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10.27.15

Links 27/10/2015: Tanglu 4.0, Simplicity Linux 15.10

Posted in News Roundup at 8:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Miracle Comes to Linux

    Morgan’s parents will not allow any personal identification to go forth in the legal or scientific community until Morgan is considered an adult. At that time, he can allow various communities and professionals to make his case public, or not. Morgan is strict about allowing access to him. Bianca and Morgan remain close friends to this day. And no…I did not have to help David at all with the use of his new Linux computer. His brother will be looking into becoming a kernel maintainer as soon as he finishes “looking the whole Linux thing over.”

  • Desktop

    • I’m an artist who loves Linux

      One day I got a new fancy machine and booted CentOS on it. Then, instead of going for commercial software, I started using open source applications to make art. I started using Blender for all my 3D animation work, and GIMP and Krita for my painting needs. Recently I’ve started using MyPaint and love it. In short, once I found out about all the open source alternatives to the commercial applications, I never looked back.

    • Xiamoi’s Linux laptop will be available in early 2016

      Good news for anyone looking to avoid the Microsoft tax: Chinese electronics behemoth Xiaomi is reportedly planning to launch an affordable Linux laptop in early 2016.

      Xiaomi has made supply chain orders for 750,000 laptops, according to industry site Digitimes is reporting. It would be the first laptop made by the Xiaomi, and could give desktop Linux a mainstream user base across the planet.

    • The seduction of the new

      I don’t know about the Windows or Mac users’ reactions, but the Linux user’s always makes me smile as I recognize an attitude I see regularly and to some extent share. Free software users are always ready to upgrade, although their obsession is only partly rational.

    • On Being Ripped Off

      Given I had paid a lot of money for the Kaspersky Crystal Pure protection quite recently (and I think it was on an automatic renewal) I feel pretty ripped off. Am I being reasonable, or is it my fault for changing the operating system?

  • Server

    • SGI Introduces the New UV 300RL With Oracle Linux

      SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics, and data management and Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today introduced the SGI UV 300RL. A new model in the SGI UV server line certified and supported with Oracle Linux, SGI UV 300RL provides up to 32 sockets and 24 terabytes (TBs) of shared memory. The solution enables enterprises that have standardized on Intel-based servers to run Oracle Database In-Memory on a single system to help achieve real-time operations and accelerate data analytics at unprecedented scale.

    • Cambridge Technology Enterprises Nominated for Oracle Linux and Virtualization Partner Award at Oracle OpenWorld 2015

      Cambridge Technology Enterprises Ltd has been nominated for the first Annual Oracle Linux and Virtualization Partner Award at Oracle OpenWorld 2015. The award ceremony will take place at Oracle OpenWorld on October 26, 2015 and will recognize CTE’s work with Oracle Linux and Virtualization.

    • Oracle OpenWorld 2015: Ellison Disses IBM, SAP as ‘Nowhere in the Cloud’

      Oracle CTO Larry Ellison kicked off Oracle OpenWorld 2015 in true Ellison style—with both guns blazing, pointing squarely at Oracle’s biggest competitors in the cloud space.

      “Our two biggest competitors in last two decades have been IBM and SAP and we no longer pay any attention to either one,” Ellison said during his keynote event Oct. 25. “It’s quite a shock. SAP is nowhere in cloud, and only Oracle and Microsoft is in every level of the cloud—applications, platform and infrastructure.”

  • Shows

    • Inside SparkFun’s Fellowship of the Things video series

      The Fellowship of the Things video series was conceived out of our passion for the burgeoning world of Internet of Things and connected projects, and our desire to showcase some of the SparkFun tools and products that fit particularly well into them. We somehow got permission to build an Internet of Things-dedicated apartment inside SparkFun HQ to use as a demo area for the projects, and so far it’s been a huge success!

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Anthony Hooper

      The Linux Foundation regularly awards scholarships as part of its Linux Training Scholarship Program. In the five years that the Linux Foundation has hosted this program, it has awarded a total of 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals who may not otherwise have access to these opportunities. In this continuing series, we share the stories of recent scholarship recipients with the hope of inspiring others.

      Whiz Kid scholarship recipient Anthony Hooper (age 23, from Jamaica) has been interested in technology since junior high. He says learning more about Linux is important to his future so he will be able to do what he deems is meaningful work. What Anthony loves most about Linux is the “sheer magnitude of collaborative work poured into the kernel over the years by individuals all over the world and companies who are even rivals themselves.” He says that being able to learn about the system and make a contribution to it, even a small one, would be nothing short of amazing.

    • Linux Kernel 4.2.5 Has Been Released with Many AMD GPU Improvements

      After only four days from the release of Linux kernel 4.2.4, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on the last hours of October 26, 2015, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.2.

    • Linux 4.1.12
    • Linux 3.14.56
    • Linux 3.10.92

    • Graphics Stack

      • X.Org Server 1.18 RC2 “Amontillado” Released
      • NVIDIA GPU Offloading Support For GCC Is Still Up & Coming

        It’s been nearly two years that there’s been work going on for OpenACC 2.0 with GPU offloading for GCC, primarily geared for NVIDIA GPUs. That work continues taking shape and hopefully for GCC 6 the support will be in better standing.

      • Is Upgrading To Mesa 11.1-devel Worthwhile For Radeon R600g Users?

        With last week’s release of Ubuntu 15.10, Mesa 11.0 is part of the open-source graphics stack. Unfortunate for those with an AMD GCN GPU that uses the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, Mesa 11.0 on Ubuntu 15.10 is built against an older version of LLVM that doesn’t allow the OpenGL 4.1 support to be exposed. For RadeonSI users, I’d say switching to Mesa 11.1-devel + LLVM 3.8 SVN is almost a must once installing Ubuntu 15.10, but is it worthwhile for R600g users?

    • Benchmarks

      • 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux

        Continuing on from Friday’s article that was a 22-way comparison of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards on SteamOS for Steam Linux gaming, which tested the hardware at the common TV resolution of 1080p, here are results for the higher-end Radeon and GeForce graphics cards at 4K.

        This article is structured quite similarly to Friday’s article but rather than testing at 1080p, the Steam Linux game tests were at 4K (3840 x 2160). Due to the increased resolution, not all twenty-two graphics cards were used for this article but only the higher-end AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Cinnamon 2.8 and MATE 1.12 to Arrive In a Few Days, Says Clement Lefebvre

      Clement Lefebvre, the leader and maintainer of the popular Linux Mint operating system, as well as the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, sent his monthly report about the work done by the entire team.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • First Beta release of KDevelop 5.0.0 available

        We spent a lot of effort on keeping the porting bugs to a minimum, and our thanks go out to the many testers who have guided us in the process. Porting to KF5 and Qt 5 also cut down our dependencies, bringing us closer to a proper KDevelop on Windows and KDevelop on Mac OS X. If you want to see KDevelop 5 become a reality on these platforms, then please get in touch with us and help us iron out the last issues.

      • KDE e.V. Quarterly Report – 2014Q4

        The KDE e.V. report for the fourth quarter of 2014 is available (PDF). It features a compendium of all the activities and events carried out, supported and funded by KDE e.V. in that period, as well as the reporting of major events, conferences and mentoring programs that KDE has been involved in.

      • Add an “Archive” button in KMail

        I love the “archive” button in Thunderbird (which was adopted from GMail, I think…) and (so far) am enjoying KMail. However, I was missing the “read it, don’t need to do anything further with this email – so put it in my 2015 folder.”

      • Interview with Laura

        My name is Laura, and I currently live in Calgary, Alberta. Aside from 2D art, I model/sculpt with Blender, Maya, and ZBrush. I enjoy running and board sports, and I love science and cats!

      • My Wishion for KDE – Part 1 – Now

        KDE is mostly about people. We are a huge project with an almost 20 years old history. We’ve great infrastructure and values (Manifesto) and our software is targeted towards end-users and normal people. But do we really succeed and achieve what we want? Are there problems and what are they?

      • KDevelop 5.0 Open Source IDE Enters Beta, Ported to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5

        After more than a year of hard work, Milian Wolff from the KDevelop project has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of KDevelop 5.0.0.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GeoJSON in Maps

        For Maps 3.19.1 release we managed to land some support for showing a GeoJSON layer. This means that you can get a GeoJSON file from somewhere then open it with Maps.

  • Distributions

    • Learning Linux – Lesson Three: GNU/Linux Distributions

      While in the first lesson of our Learning Linux series you learned the basics of Linux and the difference between a GNU/Linux operating system and the Linux kernel, in the second one you found out how GNU/Linux OS works.

    • Happy Distrovus: 3 big Linux Distros released in 8 days

      Five days! We have just five tiny little days to fully feast upon Ubuntu 15.10 before we need to make room in our lives to take Fedora 23 for a full spin. Which, based on my testing of an earlier beta build, tells me that this is going to be a release worth paying some attention to.

      But those five days seem like an eternity compared to the mere THREE DAYS between the release of Fedora 23 and the Gold Master version of openSUSE Leap 42.1 on October 30th. Another gigantic release that is worthy of our attention.

    • Happy Distrovus, Kissing Kubuntu Kousins

      Today in Linux news, Brian Lunduke declared a new holiday to celebrate the autumn distribution release season. UnixMan Chris Jones reviewed Fedora 23 already, due for release November 3, and Jesse Smith reported on GhostBSD 10.1 in today’s Distrowatch Weekly. Bruce Byfield is still grumbling about his failed Debian upgrade and Canonical issued a statement today on their relationship with Kubuntu.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Singapore’s First Liberal Arts College Taps Red Hat and Dell for OpenStack-based Software-defined Datacenter

        Yale-NUS College was established in 2011 as a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore (NUS) to provide a new model for liberal arts colleges in Asia.

      • Dualtec Cloud Builders Selects Red Hat to Deploy Brazil’s First OpenStack-based Cloud
      • SF Hosts AnsibleFest Nov. 19

        First, Red Hat acquires Ansible two weeks ago, which is both no small feat and a coup for the folks in Raleigh. The acquisition was a smart, yet expected, move: It marries Ansible’s ease of automation to the wide portfolio of Red Hat clientele, driving down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments. In short, by writing a check, Red Hat expanded its leadership in hybrid cloud management.

      • Open source software’s implications beyond software

        Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, was sporting his awesome red shoes as he spoke to a crowded room at All Things Open last week. During his keynote on Day 1, he talked about how open source is a key part of the open organization, but what we’re all looking to achieve has implications far beyond software.

        Jim began his keynote by explaining why there is a need for the principles of open source in business. If we think of the world we come from and the world we are coming into we see that there is a long line of change. We have come from a world of mass manufacturing, where relatively uneducated people were typically doing rote tasks on assembly lines in a static environment where there was little sharing of information. Society has based a lot of our structure of managing businesses on this model, but if we think about how we live and work today things are much different.

      • Insider Selling: Red Hat CEO Sells $303,592.50 in Stock (RHT)

        Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) CEO James M. Whitehurst sold 3,930 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction on Monday, October 19th. The shares were sold at an average price of $77.25, for a total value of $303,592.50. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 372,478 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $28,773,925.50. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this link.

      • FICO Chooses Red Hat to Deploy OpenStack, Management, and Storage Solutions for Agile Cloud Infrastructure

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that FICO, the predictive analytics and decision management software company, has deployed Red Hat software, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Ceph Storage, as the basis of its cloud infrastructure. Moving to an OpenStack and Ceph-based cloud has not only helped FICO reduce time to market by 50 percent and lower costs by 30 percent compared to previous infrastructure implementations, but it has helped transform FICO into a Software-as-Service (SaaS) company, driving added sales to new and existing customers in expanded markets.

      • Fedora

        • Mark command usecase

          In the early days of DNF development, the original members of the team decided that the cool feature called clean_requirements_on_remove should have been enabled by default . This is exactly that feature of DNF which prevents your system from overblooting by installed, but no longer needed dependencies of packages.

        • Year of the Linux Desktop: Flock 2015 Summary

          Flock to Fedora 2015 was a conference full of incredible people with incredible ideas, and it was a tough decision to decide which sessions to attend of all the good options. One that caught my eye was the “When is the year of the Linux desktop?” talk by Red Hat software engineering intern Levente Kurusa. Some of the key talking points of his session were evaluating why this statement always seems to be “next year” and why this awesome idea never seems to gain much ground. Are we doing something wrong? Can we improve somewhere? All of this, and more, Levente aimed to cover in his talk. I was fortunate enough to be in attendance of this talk!

        • Fedora – A peek into IRC meetings using meetbot data

          fedmsg has a few meetbot-related topics corresponding to meetbot commands using which I gather daily,weekly and monthly IRC meeting data. You can construct queries for a time period by specifying by the start and end parameters for the query.Use count variable from JSON data dump to get total number of messages pertaining to our query. (Check out the meetbot-related fedmsg topics here and documentation for constructing queries for Datagrepper here ). You can also use Datagrepper Charts API for some basic visualizations. (Check it out here).

        • Getting started with Fedora

          In this post I would like to tell you about the process of creation of a book cover. Some time ago Jiří Eischmann had an idea of creating a user guide for potential new Fedora users.

        • DNF 1.1.3 and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE 0.1.13 Released

          New release of DNF stack (dnf, dnf-plugins-core, dnf-plugins-extras, hawkey and libsolv) is going to Fedora 21, 22, 23 and rawhide. Most of the fixes happened under the hood in DNF libraries. The emphasis was on stability and making smooth system upgrades. For more information take a look at release notes.

        • Globalization test days report for Fedora 23

          Each Fedora release, developers add interesting features and changes. The Fedora QA group puts in extra effort to make sure these features work well. The Fedora QA group runs test days, together with our development teams. Test days usually happen between Alpha and Beta test releases. These events are essential to help us find critical flaws.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 4 Drops The CD Sets

        The Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 4 release has various hardware support improvements, accessibility support by default is now enabled for GTK2 applications and improved for Qt4/Qt5 applications, and various other changes took place.

      • Debian 9 “Stretch” Installer Alpha 4 Drops Support for CDs, Adds Improvements

        The Debian Project, through Cyril Brulebois, announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 “Stretch” installer.

      • Derivatives

        • SteamOS Switches To Linux 4.1, Latest Graphics Drivers

          SteamOS Brewmaster now has the Linux 4.1 kernel, which is a big upgrade over their earlier Linux 3.18 kernel. SteamOS Brewmaster also switches to using the Catalyst 15.9 proprietary graphics driver and has upgraded the NVIDIA binary blob too.

        • Major SteamOS Update Brings Linux Kernel 4.1, Updates Nvidia and AMD Drivers

          Valve announced a few minutes ago that the Brewmaster branch of their Debian-based SteamOS Linux operating system received a major update, version 2.49, that was pushed to the Beta channel.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Avengers Is an Excellent Resource for Users Who Want to Report Ubuntu Touch Bugs

            If you’re one of the thousands of Ubuntu Phone users, and you have encountered a bug that needs reporting, you might want to check out this excellent Wiki page that directs users to the proper channels for most of the components of the operating system.

          • Ubuntu 15.10 offers new UI and enhanced developer tools

            Ubuntu 15.10 has been revealed, with a new UI and re-fashioned developer tools, including the ability to preview apps with a converged phone, desktop and tablet experience.

            For Ubuntu Phone users, the update will be automatically rolled out, apparently demonstrating the platform’s “famous flow of updates to this new ecosystem.”

          • Ubuntu MATE Tools Could Bring Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Server to Raspberry Pi 2

            Ubuntu MATE developers have been working on some tools that allowed them to build the distribution for the Raspberry Pi 2 platform, and they are looking to share those tools and to name them so that other projects can use them, like Xubuntu or Lubuntu.

          • Mycroft AI on Ubuntu’s Unity 8 Hits a Bump in the Road the Size of Python 3

            The Mycroft AI home automation solution that managed to gather enough funds on Kickstarter just a few months ago also promised an Ubuntu implementation of its Mycroft AI. It looks like those plans have hit a bump in the road for Unity 8.

          • Canonical Promises Easy, Secure Containerized Apps for Ubuntu with LXD

            Turn on, tune in, drop out—without Docker! That—or, uh, something like it—is the container management experience Canonical hopes to deliver by bundling LXD, the open source containerized app framework, into the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, 15.10, which was released a few days ago.

          • Kubuntu and Ubuntu Councils Issue Joint Statement

            A joint statement from the Kubuntu Council and the Ubuntu Council has been published today in an attempt to alleviate the questions raised after the departure of the Kubuntu release manager, Jonathan Riddell.

          • The Ubuntu-Powered Erle-Spider Drone Now Available for Sale

            The Erle-Spider drone that’s powered by Ubuntu and based on ROS, the Robot Operating System, is now available for purchase, outside of the previous crowdfunding campaign.

          • Superb Ubuntu MATE Gold Edition Proposed by User – Video

            An Ubuntu MATE user put together a “Gold Edition” of the distribution and made some propositions for the leader of the project, Martin Wimpress. As it turns out, he’s going to make some of those things happen.

          • Ubuntu 15.10 offers new UI and enhanced developer tools

            Ubuntu 15.10 has been revealed, with a new UI and re-fashioned developer tools, including the ability to preview apps with a converged phone, desktop and tablet experience.

            For Ubuntu Phone users, the update will be automatically rolled out, apparently demonstrating the platform’s “famous flow of updates to this new ecosystem.”

          • Is Ubuntu 15.10 a Fearless Werewolf or a Boring One?

            I believe that every Linux and Ubuntu user out there knows that Ubuntu 15.10 (codename Wily Werewolf) has been released, and it aims to become a better replacement for the previous version, Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).

          • Unleashing the Werewolf

            Upgrading from Vivid to the latest version using the Update Manager was smooth and painless and took about two hours. The time required may vary depending on the speed of your Internet connection. When my PC rebooted after the upgrade, the only hint that I was using a new operating system was a watermark at the bottom of the startup screen. Then, I was taken back to the comfortable familiarity of my customized XFCE desktop so that I could resume where I had left off.

          • Here are the 9 New Ubuntu 15.10 Features You Should Know

            The stable edition of Ubuntu 15.10 wily werewolf is just released by canonical few days a ago and it now available to download and install on your computer. Lets take a look at the features that are implemented in the new release of ubuntu 15.10 and see what important packages have been updated.

          • System76 Users Can Now Upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10, Here’s How

            System76, the American hardware company behind those Ubuntu-powered laptops and desktop computers, announced earlier today, October 26, that all of their users can now upgrade to the recently released Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.

          • Ubuntu Linux Demonstrates New Cloud Application Store

            Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth announced new cloud application store capabilities at the OpenStack Tokyo Summit.

            TOKYO—In the OpenStack world, no operating system is more widely deployed than Ubuntu Linux. It’s a fact that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, emphasized during a presentation at the OpenStack Summit here, while detailing new features that he hopes will further extend his lead.

          • Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 Receives Basic Support for Store Channels, More

            On October 26, Canonical’s Michael Vogt was happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance update of the Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 operating system.

          • Massive Unity 8 Convergence Goodness Now Available for All Ubuntu Phone Users
          • Ubuntu Touch with a Mouse Cursor Is Interesting and Cool at the Same Time
          • Ubuntu 15.10 Review: Less Exciting & Largely Unchanged

            From a technological point of view, according to the release notes, a lot of efforts have been made to smoothen the transition from the Upstart (init daemon — a core utility that manages boot-up services & applications that work in the background called ‘daemons’) to Systemd which was first initiated with the Ubuntu 15.04 release. There’s also a technological preview of the upcoming Unity 8 desktop as well. Previously it was also mentioned that ‘TLP’ (a handy power usage optimizer) will also be shipped by default, but it has not made its way to this release due to unknown reasons.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Simplicity Linux 15.10 is now available to download!

              We are very pleased to announce the release of Simplicity Linux 15.10. Due to some issues users were finding with the 64 bit edition of Simplicity 15.7, we’ve decided to put our 64 bit releases on hiatus until we can resolve the issue.

              The two 32 bit bit editions of Simplicity 15.10 both feature the 4.1.1 Linux kernel and are based on the excellent LXPup. LXDE is used as the desktop, and wbar is used as a dock for preinstalled software and features.

              Netbook is our lightweight edition, which comes with fewer local apps and more cloud based applications. It’s a good starting point for anyone who might feel intimidated by Linux or people with older hardware.

            • Kubuntu 15.10 Gaming Impact With KDE Plasma 5 Compositing For R600 Gallium3D

              As mentioned in yesterday’s article with KDE Plasma 5 generally leading to a slower gaming experience than GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE, the issue comes down to KDE continuing to composite full-screen windows by default. This leads to a performance penalty as has been explained and tested in many articles before on Phoronix. For making things fair, it was a performance comparison of these Fedora 23 desktop environments out-of-the-box as representative what a new user would encounter and making the assumption the software vendor makes the best decisions regarding defaults. However, in the comments to yesterday’s article were several requests for running some fresh tests to show the impact of the full-screen window compositing versus when the compositing is suspended.

            • Simplicity Linux 15.10 Officially Released, Rebased on Linux Kernel 4.1.1 LTS

              The developers of the Simplicity Linux distribution have had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of Simplicity Linux 15.10.

            • Joint statement: Kubuntu Council + Community Council

              Members of both the Kubuntu and Community Councils have been approached by community members and asked what the relationship is between the each other. Both councils would like to confirm that the relationship is strong, and mechanisms are in place to ensure a healthy and open relationship between both councils. We would all like to point out that both councils collaborated and resolved any tensions together. We are all part of this one Ubuntu community, many of us have known each other for years and we all believe that everyone’s contributions are important, no matter which part of the project they ultimately land in. The two council are actively working on a number of concrete issues together and have decided to increase the frequency of meetings to better track progress.

            • Ubuntu Community Council + Kubuntu Issue Joint Statement

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • San Francisco could lead on open source voting

    Open source voting systems offer increased transparency by using nonproprietary software open to the public to review the source code, which counts the ballots and issues election results. Supporters say open source voting is needed to safeguard against election tampering.

  • An Experiment In Reviving Dead Open Source Projects

    Earlier this week I did a keynote at All Things Open. While the topic covered the opportunity of us building effective community collaboration and speeding up the development of Open Source and innovation, I also touched on some of the challenges.

    One of these challenges is sustainability. There are too many great Open Source projects out there that are dead.

    My view, although some may consider it rather romantic, is that there is a good maintainer out there for the vast majority of these projects, but the project and the new maintainer just haven’t met yet. So, this got me thinking…I wonder if this theory is actually true, and if it is, how do we connect these people and projects together?

    While on the flight home I started thinking of what this could look like. I then had an idea of how this could work and I have written a little code to play with it. This is almost certainly the wrong solution to this problem, but I figured it could be an interesting start to a wider discussion for how we solve the issue of dead projects.

  • Open source code isn’t a warranty

    So where does open source fit into this? Accidental bugs, sometimes significant, will continue to exist whether or not the source code is open. Heartbleed, ShellShock, and many other high-profile vulnerabilities in open source software tell us this is the case. Intentional misbehavior would become riskier in the open, but openness is only helpful to the degree we have some way of validating that the source code that has been provided is what’s actually running. This becomes increasingly important as cars become open systems, connected to our phones and to mobile Internet services.

  • LinkedIn open-sources PalDB, a key-value store for handling ‘side data’

    LinkedIn today announced that it is releasing a new key-value store — which is a category of database — under an open-source license. The software, which goes by the name PalDB, was designed to store what LinkedIn calls “side data” — essentially, data that’s needed for a certain very small piece of an entire application.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla props up its Open Source projects

        Open saucy browser maker Mozilla is spending a million dollars to make sure that the projects, upon which the company depends on do not collapse.

        One of the problems of Open Sauce software is that projects get dumped because they cannot find enough developers interested in maintaining them, or the money to keep them active. This is a problem for a big organisation like Mozilla which needs some projects to be kept going at all costs.

      • Mozilla Open Source Support Program

        The Mozilla Foundation has launched the Mozilla Open Source Support program with an initial allocation of $1million which will be shared between up to 10 projects that Mozilla relies on.

      • Mozilla pledges $1M in funds to open-source projects

        The Mozilla Foundation, the organisation behind open-source projects Firefox, Thunderbird, and others, has announced an initiative to give back to projects on which its own creations rely – and is beginning with an impressive $1 million in funding.

      • Mozilla Launches $1M Program for Open Source/Free Software Projects

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Attunity Expands Big Data Management Platform to Support PostgeSQL

      Attunity Ltd., a provider of data management software solutions, has introduced the latest version of its data replication and loading solution. Designed to accelerate enterprise big data analytics initiatives, Attunity Replicate 5.0 automates big data movement to, from and between databases, data warehouses, Hadoop and the cloud, reducing the time and labor, and ultimately the cost of making big data analytics available in real time.

  • CMS

  • Business

  • BSD

    • GhostBSD 10.1: Ghost in the machine

      I like the GhostBSD project and its goal. I think, in the past, there has generally not been enough work done to make FreeBSD a good operating system for desktop use. FreeBSD works well in the role of a server operating system, it’s stable, fast and the project evolves in such a way that it is fairly easy to upgrade a FreeBSD system over time. However, FreeBSD (while it can be used as a desktop operating system) lacks many of the characteristics one might want on the desktop, such as a graphical installer, multimedia support, a graphical package manager and an attractive, pre-configured desktop environment. While these features can be added or enabled on FreeBSD, most users will want those tools to be in place and to just work right from the start.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • LLVM Developers Discuss Relicensing Code To Apache License

      However, shifting the license would break compatibility with the GPLv2 and could make this compiler less interesting to the BSD developers from contributing. LLVM Founder Chris Lattner issued the request for comments over possibly changing the license. The current licensing situation is also problematic for not being able to easily move code from LLVM to their Compiler-RT sub-project, since that’s licensed under both the UIUC and MIT licenses.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Infrastructure Should Enable Not Block Business

      In the modern world, companies are decreasing their investment in commodities, whether it be software, hardware, or infrastructure. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation explained in an interview. “Organizations have discovered that they want to shed what is essentially commodity R&D and software development that isn’t core to their customers and build all of that software in open source. The reason is there is simply too much software to be written for any single organization to do it themselves.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • US Has No Choice but to Coexist with Iran, CIA Director Said in 2007

      Iran “will be a major player on the world stage in the decades ahead” and the US has no choice but to “find a way to coexist” with the Islamic Republic, said CIA Director John Brennan in 2007, the WikiLeaks has revealed.

      According to a new revelation which the WikiLeaks posted Wednesday on its Twitter account, the organization claimed it had obtained a new document from an email account belonging to Brennan.

    • Washington Accuses Putin. Russian Airstrikes are Targeting “Our Guys” in Syria: CIA Operatives, Military Advisers, Mercenaries, Special Forces, … Instead of ISIS Terrorists

      The “Our Guys” category (“fighting for their lives”) not only includes bona fide “moderate terrorists” trained by the Western military alliance, it also includes countless Western military advisers, intelligence agents and mercenaries (often recruited by private security companies) operating on the ground inside Syria since March 2011.

    • US special forces and the CIA are using drones against al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and Iraq

      The drone strikes – separate from the large air campaign run by U.S. Central Command – have significantly diminished the threat from the Khorasan Group, an al-Qaida cell in Syria that had planned attacks on American aviation, officials say.

    • Old hurdles and new haunt the Sept. 11 case at Guantanamo

      Colleen Kelly came to Guantanamo Bay with a sense of impatience, dismayed at the U.S. military’s floundering effort to try five detainees charged with roles in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

    • No mission creep: US troops wear ‘sneakers not boots’ on the ground in Iraq

      It is recognized that besides 35,000 US troops on the ground in Iraq, there are an unknown number of other Special Forces and CIA forces on the ground, says Phyllis Bennis, Director of the New Internationalism Project at IPS, Washington DC.

    • The New York Times Debunks Conservative Media’s “Vigilant Citizen” Concealed Carry Myth

      The New York Times editorial board debunked the prevalent conservative media myth that a “vigilant citizen packing a legally permitted concealed weapon” might “stop the next mass shooter.” To the contrary, the October 26 editorial cites a recent finding that individuals with concealed carry permits committed 579 shootings since 2007, claiming at least 763 lives, noting “the vast majority of these concealed-carry, licensed shooters killed themselves or others rather than taking down a perpetrator.”

    • Did Times Underplay Drone Program Leak?

      Using a cache of material from an intelligence source that some are calling a “new Snowden,” the start-up national security news site called The Intercept earlier this month published an ambitious investigative project, “The Drone Papers.”

      It exposes details about the inner workings of the American drone program, describing a bureaucratic “kill chain” that leads to the president. It also describes the shocking extent to which drones kill people who were not the intended targets in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. (According to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the individuals killed in one five month period during an operation in Afghanistan were unintended targets.)

      The “Drone Papers” have been covered by many outlets around the world and in the United States since its publication. Among those that published stories on the project were NPR, CNN, PBS NewsHour, Newsweek, The Guardian and Quartz. The series was excerpted in the Huffington Post, which also ran a related story on the source.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ​Climate Change Is Already Costing Us Billions of Dollars Every Year

      Climate change has already begun to cost us, and it’s only going to get worse.

      Hurricanes, intensified in size and frequency by climate change, are taking a massive financial toll already, according to a new paper. The study, published in Nature Geoscience this week, found that an increase in property dollar amounts lost over the past several decades in a case study was due to hurricanes intensified by global warming.

      Conducted by researchers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico and VU University in the Netherlands, the researched used statistical models to estimate the economic losses from storms from 1900 to 2005, taking into account societal change and wealth gains over the years. The findings suggest that between 2 and 12 percent of losses during the year 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, could be attributed to global warming.

  • Privacy

    • Silicon Valley’s opposition to cybersecurity bill mounts as US Senate prepares to vote

      Which matters more to you: curbing the onslaught of daily cyberattacks or protecting your online privacy?

      That will be the crux of the debate Tuesday as the US Senate prepares to vote on the latest version of a controversial cybersecurity bill.

      The aim of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) seems straightforward. The bill’s backers say it will create a system that lets companies share evidence of hackers’ footprints with one another and the US government, without the risk of being sued for breaking privacy-protection or antitrust laws.

    • Advertisers Should Take Responsibility for Annoying People and Driving Them to Use Ad Blockers

      The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers…

    • DOJ Claims Apple Should Be Forced To Decrypt iPhones Because Apple, Not Customers, ‘Own’ iOS

      The DOJ has filed its response to Apple’s claims that unlocking an iPhone 5 would be unduly burdensome. This ongoing dispute over an All Writs Act order (the act itself dates back to 1789) is also an ongoing dispute over the use of encryption-by-default on Apple phones running iOS 8 or higher.

      The argument started with one of the founding members of the “Magistrates’ Revolt” — Judge James Orenstein — who, back in 2005, challenged another All Writs order by the DOJ. A decade ago, Orenstein pointed out that the government’s use of these particular orders circumvented both the judicial system (by granting it powers Congress hadn’t) and the legislative system (which hadn’t created statutes specifically authorizing the actions the order demanded). Nothing has changed a decade later — not even the DOJ’s continued attempts to teach an old law new tricks.

    • While Most Of The Rest Of The Internet Industry Is Fighting Against CISA, Facebook Accused Of Secretly Lobbying For It

      However, the folks at Fight for the Future, who have been working hard to stop CISA, are now claiming that they have it on good authority that Facebook is one of the only internet companies secretly lobbying in favor of the bill and is asking people to sign its petition to convince Facebook to back down…

    • Two Intended Consequences CISA Supporters Will Be Responsible For

      Given that a majority in the Senate is preparing to vote for CISA, I wanted to lay out two intended consequences of CISA, so supporters will know what we will hold them responsible for when these intended consequences prove out:

      The government will lose power to crack down on providers who don’t take care of customers’ data.

    • Reading The Tea Leaves To Understand Why CISA Is A Surveillance Bill

      I’ve had a few conversations recently with people on Twitter who claim that CISA is “not a surveillance bill,” claiming that they’ve read the bill and there’s nothing about surveillance in it. It’s true that the bill positions itself as nothing more than a “cybersecurity” bill that clarifies a few things and then provides some immunity for companies who “voluntarily” share information. However, as I’ve said in response, in order to understand why it’s a surveillance bill, you have to look more closely at how CISA interacts with other laws and what the intelligence community is currently doing. Unfortunately, this isn’t always easy, because part of what the intelligence community is doing and how they’ve interpreted other laws remains secret. But, as you’ve probably heard, some of that has been leaking out over the past few years.

    • Clinton Private E-Mail Included CIA Source Identity: Yahoo

      Nothing indicates March, 2011 e-mail was marked classified when Clinton received it, though sensitive nature of it should have been red flag and it should not have been passed along, former CIA officer John Maguire tells Yahoo

    • CIA Steps Up Its Game in Cyberfight Against Hackers

      The CIA is making a great leap into the 21st century.

      As part of a broader reorganization, the clandestine agency this month launched its first new directorate in more than 50 years, designed to expand the agency’s cyber-espionage efforts and its fight against hackers. Director John Brennan called the move “a key milestone” in the CIA’s broader modernization efforts.

  • Civil Rights

    • CIA pulled officers from Beijing after breach of federal personnel records

      The CIA pulled a number of officers from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing as a precautionary measure in the wake of the massive cybertheft of the personal data of federal employees, current and former U.S. officials said.

    • CIA Use of Waterboarding Found to be More Extensive than Agency Admitted

      In these cases, men endured “water dousing” that, like waterboarding, could simulate a drowning sensation or chill a person’s body temperature through immersion in water, with or without the use of a board, causing them to suffer hypothermia.

    • Guantánamo war court grapples with how an ex-CIA ‘Black Site’ captive can be his own lawyer

      Lawyers and the judge at the Sept. 11 trial haggled over the mechanics on Tuesday of how a former CIA captive kept virtually incommunicado could defend himself at the five-man death-penalty trial.

      No date has been set for the trial of the alleged architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and four alleged co-conspirators. The question arose Monday after an alleged plot deputy, Walid bin Attash, asked the judge how he would go about representing himself.

    • Former CIA interrogator forced to resign from college post following exposé

      A former CIA interrogator says he was asked to resign from his college teaching post in Erie, Pennsylvania after Newsweek magazine ran a feature article about him earlier this month.

      David Martine, 59, told local Fox affiliate WJET-TV in a story broadcast Friday that Gannon University “demanded his immediate resignation” last week after publication of the article, which explored his 26-year career as a CIA interrogator and security agent. He said his dismissal was so abrupt he was “not able to transition any of his classes, or say goodbye to his students,” the station reported.

      A spokesperson for Gannon, a private Catholic college founded in 1925, would not say why Martine was forced out, telling WJET-TV: “It is university policy not to comment on personnel matters.”

    • NYPD Continues to Confuse Itself with the CIA

      The New York Police Department has said it has ended its practice of using informants to snoop on Muslim organizations in New York and New Jersey without any actual definable suspicion of terrorist activity attached to the targets.

      Instead it could very well be using vans with X-ray-emitting equipment (costing more than $700,000 each) to snoop inside vehicles and buildings. We don’t know the extent to which this is happening, nor whether it’s creating health hazards for anybody caught up in it, because the New York Police Department is refusing to provide any information and fighting against a court order that they do.

    • Kevin McKenna: The UK establishment’s in-built prejudice is still with us 80 years on

      The PM’s sneers at Corbyn betray just how attitudes have not really changed

    • JFK Assassination Plot Mirrored in 1961 France: Part 1

      What the colonial powers have done in Muslim countries is well known. Less well known are the machinations of Allen Dulles and the CIA in one of these colonial powers, France.

    • Saudi Arabia attacks Jeremy Corbyn over lack of ‘respect’

      The Labour leader has urged the Government to scrap a £5.9m prison consultancy contract with the repressive Middle Eastern regime

    • BBC Protects U.K.’s Close Ally Saudi Arabia With Incredibly Dishonest and Biased Editing

      The BBC loves to boast about how “objective” and “neutral” it is. But a recent article, which it was forced to change, illustrates the lengths to which the British state-funded media outlet will go to protect one of the U.K. government’s closest allies, Saudi Arabia, which also happens to be one of the country’s largest arms purchasers (just this morning, the Saudi ambassador to the U.K. threatened in an op-ed that any further criticism of the Riyadh regime by Jeremy Corbyn could jeopardize the multi-layered U.K./Saudi alliance).

      Earlier this month, the BBC published an article describing the increase in weapons and money sent by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf regimes to anti-Assad fighters in Syria. All of that “reporting” was based on the claims of what the BBC called “a Saudi government official,” who — because he works for a government closely allied with the U.K. — was granted anonymity by the BBC and then had his claims mindlessly and uncritically presented as fact (it is the rare exception when the BBC reports adversarially on the Saudis). This anonymous “Saudi official” wasn’t whistleblowing or presenting information contrary to the interests of the regime; to the contrary, he was disseminating official information the regime wanted publicized.

      [...]

      So the Saudis, says the anonymous official, are only arming groups such as the “Army of Conquest,” but not the al Qaeda affiliate the Nusra Front. What’s the problem with this claim? It’s obvious, though the BBC would not be so impolite as to point it out: The Army of Conquest includes the Nusra Front as one of its most potent components.

      [...]

      In other words, the claim from the anonymous Saudi official that the BBC uncritically regurgitated — that the Saudis are only arming the Army of Conquest but no groups that “include” the Nusra Front — is self-negating. A BBC reader, Ricardo Vaz, brought this contradiction to the BBC’s attention. As he told The Intercept: “The problem is that the Nusra Front is the most important faction inside the Army of Conquest. So either the Saudi official expected the BBC journalist not to know this, or he expects us to believe they can deliver weapons to factions fighting side by side with an al Qaeda affiliate and that those weapons will not make their way into Nusra’s hands. In any case, this is very close to an official admission that the Saudis (along with Qataris and Turkish) are supplying weapons to an al Qaeda affiliate. This of course is not a secret to anyone who’s paying attention.”

      [...]

      But what this does highlight is just how ludicrous — how beyond parody — the 14-year-old war on terror has become, how little it has to do with its original ostensible justification. The regime with the greatest plausible proximity to the 9/11 attack — Saudi Arabia — is the closest U.S. ally in the region next to Israel. The country that had absolutely nothing to do with that attack, and which is at least as threatened as the U.S. by the religious ideology that spurred it — Iran — is the U.S.’s greatest war-on-terror adversary. Now we have a virtual admission from the Saudis that they are arming a group that centrally includes al Qaeda, while the U.S. itself has at least indirectly done the same (just as was true in Libya). And we’re actually at the point where western media outlets are vehemently denouncing Russia for bombing al Qaeda elements, which those outlets are manipulatively referring to as “non-ISIS groups.”

    • IMF: Saudi Arabia is in danger of running out of money within five years

      Saudi Arabia has about $650 billion in foreign reserves to help it withstand the slump in oil prices. But at the country’s current rate of spending, it won’t take long before the supply of reserves runs out.

      According to a recent IMF report, the drop in oil prices from around $100 per barrel in 2014 to $45 per barrel this summer has already cost oil exporters in the Middle East roughly $360 billion this year. Without drastic action, several countries are at risk of using up their cash reserves within five years.

    • Rape victims in the UAE facing imprisonment for having extramarital sex, claims documentary

      A significant number of migrant women working in the UAE face prosecution and sometimes jail after being raped, a new documentary claims.

      The Zina laws, based on Islamic Sharia law, makes extra material sex illegal in the country; this includes adultery, fornication and homosexuality.

      A BBC Arabic documentary, Pregnant and Chains — to be screened at the BBC Arabic Film Festival this week — found “hundreds” of women have been imprisoned under these laws, including women who have been raped and women who are pregnant.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • MEPs Ready to Give in to Telcos

      Tomorrow, MEPs will vote during the plenary session the Telecom Single Market regulation which includes a part on Net Neutrality, more than a year after their very positive vote. On the pretext that the dispositions, to be voted tomorrow, are less harmful that the Council’s version, a large majority of the MEPs are ready to come back on the breakthroughs of the previous version by approving a text that has too many loopholes to be adopted without being amended as it will put at risk our fundamental rights and liberties.

    • Letter to MEPs: Net Neutrality, Will You Betray Yourselves?

      Tomorrow, MEPs will vote the the Telecom Single Market regulation text. If amendments to ensure Net neutrality are not adopted, then MEPs will have betrayed their own vote of April 2014 and the citizens who elected them.

    • The EU Prepares To Vote For Awful, Loophole-Filled Net Neutrality Rules

      On Tuesday, the European Union is expected to vote on new net neutrality rules, the end result of months of debate between the European Commission, European Parliament, and the EU Council. Of course just like here in the States, heavy lobbying pressure by ISPs has the lion’s share of politicians supporting loopholes that will let giant ISPs do pretty much everything they want. The rules at first glance look very similar to the flimsy, 2010 rules proposed in the U.S. back in 2010 — allowing ISPs to engage in anti-competitive shenanigans — provided the carrier vaguely insists it’s for the safety and security of the network.

    • Net Neutrality in Europe: A Statement From Sir Tim Berners-Lee

      Tomorrow, members of the European Parliament face a key vote on the future of the Internet. The proposed regulations in front of them are weak and confusing. To keep Europe innovative and competitive, it is essential that MEPs adopt amendments for stronger “network neutrality” (net neutrality).

      When I designed the World Wide Web, I built it as an open platform to foster collaboration and innovation. The Web evolved into a powerful and ubiquitous platform because I was able to build it on an open network that treated all packets of information equally. This principle of net neutrality has kept the Internet a free and open space since its inception.

      Since then, the Internet has become the central infrastructure of our time — every sector of our economy and democracy depends on it.

    • Net neutrality: Final countdown to keep the internet fair and equal

      The proposal before the Parliament has crucial loopholes. My colleagues and I are fighting until the last minute for an internet that is fair and equal.

    • The Gaps in Global Internet Governance Are Growing, According to New CFR Interactive

      With over 40 percent of the world’s population now online, the Internet has revolutionized the way the world communicates. But with fast evolving technology, a proliferation of actors with access to the Internet, and an absence of international consensus on what should be permissible, the gap between existing world arrangements and the challenges posed by the Internet is in fact widening, according to the latest addition to the Global Governance Monitor, a multimedia resource from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

    • New top-level domains a money grab and a mistake: Paul Vixie

      DNS is what makes the internet relevant, says Vixie, with ICANN caving in to demands from the companies it’s meant to be regulating indicating corruption.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Sony Filed a Copyright Claim Against the Stock Video I Licensed to Them

        For the past few years, people have been contending with more and more false copyright claims and ID matches on services such as YouTube. While these copyright claims often involve an audio match of copyrighted music, sometimes it is the visual content that is in question.

        Whether it’s still photography or motion imagery, your visual content can be flagged, blocked, or removed due to a copyright dispute. If you have original content on YouTube, this could happen to you.

      • Russian companies should block UDP traffic to fight piracy, says think tank

        A Russian Internet industry think tank has proposed making companies legally responsible for Internet traffic flowing on their networks if it uses the UDP protocol. Discouraging the use of UDP in this way is designed to stymie BitTorrent clients, most of which have switched from the more usual TCP protocol to the simpler, connectionless UDP, according to a report on the Cnews site (Google translation).

        The proposal forms part of a larger “media and information roadmap” (Russian PDF), which comes from the Internet Development Institute, set up earlier this year by organisations representing the main Internet, software, and media companies in Russia. The aims of the think tank are to create a forum for industry discussions, carry out research, and “dialogue with the authorities.”

      • Why can’t I fix my tractor?

        Down on the farm, there’s a controversy brewing, because farm equipment manufacturer John Deere doesn’t want farmers tinkering with the software on the farmers’ own tractors. Spark contributor Sean Prpick talks to Saskatchewan farmer Chris Herrnbock, who wants to see a more flexible and farmer-friendly policy rather than a copyright crackdown.

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