07.08.15
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Google, Microsoft at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: CIO, a Web site of IDG, smears Microsoft’s competition by quoting sources that are closely aligned with and/or subservient to Microsoft
AN old ‘friend’, a branch of Microsoft AstroTurfing ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’, has just reared its ugly head again with help from IDG‘s “CIO” (a misleading site name). Consumer Watchdog is not a watchdog and it’s not for consumers. IDG should know better than that by now. Consumer Watchdog is an attack dog and a front group against Google. Right now it complains that Google is not censoring enough (as if censorship is a good thing). Remember that censorship is not privacy and “Consumer Watchdog” cares only about making Google look bad, it never cared about privacy at all.
To quote the nonsense from IDG’s “CIO” site (neglecting to correctly identify the messenger): “Consumer Watchdog will file a complaint against Google with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Tuesday, said John Simpson, director of the group’s Privacy Project. The complaint will ask the FTC to rule that Google, by declining to delete search engine links on request from U.S. residents, is an unfair business practice that violates the U.S. FTC Act.”
‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ has a Privacy Project? That’s just hilarious. That’s would be like BP forming a “green group”. Moreover, it is hilarious that IDG covers “privacy” and pretends that it cares about the concept because CIO, for example, based on NoScript, want to run a massive number of scripts on my machine from just about thirty different domains! Holy cow! The reader is the product and browsing habits are up for sale to so many entities at the same time. The same is true for other sites of IDG (there are many of them).
“The original source of that really bad scraper site is a CIO trash opinion piece,” wrote someone to us. IDG has become complicit in lobbying and AstroTurfing, whether it realises this or not.
Another new piece of garbage came from IDG only a short while ago, quoting XenSource (Microsoft-friendly as we have shown many times in past years) as some kind of authority on FOSS. This is again mischaracterising the messenger to give the messenger undeserved credibility. That’s like calling Richard Stallman an “open core” proponent. The headline boldly states that “open source business model is a failure” and the body belatedly adds vital context to this headline: “That’s the conclusion of Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backed Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Box as startups. Levine is also former CEO of XenSource, a company that commercialized products based on the open source Xen hypervisor.”
“…sites that pretend to offer ‘news’ often just treat readers (audience) as the product, selling the audience to the real client (the advertiser or agenda setter).”Levine is not a truly technical person and he ignores plenty of evidence that open source as a business model works, and often works very well. A lot of people can easily claim that the proprietary software business model is inherently flawed because very few proprietary software companies sell stuff (only a few giants do). A lot of those claiming that no open source business model can work also say FOSS is sexist, racist, not secure, brings licence/liceinsing risk, etc. — the very same things that can be said about proprietary software. If only 10% of Free/libre software companies manage to survive in the long term (based on level of sustainable income) it might not be any different, statistically, from their proprietary counterparts. The company my wife and I work for does manage to make income from Free/libre software development and maintenance. This company is far from the only one in Europe and many are doing very well. Proprietary software is not a business model. Free/libre software development is not a business model either. It’s modality of distribution/development. People buy services, not zeros and ones. For IDG to publish and republish misleading headlines like “Why the open source business model is a failure” is merely to provoke. For IDG to call ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ a “privacy group” (even in the headline) and to label censorship “right to be forgotten” is to reveal sheer bias. Remember that Microsoft is a huge client of IDG (advertising, IDC contracts and so on), so maybe we oughtn’t be very shocked by that. Here is a great new example of proprietary software advertment disguised as an article. It bashes Free/libre software as a whole, too, while promoting one particular piece of proprietary software in Computer Weekly.
Watch out what you read because there is plenty of agenda on sale everywhere. Moreover, sites that pretend to offer ‘news’ often just treat readers (audience) as the product, selling the audience to the real client (the advertiser or agenda setter). That’s their business model. Very unethical. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 7:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A game of perception alternation
“Well, it’s in the brand. The image you create around the brand. That’s why I need you in this company. Because nobody in this company, or in this industry, really understands that. And if we can have the perception, I can create the reality. With the combination of the reality and the perception, nobody will ever beat us.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: More AstroTurfing for Vista 10, including shameless promotion of the mere perception of it being ‘open’ and ‘secure’
THINGS must be working out pretty well for Microsoft’s PR agencies when/if even some Linux sites are willing to promote the NSA-friendly (hyper-visor runs only on Windows) Hyper-V. This is a little frustrating because it is not hard to see what it’s all about for Microsoft, whose software is made insecure by design. As FOSS Force put it the other day:
I assume that most enterprise users of Microsoft products already know not to trust Redmond to handle Windows’ security. I worry, however, about the poor consumer who plops a thousand dollars down for a laptop, and thinks it’s just fine to stop in to use the free Wi-Fi at Mickey Dee’s for a quick check of the bank account while being protected by nothing more than the best Redmond has to offer.
It looks like Vista 10 will remain as flawed and inherently insecure and its predecessors, no matter how much AstroTurfing Microsoft does (it gets worse by the day, as perception changing is the goal with official release day imminent) and how much openwashing Microsoft constantly does. It’s hard to keep up with the propaganda and refute it quickly enough.
Yesterday we spotted Microsoft’s propaganda channel (Channel 9) brainwashing Microsoft staff and readers of Channel 9, implicitly telling them that Visual Studio “open source”. Openwashing of SAP [1] and Apple [2] (below) could also be found in the news yesterday, so not only Microsoft does this. Remember that both companies were asked (if not demanded) by Russia to reveal their source code last year, for fear of back doors. We don’t know if SAP and Apple ever complied. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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SAP SE is dedicated to helping businesses respond to market demands around the clock, according to Steve Lucas, president of Platform Solutions at SAP. Its partnership with Red Hat, Inc. is a key part of its strategy. In an interview with theCUBE at RedHat Summit, Lucas explained further.
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Recently, Apple released its programming language, Swift 2, to the public. By releasing Swift to the open source community, Apple is giving software developers more access to and control over the programming language. This release opens up a myriad of exciting possibilities for application development, software advancements and increased functionality.
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Posted in Apple, Europe, Patents at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Who’s copying who?
Summary: Europe is being drained by the patent industry (lawyers, judges, etc.) while the US gradually takes on the problem
“So Software isn’t Patentable in the EU but the EPO is ignoring the Law?”
That’s a comment made the other day by “AntiSoftwarePat” over at Twitter. Well, we have already shown many other instances where the EPO ignores the law — knowingly too — including the extension of patent scope (in order to artificially elevate patents count).
The Unitary Patent will take expansion of patent scope even further, transcending borders. “UK Unitary Patent ratification before Brexit referendum, Mr Cameron is taking risks by giving EU super patent powers,” wrote the FFII’s President regarding this new article about UK-IPO. “In a statement sent to Out-Law.com,” said the author, “the IPO ruled out ratification of the Agreement this year but said that it intends to complete the “domestic preparations” for ratification ahead of the UK referendum on whether the country should remain in the EU, which is scheduled for some time in 2017.”
So they are jumping the gun. The public isn’t even taken into account.
“Hey, let’s patent life,” some folks may think (they can make a lot of money from that). According to this article from a London-based blog of lawyers, “Life sciences come to life again, this time in Berlin”. To quote: “Arrangements are now being made for the training of judges, the provision of court facilities and the projecting of existing patenting and dispute resolution techniques on to a fresh canvas. This is a scenario in which the accumulated experience, knowledge and wisdom of the life science sector cannot be relied upon in the absence of rigorous double-checking against a new framework for patenting, new litigation rules and — this is going to hurt the most — a set of complex transitional provisions.”
This shows that Europe is rushing (even fast-tracking) these expansions without public consent. While the US is narrowing down patent scope, Europe seems to be expanding patent scope.
A new article from the US (CBS) asks: “What would ‘real’ patent reform look like?”
The author correctly points out that “last year, the US Supreme Court issued a number of patent-related decisions that drew modest limits around both the process and substance of newly created categories of patents, including for software and business methods. Courts and the Patent Office became more aggressive about rejecting or overturning applications that should never have been granted. As a result, the overheated market for low-quality patents collapsed.”
The whole patent system in its current form is so utterly corrupt, biased and inherently protectionist (that’s just its goal, not publication). Too few people are willing to say that. Watch what Apple is patenting right now [1, 2]. It’s computer vision, i.e. software patents, on selfies! Will Europe go down the same abyss? hopefully not. European citizens need to educate themselves about what today’s patent system really is and who it benefits. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat, Security at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Red Hat and back doors: poll from FOSS Force
Summary: The return of XKEYSCORE to some media outlets (not news anymore) brings us back to debating Red Hat’s role (also not really news)
QUITE a few sites (see [1-3] below) seem to be talking about Red Hat’s special (but no longer secret) relationship with the NSA, which is not at all news. The NSA uses a lot of RHEL (and also Fedora) on some malicious spying equipment, based on various NSA leaks. We already wrote a great deal about this back in 2013 [1, 2, 3, 4]. The only new thing we learn from the latest articles is that Red Hat continues to refuse to remark on the subject, even when asked by journalists (see the first article below). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A little over two years ago, the first disclosures about the massive surveillance operation being carried out by the NSA were made in the Guardian, thanks to an intrepid contractor named Edward Snowden.
Now comes the rather disturbing information that the NSA runs its XKEYSCORE program — an application that the Intercept, the website run by journalist Glenn Greenwald, describes as NSA’s Google for private communications — for the most part on Red Hat Linux servers.
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If report is correct, Red Hat’s marketing department has a very tricky customer reference
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SELinux is a product of the NSA and some worried when it was added to Red Hat, Fedora, and later many other distributions. Even before Snowden revealed the massive government spying, having the NSA anywhere near Linux activated certain Spidey-senses. Now we learn that SELinux may have had an exploit for bypassing the security enforcements. Italian software company Hacking Team, who admits to providing “technology to the worldwide law enforcement and intelligence communities,” has been selling technology to governments (most with bad human rights records) to assist in gathering surveillance data on citizens, groups, journalists, and other governments. Recently Hacking Team was hacked and their information has been leaked onto the Internet. Besides the SELinux exploit, it’s been reported that the FBI, U.S. Army, and the Drug Enforcement Agency are or were customers of Hacking Team’s services.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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In fact, her prowress around Linux and FOSS is to such a high degree that it makes her father proud beyond words. Recently she was having some problems with Linux Mint for which the solution, she decided, was to upgrade to Rafaela 17.2 shortly before it was ready for prime time. I started into the litany of what to do in a upgrade, and she shushed her old man — “I got this Dad,” before adding the family head shake accompanied by the word, “Sheesh.”
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It’s great having a little netbook that I don’t actually care about. It cost a few hundred, years ago, and rather than spend a few more hundred now for a new one, it serves its function and I care even less about it. That’s wonderful for the thing I use it for most – travel – because if it gets stolen, who cares? Working in the cloud on terrible hardware — it feels a lot like freedom.
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Server
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The architectural change in Cloud computing sparked by Docker is a rare occurrence. And a few key practices made Docker, Inc. successful enough to bring about this critical change. First, Docker realized the importance of agility in infrastructure and capitalized on this.
Businesses like Amazon proved that using an agile application is critical to business survival. “If you’re not trying to learn how to take advantage of agile infrastructure, of agile applications, you’re going to be left behind,” Scott Johnston, SVP of Product at Docker, told theCube at DockerCon 2015.
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Kernel Space
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The father of the Linux project, Linus Torvalds, talked about Valve and its potential role in the Linux ecosystem with the upcoming gaming consoles.
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Gummiboot is dead, of course, because it was spun into systemd to form systemd’s SD-Boot (U)EFI boot manager. SD-Boot has been in there since systemd 220 as an optional feature and can be used for doing some cool stuff.
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While Linux is open-source, which allows people to change it as they please, Torvalds remains the lone official arbiter of the software, guiding how Linux evolves. He is The Decider.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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I first started using ntop about eight or nine years ago. I was technology director of a K-12 public school, and we were looking for network analysis tools that would not break our budget. I found ntop through a Google search and installed it on an extra computer we had that was running CentOS.
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Laptop Mode Tools is a power-saving package for Linux systems, which lets users increase the life expectancy of a laptop’s battery. A new version has been released and is now available for download.
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Today the ownCloud community released ownCloud 8.1. You might think it sounds like a smaller release because we called this 8.1 instead of 9.0 but you’d be wrong. The contributor community hasn’t slowed down, quite the opposite. By the end of last year we decided to do smaller releases instead of huge ones. Because of that we will jump to a major version number only once a year and will increase the minor version number for the other releases. So this one is called 8.1 but it’s a major new version. So what is in 8.1?
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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If you are new to Linux then I’m sure you are giving up lots of time choosing Desktop Environment of your Linux Distribution. You are probably thinking to give a try to each one of them but that’s very time consuming. That’s why here I’m reviewing the 5 Best Linux Desktop Environments with the pros & cons. The article gives you what you should know for choosing a DE. So let’s get started!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Kexi report plugin has reached milestone 1 (build and display). In Kexi 3, the report plugin is powered by the new KReport library, which has been separated out of Calligra into it’s own repository to allow re-use by other projects.
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3D visualization in LabPlot is supporting now several types of data:
Spreadsheet
Matrix
File sources (currently only .obj and .stl files)
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I’d like to introduce KDE Reports, a web app that shows graphical reports that can help you get insight about activity going on with different KDE projects.
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Repeating what became a constant on last years, KDE project is bringing an eventful series of presentations and activities on community driven software to the FISL, the Fórum Internacional de Software LIvre, which will be realized at Porto Alegre, south of Brazil, starting July 7.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As you may know, GNOME Commander is an open-source two panel file manager similar to Norton Commander or Midnight Commander, being very popular among the Linux power users.
Among others, it has support for tabs, permits the users to select or deselect files, has support for FTP, SAMBA, folder bookmarks and history, integrated command-line, embedded file viewer and other useful features.
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New Releases
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The upgrade is the first in two years since BackTrack Linux was redeveloped and relaunched as Kali Linux in May 2013. It has followed two-year upgrade cycles since 2011 when a new version was released every 12 months
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 has received a new update pack, the third for this development cycle, and the devs have upgraded a lot of the biggest packages, including LibreOffice and some of the supported desktop environments.
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Slackware Family
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LibreOffice galore! Last week saw the announcement of the latest in the 4.x series, and I decided to build LibreOffice 4.4.4 packages. This time however, they are created for Slackware 14.1. The stable release of Slackware deserves the latest stable office suite to keep you guys productive.
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Red Hat Family
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A little over two years ago, the first disclosures about the massive surveillance operation being carried out by the NSA were made in the Guardian, thanks to an intrepid contractor named Edward Snowden.
Now comes the rather disturbing information that the NSA runs its XKEYSCORE program — an application that the Intercept, the website run by journalist Glenn Greenwald, describes as NSA’s Google for private communications — for the most part on Red Hat Linux servers.
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If report is correct, Red Hat’s marketing department has a very tricky customer reference
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SELinux is a product of the NSA and some worried when it was added to Red Hat, Fedora, and later many other distributions. Even before Snowden revealed the massive government spying, having the NSA anywhere near Linux activated certain Spidey-senses. Now we learn that SELinux may have had an exploit for bypassing the security enforcements. Italian software company Hacking Team, who admits to providing “technology to the worldwide law enforcement and intelligence communities,” has been selling technology to governments (most with bad human rights records) to assist in gathering surveillance data on citizens, groups, journalists, and other governments. Recently Hacking Team was hacked and their information has been leaked onto the Internet. Besides the SELinux exploit, it’s been reported that the FBI, U.S. Army, and the Drug Enforcement Agency are or were customers of Hacking Team’s services.
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Gaining entry to the open-source community can seem daunting to customers unfamiliar with the territory. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said that might be because they don’t understand that it isn’t just one large community, but several different ones.
“There are thousands of open-source communities, and the each have their own culture. They each have their own norms, ways of working, you know, personalities. And breaking in isn’t easy,” Whitehurst said.
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Sell-side Wall Street analysts are anticipating Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) will post a current quarter earnings per share of $0.29. This figure is based on the combined estimates of the analysts that cover the company. For the period ending on 2015-05-31 the company reported earnings per share of $0.31. Based on the latest public information, the firm is slated to next report earnings on or around 2015-09-17.
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 GNOME felt very snappy for me. All windows opened and closed very quickly in the Live session. There were no bugs or crashes during my Live run. The system was stable.
However, I felt quite uncomfortable in the system itself. I think it is partially because I am not very familiar with GNOME 3, and its concept is not very close to my heart.
But I must admit that in many places Fedora 22 left the impression of something unfinished, still requiring polishing. I’ve never felt this in recent releases of Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Some applications like Weather or Map still lack features that we take for granted in similar web tools.
I wish the Fedora team success in improving their system in future releases, and see them soon!
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Debian Family
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Plans have been laid for making GCC 5 the default compiler in Debian Unstable by month’s end. With the move to GCC5 comes libstdc++6 ABI breakage.
GCC 5 is a huge compiler update and offers a ton of new features/functionality but for a distribution moving to it comes some ABI incompatibilities in the libstdc++6 standard library. There is also potential package breaks due to defaulting to C++11 as the default C++ language version.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu has daily images for its development cycle, and you can always download the latest version for the distros that is being worked on right at the moment. Or at least you could until Ubuntu 15.10. It seems that no image has passed testing for a few weeks.
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Ubuntu developers are working on a new OTA update for Ubuntu Touch, and it looks like it’s coming along just fine. Even better, the new Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition got some special attention, and the battery life will be much better.
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Canonical has numerous hardware partners around the world, and Lenovo is one of them. The two companies are now planning to release devices with Ubuntu Linux preloaded in India, starting with the Thinkpad L450 laptop.
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As you may know, Canonical is constantly updating its Ubuntu Touch operating system, the OTA-5 Update being scheduled for release in mid-July.
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At first glance, you may want to equate the Intel Compute Stick with Live USB devices of the type that you can create yourself at sites like Pendrive Linux. What’s different about the Intel Compute Stick, though, is that storage and all of the hardware resources necessary to run a computer are onboard. Users just need a display to get going, and they can add wireless mice and keyboards through Bluetooth.
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A cups-filters vulnerability has been identified and corrected in the Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” MATE was launched last week and, as usual, I installed it on my machines to see how this distro is progressing. I found a refreshed, faster and more feature-rich distro that’s well worth trying.
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Advantech is prepping an Intel Quark based IoT gateway that runs Yocto Linux and offers PoE support. mini-PCIe expansion, and web-based device management.
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Phones
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Hardware and software outfit Jolla is to give up making hardware, with that part of the business set to be taken on by a new, yet-to-be-announced company, with Jolla then concentrating on its Sailfish OS.
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Tizen
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As part of the spread of Tizen education in India, Samsung will train the youth of the Telangana Academy on innovative digital technologies based on the Tizen operating system.
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Android
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Apple isn’t shy about taking great features from Android, its number-one rival in smartphones and tablets.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing — it shows Apple is willing to adapt to customer demand. By doing that, it’s giving people more incentive to switch from Android to the iPhone. In fact, Tim Cook couldn’t stop talking about “switchers” — people switching from Android to the iPhone — during the company’s most recent earnings call in April.
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What: Shares of smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY) fell 14% in June, according to S&P Capital IQ data, as concerns about the Canadian company’s path forward remained in doubt amid another disappointing quarterly earnings report. But while Wall Street seemed unsure about BlackBerry’s path forward, CEO John Chen seemed decidedly more sanguine about its prospects.
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Enterprise needs are a different beast from those of SMBs. Few areas define this as clearly as storage. Instead of storing a few hundred gigabytes, you’re looking at terabytes and maybe even petabytes. Failover, redundancy, security, backups—all essential when it comes to enterprise storage.
You might think the only viable solutions for such tasks are proprietary solutions. Fortunately, for businesses and those working within them, that assumption is incorrect. Open source has come a long way and now powers the backbone of enterprise computing—and that includes storage. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the following 10 reasons why open source could be the right storage solution for your organization.
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We all know that open source software isn’t always pretty. Una Kravets, a front end developer at IBM, will be speaking at OSCON this year about getting more designers involved in our projects. While it’s easy for developers to see that working together produces better software, it’s not always that way for designers who are trained to work alone. I had the chance to interview Una about open source, design, and her upcoming talk.
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I’ve been involved with open source software since 1994. At that time I was working for a solution provider, and a customer asked us to implement a seamless authentication system for mobile users. Neither RADIUS or TACACS met our needs, and we had to build a custom solution. Luckily enough, we didn’t need to start from scratch, as we were able to borrow some open source code.
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Events
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In addition to picking up technical skills, networking, and learning about products and services in the expo, OSCON attendees can learn practical community-building tricks. In this interview, Kara Sowles (community initiatives manager at Puppet Labs) and Francesca Krihely give advice for hosting a community event. They’ll be teaching a half-day tutorial on planning and running tech events at OSCON 2015 in Portland.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Emma Irwin is a participation designer at Mozilla who dedicates a lot of volunteer time to educating and empowering adults and youth on the web through making. She has a background as web developer and lives in a small Vancouver Island town with her husband and three daughters.
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As you may already know, Firefox is being developed on three separate channels. First, the features are implemented in the developer branch, they reach the beta channel when enough tests have been performed and finally, some of the new features from the betas get included in the stable version of Firefox.
Recently, Firefox 40.0 Beta 1 has been released, bringing improved scrolling, graphics and video playback performance for Linux. And Mozilla claims that this improvements are Linux specific.
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Firefox is about to undergo some dramatic changes, according to Mozilla. Most notably, it sounds like future versions of Firefox will focus on Firefox-esque features such as Private Browsing Mode, while features that are unpolished or otherwise not very useful will be stripped out of the browser entirely. Furthermore, it looks like Mozilla is finally getting serious about moving Firefox away from XUL and XBL, though it isn’t clear if they will be replaced with open Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) or native UI.
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Firefox has gone through a rough time over the last couple of years, with increased competition from Chrome and other browsers. Now the browser’s developers are planning big changes to Firefox. Will these changes win back users and developers who have abandoned Firefox?
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SaaS/Big Data
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The next major OpenStack cloud platform release is set to debut in October and is codenamed : Liberty but what follows Liberty? OpenStack Foundation members have voted and the winning name is Meiji.
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Databases
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In June, Bloomberg conducted a survey of 20 startups valued at $1 billion or more, reporting, “None of the companies surveyed indicated they had a large Oracle database deployment for their main services though many used bits of Oracle software to run aspects of their organizations.”
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Security
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Server admins and developers beware: The OpenSSL Project plans to release security updates Thursday for its widely used cryptographic library that will fix a high severity vulnerability.
OpenSSL implements multiple cryptographic protocols and algorithms including TLS (Transport Layer Security), which underpins encryption on the Web as part of protocols like HTTPS (HTTP Secure), IMAPS (Internet Message Access Protocol Secure) and SMTPS (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Secure).
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A few days earlier, small USB drives had been inserted into the company’s computers. They were programmed to intercept the nine-digit PINs that controlled access to DP World’s shipping containers. Besides fruit, metals, and other legitimate cargo, some of these containers carried millions of euros in heroin and cocaine. To get their drugs out of the port, often traffickers use low-tech methods: They hire runners to jump fences, break open containers, and sprint away before guards can catch them, earning as much as €10,000 ($11,200) a trip. Stealing PIN codes is more elegant and less risky. Whoever has the codes can pull into the terminal, enter the PIN into a keypad, wait as robot-controlled loaders put the container on their truck, and drive off—sometimes minutes ahead of the cargo’s legitimate owner.
[...]
There was only one condition of the release: Van De Moere had to give Okul an intensive training session on Linux, the operating system on which Metasploit, the hacking software, is based. A few weeks later, according to police and interviews, he did so over one weekend at a Holiday Inn in Ghent. In November, Van De Moere returned two antennas and had a couple of beers with Okul. That was the last either man would see of the Turks.
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Joanna Rutkowska came up with the idea of Anti Evil Maid. This can take two slightly different forms. In both, a secret phrase is generated and encrypted with the TPM. In the first form, this is then stored on a USB stick. If the user suspects that their system has been tampered with, they boot from the USB stick. If the PCR values are good, the secret will be successfully decrypted and printed on the screen. The user verifies that the secret phrase is correct and reboots, satisfied that their system hasn’t been tampered with. The downside to this approach is that most boots will not perform this verification, and so you rely on the user being able to make a reasonable judgement about whether it’s necessary on a specific boot.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Of all the voices challenging the Israeli military’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, those of Israeli soldiers stand out as powerful insights from within the military establishment.
Avner Gvaryahu is director of public outreach for Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans who are working to dismantle the traditional narrative put forth by their own military establishment. The former soldiers founded the organization in 2004 after realizing they shared deep misgivings about what they had seen and done while serving in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They felt a moral obligation to present the truth, and over the past decade, they have collected, fact-checked, and published over a thousand testimonies from soldiers of ranks high and low. These testimonies reflect a deterioration of moral standards and worrying shifting of the rules of engagement. Through lectures, reports, and other public events, Breaking the Silence has brought to light what so many try to ignore: the grim reality of what it takes to sustain a military occupation of an entire population.
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We have companies that recruit and control active armies of mercenaries, which are responsible for thousands of deaths overseas. I detest the violence of “ISIS” but it is not morally different from Executive Outcomes machine gunning villages from helicopters in Angola or from Aegis killing random vehicle occupants in Iraq who happened to be near their convoys. Yet Tony Buckingham and Tim Spicer became extremely rich after founding their careers on the latter killings, and now are respected figures in the London establishment. Apparently killing for money is good; only killing for religion is bad.
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Finance
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Greek banks are preparing contingency plans for a possible “bail-in” of depositors amid fears the country is heading for financial collapse, bankers and businesspeople with knowledge of the measures said on Friday.
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The unexpectedly strong No in the Greek referendum was a historical vote, cast in a desperate situation. In my work I often use the well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the Communists will lose power, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communist crimes on us, Jews – there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms . . .”
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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has arrived in Brussels for an emergency eurozone summit two days after Greek voters overwhelmingly turned down the terms of an international bailout in a historic rejection of austerity. On Sunday, Greeks, by a 61-to-39-percent margin, voted against further budget cuts and tax hikes in exchange for a rescue package from European creditors. Tsipras is scrambling to present a new bailout proposal as Greek banks remain shut down. If Greek banks run out of money and the country has to print its own currency, it could mean a state leaving the euro for the first time since it was launched in 1999. Euclid Tsakalotos was sworn in Monday as Greece’s new finance minister, replacing Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned following Sunday’s referendum. Tsakalotos, who has called for a “Europe of equals,” had served as Greece’s main bailout negotiator and has been a member of Syriza for nearly a decade. Like Varoufakis, Tsakalotos has been a vocal opponent of fiscal austerity imposed by the core of the eurozone, saying it has unnecessarily impoverished Greece. We go to Athens to speak with Paul Mason, economics editor at Channel 4 News, and economics professor Richard Wolff.
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The EU elites, referred to as “creditors” but actually representing Europe’s large financial institutions, are repeatedly described as “mainstream”. That is presumably supposed to confer legitimacy on them and suggest they represent Europe and Europeans. But there is nothing “mainstream” about these unaccountable elites trying to bring about “regime change” in Greece by bleeding the country of hope. If they succeed and Syriza goes down, Greece will end up with real extremists – either the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn or the country’s crony elites who got Greece into this mess, with the aid of the wider European elites, in the first place. What “mainstream” opinion in the rest of Europe thinks about Greece, Syriza or the European project is impossible to gauge because most European countries are too terrified to put such questions to their electorates in the way Syriza has done. – See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-07-06/how-the-media-discredit-greek-democracy/#sthash.XwlWGfHp.dpuf
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Several former commissioners are making the most of their status to gain access to EU policymakers.
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Censorship
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A long-running copyright fight between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Universal Music over fair use in the digital age was considered by an appeals court today, a full eight years after the lawsuit began.
EFF and its client Stephanie Lenz sued Universal Music Group back in 2007, saying that the music giant should have realized Lenz’s home video of her son Holden dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” was clearly fair use. Under EFF’s view of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Universal should have to pay damages for a wrongful takedown.
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Privacy
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The Netherlands has launched a public consultation (in Dutch) on a draft bill (Google Translate) that updates the country’s existing Intelligence & Security Act of 2002. The proposed bill is wide-ranging, covering things like the use of DNA samples and the opening of letters, but a key part concerns the regulation of bulk surveillance online. As Matthijs R. Koot explains in a blog post, under the new law, mandatory cooperation will be required from “not only providers of public electronic communications networks and services, but also providers to closed user groups, including telcos, access providers, hosting providers and website operators.”
Importantly, domestic interception is explicitly allowed: “The services are authorized to, using a technical aid, wiretap, receive, record and listen to any form of telecommunications or data transfer via an automated work [a computerised system] regardless of location.” However, a new constraint on bulk collection is introduced: all such interceptions must be conducted in a “purpose-oriented manner.” As Koot notes, this aims to “limit the hay stack created using non-specific interception to relevant information,” although it is not yet clear how broad those “purposes” can be.
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Influential group of international cryptographers and computer scientists says proposals will open door to criminals and malicious nation states
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After suffering a massive hack, the controversial surveillance tech company Hacking Team is scrambling to limit the damage as well as trying to figure out exactly how the attackers hacked their systems.
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Former Attorney General Eric Holder said today that a “possibility exists” for the Justice Department to cut a deal with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that would allow him to return to the United States from Moscow.
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The number of vulnerabilities in the wild is growing. The number of exploits, as well as the speed of those exploits — in the case of Heartbleed, only four hours from the publication of the vulnerability to a circulating exploit — is somewhat disheartening, if not all that surprising.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Last week my inbox got flooded by PR comments about how the Internet was running out of addresses, as ARIN (American Registry of Internet Numbers) and its public relations people were warning about IPv4 address availability.
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