12.20.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I’ve been following the progress of OpenShot, an open source video editor, for the past few years. I think it achieves just the right balance between ease-of-use and a rich feature set. When I heard about the OpenShot Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I was one of the first to contribute. By the deadline, their intended fund raising goal was more than doubled at $45,000+. This success also meant that OpenShot 2.0 will become available on Windows and Macintosh. Considering that video consumers constitute more than 50% of all Internet traffic and that every passing year this figure continues to rise, a free, high-quality video editing program for Linux, Macintosh and Windows is sure to cause quite a stir. The possibilities are endless for new authors of documentaries, narrative films, and personal video projects.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long let users deploy Linux images from its own collection. Now it is allowing the import of pre-defined virtual machine images for popular Linux distros, as well as the ability to export those images once in use.
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However, the increase in popularity for Linux, as well as customers’ need for efficient data backup and restore services, made IDrive’s decision to expand the express service to other operating systems an obvious endeavor.
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Posted in News Roundup, Red Hat at 9:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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As with each release, installation images for the major desktop environments, hardware platforms, and the Cloud, are accounted for.
Aside from installation images for the GNOME 3 desktop, which is the main edition, installation images for KDE, MATE, LXDE and Xfce desktops are also available. Fans of the Cinnamon and E17 desktops have to install them from the bfo, DVD, netinstall CD image or from an existing installation of Fedora.
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12.19.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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12.18.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Today, a special police unit can decide that a certain website needs to disappear from the Internet, and threaten its domain name registrar into revoking the address “until further notice”, without any legal basis whatsoever.
The name of the unit is PIPCU (Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit) and it has just reported on the success of Operation Creative – a three month long campaign that resulted in 40 websites accused of copyright infringement shutting down, or at least moving to a new Web address.
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Speaking at the Internet Service Providers Association, Security Minister James Brokenshire said that an announcement on blocking extremist websites is ‘forthcoming.’
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Numerous reactions are now being voiced against the inclusion in the 2014-2019 Defense Bill of article 13 whose provisions enable a pervasive surveillance of online data and communications. Gilles Babinet, appointed in 2012 as French Digital Champion to Nellie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, was quoted [fr] in the French newspaper Les Echos, “This law is the most serious attack on democracy since the special tribunals during the Algerian War” (our translation).
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Social networking giant Facebook has been granted a patent to use profile information to analyze whether shared files are “pirated” or not. The data is carefully analyzed using several social indicators including the interests of the poster and recipient, their geographical location, and their social relationship. According to Facebook the patent can help the company to “minimize legal liabilities,” but whether users will be happy remains to be seen.
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Facebook is developing a speech impediment. The recent fracas over beheading videos was marked by severe bouts of waffling from the social media giant. On one hand, it seems to want to ease unfettered expression. On the other hand, it’s set itself up as the content police.
These two aspects often collide with disastrous results. Beheadings are a go, but breast cancer groups can’t post photos of mastectomies. Recent partnerships with government agencies see Facebook willing to censor by proxy, even as it attempts to roll back its control in other areas. Giving 800+ million users access to a “report” button is well-intended, but the reality is more troubling. Something that’s simply unpopular can be clicked into oblivion in nearly no time whatsoever.
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It seems that Google now wants you to make use of words in a more careful and responsible way, and thus, has drawn off many words, including a bunch of profane words, from its built-in dictionary for Android. With the rollout of Android 4.4 KitKat, Google has now stopped giving you predictive suggestions for a raft of words.
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Last Tuesday (26 Nov) representatives from the country’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the Haya’a — raided several bookshops selling the novel H W J N by Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt’s, demanding it’d be taken off the shelves. H W J N is a “fantasy, sci-fi and romance” novel about a genie who falls in love with a human, and is a best-seller in Saudi Arabia.
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China’s campaign against online rumors, which critics say is crushing free speech, has been highly successful in “cleaning” the Internet, a top official of the country’s internet regulator said on Thursday.
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The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this month rammed through Parliament a state secrecy law that signals a fundamental alteration of the Japanese understanding of democracy. The law is vaguely worded and very broad, and it will allow government to make secret anything that it finds politically inconvenient. Government officials who leak secrets can be jailed for up to 10 years, and journalists who obtain information in an “inappropriate” manner or even seek information that they do not know is classified can be jailed for up to five years. The law covers national security issues, and it includes espionage and terrorism.
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Fukushima continues to spew out radiation. The quantities seem to be rising, as do the impacts.
The site has been infiltrated by organized crime. There are horrifying signs of ecological disaster in the Pacific and human health impacts in the U.S.
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The drawn-out process in which a bill becomes a law lends itself to harmful things, like mission creep and bloating. Canada’s new cyberbullying legislation, problematic in its “purest” form, is now becoming even worse as legislators have begun hanging language aimed at other issues (child porn, terrorism, cable theft [?]) on the bill’s framework.
As was noted earlier, language aimed at punishing revenge porn had already been attached to the bill. But the urge to target as much as possible with a broadly written bill is too much for Canada’s politicians to resist. Michael Geist notes that Bob Dechert (Secretary to the Minister of Justice) took a moment during the debate to speculate about the “dangers” of “stolen” cable.
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This month, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must make its plan to shut off the Internet and cellphone communications available to the American public. You, of course, may now be thinking: What plan?! Though President Barack Obama swiftly disapproved of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turning off the Internet in his country (to quell widespread civil disobedience) in 2011, the US government has the authority to do the same sort of thing, under a plan that was devised during the George W. Bush administration. Many details of the government’s controversial “kill switch” authority have been classified, such as the conditions under which it can be implemented and how the switch can be used. But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), DHS has to reveal those details by December 12 — or mount an appeal. (The smart betting is on an appeal, since DHS has fought to release this information so far.)
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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We’re proud to announce that Qt 5.2 is now available. With the release of Qt 5.1 in July, we showcased the Qt for Android and iOS ports and laid down the beginning of some heavy improvements we have now done on Qt’s graphics capabilities. In the last 6 months, we’ve worked very hard to finalize this release and especially these ports.
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Fresh Alpha 5 update brings improvements of Qt Quick Controls, aligns to newer Tizen 2.2.1 and standard Qt 5.2 RC 1 released week ago.
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Project Neon, the daily builds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 2 for Kubuntu, has started releasing ISO images for testing. These are very early previews of the next generation of KDE Software. It is strongly recommended not be installed on a production machine but can be tested as live images or installed into a VirtualBox or other VM.
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If you are using a Linux desktop computer that’s running the KDE desktop, it’s likely that you are running a KDE 4.11 series, either version 4.11.2 or 4.11.3. Those are the last two stable editions.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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After receiving push support for the SFTP (secure FTP) protocol last month, the GVFS (GNOME Virtual File System) software was updated a few days ago with pull support for the aforementioned protocol.
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On December 12, the Yorba Foundation has unofficially announced that a new version of its Geary email client for the GNOME desktop environment reached version 0.5.0 and it’s available for download, or update where appropriate.
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The latest open-source project being forked by the Ubuntu developers at Canonical is the GNOME Control Center. In Ubuntu 14.04, there will now be the Unity Control Center.
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The GNOME developers have announced earlier today, December 11, the immediate availability for download and testing of the GNOME Photos 3.11.3 photo viewer application for the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.
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GParted 0.17.0 was released today and its key feature is support for online resizing of file-systems along with other bug fixes and updates.
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12.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data. In a nutshell, it is the study of website visitor behavior. It is the process of using online data to transform a organization from faith-based to data driven.
This type of software helps you generate a holistic view of your business by turning customer interactions into actionable insights. Using reports and dashboards, web analytics software lets you sort, sift and share real-time information to help identify opportunities and issues. Keeping track of web visitors, analyzing traffic sources, measuring sales and conversions are just some of the possibilities.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Valve has opened the flood gates if you’re curious or brave enough to download and try the beta version of SteamOS which is making its public debut today. Some 300 lucky recipients were also slated to receive prototype hardware, including controllers, this weekend meanwhile the rest of us can take a peek at the gaming-oriented Linux fork that Valve has been cooking for a while.
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Following the announcement of “Steam Machines” from Valve to “conquer” the living room, the first “Steam Machine” has been revealed recently. The American company iBuyPower has revealed its own vision of a Steam box to compete with the recently released game consoles from Microsoft and Sony.
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I suspect that savvy Linux users will perceive this the way that a bull thinks of a red flag when it’s waved in front of it. In other words, they will charge! Hey, why not right? It could be a lot of fun for distrohoppers and other Linux tinkerers to snag SteamOS and see what they can do with it.
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