05.11.15
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Vista 7, Vista 8, Windows at 4:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft cannot compete with zero-cost Free/libre software anymore
Summary: Microsoft is failing to convince people to ‘upgrade’ Windows, whereupon business models are being altered and migration to Linux-based platforms (like Android) continues uninterrupted
WHILE Microsoft-connected media like the BBC persists with Microsoft propaganda like this nonsense or this one puff piece (a couple among several articles we found, all singing along the lines of Vista 10 being the last version of Windows), it is becoming abundantly clear that the era of Windows is ending. People refuse to adopt the latest versions of Windows, so now comes spin like this: “Reiterating the company’s “Windows as a service” philosophy, Nixon said the firm is planning no new OS version launches in the future. “Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10,” he added.”
The name Nixon is just so perfect here. Trust Nixon.
Vista 8 was so bad (worse than ME and Vista in terms of adoption) that only a fool would think Vista 10 can change that. Remember that hype/PR ahead of Vista 8; it’s all promises and bribed-for reviews. Several years after Vista 8 came out there is still a rush towards an operating system more than half a decade old (Vista 7) or some variants of GNU/Linux. The largest branches of the British government are still struggling with a 14-year-old version of Windows and refuse to move on with the upgrade treadmill. See this new report which says: “UK government departments still running Windows XP are now doing so entirely on their own. A framework support agreement between the Crown and Microsoft guaranteeing the release of special security patches for PCs still on Windows XP has ended after one year. That deal – revealed here – expired on April 14 and it’s been decided it will not be rolled into a second year, Microsoft has told The Reg.”
For Microsoft it has become impossible to charge for Windows and expect to gain at the expense of GNU/Linux, Android, etc. Now, as Pogson put it, they need to compete on price. “No longer will the price be hidden,” he wrote. “Consumers who can do the maths will seek alternatives if for no other reason than comparison shopping. GNU/Linux will prevail because there’s no OS out there that gives as great a service for $0 as GNU/Linux. Amen.”
The “PC” is dying based on figures that are derived from sales and Google, whose flagship platform (Android) now commands the lion’s share of the mobile market, says that mobile search tops desktop “Google says that more people now use Google Search on mobile devices than they do on desktops,” to quote just one report. The delusion that Windows will always be around and be used by a majority is a sort of paid propaganda Microsoft still relies on. █
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security at 3:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
Summary: How the corporate media, especially that which is connected to Microsoft, fallaciously frames Windows issues as universal issues and lays blame on GNU/Linux where Windows is affected
Our previous post, which talks about OOXML being insecure [via], was a reminder that Microsoft is inherently insecure, usually by design (for surveillance/espionage purposes, among other reasons). Today we would like to show some gross media bias which deliberately fails to highlight Microsoft’s uniqueness when it comes to poor security.
First of all, the Microsoft-occupied BBC is a disgrace. The BBC got very badly stuffed/filled (at management level) with Microsoft UK staff. It happened several years ago. Examples were covered here before. In an article titled “Self-destructing virus kills off PCs” they completely fail to mention that it’s just Windows. Microsoft and Windows are mentioned only in context that promotes them, but not otherwise. “Restoring a PC with its MBR deleted involves reinstalling Windows,” says one paragraph in the middle, “which could mean important data is lost.” Would the article bear the same headline if the virus targeted Android? It’s just so vague. “PC” just means “Windows” now. The BBC seems to serve as a Microsoft advertising platform, there is no pretence of objectivity at all. If the BBC’s language was reversed, it would announce “new version of PC” and “Windows malware destruction of Microsoft Windows” (to amend the aforementioned headline). The BBC has a newspeak name for Microsoft Windows when there’s bad news: “PC”. But it’s called “Windows” (or Vista 10/Windows 10) when there’s good news. How convenient.
Zack Whittaker from Microsoft (formerly working for Microsoft UK) writes about the latest Lenovo back door, neglecting to say that it affects only those who use Microsoft Windows (like previous Lenovo back doors). How convenient an omission.
Last but not least, take a look at this rebuttal to articles from IDG and the highly biased Dan Goodin (among few others whom we cited here the other day). Anti-Linux circles framed general-purpose threat to computers as a “Linux” thing. What a bogus claim that was! “Stealthy Linux GPU malware can also hide in Windows PCs, maybe Macs,” says the latest headline. The author says quite correctly: “Most news stories last week about Jellyfish focused on the Linux aspect, leading some to believe that Windows or Mac PCs can’t be affected by such threats. It now seems that Team Jellyfish is bent on disproving that.”
So once again GNU/Linux is receiving bad press (perception of insecurity) despite it being just a scapegoat in an attack that is hardware-based. We covered very similar examples in recent months.
The media is just so biased against Free software. Bias by omission and scapegoating is a longstanding issue that led to the “call out Windows” campaign. It’s not acceptable that Microsoft receives special treatment. █
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Posted in Europe, Office Suites at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OpenDocument Format, or ODF as it’s commonly referred to, is spreading quickly throughout Europe after Microsoft failed to kill in in Britain last year
France, like the UK and parts of Germany, is joining the ODF revolution, making the European Union a lot more standards- and Free software-oriented. Germany, in the mean time, attacks OOXML on the basis of poor security. As a European Commission site put it the other day: “Using the proprietary OOXML document format, i.e. docx, pptx and xlsx, makes you more vulnerable to phishing and other attacks. Earlier this month, the Japanese anti-virus company Trend Micro published a blog post describing how the attack group “Operation Pawn Storm” uses spear-phishing mail messages with malicious Office documents to target the military, governments, defense industries and the media.
“Four years ago, Thomas Caspers and Oliver Zendel from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) already presented research results stating that most spear-phishing attacks targeting specific persons or a small group of victims are using “launch actions” in Office and PDF documents to have their malicious code executed.”
We have written nearly a thousand articles about document formats and security aspects too have been covered. Now that France is moving to ODF, joining the UK and some parts of Germany, it it definitely worth revisiting this debate (more on security in our next post). Microsoft attacked ODF in Europe as recently as last year because the EU is gradually removing format lock-in (gateway to Free software), essentially saying bye-bye to Microsoft dependency. Without restrictions on choice — or contrariwise — if people are left to make rational choices, Microsoft will soon be history.
In the words of Gregg Keizer, “Office 365 customers pay Microsoft up to 80% more over long haul”, so the ‘cloud’ nonsense too (giving Microsoft one’s files, not just using Microsoft’s proprietary formats) is a big and expensive mistake, especially where taxpayers foot the bill. Microsoft is making money from corruptible officials or fools who deem Microsoft essential “and lose custody of their own data,” as iophk put it in an E-mail to us.
Prepare Microsoft to increasingly openwash itself, pretending that OOXML is “open”, Office is “open”, Windows is “open”, and so on. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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You want to install Ubuntu on your Windows computer, don’t you? The thing is, you’re not 100% certain, yet. What if it goes wrong?
Fortunately, there are many ways in which you can try Ubuntu Linux and see whether you really like it, from running a Live CD to installing the OS in a virtual machine, before going all the way and installing it alongside Windows to dual boot.
You might even abandon Windows altogether, converting your device into a 100% Ubuntu computer!
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After all this time it still amazes me when I see Windows XP used among the public. Some of the most recent examples I’ve seen in ‘the wild’ have been with home users and some small businesses.
In this article, I’ll look into what the attraction is to continue using Windows XP and which Linux distributions might make the best candidates for a switch.
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Desktop
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After debuting its own Chromebook for education last year, Dell is turning its Chrome OS attention to offices. The company announced on Tuesday a new computing appliance to deliver Windows applications on Chromebooks.
In tandem with virtualization software, one Dell Appliance for Wyse – vWorkspace can serve up Windows apps to up to 350 Chromebooks or Chromeboxes. Dell says the cost starts at $180 per user for the server hardware and licenses, hypervisor and vWorkspace broker. The Chrome OS devices can also be managed or deployed through the new appliance.
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Server
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Two months after Docker brings in new faces to lead security efforts, a new benchmark for securing Docker container deployments debuts.
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Varnish Software has just released Varnish API Engine, a high performance HTTP API Gateway which handles authentication, authorization and throttling all built on top of Varnish Cache. The Varnish API Engine can easily extend your current set of APIs with a uniform access control layer that has built in caching abilities for high volume read operations, and it provides real-time metrics.
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Apcera, Google, Red Hat and VMware are supporting CoreOS’ application container specification effort, which extends the reach of containers beyond Docker.
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The open source quagga router is garnering attention as a flexible choice for SDN. It’s easy to set up with the right hardware.
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Kernel Space
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I’m announcing the release of the 3.10.77 kernel.
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Ben Hutchings, the maintainer of the Linux 3.2 kernel branch, announced today the immediate availability for download and upgrade of a new maintenance release for one of the oldest LTS (Long Term Support) kernels.
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Here’s a Mother’s Day Sunday release for you all, whether you’re a mother or not. Because hey, it’s Sunday afternoon once again, and that’s just how my -rc releases roll.
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It’s Sunday, so Linus Torvalds has just announced the third Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel, which should be released sometime in summer.
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Linux kernel 4.0.2 is now available for download on the kernel.org website, and it is the second maintenance release to the stable and most advanced branch of the Linux kernel, version 4.0. This release brings a number of improvements, updated drivers, code cleanup, and bugfixes in various areas.
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After the announcement of the Linux 3.14.40 LTS kernel by Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jiri Slaby had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability of Linux kernel 3.12.42, an LTS (Long Term Support) release that brings important fixes and updated drivers.
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Graphics Stack
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With the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is finally out-of-the-box acceleration for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 series on the Nouveau driver. With the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver able to self-generate the needed firmware/microcode to enable acceleration, it’s quite easy to get running. However, the performance leaves a lot to be desired.
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While OpenGL 4.0+ support continues to be tackled for Mesa, finishing up OpenGL ES 3.1 support within Mesa seems to be a pressing priority for Intel.
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While a few months back there was talk of libinput 1.0 coming after libinput 0.13~0.14, libinput 0.15 was released today as the latest major pre-1.0 update to this input handling library used by Wayland compositors, optionally as an X.Org input driver, and is starting to be integrated on Mir.
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Thanks to work by Samuel Pitoiset, NVIDIA’s hardware performance counters of their recent GPU generations are now being exposed through the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.
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Julien Cristau of Debian has released updated versions of some of the older X.Org DDX drivers.
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Benchmarks
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A Red Hat developer mentioned to us at Phoronix that they’re seeing “drastically improved battery life” in some cases with the Linux 4.1 kernel to the extent that it’s up to 2~4 hours of extra battery life with the kernel upgrade to Git. I’ve since started some fresh Linux laptop battery tests.
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It’s been a while since last running any extensive Amazon EC2 cloud benchmarks. However, in trying out the latest releases of a few distributions, I ran some quick cloud benchmarks yesterday.
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Applications
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Video (formerly Totem) 3.16.1, the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on Gstreamer that features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, and many other features, has been released and is now available for download.
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NetworkManager 1.0 was released after more than one decade of development at the end of 2014. Nearly six months later, the first point release to NetworkManager 1.0 is now available.
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Almost everything that happens on a Linux system is logged in some way. These log files are typically stored plain ASCII text in a standard log file format, although they can be in binary format. Most logs are stored in the traditional system log subdirectory /var/log. Logs keep track of events, such as system errors, user activities, and transaction histories. These log files are everywhere.
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Today, May 4, we announce the immediate availability for download of the Enlightenment 0.19.5 desktop environment, a release that fixes a significant amount of issues discovered since Enlightenment 0.19.4, which is currently used by default in various GNU/Linux distributions.
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The procps project for a few years has been hosted at Gitorious. With the announcement that Gitorious has been acquired by GitLab and that all repositories need to move there, procps moved along to GitLab. At first I thought it would just be a like for like thing, but then I noticed that GitLab has this GitLab CI feature and had to try it out.
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Windows/Mac/Linux: If you’re running your Raspberry Pi in headless mode and you’re not using a static IP address, it’s a pain to locate the IP address. Adafruit made a simple little utility that makes the process as easy as a click of the mouse.
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The ownCloud developers have released the third maintenance release for the open-source ownCloud 8.0 self-hosting cloud server software that lets anyone to build his/her own file hosting service without too much hassle.
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The ownCloud development team, through Daniel Molkentin, has had the great pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the ownCloud Desktop Client 1.8.1, which has been declared by the project leader the best release ever.
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The third beta to VirtualBox 5.0 is now available. VirtualBox 5.0 is a big step forward to Oracle’s virtualization software and adds PV support to Windows/Linux guests, XHCI controller support for USB 3.0 devices, bi-directional drag-and-drop to guests, and more.
VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 3 brings more fixes over the earlier beta releases. There’s XSAVE/AVX/AVX2 extensions now exposed to the guest when available, GUI improvements for encryption handling, improved volume control, fixed SB16 playback, and a variety of other improvements went in.
Details on VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 3 can be found via the release announcement at VirtualBox.org.
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Oracle has announced today, May 7, the immediate availability for download and testing of the third Beta version of the forthcoming VirtualBox 5.0 cross-platform virtualization software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Proprietary
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I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 14.1.0 for both Mac OS X and Linux. CrossOver 14.1.0 has important bug fixes for both Mac and Linux users.
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CrossOver Linux, an application based on Wine that allows users to install popular Windows applications and PC games on a Linux computer, is now at version 14.1.1 and is ready for download.
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Opera Software, through Tomasz Procków, has announced the general availability for download and testing of the Opera 30 web browser, which has just been promoted to the Beta channel.
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On May 7, Opera Software, through Mateusz Madej, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Opera 31 web browser in the Developer channel, available for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Here’s a book that could teach you more than you ever thought possible about make.
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Games
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On May 8, the CryEngine team from Crytek published a brief announcement informing game developers about a small, yet very important modification to their EULA (End-User License Agreement).
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Crytek known from its very popular first-person shooter Far Cry promised better Linux support in the very near future, with its CRYENGINE game engine.
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Project Ascension is the name of a new launcher that aims to provide a unified experience for gamers who have titles on multiple gaming clients, and to encourage said platforms to compete. Confused? We were too.
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The Unvanquished development team, through Corentin Wallez, has had the pleasure of announcing today, May 10, the immediate availability for download of a new Alpha build of their first-person shooter game for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.
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GOG.com is taking its job seriously, and they are working to promote Linux in any way they can. Now, the DRM-free digital platform has just released three classic Star Trek games, and they all come with Linux support.
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Diablo III and its expansion, Reaper of Souls, are amongst the most played games from Blizzard, and they are now making a comeback after Blizzard made some serious changes to the gameplay by introducing adventure mode and rifts.
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Valve has announced today, May 6, the general availability of a new stable update for its popular SteamOS operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and powered by the awesome Steam for Linux client.
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Lethal League, a competitive projectile fighting game developed and published by Team Reptile on Steam, has just received a Linux version.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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On May 8, KDE announced the general availability of KDE Frameworks 5.10.0, a maintenance release that fixes bugs and improves performance. All users of KDE Frameworks 5.9.0 and previous versions are urged to upgrade to KDE Frameworks 5.10.0 as soon as possible.
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KDE Frameworks 5.10 was released on Friday as the latest add-on libraries complementing Qt within the KDE world.
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Martin Gräßlin just shared that with the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.4 update, KWin will serve as a proper Wayland compositor!
For years now Martin and other KDE developers have been working toward Wayland support and separating out the X11 Linux support. A huge milestone was reached today with the latest KWin code now being able to function as a proper Wayland compositor.
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The Qt 5.5 Beta was supposed to happen back on 12 March, but that goal failed to be realized. However, it looks like Qt 5.5 Beta is quite close now with The Qt Company putting out a beta snapshot.
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Krita is an open-source digital painting software that is undergoing a big upgrade right now. Before the developers manage to get version 3.0 out the door, a new release was made available in the 2.9 branch.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Continuing with the first day: Shobha Tyagi elaborated on the acceptance problems when moving users from Microsoft Windows to Linux based systems at her university. That talk resulted in interesting follow-up discussions on regional differences.
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After three intensive days the GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 have concluded in Depok, Indonesia.
The 2015 Summit started off with a series of workshops with a focus on how to start contribute to GNOME.
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New Releases
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The Tiny Core development team had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core Linux 6.2 operating system, an independent distribution known for being one of the smallest Linux kernel-based OSes in the world distributed as Live CDs.
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Today, we are happy to introduce you to the Lakka Linux kernel-based operating system that acts as a DIY (Do It Yourself) retro emulation console build around the RetroArch game emulator software.
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You don’t need a modern PC to run some 25-year-old game, of course, but that’s where Lakka comes in. It’s a lightweight OpenELEC/ RetroArch-based Linux distribution which transforms small computers into retro games consoles.
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Monday May 11, 2015 we are releasing Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1. Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 is the first service release of the free release of our distribution. This included all security and bug fixes from our initial release until May 6, 2015 which includes several important bug fixes.
Along with security fixes Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 completes our transition to one standard desktop, KDE. Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 will not have separate ISO’s of the different desktops but you can download and install alternative desktop environments from the repositories.
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On May 11, the Black Lab Software developers announced the immediate availability for download of the first service release of the Black Lab Linux 6.5 computer operating system.
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With Kodi 15 coming along, the OpenELEC team has released their first beta of the next version of their multimedia focused Linux distribution.
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On May 7, the OpenELEC development team, through Stephan Raue, had the pleasure of announcing the general availability for download and testing of the first Beta version of OpenELEC 6.0, a Linux kernel-based operating system for embedded devices.
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Zbigniew Konojacki has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final and stable 4MLinux 12.0 and 4MLinux Allinone Edition 12.0 distributions.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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We are happy to announce our eight update for Manjaro 0.8.12.
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The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, announced this past weekend the immediate availability of a new update for the current stable branch of the Manjaro Linux operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Meet ChaCha20 stream cipher and Poly1305 authenticator, together forming the ChaCha20-Poly1305 Authenticated Encryption with an AEAD construction. Currently, ChaCha20 is the preferred cipher for Google Chrome and Android 5.0+ OS. It is interesting to note that ChaCha20 was initially created as a variant of Salsa20 in 2008, by Daniel Bernstein (Google).
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Red Hat has announced today the immediate availability of the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7.
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On May 5, Red Hat had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 Beta operating system, a pre-release version that brings a number of new features and fixes in order to keep the 6.x branch stable and reliable.
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Fedora
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Hey everyone! Fedora 22 is on the cusp of being released and the Fedora Cloud Working Group has elected to organize a test day for May 7th in order to work out some bugs before shipping it off to the rest of the world.
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Red Hat’s Christian Schaller had recently been collecting Fedora Workstation feedback on his personal blog in order to continue to improve Fedora moving forward. This week he’s summarized the feedback provided by the community to see what they dislike the most about Fedora and where improvements can be made in the future.
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Debian Family
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From the creator of numerous GNU/Linux distributions, we are happy to introduce you today to RaspEX, a distro based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8.0 (Jessie) and designed to run on the Raspberry Pi 2 computer board.
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Neil McGovern was elected as Debian Project Leader in April. The project is going through some major changes such as a switch to systemd. We reached out to McGovern to understand his roles and plans for one of the most revered open source projects.
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Željko Popivoda, the lead developer of the Linux AIO (All-In-One) project, had the pleasure of informing Softpedia today about the immediate availability for download of Linux AIO Debian Live 8.0.0.
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Derivatives
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The news comes after yesterday’s keynote of Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, where we learned about the goals of the next major version of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Forget drones and warships, Ubuntu now powers the world’s first ‘smart’ refrigerator called ChillHub
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CANONICAL HAS BEEN chilling after announcing the first fridge powered by Snappy Ubuntu Core, the firm’s lightweight platform for the Internet of Things (IoT).
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Canonical has already come up with such feature with the Ubuntu Edge phone. The device reportedly has the feature to boot either to Ubuntu OS or Android and gives users the same experience PC experience when connected to a larger display.
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During the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) that took place early this week, between May 5-7 on the UbuntuOnAir channel, the Ubuntu developers discussed the possibility of switching to the GCC 5 compiler by default.
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The new application switcher for Unity 8 has been demoed at the latest Ubuntu Online Summit and it shows the rapid progress that the Ubuntu developers are making with the latest version of the famous desktop environment.
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This Ubuntu smartphone should have “Converged Unity Experience”. This means it will be some kind kind of Smartphone with desktop computer functionality; it could hook up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard.
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The new application switcher for Unity 8 has been demoed at the latest Ubuntu Online Summit and it shows the rapid progress that the Ubuntu developers are making with the latest version of the famous desktop environment.
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Martin Pitt, a renowned Ubuntu and Debian developer, came with the proposal to enable stateless persistent network interface names in the upcoming versions of the Ubuntu Linux and Debian GNU/Linux operating systems.
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The Snappy packages that are being worked on by Canonical are taking all the headlines and with good reason. They provide many advantages, and one of them is the ability to rollback an update, even for critical components, such as the Linux kernel.
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ChillHub is a refrigerator with two USB ports and built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. In addition, ChillHub has an open-source iOS-compatible app that provides seamless integration with the refrigerator by giving a user access to sensor data and control of the refrigerator’s components allowing for new interior accessories to be easily developed. This is a first-of-its-kind platform that enables the development of new hardware products that can operate inside a cooled space.
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IoT is a new concept that stands for Internet of Things, and it basically describes the ecosystem that gathers all the devices capable of connecting to the Internet at the second annual Internet of Things World conference. People tend to think of phones, smart TVs, tablets, and computers when you say devices that can go online, but there are so many more out there that have online capabilities, and yet we don’t think of them very often.
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The world is changing, and it looks like everything will soon be powered by operating systems and apps, and that includes drones, as unlikely as it might sound.
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Back when the GNOME 2 desktop was forked in 2011 as the MATE Desktop Environment, there were polarized views from the Linux community how this fork of GNOME2 could survive and what sort of future it would have. Four years later, MATE is still being maintained, there’s distributions shipping with MATE as the default desktop, and the project is managing to stay relevant.
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One of the most interesting smartphone makers to come out of China as of late is Meizu. The company has already introduced a few handset models on the market, and they have been getting pretty good reviews so far.
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Given that GCC 5 (technically GCC 5.1) was released in late April, it was too late for Ubuntu 15.04, but now it will have six months of maturing for Ubuntu 15.10. This upgrade doesn’t come as a surprise given that it’s been that way for GCC’s major annual releases going back years. There’s been no discussions at all about making LLVM/Clang the default compiler in Ubuntu Linux, though this alternative compiler continues to be offered in the Debian and Ubuntu archives.
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The roadmap for the next major update of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used in various Ubuntu Phone devices, including BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and Nexus 4, was revealed on May 5 during a “Phone roadmap” session as part of the Ubuntu Online Summit event that takes place these days between May 5 and 7.
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Canonical revealed details about a ClamAV vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is one of the most used open source operating systems, especially with the Cinnamon and MATE flavors, but the developers also have a few other distros in the works, including a KDE one. It looks like the latest KDE version won’t arrive by default too soon..
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Xubuntu Core though isn’t to be confused with Ubuntu Core or Snappy package management as is the case with upstream Ubuntu. Xubuntu Core is simply a slimmed down version of the Xfce version of Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 is an official ubuntu flavors based on ubuntu 15.04, released and announced by Ubuntu Gnome Team with the latest version of GNOME 3.14. This release is supported with security patches and software updates for only 9 months, until February 2016.
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We announced last week that the Ubuntu MATE operating system based on Ubuntu and built around the traditional MATE desktop environment was available for the Raspberry Pi 2 computer board.
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After Debian had adopted systemd, many of the distros based on this operating system made the switch as well. Ubuntu has already implemented systemd, but Linux Mint is still providing dual options for users.
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The Linux Mint developers have announced today, May 7, in what appears to be the shortest monthly newsletter ever released, that the team works hard these days to bring you the second installment of the Linux Mint 17 operating system.
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The Arduino IDE is heading into a rather neat consolidation of the numerous Arduino inspired boards out there. The introduction of a mechanism, in version 1.6.2, to allow people to plug their boards into the IDE easily is starting to snowball. To understand why this is important, before 1.6.2’s release if you had a custom board and the tools to make it work with the IDE, then to install them involved copying files into directories, editing files and crossing fingers (and being disappointed often). Anyone who used a lot of boards would find themselves with multiple copies of various versions of the IDE just to keep life simple.
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A new Kickstarter campaign was launched for a small CHIP mini PC, and the response from the community was over the top. It’s the first device of its kind that arrives at this price, and its makers are surely surprised at the sheer amount of support that they have received. They initially asked for just $50,000 (€45,000), but in just a few days they managed to raise more than $550,000 (€445,000), and they still have 25 days left in their campaign.
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Around two years back, Israeli company SolidRun launched CuBox-i, a line of ARM-powered 2-inch cube PCs with a starting price of $45. It’s now upping the ante on that front with a device it says is the “smallest ARM quad core 4GB mini computer” out there.
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The Raspberry Pi is a heck of a deal at just $35 but now there’s a new option that significantly undercuts the foundation’s popular PCB. Meet C.H.I.P., a tiny barebones system billed as the world’s first nine dollar computer.
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The Compute Stick does come with a USB port, to which you could attach a 500 gigabyte USB disk drive, but unfortunately Microsoft won’t let you install Windows to a USB drive, either. If you buy the Linux version of the Compute Stick, you’re probably stuck with Linux.
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Phones
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Android
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While Android Lollipop OTA updates are already available for the Sony Xperia and HTC One series devices, users are now anticipating the inevitable Android 5.1 roll out. In the sections below, we will look at the Android situation for the following devices – Sony Xperia Z3, Z2 and HTC One M7, M8.
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A new Android OTA update has been released recently for some select devices, bumping up their Android versions to Android 5.0.2 Lollipop.
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FaceTime is Apple’s video calling system, and when it was introduced Apple promised to make it open source. We’re still waiting. One day, we hope, we’ll be able to tell you how to get Apple FaceTime on Android. But until that day comes, we’ll keep you posted with all the alternatives on offer.
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The release notes proving that Motorola is ready to roll out the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Moto X 2013 and Moto X 2014 versions were finally unveiled, which means that the first two versions of the brand’s flagship smartphone will finally get the highly anticipated mobile operating system.
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Google has introduced an interesting new feature to the Google Play Store after it began allowing users to pre-register for upcoming Android apps.
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Android M, the next version of the mobile OS from Google which will be unveiled at the upcoming Google I/O conference, will give users more control over their privacy, reports Bloomberg.
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Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge is reportedly bound to receive the latest Androids 5.1.1 Lollipop OS update and it will bring dramatic improvements in the camera features of both devices.
SamMobile cited sources who were close to Samsung saying that the South Korean tech company is working on a big software update that will be pushed to Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. The camera update is similar to what HTC One M9 received that greatly improved the quality of the photos.
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A report citing people familiar with the matter suggest that Google has plans to give Android users more control over what information the apps they install can access. The app permissions on Android are expected to receive more detailed choices, according to the report.
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While traditionally iOS has seen higher mobile ad revenues than Android, this trend saw a reversal in the last quarter as per the new State of Mobile Advertising report by Opera Mediaworks.
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What’s one of the easiest ways to breathe in new life in your phone’s interface is by giving it an icon overhaul. There are already a great lot of totally awesome and beautiful icon packs for Android.
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Corbin Davenport already has some impressive smartwatch hacks to his name, but his latest coding effort may well be his best yet: The teenager has managed to get the original Macintosh II software running on Android Wear (specifically the Samsung Gear Live watch).
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A screenshot instigated all the frenzy but even before that, Sony had already made preliminary hints that Sony Xperia Z handsets are on the verge of getting an Android 5.0.2 bump.
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In today’s open source roundup: Nintendo prepares games for smart devices. Plus: A $9 computer that runs Debian. And a Linux rootkit users graphics cards to hide itself
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The Nexus Player is Google’s set-top box. Built by Asus and announced alongside the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, the Nexus Player brings Android Lollipop to your TV.
It acts as a bridge, giving Google an avenue to providing content for your TV and leverages a number of familiar technologies and services to do so. For those in the Google ecosystem, it seems like an easy option.
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This week the makers of open source home media centre application Kodi formerly known as XBMC have announced the release a new official Kodi Remote App designed specifically for Android devices.
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Arne Exton, the creator of numerous Linux distros, had the pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability of a new build of his custom Android-x86 project, based on Android KitKat 4.4.4 and designed to allow users to run Android on their computers.
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Life’s not so good when you’re stuck in the shadow of a big rival with deep pockets, but if anything can drag LG into the sunlight, it’s the new G4. LG’s flagship Android smartphone for 2015, the G4 takes what we loved about the G3 before it – and made it into the Android-to-have among those in the know – and hits the boost button. Screen, camera, performance, all have been in line for an upgrade. Nonetheless, the rest of the mobile world hasn’t stood still either, so does the G4 have what it takes to push back against Samsung’s excellent Galaxy S6?
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Qualcomm Atheros, Lantiq (part of Intel) and Broadcom have appointed representatives to the board of the Prpl (‘purple’) Foundation, organisation set-up by Imagination Technologies to support open-source software on the MIPS architecture.
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Events
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Held in Tirana and with attention on gathering free libre open source technology users, developers, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the same idea. Oscal aimed to inform and promote that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone. The conference is supported and organized by Open Labs, the community that promotes free libre open source culture in Albania since 2012.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today we’re excited to announce two new additions to the leadership team at Mozilla, one joining us for the first time today, and the other returning.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As anyone pursuing a big data initiative knows, every big data strategy really has two components: the technology and the people. The technology part is actually very simple to solve, relative to the people. As long as you’re not trying to crack big data problems with relational database technology from 2004, this piece of the equation shouldn’t be a big scary beast.
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Just a few months ago, Pivotal announced that it would open source its entire big data stack: the Pivotal HD distribution, Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal GemFire real-time distributed data store, Pivotal SQLFire (a SQL layer for the real-time distributed data store), Pivotal GemFire XD (in-memory SQL over HDFS) and the Pivotal HAWQ parallel query engine over HDFS. These updates, says Michael Cucchi, senior director of Outbound Product at Pivotal, underscore Pivotal’s continued commitment to supporting that open source strategy.
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CMS
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Education
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Koha is a concept from Maori culture that can be translated as gift, present, offering, donation, or contribution. And, isn’t that concept the ethos of open source culture?
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Funding
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Besides the six new X.Org projects this summer, there’s also a lot of other interesting projects being pursued over the next few months via Google’s annual Summer of Code initiative.
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BSD
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DragonFlyBSD developers continue porting over code from the Linux kernel’s i915 DRM driver for supporting newer Intel graphics features on BSD. The latest work is for matching the DragonFlyBSD’s ported Intel driver up through the code found in the Linux 3.14 kernel.
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The first beta of GhostBSD 10.1, the desktop-focused distribution using the FreeBSD kernel with MATE Desktop Environment, is now available.
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Openness/Sharing
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Here at Opensource.com, the staff, community moderators, and contributors strive to show how the ideas underpinning open source go beyond technology and apply to all aspects of life and society. Imagine organizing a conference around that idea.
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Open Hardware
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Surrounded by small yet sturdy pieces of 3D-printed plastic, a Macintosh and a couple of 3D-printers, sits 22-year-old Diwakar Vaish at New Delhi-based A-SET Training & Research Institute’s robotics lab watching a robot move its mechanical joints to groovy songs from old Bollywood movies. Vaish, who has a faint smile playing along his lips while watching the show, has jolted the robotics sector with his new first ever 3D-printed humanoid robot.
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But what about the motors themselves? For his entry to The Hackaday Prize, [Shane] is designing an open source engine. It’s small, it’s a two-stroke, and it’s diesel, but it’s completely open hardware; a great enabling project for all the open source dirt bikes and microcombines.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Khronos Group today announced the official release of the SYCL 1.2 specification. SYCL is the Khronos Group’s single-source heterogeneous programming language that serves as an abstraction layer for utilizing OpenCL while writing standard C++ code.
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Hardware
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Security
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Lots of chatter in my news feeds the last few days about Oracle allegedly hiring most of Nebula’s OpenStack devs. Trouble is it’s not entirely accurate.
[...]
I can’t speak to the rest of Nebula staff, and no doubt some of them have landed at Oracle – but not all.
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Hackers will put Internet-connected embedded devices to the test at the DefCon 23 security conference in August. Judging by the results of previous Internet-of-Things security reviews, prepare for flaws galore.
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Recently, I have received a large amount of subscription confirmation emails. These mails are from public mailing lists, especially lists of Free and Open Source Projects, included but not limited to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, GNU Project, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Qt. The “subscribers” are from multiple IP addresses. After I shared my experience to social networks, I have found more than 10 victims of the same attack, included a famous Chinese tech-blog writer. One of us received more than 10k email for 24 hours. Some of our emails have already stopped operating and refusing all new incoming emails.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’
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Censorship
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Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she said, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller promises to continue with such “freedom of speech” events. ISIS is now threatening to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the right and the center-right have essentially blamed her for the gunmen’s attack, just as far too many, last January, surreptitiously pardoned the Kouachi brothers and, with consummate perfidy to human decency, inculpated the satirical cartoonists they slaughtered, saying “Charlie Hebdo asked for it.”
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Privacy
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The Conservatives are already planning to introduce the huge surveillance powers known as the Snoopers’ Charter, hoping that the removal from government of the Liberal Democrats that previously blocked the controversial law will allow it to go through.
The law, officially known as the Draft Communications Data Bill, is already back on the agenda according to Theresa May. It is expected to force British internet service providers to keep huge amounts of data on their customers, and to make that information available to the government and security services.
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Faced with criticism from lawmakers and civil rights groups, the U.S. Department of Justice has begun a review of the secretive use of cellphone surveillance technology that mimics cellphone towers, and will get more open on its use, according to a newspaper report.
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Information security professionals were overwhelmingly opposed to a plea to rethink encryption by the Department of Homeland Security at last week’s RSA conference.
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Civil Rights
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But it’s too late for that now. All the money – $16,000 in cash – that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.
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The ACLU has a “new” app available that allows users to record interactions with the police and automatically upload them to the ACLU’s servers to preserve the footage in case the phone is seized… or smashed on the ground.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)
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Send this to a friend
05.10.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Those GNU/Linux PCs don’t disappear just because they don’t hit StatCounter’s sites.
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Server
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Containers are a very promising and exciting technology that solve a class of problems for which we haven’t had great tools in the past. In particular, web-scale applications that are very large and very demand-driven are in a great position to take advantage of containers. This class of applications is well-suited for being constructed with a set of very small services, called microservices, that are self-healing and self-scaling.
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Kernel Space
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After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.0.2 and Linux kernel 3.19.7, Greg Kroah-Hartman was happy to announce a new maintenance version of the LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel 3.14, which means that all users of 3.14 kernel series must upgrade immediately.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the new maintenance version of LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel 3.14. The new Linux kernel 3.14.41 LTS has fixed issues in the ARM, ARM64, PowerPC, Xtensa, x86, c6x, MIPS, Unicore, and SPARC architectures.
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My first experience with systemd could not have been worse. Suddenly, after upgrading KDE from Debian unstable, my monitor could not display at its highest resolution. Booting displayed errors because I was not using GNOME. Even worse, I had to search for how to turn off my computer, and even then could only do so from the root account. All this seemed a high price to pay for an init replacement, but I reserved judgment until I knew enough to develop an informed opinion.
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Applications
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3.14 is now available in Debian unstable and Ubuntu wily. As usual, for older releases you can just grab the deb and install it, it works on all supported Debian and Ubuntu releases.
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Just as SFLphone, Ring is also fully standard compliant and inter-operable with existing communication infrastructure such as most enterprise SIP phones and accounts.
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Version numbers for the current man-pages release had been getting uncomfortably high, so that I’d been thinking about bumping to a new major version for a while, and now that the Linux kernel has just done that, it seems an opportune moment do likewise. So, here we have it: man-pages-4.00, my 166th man-pages release.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Another few weeks have passed, and another release of Wine has been released. It has the usual assortment of bug fixes and a few new features.
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Games
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A new action adventure game is heading our way in the form of HUSH. The game is inspired by childish nightmares and fears, which sounds pretty fun if they do it right.
They confirmed in a recent announcement on their greenlight page that Linux will be officially supported. It’s nice to see a developer on Greenlight who not only lists Linux as a platform, but actually makes an announcement stating it. Makes me feel like they are invested in it, unlike other projects that list Linux as a platform and drop out on supporting it.
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You might not remember, but we had the Publisher of Two Worlds II confirm to us multiple times that Two Worlds II would come to Linux, and then things got confusing, but now one of the actual developers has confirmed it will happen.
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They are part of a series as Star Trek Judgement Rites takes place right after Star Trek 25th Anniversary. Apparently a mission in Judgement Rites is a direct sequel to the final mission in the 25th Anniversary game too.
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Vertiginous Golf is an unlikely mix of minigolf and a narrative that has just come out of Early Access and is making its début on Steam for Linux.
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Valve has recently gone through a major PR debacle after the company announced that it’s implementing paid mods for games and Skyrim in particular. Their decision was short-lived, and it was retracted, but they have managed to incur the rage of the community. Independent developers are now working on a new game launcher that will make Steam obsolete.
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The highly anticipated GOG Galaxy client has arrived for Windows & Mac in beta form, but sadly not for Linux yet.
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It took longer than we liked, but Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth now has the winter update. You can now play with your Mac & Windows friends again.
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More GOG news today folks! Fantasy General is new to GOG and comes with a Linux version, so for the fans of classic games here’s another to check out.
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Another survival game, but is it one I can actually get into? It’s another Early Access game, and I’ve taken a look. As usual I’m pulling no punches here, and I’m being brutally honest.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The 2015 Edition of the GNOME Asia Summit that is taking place in Depok, Indonesia started today.
GNOME Asia Summit 2015 promises several days of learning, community building and fun.
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Linux distributions can be separated into various categories based on use case and the intended target group. Server, education, games and multimedia are some of the most popular categories of Linux distros.
For security conscious users, however, there’s a growing niche of distros aimed at protecting your privacy. These distros help ensure you don’t leave a digital footprint as you go about navigating the web.
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New Releases
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The status of the 4MLinux 12.0 series has been changed to STABLE. Major modifications in the core of the system, which now includes the GNU C Library 2.21. Additionally, PAE support has been enabled in the Linux kernel. The most important new applications are: Asunder (CD-ripping program), aTunes (audio player), and Chrome (web browser). The net browsing software available in 4MLinux has been significantly improved (see: the 4MLinux Blog).
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Red Hat Family
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It’s time for more standards in the open source Linux containers world. So says Red Hat (RHT), which has published a call for developers of containerization platforms, such as Docker, to adopt a standardized approach to building, packaging and distributing container-based apps.
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Enterprises are under pressure to deliver new applications fast; however, many factors, including rigid proprietary stacks, inflexible licensing agreements, and cultural silos in IT can prevent enterprises from achieving the agility they need to stay competitive. Enterprises are increasingly implementing DevOps methodologies, and technologies that complement them, to break down siloed communications between development and operations teams and accelerate application development and delivery. As DevOps adoption increases, so does the demand for technologies that complement DevOps methodologies and enable high productivity of developers and operations teams working closely together.
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Fedora
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In a potpourri of stories today, Red Hat’s Lennart Poettering spoke to an audience at CoreOS Fest on how systemd can help with containers. Bruce Byfield is “learning to live with systemd.” Fedora developer Christian Schaller shared some of the response he’s received to “What are we still missing for you to switch to Fedora Workstation?” Also, Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” is “planned for the end of June.”
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Quite a few people did bring up that our Optimus support wasn’t great. Luckily I know Bastien Nocera is working on something there based on work by Dave Arlie, so hopefully this is one we can check off soon.
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So a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the work robyduck and the Fedora websites team have been putting in on the new websites for Fedora, primarily, spins.fedoraproject.org and labs.fedoraproject.org.
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As this concern was raised in several places already, I would like to announce that the RPM Fusion free repository is published since few days for Fedora 22.
At this time, only the free section is available, but it’s also there for armhfp at the same time as i686 and x86_64. (no aarch64 but that’s can be a secondary step if I manage to have a builder).
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In the last few years, Red Hat’s portfolio of products and future directions have greatly expanded. No longer just a producer of a Linux distribution, Red Hat is pursuing revenue sources in application middleware, both IaaS and PaaS pieces of the cloud, and containers. They also have engineers working on a multitude of open source solutions that enhance these basic products, adding flesh to the framework they set up. But where does the Fedora Community fit into this expanded roster of technologies? The Fedora Product has been very focused on “A Linux Distro” for a number of years but the Fedora Community is very broad and multi-talented. I’m hoping that Denise’s talk will provide an entrypoint for Fedora Contributors to start talking about what new directions they can take the Project in that would align with Red Hat’s needs. There’s a number of difficulties to work out (for instance, how does Fedora keep its identity while at the same time doing more work on these things that have traditionally been “Upstream Projects”) but we can’t even begin to solve those problems until we understand where our partner in this endeavour wants to go.
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Debian Family
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So, following the Jessie release, and after a quick approval by the release team for the 4.12 transition, we’ve uploaded Xfce 4.12 to sid and have asked the RT to schedule the relevant binNMUs for the libxfce4util and xfce4-panel reverse dependencies.
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Debian published Jessie last month. Big congratulations to the release team and all the contributors; quality is again at the rendez-vous!
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Now that Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) came to an end, Canonical’s developers have just published the first snapshots, or daily builds as they call them, for the upcoming operating system.
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Ubuntu’s race to beat Windows 10 to smartphone-PC convergence has a massive potential roadblock ahead of it: The adaptable interface depends on the Unity 8 desktop with the Mir display server, new and untested technologies.
Unity 8 and Mir are currently used on Ubuntu phones, but Unity 8 is far from ready for desktop PCs. Ubuntu developers are currently discussing getting Unity 8 ready to be the default desktop as part of the Ubuntu Online Summit.
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So, you’ve just installed the recently released Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system, and you’re interested in changing the default look (wallpaper and icons) with some awesome ones.
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When the first Ubuntu phone launched, it was only available via limited-time “flash sales.” If you missed them, rejoice! You can now purchase an Ubuntu phone like you would any other product—if you live in the European Union, at least.
The phone in question here is the BQ Aquarius E4.5 Ubuntu Edition. It’s now available for purchase on BQ’s website for €169.90, or about $181 US. This is the same price the phone was offered in via flash sales, but those are done. Want an Ubuntu phone and live in the EU? You can get one for less than two hundred euros.
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The Mate desktop started as GNOME 2 fork back in 2011, when the Linux systems adopted GNOME 3. Today, MATE is available by default on Fedora, Arch Linux, Linux Mint and BSD (and forks of this systems).
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Not long ago, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that the development of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf has been officially started. Today, Canonical has just published the first Ubuntu 15.10 Daily Builds, which do not bring too many changes to the Ubuntu 15.04 (yet).
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, the Linux Mint developers have announced that a RC version of Linux Mint 17.2 will be released in June 2015 and will include important new features, updates and bug-fixes. Among others, a newer kernel will be added, the code base will switched most likely to Ubuntu 14.10 and Cinnamon 2.6 and Mate 1.10 will be available on the Cinnamon and Mate flavors.
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Tucked away in a small office on a side street in the historic industrial zone of West Oakland, something magical is happening.
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Phones
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Android
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Google has announced the schedule for Google I/O 2015, its developer conference scheduled to take place later this month.
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It’s always a little concerning when a battery management app needs access to your location and contacts. According to Bloomberg, Google’s poised to ease that anxiety by improving control over what apps can access in Android. According to its sources, an update to the operating system — possibly coming ant Google’s I/O event this month — would allow users to switch off access to things individually, similar to how app management in Facebook works. Features like those described were discovered in Android, hidden, as far back as 2013. If you’re using one of Android’s most famous forks, you’ve had them since 2011. Google eventually removed the hidden controls, perhaps to prevent incomplete tools from interfering with apps not primed for the change, but now it seems they’re ready for prime time. How will your torch cope without knowing all your friends’ names, and where you are? We’ll just have to wait and see.
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Google Inc. is planning to give its mobile users more control over what information applications can access, people familiar with the matter said.
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Starting with Glu’s Terminator Genisys: Revolution mobile game, you can now pre-register for apps from the Play store.
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Wearables are slowly but surely making their way into our daily lives, but one very critical aspect—health—is already helping to bring them mainstream. It’s something that every person is conscious of on a daily basis, and wearable device makers—as evidenced by the countless fitness trackers on the market—want to make it easier to stay on top of exercise, diet, and more. But another aspect of our health, chronic illness, is also big opportunity for wearables to make a difference—and they already are.
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Android has ousted iOS to wrest the numero uno spot for the favored platform, beating the latter both in terms of ad revenue and traffic.
The tide has turned in Android’s favor thanks to the global increase in demand for Android-based devices as opposed to iOS ones. The volume of consumers deploying Android is working to its advantage as reports reveal that “the Android ecosystem has started to overtake the one surrounding the iPhone.”
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OpenStack is backed by an involved community of developers, as well as leading vendors including HP, IBM, Intel, RedHat, Rackspace and AT&T. The project’s website features a portal with links to user groups around the world.
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Events
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EMC is one of the biggest technology companies in the world and has its fingers in a lot of pies, offering everything from storage and cloud solutions to anti-hacker defences.
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EMC’s move to make its ViPR software-defined storage platform open source (as Project CoprHD) appears a bold one, but I can’t help thinking it looks like the giant from Hopkinton, MA, has been been subject to forces too strong to resist.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Despite the fact that the Mozilla developers have neglected Thunderbird lately, they are now working at bringing major improvements to their email client, Thunderbird 38 (currently beta). Among others, support for the Yahoo! Messenger chat protocol will be implemented, a new feature for filtering both archived emails and sent emails will be added.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Tech giant Google is throwing down the cloud Relevant Products/Services gauntlet. The company is making the same database that powers Google Search, Gmail and Google Analytics available to the masses via its Google Cloud Platform.
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Business
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Fortnum & Mason has opted for the Spree open-source e-commerce platform to underpin its new website.
Headed up by customer experience director Zia Zareem-Slade, former head of digital at Selfridges, the 300-year-old retailer has revamped its digital presence with a multichannel site based on responsive design targeted at the mobile era.
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Funding
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Open source webmail client Roundcube has begun an Indiegogo campaign to raise funding for what it calls Roundcube ‘Next’. With Roundcube Next, they plan to use new web technologies to bring Roundcube up to date, the process will involve porting existing over to the new project and even rewriting code.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Gnubik Version 2.4.2 has been released.
Gnubik is a 3D single player game which displays an interactive cube similar to the well known Rubik Cube.
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Public Services/Government
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The ‘R’ tool is used in different disciplines such as retail, financial services, health research, weather modelling, astronomy, psychology, and social sciences.
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Open Source tools for data science domains such as data mining, analytics and big data, previously used in the Information Technology (IT) industry, are increasingly becoming important for governments across the world, said Graham Williams, a data scientist at Togaware and the Australia Taxation office.
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Openness/Sharing
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“VisibleTesla” an open source app created by Joe Pasqua helps ‘Tesla Model S’ owners to record the status of their vehicle’s systems along with scheduling automated commands.
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Let’s take a look at the notion that the big data revolution was some kind of “overnight sensation” that magically appeared with no warning. In reality, the big data revolution began more than a decade ago. It was ignited by search companies like Google and Yahoo, whose business models required new frameworks and techniques for processing huge amounts of data very rapidly.
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A little less than a week ago, Dr. Hong Sheng Chiong took the TEDxAuckland stage with a blow to the audience. An eye doctor born and raised in Borneo, medically trained in Ireland, and now practicing in Gisborne Hospital, New Zealand. One of the first speaker to receive a overwhelming response from the two thousand strong audience. He concluded his speech with “Ending preventable blindness is my fight, what’s yours?” and deservedly received the first standing ovation in two years.
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Open Data
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On June 1st, the Dutch ‘Leer- en Expertisepunt Open Overheid’ (Open Government Learning and Expertise Centre) will organise a learning session on Open Data for Dutch provinces. The meeting is aimed at people working in the provinces who want to know more about open data.
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The Toilet Map Vienna was the first Open Data application of the City of Vienna in May 2011, which the public toilets by means of augmented reality app Wikitude makes the smartphone visible. Although in this app the directly engage in extension benefits of open data was easily recognizable, there was in consequence also often criticized by the Open Data community: the data provider would often publish only “uncritical” records, as in about locations of dog feces Ackerl donor instead budget data ( whereby the latter by the increasing availability of budget data on https://www.offenerhaushalt.at/ has at least been significantly improved at the community level).
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Open Hardware
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Those of you who visited the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, the Netherlands in October 2014 might still remember a very interesting collaboration called Keyshapes. A combination of three intriguing projects by the Belgian Unfold, the American Jesse Howard (USA) and the Dutch Kirschner 3D projects, this exposition in a nutshell was seeking to reinterpret manufacturing. All three projects sought to revolutionize design and creation by asking themselves how manufacturing can make our surroundings more environmentally friendly and how design itself can be reinterpreted.
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Dog carts are common but clunky. These little carts, attached to disabled dogs via straps and webbing, are often expensive and rarely cool. Now, however, you can get your disabled dog some sweet open-source wheels for the price of a quick 3D print and some rubber.
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Legitimacy is a different question to legality. The government is undoubtedly legal under the current rotten system, but its legitimacy is a different question entirely. Legitimacy lies on the popular consent of the governed. With an extreme government supported by only 23% of the population, actively planning to inflict actual harm on many more than 23% of the population, there are legitimate philosophical questions to be asked about the right of the government to rule. With so many, particularly but not exclusively young people, now reading sources like this one and not being enthralled by the mainstream media, today’s protest is but a start.
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State propaganda and corporate media are wasting no time in promoting their candidate for leader of the pretend opposition: Chuka Umunna. He ticks absolutely all the right boxes. Private school educated, son of a High Court judge (which did not hold back his career to become a multi-millionaire lawyer) and entirely London based. Umunna has only ever moved out of the M25 on an aeroplane.
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Science
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Large corporations such as Amazon, Ebay, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are as much data science companies as they are leaders of specific domains.
Global data science market is projected to be worth $320 billion by year 2020, says Graham Williams, data scientist at data processor company Togaware as well as the Australia Taxation Office.
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The open source tools for data science domains such as data mining, analytics and big sata, previously used mostly by IT Industry, are increasingly becoming important for governments around the world, said Graham Williams, data scientist at Togaware and Australia Taxation Office. He was speaking at the three-day Workshop on “Data Mining and Analytics with R”, organized by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) at Technopark.
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Transparency Reporting
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Non-disparagement clauses are one of the stupidest things any company can enact. In most cases, it’s almost impossible to enforce them, no matter how artfully crafted. Most aren’t. Most non-disparagement clauses found lying around the internet have been lazily copied and pasted from pre-existing bad ideas instituted by other companies.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The climate-change-as-new-world-order-conspiracy trope is going strong south of the equator, with the chairman of Australia’s Business Advisory Council claiming that climate science is filled with “dud predictions.” Maurice Newman, who previously served as chancellor of Macquarie University and headed up the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, expressed his views in an opinion piece (subscriber only) published Friday in The Australian.
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Finance
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Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström tried to convince MEPs that there are ways to keep the Investment-State Dispute Settlement in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership deal (TTIP). But unimpressed lawmakers failed to greet it as a full-fledged reform.
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Censorship
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BBC Worldwide has sent tens of thousands of takedown requests to Google this week, but not all reported links are as bad as they claim. In fact, the company is targeting the IMDb pages of several of its own shows, including Top Gear and The Game, as well as one of Dailymotion’s homepages.
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Privacy
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Simon and I have known each other for years, way back to 2002, when he gave one of the earliest Winston Awards to David Shayler, in recognition of his work towards trying to expose surveillance and protect privacy. That award ceremony, hosted by comedian and activist Mark Thomas, was one of the few bright points in that year for David and me — which included my nearly dying of meningitis in Paris and David’s voluntary return to the UK to “face the music”; face the inevitable arrest, trial and conviction for a breach of the Official Secrets Act that followed on from his disclosures about spy criminality.
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Last week artist Davide Dormino unveiled his sculpture celebrating whistleblowers in Alexanderplatz, Berlin.
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We recently wrote about some dangerous terms of service from a big prison messaging service, JPay, in which the company claimed to flat out own any content that anyone sent through its service. While the company itself did not appear to be doing stupid things to enforce this, this clause did allow prison guards to put one prisoner in solitary confinement after his sister posted a video he had sent via JPay to social media. The prison claimed it was doing so to protect JPay’s intellectual property.
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The most recent example being retiring Classic Maps. That’s a problem, because the current Maps mysteriously doesn’t show most of my saved (“starred”) places. Google has known about this since at least 2013. There are posts all over their forums about it going back to when what is now “regular” Google Maps was beta. Google employees even knew about it and did nothing. For someone that made heavy use of it, this was quite annoying.
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As soon as my article about how NSA computers can now turn phone conversations into searchable text came out on Tuesday, people started asking me: What should I do if I don’t want them doing that to mine?
The solution, as it is to so many other outrageously invasive U.S. government tactics exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is, of course, Congressional legislation.
I kid, I kid.
No, the real solution is end-to-end encryption, preferably of the unbreakable kind.
And as luck would have it, you can have exactly that on your mobile phone, for the price of zero dollars and zero cents.z
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Civil Rights
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In my view this, to date, includes the four wars — on drugs, terror, the internet, and whistleblowers. No doubt the number will continue to rise.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Federal Communications Commission today denied the requests of five broadband industry trade groups that asked for an immediate halt to the reclassification of Internet service providers as common carriers subject to Title II regulation.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A new Hollywood commission report investigating the revenue sources of more than 600 supposedly infringing sites has controversially included file-hosting site Mega. The listing marks the second time in a matter of months that the cloud-storage service has been accused of online piracy via an industry-connected report. Yet again, the report’s authors are refusing to comment.
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An intriguing case dating back more than 3.5 years ended this week when two men went on criminal trial in Sweden. One was the former sysop of a 26,000 member private BitTorrent tracker. The other provided the site with web hosting and allegedly refused to take the site down when copyright holders asked.
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Send this to a friend
05.09.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Every so often I get the pleasure of writing a review where the biggest challenge is finding something, anything, to nitpick in order to ensure I don’t sound like I’ve been bought off by the company. Such is the case with the Meerkat, by System76. A small device that, at first blush, one might think a toy. I can assure you, this 4.5” by 4.5” device performs with the power of a machine three or four times its size.
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Server
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The world of application container virtualization is relatively nascent, but it’s growing fast. Initially, Docker commanded much of the hype and attention, but this week in particular CoreOS has been grabbing headlines, thanks in part to its CoreOS Fest event. Now Intel is jumping into the fray, with a new server effort that backs a particular flavor of CoreOS’s container Linux approach.
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Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet many wonderful individuals at conferences. A conference is a unique setting that lends itself to quick exchanges and brief meetings. Every once in a while, however, there’s a connection made that instantly turns into a great friendship.
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As Docker and container technologies continue to evolve, a whole ecosystem of adjunct tools are going to take shape too, including monitoring tools. Software analytics company New Relic has announced a set of new features in its Software Analytics Platform that are designed to enable greater control over microservices, including Docker monitoring.
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New Relic, which provides software analytics, is expanding its platform to monitor Docker containers and microservices in a move that takes it deeper into the enterprise.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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We can all admire the vast number of open source apps and tools that are available on modern operating systems. They come in all shapes and sizes. Small console tools that can be easily integrated into large projects, feature-rich apps that offer everything bar the the kitchen sink, well designed tools, and eye catching candy. Open source software holds numerous compelling advantages over proprietary software.
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Just this morning Lubomir released NetworkManager 1.0.2, the latest of the 1.0 stable series. It’s a great cleanup and bugfix release with contributions from lots of community members in many different areas of the project!
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Proprietary
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Opera 31 (31.0.1857.0) Dev has been released, being available for all the major desktop platforms: Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
It is based on Chromium 44 and brings interesting new features, like: Encrypted Media Extensions like Widevine DRM, enhanced Bookmarks Bar and touch support for tab dragging.
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Instructionals/Technical
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With the recent release of Ubuntu 15.04, aka “Vivid Vervet”, the Ubuntu community has also unveiled an early release of LXD (pronounced “lex-dee”), a new project aimed at revitalizing the use of LXC and LXC-based containers in the face of application container efforts such as Docker and rkt. In this post, I’ll provide a quick introduction to LXD.
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Games
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The developers behind the popular PlayOnLinux project, an open-source and cross-platform application that has been designed from the ground up to act as a user-friendly interface to the well-known Wine project, has released PlayOnLinux 4.2.7.
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Minecraft is a hugely popular game that runs on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and even smartphones. It’s the best-selling PC game of all time and has become a worldwide sensation with obsessive players around the world, a large online community, and a vast array of merchandise. Many people enjoy building complicated structures and even creating their own interactive systems using only the mechanics of the game.
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It looks like Evolve will be coming to Linux sooner rather than later, thanks to more goodness from the SteamDB resource.
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Today, CryTek’s Brand Manager, Marcel Hatam was kind enough to push this announcement in our direction, outlining a “small, but important” update to the EULA for their Engine as a Service platform, confirming that the long awaited Linux client release of the CryEngine is near on the horizon.
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Version 9.8 of the Google Maps app for Android brings three changes that seek to enhance your user experience. You’ll now be able to add multiple photos at a time, hide scheduled events on location cards, and you can pull up all scheduled events with new commands. Here’s how to use each:
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Out of eight games in the latest Humble Weekly Bundle, seven are available for Linux. And it’s a good mix of popular games from indie label Surprise Attack.
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MadSpace: To Hell and Beyond is a rather obscure late 90s sci-fi FPS/Space combat game. Thanks to Night Dive Studios this rather unique game has been re-released and is now available on Steam.
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I do a fair few articles covering Linux sales statistics with lots of different developers, and today is the day for Among the Sleep from Krillbite.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Budgie is a new desktop environment that has been making quite a few waves into the Linux community. It’s used to power the Solus operating system, and a new version has been released, pushing the version number to 8.2.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I started out trying to color ink drawings in GIMP with a mouse! That never turned out very well, haha. I talked my parents into getting me a little wacom bamboo tablet for Christmas when I was in… 9th grade, I think?
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Okay, so I’ve wanted to do a tutorial for transform masks for a while now, and this is sorta ending up to be a flower-drawing tutorial. Do note that this tutorial requires you to use Krita 2.9.4 at MINIMUM. It has a certain speed-up that allows you to work with transform masks reliably!
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The KDE system monitor needs an update. In the first step we like to ask you to join the brainstorming about requirements. What do you want integrated into KSysGuard?
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You get to see and hear Riddell, Rick Timmis, Aaron Honeycutt (ahoneybun), and ovidiu-florin, and pick up a few tricks from the video.
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Users are often confused by the current KWallet system behavior. When their computers start, they enter the KDE session password but just after logging-in, they are prompted yet another password, for something named KWallet. Sometimes, they even see several password prompts from KWallet, depending on their precise desktop configuration.
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KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.10.0.
KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It’s that time of the year again: GNOME.Asia Summit at Universitas Indonesia in Depok (Indonesia)! On Thursday some workshops took place how to contribute to GNOME translation and documentation and how to start coding.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Dominique Leuenberger from the openSUSE Tumbleweed development team announced today, May 8, what was implemented this week on the Tumbleweed version of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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With parts of the emerging application container infrastructure moving ahead on separate tracks, a key player is reiterating its support for a set of open standards for packaging, orchestration and distribution of application containers.
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Red Hat, a provider of open source software solutions, has made a strategic investment in VMTurbo, a demand-driven control platform for the software-defined data center.
VMTurbo plans to use the funds to develop its control platform, improve adoption of demand-driven control in OpenStack deployments, and increase support to VMTurbo’s growing customer base.
Charles Crouchman, CTO of VMTurbo, said: “Our demand-driven control platform, tightly integrated with Red Hat CloudForms and the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, makes OpenStack deployments more resilient, performant and agile.”
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Red Hat, one of the early Linux pioneers and the first billion dollar open source company, is taking on another pioneering role in enterprise software by putting forth the idea of creating standards for containers. To that end, Red Hat is pushing the development and the adoption of four key standards areas within the Linux community: isolation, packaging format, orchestration, and distribution.
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The systemd developer produced an initialization system that no one liked, but everyone adopted for use with Linux containers. Are his days as a target over?
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This major version release updates Apache httpd and the versions of Apache Tomcat to recent versions, including updates to all of the mod* extensions for httpd, and the version of Hibernate for the JWS Plus product.
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Tata Consultancy Services (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, has been awarded the prestigious recognition of “System Integrator Partner of the Year” by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. Announced during the annual Red Hat North America Partner Awards on April 8 in Orlando, Florida, recipients were honored for their ability to successfully deliver innovative open source solutions to customers in the commercial and public sector channels.
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Fedora
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Flock is Fedora’s big annual conference for contributors and developers, where we meet to plan for — and hack on — the future of the project. This year’s event will be August 12-15 in Rochester, New York. The call for papers is complete, and we received 132 submissions. That’s more than we can accommodate, of course, so please vote now on your favorites.
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We again met at Starbucks Coffee, Indiranagar on May 2, 2015 at 6 PM for our monthly Fedora meetup in Bangalore. Like the meetup in the month of April, there were only 2 attendees: myself and Sayan Chowdhury. Well, we are used to such things and were not disheartened.
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Debian Family
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In my previous post I looked at the possibility of using rake, a Ruby build tool, instead of make to write debian/rules files. While that turned out to not be entirely impossible as far as the core dpkg-* utilities used to build Debian packages are concerned, wiring it up with the debhelper ‘dh’ command sequencer appears unfortunately impossible without changes to dh itself.
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We can’t possibly express how good Debian 8.0 really is. It is simply fantastic.
It has found the exact balance between being a distribution for advanced Linux users and veterans alike. It is also usable enough for beginners to jump right in and learn something new. So many Linux distributions have tried to get this balance right, many have come close. None that we have tested here in the Labs have got it so accurate. Debian 8.0 simply could not be any more accurate and has struck the balance right on the head.
Debian 8.0 is undoubtedly the fastest and more responsive we have ever used. It is fast to install, boots instantly and is responsive like nothing we have experienced in a Linux distribution, to date. It sets a new benchmark for all other Linux distributions.
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The Debian project has just updated their official Wiki with a new entry called DontBreakDebian, which provides some helpful tips on how not to ruin your Debian installation by doing stuff that you’re not supposed to be doing.
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Derivatives
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Raspbian is a Linux distribution based on Debian built specifically for the Raspberry Pi platform. Developers have just implemented a huge update to it, and it’s now available for download and upgrade.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced plans to switch all versions of Ubuntu to its new Snappy package manager. The new tool offers the promise of greater stability and security for the system and applications.
Snappy already is used in Ubuntu core, a minimal version of Ubuntu intended for use in the cloud, on mobile devices and in embedded systems.
The next step is rolling Snappy into “Ubuntu Desktop Next”. Next is a special version of Ubuntu that acts as a test bed for new technology before it is included in the desktop version. Testers use Next to try out new features, such as Mir and Unity 8.
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When I first started out with Linux I used Mandrake (later Mandriva, then Mageia) and then openSUSE and the desktop environment that I used was KDE.
The first time I tried GNOME was with Ubuntu 8.04 and for years this set the standard. In what was seen as a controversial move at the time Ubuntu switched from GNOME to Unity and GNOME seemed to be heading in a direction aimed at losing its loyal support base.
At first Unity was hated by nearly everybody but with the release of Ubuntu 12.04 many people could see the benefits.
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Ubuntu’s race to beat Windows 10 to smartphone-PC convergence has a massive potential roadblock ahead of it: The adaptable interface depends on the Unity 8 desktop with the Mir display server, new and untested technologies.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet uses systemd as the default init service manager, replacing Canonical’s Upstart (sysVinit on Debian).
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The Ubuntu community is already spotting the operating systems in all kind of cool places, like NASA or The International Space station, but it looks like there is a Manga collection of comic books that details the adventures of Ubuntu users, usually trying to convince other people that it’s a perfectly good system.
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Canonical revealed details about a ClamAV vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04.
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We reported earlier this week that a vulnerability discovered recently in the Linux kernel packages of Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been addressed.
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Back in April, we announced that Canonical and Dell worked together on bringing the next-generation Ubuntu-based Dell XPS 13 laptop developer edition to the Ubuntu’s strong developer community, but the fact of the matter is that, at that point in time, Dell launched two laptops, the Dell XPS 13 and the Precision M3800 mobile workstation.
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C.H.I.P. is a new mini computer that aims to provide powerful hardware at the ridiculous price of just $9 (€8), not to mention the fact that it’s incredibly small.
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The cost of computing keeps getting lower as a project to launch a $9 machine takes to Kickstarter.
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The world’s first $9 computer is about to become a reality thanks to Next Thing Co. The California-based company launched a Kickstarter offering the development board called C.H.I.P.
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A new miniature computer that features all the same functionality as a regular PC has been developed by a US startup, costing just $9.
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As Make: points out, some of C.H.I.P.’s specs are similar to the BeagleBone Black: a 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM and 4GB storage. But C.H.I.P. has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity out of the box, and is of course is much cheaper than the BeagleBone Black. C.H.I.P. only has a composite video out port though, but maker Next Thing Co. – the same company behind the Otto GIF camera – will release VGA and HDMI shields for the computer.
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The world’s first $9 microcomputer to rival Raspberry Pi has landed on Kickstarter.
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When your latest project requires a bit more processing power than an Arduino provides then most Makers switch over to the Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone Black. Now there is another option. It’s called the C.H.I.P and it’s being sold as the world’s cheapest computer.
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Remember when the $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer seemed crazy cheap? Actually that is still a pretty good price for a computer that’s as versatile as the Pi.
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Development board lovers, some news for you today. Our friend Leon, with the assistance of his colleagues in the Konsulko Group, has successfully built Tizen:Common with Linux kernel 3.14.14 using Yocto. The target dev board is the HummingBoard-i2eX (Freescale i.MX6 SoC) and interestingly hardware accelerated graphics is supported in Wayland/Weston 1.6.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung Electronics is reportedly working on a new mobile cloud service called Samsung Artik, which is a Internet of Things (IoT) based cloud platform that would connect different devices made by the company. According to a trademark application that was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on April 27, Samsung applied for a cloud service called Samsung Artik (serial no. 86610549). The description for the service was for a “cloud computing system to connect, manage, and operate devices, in addition to M2M communication.”
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Android
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The device runs Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box.
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Google announced an update to Android Wear in April, making its debut on the LG Watch Urbane and rolling out to other devices in the family. It’s the most significant Wear update so far, a step change in functionality.
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Focus on user data privacy is tipped for Google’s next version of Android, to bring it in line with Apple’s iOS and custom Android versions such as Cyanogen
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Motorola has just started the soak test of the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Moto X (2014) 2nd generation smartphones across select countries. Along with the laundry list of bug fixes and tweaks, a couple of interesting features are also included.
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It has been a long wait for the Lollipop update for the Dell Venue 8 7840. Dell has missed several deadlines to get Lollipop rolled out to this device, but now it’s here. Android 5.0.2 is available for download from the update menu right now.
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Not long after Android 5.0 Lollipop started rolling out on various Android devices, the 5.1 version of the mobile OS began arriving in a number of Android-based gadgets, as well. According to Christian Today, the Moto X 1st generation and 2nd generation 2014 models will reportedly be receiving the update “as early as next week,” based on Motorola’s recent announcement regarding the new OS update.
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Warner Bros and NetherRealm Studios finally released the Android version of Mortal Kombat X this week, and for those who are a fan of either the Mortal Kombat series or just simply enjoy the mindless, indulgent swiping and tapping on screen within Netherrealm’s action games, this will be one to keep on the radar, or better yet just download immediately. Similar to the likes of the Injustice Gods Among Us or Batman Arkham Origins mobile adoptions, Mortal Kombat X is a simpler action game meant to mirror image the likes of a true fighting title, and although there is no free movement involved like an actual fighting game, there is enough action, eye candy, and interaction with the character movements to make it pretty enjoyable.
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The Nexus 9 isn’t the only device getting a 5.1 update today—Motorola has made the Android 5.1 update for the 2nd gen Moto X official and has started sending it out. The rollout is starting with a soak test in Brazil, but it shouldn’t be long before it hits all the Moto X variants.
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A new quick-access gesture in the latest Lollipop build turns on the phone’s flashlight with a wave of the wrist.
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Several variants and later iterations of the Sony Xperia Z have already received an Android Lollipop update, yet the original flagship Sony Xperia Z has gone un-updated so far. That’s no longer going to be the case, as the official OTA rollout for the Sony Xperia Z has an official release date.
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Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including a long-term review of the Galaxy S6 Edge, the iPhone 6 Plus Killer is launched in China, Lollipop reaches for a ten percent share, LG’s Urbane smartwatch, phablet fans switching to Apple, A/B testing for Android developers, I/O sessions and topics, and what does the ‘M’ stand for in Android M?
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In the past two weeks, we’ve seen the Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1 update and release start to develop. Samsung isn’t talking about its Galaxy Android 5.1 release just yet but thanks to a flurry of leaks, we now have a pretty good idea about what to expect from Samsung’s next big Lollipop update.
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While many people may have forgotten about it altogether, Amazon hasn’t left the users of its Fire smartphone behind. The company just released an update to the device that’s based on Android 4.4 “KitKat,” and provides the handful of loyal Fire phone users with some key, long-awaited improvements to the device.
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Google I/O kicks off by the end of the month, and the search giant has now put out the schedule for the event. While Android M is said to be one of the biggest announcements, Google also has some nifty details up its sleeve to reveal at its upcoming event. Here’s a quick look at what to expect at Google I/O.
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While many smartphone users might be considering a switch over from Android to iPhone – and recent sales data shows the iPhone 6 is a great incentive for doing that – others are interested in doing the exact opposite. Leaving behind one smartphone platform for another isn’t as simple a task as it may sound, especially if you want to take most of your data with you. However, Re/code has put together a neat guide that tells you how to move your most important data over from an iPhone to Android, including contacts, music, photos and even apps.
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Sometimes things just don’t work out. You invest a lot of time and energy (and money) into the relationship, but you’re not getting what you need. Or you fight constantly about everything, even though you’ve created some wonderful memories together. So, you decide it’s time to break up … with your phone.
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Whatever candy Google chooses as the nickname for its upcoming Android M update, it seems that M may also stand for “workplace.”
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Google is set to introduce A/B testing for Android developers at its I/O Conference (reports Amir Efrati at The Information). This will allow developers to run multiple variants of an applications profile in the Google Play store to test which choices offer the best results.
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The contents of a conference agenda often reveal quite a bit about the event in question. Case in point? An overzealous Googler posted an entry for an Android for Work session that seemingly confirms the existence of Android M, the next logical release of Google’s mobile operating system.
The timing and name make sense. Google’s historically progressed through the alphabet for Android version codenames, naming each after a distinctive dessert — last year was Android L, or Lollipop. The company typically showcases releases at its opening I/O address and issues a developer preview edition ahead of stabler releases in the months that follow.
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After spending roughly a month with the Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update this is our AT&T Galaxy S5 Android Lollipop review that covers the performance of this major update for the AT&T model.
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Google finally delivers a new Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update to the Nexus 7 with a collection of bug fixes wrapped up in a small update that is rolling out to many Nexus 7 devices right now. After spending a day with the Nexus 7 Android 5.1.1 update We want to share an early Android 5.1.1 review to help you decide if it is worth installing on your Nexus 7.
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The average free Android app silently connects to more than 100 different web addresses to serve adverts and track users, according to a paper from French research institute Eurecom.
The worst offenders found on the Google Play store connect to orders of magnitude of up to 20 times more sites. One app that does nothing more than control volume “connects to almost 2,000 distinct URLs” when it’s booted up on a phone
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The latest figures from Google show the adoption of Android Lollipop is rapidly increasing. From a 5.4 percent share of the active Android handset space at the start of April, version five of the mobile operating system is now on 9.7 percent of Android handsets communicating with the Google Play Store. That represents a month on month increase of 79.6 percent.
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LG’s newest smartwatch, the LG Watch Urbane, costs $350. So let me just throw it out there now: judging LG’s new Watch Urbane from a value perspective is sort of completely silly. When it comes to value, I don’t think any Android Wear watch has especially great appeal – after all, you’re paying as much or more for one than you would a relatively inexpensive smartphone, a smartphone that does many, many more things. But the Watch Urbane has even less value appeal than most Wear devices (not that this is at all fatal to its success as a product).
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The Android 5.0.2 update apparently is breaking some Nexus 9s. But it’s possible to reset your way out of it.
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Ever wish you could leave your phone at home and rely only on your smartwatch for a while? With Google’s latest Android Wear update — available now on the LG Watch Urbane and making its way to other Wear watches soon — you can.
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One of the more common things people need to do is transfer files from their mobile device or tablet to their desktop. Sometimes it’s a photo, sometimes it’s a song, and many other times it’s some sort of document, presentation, or other file that needs transferred. There are actually quite a few ways to transfer files from Android to PC (and back again) and we’ll take a look at them here.
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A slew of new Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1 release details have emerged today as Samsung works to update its devices with the latest version of Google’s Android Lollipop operating system.
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Wi-Fi connectivity has been one of the real headline features for Android Wear 5.1, and rightly so: this new functionality will allow your Android Wear device to stay connected to the internet even when your phone is nowhere to be found (so long as you have a saved Wi-Fi network nearby). Here’s what we’ve learned about the feature in using it so far, including a video primer of how to get it set up.
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It’s been awhile since Android app developers have felt that spark of innovation from Google’s app marketplace — but the company is reportedly about to play a cool hand.
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Typically when we talk about the Amazon Fire phone, it’s because Amazon has slashed the handset’s price in an attempt to get more folks to spring for its not-totally-well-received phone. That’s not the case today, though.
Amazon is pushing an update to the Fire phone that includes Fire OS 4.6.1. What’s notable about this update is that it bumps the Fire phone up to Android 4.4, which while not totally exciting now that Android 5.1 is out, is exciting for the Fire phone since it’s coming from Android 4.2.
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Today Android M was listed by Google in their collection of events for Google I/O. This is Google’s yearly developers conference, one where it’s common for Google to reveal a new flavor of Android – or at least major updates for flavors of Android. At this year’s Google I/O 2015, Google’s first mention of Android M has appeared. This will most likely end up being called Android Marshmallow. Meanwhile there’s a rumor that the Nexus 9 will be replaced amid some (relatively outlying) price drops abroad.
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Lollipop continues to chomp its way up the Android food chain.
Released Tuesday, the latest update of Google’s Android Developers Dashboard shows a collective share of 9.7 percent for Android 5.0 and 5.1 — both otherwise known as Lollipop.
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Now that Android 5.1.1 factory images have been posted for a number of Nexus devices, we are starting to see the rollout of over-the-air (OTA) updates to them, namely the Nexus 7 (2012) and (2013), Nexus 10, and Nexus Player. More will arrive soon (Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 4, and Nexus 9), so we are starting to compile a list of them all below. We know that many of you like to sideload updates rather than wait for them to hit your device – feel free to bookmark this one.
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The Nexus 9 already feels like the forgotten child of the Nexus program. Introduced only six or so months ago, this device seems to be the slowest of them all to receive timely updates. We aren’t sure if the tablet’s NVIDIA chip is to blame, if Google is mad at it for coming in “sand,” or if they keep confusing their whale phone for it, but the N9 has been stuck on Android 5.0.1 for quite some time. It hasn’t been updated to 5.0.2 or 5.1 or 5.1.1 to date. Look at our Android 5.1 OTA update list – see anything missing? Yep, only the Nexus 9 is without links to update files.
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Apple may have been right all along with the iPhone, at least according to the recent actions of several top Android device makers. There’s one smartphone feature that’s still important to many outspoken shoppers who choose Android over iPhone, but now that feature seems to be disappearing from flagship handsets in favor of an approach more like the one Apple has been taking since it first launched the iPhone in 2007.
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We’ve got some solid options for Android Wear watches, but let’s be honest: It’s been tough so far to single out any one of them as providing a truly great all-around user experience.
The Moto 360 is gorgeous but not without its issues. Sony’s SmartWatch 3 has lots of positives but also has a weird display that gets monochromatic and practically impossible to read in its dimmed state. Asus’s ZenWatch is pretty but with lackluster screen quality, meanwhile, and LG’s G Watch R has outstanding hardware but a clunky form (and let’s not even get into that awkwardly marked bezel).
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In its battle with Uber for passengers — and relevancy — Lyft has formed a national partnership with Verizon Wireless that the pair hope will steer more customers their way.
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Android Auto is rolling out, and it’s coming to major auto makers such as Acura, Chevy, Honda and more later this year. But you don’t have to wait to get directions, voice actions, music, apps and more behind the wheel. You can outfit your vehicle now with Pioneer’s NEX line of in-dash receivers.
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The Sprint variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 received the Android 5.0 Lollipop firmware update on Friday. The update came nearly three weeks after the network provider rolled it out and later pulled it back for the Galaxy S4 Spark variant that has the company’s enhanced Long-Term Evolution (LTE) service.
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Likely as the result of the well-deserved flack it’s caught over poor app security, Google’s made significant strides towards cutting down on the number of unscrupulous apps inhabiting the Play Store. And perhaps in recognition of the fact that no centralized system is perfect, the company’s planning to put part of curation in the hands of users. According to Bloomberg, a future update — presumably Android M — will give “more detailed choices over what apps can access.”
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Each wearable platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, if you’re already deeply invested into the iPhone ecosystem, the Apple Watch is the way to go. And if you’re an Android user, Android Wear makes sense. Neither is compatible with one another (although there’s a rumor that Google is working on an Android Wear app for iOS).
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So many pundits, bloggers and technology journalists focus on telling you what’s best. This is the best phone. These are the best apps. I do it too, though I often try to explain exactly why the device I’m covering is the best for the widest range of users. This time, however, I’m going to forget about what’s best for you and focus instead on what’s best for me. And if your priorities are at least somewhat aligned with mine, it’ll likely be what’s best for you as well.
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Vatican wants to save the human history in a digital form, and the best way to do so is to use open-source, non-proprietary software that will still be easily accessible and usable in 50 years, it says.
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The results from the annual Future Of Open Source survey are in, and they confirm everything we already knew: Open source is now the default.
The survey reports that 78 percent of its respondents are now running their businesses with open source software, and two-thirds are building software for their customers that’s based on open source software. More significant, the percentage of respondents actually participating in open source projects has increased from 50 percent to 64 percent, and 88 percent say they expect to contribute to projects within the next three years.
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Over the past few years there has been a race among old-school tech providers—companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, VMware—to paper over their proprietary roots by open-sourcing at least some of their technologies.
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Events
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Proposals are due by June 5th, and accepted speaker notifications will go out by June 12th.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We are happy to share that the first Firefox OS smartphones went on sale in Senegal and Madagascar this week. This follows an announcement from Mozilla and Orange at Mobile World Congress 2015 that Firefox OS smartphones would be available in markets across Africa and the Middle East later this year.
“We are pleased to partner with Orange to bring the mobile Web to users in a substantial number of new growth markets across Africa and the Middle East said Andreas Gal, CTO of Mozilla. “I’m also thrilled to see how the imminent arrival of Firefox OS has created excitement in the local Mozilla communities.”
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Microsoft has included a surprise feature in its new Edge web browser for Windows 10, in the form of support for the ultra-optimizable Asm.js JavaScript dialect.
First developed by Mozilla and championed by the nonprofit’s former CTO Brendon Eich, Asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that aims to be the “assembly language of the web.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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In order for an open source project to have a truly global reach, it must reach its users in their native tongue. OpenStack is no different. In order to bring open source cloud computing to countries around the world, a dedicated team of individuals helps translate both the project itself and its documentation into the native language of numerous peoples.
One of the translators working on that effort is Łukasz Jernaś. Jernaś is a software engineer for the Allegro Group doing internal tools development in Python, but he is a systems administrator by heart. He started working on OpenStack around the Grizzly release, when the company he works for deployed its first private cloud. Striving to keep his environment in his native language, translating Horizon (the web-based interface to OpenStack) seemed a natural thing to do.
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Databases
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The world is moving toward a NoSQL one. It’s requiring us to learn new techniques and approaches to working with data. We have to spend more time engineering and designing schemas. Finally, we have to know more about our database’s workings than with relational databases.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 4.4 is the most beautiful and featured release ever by The Document Foundation and now The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 4.4.3, a bug-fix release with 88 bug fixes over 4.4.2. This release makes LibreOffice even more stable. So let’s install or update LibreOffice 4.4.3 inUbuntu/Linux Mint or in other Ubuntu based distributions.
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The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third minor release in the “Fresh” branch of the popular Open Source office suite. This release features nearly 90 fixes, mostly import/export and formatting issues as well as some functionality bugs. In the same post, Italo Vignoli called for LibreOffice Conference 2015 papers and help bug hunting in LibreOffice 5.0.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Recently, I wrote about the interesting Open Humans Network, which aims to make it easier for people to share various forms of biological data. That’s become a hugely important area; the hope is that by applying big data analytical techniques to the increasingly large stores of genetic data now being produced by low-cost sequencing techniques, it will be possible to come up with personalised medicines designed for a specific genetic make-up, rather than average ones as now.
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Project Releases
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Today we are very proud to announce the release of our very first version of Macaw Movies! If you don’t know what this is about, please read our previous post.
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I am considering modernizing the application a bit. First migrating it to Python 3, then to Qt 5, we’ll see how it goes.
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Many of us use Telegram on our smartphones and tablets but if you are using Linux then you can also use Telegram on Linux by installing Cutegram. Cutegram is a completely free and open source graphical software project that has been designed from the offset to act as a Linux client for the Telegram messaging service. It offers an attractive and modern graphical user interface implemented in Qt.
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Openness/Sharing
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Scandinavian countries are the most advanced countries in Open Government, with Sweden ranking first, according to the World Justice Project Open Government Index 2015. Norway ranked 3rd, ahead of Denmark (4th) and Finland (6th).
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Open Data
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SINCE A MASSIVE 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, over 7,000 people have died, and many more have been injured or left stranded in rural areas. Aid groups like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have deployed teams to help those left behind in the districts of Dhading, Gorkha, Rasuwa and Sindhupalchowk. But there are plenty of people who are contributing from thousands of miles away—on their lunch break, after work, or on the weekend. They’re part of an online community of volunteers from all over the world who are mapping Nepal from their laptops, creating data that’s critical to on-the-ground relief.
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Open Hardware
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After [Brian] starting selling his own Raspberry Pi expansion boards, he found himself with a need for a robot that could solder 40-pin headers for him. He first did what most people might do by looking up pre-built solutions. Unfortunately everything he found was either too slow, too big, or cost as much as a new car. That’s when he decided to just build his own soldering robot.
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At the NFV World Congress, ARM is teaming with Enea, Applied Micro and Netzyn to show off platforms for OPNFV and virtual set-top boxes.
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Programming
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I cringe when I see job listings searching for “rock star developers.” What does that even mean? Developers who take all the credit, while the band, agent, road crew, and sound engineers do the heavy lifting?
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I revamped some code based off of work I did a few years ago to make relatively fast perf counters. We are going to start using this in Builder so we can have fairly accurate statistics about our subsystems.
On modern Intel x86_64, these take about 5-8 instructions based on your optimization level. The nice thing is that they don’t require any atomics. Those in the know are getting that warm feeling right now about why that is important. Atomics cause cacheline flushes, and cacheline flushes are the enemy of fast code. I once had a manager that called atomic instructions “cacheline nukes”. Appropriate.
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Authorities are looking for a teen who wanted a date with Destiny and hoped to get it by spray-painting a prom proposal on an Idaho cliffside.
The Idaho Statesman reports (http://bit.ly/1GYk3Us ) that the message “Destiny, Prom?” was painted in large pink and blue letters on the side of the Black Cliffs, in a popular rock climbing spot, east of Boise. The Ada County sheriff’s office is searching for the culprit.
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SSDs have a shelf life. They need consistent access to a power source in order for them to not lose data over time.
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I’m not a celebrity — I’m a Twitter celebrity. But the retweets and faves don’t do it for me anymore
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Security
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As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. There are also many concerns about security, though. Many people have some level of familiarity with how the Internet of Things will make everyday devices and objects smarter, but it’s also important to understand that it will also extend all kinds of devices toward the cloud and new types of networks.That potentially leaves lots of back doors open.
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Security’s heavy reliance and emphasis on technology–due to both its heritage and the reality of a shortage of manpower–is part of the reason attackers are getting the upper hand, experts said here this week.
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In-brief: A researcher studying the workings of a wireless-enabled drug infusion pump by the firm Hospira said the device utterly lacked security controls, making it “the least secure IP enabled device” he had ever worked with. His research prompted a warning from the Department of Homeland Security.
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Promoted tweets have been part of the Twitter service since 2010, and they’ve allowed advertisers to pick and choose who sees specific ads based on “what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a Tweet, what they retweet, and more.” But users have found how loosely those ads are monitored or filtered before they reach users’ eyeballs—and how cheap, fast, and easy the system can be exploited to annoy users as opposed to “engaging” them.
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When a man was fired from his job in Minneapolis, Minn., last May, he inadvertently touched off a boom in Silicon Valley.
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Transparency Reporting
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Classified briefings and bill-readings in basement rooms are making members queasy.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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New techniques of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) are now used to unlock oil and gas from rocks with very low permeability. Some members of the public protest against HVHF due to fears that associated compounds could migrate into aquifers. We report a case where natural gas and other contaminants migrated laterally through kilometers of rock at shallow to intermediate depths, impacting an aquifer used as a potable water source. The incident was attributed to Marcellus Shale gas development. The organic contaminants—likely derived from drilling or HVHF fluids—were detected using instrumentation not available in most commercial laboratories. More such incidents must be analyzed and data released publicly so that similar problems can be avoided through use of better management practices.
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Oklahoma officials have acknowledged a likely connection between earthquakes and oil drilling. But will they act to stop the shaking?
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Public arguments about fracking (at least among those who have heard of the natural gas production technique) have become contentious—a situation not helped by the technical and complicated topic. Lots of information and claims fly around, but there’s little in the way of an established framework to help make sense of them.
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Finance
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The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), sometimes known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), is currently being negotiated behind closed doors by the European Union and the US. If it is successfully completed, it will be the biggest trade agreement in history. But TTIP is not just something of interest to export businesses: it will affect most areas of everyday life, including the online world.
Opponents fear it could undermine many of Europe’s hard-won laws protecting online privacy, health, safety and the environment, even democracy itself. For example, it could effectively place US investors in the EU above the law by allowing companies to claim compensation from an EU country when it brings in a regulation that allegedly harms their investments—and for EU companies to attack US laws in the same way.
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Nordea Bank has come forward to help fund a field trip for students of Kilpisjärvi school, which was razed by a fire last Sunday. Despite the best efforts of school officials, they were unable to deposit cash raised from the students’ fundraising efforts in a bank, so the money which was stored on the premises, went up in smoke with the school.
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Mathew Ingram recently wrote a fantastic post about Twitter’s big mistake a few years back, basically killing off its openness for developers. He builds his argument off of an interesting post from Ben Thompson, arguing that Twitter has lost its strategic focus. Both articles are great, and I recommend them both. In the early days, Twitter was almost completely open. Many of its most useful features and services came from others building on top of it.
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We’ve long talked about how companies are only just starting to figure out the litany of ways they can profit from your cell location, GPS and other collected data, with marketers, city planners, insurance companies and countless other groups and individuals now lining up to throw their money at cell carriers, auto makers or networking gear vendors. For just as long we’ve been told that users don’t need to worry about the privacy and security of these efforts, and we definitely don’t need new, modernized rules governing how this data is being collected, protected, or used, because, well, trust.
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There is no doubt that this is the best possible election result for achieving Scottish independence in the near term. The one thing that I believe might have postponed independence for decades, was a Labour Party government of the UK with SNP support, governing as Tory Lite but making the dreadful repressive UK state that little bit less openly vicious, the abuse a little bit more disguised, the wealthy corporate elite less openly triumphalist.
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Censorship
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The RIAA and BPI have reached a new milestone in their ongoing efforts to have pirated content removed from the Internet. This week the music industry groups reported the 200 millionth URL to Google. Looking ahead, the BPI is urging Google to introduce more piracy prevention measures, or else Governments will have to intervene.
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Norway has scrapped its longstanding blasphemy law, meaning it is now legal to mock the beliefs of others, in a direct response to January’s brutal attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
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Privacy
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One of the godfathers of the Internet has harsh words for federal efforts to insert “back doors” in digital security systems.
“If you have a back door, somebody will find it, and that somebody may be a bad guy or bad guys, and they will intentionally abuse their access,” Vint Cerf, one of the co-founders of the Internet, said during remarks on Monday at the National Press Club.
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Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf argued Monday that more users should encrypt their data, and that the encryption back doors the U.S. FBI and other law enforcement agencies are asking for will weaken online security.
The Internet has numerous security challenges, and it needs more users and ISPs to adopt strong measures like encryption, two-factor authentication and HTTP over SSL, said Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google, in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Recent calls by the FBI and other government officials for technology vendors to build encryption workarounds into their products is a bad idea, said Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP. “If you have a back door, somebody will find it, and that somebody may be a bad guy,” he said. “Creating this kind of technology is super, super risky.”
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The Conservatives are already planning to introduce the huge surveillance powers known as the Snoopers’ Charter, hoping that the removal from government of the Liberal Democrats that previously blocked the controversial law will allow it to go through.
The law, officially known as the Draft Communications Data Bill, is already back on the agenda according to Theresa May. It is expected to force British internet service providers to keep huge amounts of data on their customers, and to make that information available to the government and security services.
The snoopers’ charter received huge criticism from computing experts and civil liberties campaigners in the wake of introduction. It was set to come into law in 2014, but Nick Clegg withdrew his support for the bill and it was blocked by the Liberal Democrats.
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The French parliament has approved a controversial law strengthening the intelligence services, with the aim of preventing Islamist attacks.
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A new transparency project has mined LinkedIn to create a database of the US intelligence community – complete with codewords.
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Against all expectations the Conservatives have won an absolute majority in the General Election. They will be able to propose whichever new laws they like. And if all the Conservative MPs vote together, they will be able to pass whichever laws they like.
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End result? A tracking device on Afifi’s car, and for something he didn’t even write. So, he sued the FBI and the DOJ for violating his First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. The suit was stayed by the court while the Supreme Court sorted out US v. Jones — a case dealing with warrantless GPS tracking. Unfortunately, the Court returned not much in the way of a decision, stating that GPS tracking did constitute a “search,” but didn’t go so far as to add a warrant requirement, suggesting the longer the tracking lasts, the worse it is constitutionally.
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Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate majority leader, urged lawmakers Thursday to renew the expiring section of the Patriot Act that the National Security Agency says authorizes the bulk telephone metadata spying program. That’s the same section that the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled hours earlier didn’t justify the NSA’s phone spying program.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other top Republicans on Thursday defended the National Security Agency’s surveillance program as vital to protecting national security.
McConnell and other Republicans also starkly criticized legislation that would effectively end the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program.
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At the height of the War on Terror, in May 2005, James Comey walked into the headquarters of the National Security Agency and explained just how hard it is to say “no” to them.
Given an unprecedented mission scope following 9/11, the NSA began engaging in warrantless domestic wiretaps, among other growing surveillance powers, that would soon spark national controversy. When Comey stood in front of the NSA in 2005, the American public remained ignorant of its government’s overreach; his speech was mostly ignored by the press. Within the NSA, however, the surveillance was no such secret.
“It can be hard [to say no],” Comey said, “because the stakes couldn’t be higher. Hard because we are likely to hear the words, ‘If we don’t do this, people will die.’”
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Uploading photos to Microsoft’s viral How Old Am I app lets the company post them anywhere on the internet along with your name.
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The right to privacy is a fundamental human right defined in international and regional human rights instruments. As such it has been included as a core component of key legislature and policy proceedings throughout the brief history of the World Wide Web. While it is generally recognized in public policy making that the right to privacy is challenged in new ways in a structurally transformed online public sphere, the way in which it has been framed does not seem to acknowledge this transformation. This paper therefore argues for a reformulation of “online privacy” in the current global policy debate. It presents the results of a qualitative study amongst 68 Danish high school students concerning how they perceive, negotiate and control their private sphere when using social media and builds a case for utilizing the results of studies as this to inform the ongoing policy discourses concerning online privacy.
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Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper wasn’t lying when he wrongly told Congress in 2013 that the government does not “wittingly” collect information about millions of Americans, according to his top lawyer.
He just forgot.
“This was not an untruth or a falsehood. This was just a mistake on his part,” Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency on Friday.
“We all make mistakes.”
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Investigators do not need a search warrant to obtain cellphone tower location records in criminal prosecutions, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a closely-watched case involving the rules for changing technology.
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Civil Rights
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Many years ago I received spam from a woman I did not know. It was the type of spam where I could tell that her computer was compromised by a bot. That is, the spammer wasn’t simply using her email address and sending the email from somewhere else. With the best of intentions I emailed her to let her know I was an Internet security professional, and I had received a spam email from her computer indicating it was actively infected. I told her what to do to clean it.
Her reply was very defensive and went something like this: “I’m tired of you people accusing me of sending out viruses and infecting my machine. If you don’t stop emailing me I’m going to report you to the Internet police!” I calmly replied that I was a good guy trying to help. But she said she had reported me to the Internet police and I was surely to be arrested soon.
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Obama administration officials and lawmakers are calling for greater accountability and tougher disciplinary procedures at the Drug Enforcement Administration after the agency imposed only light punishments on agents who forgot a San Diego man in a holding cell, leaving him without food or water for five days and nearly killing him.
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In a remarkably swift turnaround — no doubt prompted by some media backlash — the Warwick, RI, police department has announced it will no longer be accepting late night guest list faxes from Motel 6.
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Security video from the garage of the Miami Beach Police Department shows a group of officers milling about, a petite, handcuffed woman standing among them. The woman reaches out her foot, as if to trip one of the officers, who then slugs her in the face and kicks her.
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A campaign has been launched by the anti-censorship organisation Backlash to stop young people who exchange sexually-explicit images of themselves consensually from being prosecuted. A flaw in existing child abuse legislation means that possession of all sexually explicit images of people under 18 is classified as “indecent,” regardless of who makes them, why or how. Thus young people aged between 16 and 18 are able to consent to sex, but are unable to possess images of their own lawful sexual activities.
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Police quizzed a four-year-old and his six-year-old sister after a neighbour complained they were making too much noise while playing in the street.
Uniformed officers were called to the quiet cul-de-sac in Belper, Derbyshire, where Zara and Tom Corden were playing on their go-kart and scooter with friends on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
A neighbour had rung police because the children were ‘being too loud’ and officers asked whether they could play further down the street.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The European Commission presented a plan for making the internet and digital content more ‘border-free’ on Wednesday, suggesting ways to loosen up restrictions that often see music, movies and other services blocked when users travel across borders. But could such a plan succeed?
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Companies have been gunning for the FCC’s open internet rules since the very moment news crossed the wires, and their latest move involved pushing for a stay — a sort of legal “not so fast!” — on the classification of the internet as a public utility. While visiting TechCrunch Disrupt in New York this morning, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler reaffirmed his belief in a victory for the internet, saying he was “pretty confident” in the outcome of the cases and that his plan for now was simply “not to lose.”
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Moving on to policy, Fiorina again had strong words for the FCC’s net neutrality plan, calling it a “terrible thing.”
The FCC issued its net-neutrality plan “without anyone commenting on it or anyone voting on it,” according to Fiorina, though Lane pointed out that the plan did in fact attract millions of public comments. Fiorina, however, said that she does not have a lot of confidence that the FCC took into account those comments.
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Government on Tuesday promised to ensure “non-discriminatory access to internet” to all citizens as members cutting across party lines in Rajya Sabha slammed TRAI for its consultation paper that sparked off a debate over net-neutrality.
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FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, shown above in a March appearance, warned cable executives not to stifle competition, especially when it comes to Internet service.
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DRM
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The labels have always found a way to keep the bulk of the money made from recorded music, and this unfortunate fact is truer than ever today. The large license fees that the labels get from streaming services fall mainly to their bottom lines, and little finds its way to the artists. This is also the case of label investments in streaming services, as we’ve seen when Beats Music was purchased by Apple and Universal Music reaped a $500 million windfall for its 14% stake. You didn’t hear any artists thanking the company for the bonus they received in their next royalty statements, did you?
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SPOTIFY HAS HIT BACK at Apple with claims that its App Store practices are ‘anticompetitive’, following reports that Cupertino is trying to convince music labels to force it to can its free streaming offering.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Skype, the popular telephone software platform owned by Microsoft, has lost its latest trademark tussle in Europe with British satellite broadcaster Sky.
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Copyrights
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On February 13, 2014, the European Court of Justice – the Supreme Court of the European Union – appears to have ruled that anything published on the web may be re-published freely by anybody else. The case concerned linking, but the court went beyond linking in its ruling. This case has not really been noticed, nor have its effects been absorbed by the community at large.
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Simply introducing ‘roaming for Netflix’ will not end the discriminatory practice of geoblocking.
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The European Commission adopted a new Digital Single Market Strategy today, which aims to improve consumer access to digital services and goods. Among other things, Europe vows to end geo-blocking and lift other unwarranted copyright restrictions.
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Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has failed in its bid to go public via a backdoor listing on the New Zealand stock exchange. While conceding that the news is a disappointment, CEO Graham Gaylard informs TorrentFreak that it is not viewed as a setback for Mega.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.08.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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At a time when faith in open source code has been rocked by an outbreak of attacks based on the Shellshock and Heartbleed vulnerabilities, it’s time to revisit what we know about Linux security. Linux is so widely used in enterprise IT, and deep inside Internet apps and operations, that any surprises related to Linux security would have painful ramifications.
In 2007, Andrew Morton, a no-nonsense colleague of Linus Torvalds known as the “colonel of the kernel,” called for developers to spend time removing defects and vulnerabilities. “I would like to see people spend more time fixing bugs and less time on new features. That’s my personal opinion,” he said in an interview at the time.
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Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable– and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided.
Admittedly, the free software that runs on Linux has some shortcomings. For example, you still can’t fill out PDF forms, or, in most countries, calculate your taxes using Linux. In other cases, such as optical character recognition or speech recognition, free software tools are available but primitive compared to proprietary ones. However, the number of legitimate shortcomings becomes smaller every year, and, increasingly the complaints are more likely to be the results of ignorance as anything else.
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Linux companies Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical will benefit from the decision by Microsoft to suggest that OEMs not provide a means of turning off secure boot on PCs running Windows 10.
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As the idea of containers gains momentum, there are a couple of problems that increasingly need to be solved – networking, storage and security being the key three. Twistlock aims to solve the last of those and be part of unlocking far-broader container adoption.
Containers are, of course, a Linux concept that allows the running of multiple isolated Linux systems on a single control host. Instead of creating a full virtual environment, with Linux containers, an operating system is shared across the various containers while running resources are offered to the container in isolation. Linux containers have existed for a long time, but Docker re-invigorated the notion and brought it to a wider audience.
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Linux has been around for quite a long time now, but it still plays third fiddle to Windows and OS X. Which problems are stopping Linux from dominating the desktop? A redditor asked this question and got some very interesting answers.
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Desktop
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The Finns have long used a high percentage of GNU/Linux desktops like many European countries.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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I want to make this short and sweet. The days that follow will be filled with varied speculation I suspect. This happens anytime there is change afoot! But those who know me, know that I’m merely moving onto new exciting projects.
As of today, I am no longer part of Jupiter Broadcasting. I enjoyed my tenure co-hosting two of the programs and stand by my belief that they have a great production staff and amazing co-hosts. I wish all of them tons of success in their endeavors going forward.
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Kernel Space
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Alexander Holler wanted to make it much harder for anyone to recover deleted data. He didn’t necessarily want to outwit the limitless resources of our governmental overlords, but he wanted to make data recovery harder for the average hostile attacker. The problem as he saw it was that filesystems often would not actually bother to delete data, so much as they would just decouple the data from the file and make that part of the disk available for use by other files. But the data would still be there, at least for a while, for anyone to recouple into a file again.
Alexander posted some patches to implement a new system call that first would overwrite all the data associated with a given file before making that disk space available for use by other files. Since the filesystem knew which blocks on the disk were associated with which files, he reasoned, zeroing out all relevant data would be a trivial operation.
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…than to understand Linux permissions! Honestly though, that’s not really true. Linux permissions are simple and elegant, and once you understand them, they’re easy to work with. Octal notation gets a little funky, but even that makes sense once you understand why it exists.
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Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.0.2, which is currently the most advanced stable branch of Linux kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman also announced the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the seventh maintenance version of Linux 3.19 kernel.
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Applications
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On May 5, Lubomir Rintel announced the immediate availability for download and upgrade of NetworkManager 1.0.2, the default utility for managing network connection under GNOME and GNOME-based desktop environments.
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We’re not just keeping an eye on the kickstarter campaign (three days and almost at 50%! but go ahead and support us by all means, we’re not there yet!), we’re also working hard on Krita itself. Dmitry is busy with improving the performance of clone layers, adding PSD file support to the Layer Styles feature and fixing loading and saving masks to PSD files (we implemented that in October, but broke it subsequently…), and we’ve got a brand new release for you today.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I personally like Google’s Chrome interface. It’s simple, fast, elegant and did I mention fast? Unfortunately, I don’t like how locked down the Chrome OS is on a Chromebook, nor do I like its total dependence on Google. I also don’t like the lack of ability to install Chrome easily on generic hardware. Thankfully, Budgie is here to help.
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Games
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One of the strengths of Linux is that there really is a distribution for everybody. But which distro would work best for a game developer? One redditor asked that question and got some interesting answers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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My efforts to revamp the Jenkins Continuous Integration system for KDE finally came to life and went live!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As I hinted in my retrospective in February, 2014 has been crazy busy on a personal level. Let’s now take a look at 2014-2015 from a GNOME perspective.
When I offered my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation‘s Board of Directors in May last year, I knew that there would be plenty of issues to tackle if elected. As I was elected president afterwards, I was aware that I was getting into a demanding role that would not only test my resolve but also make use of my ability to set a clear direction and keep us moving forward through tough times. But even if someone tries to describe what’s involved in all this, it remains difficult to truly grasp the amount of work involved before you’ve experienced it yourself.
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Despite the fact I have a different view of which distros are best for kids — Qimo (pronounced “kim-o,” as in the last part of eskimo, not “chemo”) tops the list, as it should, but the French distro Doudou (add your own joke here) is unfortunately left out — the link there is informative. So for those who are just getting their proverbial feet wet in Linux, this is a godsend.
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Clonezilla Live, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do a lot of maintenance and recovery work, has been updated to version 2.4.1-15 and is now ready for download.
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Voyager-X 10.14.4, released in March, is based on Xubuntu/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). This new Voyager-X is one of the first distros to use the new Xfce 4.12 desktop, more than one year in the making.
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New Releases
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The OpenELEC team is proud to announce its 1st Beta of OpenELEC 6.0.
Internally this will be known by the less-catchy name OpenELEC 5.95.1.
The OpenELEC 5.95 release series are test releases (beta) for OpenELEC-6.0.
OpenELEC-6.0 will be the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-5.0.
The most visible change is the update from Kodi-14.2 Helix to Kodi-15.0 Isengard (beta 1). Beginning with Kodi-15 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer included in our base OS, but they are available via Kodi’s addon manager and must be installed from there, if needed. Our own PVR backends such as VDR and TVHeadend will install needed dependencies automatically. Other than that, please refer to http://kodi.tv/kodi-15-0-isengard-beta-1/ to see all the changes in Kodi-15.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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The German GNU/Linux company SUSE has announced support for the “simpler choice” database programme from SAP, whereby it will offer to help businesses migrate any legacy database solution to a more modern alternative.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has been grabbing headlines the last couple of days. It started yesterday with the announcement of RHEL 6.7 Beta which brings new and updated features to those not ready to move on to RHEL 7.x. Today Red Hat took “a stand against container fragmentation” and announced their part in six record breaking Intel Xeon E7 v3 systems. SuSE lead seven to world records too and Debian Jessie reviews are still rolling in.
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At Red Hat, our involvement in open source technologies does not just revolve around code commits and community stewardship; one important focus is on the creation of standards. It may sound boring, but open standards applied to emerging software technologies can go far in not only fostering adoption but also helping to further drive innovation.
Open standards and the governance model of open source projects are closely related. The best projects create innovation and ubiquity by becoming the defacto standard for a given set of problems, absorbing and aggregating the many agendas and needs that drive their contributors. Our approach to open standards is demonstrated by the “power of code,” developed in the open, unlike abstract documents negotiated in the backroom.
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With every new Intel Xeon processor generation, the benefits typically span beyond simple increases in transistor counts or the number of cores within each processor. Things like increased memory capacity per chip or larger on-chip caches are tangible and measurable, and often have a direct effect on performance, resulting in record-breaking scores on various standard benchmarks.
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This post is aimed to clarify certain terms often used in the security community. Let’s start with the easiest one: vulnerability. A vulnerability is a flaw in a selected system that allows an attacker to compromise the security of that particular system. The consequence of such a compromise can impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the attacked system (these three aspects are also the base metrics of the CVSS v2 scoring system that are used to rate vulnerabilities). ISO/IEC 27000, IETF RFC 2828, NIST, and others have very specific definitions of the term vulnerability, each differing slightly. A vulnerability’s attack vector is the actual method of using the discovered flaw to cause harm to the affected software; it can be thought of as the entry point to the system or application. A vulnerability without an attack vector is normally not assigned a CVE number.
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Not ready for the jump to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7? Be of good cheer, Red Hat is still improving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x.
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Red Hat have announced JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.4 and expanded benefits for subscribers of the software. This release is notable as it now supports Java 8 applications.
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Red Hat has made available a beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.7, an update for the firm’s Enterprise Linux 6 operating system that provides security enhancements along with updated systems management and monitoring capabilities for customers.
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Red Hat, a provider of open source software solutions, has made a strategic investment in VMTurbo, a demand-driven control platform for the software-defined data center.
VMTurbo plans to use the funds to develop its control platform, improve adoption of demand-driven control in OpenStack deployments, and increase support to VMTurbo’s growing customer base.
Charles Crouchman, CTO of VMTurbo, said: “Our demand-driven control platform, tightly integrated with Red Hat CloudForms and the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, makes OpenStack deployments more resilient, performant and agile.”
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Fedora
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AAEON Technology Inc., a Taiwanese computer manufacturer, has recently introduces a new ultra-slim compact embedded computer that runs the Fedora Linux operating system on Bay Trail Intel Atom or Celeron processors.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project has a long and rich legacy. Debian is one of the oldest surviving GNU/Linux distributions and, along the way, it has also become one of the largest (over 1,000 developers work on Debian, providing users with over 40,000 packages) and Debian has even branched out, adding GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/Hurd ports to its list of offerings. Debian is sometimes referred to as the “universal operating system” because it runs on a wide array of architectures, offering not only a production branch (Stable), but also multiple development branches (Testing, Unstable and Experimental). Debian, in short, provides a little something for everyone. This “universal” approach, which allows Debian to work just about anywhere while doing almost anything, also attracts developers who wish to build products using Debian’s packages and open infrastructure. Many of the world’s more popular Linux distributions, including Linux Mint and Ubuntu, have their roots in Debian.
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The Debian Project may not be that slow with new releases, but sometimes it feels like it. The project typically releases a new version “when it’s ready,” which seems to work out to about once every two years lately.
Debian 8, branded Jessie, in keeping with the Toy Story naming scheme (Jessie was the cowgirl character in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3) had its feature freeze in November 2014 and there’s a been a beta and RC release available for testing. It wasn’t until the end of April when Jessie was finally judged range ready.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In a recent security notice, dated May 5, Canonical announced the immediate availability of a new kernel update for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin).
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Do you want to use OpenStack, but you’re afraid of the headaches of getting its architecture just right? Well, EMC is here to help with OpenStack reference architectures for three leading OpenStack vendors: Canonical, Mirantis, and Red Hat.
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The first kernel update for the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system arrived on May 5 and it patched a very important vulnerability in the upstream Linux kernel 3.19. As such, all Ubuntu 15.04 users are urged to update their systems as soon as possible.
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Canonical is bringing some very significant changes to Ubuntu and that includes a new way of packaging and maintaining the system. That being said, the company will continue to provide support for both the .deb based and .snap based Ubuntu systems for a long time.
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Mark Shuttleworth had a very interesting keynote at the opening of the Ubuntu Online Summit for 15.10, and he said the developers from all the desktop environments should work together towards a common goal.
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The desktop flavor of Ubuntu has already moved to systemd from an upstart, but Ubuntu Touch is still using upstart. It’s not clear when the mobile platform will move to the new init system, but Ubuntu developers are already working towards this goal.
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A new official Xubuntu flavor called “core” has been announced by developers. It’s based on Ubuntu, and it integrates the Xfce desktop environment and nothing else.
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The ONOS Project and partners said Wednesday they have demonstrated the real-world practicality of using a router with open source software to connect networks in Australia and the US. The test validates the vision of SDN, open source for carriers, as well as ON.Lab’s ONOS network operating system, according to one of its coordinators.
“SDN is about disaggregation of closed, proprietary boxes and separating of forwarding planes, control planes and applications,” says Guru Parulkar, executive director and board member of ON.Lab , which coordinates ONOS development. The communications test between Australia and the US achieved just that, he says. (See ON.Lab Aims to Make White Boxes Carrier-Grade , ON.Lab Intros Open Source SDN OS and SK Telecom Bets on SDN for Wireless.)
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We reported the other day that the Ubuntu Touch developers had a great session during the Ubuntu Online Summit for the next major release of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
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Unity 8 is the next iteration of the desktop environment that powers the Ubuntu Linux distribution. It’s still under development, but the Ubuntu developers have presented a short demo during one of the Ubuntu Online Summit sessions.
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Making a mobile device act like a PC might seem like a thing of the future, but it’s not. Ubuntu developers just showed how connecting a mouse to a tablet transforms the Ubuntu Touch into a desktop experience.
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The Ubuntu Touch platform has a music scope and one of the music sources for that service was Grooveshark, but the service has been shut down. Now Ubuntu developers need to make some adjustments to Ubuntu Touch.
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Today was the last day of the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event that took place online on the UbuntuOnAir channel on Google+ via YouToube live sessions, between May 5-7, and there were still some interesting discussions about the upcoming features of Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
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Despite the recent announcement that Windows 10 phones will be able to be used as PCs when connected to an external monitor, Ubuntu—the first operating system to toy with the idea—hasn’t conceded the smartphone-PC convergence race to Microsoft just yet.
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As the proprietary and open-source systems battle for mobile and PC users, what are the prospects for these two champions of converged computing?
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Flavours and Variants
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During a very informative session at UOS (Ubuntu Online Summit) for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) that took place today, May 7, Martin Wimpress had the great pleasure of informing us about the upcoming features of the Ubuntu MATE 15.10 operating system.
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elementary OS “Freya” was released a month ago, but the developers are still making big changes to it. One of these modifications will bring a new “Open File Dialog” that should look and work much better than the previous one.
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The Linux Mint project is constantly working to improve the operating systems they are developing, along with the Cinnamon desktop environment. A new major update for Cinnamon is expected to land pretty soon, and it will come with lots of new features and changes.
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Ubuntu MATE is now an official distribution for Raspberry Pi 2, and the images for this light and modern operating system are now listed on the website.
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The Linux Mint developers have announced today, May 7, in what appears to be the shortest monthly newsletter ever released, that the team works hard these days to bring you the second installment of the Linux Mint 17 operating system.
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During the last day of Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), the Lubuntu development team discussed some of the upcoming features that will be implemented in the Lubuntu 15.10 Linux operating system.
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Giada’s compact i200 mini-PC for thin client and signage runs Linux on a 4th Gen Intel Core, and offers mini-PCIe, mSATA, and automated scheduling features.
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Snuggly situated in an industrial section of Oakland, CA is Next Thing Co. a team of nine artists and engineers who are pursuing the dream of a lower cost single board computer. Today they’ve unveiled their progress on Kickstarter, offering a $9 development board called Chip.
The board is Open Hardware, runs a flavor of Debain Linux, and boasts a 1Ghz R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC storage. It is more powerful than a Raspberry Pi B+ and equal to the BeagleBone Black in clock speed, RAM, and storage. Differentiating Chip from Beagle is its built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and the ease in which it can be made portable, thanks to circuitry that handles battery operation.
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A Kickstarter campaign promises a $9 computer with a larger processor than Raspberry Pi and the ability for cheap and easy mobile computing.
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Anyone who thought the Raspberry Pi was a little expensive priced at $35 is sure to find the $9 C.H.I.P. tiny computer much more to their liking.
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A crowd funded startup named Next Thing Co. is creating world’s cheapest computer which will be priced just $9. Named as “C.H.I.P”, this is technically faster, smaller & cheaper than Raspberry Pi, which is currently hailed as the leader of single-board computing world, introduced at $25.
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Phones
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Android
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There are plenty of TV boxes available to choose from on the market, but if you are looking for something a little different that allows you to dual boot Android and Ubuntu, the Ugoos UM3 TV Box is worth more investigation.
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The Ugoos UM3 is a small box that you can plug into your TV to run Android apps. But unlike most devices that fit that description, this one can also run Ubuntu Linux.
That means you could use it to stream videos from YouTube or Netflix, play music from Pandora or Spotify, or play Android games. Then you could reboot the device and switch operating systems to run full desktop apps including LibreOffice and Firefox.
Ugoos offers a larger model called the UT3S which sells for about $179. But the Ugoos UM3 costs about $50 less.
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Samsung had confirmed earlier this year that it was taking its time with the next Gear smartwatch in order to make sure it’s as perfect as possible. Called the Gear A, this watch will be the first round smartwatch from Samsung and will bring a new method of user interaction thanks to its use of a rotating bezel ring. Samsung has never actually offered a time frame for when the Gear A will be officially announced, but according to our insiders, the company has delayed the launch till the second half of this year.
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In the world of smartphones, Samsung and Apple cast big shadows. Perhaps no company is more familiar with those shadows than LG, which has been chasing Samsung’s mobile phone division for years. Each time that Samsung makes a move, LG follows along a few months later and a little less impressively.
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Those looking for a new Android phone in the month of May are going to find themselves staring at a number of solid options. With that in mind, we want to help narrow things down for those that are need of some assistance. Here, we take a look at the device’s we think represent the best Android phones for May, 2015.
Last month, Samsung and HTC released their new 2015 flagships into the wild. The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, Samsung Galaxy S6, and HTC One M9 join a crowded field of competitors tempting those looking for a new Android phone this month. They will soon be joined by an LG G4, a device that’s set to replace the popular LG G3 in June.
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It looks like Google will reveal the successor to Android 5.0 Lollipop at its upcoming annual I/O 2015 developer conference.
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Arne Exton had once again the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the general availability of a new build for its AndEX Live CD project, whose primary goal is to help you run the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop mobile operating system from Google on your personal computer.
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The choice of Android TV devices has finally expanded beyond Google’s Nexus Player. Last week, Sony, which years ago launched the first Google TV set-top, began shipping the first Android TV based TVs, and this week it will be joined by Razer’s Forge TV gaming player. Later this month, Nvidia will ship its third-generation Nvidia Shield, which similarly runs Google’s new media player and gaming platform.
In today’s more enlightened tech world, failure is not exactly acceptable, but it is at least considered natural. Fail twice in the same product category, however, and few will give much credence to future attempts. The pressure is on for Google to see some early wins for Android TV that can erase memories of its failed Google TV integrated TV/web platform.
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Bitcoin startup Bitseed has announced it is open-sourcing the creation of its new plug-in node.
The company, which launched its first node in March, is asking contributors to help evolve its product by completing tasks and solving bounties in exchange for rewards.
Bitseed’s project is hosted on Assembly, a collaborative platform that tracks contributions to projects with coloured coins on the bitcoin blockchain.
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Nervana Systems, one of a handful startups focusing on a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, today is announcing that it has released its Neon deep learning software under an Apache open-source license, allowing anyone to try it out for free.
The startup is pointing to benchmarks a Facebook researcher recently conducted suggesting that the Nervana software outperforms other publicly available deep learning tools, including Nvidia’s cuDNN and Facebook’s own Torch7 libraries.
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Ammenti explained that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.
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Open source software is everywhere, and chances are high that you’ll be writing, deploying, or administering it when you enter the workforce. Hiring managers are looking for candidates with experience in open source. Employers will often ask you for your GitHub username along with – or instead of – your resume. So, if you’re all new to open source, where should you get started?
If you’re feeling a bit intimated about the wide world of open source software, it’s totally understandable. There’s thousands of projects, and it’s hard to know which one will give you the best experience you can use to build your skill set. And it can be even harder to know which one will give you the best experience as a contributor and human being.
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Project CoprHD is positioned in the data center as a single, open control plane for multivendor storage. It offers the same level of flexibility, choice, security and transparency as EMC’s commercial ViPR Controller product. It adds the ability to create new services and applications. EMC will continue selling ViPR Controller as a commercial offering.
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With the release of the Nginx 1.9.0 Web server, Nginx has taken TCP load-balancing capabilities from its commercial Nginx Plus product and fitted it to the company’s open source technology.
TCP load balancing improves failover consistency among worker processes, according to Nginx. The feature already has appeared in the commercial Nginx 5 and 6 products.
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Events
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This is a fun month. Not only are we moving forward with the ownCloud Contributor Conference (some cool interviews coming out soon), but there’s a sudden avalanche of events this month. The ownCloud.org blog already wrote about it – we have had FOSDEM, SCALE, Chemnitz and may others I didn’t attend myself. Find out about the openSUSE conf from last week and the upcoming OTS in Berlin!
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I asked this of the openSUSE community at the start of my keynote last week at the openSUSE Conferene in The Hague, and they gave some great answers. Community, YAST, quality, OBS, etc.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has revealed how it reckons Firefox should look when it’s on the tellie.
Firefox OS user experience designer Hunter Luo reckons that the four basic functions of a smart television are watching shows, accessing apps, controlling devices and looking at list of your content. The user interface for Firefox-for-tellies therefore presents each of those options as a “deck”, concealing “cards”. So in the image below, “TV” is the deck and each of the channels gets a “card”, in this case Channel 32.
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Every committed Mozillian and many enthusiastic end-users will use a pre-release version of Firefox.
In Mac and Windows this is pretty straightforward, you simply download the Firefox Nightly/Aurora/Beta dmg or setup tool, and get going. When it is installed it is a proper desktop application, you could make it your default browser, and life goes on.
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Believe it or not, the folks at Mozilla are working hard these days to bring you a major update to one of the best open-source and cross-platform email, news, and chat clients on the market.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has just announced that LibreOffice 4.4.3 has been released and is now available for download. It’s a maintenance release with not so many improvements, but it’s here and it will land in repositories soon enough.
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Please do NOT use this VirtualBox Beta release on production machines. A VirtualBox Beta release should be considered a bleeding-edge release meant for early evaluation and testing purposes.
You can download the binaries here. Please use sha256sum to compare the hash of the downloaded package with the corresponding hash from this list.
Please do NOT open bug reports at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker but use our VirtualBox Beta Feedback forum to report any problems with the Beta release. Please concentrate on reporting regressions since VirtualBox 4.3.26.
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CMS
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After helping to put the dot in .com by building and configuring enterprise class solutions with WorldCom as a Sun hardware and software engineer, Jason Smith went on to AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the publishers of the journal Science) to direct the technical needs of the education directorate.
Jason has built or architected solutions ranging from enterprise to small business class and has found in Drupal a flexible, scalable, rapid development framework for targeting all levels of projects. A long time beneficiary of the open source movement, Jason—now a senior software architect at The Weather Company—is an avid supporter of open source projects and believes strongly in giving back to the community that supported him.
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My favorite part about our open source project, PencilBlue, is that I get to interact with people from all over the world. When we first started, there were just two of us, but as the months progressed we saw our contributors begin to grow. It got me thinking about what it takes to be a good maintainer and how my team will make sure the project continues to run smoothly for years to come.
How many people across the world contribute to open source software? If GitHub’s user base is any indication, the open source community is more than 8.5 million. That’s a massive number of people that have the capacity and desire to contribute. These numbers don’t even take into consideration those who clone or download distributions anonymously. Now that we know how many people we can potentially engage, how do we get them interested in our projects?
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Website publishers using the popular free and open source WordPress content management system (CMS) woke up this morning to find that their sites had been upgraded to version 4.2.2. Users who’s sites somehow missed being automatically upgraded are urged to update immediately, as this update addresses several important security issues. According to Wordfence, maintainers of a popular WordPress security plugin, this release fixes one recently discovered vulnerability and further hardens a security issue that was addressed in version 4.2.1.
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Healthcare
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Software projects in health care would benefit from increased collaboration, using open source, exchanging know-how and open documentation, say experts from IsfTeH, International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth. “Most important is the sharing of best practices, but reusing common software components also reduces costs”, the experts say.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Gnubik is a 3D single player game which displays an interactive cube similar to the well known Rubik Cube.
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This is a bug-fix release, network still only works at a prototype stage. However, a bunch of bugs have been fixed, including a good deal show-stoppers which were preventing the game from starting some os OS/hardware combinations.
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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 Boston-based individual to be its full-time Web Developer.
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Project Releases
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Cutegram 2 is once again back as one of the best Telegram clients for Linux ever. Version 2.2.0 is here to attest just that, as announced today by its developer on the project’s website.
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Public Services/Government
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Ammenti explained that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.
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Gecamed, an open source Electronic Health Record system developed in Luxembourg since 2007, is already used by more than 10 per cent of all general practitioners in the country. It is also the first EHR system in Luxembourg to achieve interoperability with the health records management system used by eSanté, the country’s national eHealth agency, says Guido Bosch, a research engineer at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology.
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Political commitment and innovative individuals are crucial to get public administrations to switch to open source software, conclude researchers at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University (Netherlands). The potential cost savings or the size and complexity of the public administration “have no discernible effect”, the researchers write in Government Information Quarterly.
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Germany’s Rhine-Neckar metropolitan area, with the three states of Baden Wuerttemberg, Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, are testing an open source patient portal that provides access to a ‘personal’ Electronic Health Record (p-EHR) system.
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It’s fair to say no one was expecting that. Not the political parties, not the punditocracy and – least of all – the pollsters. The exit poll that came on the stroke at 10pm will have caused ashen faces at Labour headquarters. At Lib Dem towers, the spirits would have crumpled in an instant. At Tory mission control, the joy would have been unconfined.
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Finance
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CMD’s guide, “New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money Is Wasted by Charter Schools—Stringent Controls Urgently Needed as Charter Funding Faces Huge Increase,” analyzes materials obtained from open records requests about independent audits of how states interact with charter school authorizers and charter schools.
These documents, along with the earlier Inspector General report, reveal systemic barriers to common sense financial controls. Revealing quotes from those audit materials, highlighted in CMD’s report, show that too often states have had untrained staff doing unsystematic reviews of authorizers and charter schools while lacking statutory authority and adequate funding to fully assess how federal money is being spent by charters.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In case you’re curious, the percentage of Democrats who say they “would consider voting for” Sanders has risen from 14 percent in February to 23 percent now–but 61 percent say they haven’t heard enough to be able to say…which is, of course, in part a function of journalists treating next year’s Democratic contest as a foregone conclusion.
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Censorship
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Copyright law is frequently misused as a tool to censor unwanted online criticism. And often, this misuse does not make it into court. But one such case has recently made its way up to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And yesterday, EFF filed a “friend of the court” brief, urging the court to consider the First Amendment interests at play when copyright is used to silence public criticism.
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Privacy
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The US court of appeals has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful, in a landmark decision that clears the way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency.
A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit overturned an earlier ruling that the controversial surveillance practice first revealed to the US public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 could not be subject to judicial review.
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There is a measure of irony to the landmark intelligence bill that passed the lower house of France’s Parliament on Tuesday: It is intended to legalize some activities that French spies are already doing illegally. With militant fighters streaming back into Europe from the battlefields of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, French authorities have more radicals to keep track of than they have police officers to shadow them. That has left the French security apparatus deeply strained, and the bill passed Tuesday embraces digital mass surveillance as a solution to the manpower problem: What can’t be tracked by a team of undercover officers can perhaps — and “perhaps” is the operative word — be more efficiently monitored by banks of computers.
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Send this to a friend
05.06.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Retired pastor James Anderson, age 84, has never worked in IT or had any formal computer training, but over the past two years he has rebuilt more than a hundred IBM ThinkPad laptops and sent them to schools and nonprofits in Africa – all running Linux.
For the past nine years, Anderson has volunteered at FreeGeek, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit that recycles and rehabilitates old computers for donation. He spends four hours every Friday testing and rebuilding the ThinkPads, which he then loads with Linux Mint 17 and sends one or two at a time to Africa via personal couriers.
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One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I have rounded up some theories, which I’d like to lay out here.
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You’ve always been able to run containers on a variety of operating systems: Zones on Solaris; Jails on BSD; Docker on Linux and now Windows Server; OpenVZ on Linux, and so on. As Docker in particular and containers in general explode in popularity, operating system companies are taking a different tack. They’re now arguing that to make the most of containers you need a skinny operating system to go with them.
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The folks at UK retailer Cloudsto have been offering tiny desktop computers loaded with Ubuntu Linux for a little while. But most have basically been Ubuntu versions of existing Android boxes with ARM-based processors.
Now Cloudsto is introducing a line of mini PCs with x86 processors, starting with the Cloudsto X86 Nano Mini PC. It’s available with either Windows 8.1 or Ubuntu 14.04.
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What is Linux? For many this seems like a question with an obvious answer, but the truth is there are a large number of people who would shrug their shoulders. Many have never heard of Linux (gasp!) or aren’t confident in their answer.
Here at Opensource.com, we want to help answer that question in a manner that allows others pass it around and share it with the world. So, we created a new resource page which gently introduces Linux, the world’s most popular open source operating system.
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Here’s why I’m even bothering to write this: I’m writing to the person who is considering Linux as a desktop system. I am writing to the kid who wants to explore computer programming. I’m writing to the person who is intrigued with the look and feel of Linux on the desktop.
Should you run into this kind of person while you are asking for help or even offering to help others, just write him off as someone who had an extremely bad day and move along. He is most certainly an anomaly within the global Free Software community…within the Linux community.
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Server
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Cloudy Linux startup CoreOS kicked off its inaugural CoreOS Fest event in San Francisco on Monday with word that its homegrown rkt (pronounced “rocket”) container runtime software will be integrated into the Google-derived Kubernetes container orchestration software.
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Application containerization is potentially the biggest disruptive technology in the IT infrastructure world today. Containerization not only puts at risk a number of vendors (think those who make their money from virtualization) but it fundamentally promises to enable a business transformation as well.
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Taking a major step forward in its quest to drive a Linux container standard that’s not created and controlled by Docker or any other company, CoreOS spun off management of its App Container project into a stand-alone foundation. Google, VMware, Red Hat, and Apcera have announced support for the standard.
Becoming a more formalized open source project, the App Container (appc) community now has a governance policy and has added a trio of top software engineers that work on infrastructure at Google, Twitter, and Red Hat as “community maintainers.”
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It is well known that the term “high performance computing” (HPC) originally describes the use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly. The term applies especially to systems that function above a teraflop or 10^12 floating-point operations per second, and is also often used as a synonym for supercomputing. Technically a supercomputer is a system that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. To increase systems performance, over time the industry has moved from uni-processor to SMP to distributed-memory clusters, and finally to multicore and manycore chips.
However, for a growing number of users and vendors, HPC today refers not to cores, cycles, or FLOPS but to discovery, efficiency, or time to market. Some years ago, IDC came up with the interpretation of HPC to High Productivity Computing, highlighting the idea that HPC provides a more effective and scalable productivity to customers, and this term fits really well for most commercial customers.
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Linux is a reliable and popular operating system – and this is quite fair. Any contemporary Linux dedicated server offers the best performance, maximum security, and reliability on the market without breaking your pocket book.
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Kernel Space
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Linux kernel 3.14.40 LTS arrived a few days ago, as announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on the kernel mailinglist, and it brings a number of important improvements to the ARM and PowerPC architectures, as well as several updated drivers.
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Someone at work recently asked me about code coverage tooling for the kernel. I played with this a little last year. At the time I was trying to figure out just how much of certain syscalls trinity was exercising. I ended up being a little disappointed at the level of post-processing tools to deal with the information presented, and added some things to my TODO list to find some time to hack up something, which quickly bubbled its way to the bottom.
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Mark Shuttleworth has just announced the name of the Ubuntu 15.10, the next iteration of the Linux distribution from Canonical, and it’s Wily Werewolf.
The founder of Canonical used to make these announcements on this personal blog, but he has chosen the Ubuntu Online Summit keynote to make this one. What’s interesting about this particular name is the fact that it makes a full circle (almost) to the first Ubuntu release Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog), that dates back to October 2004.
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Mark Canonical has announced that a pocket PC powered by Ubuntu will be released this year, but he just teased about it, and he didn’t reveal any additional details.
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Today, May 3, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux kernel 4.1, due for release in summer 2015.
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Applications
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uGet 2.0 was released recently, bringing support for multi-thread downloading and mirrors for the curl plugin, individual download speed limiting, new settings dialog and more.
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Guake is a drop-down terminal inspired by computer games consoles such as the one used in Quake, which slides down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed (F12 by default in Guake).
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4MPlayer is new interesting Linux distribution that has been built with a single use in mind, to play any kind of video files, including CDs and DVDs, without having to boot an entire distro and its desktop environment.
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A few days ago, Erik released a new version of his Annoy library — a small, fast, and lightweight C++ template header library for approximate nearest neighbours — which now no longer requires Boost. While I don’t mind Boost (actually, quite the opposite), it appears to have been a blocker in getting the Python part of Annoy over to the world of python3.
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Today I released virt-manager-1.2.0. You can read the release announcement here…
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After a bogus Calligra 2.9.3 release, the developers of the number one open source office suite for the KDE desktop environment released Calligra 2.9.4, which brings multiple improvements to the popular Krita digital painting software.
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On May 4, the Kubuntu developers had the pleasure of informing their users about the immediate availability of the recently announced KDE Applications 15.04 software suite for the Kubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system.
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Proprietary
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The modern and powerful Plex Media Server, a free and cross-platform media server software for GNU/Linux, BSD, OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms, has been updated recently to version 0.9.12.0.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Elasticsearch has offered Hadoop InputFormat and OutputFormat implementations for quite some time. These made it possible to process Elasticsearch indices with Spark just as you would any other Hadoop data source. Here’s an example of this in action, taken from Elastic’s documentation:
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Tony Northrup is an Award-winning author and photographer who has published more than 30 how-to books and sold more than a million copies around the world. He has created a video tutorial, that is over an hour long, for beginners and more advanced users that aims at getting you familiar with your Samsung NX1 Compact Systems Camera (CSC).
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Firejail is a generic Linux namespaces security sandbox, capable of running graphic interface programs as well as server programs. The sandbox is lightweight, the overhead is low. There are no socket connections open, no daemons running in the background. All security features are implemented directly in Linux kernel and available on any Linux computer.
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Games
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While we didn’t expect any big gains for the Linux gaming market-share over the past month, it does come as a surprise there’s a significant drop.
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When Valve first announced that the Steam gaming platform was going to be made available on Linux computers back in 2012, few expected the OS to become the first choice for gamers. However, even despite the many hundreds of titles that have been made available via the service since then, the share of Linux users on Steam struggles to remain relevent.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Packages for the release of KDE Applications 15.04 are available for Kubuntu 15.04. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.
To update, use the Software Repository Guide to add the following repository to your software sources list:
ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
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Krita, an open-source digital painting software that proved to be a very powerful and useful solution, is once more present on Kickstarter and this time it wants to become faster than Photoshop.
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I meant to have a post about Gardening efforts next, but KMouth is improving lately, so I’ll throw out a quick post about progress.
KMouth master branch is now Qt3 free. It’s still using K3Process for the speech synthesizer command-line calls, but all Qt3Support is gone.
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In my last blog posts, I explained the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which guarantees the free availability of the Qt Toolkit. Today, The Qt Company introduced a new Qt online installer that requires users to accept additional license terms. Many people have contacted me with concerns about this change. I share this concern. Even before this, I have already been concerned about the structure of the qt.io download page, since it blurs the lines between the Qt Toolkit itself and additional, proprietary products.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As we reported last week, the GNOME development team started work on the next major version of the acclaimed desktop environment, GNOME 3.18, and they’ve just released the first snapshot, GNOME 3.17.1.
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Mutter, the default window manager and compositor of the acclaimed GNOME desktop environment received an update as part of the first development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.18, due for release on October 23, 2015.
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Linux offers a tremendous amount to any computer user, but the proliferation of distributions can sometimes be confusing to newer folks. A Linux redditor asked what the differences were and got some helpful answers.
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New Releases
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Jacque Montague Raymer, the lead developer and founder of the MakuluLinux distribution based on the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, had the pleasure of announcing the release of MakuluLinux 9 Xfce.
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Ultimate Boot CD, an ISO image that gathers together all the necessary tools for helping users with advanced system repair tasks and general system maintenance, reached version 5.3.4.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Today, we have the great pleasure of introducing you to the first ever openSUSE Live CD built around the MATE desktop environment, as it looks like the openSUSE team plans on delivering a MATE flavor as well, after Ubuntu got its own.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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The openSUSE development team, through Dominique Leuenberger, had the pleasure of informing openSUSE users about what happened last week on Tumbleweed, the rolling-release branch of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Docker has certainly gathered most of the headlines in the container space, but the team behind CoreOS deserves some praise for creativity, too. We’ve been covering their creation, dubbed Rocket, extensively. Rocket is a new container runtime, designed for composability, security, and speed, according to the CoreOS team.
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The short answer appears to be yes. To varying degrees, Google, Red Hat, VMware, and Apcera have joined the list of App Container (AppC) adoptees. But preemptively replacing Docker doesn’t seem to be on the agenda; it’s more about increasing the list of container options available to customers and letting the market decide.
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Before we declare Docker the champion of the container wars, CoreOS begs to differ. If CoreOS was just doing this alone, it might not matter much. But, CoreOS has some big friends, Red Hat, Google, VMware and Apcera, that will make its efforts count.
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Today, the EVP, Chief People Officer of Red Hat, Delisa Alexander, sold stocks of RHT for $815.6k.
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Even though RHEL 7 is the latest version, the Linux vendor continues to add new features to RHEL6.x.
Linux vendor Red Hat on May 5 released its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.7 beta, providing users with a preview of features and capabilities that will become generally available later this year.
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We are pleased to announce the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7, the latest version of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. Nearly five years into its lifecycle, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 continues to provide a stable, proven, and predictable foundation for organizations seeking to build and deploy large, complex IT projects with confidence.
The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations preserve investments in existing infrastructure, bolster security, stability, and systems management/monitoring capabilities, and embrace the latest Linux innovations.
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Fedora
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The Korora Project had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the MATE edition of the Korora 21 Linux distribution, based on the popular Fedora 21 operating system.
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Hey everyone! Fedora 22 is on the cusp of being released and the Fedora Cloud Working Group has elected to organize a test day for May 7th in order to work out some bugs before shipping it off to the rest of the world.
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All this issues fixed in RussianFedora always (we release alpha, beta versions of RFRemix with 1-2 days delay after Fedora), so we support devel branches of Fedora. Also we’re using Koji to build packages and git to store RPM specs, patches.
Today I did copy and update of ffmpeg and mpv packages from rpmfusion to RussianFedora. They already in F22 and rawhide repos. Tomorrow I will do the same for F21.
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Debian Family
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Something I was used to and which came as standard on wheezy if you installed acpi-support was screen locking when you where suspending, hibernating, …
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Derivatives
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The Tails development team announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Tails 1.4 amnesic incognito Live CD distribution that has been used by Edward Snowden to stay invisible online and browse websites anonymously.
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The development team behind the popular UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) project have announced recently that they are working on a Live version of Ultimate Boot CD, which is currently based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and has the ultimate goal of becoming a Parted Magic replacement.
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At this year’s CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, Christopher von Eitzen sat down with Linux legend Klaus Knopper to discuss his popular Knoppix Linux distribution as well as Linux and accessibility in open source software.
Designed to boot and run directly from a CD, DVD or USB flash drive without needing to be installed on a computer’s hard drive, Knoppix incorporates automatic hardware detection with support for a wide range of video and sound cards, USB devices and other peripherals and uses and on-the-fly decompression to run entirely in a computer’s memory. The CD version carries up to 2GB of executable software, while the single-layer DVD edition stores up to 10GB of data. The operating system can be used, for example, as a rescue system, to demonstrate Linux, as an educational CD, or installed directly to a system.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical released Ubuntu 15.04 a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that it’s been a success. The community is mostly reporting a nice experience, which is important since this is the first Ubuntu release that uses systemd instead of upstart.
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Canonical has announced that Git repositories can now be hosted directly on Launchpad, which was one of the most requested features of the community.
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Ubuntu Touch is working great on the Bq Aquaris and Nexus 4 devices, especially after the previous update, and now the developers are focusing on a new OTA upgrade that should also bring some interesting fixes.
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After introducing the Erle-Copter drone powered by Ubuntu Snappy Core back in February 2015, Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all sorts of Linux-powered robots, launched on May 3 the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone.
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The first ‘production’ smartphone running the Ubuntu operating system is finally here. Designed and marketed by the Spanish company BQ (not to be confused with the Chinese company BQ Mobile) and made in China, the first Ubuntu Phone is based on the 4.5-inch BQ Aquaris E4.5, which normally ships with Android 4.4. Included with the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition are two copies of the quick-start guide (in four languages each, one of the eight being English), a charger (with a built-in two-pin continental mains plug) and a 1-metre USB-to-Micro-USB cable. A comprehensive User Manual is available for download from the BQ website. The list price for the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, which is only available in the EU, is €169.90 (~£125).
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Ubuntu also aims to offer a phone that would provide a middle ground between mobile and desktop before the year is out, according to the founder of the company behind the OS, Mark Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth confirmed that the device will launch in 2015 in a YouTube Q&A earlier this morning, according to a report by Liliputing.
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In case you didn’t have the time to watch today’s live keynote video with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the famous Ubuntu Linux operating system, you can watch the recording right now (see the video at the end of the article).
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In the online Ubuntu summit on Monday, Mark Shuttleworth announced that the 15.10 release of Ubuntu, due out in October, will be codenamed Wily Werewolf. Other names that I liked were Wooley Wammoth and Wicked Wabbit. The 15.10 release will see more work on convergence ready for the LTS release next year.
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Canonical wanted to have Unity 8 and Mir ready for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in order to provide them by default, but it looks like that is not going to happen. Instead, the community will be able to choose the default desktop they want for that particular LTS release.
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Ubuntu dominated the headlines today with its Ubuntu Online Summit for 2015 beginning today. Mark Shuttleworth gave the keynote and informed a loyal public of the new 15.10 lsb_release -a. Elsewhere, Ubuntu 15.04 gets a thumbs-up and Ebuyer.com is now selling Ubuntu laptops.
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Developers from Canonical explained last week that they intended to rebase the Ubuntu Next flavor (featuring Mir and Unity8) on Snappy, which means that they were also considering moving to a rolling release model, even if it was just for this branch.
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Wow! What wonderment! The Ubuntu 15.10 has has been revealed as ‘Wily Werewolf’.
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Most users will notice very little overall difference in this latest Ubuntu release, but it’s this change that packs the biggest punch.
There are a couple of new things that make 15.04 worth the upgrade from previous versions, but the really big changes – like the move to Unity 8 and the whole “convergence” of the desktop and mobile versions – remain in the future.
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The Ubuntu community is having a vivacious discussion regarding the placement of the window buttons on the left side. From the looks of it, some users would prefer to have the option of moving the buttons to the right side.
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Snow melts and trees blossom, but nothing really says spring around the Ars Orbital HQ like the arrival of a new version of Ubuntu Linux. Right on schedule, Canonical has recently released Ubuntu 15.04, also known as Vivid Vervet.
Ubuntu 15.04 arrived in late April and has, judging by other reviews, largely underwhelmed. According to the popular storyline, there’s not much new in 15.04. Of course, a slew of changes and unforeseen features in 15.04 could have just as easily earned a negative reaction, probably from the same people calling the actual release boring. The top of the Linux mountain is a lonely, criticism-strewn place.
The truth is, this line of thought is partially correct. There isn’t much new in 15.04, at least not in terms of visible changes to the Unity desktop.
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Erle Robotics has launched an Ubuntu Core “Snappy” version of its open source Linux and ROS-based Erle-Copter quadcopter, with Erle-Copter app store access.
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Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Dnsmasq vulnerability in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, that has been found and fixed.
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The Bq Aquaris e4.5 Ubuntu Edition has been out for some time and is available for purchase right now. It’s the only Ubuntu phone on sale, and one of the users found out how to access a hidden Factory Mode that gives access to all kinds of cool stuff.
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Mark Shuttleworth has announced today that Ubuntu 15.10, scheduled for release in October 2015, will be named Wily Werewolf.
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After announcing that the code name of Ubuntu 15.10 will be Wily Werewolf, Mark Shuttleworth has also announced that a new Ubuntu phone will be released this year, its vendor being still unknown for now.
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Mark Shuttleworth has announced yesterday that the codename of Ubuntu 15.10 will be Wily Werewolf and that a new Ubuntu phone will get released this year.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu MATE project is known for the fact that it contributes back, and it rewards developers for their work. It happened a few times already, and the latest projects awarded are Ubuntu and Debian.
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Today, We have come up with an interesting news for both Ubuntu and Chrome OS users. Meet Chromixium – the new modern desktop operating system based on Ubuntu that has the functionality, look and feel of Google’s “Chrome OS”. Chromixium has brought the elegant simplicity of Chromebook and flexibility and stability of Ubuntu together. Chromixium puts the web front and center of the user experience. Web and Chrome apps work straight out of the browser to connect you to all your personal, work and education networks. Sign into Chromium to sync all your apps and bookmarks. When you are offline or when you need more power, you can install any number of applications for work or play, including LibreOffice, Skype, Steam and a whole lot more. Security updates are installed seamlessly and effortlessly in the background and will be supplied until 2019. You can install Chromixium in place of any existing operating system, or alongside Windows or Linux.
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Raspberry Pi, when first launched about two years ago, became an instant phenomenon. After all, who could have thought of a $35 computer that lets you browse the web and does most of your office work? What is even more surprising is the reception it got from average users. Usually, one would expect a bare-minimum $35 board computer that runs Linux to be popular only among developers or geeks. However, as many as 100,000 Raspberry Pi units were sold on the day of its launch eventually selling more than 2.5 million units till date.
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Gateworks unveiled a tiny, UAV-oriented SBC that runs Linux or Android on an i.MX6 SoC, and offers HDMI in/out, USB, serial, GPIO, CAN, mini-PCIe, and more.
Like other Gateworks Ventana boards, such as the recent Ventana GW5200, the tiny “Ventana GW5510″ runs Linux or Android on a Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6 SoC clocked to 800MHz, and offers a wide-range power supply and -40 to 85°C temperature support. Other Ventana-like features include a programmable pushbutton switch, as well as programmable board shut-down and wake-up for remote sensor applications.
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Armadeus has launched a Linux-equipped module that integrates a Freescale i.MX6 SoC with a Cyclone V GX FPGA, and offers SATA, CSI, DSI, and optional WiFi.
French technology firm Armadeus Systems has been selling Freescale i.MX based modules for years, including the circa-2009, i.MX27 based APF27. For the new “APF6_SP” computer-on-module, Amadeus has turned to Freescale’s Cortex-A9 i.MX6 SoC, which it had previous adopted for its APF6 COM. The feature set on the APF6_SP is very similar, with one major exception: the addition of an Altera Cyclone V GX FPGA.
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Phones
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Tizen
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We have mentioned previously about the rumoured upcoming Samsung Z2 Smartphone and an un-named Global Tizen Smartphone. Well today these are allegedly leaked images of the Samsung Z2, a Tizen based Quad core Smartphone with 1Gb memory, 540 x 960 Screen to be released 1H 2015, which is potentially only a few weeks away.
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The new line of Tizen 4K Samsung SUHD TVs has now officially been launched in the Philippines at an event held a few days ago. The new line-up of TVs includes the JS9500, JS9000 and JS8500 models, supporting screen sizes ranging from 55 to 88 inches. Samsung boasts that their TV technology, which uses nano-crystal semiconductors, leads in color and brightness compared to its competitors.
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Android
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Samsung started pushing the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to the Galaxy S5 flagship smartphone late last year.
Soon after the update rolled out, users began reporting various bugs in the final Android 5.0 Lollipop build for the Samsung Galaxy S5. This even led the company to pause the Android Lollipop update in European regions for a major period. Samsung Norway back in March while replying a user on Facebook had confirmed that the update caused various bugs.
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Android has had an unfortunate reputation over the years. There have been numerous criticisms that the open source mobile operating system is unsafe; that it’s riddled by constant security threats and malware.
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Moto X 2014 owners will soon be able to update their smartphone to the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop software. Motorola announced that the update is set to make its way to the units next week.
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The Android platform will soar past iOS in terms of revenue in a few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more money for Google.
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Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop. No, these aren’t just the names of various delicious treats – they’re also the names of each consecutive, major Android release after Alpha and Beta.
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Last week, Google’s Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update finally started to pick up steam. With Android 5.1.1 Lollipop updates finally on the move, we want to take a look at five things Nexus users need to know now about Google’s Android 5.1.1 update and its release.
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Security researchers have developed an Android application that’s capable of alerting when other apps on a phone or tablet are covertly tracking users and connecting to ad networks.
The team at France’s Eurecom and Technicolor Research – explained in a paper published in the Cornell University Library archive that their prototype NoSuchApp application* functions as an on-board proxy: it monitors traffic and compares URLs silently requested by apps to a list of known ad-serving and user-tracking domains.
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It took a while for Android Lollipop to even get its own slice on the OS pie chart Google releases regularly, but it now seems to be steadily gaining popularity. According to the latest Android stats collected from April 28th to May 4th, nine percent of devices are now running Lollipop. While that’s still quite small, it’s almost double last month’s percentage (five percent). KitKat’s stat slid down to 39.8 percent from last month’s 41.4 percent, so a number of stragglers might have finally upgraded. However, we’re sure the new flagships that recently started shipping with Lollipop out of the box (such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge) helped boost the version’s usage. All the older versions’ percentage are slightly down from last month’s, as well, but Froyo’s impressively still hanging on at 0.3 percent.
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Last week Google finally released the latest Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update aimed at fixing a few last outstanding bugs and issues since the initial Lollipop release back in November. This is the fourth update, however, the Nexus 9 hasn’t received anything past Android 5.0.1 back in November, but we’re hearing the Nexus 9 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update could be here any day now.
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Users of the LG G2 and G3 smartphones are experiencing widespread performance issues after receiving the Android 5.0 Lollipop update. LG G2 and G3 owners report various problems involving battery drain, slow charging and Wi-Fi connectivity, among others.
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Back in January, the news came out that after just three months, the brand new Android 5.0 Lollipop was installed on roughly 1.6% of active Android devices. Since then, it has been slowly but surely climbed upward. In the latest distribution numbers, Google’s tasty sweet treat has reached 9.7 percent market share.
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Valve has recently gone through a major PR debacle after the company announced that it’s implementing paid mods for games and Skyrim in particular. Their decision was short-lived, and it was retracted, but they have managed to incur the rage of the community. Independent developers are now working on a new game launcher that will make Steam obsolete.
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After the announcement, our community growth skyrocketed. Our investors were so impressed by the welcoming of our open source announcement that they let us go ahead with open sourcing biicode early. We worked hard to release most of it in biicode 3.0.
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Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has decided to reveal the source code of the Sudoku-solving app he personally coded.
The PM revealed he likes to program in his spare time last month and mentioned the Sudoku-solver. He’s since taken to Facebook to announce the source code dump.
“The program is pretty basic,’ the PM writes, “it runs at the command prompt, in a DOS window. Type in the data line by line (e.g. 1-3-8—6), then the solver will print out the solution (or all the solutions if there are several), the number of steps the program took searching for the solution, plus some search statistics.”
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Welcome to the third installment of my monthly column, where I explore how open source software and the open source way are used in the digital humanities. Every month I take a look at open source tools you can use in your digital humanities researc, as well as, a few humanities research projects that are using open source tools today. I will also cover news about how transparency and open exchange, and principles of the open source way, being applied to the humanities.
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ViPR is software storage controller tech that separates the control and data planes of operation, enabling different data services to be layered onto a set of storage hardware products – such as EMC’s own arrays, Vblocks, selected third-party arrays, JBODs and cloud storage. The data services are typically ways of accessing data, such as file services,
The open source software will be called Project CoprHD* and be made available on GitHub for community development. It will include all the storage automation and control functionality and be supplied under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0). Public supporting partners for CoprHD are Intel, Verizon and SAP.
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When Kurt Rohloff was working as a senior scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies, he quickly realized the value of encryption when storing data in the cloud. However, he viewed the fact that the data couldn’t be computed on after encryption as a major obstacle in what he needed to accomplish.
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Netflix has released source code for its automated incident response tool to help organisations cut through the noise of security alerts.
Project lead and security boffin Rob Fry together with Brooks Evans, and Jason Chan announced the unleashing of the Fully Integrated Defense Operation (FIDO) saying it has chewed the time to respond to incidents from weeks to hours.
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I recently attended the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Shenzhen, China, to promote Intel’s software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) software solutions. During this year’s IDF, Intel has made several announcements and our CEO Brian Krzanich showcased Intel’s innovation leadership across a wide range of technologies with our local partners in China. On the heel of Krzanich’s announcements, Intel Software & Services Group Senior VP Doug Fisher extended Krzanich’s message to stress the importance of open source collaboration to drive industry innovation and transformation, citing OpenStack and Hadoop as prime examples.
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A recent article by Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker gives a great overview of how these massive projects have benefitted from recent advances in technology. One of the bigger innovations of the last 10 years has been the open-source software Arches. Developed by The World Monuments Fund (WMF) and the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the software provides collaborative tools to document and analyze the “before” data for a damaged site. A group, whether of historians, architects, or a whole city, can contribute information they have from the site, like aerial photos or video, among other documentation.
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Events
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The open source community lives and grows through collaboration. That collaboration is driven online but we’ve witnessed first hand how much can be done and quickened by face-to-face meetings. This is due, in part, to the session speakers at events like LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Embedded Linux Conference and more. Speakers at our events represent the leaders and subject matter experts across a diverse range of technology areas and lend so much more to the event experience than just speaking. They help grow the community through their contribution; they make the experience for attendees so much more rich; and they represent the passion and genius that Linux and open source are known for.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has taken another step toward protecting users from fishing attempts by releasing a new Google Chrome extension ‘Password Alert’. The extension protects users from being gmail account overused with other non-google websites. As soon as it detects that the password has been exposed to any non-google website/service, it prompts to reset password immediately.
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Mozilla
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We’ve been writing about the benefits of HTTPS (HTTP Secure) connections, as opposed to basic HTTP connections, for years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even endorses a browser extension called HTTPS Everywhere that uses it to encrypt communications on the web.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Chris C Kemp, the former NASA CIO credited with originating OpenStack, has predicted stacks-in-a-box that make the cloud platform more accessible and easier to use aren’t far off.
Speaking at CeBIT Australia, Kemp responded to a Register question about OpenStack usability by saying “in 1996 Linux was no fun either, but it provided a lot of value.” That value, and the fact the platform was open, led to innovation and the more polished Linuxes available and widely-used today.
Kemp reckons that cycle will repeat for OpenStack.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has just announced that the second RC (Release Candidate) for the LibreOffice 4.4.3 branch has been released and is now available for download and testing.
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The GSOC 2014 Color Selector is in LibreOffice 4.4, but it’s not used for the “area fill” dropdown in impress or draw. So I spent a little time today for LibreOffice 5.0 to hack things up so that instead of using the old color drop down list for that we now have the new color selector in the toolbar instead. Gives access to custom colors, multiple palettes, and recently used colors all in one place.
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CMS
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WordPress issued an emergency update last week to patch a fresh zero-day vulnerability that could have enabled commenters to compromise a site. The previously unknown and unpatched weakness affected current versions of WordPress, according to Finnish company Klikki Oy.
On April 26 — just three days after WordPress released it’s latest version, 4.2 — Klikki Oy released a video and proof of concept code for an exploit of the flaw, which allows a hacker to store malicious JavaScript code on WordPress site comments. The script is triggered when the comment is viewed.
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I’m very excited about Joshua Lee’s talk on the Drupal-powered International Biosecurity Intelligence System (IBIS) at DrupalCon 2015. Though I’m no biosecurity expert, the aggregation methods and process workflow for gathering biosecurity information is relevant to many industries. In his talk, the technology for creating this data aggregation system will be covered, as well as how the Drupal community can both benefit and contribute to this project.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The European Commission has published a new version of its strategy for the internal use of Free Software. The FSFE provided input to the Commission during the update phase and while the strategy is broadly similar to the previous version, there are some improvements.
Unlike previous versions, this time the strategy is accompanied by an action plan aimed at putting it into practice. However, the action plan is not public, so it is not possible to assess the Commission’s progress towards its own goals. We would welcome it, if the Commission would soon publish its action plan.
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Public Services/Government
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The city administration of Helsinki (Finland) will prefer open source software solutions for new IT solutions. The city council on 13 April adopted a new IT strategy, emphasising a preference for open source, especially when developing or commissioning the development of software solutions.
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Switzerland’s public administrations are increasingly turning to using open source, according to the country’s IT trade group SwissICT and the open source advocacy group /ch/open. Like in 2012, the two groups have surveyed public administrations and companies in the country. They notice a “high increase in the use of open source software.”
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Openness/Sharing
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The Turkish government will restart the process of participating in the Open Government Partnership, after having been found “acting contrary to the OGP process for two consecutive Action Plan cycles”.
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People in tech companies and particularly in open source communities believe in and value meritocracy—letting the best ideas win. One thing that’s become increasingly clear to me over the past few years is this: meritocracy is a great driver of innovation, but if we want to get to the best ideas, we need diversity of thought and an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome to participate and offer different perspectives. Indeed, to live up to our ideal of meritocracy, we must consistently question and seek to improve it.
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Open Data
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A group of Cambridge computer scientists have set a new gold standard for openness and reproducibility in research by sharing the more than 200GB of data and 20,000 lines of code behind their latest results – an unprecedented degree of openness in a peer-reviewed publication. The researchers hope that this new gold standard will be adopted by other fields, increasing the reliability of research results, especially for work which is publicly funded.
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Open Access/Content
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A new gold standard has been set for openness and reproducibility in research – and it was done by Cambridge computer scientists. At a talk today at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in Oakland, they are going to unveil peer-reviewed results with 200 GB of data and 20,000 lines of code.
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Open Hardware
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Now the design the engineering team came up with is available as an open source device for anyone who wants to help a handicapped animal. The construction plan, the print data, and parts lists can all be downloaded from the Multec website or this Instructable the company published.
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This low cost magnetic resonance imager isn’t [Peter]’s first attempt at medical imaging, and it isn’t his first project for the Hackaday Prize, either. He’s already built a CT scanner using a barium check source and a CCD marketed as a high-energy particle detector. His Hackaday Prize entry last year, an Open Source Science Tricorder with enough sensors to make [Spock] jealous, ended up winning fourth place.
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Programming
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Facebook today announced the public release of HHVM 3.7.0, the latest version of the HipHop Virtual Machine that powers their Hack language and PHP implementation.
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Security
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Linux has a well deserved reputation as being one of the most secure platforms for individuals and businesses. This is largely due to the way security is integrated into the system, but there is a great risk in being too complacent. Recent events serve to remind us that there is no such thing as an uncrackable system.
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“It’s more a question of an uptick in publicity,” suggested Bill Weinberg, senior director of open source strategy at Black Duck Software.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Britain and Nato have launched their biggest war games on Russia’s doorstep amid growing tensions over Vladimir Putin’s military aggression.
The largest ever Nato anti-submarine exercise, including the Royal Navy, is under way off the coast of Norway just weeks after reports of Russian submarines encroaching in to foreign waters.
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Finance
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The UK Supreme Court recently ruled on the law relating to prosecutions for entering into, or becoming concerned in, an arrangement which facilitates the acquisition, retention, use or control of criminal property for, or on behalf of, another person – contrary to s328 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.
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It’s USA Today, not the unions, who are being simplistic here. The data they are relying on refers to gross output. This would include the full value of a car assembled in the United States, even if the engine, transmission and the other major components are imported.
It also doesn’t adjust for inflation. If USA Today used the correct table, it would find that real value added in manufacturing hasn’t “nearly doubled”–it’s risen by a bit less than 41.0 percent since 1997, compared to growth of 45.8 percent for the economy as a whole.
The story here is a one of very basic macroeconomics. The $500 billion annual trade deficit ($600 billion at an annual rate in March) implies a loss of demand of almost 3.0 percent of GDP. In the context of an economy that is below full employment, this has the same impact on the economy as if consumers took $500 billion every year and stuffed it under their mattress instead of spending it. USA Today might try working on its numbers and economics a bit before calling people names.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The male gaze theory posits that because men control the creation of media; the media messages are dominated by a male point of view. The CEOs of the six companies that own 90% of media are all white males. Those same corporations are also heavily invested in the entertainment industry.
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The Guardian reflects the metropolitan London world of New Labour, and nothing else. Its coverage of the referendum, particularly by Severin Carrell, achieved the remarkable feat of being even less fair and containing even more lies than the Scotsman. But if you want really to get inside the mind of Labour, the Guardian remains the place to go to know what the Labour elite – London’s Balls, Cooper, Miliband, Harman, Umunna, Jowell etc. are thinking.
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Meet the Press host Chuck Todd can’t seem to get enough of the 2016 presidential race. Yet the one major candidate who announced he was running last week–Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who declared on April 30 he was running for the Democratic nomination–was strikingly ignored on Meet the Press‘s May 2 broadcast.
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Todd may think seeing whether or not someone has been mentioned on Meet the Press is “some arbitrary way to judge the show,” but it seems to us to be a fairly straightforward way to gauge who the show thinks is an important part of the political discussion and who is not. And a tally of the show’s mentions of potential presidential candidates so far in 2015 is revealing.
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How the European Commission gave lobbyists pretty much what they wanted
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Censorship
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Two people were fatally shot Sunday outside a Garland, Texas, community center that was hosting an event displaying cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, local officials said.
Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said that two men drove up to the community center and “opened fire on the security officers” hired to protect the event before being shot themselves.
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Privacy
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French MPs are due to approve a bill reforming French intelligence law to counter terrorist threats. But critics warn that the draft law is a license to spy on citizens’ private lives. Erin Conroy reports from Paris.
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The Intelligence Bill, which was presented on the fast track on 19 March by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, rallied a very large, argued and vigorous opposition, from a number of civil rights associations, collectives, lawyers’ and magistrates’ unions, but also administrative authorities such as the CNIL (French Data Protection authority) and the CNCDH (French National Consultative Committee for Human Rights).
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As we’ve noted, there’s a new USA Freedom Act in town, and it’s on the fast track through Congress. It has some good stuff in there, and is generally a step forward on surveillance reform and ending certain forms of bulk collection — though there are some concerns about how it can be abused. But one thing that plenty of people agree on, is that even if it’s a step, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Last Thursday, there was a markup in the House Judiciary Committee, to help move the bill to the floor, and some amendments were proposed to improve the bill — all of which got rejected.
What was especially frustrating, was that for at least one key amendment, everyone agreed that it was important and supported it, and yet they still refused to support it. The reasoning, basically, was that the existing bill was the work of many, many months of back and forth and compromises, and the administration and the House leadership had made it clear that it would not approve a single deviation, even if it was really important. The amendment in question was basically a replica of an appropriations amendment from Reps. Ted Poe, Zoe Lofgren and Thomas Massie that we wrote about last year, which surprised many by passing overwhelmingly in the House, only to be stripped out by the Senate.
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Civil Rights
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If you were holding onto the faint hope that federal election campaigns were ever going to be anything but “buy your way into office” spending sprees, you may as well kiss it goodbye. The Federal Election Committee’s head has just admitted her agency is completely powerless to do the one thing it’s supposed to be doing.
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The idea that police officers should use handcuffs and leg shackles to control an unruly individual is hardly unusual in the US, where fondness for the use of metal restraints runs through the criminal justice system.
What is unusual is when the individual in question is five years old, and the arrest takes place in an elementary school.
New York state police were called last week to the primary school in Philadelphia, New York, close to the Canadian border, after staff reported that a pupil, Connor Ruiz, was disruptive and uncontrollable. When officers arrived at the premises, they placed the five-year-old boy in handcuffs, carried him out to a patrol car and put his feet into shackles before taking him to a medical center for evaluation.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Facebook’s Internet.org, which aims to give impoverished people around the world free mobile access to a selection of Internet services, is opening the platform to developers after facing criticism that the program’s restrictions violate net neutrality principles.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is opening up his Internet.org platform to developers to help bring new types of content to the more than four billion people who lack Internet access.
The move comes weeks after several Indian firms decided to pull out of the project due to concerns that the app does not provide equal access to information, one of the principles of net neutrality.
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DRM
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Today, a wide variety of community groups, activist organizations, and businesses are taking part in the ninth International Day Against DRM (dayagainstdrm.org).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Techdirt has covered its fair share of idiotic legal threats over trademarks, but the following example is spectacular even for a field that has many superb examples of corporate bullying. It concerns the village of Copthorne (population 5,000), in the English county of West Sussex. It’s rather well established: it’s been around for a thousand years, and is mentioned in the Domesday Book, which was compiled in 1086. Recently, though, its village association was threatened with legal action for using the name ‘Copthorne’ on its Web site, as the Plymouth Herald newspaper reports…
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Copyrights
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A presumed pirate with an unusually large appetite for activating Windows 7 has incurred the wrath of Microsoft. In a lawsuit filed at a Washington court, the Seattle-based company said that it logged hundreds of suspicious product activations from a Verizon IP address and is now seeking damages.
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A couple of years ago in the Svensson case, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) made it clear (finally) that merely linking to content is not infringement. That was a case involving a news aggregator linking to official sources. However, in a new case that has been referred to the CJEU, the court will examine if links to unauthorized versions of content is infringing as well. The excellent IPKat has the details of the case which involves a blog that linked to some pre-publication Playboy photos in the Netherlands. A lower court had said that it wasn’t copyright infringement, but still broke the law, by facilitating access. On appeal, the court found that the free speech concerns outweighed the copyright concerns. From the description by the lawyer representing the blogger (“Geen Stijl news”):
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Remember, just last week, when HBO and Showtime were flipping out about a couple of streaming sites promising to broadcast live streams of the big Floyd Mayweather/Manny Pacquiao fight? Apparently, they had the wrong target.
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As Kim Dotcom remains stuck in legal limbo, his once-extravagant life keeps moving on and costing plenty of money. Auckland Now reports that Dotcom will theoretically be able to keep the balancing act up for a while longer, as this week a New Zealand court released some of Dotcom’s frozen financial assets to specifically allow the Mega mogul to pay for his continual monthly expenses.
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A few months ago the UK Government legalized copying of MP3s, CDs and DVDs for personal use, as that would be in the best interest of consumers. A common sense decision for many, but leaked emails now show that Hollywood fiercely protested the changes behind the scenes.
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Further Recent Posts
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