04.10.14

Political News: Western Foreign Policy, Torture, Surveillance, and Assassination

Posted in News Roundup at 6:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

PRISM

• Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox’s Board As It Names New CFO, COO

  Condoleezza Rice, former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor has joined the board of cloud file storage and syncing firm Dropbox.

• Fedora Google Drive Client with Grive and Grive Tools

• Edward Snowden briefs Europe on PRISM and data security

Torture

• Shorter DiFi: The Torture Report Started in Response to Michael Hayden’s Lie

• Share the Torture Report

• The CIA Tortured Prisoner With Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Songs

• Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea penning revealing memoir

• The CIA used Red Hot Chili Peppers to Torture Detainees, Plus More Artists Used

• Red Hot Chili Peppers Used By CIA To Torture Prisoner

  While much has been said of the torture techniques used by the US government in the early days of the War on Terror, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, a prisoner named Abu Zubaydah was subjected to all 10 sanctioned torture techniques, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

• Feinstein asks White House to edit torture report instead of CIA

• Revealed: Senate report contains new details on CIA black sites

• Newly Revealed Portions of CIA Torture Manual: Doctoring Tapes, Foreign “Illegal” Detentions, Interrogating “Defectors”

  “Tapes can also be edited and spliced, with effective results, if the tampering can be hidden,” the CIA manual explained in a section previously redacted. The CIA further elaborated on the effects of having a tape “edited to make it sound like a confession.”

• Guest editorial: Bruising report on CIA abuses needs quick, full disclosure

• Lawyers for alleged USS Cole bomber seek details on CIA rendition program

  Just-released transcripts of a secret session at the Guantanamo war court show defense lawyers want a list of the countries where the CIA secretly jailed the alleged USS Cole bomber, and the names of people who worked at the agency’s black sites. But the prosecution won’t provide them.

• CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou, in Latest ‘Letter from Loretto,’ Describes Work in Prison Chapel

• Judge moves on Senate-CIA report

• Declassify CIA report, learn from its lessons

• White House Allows CIA To Heavily Edit Torture Report

• When the CIA was an outpost of Arabism

  From Cold War-era coups to “enhanced interrogation” in the “war on terror,” the CIA has courted the suspicion and hatred of the Muslim world. But it was not always so. For several years after its creation in 1947, the agency was an outpost of support for Arab nationalism in the U.S. government.

• CIA’s moral black hole

• Feinstein opposes letting CIA edit report

  The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee appealed to President Barack Obama to reconsider his administration’s decision to task the CIA with editing a torture report harshly critical of the spy agency’s treatment of terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks before it can be made public.

Syria

• Tony Blair: We should invade Syria whether the British public wants it or not

  You can’t keep a good war criminal down: Tony Blair cannot resist calling for more war every time he opens his mouth.

Iraq

• The Feminist Defence of Blowing Out the Brains of Small Children

  Rather a side issue, but even if we accept Zoe Williams view that dead Iraqi children don’t matter, she appears not to have noticed that Blair introduced tuition fees, academies, kick-started NHS privatization, allowed the banksters’ bonanza leading to worldwide economic crash and oversaw the greatest widening of the gap between rich and poor in British history.

Somalia

• You Been Lied To: 7 Things You May Not Know About Somali ‘Pirates’

  In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. It’s nine million people who have been battling widespread starvation ever since. America and other European nations saw this as a great opportunity to rob the country of its food supply and dump their nuclear waste in Somalia’s now unprotected seas.

  According to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, approximately 12 miles into the ocean from the coast is sovereign territory of the state. Every Somali highjacking that has ever occurred happened within those 12 miles.

Venezuela

• Venezuela protests are sign that US wants our oil, says Nicolás Maduro

• UK ‘aid’ is financing a corporate scramble for Africa

  £600 million of UK aid money is going to help companies like Unilever and Monsanto take over African land and agriculture, writes Miriam Ross. The corporate power-grab will be disastrous for the small-scale farmers who feed at least 70% of Africa’s people.

Ukraine

• How Many Americans Can Find Ukraine On A Map?

  *Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is. On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force…* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

• Exposing the U.S. Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Coup [a little old]

  Behind the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the democratically elected president of Ukraine are the economic interests of giant corporations – from Cargill to Chevron – which see the country as a potential “gold mine” of profits from agricultural and energy exploitation, reports JP Sottile.

• ‘Blackwater’ footage: Who are the Mercenaries in Eastern Ukraine?

  Surely these men were not Blackwater – simply because such a company does not exist anymore. It has changed its name twice in recent years and is now called Academi.

  [...]

  Greystone Limited mercenaries are part of what is called ‘America’s Secret Army,’ providing non-state military support not constrained by any interstate agreements, The Voice of Russia reported.

• Geopolitics of Empire: Mackinder’s Heartland Theory and the Containment of Russia

  What’s been happening in the Ukraine recently makes little sense without seeing it in broader geopolitical and historical contexts, so in my search for a firmer understanding of what’s going on, I’ve been consulting the history books. First off, it needs to be said that the Ukraine is historically a part of Russia. It has been “an independent nation-state” in name since 1991, but has been completely dependent on external support ever since. And most of this “support” has not been in its best interest, to say the least.

• Meet Obama’s New Ukrainian Friends

  Many are militant fascists. They’re thugs. They’re criminals.

• A Press Kit on Human Rights in Ukraine

  The flywheel of political repressions in Ukraine is gaining momentum these days. In sharp contrast with the liberal approach by president Yanukovych to the “Euromaidan” rout, the interim Kievan administration did not hesitate much about cracking down the public uprising against the “neo-Nazi regime” on the rise in the East and South of Ukraine. Today only in Kharkov at least 70 activists have been arrested during so-called “anti-terrorist operation”. According to the reports, foreign mercinaries presumably from the US Greystone Ltd private military contractor firm were participating in the operation along with the National Guard (majorly consisting of the ultranationalist Pravy (Right) Sector fighters) and some loyal Interior Ministry units.

AstroTurfing

• Examining the Existence of Fascism in the United States

  “The US corporate media and education system provide the ideological chains of fascism.”

• Thought money could buy an American election? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet

  The supreme court’s relaxing of donation rules just made US elections even more undemocratic and corruptible

• The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket

• What Corruption? McCutcheon Reveals Absurdity of Citizens United

  The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission may actually undermine the Court’s reasoning in Citizens United that unlimited spending from Super PACs pose no risk of corruption.

• Wikimedia and Twitter Bots Are Breaking the News

  We already knew that bots were writing news content, automating narrative stories from data-rich topics like sports scores and financial markets. Now, robo-reporters are starting to get scoops. They’re not just writing stories; they’re breaking them.

Privacy

• How advertising cookies let observers follow you across the web

  Back in December, documents revealed the NSA had been using Google’s ad-tracking cookies to follow browsers across the web, effectively coopting ad networks into surveillance networks. A new paper from computer scientists at Princeton breaks down exactly how easy it is, even without the resources and access of the NSA. The researchers were able to reconstuct as much as 90% of a user’s web activity just from monitoring traffic to ad-trackers like Google’s DoubleClick. Crucially, the researchers didn’t need any special access to the ad data. They just sat back and watched public traffic across the network.

NSA

• NSA monitors WiFi on US planes ‘in violation’ of privacy laws

• Call of cyber duty: Military academies compete against NSA in high-tech security drill

• Stop Comparing the NSA to 1984 (and Start Comparing It to Philip K. Dick)

• Democratic Congressman: NSA Deputy Director “Idiotic” “Extraordinarily Disrespectful Of The Constitution”

  Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, has harsh words for comments that NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett made at a recent TED talk. Ledgett said, “President Madison would have been proud” of the process to authorize the NSA’s activities.

Thomas Drake

• Former NSA official to speak in Salt Lake City

  Thomas Drake will be discussing the spy agency’s practices and how they relate to constitutional rights at an event put on by the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics.

• NSA Whistleblower Warns USC Students Of Government’s Power

Europe

• Op-Ed: U.S. claims using EU companies to circumvent NSA spying unfair

  Recent U.S. criticism will increase the conflict between the U.S. and Europe over NSA spying. The office of the U.S.Trade Representative(USTR) claims that creating an EU-centric system to avoid NSA spying would violate international trade laws.

• USTR Warns That EU-Only Cloud To Avoid NSA Surveillance May Violate Trade Agreements

• US Officials: EU’s NSA-Proof Communications System Violates Trade Laws

• EU Court Scraps NSA Style Spying Legislation

NETmundial

• WikiLeaks release: Internet governance body trying to stop NSA surveillance

  WikiLeaks has published what the anti-secrecy organization says is the penultimate draft agreement expected to be discussed later this month in Brazil at a global internet governance meeting co-hosted by 12 countries including the United States.

Germany

• United States denies Merkel access to her own NSA files

  Germany’s interior ministry reportedly approached the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) last October to ask for the file’s content, amid revelations the NSA had been tapping the Chancellor’s mobile phone, Germany’s The Local said in one of its reports.

• Merkel denied access to own NSA file

• Merkel kept in the dark by ‘insufficient’ NSA disclosure of spying

• Head of German Parliamentary Committee Investigating NSA Resigns

  Although Edward Snowden has never set foot on German soil—and is unlikely to do so any time soon—he remains a source of high drama for politicians in Berlin.

• ‘No reply’ to NSA phone hack query

• Head of German NSA inquiry quits over Snowden row

Holder

• Eric Holder Admits That, If It Wanted, NSA Could Collect Internet Searches & Emails Just Like Phone Metadata

• Lawmakers push US attorney general for NSA surveillance changes

  Several U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday urged the nation’s attorney general to curtail the National Security Agency’s collection of overseas electronic communications, saying President Barack Obama’s promise to revamp a surveillance program focused on U.S. telephone records didn’t go far enough.

Censorship

• Censorship-shaming awards ‘Jefferson Muzzles’ go to White House, NSA

Reform

• What the Proposed NSA Reforms Wouldn’t Do

• Obama privacy chief wants NSA phone-snooping program to end now

  David Medine had not been on the job for a week as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board when The Guardian dropped its first of many bombs supplied by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

• Feinstein Backs Court Orders for NSA Bulk-Phone Records

Drones

• WE CAN DO BETTER | Droning About Drones

• Strategic Horizons: Amid Debate, U.S. Shares Drone Approach With Partners

  While Americans debate when and where the United States should use drones to strike at insurgents and terrorists who cannot be reached by other means, they may be overlooking an important trend: the move to supply a targeted killing capability to allied nations. This began when the Bush administration decided to provide technology and advice to help the government of Colombia kill the leaders of its narco-insurgency. Today, the U.S. military is also helping the armed forces of Yemen field systems for the targeted killing of anti-government extremists associated with al-Qaida. This is the beginning of a trend, as more states will field such capabilities, including drones, with or without American help.

• Killer Drones in a Downward Spiral?

• The Homebound “Imperial Presidency”

  The eponymous charge of presidential imperialism, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. back in 1973, was largely centered on the waging of secret, unilateral war (in Cambodia, say). Such issues were also front and center in the debate over George W. Bush’s claims to executive authority — recall “enhanced interrogations,” the creation of military commissions, surveillance, treaty rights, and the like. And the Obama administration is surely vulnerable to these criticisms. Obama has shown more continuity than change in these areas, embracing a number of Bush-era practices and even pushing past them in some areas, for instance in authorizing the use of drones to kill American citizens overseas and in using military force in Libya without seeking congressional approval. (Bush, by contrast, sought and received legislative sanction for both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.)

• City Theatre’s Grounded

• Can Any Court Hold U.S. Accountable for Killing Americans Overseas with Drone Strikes?

  A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. government’s killing of three Americans in Yemen drone strikes. The case was filed by the families of Samir Khan, Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, his teenage son, Abdulrahman, accusing top U.S. officials of unlawful killings. But on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled the victims’ constitutional rights were never violated and said the U.S. officials involved cannot be held liable. We get reaction from Maria LaHood, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of the attorneys working on Anwar Al-Awlaki’s case. “The courts have abdicated their roles with torture, they’ve abdicated their roles with indefinite detention,” LaHood says. “Here we thought finally the courts would uphold the Constitution with the killing of American citizens.”

• Bipartisan Team Wants More Transparency in U.S. Drone Policy

• Pass the Drone Strike Transparency Act

  Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, we all believe that government should be transparent and accountable, right?

  How should we decide where we stand on a controversial government policy? A crucial first step is to try to establish key facts in the public record.

• American Held Incommunicado in Yemen for 39 Days, Legal Team Still Doesn’t Know Why

• What are the drones for?

  We also know that the US has eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, even though we don’t know yet about the content of her conversations. This eavesdropping scandal could have started a huge diplomatic war between the US and Germany, but in a time when Russia was invading Crimea, these two decided to postpone the crisis for a while. Maybe the US believed this was a good opportunity to remind Germany that its hands are not clean on a number of international issues, too, and that the US knows everything about it. There is a lesson here for Turkey as well.

Snowden

• Bill Clinton discusses NSA leaker Snowden during Naval Academy speech

  Former President Bill Clinton called Edward Snowden “an imperfect messenger” who, while he leaked critical surveillance information, also began an important national debate on whether technology can interfere with citizen privacy.

• Snowden to EU: NSA is Spying on Human Rights Organizations

• Edward Snowden: Whistleblower ‘did complain to NSA’ before leaking classified US Government documents

• Snowden Speaks: A Vanity Fair Exclusive

  “Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away, because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating,” former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden tells Vanity Fair about his motivation for leaking tens of thousands of secret documents. “But there’s a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I’m no longer alone.”

• Rep Zoe Lofgren asks AG Eric Holder if Internet Searches Are Treated Like Telephone Records

  Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-19) asks Attorney General Eric Holder if the Department of Justice treats third party information like Internet searches similarly to telephone records under the Patriot Act. This exchange occurred during an April 8, 2014, House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing.

• Edward Snowden: US government spied on human rights workers

• NSA Spied On Human Rights Watch And Amnesty International

  Of course, one of the things that’s bugged me most of all about the response from NSA defenders is the typical line: “we’re not listening to you talk to your grandmother” or whatever similar line may be. But, as more and more revelations have come out, they get closer and closer to the kinds of communications I actually do have on a regular basis. Talking to sources working on interesting technology projects, talking to human rights and civil society groups around the globe. Spying on journalists. Each day there’s more and more evidence that while the NSA might not care about some mythical person talking to his or her mythical grandmother, it is very much collecting all sorts of information that those very same people thought were private — and which clearly have nothing to do with national security.

Europe

• ISPs will break the law if they continue to retain our data

  Yesterday’s invalidation of the Data Retention Directive opens up the question, what do the government and ISPs do next? Both are in a dubious legal situation now that data retention has no legal basis.

• European Court of Justice finds Data Retention Directive invalid

• European Court invalidates Data Retention Directive, says mass surveillance of metadata interferes with right to privacy

• Data Retention: EU Court of Justice Denounces Mandatory Data Retention

  In a judgement issued this morning, the Court of Justice of the European Union opposed itself to the bulk data retention of our online communications by ruling the 2006 European Data Retention Directive invalid. In the midst of the ongoing debate on mass surveillance, this legal decision represents an important step towards regaining our fundamental right to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.

• Victory for privacy rights as ECJ rules that Data Retention Directive is invalid

  There was a major victory for privacy rights today when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the 2006 Data Retention Directive is invalid on the grounds that it severely interferes with two of our fundamental rights: the right to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.

Police

• ​Nevada rancher’s land surrounded by heavily-armed federal agents, his cattle confiscated

  After 20 years of battling the US government for use of his family’s land, a Nevada rancher’s “one-man range war” may soon end. The family says heavily-armed federal agents have surrounded the ranch as “trespass cattle” are removed from the disputed land.

• LAPD Cops Sabotaged Equipment Installed to Monitor Them

  Police officers generally insist that they are the biggest fans of being recorded. A PoliceOne explainer on how cops can beat a lawsuit that I’ve highlighted before stresses the important of having footage of an incident that may later be called into question. Video evidence, police instructor Richard Weinblatt wrote, “should actually be welcomed, as the majority of officers do what they are supposed to do and thus will be cleared by the video from any allegations of wrongdoing.”

Human Rights

• Britain Increasingly Invokes Power to Disown Its Citizens

• The Cost of War

  Kathy Kelly’s eyewitness reports from the U.S. War in Afghanistan

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Red Hat News: OpenStack Training, Google Deal, Fedora 21

Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

OpenStack

• Red Hat Announces New Training Course for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform

  The new course uses a hands-on lab atmosphere to provide IT professionals with the skill-sets they need to implement and maintain OpenStack deployments. Aimed at helping enterprises build their teams’ readiness to adopt and use Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, the course takes an in depth look at the technology and how organizations can fully reap the benefits. The OpenStack Networking (Neutron) training course is available via traditional and virtual classrooms and on-site private team training. In the coming weeks, the new course will be available via self-paced online learning for added flexibility and convenience.

• Red Hat’s Latest OpenStack Training Course Is Available Online or In Class

• SUSE and Red Hat Training, New Linux “Flaw,” and Fedora Changes

Oracle’s Clone

• SEP Software Corp. Announces Certification of Oracle Linux

Google

• Google And Red Hat Arrange A Marriage Of Convenience In The Cloud

• Google to enable Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to move to Cloud platform

• Red Hat lets customers move Linux subs to Google Compute Engine

• Red Hat Teams With Google Compute Engine To Ease Cloud Management

• Red Hat: Enterprise Linux Subscribers Can Now Move to Google Compute Engine

• Red Hat and Google Solidify Compute Engine Agreement

• Now Red Hat customers can access Google’s Compute Engine

• Google loads Red Hat Enterprise Linux into its cloud

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can now shift their licenses from on-premise gear up into Google’s cloud as well as Amazon’s.

• Red Hat Enables Cloud Flexibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Google Compute Engine

• Google needs more cloud customers, so it’s turning to Red Hat for help

  Google can’t build its public cloud into a behemoth by itself.

  Today, key enterprise software company Red Hat unveiled Google’s latest partnership initiative, to let Red Hat customers move certain subscriptions to the growing Google Compute Engine.

Fedora Web Site

• Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-08)

  Although she posted it on April 1st, Fedora designer Máirín Duffy’s proposal for Fedora’s website (considering Fedora.next) is no joke. I mentioned this effort last month, but there’s a lot more detail here, with sections on the brochure site, a user support site, and the “community hub”. Worth a read — and we’d love your input, especially on how we might make this idea succeed now when somewhat similar efforts have faltered in the past.

Fedora 21

• Fedora 21 Might Include GNOME 3.14

• Fedora 21 Looks To Have A “Playground” Repository

  The Fedora Playground Repository would effectively be a staging area for new packages before they are up to the standards of being added to the main Fedora repository. Fedora Playground packages would be packages destined for inclusion into the main archive along with other packages that are never going to make it there. Stability wouldn’t be guaranteed by this archive and it would continue to meet Fedora’s strict requirements for packages needing to be free software and cannot contain proprietary or patented software.

• Fedora Linux Plans Changes for Open Source OS

  Fedora Linux, the open source operating system associated with Red Hat (RHT), has major changes on the horizon. That’s the plan, at least, as open source developers discuss revamping the platform through the initiative they’re calling Fedora.next.

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CMS News: WordPress, Drupal, and More

Posted in News Roundup at 4:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

WordPress

• WordPress Customers Receive Automatic Security Updates

  WordPress blogs around the world began to receive an automatic security update late on April 8 to fix security vulnerabilities. The WordPress 3.8.2 and 3.7.2 updates each provide five security fixes, as well as multiple non-security bug updates.

• WordPress 3.8.2 Security Release

• Open Source WordPress 3.9 Now at Beta 2

  The next major release of the widely deployed open source WordPress blogging and content management system software is continuing to mature. The WordPress 3.9 beta 2 is now available, providing a long list of changes. The WordPress 3.8 release debuted back in December of 2013.

Drupal

• Angie Byron on Drupal 8 out of the box

  Opensource.com community manager Jason Hibbets interviewed Angie Byron, a Drupal core co-maintainer, about the latest version of this open source content management system.

• Acquia’s Dries Buytaert: It’s open-source software that’ll eat the world

  Expect a larger portion of software innovation to come from the world of open source in the future, says Dries Buytaert, original creator of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia. While open source once drew its appeal from being free, now it’s the quality of the software projects — which draw on the skills of huge numbers of contributors — that attracts businesses and developers to use it, he said.

Misc.

• Available Today, Jahia 7 Defines a New Standard for Java-Based Open Source High-End CMS

  Jahia, leading open source vendor today announced the GA availability of its new platform Jahia 7, introducing powerful Distributed Development features, Private App Stores to re-use and distribute components securely with a new OSGi integration to enable the Digital Industrialization era.

• What’s New in April for Open Source CMS

• Open source frameworks create ‘super’ web-based apps

  It’s this kind of collaborative environment that fosters creativity and innovation among today’s programmers—more and more of whom are leveraging best-of-breed solutions while freeing themselves of the constraints of closed-source solutions and traditional open source CMSs.

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ODF News: ODF 1.2, European Support for ODF, LibreOffice and More

Posted in News Roundup, Office Suites, OpenDocument at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Standard

• ODF 1.2 Submitted to ISO

  Last Wednesday, March 26th, on Document Freedom Day, OASIS submitted Open Document Format 1.2 standard to the ISO/IEC JTC1 Secretariat for transposition to an International Standard under the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) procedure.

• ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words Chapter 5: Open Standards

  Plug.and.socket 142One of the two articles of faith that Eric Kriss and Peter Quinn embraced in drafting their evolving Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) was this: products built to “open standards” are more desirable than those that aren’t. Superficially, the concept made perfect sense – only buy products that you can mix and match. That way, you can take advantage of both price competition as well as a wide selection of alternative products from multiple vendors, each with its own value-adding features. And if things don’t work out, well, you’re not locked in, and can swap out the loser and shop for a winner.

Europe

• Galicia recommends use of Open Document Format

• Call to fix interoperability of office suites

  Last week Monday, five European public administrations published a new call for tender, to further improve interoperability between free and open source office suites and the ubiquitous proprietary alternative. This is the second time that the German cities of Munich, Leipzig and Jena, the Swiss Federal Court and the Swiss Federal IT Steering Unit have issued such a call. ICT specialists have until 30 April to submit proposals.

  The office suites’ interoperability project is again managed by the OSB Alliance, a trade group representing open source service providers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

  According the alliance’s press release, one of the main features to be developed concerns change tracking between open source and proprietary office suites. The public administrations issuing the call want to improve the specification of change tracking, and make this part of the Open Document Format ISO standard.

• South Tyrol governor: ‘EC, use open formats’

  Such a policy would help the South Tyrol government in its new IT approach, increasing its use of ICT solutions based on free and open source, the governor says.

  South Tyrol’s new policy was announced on 11 March. Responding to emailed questions, Governor Kompatscher said that the region is in favour of using free and open source solutions not only for new IT solutions, but also when upgrading existing IT components. “We’ve started to review our license costs. If there are free and open source alternatives, and where the costs and risks of changing are justified, we will switch to these.”

LibreOffice

• 2014 Will Be A Great Year For LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Gains 3D Bar Shape Support

• LibreOffice 4.2.3 RC2 Arrives with Multiple Fixes on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

Misc.

• New Document Liberation Project aims to free users from vendor lock-in

  The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the Document Liberation Project, in an effort to empower individuals, organizations, and governments to recover their data from proprietary formats and offer a mechanism to transition that data into open file formats.

• 4 Spreadsheet Alternatives to MS Excel

  There was a time when office compatibility was a bit of a problem on Linux, but with the latest office suites out there available for Linux, this is not an issue anymore. The applications here mimic MS Excel’s behavior, so switching to one of them should be pretty straightforward. Exporting and importing to and from MS Excel format works as well, and there aren’t many compatibility issues (however, the native format these programs use is the OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format.

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eGov News: Moves to Free/Libre Software

Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

UK

• Memset Urges Government To Ditch VMware For Open Source

  Influential government service supplier Memset has urged local and central government to ditch VMware in favour of open source alternatives, promising that open-source-based service suppliers can shave as much as 40 percent off government bills simply by removing the licensing fees.

• UK gov targets £500m IT savings this year and is ‘taking business elsewhere’

HMRC

• HMRC uses Hadoop to tackle corporate tax avoidance

  HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is driving the use of open source technology with a Hadoop NoSQL big data engine to analyse corporate tax.

Continental Europe

• EU institutions accused of doing nothing to free themselves from dependence on Microsoft

  The European Commission and European Parliament are doing nothing to rid themselves of their dependance on Microsoft, two lobby groups said Wednesday, Document Freedom Day.

  The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and Open Forum Europe urged EU institutions to support open standards in an open letter to Giancarlo Vilella, president of the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Innovation and Technological Support. He also chairs the body that coordinates IT activities for government agencies including Parliament, the Commission and the Council of the E.U.

• A council of hope – the free software column

  For most organisations the primary reason for moving from Windows to Linux is perceived cost savings. The secondary reasons are factors such as interoperability and greater compliance with standards, which themselves bring longer- term cost benefits. Unlocking interfaces and data from vendor lock-ins may be rather time consuming and costly in the short term, but doing so brings considerable cost and efficiency pay-offs in the long term.

  One of the payoffs for the City Council, other German councils, the Linux community and other interested parties, has been the development of LiMux, the German language Linux distribution which has since been approved as an official distribution by the German government. The work of Munich will make it easier for others to follow.

  In an ideal world, LiMux would provide a model that would inspire more government-sponsored IT projects in the UK, which are all too often outsourced to proprietary interests. Whether it does or not, is yet to be seen.

• Dutch municipality group adopts and fosters open source

  The TYPO3 CMS project has a long history as open source project, with its foundation going back as far as 1997 when it was initially developed by Danish Kasper Skårhøj. Currently, the TYPO3 project has a solid foundation in Europe. Large cooperations like Deutsche Bank, Airbus, Air France, as well as, universities and non-governmental organizations like Food and Agriculture Organization, Greenpeace, and Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons run on the TYPO3 CMS.

National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

• NGA releases open source code on GitHub

  The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency did a first for a U.S. intelligence agency by opening an account on open source site GitHub earlier this month.

NASA

• Open-Source software database to be launched by NASA

• NASA plans to open source its code in a searchable database

  As a part of a federal order to make technology transfer faster, NASA is building a central location for the public to dig into more than 1,000 of its past projects.

• NASA to launch open-source software database

• NASA plans to open source its code in a searchable database

• NASA’s R2 bot to receive legs via SpaceX

  The 330-pound Robonaut 2 measures 3 feet, 4 inches tall from the waist, and is equipped with more than 350 sensors. Its stomach-located brain runs Linux on 38 PowerPC-based processors. The robot is operated remotely by humans, using the Robonaut Tele-operation System (RTS). This telerobotics system requires a ground- or space-based user to wear a 3D visor, vest, and pressure-sensitive gloves. (For more on the R2, see our original coverage.)

Misc.

• Pursuing adoption of free and open source software in governments

  LibrePlanet examines our modern technological society and finds much to criticize. But it is not a crabfest for frustrated policy wonks: these people are making new tools in hardware, software, and networking — tools that may well become as mainstream as GNU/Linux is already in data centers, cell phones, and stand-alone computer systems.

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04.09.14

Programming News: Python, Java, LLVM and More

Posted in News Roundup at 2:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Python

• Introducing Pyston: an upcoming, JIT-based Python implementation

  I’m very excited to announce Pyston, a new open-source implementation of Python, currently under development at Dropbox. The goal of the project is to produce a high-performance Python implementation that can push Python into domains dominated by traditional systems languages like C++.

• IPython 2.0 released

• You say Python, and I say Perl …

Java

• Java 8 grasps parallelism (more tightly) with Lambda Expressions

• The Java parallelism paradox

  Java 8 has been reengineered with the strength of Project Lambda Expressions.

  Lambda, is a Java function that adds ‘closures and related features’ dedicated to supporting multicore programming.

DevOps

• You can’t have DevOps without open source

  You probably think I’m going to talk about all the reasons why you should use open source tooling as the foundation for an effective DevOps culture in your organization, but that’s not what this is about. Not to marginalize the complexity of the challenges faced by the team I work with, but I have confidence that the engineers are going to figure the tooling part out. Believe it or not, the daunting part is wrapped in cultural change.

• DevOps is a real job, it’s official

  The ‘developer’ and ‘operations’ DevOps role is now an official part of the tech industry nomenclature.

  The number of permanent and officially recognised DevOps Engineer posts in the UK has jumped 347% in the past two years.

LLVM

• [LLVMdev] 3.4.1 Release Plans (BSD Development)

• LLVM Spun Off Into Its Own Independent, Non-Profit

  Chris Lattner has announced the LLVM Foundation this morning as “The LLVM umbrella project has grown over the years into a vibrant community made up of many sub-projects, with hundreds of contributors. The results of this project are used by millions of people every day. Today, I’m happy to announce that we are taking the next big step, and forming a new, independent non-profit to represent the community interest.”

• Fake MSAA Support Added To LLVMpipe, Yields OpenGL 3.0/3.2

  Months ago there was work on advancing Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe software-based driver with its OpenGL 3.x support, including work-in-progress patches, but nothing was merged at the time. With that said, it was a surprise to see fake MSAA support added tonight for Gallium3D and used by the LLVMpipe driver so it fakes OpenGL 3.0 compliance and forces the necessary extensions for handling OpenGL 3.2.

Leftovers

• How Git redefined open source software development

  It’s not hard to come up with a dozen different reasons why the rise of open source development has been a watershed event in both the software and hardware industries. All of us can build new web applications faster with our feet firmly planted on the shoulders of jQuery, Bootstrap, and Apache. Languages like Ruby, PHP, and Python power the Internet, and operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD provide the foundation for thousands of companies and services.

• Facebook Data Science Team Announces Open Source Tools for A/B Testing

• LINQ-like List Manipulation in C++

• early release of Advanced Gtk+ Sequencer 0.4.0-beta

  I’m proud to announce the very first beta release of Advanced Gtk+ Sequencer. There many improvements releated to thread safety and synchronization. It was a hard way to get to this point but I just want to say I love C programming with GNU tools.

• Developing diversity: Will IT ever fix its gender problem?

  And sadly, gender inequality in open source communities is widely acknowledged to be even worse than in the proprietary software world. Figures are hard to come by, but a 2009 keynote at OSCON Alex Bayley cited a 2006 EU survey that found only 1.5 per cent of contributors to open source are women.

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GNU News: New Releases, Coreboot Milestone, GNU Linux-libre, MediaGoblin, and Compilers

Posted in News Roundup at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Misc. GNU Packages

• GNU recutils – News: recutils 1.7 released

• Release of GNU pyconfigure 0.2.2

• Release of GSRC 2014.04.06

  I’m happy to announce the 2014.04.06 release of GSRC, the GNU Source Release Collection.

• GNU lightning 2.0.4 released!

GNUnet

• GNUnet 0.10.1

• Installing GNUnet from Subversion on Ubuntu 14.4

• Installing GNUnet 0.10.1 on Ubuntu 14.4

Kernel

• Coreboot Adds Support For The Lenovo ThinkPad T530

• The GNU Linux-libre 3.14-gnu Ultra-Free Kernel Released

  Following last night’s release of the Linux 3.14 kernel, the GNU folks are out with their Linux-based “Freedom Pi” kernel.

  The GNU Linux-libre 3.14-gnu kernel is the upstream Linux 3.14.0 kernel but is “100% free” and removes non-free components from the kernel source tree like firmware blobs and “[code] disguised as source code." The libre kernel flavor also disables run-time requests for non-free kernel components.

MediaGoblin

• Meet MediaGoblin, a Decentralized Alternative to YouTube and Flickr

  Running on GNU, MediaGoblin allows user to upload videos, images, audio, and other types of digital media. But, unlike YouTube, Flickr, and Soundcloud, users control their own servers. And, if Webber, Nicholson, and the rest of the MediaGoblin community have their way, each users' media will be stored on Tahoe-LAFS, an encrypted server that does not know what data it stores.

Compiler

• Warp: Facebook Open-Sources A Super Fast C/C++ Pre-Processor

  Following Facebook's announcement of the Hack language and being one of the organizations backing the new WebScaleSQL, Facebook developers ended out last week by announcing Warp, their latest open-source contribution.

  Warp is a C/C++ pre-processor that aims to be as fast as possible. The Warp pre-processor aims to be much faster than GCC's pre-processor.

• GCC 4.8.2 vs. GCC 4.9.0 Benchmarks On Intel's Core i7 Haswell

GMP

• GMP 6.0.0 Brings Faster Performance, New Features

  Version 6.0.0 of the GNU Multiple Precision (GMP) Arithmetic Library has been released and it's landing heavy with new features.

• GMP 6.0.0 released

  A new major release of the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP) is now available.

Philosophy

• To Hell With Non-Free Software

  It’s clear that a lot of IT hardware is being supplied to consumers and organizations with built-in malware, stuff that spies on us and supplies people like NSA with information we don’t want them to have. Ironically, we actually subsidize this activity with our money either by taxation or the purchase-price.

• Richard Stallman to speak at TedxGeneva2014

  Richard Stallman will be speaking as part of TedxGeneva. His speech will be nontechnical and the public is encouraged to attend.

• Introducing Jaewoo, the Licensing Team's spring intern

  Jaewoo Cho recently started working at the FSF as a licensing intern. In this post, he writes about his experience with free software and his goals for the internship.

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Links 9/4/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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