

  The hackers did not appear to be trying to send out a particular message and didn’t appear to know much about the far-right party, but were simply trying to cause trouble for the BNP.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Washington’s drive for regime change in Venezuela

  The statements by the US president and the two top State Department officials only go to confirm the warning made last month by Maduro that his government is confronting a “slow-motion” coup, in which US-backed violent demonstrators are “copying badly what happened in Kiev.”

• John ‘Flashback’ McCain Wants Moar War But German Industry Stands in the Way

• Obama’s New Ukraine

• Military Buildup. NATO Now Considers Russia as “An Enemy”. Militarization of “Russia’s Neighbors

  The 61-year-old former United States ambassador to Russia reportedly told journalists this week that Moscow’s role in the ongoing crisis in Ukraine has forced NATO to reconsider the alliance’s opinion on Russia, and that additional troops may soon be mobilized to the region as tensions worsen.

• How to Win the Information War against Vladimir Putin

• Odessa Massacre Pushes Ukraine to the Edge

  Western headlines have attempted to spin into ambiguity the death of over 30 anti-fascist Ukrainian protesters cornered and burned to death in the Trade Unions House in the southern port city of Odessa. The arson was carried out by Neo-Nazi mobs loyal to the unelected regime now occupying Kiev.

  Both the London Guardian and the BBC attempted in their coverage to make the perpetrators and circumstances as ambiguous as possible before revealing paragraphs down that pro-regime mobs had indeed torched the building. And even still, the Western press has attempted to omit the presence of Right Sector, the militant wing of the current regime charged with carrying out political intimidation and violence against Kiev’s opponents.

• Yemen Qaeda warns of reprisal over drone war

• Al Qaida threatens to hit back over Yemen drone strikes

• Anti-drone events in Central New York

  In a determined protest against the U.S. use of drone warfare, 150 people marched to the gates of Hancock Air Base in Syracuse, N.Y., on April 27. The multinational march was part of a regional day of education and action linking poverty, racism and war.

  People in Afghanistan, for example, are targeted by Reaper drones piloted out of Hancock Air Base. Soldiers in the 174th Attack Wing, New York National Guard, fly the drones. The 174th previously flew F-16s; it is the first U.S. squadron to convert to all-unmanned combat planes.

• UK telecoms infrastructure used to support controversial US drone operations

  The UK’s telecommunications infrastructure is being used as part of a global defence intelligence network that the US government uses for controversial drone operations and other military purposes.

  Human rights experts say the UK’s involvement is the digital equivalent of allowing secret US rendition flights to land at UK military sites, or permitting the US government to launch air strikes from its airforce bases in the UK – actions for which the UK has, in the past, been heavily criticised.

• The Drone War’s Secrets and Lies

  …targeting U.S. citizens overseas for sudden, fiery death from the sky.

• The burden of atrocity: How Vietnam was exposed as a “dirty war”

  A conservative estimate of civilian deaths arising from the war is two million in South Vietnam alone, from a population of nineteen million. An analogous civilian casualty rate in the United States today would be nearly thirty-three million — in fact, looking at the dead and wounded in Vietnam as ratios of the general population puts the conflict on par with the horrendous bloodshed of World War II. As Kill Anything That Moves relives in graphic detail, the Vietnam War was horrendously brutal in its plans, execution and outcomes.

• CIA Whistleblower faces the ire of an angry Justice Department over Benghazi questions

  Longtime former CIA field operative turned whistleblower Robert “Tosh” Plumlee is currently in the crosshairs of a very angry Holder Justice Department for publicly posting 11 “questions” about Benghazi and the illegal weapons running operations being conducted by criminal elements within the U.S. government. Mr. Plumlee is no ordinary CIA whistleblower, however.

• Please Don’t Read This Benghazi Article

  If you ignored the headline and are reading this anyway, you are part of the problem. Despite the fact that the last several resurgences have produced nothing that verifies the claims of the right wing, we’re once again forced to wade into the matter and endure at least the fifth round of grandstanding in a cycle that leads us no closer to actually solving the problems that Benghazi revealed.

  The latest return of the assault that killed four Americans in a diplomatic outpost in the eastern Libya city to the public consciousnesses comes from conservative group Judicial Watch obtaining on Tuesday a copy of White House emails from the days after the attack through a FOIA request to the State Deparment. Now Republicans and conservative media have narrowed in on one in particular from Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes as the latest in a string of smoking guns that proves malfeasance on the part of the administration. So now, after 11 open hearings in the House of Representatives alone, scores of witnesses called for testimony, millions of dollars spent, and thousands of documents from the administration, we’re at the point where the Republicans are generally scraping the bottom of the barrel in formulating their reasons to keep the investigation alive.

• Former CIA spy Andre Le Gallo recounts his time in Iran in 1978-79

  During the Gulf War in the 1990′s he helped choose high value targets for Tomahawk cruise missile strikes in Iraq…

• Lusitania divers warned of danger from war munitions in 1982, papers reveal

  Foreign Office officials also voiced serious concerns that a final British admission that there were high explosives on the Lusitania could still trigger serious political repercussions with America even though it was nearly 70 years after the event.

  The RMS Lusitania was sunk on 7 May 1915 by a torpedo fired without warning from a German submarine just off the Irish coast with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 American civilians. The liner went down in just 18 minutes and the loss of civilian life enraged US public opinion and hastened American’s entry into the first world war.

• Afghan opium production explodes despite billions spent, says US report

  A report released Wednesday by Washington’s Afghanistan war watchdog has found that the billions spent by the State and Defense departments on counter-narcotics since 2002 has been for nought. Opium-poppy cultivation takes up 209,000 hectares (516,230 acres) of land in Afghanistan, a 36% increase since 2012.

• Pacific Ocean Marshall Islands launch lawsuits against nations with nuclear arms over testing effects

  The small Oceanic Marshall Islands is to launch an unprecedented round of lawsuits against nine nations with nuclear arms, including the US, to demand that they meet their obligations to disarm.

Transparency Reporting

• DOJ Continues Its “Multi-Subject” Investigation of WikiLeaks

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Safety Failures Pervasive at Site of Mysterious Nuclear Leak

  U.S. government’s own report faults declining safety culture for release of radiation at troubled New Mexico dump

• US corn yields are increasingly vulnerable to hot, dry weather, study shows

  The study, which appears in the journal Science, was led by Stanford’s David Lobell, associate professor of environmental Earth system science and associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. “The Corn Belt is phenomenally productive,” Lobell said, referring to the region of Midwestern states where much of the country’s corn is grown. “But in the past two decades we saw very small yield gains in non-irrigated corn under the hottest conditions. This suggests farmers may be pushing the limits of what’s possible under these conditions.”

• Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas

  The crisis gripping Ukraine has plunged transatlantic relations to their lowest point since the Cold War and threatens to send Ukraine into an armed conflict with potentially dire consequences for the country and the wider region.

• If Scotland Secedes, Who Gets Its Oil?

  The U.K.’s debate over Scottish independence is an oddly blinkered affair. People are obsessing over things that don’t matter and ignoring things that do — such as who owns the U.K.’s North Sea oil.

• Ex-CIA Analyst Ruth: China’s Growing Economy Sparks Green Fears

  If the Chinese economy really is growing as reported, China will find itself under a lot more pressure by the international community to comply with environmental regulations, says Lisa Ruth, former CIA analyst and Lignet analyst.

• Japan begins northeastern whale hunts after ICJ ban

  If there’s a will, there’s a way. Taking advantage of the fact that the recent international court ruling only covers whale hunts in the Antarctic Ocean, a Japanese whaling fleet left last Saturday to begin it’s hunt in the northern Pacific.

• Diesel engine pollution linked to early deaths and costs NHS billions

  Environmental experts warn high percentage of diesel engines in public transport may cause quarter of all air pollution deaths

Finance

• Russia pushes BRICS nations to establish their own rating agency

  Standard & Poor’s has downgraded Russia’s long-term foreign currency sovereign credit rating from BBB to BBB-. According to the Russian authorities, the major rating agencies are influenced by the United States, and an alternative BRICS-based rating agency should be established. China has already expressed its interest in the project.

• Putting the ‘Sharing’ Back in to the Sharing Economy

  A vibrant debate is beginning to question the meaning of sharing in relation to the big questions of our time.

• IMF Approves Loan (To Pay Ukraine’s Gazprom Bill): Putin 1 – 0 IMF

  Remember, this is all about ensuring Europe gets it gas – since Russia/Gazprom had said no more through Ukraine pipelines if the bill was not paid since they were afraid of stealing.

• Amazon’s hypocritical tax scheme: How exploiting a massive loophole helped it destroy bookstores

  A free market success story? Hardly. Amazon’s built on a billion-dollar loophole, and they’re still manipulating it

• Corporate giants stash trillions abroad.

  Corporate America did well last year, so well, US corporations added $206 billion to their offshore stash of profits. These companies now have a total of $1.95 trillion parked in offshore accounts. It’s easy for these companies, those like Apple and Microsoft, to use the location of their foreign subsidiaries as sources of their intellectual property like patents for example.

• USA: Bad Jobs Country

  Researchers confirm what desperate workers have sensed: most of the good jobs lost in the Great Recession have been replaced with bad jobs. That’ fine with Wall Street, since “capital’s global plan is to reduce all workers to a state of absolute insecurity, so that they will accept those bad jobs without complaint.”

• Scathing Report Finds School Privatization Hurt Poor Kids

  Gordon Lafer, a political economist and University of Oregon professor who has advised Congress, state legislatures, and the New York City mayor’s office, landed at the airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week bringing with him a briefing paper on school privatization and how it hurts poor kids.

  Lafer’s report, “Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” released today by the Economic Policy Institute, documents the effects of both for-profit and non-profit charter schools that are taking over struggling public schools in Milwaukee.

• Commission of Audit unveils radical blueprint to shrink government

• In Abbott’s Team Australia, the weakest players must do the heaviest lifting

• Freeze minimum wage for a decade, says Commission of Audit

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• BBC Propaganda Hits New All-Time Low

  Every half hour BBC News is running a three minute puff piece which is even more sinister for what it hides than for what it says – and By God! That is sinister enough.

  [...]

  Now pay close attention: Fiona Gilmore is chief executive of Acanchi a PR Consultany which specializes in “Country Branding”. Its clients include Israel, Dubai, Bahrain and “England”. Yes, it actually specifies “England” on the company website. Acanchi also works for DFID – in short, it gets UK taxpayers’ money, plus Israeli and Gulf Arab money. Are you familiar with the word fungibility?

Censorship

• Arrests, Censorship and Propaganda: China’s Tiananmen Anniversary Dance

• Self-censorship limits media: survey

• The Price of Press Censorship in China

• Turkey’s Erdogan: One of the World’s Most Determined Internet Censors

  His political party passed laws letting him shut down websites without a court order and collect Web browsing data on individuals. He put a veteran spy in charge of Turkey’s telecommunications regulator.

• Censorship to political pulls, is Indian media in crisis?

  Eight journalists were killed in India in 2013. This was a jump from the five killed in the preceding year, and three in 2011. If there were 74 instances of censorship in 2012, the following year saw 94 such instances — with the internet being the single biggest casualty of the clamp-down. Also, 19 journalists were attacked in the year.

Privacy

• We Need Online Alter Egos Now More Than Ever

• The NSA Comes Home: Police Departments Conceal Phone Tracking Equipment From Courts

  The intricate surveillance equipment used by the federal government to track and store the cellphone data of millions of people and to monitor terrorism suspects is making its way to Main Street.

• Digital arms makers build NSA arsenal from cyber flaws

  ON Florida’s Atlantic coast, cyber arms makers working for US spy agencies are bombarding billions of lines of computer code with random data that can expose software flaws the US might exploit.

  In Pittsburgh, researchers with a Pentagon contract are teaching computers to scan software for bugs and turn them automatically into weapons. In a converted textile mill in New Hampshire, programmers are testing the combat potential of coding errors on a digital bombing range.

• Google ends “creepy” practice of scanning Gmail education apps

  Technology giant Google has ended its practice of scanning its users’ Apps for Education accounts for advertising purposes after being sued by students and other Gmail users last year, the company announced Wednesday.

  The Google Apps for Education tool suite is a service the company provides for free to more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators globally. The service includes access to Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and cloud storage.

  Users of the Apps for Education tools suite and other Gmail users have alleged that the company’s data scanning practices violated federal and state anti-wiretapping and privacy laws, according to the suit filed in a California federal court.

  The plaintiffs have further claimed that the company crossed a “creepy line” by using scanned information to build “surreptitious” profiles of students, according to Education Week. The users who filed suit have sought money damages and an injunction preventing further scanning of accounts. The suit is ongoing, and, after a preliminary hearing in February, the court denied a motion for certification as a class action lawsuit in March.

• L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept. used spy plane to watch Compton

• William Binney and Thomas Drake on NSA Surveillance: An Alien Form of Government

• Glenn Greenwald debates former NSA director Michael Hayden on state surveillance

  The ongoing debate over whether Americans should value privacy or security stretched into Toronto, Canada Friday night when four of the most influential voices on the matter sat down to discuss the leaked NSA surveillance programs and their fallout.

• Glenn Greenwald Faces Off Against Former NSA Chief Michael Hayden

• Hacker from Germany claims he managed to hack NSA website

• German IT expert hacks NSA homepage

  A computer expert from eastern Germany claims to have hacked the homepage of the US National Security Agency (NSA), leaving a message on the site for American security experts.

• U.S. and Germany Fail to Reach a Deal on Spying

• Germany not satisfied with US assurances over NSA spying

  The chancellor of Germany spoke alongside United States President Barack Obama on Friday about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices for the first time in the US since she voiced concerns last year about leaked NSA operations.

• Obama: US, Germany ‘not perfectly aligned’ on NSA

• Merkel’s White House test: suppress anger over NSA to show unity on Ukraine

• Merkel makes first White House visit since NSA spying scandal

• 
  MERKEL MAKES FIRST U.S. VISIT SINCE NSA SCANDAL

• NSA Training Cyberwarriors to Bolster Force

  The main goal of such programs, for the NSA and other arms of the military, is to have a respectable cyberwarrior force in the future. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said in the past that he aims to triple the size of Pentagon’s Cyber Command.

• White House big-data panel calls for privacy protections, ignores NSA

  Congress should take action to protect privacy in response to a growing big-data revolution, a White House panel has recommended, but its report does not address wide-ranging surveillance and data-collection programs at the U.S. National Security Agency.

• The Shaky Legal Foundation of NSA Surveillance on Americans

  A secret opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently released to the public is a reminder that the NSA is still conducting mass surveillance on millions of Americans, even if that fact has faded from the headlines. This would seem to violate the Fourth Amendment if you read its plain text. So how is it that FISA-court judges keep signing off on these sweeping orders?

  They base their rulings on Smith v. Maryland, a case the Supreme Court decided decades ago. Before we examine the glaring flaw in the jurisprudence of the FISA-court judges applying it to mass surveillance, here’s a brief refresher on that case.

• White House seeks legal immunity for firms that hand over customer data

  The White House has asked legislators crafting competing reforms of the National Security Agency to provide legal immunity for telecommunications firms that provide the government with customer data, the Guardian has learned.

• The FISA Court Has Only Denied an NSA Request Once in the Past 5 Years

  From 2009 to 2013, the National Security Agency went to the secretive United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) 8,164 times asking for legal permission to conduct electronic or physical surveillance. As Jason Koebler points out over at Motherboard, of those thousands of requests the FISA Court denied just one, in 2009.

• The US Surveillance Court Hasn’t Turned Down an NSA Request This Decade

• GCHQ wants access to NSA surveillance data

• EFF Seeks Unreleased Court Orders On NSA Spying

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Thursday hit the U.S. Department of Justice with a suit in D.C. federal court alleging it has failed to turn over documents regarding court orders on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs despite numerous Freedom of Information Act requests.
  The digital rights group filed suit, alleging it has requested that “still secret and significant surveillance decisions” issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be made public, but the DOJ has missed the deadline for responding to FOIA requests, according to the complaint.

• Himes calls for increased NSA oversight

  U.S Rep. Jim Himes, whose 4th District includes Ridgefield, joined Reps. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) in introducing legislation to increase independent oversight over the National Security Agency. The Cooper-Smith-Himes NSA Internal Watchdog Act creates a Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed Inspector General (IG) for the agency, placing a watchdog inside the NSA who will be accountable to Congress and to the American people.

• Edward Snowden decries increased surveillance of entire populations

• Find Two Hours To Watch Glenn Greenwald Debate Michael Hayden

• Data privacy recommendations unveiled by White House

  The White House is calling on U.S. lawmakers to pass legislation that will both strengthen the safeguards against corporate and governmental misuse of consumers’ private data, but also open the door to recording and using more of it on an everyday basis.

Civil Rights

• Sultan of Brunei unveils strict sharia penal code

  Fines and jail terms for offences such as indecency and failure to attend Friday prayers, with future penalties to include flogging and death by stoning

• Botched executions show there’s no such thing as humane capital punishment

  Once again, a prisoner has died an unseemly death in the execution chambers of the United States of America. Facing a shortage of the drugs needed to carry out a lethal injection, the state of Oklahoma decided to experiment on a live human being – with disastrous results. After being subjected to treatment some described as torture, Clayton Lockett ultimately died of a heart attack.

• Listen to a Secret Tape of FBI Agents Interviewing—and Threatening—a Potential Informant

  On Thursday, Mother Jones broke the story of Naji Mansour, an American living abroad who refused to become a government informant—and saw his life, and his family’s, turned upside-down. After he rebuffed the government’s advances, Mansour was banned from returning to his family’s home in Kenya, locked up for 37 days in a squalid prison in South Sudan, and eventually found himself living in Khartoum, where two FBI agents he had met before, Mike Jones and Peter Smith (pseudonyms we created at the FBI’s request), tried again to win his trust. Mansour recorded the conversation, which you can listen to above; a full transcript follows below.

• Meet the American Citizens Who Allege the US Had Them Locked Up Abroad

• From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany

  After World War II, West Germany rapidly made the transition from murderous dictatorship to model democracy. Or did it? New documents reveal just how many officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A surprising number were chosen for senior government positions.

• 1,000 native women murdered, missing in Canada over 30 years: RCMP

  The RCMP revealed Thursday a shocking number — nearly 1,200 aboriginal women have been murdered or gone missing in Canada in the past 30 years.

  RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said most of those women — about 1,000 — are murder victims.

  The rest, about 186, are disappearances, still logged in police files across the country, and in a majority of those — some 160 missing person cases — the RCMP says authorities “ought to” suspect foul play. The others have been determined to be disappearances for “reasons unknown.”

• Feds didn’t act on polygraphs indicating child abuse

  The nation’s spy satellite agency failed to notify authorities when some employees and contractors confessed during lie detector tests to crimes such as child molestation, an intelligence inspector general has concluded.

  In other cases, the National Reconnaissance Office delayed reporting criminal admissions obtained during security clearance polygraphs, possibly jeopardizing evidence in investigations or even the safety of children, according to the inspector general report released Tuesday, almost two years after McClatchy’s reporting raised similar concerns.

  In one instance, one of the agency’s top lawyers told colleagues not to bother reporting confessions by a government contractor of child molestation, viewing child pornography and sexting with a minor, the inquiry by the inspector general for the intelligence community revealed.

• How to Starve the For-Profit Prison Beast

  I know some private prison lobbyists who would love it if you were found with a cell phone. Assuming, of course, that you’re already locked in one of the prisons their clients operate in Oklahoma.

  Introducing a cell phone into a correctional facility used to be a misdemeanor in Oklahoma. Now, it’s a felony. This change did not happen for any reason other than a private prison lobbyist provided his client with a good way to make even more revenue off of people already imprisoned. Bumping this crime up from a misdemeanor to a felony means that when a person is caught with a cell phone in prison, he or she will end up staying in prison even longer; in most cases the new sentence will be added to the end of the existing one, instead of allowing people to serve time for both the crime that landed them behind bars and the cell phone infraction simultaneously. More prison time, more profits.

• Where Was Anal Rape Approved in the OLC Memos?

  Sorry I’ve been AWOL for the last several days. I’ve been traveling and speaking and traveling. Thanks to Jim and bmaz for holding down the fort.

  While I’ve been gone, there has been fairly shocking testimony from Gitmo (thanks, as always, to Carol Rosenberg for her persistence in covering this thankless story). In Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri’s trial, a doctor called to testify to his untreated PTSD described the trauma evidence she found on him.

• FBI may put alleged Anonymous member behind bars for 440 years

• State Law Hides Investigations of Police Misconduct from Public Scrutiny

  Former State Senator Gloria Romero tried to change POBOR during her time in Sacramento, but said the police union opposition was too strong to overcome. “Most states in the nation allow for the knowledge of these misconduct reports,” said Gloria Romero. “That essentially translates to, we have a secret police force and I think that surprises people in a democracy such as California’s.” Partensky and Woosley, the two San Francisco residents who called 911 for some injured bicyclists, never did get the answers they were looking for. The SF Police Department told us that the two were detained for interfering with medical rescue crews. There was no internal police review and no police officers were disciplined.

• Senate report set to reveal Djibouti as CIA ‘black site’

  The legal case of a former CIA detainee suing the government of Djibouti for hosting the facility where he says he was detained could be helped by the contents of a still-classified Senate report. Djibouti, a key U.S. ally, has denied for years that its territory has been used to keep suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in secret captivity. But the Senate investigation into the agency’s “detention and interrogation program” concluded that several people had been secretly detained in the tiny Horn of Africa state, two U.S. officials who read an early draft of the report told Al Jazeera.

• Military judge orders CIA to list ‘black sites’

• 30 Retired Generals Urge Obama To Declassify The CIA Torture Report

  Thirty retired generals are urging President Obama to declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, arguing that without accountability and transparency the practice could be resumed.

  “After taking office, you showed decisive leadership by issuing an executive order banning torture and other forms of abusive interrogation,” the retirees say in an open letter released Thursday.

• Fine Print: U.S. can’t seem to shake the ‘water cure’ as a method of interrogation

  In a March 11 floor speech, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), said the panel is investigating “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed.”

  But that quote was from testimony delivered in 1903 by U.S. Army Lt. Grover Flint before the Senate Philippines Committee. Chaired by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.), the committee was reviewing how U.S. Army units were dealing with Filipino fighters who opposed the United States taking over governing their country in the wake of the Spanish-American War.

• Nat Hentoff: Lifting secrecy a matter of time

• Comey: CIA-Senate probe hasn’t drawn in FBI

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

May 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Cool Projects

May 2014 Video Preview

Nvidia $192 Tegra TK1 board could be used as a Linux gaming PC

Nvidia is bringing supercomputer-class performance to its $192 Jetson TK1 computer, which is targeted at embedded devices but could be used as a Linux-based gaming PC.

The TK1 is an uncased board with all the major components on it, much like the popular Raspberry Pi. But the computer offers 300 gigaflops of performance, and Nvidia said it could be used as a PC for games supporting ARM processors and the Linux OS.

Desktop

• Something’s Happening in Ethiopia – I Think It’s The Schools

  A report from a few years ago (2003) showed government was still using IT only about 10% of the time and then mostly for typing. “Linux” only appeared once in that report and it was misspelled, “Linu x”. Spreading that other OS clearly was the goal.

• Chrome OS getting support to control movable camera

• New Acer Chromebook has Core i3 processor

  Power is not generally associated with Chromebooks, since they utilize either ARM processors, like tablets, or Intel’s Celeron processors. Google‘s Pixel was the only Chromebook that could be described as powerful because it uses one of Intel’s Core i5 processors. However, on Monday we saw an Acer Chromebook that is powered by an Intel Core i3 processor. This is a large jump from the usual low power processors found in most Chromebooks, and will offer that power at a much lower price than the Chromebook Pixel.

• The Reality of Chromebooks/OS – Not as limited as you think!

  So when you consider your next PC purchase, give ChromeOS a consideration and when you look at the sales on Amazon, it appears many people are starting to do just that. I would suggest though if you are looking for a Chromebook replacement to a bulky desktop PC with features you don’t need, you go for as large a screen as possible. 14″ seems to be the best size and accommodates web pages, apps et al, comfortably.

Server

• Google’s motherboard to use IBM’s Power8 architecture

  When a Senior Director at Google, Gordon MacKen, showed off new Google server motherboard design based on IBM’s Power8 architecture, it sparked trouble for Intel. Since 1998, Google has used Intel processors based on x86 architecture to power its army of servers, but this sudden move to use IBM’s architecture is a reason for worry at Intel.

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 292: OSCON

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds wins IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award

  Linus Torvalds, the principal force behind development of the Linux kernel and overseer of open source development for the Linux operating system, has been named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award “for pioneering development of the Linux kernel using the open-source approach”.

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland 1.5 Release Candidate Is Out There

    The first version 1.5 release candidates of Wayland and the Weston compositor are now available.

    Kristian Høgsberg announced today the first release candidates for Wayland/Weston 1.5. Kristian noted, “We’re at a historic low in terms of open bugs – as of this writing we have 15 bugs in wayland/weston bugzilla. There are a few more bugs we can fix and I expect more will come in as we start testing, but right now it’s looking pretty good.”

  • Radeon DRM Graphics Benchmarks On Linux 3.15

    Our latest focus in benchmarking the Linux 3.15 kernel is the Radeon DRM kernel graphics driver. There’s been some reports of small performance changes with this newest kernel currently under development, in part due to some video memory optimizations that landed this cycle. In this article are benchmarks of four AMD Radeon graphics cards when running Linux 3.14 and 3.15 Git.

  • AMD Is Trying For Mullins Support In Linux 3.15

    The pull request was sent in by AMD’s Christian König and tries to add support for their newly-announced Mullins APUs. This pull comes shortly after AMD announced open-source Mullins/Beema APU support, one day after the APUs were announced. Support for the new AMD graphics hardware might come in still for the Linux 3.15 kernel even though it’s past the merge window since the GPU is based upon AMD’s Kabini and mostly deals with adding new PCI IDs and enums to the kernel driver. There’s also the libdrm and Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D updates needed in user-space for complete support.

  • The X.Org Server Video ABI Gets Bumped

    The recent issues were expressed by NVIDIA and come from a change to the cursor handling with X.Org Server 1.16, which will be released around July of this year. A late change broke the video API/ABI driver interfaces and expressed concern to the open-source graphics driver developers. The issue was of concern since it came after the code freeze for X.Org Server 1.16.

  • Mesa Gets Support For Another OpenGL 4.4 Extension

    Another OpenGL extension can be crossed off the list for the goal until Mesa supports the OpenGL 4.4 specification.

  • NVIDIA Publishes Revised Open-Source TK1 Graphics Code

    Building upon their open-source graphics driver support for the Tegra K1 and their revised code for handling this Kepler GPU in the ARM world, the third revision was sent out a short time ago by Alexandre Courbot.

• Benchmarks

  • Benchmarks Of The NVIDIA Tegra K1 & Its Hotness

Applications

• Scrot: A Command Line Tool to Take Desktop/Server Screenshots Automatically in Linux

• Powerful Image Editing Software Fotoxx 14.05 Now Requires at Least Ubuntu 13.10

  Fotoxx 14.05, a free, open source Linux photo editing and collection management program that’s easy to use and install, is now available for download.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 5 Best Free Node.js Introductory Books

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.5 x86_64 (Apache2, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3)

  • Dynamic website templates with Flask and Jinja2

  • Ubuntu 14.04 Web Server Tutorial

  • How To Install Google Drive Ocalmfuse 0.5.3 On Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Small update for supernova 0.9.6

  • How To Install Google Chrome 35 Beta On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • How To Change Your Folder Icon Colors On Ubuntu And Linux Mint Using Nautilus/Nemo, Via Folder Color 0.9

  • How To Install Chromium And Enable Pepper Flash Plugin On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Install Chromium And Enable Pepper Flash Plugin On All The Supported Ubuntu Systems And Their Derivatives

  • Install Android Studio In Ubuntu Via PPA

  • How To Install Bodhi Desktop (Enlightenment Desktop Environment) On Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Via PPA

  • Canonical Won’t Resume The Work For Their Ubuntu For Android Project Soon

  • Ubuntu 12.10 Reaches EOL On The 16th Of April. How To Upgrade To Ubuntu 14.04 Via Ubuntu 13.10

  • How To Install Wireshark 1.10.7 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3

  • How To Install Kernel 3.11.10.9 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Their Derivative Systems

  • 4 things to do after installing Ubuntu 14.04

• Games

  • Dota 2 for Linux Gets Fixes for Numerous Weapons and Spells

    Dota 2, Valve’s own take on the famous Dota mod for Warcraft 3, has just received a fresh update for all platforms, bringing a long list of minor fixes.

  • Linux Version Of Hugely Customizable Game ‘Vox’ To Come Soon Developer Confirms

  • Full Bore Part 2 coming to PC and Linux this month

  • Linux Version Of Hugely Customizable Game ‘Vox’ To Come Soon Developer Confirms

    The developer behind the fun indie hit Vox a voxel based, action, adventure and creation game with a big focus on player created content has re-confirmed their plans for the Linux version. The good news is that the major content patch is now out, so once dust settles on that the Linux version will come!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The development of SlideViewer – a QML based presentation program

  So SlideViewer was born. The beauty of it is that all our Qt developers can help to add features and fix bugs, and even more importantly, we no longer have to stare at incomprehensible error messages from LaTeX, or hunt down a book that will tell us how to get page numbers in the table of contents.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Applications and Development Platform 4.13

  • Calligra 2.8.1 is Out

    Packages for the release of KDE’s document suite Calligra 2.8.1 are available for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and 13.10. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA (alongside KDE SC 4.13). They are also in our development release.

  • Konqueror vs Firefox

    Firefox has extra features that Konqueror doesn’t have and the add-ons might be a deal breaker for some people. The page rendering worked perfectly on every site I tried and to be honest I use it everyday so if it didn’t work I wouldn’t use it.

  • The Little Things

    The majority of my time spent on KDE, however, is spent working on details. To illustrate that work, I picked two examples of where I think I made a difference by caring about the details.

  • KDE Applications and Development Platform 4.13

    Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of Plasma Desktop to 4.11.8.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.13.1 Officially Released

  • GNOME 3.13.1 Released

    Here it is, the starting point of the GNOME 3.14 development cycle: the 3.13.1 snapshot release.

  • GNOME MUSIC 3.13.1 RELEASED!

    The code that looks up and caches the album art was rewritten by Vadim, so it was a lot faster now. Also, the album art in the Albums view will now be loaded on-scroll – they won’t load unless they are not shown in the window.

  • GNOME Online Accounts 3.13.1 Ditches Twitter and Windows Live Support

    The GNOME developers announced that the latest version of GNOME Online Accounts, 3.13.1, has arrived and comes with just a couple of changes, which are quite important.

    The 3.13.x branch of GNOME is strictly for development and it will eventually evolve into the stable 3.14, but that’s a long way ahead. Until then, the developer chose to make some very interesting changes

Distributions

• Clonezilla Live 2.2.2-4 Is a Linux Distro for Complete Backup

  The Clonezilla developers released a new development version for their Linux distro and they’ve decided to also cool down with the version numbering. The last version before the current one was labeled 2.2.3-39, but that evolved to 2.2.3-4, which is much more user friendly.

• Top 5 XP Distros, Sour Musix, and GNIGNO

• 4MLinux Media Edition 8.2 Beta OS Can Play, Rip, and Encode Any Media File

  4MLinux Media Edition, a special distribution with a wide set of multimedia tools and software, is now at version 8.2 Beta and comes with the latest tools and applications.

• Screenshots

  • NixOS 14.04 Screenshot Tour

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • “A Breath of Fresh Air with a KDE Soul”* – OpenMandriva­ Lx 2014 is burning free!

    This release is the culmination of a huge effort by our community to bring a fresh, new release of good quality to our supporters and – to the world!Smile

  • ROSA Software Center: Beta, but looks, feels and functions better than the competition

    I was really impressed by what I found. With ROSA Software Center, users will be able to perform all package software management tasks from one beautiful and user-friendly graphical application. Here are some screenshots. What these screenshots cannot show is the smooth transition as you navigate between the different aspects of the application. Also, the screenshots cannot show the speed with which the application takes to get stuff done. Installing and removing applications happens so fast it puts similar applications to shame.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 To Sport Docker

    The tool wraps apps in a portable, lightweight run-time that can execute on laptops, desktops, servers, clusters, hypervisors and even bare metal. Docker can be used to package and automate deployment of applications, databases and back-end systems. Docker is also now part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service product.

    Expected sometime later this year, RHEL 7 will incorporate Fedora 19 and be built around Linux kernel 3.10, the upstream kernel released last June that added support for timerless multitasking, block caching from SSDs and the ARM mixed-CPU architecture. It also changes the default file system to XFS, which supports hard drive volumes as large as 500 TB and integrates with Active Directory. In beta since December, the release candidate was made available on April 15

• Debian Family

  • Snowden’s Beloved Tails OS Reaches v1.0 Milestone

    The volunteers who developed Tails, the open source operating system used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, this week released v1.0.

  • Tails secure operating system is now out of beta

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu for Android No Longer in Development According to Canonical

      • Canonical confirms it’s no longer hot on Ubuntu for Android

        Following reports that Ubuntu for Android isn’t “in active development” anymore, the Ubuntu maker sent a statement to Android Authority confirming as much.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) to Get Linux Kernel 3.15.x Soon

        For now, the Linux kernel available is 3.13.x, which is the same from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The system is basically identical with the previous one, even if there are some changes that have been implemented already.

      • $15 Minimum Wage

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-based K-9 doppelganger treads ELC

  At the Embedded Linux Conference, Intel’s new Open Hardware Technical Evangelist showed off a Linux- and MinnowBoard based robot that mimics Doctor Who’s K-9.

• Building an Arduino Pest Repeller on Linux (Part 2)

  In part two of this series we load and test our critter-scaring Arduino sketch, and play scary motion-activated noises. First let’s go back to part 1 and dissect our simple EZ1 sensor-testing sketch.

• Navy asks Raytheon to upgrade unmanned helicopter control system with Linux software and more intuitive controls

  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control experts at the Raytheon Co. Technical Services segment in Dulles, Va., will switch a major unmanned helicopter control system from Solaris to Linux software, and upgrade the system with universal UAV control qualities under terms of a $15.8 million contract.

• Six clicks: Single board computers: Banana Pi, Raspberry Pi, and more

  We all know about the Raspberry Pi, but it’s far from the only single-board computer out there that makers might find both useful and affordable.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Ouya now with Streaming capabilites

      Here is some good news for those gamers who have been hanging on to their Ouya consoles. Owners of the Ouya can now stream quite a range of Triple A titles to their little Ouya consoles. This technological feat could be achieved thanks to Play Cast media launching a new cloud gaming beta program.

    • 8 Android apps to sate your lust for open-source

      Open-source software is the philanthropic side of tech. While the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world are out making billions, amateurs are still hunched over their desks in bedrooms, classrooms and offices knocking out code for little more than the joy of it, and perhaps some recognition.

LibreS3 Open Source Amazon S3 Implementation Released

Skylable has released LibreS3, an open source implementation of the Amazon S3 service, suitable for installing on private servers in a datacenter. LibreS3 uses Skylable SX, a “reliable, fully distributed cluster solution”, on the back end for deduplication and replication. LibreS3 joins a growing list of alternative, open source storage solutions available to the enterprise today.

ActiveState to Sponsor Growing Foundation Set to Govern Cloud Foundry Open Source Project

ActiveState applauds ongoing growth of Cloud Foundry open source project as Accenture, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, GE, Ericsson, Intel, NTT and Verizon intend to join Cloud Foundry foundation

Events

• XDC2014 Bordeaux Conference Confirmed For Open Graphics Goodness

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome Pulls Further Ahead of Firefox in Market Share Metrics

    For months now, Google has been pursuing a strategy that allows users of the Chrome browser to easily find and run “packaged apps” just like sophisticated web apps that users of Chrome OS are used to running. Chrome packaged apps are now available in the Chrome Web Store. We’ve covered the fact that this is emerging as a big differentiator for Google’s browser.

• Mozilla

  • See What’s New in Firefox 29 [Ubuntu Installation]

    Firefox 29 was released yesterday with a completely rebranded interface, a new menu and many other changes. Read on to see what’s new in this release.

SaaS/Big Data

• Cloud Security Concerns at Enterprises Could Affect Open Platform Adoption

  In the annals of enterprise open source adoption, concerns over security have always been present. In fact, there are many enterprises that still don’t allow their users to use open source browsers like Firefox, or use phones based on Android. Ask the IT department personnel at these companies what’s up, and they’ll tell you that they don’t trust these platforms and applications to be secure.

BSD

• OpenBSD 5.5 Released

  Looking at the release announcement and other sources such as the release page, it’s easy to see that there are numerous goodies in store for you: A whole new traffic shaping system to replace ALTQ, 64-bit time_t, cryptographically signed base sets and packages, automatic installation features, improved hardware support, and more.

Openness/Sharing

• Facebook opens up animation library, Ceph finds a new home at Red Hat, and more

Health/Nutrition

• Why American Apples Just Got Banned in Europe

  Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents “storage scald”—brown spots that “becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months,” according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.

• Antibiotic-resistant superbug arose in northern Manhattan

  Human skin is a garden of microbes that is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign, but some invade the skin and cause illness—of these, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are particularly dangerous.

Security

• Windows XP, Internet Explorer, Security Bugs, Black Hats & Linux

• Canonical Fixes Critical Bugs Allowing Users to Bypass the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Lock Screen

• Heartbleed postmortem: OpenSSL’s license discouraged scrutiny

  An open source expert believes OpenSSL’s custom license was partly responsible for the neglect behind Heartbleed

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• John Kerry Shouldn’t Have Apologized: Israel’s Practice of Apartheid Doomed the Peace Process

• A tale of two teens

  Two Israeli and Palestinian teens, both accused of stone throwing, represent the vast disparities in the West Bank’s rule of law.

• Blackwater Trains Killer Police For FIFA’s War On Brazilians

  Blackwater (or “Academi”) mercenaries have trained Brazil‘s killer cops for the World Cup, as the government plans to deploy 170,000 armed troops to crackdown on protests and social movements against FIFA. That would be one killer cop for almost every person they’ve evicted from their land and homes for the World Cup’s stadiums or parking lots.

• How Many Cops Does It Take to Harass a Woman Collecting Rocks? 6, Oh Yeah And A Helicopter

  In an absurd show of force, and grotesque waste of tax payer money, 6 cops in a helicopter descend on a woman who is looking for pretty rocks in the middle of the desert!

• Noam Chomsky on Ukraine, Cuba and the hypocritical red-lines of US foreign policy

  The world regards the US as a ‘pariah state’ and ‘the greatest threat to world peace’, with no competitor even close in the polls. But what does the world know?

• NATO’s Eastward Expansion: Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?

  No one in Russia can vent his anger over NATO’s eastward expansion quite as vehemently as Viktor Baranez. The popular columnist with the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Komsomol Truth”), which has a readership of millions, is fond of railing against the “insidious and reckless” Western military alliance. Russia, Baranez writes, must finally stop treating NATO as a partner.

  Baranez, a retired colonel who was the Defense Ministry’s spokesman under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, asks why Russia should even consider joint maneuvers after being deceived by the West. NATO, he writes, “has pushed its way right up to our national borders with its guns.” He also argues that, in doing so, NATO has broken all the promises it made during the process of German reunification.

• Spies R Us: The “Kidnapping” of Fake OSCE “Humanitarian Monitors” in Ukraine.

  The western presstitute media are relentlessly reporting about the kidnapped monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); kidnapped by pro-Russian protesters, allegedly helped by Russian special forces.

Finance

• Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy

  Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.

• Beyond Piketty’s Capital: Richard Wolff Warns us Not to Band-Aid Capitalism

  Wolff warns that we cannot band-aid capitalism. However laudable and even attainable may be suggestions from economists like Piketty or Dean Baker, to name just two, piecemeal policies designed to stop the system from funneling wealth upwards will not work for long. The elites are fully focused on preserving and expanding their fortunes, and the structure of the contemporary economy puts in the hands of a very few people in large corporate enterprises “both the incentive and the resources to roll back whatever adjustments a movement from below is able to make.”

• IMF Confirms $17bn Loan to Ukraine with Conditions That Will Devastate the Economy

  The IMF has confirmed a conditional loan of $17bn to Ukraine in what it touts as a rescue package aimed at stabilizing Ukraine as it seeks to maintain independence from a belligerent Russia. Instead, we are witnessing the final stages of the US-EU coup of Ukraine, and by implementing the conditions of the loan, the nation will be left destitute and dependent.

• Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Councilwoman: McDonald’s Doesn’t Need Time To Phase In $15 Minimum Wage

  Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, an outspoken socialist, claimed a victory Thursday after Mayor Ed Murray announced a plan to hike the city’s minimum wage to $15, which Sawant was a driving force behind. But she told HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski that she isn’t totally happy with the plan, which gives big corporations years to phase in the new wage.

• Demanding ‘Just and Sustainable’ Economy For All, Thousands March on Congress

  In an expression of a “new populist” energy, thousands of demonstrators shut down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC on Monday as they demanded a livable wage and an end to the corporate domination of the national economy and politics.

• The Big Tip That America’s Servers Never See

  A good many Americans now know the high-finance games that JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like to play — at our expense. And big oil giants like ExxonMobil have been outraging Americans for years.

  But plenty of other corporate giants that inflate our inequality have been flying under the radar screen. Who, for instance, has ever heard of Darden? Or Yum! Brands?

  These little-known outfits just happen to rate as two of the biggest corporate behemoths in the restaurant industry. They’ve been squeezing workers — and soaking taxpayers — as relentlessly as any enterprises in America. Yet they barely have any national profile at all.

  That may be about to change.

  Last week, on the eve of the National Restaurant Association annual meeting, two top think tanks — the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Demos in New York— released new studies that detail how America’s food-service giants are growing the gap between the nation’s rich and everyone else.

  This week protesting restaurant workers will be taking that message to the streets. Many of these workers are currently laboring at the $2.13 hourly federal minimum wage for tipped workers, a base that hasn’t budged since 1991.

• Any talk of economic recovery is pure fiction

  Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, “sticking to the course”. Now things don’t look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago – and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Science Media Centre Spins Pro-GMO Line

  Since consumer campaigning got GMOs labeled and crop restricting implemented in the United Kingdom, Cameron will likely have a hard time convincing UK consumers that all is well. However, Cameron is getting help in that quest from a little known group called the Science Media Centre (SMC), which helped release the report to great fanfare. The Guardian and The Independent published prominent coverage of the report, and it was featured by the BBC. The Independent and BBC coverage were both entirely uncritical, quoting the scientists handpicked by the SMC for its reporters’ briefing. The Guardian report was less glowing, but still quoted the SMC scientists and buried the reactions of critics below the fold. None of them mentioned that the report briefing was held by the SMC.

Privacy

• Yahoo says it knows best as it drops support for Do Not Track

• 2014-05-01 Snowden statement on receiving 2014 Ridenhour Prize

  A year ago there was no way I could have imagined being here, being honored in this room. When I began this, I never expected to receive the level of support that I did from the public. Having seen what happened to the people that came before, specifically Thomas Drake, it was an intimidating thing. I’d realized that the highest likelihood, the most likely outcome of returning this information to public hands would be that I would spend the rest of my life in prison. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.

• Snowden blocked from traveling to Germany, testifying to Parliament

• The Coward Rusbridger

  The actions of the Guardian in complying with the demands of the security services to destroy the computers containing Snowden’s revelations were cowardly in the extreme. There was a principle at stake here. The existence of other copies elsewhere is not the point. That does not make the hard drive destruction better, any more than Nazi book-burning was made OK by the existence of other copies of the books.

• Snowden: Why hasn’t the Director of National Intelligence been punished for lying to Congress?

Civil Rights

• Boycott Morocco plea to UK tourists over Western Sahara ‘abuses’

  It has been described as the conflict the Arab spring forgot, the last colony in Africa and a human rights scandal. Now British holidaymakers are being urged to respond to the situation in Western Sahara by boycotting its occupier, Morocco, as a destination.

  A leading human rights activist from Western Sahara, Brahmin Dahane, 46, made the appeal after meeting members of the UK parliament to drum up support ahead of a UN security council debate on Tuesday.

• 12 Year Old Dragged From Class After Anti-Terror Police Flag Up His Facebook Protest Against Cameron

  A005A 12 year old boy attempting to save a local youth club due to be closed by government cuts has been dragged from his classroom after his Facebook protest was spotted by anti-terror police. What’s even more shocking is this story is from December 2010…and things have only gotten worse.

• Protester hits Nigel Farage with egg

• Barrett Brown lawyer: US tried to ‘kill a fly with a sledgehammer’

  The lawyer for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist in jail in Texas on charges related to his involvement with computer hackers, has called for an overhaul in the way technology cases are handled by the criminal justice system to counteract potential abuses and excessive prosecutorial aggression on the part of the US government.

• Buy a Box of Cereal, Waive Your Consumer Rights Goodbye

  Buying a cell phone plan could make you powerless to sue your phone company if it defrauds you. Using a coupon to buy a box of cereal may mean you give up your right to sue if the food is tainted. Checking your grandmother into a nursing home could prevent you from holding the facility accountable for negligence. “Liking” something on Facebook could sign you on to a legally binding contract that you’ve never read.

• Supreme Court Refuses to Uphold the Constitution: Allows Indefinite Detention

• Help EFF Test Privacy Badger, Our New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking

  EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today:

• Papers prove Japan forced women into second world war brothels, says China

  Some historians believe as many as 200,000 women were sent to frontline to be sexually abused between 1932 and 1945

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FCC’s Wheeler Says That If These Lame Net Neutrality Rules Don’t Work, He’ll Implement The Real Rules Next Time

  Following his weak attempt to diffuse concerns about his bogus “open internet” rules, FCC boss Tom Wheeler has decided to try again, by basically repeating what he said last week with slightly stronger language about how he won’t let broadband providers violate net neutrality. Of course, as many people have explained, the problem is that the new rules clearly aren’t strong enough, and leave open all sorts of ways to kill off basic neutrality online. Of course, the real problem is that the original 2010 “open internet” rules (which were really crafted by the telcos in the first place) didn’t really protect net neutrality in the first place, and the new rules are basically an even weaker version of those rules. But, have no fear, claims Wheeler, if these rules don’t work, he promises he’ll actually pull out the big gun, Title II, and reclassify broadband players as telco services rather than information services, allowing the FCC to put them under common carrier rules.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Dotcom Thanks RIAA and MPAA for Mega’s Massive Growth

    Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has seen the number of uploads triple in the past six months. Mega users now upload a total of half a billion files per month. According to Kim Dotcom, the MPAA and RIAA deserve some credit for the unprecedented growth.

  • Lawsuit Against First US Copyright Trolls For Extortion Ends In Victory

    A few years ago, we wrote about how a guy named Dimitry Shirokov, with help from the law firm of Booth Sweet had taken on the “fathers” of copyright trolling in the US, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, who had formed an organization called US Copyright Group, which initiated the first round of mass copyright trolling in the US (before the likes of Prenda and others entered the space). Shirokov had tried to make his lawsuit a class action against the lawyers, claiming fraud and extortion. And while the class action part was unfortunately rejected, the case has ended with a victory for Shirokov, with the judge ordering DGW to pay $39,909.95 ($3,179.52 to Shirokov and the rest in attorneys’ fees to Booth Sweet).

  • Books and more are relicensed to Creative Commons

    I began working with the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.

    While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.

    We worked closely with Goa University, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the Institute of Odia Studies and Research.

  • Aereo Can’t Be Bound by Secret Interpretations of Copyright Law

    It may seem like a wishy-washy answer, but there’s an alarming point nested within it: the Solicitor General’s office’s position that the interpretation of the law—which the executive branch has worked into our international trade obligations—is the only way for the law to be “properly construed.”

    That in turn suggests that the executive branch believes it is responsible for properly constructing the law. Of course, that position stands in conflict with Marbury v. Madison, the case that established judicial review in 1803: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

    That has serious implications for the democratic process. Here’s how it seems to work: the executive branch comes up with an interpretation of U.S. copyright law and then negotiates it into international agreements. It conducts these negotiations in secret, insisting that it needs no meaningful oversight because it doesn’t require a change in U.S. law.

  • Ballots 2009 for the Swedish Pirate Party’s election to the European Parliament

    More or less overnight, betting companies slashed their odds of the Swedish Pirate Party’s re-election to the European Parliament. Where a re-election scenario used to give you 8x your money back in a bet with them, it now gives a mere 1.25x. It appears the betting companies know something that Swedish oldmedia haven’t picked up on yet.

  • Kim Dotcom: On the road with Hollywood’s biggest enemy

    Kim Dotcom, the multi-millionaire hacker-turned-entrepreneur, was on the roof of his New Zealand mansion, handcuffed and surrounded.

    One by one, his luxury cars were rolled out of garages and taken away. Dotcom’s accounts, in various different countries, were frozen.

    His website, file storage service Megaupload, was shut down.

    Filings made in a court in Virginia outlined the accusation. Dotcom, US authorities said, was the man behind a “criminal enterprise” which used Megaupload to profit from piracy on a “massive scale”. He faces more than 20 years in prison.

  • Tarantino is Back, Now Claiming Gawker is an Illegal Downloader

    After landing an early victory last week against Quentin Tarantino in their leaked screenplay row, Gawker is facing a new attack. In an amended complaint, Tarantino accuses Gawker of committing not only contributory infringement, but also direct infringement, after it illegally downloaded his script from a file-hosting site.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Containers bring a skinny new world of virtualization to Linux

  Once upon a time, if you ran a data center, you used virtual machine (VM) management programs (i.e., hypervisors) There was no other practical choice. This dates all the way back to the good old IBM 360 mainframe days with CP-67/CMS in 1967. Today, our data centers and clouds run more advanced hypervisors. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, is made up of nearly half-a-million Linux servers running the Xen hypervisor, while Microsoft’s Azure cloud relies upon its Hyper-V hypervisor.

• Dell and Big Switch Partner On Open SDN Reseller Solution

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Publishes Open-Source Graphics Code For Mullins & Beema

    AMD rolled out the Beema and Mullins hardware yesterday. The AMD “Beema” APUs are targeted for mobile products like notebook PCs while AMD Mullins APUs are low-power processors for ultra low-powered devices. The low-end Mullins APUs sport Radeon R2/R3 Graphics. The AMD Mullins APUs include the A10 Micro-6700T, A4 Micro-6400T, and E1 Micro-6200Tl. The Beema APUs include the E2-6010, E2-6110, A4-6210, and A6-6310. The Mullins models top out at 4.5 Watts while the Beema APUs top out at 15 Watts.

Applications

• slurm: Within one standard deviation

• DataBasin 0.7

• slsc: Out of a sense of duty

  Time for a sad story. I’m going to list slsc here today, even though in my entire career as a Linux enthusiast, I don’t recall ever having seen it work, on any distro, not even once.

• Proprietary

  • RawTherapee 4.0.12.0 Review – A Powerful Open Source Alternative to Adobe’s Lightroom

    RawTherapee is an application that specializes in the development of RAW images and it’s probably one the best you will find on the Linux platform. It comes with so many features that it might even put Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom to shame.

  • NEC Display Solutions Introduces SpectraView II™ and MultiProfiler Software for Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Five new, excellent OpenStack tutorials

  • How To Install Fotoxx 14.05 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17 And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Add The Canonical Partner Repository On Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Their Derivative Systems

  • Helpful Linux I/O stack diagram

  • How To Install LibreOffice 4.2.4 RC1 On Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install LibreOffice 4.2.4 RC1 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint, Debian, Elementary OS And Their Derivative Systems

  • HPLIP 3.14.4 Has Been Released + Installation Instructions

  • How To Install SoundConverter 2.1.3 On Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17 Qiana And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Easily Perform Internet Speed Tests On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17 And Their Derivative Systems, Via Speedtest-CLI 0.2.7

  • Learning PHP, Part 3: Authentication, objects, exceptions, and streaming

  • How to manage Linux containers with Docker on Ubuntu

  • How To Install GCAD3D 2.20 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pinguy, Debian And Their Derivative Systems

  • How To Install QSS Editor 0.5.5 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Pale Moon 24.5.0 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • How To Easily Enable SSH On Elementary OS 0.3 And Elementary OS 0.2

  • Basic troubleshooting AIO Havana Instance on CentOS 6.5

  • How To Integrate ClamAV Into PureFTPd For Virus Scanning On Ubuntu 14.04LTS

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Ubuntu 14.04LTS

  • Using Transmission Remote as your default bittorrent client

• Games

  • ’7 Days to Die’ Linux version on its way: Developer

    7 Days to Die was a Kickstarter project about an open world, voxel-based, sandbox game that is a unique mash up of First Person Shooter, Survival Horror, Tower Defense and Role Playing Games combining combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration, and character growth. The developer had promised a Linux version of the game during its campaign period, saying that they would release a Linux version 2 months after the initial launch. But even after the game was launched, there were no signs of a Linux version or any communications from the company. Now, after a long hiatus, a developer has said that they are indeed working on a Linux version and it should be ready in a couple of weeks.

  • ‘Modern Combat 5: Blackout’ full title and story details emerge

    Gameloft recently dropped some more details on their upcoming game Modern Combat 5 which, Gameloft assures, is well on its way to be launched. This time around, Gameloft has released the full title and the story in which the game will take place. The new game is titled Modern Combat 5: Blackout.

  • Valve is the saviour of the PC: Brian Fargo

    In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Brian Fargo, the boss at inXile Entertainment, the developer of Wasteland 2, has hailed Valve as the “savior of the PC” due to their efforts in making digital distribution such a success.

  • 11bit Studios Talk About This War Of Mine & Games Republic Their New Store

  • Double Fine’s New Game Hack ‘N’ Slash Has A Trailer, Game Out Next Month

    Double Fine sure do love Linux don’t they! Hack ‘N’ Slash is looking good and will be release for Linux on the 6th of May, to go along with the release date we have a trailer for you!

    Looks like currently it will be a Steam only release, so you will have to hold out if you want it fully DRM free with no Steam attached.

  • Gigabyte’s AMD Mini Gaming PC Gets A Downvote For Poor Linux Support

    This is fun, Ars Technica a rather big general tech news website has done a review of Gigabyte’s AMD powered mini gaming box and give it a demerit for its poor Linux support.

  • Awesomenauts Major Update And Another On The Way For Linux

    For those not entirely up to date on their Awesomenauts, this month it received a whopper of an update and it might be time you gave it another go, especially with another major update looming.

  • Steam Has Greenlit 39 New Linux Games At The End Of April

    Wow Valve is on a roll for Linux gamers aren’t they! 39 more Linux games have been lit up to be included on Steam’s store.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KMyMoney reports – Trying to make sense of what we have now

    I became the maintainer of KMyMoney reports after the original developer, Ace Jones, went away and was nowhere to be found.

    By chance, I tried to fix a bug in a report, then fixed one more, later added feature here, another there. 5 years later anything that’s report-related in KMyMoney goes into my inbox.

  • KDE and GSoC 2014!

    I was selected this year to work with KDE again, and the Plasma team! Just awesome! The project for 2014 is about Plasma Media Center (PMC), and more specifically DVB support on PMC! To accomplish that I’ll be using the LibVLC library, which is fun to code with. So, stay tuned because this summer, PMC will be able to play TV too! The following days i’ll update you with screenshots and repository links too for everyone interested.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Did the GNOME 3 developers violate design principles?

    GNOME 3 is one of the most controversial desktop environments in open source history. Flame wars have raged back and forth between GNOME 3 advocates and critics for quite a while now. Datamation examines the history of GNOME 3 and considers whether or not the GNOME 3 developers violated design principles when they created it.

  • GNOME and the GIGO Principle

    GNOME 3 is usually defended in terms of design excellence. However, while GNOME has been developed with close attention to design, that does not mean that its basic foundations are as grounded in design principles as you might infer.

    Rather, a look at GNOME 3′s early history shows that development was mostly a consistent realization of principles described early in the process — principles founded on the impressions of the Design Team and apparently backed by little theory. This inconsistency between how GNOME is marketed and how it was actually designed seems the major reason for its sometimes rocky reception.

  • GNOME Shell & Mutter 3.13.1 Released

    The changes are rather light this early on into the GNOME 3.13 development cycle, and there weren’t even any NEWS release files to accompany Mutter 3.13.1 and GNOME Shell 3.13.1, but both packages are now checked in for the imminent release of GNOME 3.13.1.

Distributions

• NixOS 14.04 Released

  Version 14.04 “Baboon” of NixOS, the Linux distribution built around the Nix purely-functional package manager, has been released.

• Pinguy OS 14.04 Mini Has Been Released. The Full Version Will Also Arrive Soon

  Pinguy OS 14.04 Mini (based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr) is already available for download, while the full release is scheduled for next week.

• Emmabuntüs is a finalist of the cyber-activism competition

  Emmabuntüs Collective, the one that stands behind the Emmabuntüs Linux distribution, was recently named a finalist in a contest rewarding the cyber-activism. The competition in question is THE BOBS contest. It was organized ten years ago by a German radio and television to reward cyber-activism.

• Linux updates: Debian 7.5, SolydXK 201404, Makulu, Tanglu

  A new stable point release for Debian GNU/Linux (Wheezy), an Update Pack for SolydXK (201404), and updates for MakuluLinux and Tanglu Aequorea Victoria

• 5 Best and Top Linux Distros To Replace Windows XP

  If you’re looking to move away from Windows XP and Linux is an option, then here is our pick of linux-XP alternatives.

• Screenshots

  • Debian 7.5.0 Xfce

  • Zenwalk 7.4 Live

  • Tails 1.0

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Firefox 29 now available in Fedora

      One of Firefox’s big strengths as a web browser has always been it’s ability to be customized. The community has already developed a plethora of Themes and Plugins for Firefox users to utilize. Firefox 29 makes the experience of tweaking your browser that much easier with the new Customization Mode.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 7.5 “Wheezy” Officially Released with Security Fixes

  • TAILS: Snowden’s favorite anonymous, secure OS goes 1.0

    TAILS — The Amnesiac Incognito Live System — is a highly secure operating system intended to be booted from an external USB stick without leaving behind any trace of your activity on either your computer or the drive. It comes with a full suite multimedia creation, communications, and utility software, all configured to be as secure as possible out of the box.

    It was Edward Snowden’s tradecraft tool of choice for harvesting and exfiltrating NSA documents. Yesterday, it went 1.0. If you need to turn a computer whose operating system you don’t trust into one that you can use with confidence, download the free disk image. (Note: TAILS won’t help you defend against hardware keyloggers, hidden CCTVs inside the computer, or some deep malware hidden in the BIOS). It’s free as in speech and free as in beer, and anyone can (and should) audit it.

  • Anonymous OS reportedly used by Snowden reaches version 1.0

  • New secure OS will put Tails between NSA’s legs

  • How to be secure on the Internet, really secure

    Tails’ website states that its member users have increased its wide-world adoption in the last 18 months by a multiple of 4. Its user members include Freedom of Press Foundation, Reporters without Borders and Bruce Schneier, security expert and writer who assisted Greenwald on how to read and digest the NSA documents. The NSA is a member user of Tails.

  • Edward Snowden’s OS of choice, the Linux-based Tails, is now out of beta

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 14.10 set to be released on Oct 16

      • Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicord Will Be Released On The 16th Of October, 2014

        The release dates for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, in all its stages has been published on one of the Ubuntu wikis.

      • Ubuntu Planned, Reviewed, Hacked, and Giving Up

        Ubuntu seemed to dominate much of the headlines today. Two new reviews emerged, both rather flattering for Ubuntu. This couldn’t come at a better time to draw attention away from Canonical’s decision to pull-back from their Ubuntu on Android project. An Aussie has discovered a most embarrassing security issue for Ubuntu while the release schedule for 14.10 is drafted.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 Release Schedule Now Online

      • Rest in peace Ubuntu for Android, we hardly knew ye

      • Ubuntu for Android is on hold indefinitely

      • Ubuntu for Android active development comes to a close

      • Ubuntu for Android project no longer in development

      • Ubuntu For Android No Longer Under Development

      • Ubuntu for Android on Hold For Now

      • Ubuntu for Android Left in Limbo as Canonical Focuses on Ubuntu Touch

        When it was first announced, the idea of Ubuntu for Android sounded excellent. Running Ubuntu – a popular Linux distribution for Desktops, similar to Windows or Mac OS X – alongside Android seemed a great idea. Being able to plug in your phone to a docking station connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse to turn your smartphone into your computer was something out of the future. However, the project never really got anywhere, as support from partner vendors was thin to say the least and now, it looks like Canonical has all but given up on the innovative project. News broke earlier in the week of the company behind Ubuntu ceasing development on the platform and since then a official word from Canonical has appeared.

      • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS review: turning point for the popular Linux operating system

        Ubuntu 14.04 marks a turning point for the popular Linux operating system. Here’s our Ubuntu 14.04 LTS review.

      • UBUNTU 12.10 END OF LIFE: MAY 16 2014

        That means that if you use Ubuntu 12.10, you should upgrade to Ubuntu 13.10 (Ubuntu 13.04 has already reached end of life) and then (recommended) to 14.04. That’s because after May 16 2014, “Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 12.10″.

        It’s also important to mention that PPA maintainers will no longer be able to upload packages for Ubuntu 12.10 after that date.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 Beta Is a Minimalistic OS with an Interesting e19 Desktop

          The Bodhi Linux systems are known for their minimalistic approach, and the current release is no different. The distribution was based from the get-go on Ubuntu 14.04, but the development of Bodhi started when Ubuntu 14.04 was still a Beta release. Now that the final version of Ubuntu has been released, Bodhi is ready to switch to Beta.

        • Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

          Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, released with many improvement and updates. Come with LTS (Long Term Support) version Xubuntu 14.04 will be supported by xubuntu team and developer for 3 years. Without adding tons of new features, Xubuntu focuses on stability, simple, light and fully customizable.

          Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of Unity 7, so it works very well as a lightweight alternative to regular ubuntu desktop. On this release Xubuntu developers have introduced the new Whiskermenu a more modern menu with the ability to easily launch your favorite applications, as well as have a useful search bar and various customizations. You can also find the new Xfwm4 4.11 which includes support for Sync VBlank, Xfdesktop 4.11 and other updates.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Linux software engineer builds his own PiPhone

    Since its launch and slightly delayed shipping in 2012, we’ve seen Raspberry Pi computers used for everything from a bartender to robots to a bizarre musical instrument. Now dedicated tinkerer Dave Hunt has used a Model B to create a touchscreen smartphone called the PiPhone, though he readily admits that it would be easier and cheaper to pick up an (arguably much better looking) budget cellphone from a shop in the mall, “but hey, where’s the fun in that.”

  • Android

    • You can now stream AAA games through your Ouya

      From today, Ouya players can play any of the games provided during the beta period for free. Games included with the service include Lego Batman, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Prince of Persia, Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing, Super Street Fighter IV, Dirt 3 and Mirror’s Edge.

      Playcast says that only a small handful of games will be available today, and that the number will ramp up over the coming weeks as the service’s stability is proven. All games will be available to play using Ouya controllers.

    • Google to kill Nexus series for premium Android Silver smartphones?

      Google is developing a program called Android Silver, which would find carriers dedicating a section of their store to some of the top Android phones. The company is making this move to enhance development of premium Android smartphones and take total control over the Android ecosystem to compete with the Apple iPhone and the growing power of Samsung, the leading manufacturer of Android smartphones.

Docker Open Source Virtualization Project Forms Advisory Board

Open source tears down inefficiency and redundancy

Open source. What started as a simple description for software source code and a development model has moved far beyond that into a strong culture where presentation of patterns and models for debate is promoted. Open source has become a challenge to view the world in a pioneering way, looking for solutions that break from tradition, and doing so in a collective environment where transparency and openness are virtues that are held in the highest regard.

LibreS3 released!

LibreS3, a robust Open Source implementation of the Amazon S3 service, has just been released!

Events

• LinuxFest NorthWest: A community-driven Linux fest of power

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox “Australis” redesign goes stable in version 29

    Version 29 of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser went stable on Tuesday, showcasing a new design, deemed “Australis” that has been testing in the Firefox Nightly beta channel since November. Among the most noticeable features of this new design are the curved tabs and the Firefox Menu (similar to Chrome’s “hotdog menu“), which make for a much sleeker look, albeit a look much like its competitor browser, Google Chrome.

  • Firefox 29 Pulls from Google Chrome’s Playbook, Works Well

    This week, many of us are kicking the tires on the new version 29 of the Firefox browser, which is more than just an incremental release falling within Mozilla’s rapid release cycle. Version 29 includes the Australis interface, which has been in the works for five years and gives the browser several features similar to the ones found in Google Chrome. So far, I like version 29, and its updated look and feel are impressive.

  • Firefox 29 Has Been Added To The Default Repositories Of All The Supported Ubuntu Systems

  • Firefox 29 Debuts With New Australis User Interface

    Mozilla launches its first open-source browser release in the post-Brendan Eich era.

  • Firefox 29 out now, gets design overhaul

    Firefox 29 has been revealed and is billed as the biggest update to the open source browser since Firefox 4 in 2011, with a new design and more customisation tools

SaaS/Big Data

• Oracle Embraces OpenStack in Solaris 11.2

  Oracle today announced the beta availability of its Solaris 11.2 Unix operating system. The Solaris 11.2 release will be the second major update of Solaris in less than two years from Oracle, following the debut of Solaris 11.1 in October of 2012.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 4.2.4 RC1 Is Now Ready for Testing

  The Document Foundation announces that the first RC version of LibreOffice 4.2.4 has been released and is now available for download.

• Oracle Unveils Solaris with Built-in OpenStack: “A Modern Cloud OS”

  When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, there was a lot of speculation about which Sun products and projects would continue and which would fall by the wayside. Solaris was among the products that many people felt wouldn’t have a bright future. On Tuesday, though, Oracle unveiled Solaris 11.2, which is only the second point release of Solaris since version 11 appeared in 2011.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Tibco Acquires Jaspersoft for $185 Million

    Tibco Software announced late yesterday its plan to acquire privately-held open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft for $185 million. Under Tibco’s ownership, the current plan is to keep the JasperSoft’s BI brand intact.

BSD

• OpenBSD 5.5 “Wrap in Time” Arrives with a Fix for the Infamous Year 2038 Problem

  OpenBSD is one of the few projects that manage to stick to a specific release schedule, so a new version of this operating system is usually made available twice a year. The previous OpenBSD release was on November 3, which means that now it’s time for another one.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Ukraine Crisis Accelerating the Restructuring of the World

  The Ukrainian crisis has not radically changed the international situation but it has precipitated ongoing developments. Western propaganda, which has never been stronger, especially hides the reality of Western decline to the populations of NATO, but has no further effect on political reality. Inexorably, Russia and China, assisted by the other BRICS, occupy their rightful place in international relations.

• Wall Street Journal outlines US military options against Chinac

  The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the Pentagon’s latest “action plan” is intended to address “concerns” held by Washington’s “closest allies in Asia” over the Obama administration’s willingness to confront Beijing. The newspaper said these allies “have told American counterparts” that the response to Russia’s “aggression” in Crimea “is seen as a possible litmus test of what Washington will do if China attempted a similar power grab.” It also noted that “concerns were raised” by South Korean officials last September after Obama’s last-minute decision to call off plans to bomb Syria—partly to avoid a potential military confrontation with Russia.

• Kerry, Obama, Putin: The Fool, the Demagogue, and the Former KGB Colonel

  Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. “exceptionalism,” which make words like “invasion,” “aggression” and “international law” inapplicable to us as the world’s police; and what might be a “completely trumped up pretext” if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word “aggression” in editorializing on the Crimea events (“Russia’s Aggression,” March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).

• “War is Peace, it Makes Us Rich and Safe”… or So Says the Mainstream Media

  War is Peace. What was known as a famous quote from George Orwell’s fiction 1984 has become a reality. Or maybe it is still fiction if you consider that the mainstream media is making up reality on a daily basis.

  On April 28, 2014, the homepage of The Washington Post web site featured the picture of a nuclear explosion with the following title: “War is brutal. The alternative is worse.”

• US, Pak relationship has deteriorated: Former Obama NSA

  The relationship between the US and Pakistan has deteriorated “alarmingly” over the course of the Afghan conflict, a former national security advisor to President Barack Obama has said.

  Arguing that the role of Pakistan is crucial for resolving the Afghan crisis, Gen (rtd) James Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama, said that there is absence of trust between Pakistan and the US now.

• Israel’s drone dealers

  People and Power investigates how Israeli drone technology came to be used by the US.

• The Rise of the Drone Master: Pop Culture Recasts Obama

  In Marvel’s latest popcorn thriller, Captain America battles Hydra, a malevolent organization that has infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government. There are missile attacks, screeching car chases, enormous explosions, evil assassins, data-mining supercomputers and giant killer drones ready to obliterate millions of people.

  Its inspiration?

  President Obama, the optimistic candidate of hope and change.

• Albany drone protester Amidon acquitted

  An Albany man who dressed as the Grim Reaper outside a Syracuse airbase to protest the U.S. drone aircraft program was acquitted this week of criminal charges.

• Volk Field protester guilty of trespassing

  But Wagner said Block presented “passive resistance” when asked to leave the base property.

  “She just declined to go,” Wagner said.

• [not real news] Iraqi Judge “brushes off” Bush lawsuit against Iraqis for George’s death

  An Iraqi judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against certain individuals in the Iraqi government who killed George Bush with a drone strike in 2005—the lawsuit was filed by Bush family members.

  Allowing a lawsuit against individuals “would hinder their ability in the future to act decisively in defense of Iraq interests” said the Iraqi judge.

  I can understand the outrage that people here in America are experiencing right now. That a foreign judge would so easily dismiss something not based on it being right or wrong, but I based on keeping the door open so people from the judge’s country are free to kill more with drone strikes. They seem to carry out justice only when it is convenient for them and in their best interest.

• Gavin Hood to Direct Colin Firth in ‘Eye in the Sky’ UK Action Thriller

• Gavin Hood Set For The Drone Warfare Thriller ‘Eye In The Sky’ With Colin Firth [promoting drones on the Big Screen]

• Grounded, Gate Theatre, review: ‘mesmerising’

  If you wanted proof that virtue is its own reward in theatreland, take a look at Lucy Ellinson’s performance in Grounded. She is nothing short of mesmerising as a Top Gun pilot, who, after having a baby, is reduced to doing shifts in front of a computer screen in an air-conditioned trailer near Las Vegas. Her job is to steer unmanned “drone” aircraft towards their targets in the Middle East. And then to press the button that blows the enemy combatants below to pieces.

• Mad Men: The Lunatic Fringe That Leads the West

  I had in mind to write about Tony Blair’s remarkable regurgitation of bloodlust and bile last week. The former British PM managed to tear himself away from his consulting work for dictatorships and other lucrative sidelines long enough to make a “major speech” calling for — guess what? — even more military intervention in the endless, global “War on Terror.” The fact that this war on terror — which he did so much to exacerbate during his time in power, not least in his mass-murder partnership with George W. Bush in Iraq — has actually spawned more terror, and left the primary ‘enemy,’ al Qaeda and its related groups, more powerful than ever, has obviously escaped the great global visionary. No doubt his mad, messianic glare — coupled with the dazzling glow of self-love — makes it hard for the poor wretch to see reality.

• Waterboarding, Sarah Palin and the West’s Image Abroad as the ‘Great Satan’

  Waterboarding, a technique in which water is poured over the angled face of a prisoner — so as to fill his nose, mouth and lungs — terrifyingly creates the feeling of drowning. “When performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique — without a doubt,” Malcolm Nance, former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego states. “There is no way to sugarcoat it,” he writes, referring to the fact that he personally witnessed and supervised the waterboarding of hundreds of U.S. military trainees who were drilling to resist torture.

• Is Captain America: The Winter Soldier a Post-Snowden Superhero Movie? Not Quite

  All that said, prior to revealing the mass conspiracy against the good guys, there are some moments where Captain America has to face the America we’re all more familiar with. He looks in on a group of veterans working to heal mentally after deployment. He even questions Fury’s assertion that killing terrorists before they commit crimes is really justice. It’s not security, but it’s surprising to see an action blockbuster.

  It’s clear that Marvel didn’t think that governmental and social pressures that led to NSA’s domestic psying program made for superhero-grade entertainment, and maybe they’re right. I was still glad to see that the ideas of government openness were enshrined next to the usual superhero clichés of truth and justice. It was also just a very, very fun movie.

• The Death Penalty Is as Flawed and Heartless as War

  On Tuesday, Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack more than an hour after his botched lethal injection began. Things went so wrong that the state of Oklahoma’s second scheduled execution for that night was stayed for 14 days.

• Senate to Obama: Drone, Baby, Drone

  Remember around this time last year when President Obama gave his big ballyhooed Drone Speech, promising more transparency to the citizen-consumers of America about who, when, where and why he obliterates and maims with his flying missiles?

• US refuses to disclose civilian killings from its drone attacks in AF/PAK Region

• Why US Intelligence Officials Pressured Senate To Block Public Release Of Drone Strikes

  It appears Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee have largely forgiven the U.S. intelligence community for eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their email correspondence.

  Acting on the request of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Feinstein and her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on Monday to remove a provision from a major intelligence bill that would have required the U.S. government to disclose information about when drone strikes occur — especially overseas — as well as information about the victims of the drone strikes.

• Secrets and lies of Obama’s drone war

  Barack Obama promised to install his administration in a glass house lit up like the Super Bowl, with everything visible to the citizenry he serves. So you will not be surprised to learn that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wants nothing more than to keep the public well informed.

• Miami Jury: CIA Involved in JFK Assassination

  Not a single major newspaper nor any national news broadcast has ever reported that on Feb. 6, 1985, a jury in Miami concluded that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

• CIA keeps a tight grip on its own secrets

  The CIA does not give up its secrets easily. Even under public scrutiny and pressure from a Senate committee to declassify parts of a congressional report on harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, the CIA remains shadowed by its reluctance to open up about its operations and its past.

• CIA has Upper Hand in Deciding Public Disclosures

  The White House has directed the CIA to declassify parts of a Senate report criticizing harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, but history shows that the agency is accomplished at preventing embarrassing or damaging disclosures.

• Heading up Senate report declassification, CIA has history of tightly guarding its own secrets

• CIA’s resolve to track weapons complicates push to arm Syria rebels

  After more than three years of civil war in Syria, the Obama administration may soon send shoulder-fired missiles to the rebels fighting the country’s dictator, Bashar Assad. But before the first missiles fly, they’ll have to be outfitted with fingerprint scanners and GPS systems designed to keep the weapons from falling into the wrong hands. There’s only one problem: It’s not clear the relatively high-tech security equipment will be compatible with the decidedly low-tech, twenty-year-old missiles.

• CIA Denies Blaze Benghazi Report: ‘So Many Problems’

  The CIA denied having any role in arming Libyan rebels before the deadly 2012 Benghazi attacks, despite reporting by TheBlaze that the U.S. was covertly involved in providing rebels with weapons during Libya’s civil war that ultimately ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda militants.

• Here’s How US Arms Dealers Sell Weapons All Over The World

• Charles Krauthammer Says Americans Now Have the ‘Smoking Document’ in Benghazi Scandal

• Inside the Secret World of a U.S. Arms Dealer

  On Sept. 11, 2011, an Armenian carrier from Albania landed in Benghazi, Libya. It was carrying 800,000 rounds of ammunition originating from Albanian surplus stocks. Three of those stocks belonged to armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, according to a 2013 United Nations investigation.

• Timeline: The shocking events that led to the Benghazi attacks

  This timeline was compiled by TheBlaze and For the Record as part of their investigation into the U.S. government’s actions regarding the diplomatic team in Benghazi — and how Al Qaeda-affiliated militants benefited from the lethal aid provided to rebel forces on the ground in Libya.

• Time to End Military/CIA Torture Once and For All

  In the face of continued revelations of United States’ torture policies during the Bush administration, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), today sent letters to President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demanding an end to all ongoing practices of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees. The letter specifically calls for revoking techniques permitted in Appendix ‘M’ of the current Army Field Manual, such as solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, forms of sensory deprivation, and environmental manipulations, which individually and combined have been condemned internationally as forms of torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and therefore violate the United States’ obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. In addition, PsySR expressed particularly concern that health professionals, including psychologists, have been engaged to support such efforts in violation of their ethical responsibilities.

• CIA Thinks Syrian Rebels Might Turn The Guns We Give Them Back On Us

  If you have to worry that your proxy militias will turn your own weapons against you, maybe it’s not such a good idea to give them weapons in the first place. Just a thought.

• What CIA seeks to achieve through Ford Foundation

  James Petras, retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, wrote a damning article on September 18, 2002, exposing the Ford Foundation’s sinister choice of beneficiaries of its donations. He accused the CIA of using “philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source”.

• HENTOFF: Military judge orders CIA to list black sites and other torture data

  As first reported by the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg on April 17, during a pretrial hearing of a Guantanamo prisoner previously held at a series of CIA secret prisons, judge Army Col. James Pohl ordered the agency to provide the long-concealed “names of agents, interrogators and medical personnel who worked at the so-called black sites.”

• CIA under pressure to declassify secret report on harsh interrogations

• Shock #Benghazi Email Reveals That Obama White House Agreed With CIA Talking Points

  Judicial Watch, the conservative organization that has been FOIAing and FOIAing for an email record of the Obama administration’s talking points from the week of the Benghazi attack, has obtained one that loops White House adviser Ben Rhodes into the conversation with advice about how to massage the story for the White House. Sorry, that was a boring lede—this is the lede you want.

• The Umpteenth Guide to the Impenetrable Benghazi Outrage

  It’s hard to defend Jay Carney, or the institution of the White House press secretary in general. We’re talking about a taxpayer-funded position that exists to feed spin to reporters who are at the top of their field and could be doing literally anything else. The Benghazi Smoking Gun naturally took up a chunk of today’s Carney briefing, and ABC News’ Jonathan Karl is being celebrated on the right for sticking it to the man and being “vindicated” for previous stories about the White House’s talking points role. Carney’s excuse—that Ben Rhodes’ email about the talking points was not about Benghazi per se, and didn’t need to be released—is his typical sort of ridiculousness.

• Walter Pincus: Lingering tensions at CIA over Senate probe

  For a government worker, nothing concentrates the mind quicker or makes you at first angry and later perhaps more cautious than the prospect that you might go to jail for doing your job.

  It’s a reminder from the conflict between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA over the panel’s more-than-6,300-page report on the CIA’s coercive interrogations during the administration of President George W. Bush. They included waterboarding and other torture-like methods.

Finance

• IMF gives green light for $17 bn Ukraine aid package

  The International Monetary Fund has approved a two-year $17.1 billion loan package for Ukraine. The immediate disbursement of $3.2 billion will allow Ukraine to avoid a potential debt default.

• Did The West Become “Them” Only When It Was Cheap Enough?

  I grew up in Western Europe in the 1980s. My teenage years were characterized by the Cold War between the United States and the now-collapsed Soviet Union. We learned that the West was liberty, and that the East was oppression. Presumably, the East learned the reverse in their corresponding teenage years. But when did the West become the enemy they painted?

  It’s hard to communicate how everpresent the threat of nuclear war was. Basically, you could say that us who grew up in the 1980s didn’t expect to grow old. In this time of polarization and belligerence, identifying with your home team was more important than ever. In retrospect, it was a false sense of liberty that we were given – mass surveillance started with ECHELON and similar programs in the mid-1970s – but it was nevertheless a very strong sense of liberty.

• May Day 2014! Celebrate International Workers’ Day!

  Today in the U.S., we can thank the immigrant rights movement for the rebirth of May Day. On May 1, 2006 over 2 million working people and their allies poured into the streets of America’s big cities. The immigrant rights mega-marches shut down the repressive, anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill that criminalized undocumented immigrants and other working people who show solidarity with them. 120 years after Haymarket, another attack from big business and right-wing politicians was beat back by the power of the people.

• Inequality hurts everyone apart from the super-rich – and here’s why

  The extraordinary success of Thomas Piketty’s best-seller shows that progressive ideas are at last winning

• Help to Work? Britain’s jobless are being forced into workfare, more like

  If the government genuinely means to help people find work after a long spell of unemployment, they would not have come up with Help to Work, a curious plan that insists on a daily visit to the jobcentre or an enforced period of unpaid labour. If the government means to punish them and save its own face, the plan makes more sense.

• Is Capitalism Digging Its Own Grave?

  …the top 1% owning 40% of the wealth while the bottom 80% just own 7%.

Censorship

• Twitter’s existential dilemma: Why the super-popular social network is in trouble

  Is Twitter in trouble? The company reported first quarter earnings on Tuesday, and Wall Street immediately reacted with a big thumbs down. In just half an hour, Twitter’s stock price fell 9 percent, nearing its all-time post-IPO low.

  The reasons why aren’t immediately clear. The overall numbers were mostly in line with analyst expectations, so much so that CEO Dick Costolo kicked off the company’s earnings call by declaring that “we had a great first quarter.” Twitter did register a net loss of $132 million for the quarter, which is a hefty chunk of change. But no one was expecting the company to turn a profit this quarter, and overall revenue doubled compared to last year’s first quarter, to $250 million.

• Reflecting on Northern Ireland’s self-appointed theatre censors

  Newtownabbey council said “yes” when they cancelled what they labelled a blasphemous play, The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged), due to be performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) earlier this year. Members of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a political party with roots in the Free Presbyterian Church, called for the show to be axed fearing it would offend and mock Christian beliefs.

• Filmmaker protests Kickstarter’s ‘censorship’ of abortion film

  In protest of the crowd-funding site’s “censorship” of his TV movie project about convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, McAleer commissioned a bold billboard near Kickstarter’s Brooklyn headquarters.

• Uganda: Pushing journalists toward self-censorship

  In Uganda, journalists are not only dealing with outright censorship. It seems the government of president Yoweri Museveni is employing a strategy that is aimed at pushing journalists towards self-censorship using a broad range of measures. Although the Ugandan media has a very strong tradition of critical reporting some journalists are probably more prone to self-censor.

Privacy

• Why a Triangle tech CEO just said ‘No’ to CIA investment

  Last week I received the kind of email that would have many startup founders jumping for joy – a cold pitch from a fairly well known VC firm, inquiring if we would like to have a conversation with them about possible funding. In addition to funding, there was hinting about help getting some high-profile customers onboard as well. As a (currently) self-funded startup which is fairly under-capitalized, it’s hard not to find something like that exciting. Surely in any sane universe I should have immediately replied to say “Yes, call me right now”.

• New NSA chief Michael Rogers: Agency has lost Americans’ trust

  The NSA has lost the trust of the American people as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks, and needs to be more transparent to gain it back, the NSA’s new director said Wednesday in his first public comments since taking control of the embattled spy agency.

  “I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, let’s be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us,” Admiral Michael Rogers told a conference of the Women in Aerospace conference in Crystal City, Va.

• Britain begged to be let into NSA spying scheme

  The Government Communications Headquarters has presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. However, a new document from the Edward Snowden collection shows that GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year.

• The Strangest Interview Yet With the Outgoing Head of the NSA

  NSA watchers have seen this evasion a million times. Say that the “target” isn’t the American people, knowing most listeners will take that to mean that the NSA is spying on the private communications of foreigners or terrorists, not regular Americans.

• What’s The NSA Doing Now? Training More Cyberwarriors

  The U.S. needs more cyberwarriors, and it needs them fast, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He plans to more than triple the size of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command over the next two years.

  But where will they come from? These are not the kind of skills you can teach in basic training.

  Enter the embattled National Security Agency. Its new director, Adm. Michael Rogers, also directs the Cyber Command. Ten miles down the road from the NSA, at a defense contractor’s office in Columbia, Md., the NSA recently held a live-fire cyberwarfare exercise aimed at developing more cyberwarriors.

• NSA spying means Brazil’s $4.5B fighter jets won’t be built by Boeing

• If the NSA had an art exhibit

  All of these ‘exhibits’ are part of current or past art projects exploring surveillance technology, social media or related issues, which seem to be growing almost as fast as the NSA mission statement and enemies list.

• Edward Snowden: NSA Spies More on Americans Than Russians

  Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

• Spy court hears first anti-NSA argument

  For the first time, the federal court overseeing the country’s surveillance programs heard a formal argument this month that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of people’s phone records is illegal.

• UK slips down global press freedom list due to Snowden leaks response

  British government’s draconian response to the Guardian’s reporting sees UK drop five places on Freedom House list

• The US supreme court needs to keep up with our cellphones – and the NSA

  Tuesday’s US supreme court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest? But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place – and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.

• Facebook’s ad tentacles now infiltrate almost any app

  Facebook will now deliver targeted advertisements to practically any smartphone app, after unveiling a mobile ad network at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco.

• My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal

  This week, the President is expected to release a report on big data, the result of a 90-day study that brought together experts and the public to weigh in on the opportunities and pitfalls of the collection and use of personal information in government, academia, and industry. Many people say that the solution to this discomforting level of personal data collection is simple: if you don’t like it, just opt out. But as my experience shows, it’s not as simple as that. And it may leave you feeling like a criminal.

• German gov’t turns down testimony of Snowden

  The German government on Wednesday rejected a testimony of whistleblower Edward Snowden through the German NSA panel, local media reported, citing a conclusion of the draft opinion of the government for the parliamentary committee.

  According to information from the German media, a 27-page paper indicated that an invitation for the former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor would jeopardize the foreign and security interests of Germany considerably.

• ​Verizon to monitor wireless devices, computers and share data with advertisers

  Verizon Wireless will monitor customers’ activities on wireless devices as well as wired or Wi-Fi-connected desktop computers and laptops. Collected data on users’ online activity will then be passed to marketers for targeted advertising.

  Verizon customers recently began receiving a notice from the company that it is “enhancing” its Relevant Mobile Advertising operations to glean more information from its customers, the Los Angeles Times reported.

  “In addition to the customer information that’s currently part of the program, we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier we create when you register on our websites,” Verizon Wireless tells customers.

  “This identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver marketing messages to mobile devices on our network.”

  The telecom giant will automatically download a “cookie,” or tracking software, onto a user’s computer or device without explicit warning when the customer visits the company’s “My Verizon” website to view a bill or watch television programming online, according to Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis.

• Former NSA contractor Snowden expects to remain in Russia

  Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to Moscow last year after revealing details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, expects his asylum status in Russia to be renewed before it expires this summer, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

• Germany blocks Edward Snowden from testifying in person in NSA inquiry

• E.U action needed to counter NSA surveillance, says security expert

  Speaking during his keynote talk at Infosecurity Europe on Wednesday, Hypponen delved into whistle-blowing in the modern age and – looking at the revelations from Snowden – said that this was not just a case of the US ‘misbehaving’.

Civil Rights

• This American Refused to Become an FBI Informant. Then the Government Made His Family’s Life Hell.

  It was after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2009, when Sandra Mansour answered her cellphone to the panicked voice of her daughter-in-law, Nasreen. A week earlier, Nasreen and her husband, Naji Mansour, had been detained in the southern Sudanese city of Juba by agents of the country’s internal security bureau. In the days since, Sandra had been desperately trying to find out where the couple was being held. Now Nasreen was calling to say that she’d been released—driven straight to the airport and booked on a flight to her native Kenya—but Naji remained in custody. He was being held in a dark, squalid basement cell, with a bucket for a bathroom and a dense swarm of mosquitoes that attacked his body as he slept. “You have to get him out of there,” Nasreen said. But she was unfamiliar with Juba and could only offer the barest details about where they’d been held. “He’s in a blue building. You’ve seen it. It’s not far from your hotel.”

• Federal Court Strikes Down WI’s “Discriminatory” Voter ID as Unconstitutional

  In a landmark decision, a federal judge in Milwaukee has struck down Wisconsin’s strict voter ID restrictions as both an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote and, for the first time, a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act based on the law’s “disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result” of depriving “the right of Black and Latino citizens to vote on account of race or color.”

• The New Aaron Swartz Documentary Looks Powerful. Here’s the Trailer.

  Swartz committed suicide in January 2013 at age 26, but his reach and impact on the tech and tech-policy worlds were already enormous. A computer-programming prodigy, he worked on projects like RSS and Creative Commons before he was 16. He dove into politics and became an advocate and activist for publicly available content and an open Internet. But by the time of his death, Swartz was being federally prosecuted for downloading a huge quantity of copyrighted material from JSTOR, the online academic library, at MIT. He was facing jail time and fines.

• Yemen: End Child Marriage

  “The draft minimum age law is a real beacon of hope for the thousands of Yemeni girls vulnerable to being married off while still children,” said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “The government should act quickly on this measure and develop enforcement mechanisms to prevent even more girls from becoming victims of early and forced marriage.”

• Sri Lanka Phobia an anxiety disorder from which David Cameron, Hugo Swire, David Milliband , Stephen Harper and others suffer.

  The symptom of Sri Lanka phobia which is common among the politicians in the West, is caused through personal political ambitions. It comes from the presence of a large number of expatriates Tamils living in these Western countries. It makes the patients have a distorted view of human rights. They become blind to their own actions of violation of human rights, and war crimes.

• Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To NDAA’s ‘Indefinite Detention’ Clause

  The nation’s highest court refused to hear a case that is challenging the authority and legality of the National Defense Authorization Act’s “Indefinite Detention” clause. The refusal to hear the case has plaintiffs calling for action.

• Supreme Court Declines to Hear NDAA Indefinite Detention Appeal

  A group of journalists and activists who filed a lawsuit two years ago challenging a controversial provision in a national defense spending bill that they claimed allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens were dealt a crushing blow Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal.

• US Supreme Court Refuses to Uphold the Constitution: Allows Indefinite Detention

  Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.

• Supreme Court Lets Indefinite Detention of Americans Pass

  The Supreme Court declined to hear the case that a group of activists, journalists, and academics including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Daniel Ellsberg brought against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.

• Supreme Court green lights detention of Americans

  A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” according to critics.

• Hedges v. Obama: The Supreme Court digs its head deeper into the sand

• In Defence of Jeremy Clarkson

  Which leads me to a further thought. I am pretty sure I had no concept of people’s colour as a small child, and the following I know for certain. My elder children attended a primary school in Gravesend in which a little over half the children were Sikh. By age seven, they had absolutely no conception of any racial difference between themselves and any others in their class. It is a slender piece of evidence, but I am generally fairly convinced that racial difference is a taught construct.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FCC Chairman: I’d Rather Give In To Verizon’s Definition Of Net Neutrality Than Fight

  “The idea of net neutrality (or the Open Internet) has been discussed for a decade with no lasting results,” writes Wheeler in a lengthy blog post. “Today Internet Openness is being decided on an ad hoc basis by big companies. Further delay will only exacerbate this problem.”

  Once again, Wheeler completely glosses over the fact that the only reason a federal appeals court gutted the previous neutrality rules was because a shortsighted FCC never thought to categorize Internet service providers as vital communications infrastructure. As numerous supporters of a true net neutrality have repeatedly pointed out, reclassifying ISPs would likely mean the FCC could reinstate the old rules (and possibly more stringent ones) and survive a legal challenge.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Accused of Movie Piracy, Senior Citizen Kicked Out of Theater

    While recording a movie strictly for personal use is entirely legal in UK cinemas, the same definitely cannot be said about the United States. Recording or ‘camming’ a movie in the U.S. can result in jail-time, particularly if the activity is connected to subsequent bootlegging or illegal online distribution.