07.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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Acer has seen booming sales of Chromebooks, including government procurement orders for educational purposes in many countries, and therefore has asked supply chains to increase production to reduce supply shortages, according to company CEO Jason Chen, adding that global Chromebook shipments in 2014 are expected to increase 70% on year.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation is honoring some of its very own SysAdmins in celebration of SysAdmin Day 2014 by profiling them here on Linux.com.
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System administration can be a thankless job. To all of the tireless administrators out there who keep the systems we reply upon up and running, today is the day that we say thank you!
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Happy SysAdmin Day 2014! Over the past three weeks we’ve been profiling the Linux Foundation’s heroic team of system administrators in honor of the amazing work they do behind the scenes to keep this organization and our collaborative projects humming. Here are some of their best quotes, which highlight just how talented, passionate and also fun-loving Linux SysAdmins really are.
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Graphics Stack
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For the better part of a year, the X.Org Foundation has been evaluating a possible merger with SPI. That work is still ongoing and could be put up for a vote in the weeks ahead.
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Benchmarks
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As the second part of our Linux graphics testing this week after a Radeon R600/RadeonSI performance update with the Linux 3.16 kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel are some comparative numbers that include Intel’s Haswell HD Graphics and various NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the Nouveau driver.
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Applications
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Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, is now at version 0.23.2.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.23 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- Better support for files drag & drop.
- Improvements to the HTTP cookie management.
- Initial support for 64-bit Android builds.
- Fixes to crypto certificates management.
- Various bug fixes.
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Games
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For long-suffering Linux users who have endured the dearth of high-quality action games on their open source desktops, the wait for better game developer support soon may be over.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE has released the third beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Here the new GNOME release just in time for GUADEC, this time from Strasburg!! Remember this is a development release, so go ahead and test it, break it, send bug report and patches!
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Red Hat Family
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Global Knowledge , the world’s leading IT and business skills training provider, today announced the availability of new courses to support the recently launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 . Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 establishes the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures – pushing the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform.
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Debian Family
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TAILS Linux, used by Edward Snowden to communicate with journalists, is patching holes in one of its network overlays
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If you want to use Tor, then Tails is your best friend. Tails is a version of Linux that sends data through the Tor network.
All Internet traffic to/from Tails goes through Tor, making it resistant to end user mistakes. Tails is not normally installed on a computer, instead it’s run from a bootable DVD, USB flash drive or flash memory card. Compared to the Tor Browser Bundle, Tails is unquestionably the way to go. Ed Snowden uses it.
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Elive 2.3.4 Beta, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has been released and is now available for download and testing.
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Cornell University’s Gemini AUV will compete in next week’s 2014 RoboSub competition. The sub runs Debian Linux on an Intel Core-based computer-on-module.
The Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV) team’s Gemini AUV will enter next week’s 17th Annual International RoboSub competition with the help of Adlink, whose ‘Express-HL’ COM Express style computer-on-module will power the autonomous sub using a stripped down version of Debian ‘Wheezy’ Linux. The competition will be held at the Space and Naval Warfare Command Research facility in San Diego, from July 28 through August 3.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the first point release in the new series, has been released and is now available for download.
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In today’s open source roundup: Canonical releases an update to Ubuntu 14.04. Plus: The NY Times bashes open source for not making enough money, and a review of Deepin 2014
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Canonical announces that a number of Apache HTTP Server vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
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Denon debuted a line of Sonos-like wireless multi-room HiFi speakers that stream audio from both Internet and local sources, and run on embedded Linux.
Like the similarly Linux-powered devices available from Sonos, Denon’s ‘Heos’ wireless streaming speakers offer multi-room (multi-speaker) synchronized audio, and can deliver multiple audio streams from disparate sources to individual speakers or stereo-configured speaker pairs distributed around the home. Subscription streaming sources initially offered by Denon include Rhapsody, Pandora, Spotify, and TuneIn, with additional services offering DRM-free tracks ‘coming soon,’ says the company.
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First off, Happy SysAdmin Day. We think we have a pretty good SysAdmin surprise in store for you today as we are announcing the CoreOS stable release channel. Starting today, you can begin running CoreOS in production. This version is the most tested, secure and reliable version available for users wanting to run CoreOS. This is a huge milestone for us.
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CoreOS, the lightweight Linux distribution designed for clustered deployments and depends upon utilization of Docker/LXC software containers, has experienced its first stable release.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The future of cloud computing lies in open source. That’s the message this week enterprise software giant SAP, which has announced significant new endorsement of open source cloud projects OpenStack and CloudFoundry, as well as the release of related developer resources.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Anyway, I took the leap of faith and proceeded with the installation. OpenMandriva Lx worked like a charm: it took care of the partitioning (interestingly, it said “Moondrake” instead of “OpenMandriva” :D) and installed itself in less than 10 minutes. When we booted the machine (expecting a catastrophe, if I must be honest), none of our visions of doom panned out. GRUB2 picked up Windows 7, that OS was fully operational, and OpenMandriva also launched (desktop effects included, yay!).
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We’ve now converted all but 54 of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format. This is due to the much appreciated efforts of Palenik Mihály and Szymon K’os, two of our GSOC2014 students, who are tackling the last bunch of hard to find or hard to convert ones.
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Healthcare
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Will the next revolution in healthcare be built on open source collaboration and principles? There are increasing signs that it will be, and that the old model of scientists and doctors pursuing breakthroughs behind closed doors might be broken. Samsung, for example, has announced the Samsung Digital Health Initiative, which will be based on open hardware platforms and open software architecture. The initiative has several arms, and one surrounds an open healthcare platform called SAMI. Apple, too, announced its HealthKit at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, although it remains to be seen how open that effort will be.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD project has issued their latest quarterly status report that covers activities for the open-source operating system made between April and June of 2014.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Octave is a project started by James Rawlings and John Ekerdt, but its main developer is John Eaton, with the name inspired by the chemist Octave Levenspiel.
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The Guix package manager that’s designed to be a purely-functional package manager for GNU with an emphasis on being dependable, hackable, and liberating is out with its latest release.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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“All software contains security flaws,” touts the homepage of Bugcrowd, a new site that seeks to streamline the way flaws are reported by enforcing crowdsourced “responsible disclosure” policies. The Bugcrowd statement is probably pretty close to correct, too. As we’ve reported, Google, Mozilla and other companies have had success offering cash bounties for people who find security flaws, and those who find them are often security researchers.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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An 80-year-old local Navy veteran is facing a potential year in prison if convicted of charges stemming from his involvement in an anti-drone protest at a New York Air Force base in April.
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The results of this three-trillion-dollar effort included 4500 U.S. soldiers dead and another 32,000 seriously wounded;150,000 to 400,000 Iraqis killed; and another 2.3 million Iraqis turned into refugees.
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The United States has boosted the number of surveillance flights over Iraq to nearly 50 a day from one a month as it faces militants who control swaths of Iraqi territory, a top State Department official said on Wednesday.
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U.S. efforts to undermine democracy were spectacularly illustrated in Guatemala. Its “democratic spring” was ended by a CIA coup in 1954. A bloody, three-decade civil war followed. Hundreds of thousands, mostly non-combatants, were killed. Guatemala today is still characterized by extreme social inequality, pervasive drug violence and corruption, and impunity for human rights violations.
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Repeated inconsistencies in Israeli descriptions of the situation have sparked debate over whether Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into a confrontation. Israeli intelligence is also said to have known that the boys were dead shortly after they disappeared, but to have maintained public optimism about their safe return to beef up support from the Jewish diaspora.
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In 2006, the CIA released documents showing that it wrote to its West German counterpart in 1958, saying it had information that Eichmann “is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias ‘Clemens’ since 1952″.
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As the Israeli killing of Palestinians spreads from Gaza to the West Bank, Prime Minister Netanyahu weighs his pursuit of military objectives against growing world outrage. But his trump card remains the fear of U.S. politicians to voice any criticism of Israel, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
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These past weeks, Israel has established its dominion possibly for the first time since A.D. 70 by destroying holes in the ground built by terrorists to kill them. Israel is no longer a Washington abstraction. It no longer asks Washington or anyone else for permission to be. It is now a Jewish place. Hamas fights for abstractions, as do Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Secretary of State John Kerry. Jews today fight for earth; filling holes of terror which go back to the Oslo Accords and to the “co-presidency” of Hillary and Bill Clinton in their fleeting moment of global arrogance which has cost the death of thousands.
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A 12-hour truce has begun in Gaza, as efforts continue to secure a longer ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the scale of damage becomes clear.
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After days of placing hostile blame for the downing of the Malaysian airliner on Russia, the White House permitted US intelligence officials to tell reporters that there is no evidence of the Russian government’s involvement.
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Both these politicians have shamelessly sought to exploit this terrible tragedy to step up their pro-war and imperialist propaganda and they have been urged on by the capitalist media.
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French soldiers recovered a black box from the Air Algerie wreckage site in a desolate region of restive northern Mali on Friday, officials said. Terrorism hasn’t been ruled out as a cause, although officials say the most likely reason for the catastrophe that killed all 118 people onboard is bad weather.
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Israel has attacked targets in Sinai by drone previously, though such involvement is unpopular within Egypt, and the Egyptian Defense Ministry denied the reports, saying there were no drones in Sinai.
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Jha begins by recounting the most important moment in Nepal’s contemporary history – the 2006 Jana Andolan, which forced the monarch King Gyanendra to step aside. He traces the development of the Maoist-led armed struggle from the first weapons they obtained: two rifles that the CIA airdropped in 1961 for Tibetans to use against the Chinese Government. He chronicles how the Maoist movement in Nepal then drew upon discontentment against prevailing conditions and power equations in society, as well as police abuses and disenchantment with ‘moderate left’ politics.
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A Gallup poll found that 79 percent of Americans think that the government should not use drones to kill other Americans — even if they are suspected terrorists. Why should it be any more palatable for the government to use lethal injections or electric chairs to kill other Americans — even if they have done horrifying things?
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Finance
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Heritage Foundation chief economist Stephen Moore was caught using incorrect statistics to mislead readers about the relationship between tax cuts and job creation in the United States.
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According to the proposed 17th July bitcoin regulation from New York State, the public now has 45 days to comment and then a 45-day grace period prior to full adoption. But what’s after 17th October? More importantly, what’s after New York?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Ofcom has just published a report that shows that some 60% of households are actively switching off filters despite the best efforts of companies. ISPs that aren’t pushing filters are reporting even lower stats, with well over 90% declining filters. Ofcom’s report on Network Level Filtering Measures was based on survey questionnaires sent to the big four ISPs: BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.
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Earlier in 1967, Kermode had resigned from the co-editorship of Encounter magazine over revelations – which came as news to just about no one – that its original backer, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was in turn being funded by the CIA.
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Google’s interpretation of the European Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is prejudicing the intention of the court, the State’s data protection watchdog said yesterday, as regulators and search engine giants met in Brussels to discuss the matter.
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Privacy
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You may be dead, but the U.S. government won’t take you off its terrorist roster.
That’s according to newly leaked internal guidelines from last year that reveal intimate details regarding the government’s process for determining whether an individual should be designated as a possible terrorist suspect.
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According to an online job posting, the spy agency is looking for a new director of strategic communications who will serve as its primary representative and walk the fine line between transparency and the necessary secrecy for an intelligence agency.
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Spooks ask Dabbsy to suggest a nice hotel with pool
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The actions of the US and UK stand in stark contrast to a groundbreaking and forceful report released last week by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, about privacy in the digital age. Many of her findings directly challenge US and UK arguments defending secret, mass surveillance.
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Federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities say they are increasingly struggling to conduct court-ordered wiretaps on suspects because of a surge in chat services, instant messaging and other online communications that lack the technical means to be intercepted.
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The president who promised an unprecedented level of transparency has been disturbingly opaque during his current fundraising trip to the West Coast, as far as reporters are concerned. As Barack Obama meets with large, influential private donors like Costco co-founder James Sinegal and Silicon Valley moguls, the media is being denied even moderate access. Christi Parsons, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told Politico: “We think these fundraisers ought to be open to at least some scrutiny, because the president’s participation in them is fundamentally public in nature.”
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The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the “trusted” computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who pushed Apple’s admission.
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The White House and the NSA have something in common; they both track website user data. But it looks like the folks at the White House might not have known it was happening, and the tracking could be a violation of the White House privacy policy.
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A five-day hearing before the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) on the operations of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spying operations concluded July 18.
Civil liberties and human rights organisations, including Privacy International, Amnesty International, Liberty and the US Civil Liberties Union, brought the legal case before the Tribunal. They are attempting to establish whether GCHQ’s massive state surveillance operations are a violation of British and international law.
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Four Democratic senators have sent a letter to the director of national intelligence expressing concerns about the scope of the collection of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls under a National Security Agency program that targets foreigners overseas.
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Law enforcement and intelligence agencies want to be able to wiretap social media, instant message and chat services. But building in ways to wiretap these kinds of communication can lead to less secure systems, say technical experts, including former National Security Agency officials.
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In a recent debate on Rethinking the U.S. National Security Apparatus, Michael Hayden, a retired general and the former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Edward Snowden “blew the whistle” on the NSA’s use of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 to collect phone records of nearly every American.
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The Russian government is offering four million roubles (£65,000) to anyone who can crack the anonymous Tor network.
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In an effort to increase surveillance and censorship efforts, the Russian government is putting up a bounty to anyone who can make significant inroads to reveal users on Tor, the anonymizing network for privacy seekers.
Tor, most often accessed via the Tor Browser, is a network that encrypts user browsing data and redirects it randomly across multiple servers (known as ‘chops’) before reaching its destination. This keeps the location, IP address, and identity of the user relatively anonymous, though the fact that Tor is being used won’t be secret.
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A warning to those who might do a little online research about Internet privacy software: The NSA is tracking you, a report by the German public broadcasting group ARD concludes, according to a story published by The Independent.
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The question to bear in mind, when reading this whole sorry tale, is this: if Americans are, on average, no stupider than Germans, then why are their intelligence services so stupid?
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Given recent German indignation about the National Security Agency, it has been easy to overlook the fact that for decades the German government has cooperated extensively with the NSA on surveillance activities. But after a high-level meeting in Berlin this week, this long-standing but veiled cooperation may have a firmer legal and political base.
The two countries’ past partnership became so extensive that they even developed a special logo for their joint signals-intelligence activity, known by its initials, ‘JSA.’ It shows an American bald eagle against the colors of the German flag, next to the words Der Zeitgeist, or ‘the spirit of the age.’
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On a visit to Munich, Germany, wildly differing views between the European Union and the U.S.A. are immediately apparent on the frequently talked about (over here) subjects of information capitalism, NSA spying, and American ‘dominance.’ They can teach a lot about ourselves. The German and French perspectives on issues pose genuine cognitive dissonance.
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…embedding of computers, sensors, and Internet capabilities into more and more physical objects.
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Hekmati, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen born in Arizona and raised in Michigan, was arrested in August 2011 and sentenced to death for spying. Iran’s Supreme Court annulled the sentence. He later was convicted of ‘cooperating with hostile governments’ and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
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Civil Rights
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And while you’re at it, don’t photograph the water tower in Farmer’s Branch, Texas (as professional photographer Allison Smith found out), or planes taxiing to takeoff at the Denver airport (if you have a Middle Eastern look to you), or that dangerous “Welcome to Texas City” sign (as Austin photographer Lance Rosenfield discovered when stopped by BP security guards and only let off after “a stern lecture about terrorists and folks wandering around snapping photos”), or even the police handcuffing someone on the street from your own front lawn (as Rochester, New York, neighborhood activist Emily Good was doing when the police cuffed and arrested her for the criminal misdemeanor of “obstructing governmental administration”).
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Senator Ron Wyden is apparently getting tired of waiting for the White House to use up its buckets of black ink in redacting everything important in the Senate’s big torture report. He’s publicly pondering the idea of using Senate privilege to just release it himself.
As you may recall, the Senate Intelligence Committee spent years and $40 million investigating the CIA’s torture program, and the 6,000+ page report is supposedly devastating in highlighting (1) how useless the program was and (2) how far the CIA went in torturing people (for absolutely no benefit) and (3) how the CIA lied to Congress about all of this. The CIA, not surprisingly, is not too happy about the report. At all. Still, despite its protests, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify the executive summary of the report.
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The National Security Agency last year significantly expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world’s most repressive and abusive government agencies. An April 2013 top secret memo provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden details the agency’s plans “to provide direct analytic and technical support’ to the Saudis on “internal security” matters.
The Saudi Ministry of Interior “referred to in the document as MOI” has been condemned for years as one of the most brutal human rights violators in the world. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that “Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse,” specifically mentioning a 2011 episode in which MOI agents allegedly ”poured an antiseptic cleaning liquid down [the] throat” of one human rights activist. The report also notes the MOI’s use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents.
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The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress about alleged whistleblower retaliation related to the Senate’s classified report on the agency’s harsh interrogation program, triggering fears that the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.
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The CIA obtained a legally protected, confidential email between whistleblower officials and Congress this spring, raising questions over whether the agency illegally has access to other communications regarding whistleblowers, McClatchy reported.
It is unclear how the CIA got hold of the email and other unspecified communications between Daniel Meyer – the intelligence community’s top official for whistleblower cases – and lawmakers, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy.
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The executive branch will not eavesdrop on the computer keystrokes and Internet use of members of Congress and legislative staff members with security clearances as part of its stepped-up efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosures of classified information, the nation’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Friday.
The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., made that promise in a letter to Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. The lawmakers had raised constitutional concerns about a new ‘insider threat’ detection program amid a controversy over the C.I.A.’s search of computers used by Senate staff members who were at a C.I.A. site preparing a report on agency interrogation practices during the Bush administration.
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A little over a decade ago, federal prosecutors used keystroke logging software to steal the encryption password of an alleged New Jersey mobster, Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., so they could get evidence from his computer to be used at his trial.
The technique was classified and FBI technicians warned prosecutors that if the case went to trial, details about the tool could get disclosed in court.
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Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday Warsaw will probably appeal against a European Court of Human Rights ruling that Poland hosted a secret CIA jail.
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One of the most frustrating and depressing aspects of following extremism-related stories in the UK is the predictable frequency with which the denialist brigade rush to the fore to hush things up.
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While Gazans, their Hamas leadership and pro-Palestinian supporters around the world condemn Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, it’s time Muslims examined the other occupation: the inexorable advance of political Islamism over Islam.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is looking to defend the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not just from the Obama administration, but from states that are finding it too easy to seize private property without first charging and convicting property owners.
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Plus, Europe’s top rights court slams Poland over CIA renditions and two more anti-Putin protesters receive long prison sentences.
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A senior Senate Democrat is firing a warning shot at the White House against stalling the release of a report about the past use of torture by the U.S. intelligence community.
Sen. Ron Wyden is talking with his colleagues about the possibility of using a seldom-invoked procedure to declassify an Intelligence Committee report on the use of torture in the event the White House does not move ahead quickly.
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DRM
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Amazon has reportedly warned of slower sales in the current quarter after it incurred a loss of 126 million dollars in the second quarter. According to the BBC, Amazon forecast third quarter sales of between 19.7 billion dollars and 21.5 billion dollars, which could mean sales growth of as little as 15 percent – well down on previous quarters.
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07.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The Linux faithful have mixed opinions on the success of Google’s Linux- and Chrome browser based Chrome OS. The lightweight OS came along years after Fedora, Ubuntu and other Linux distros, and shares relatively little of their mainstream Linux codebase. Some dismiss it as a limited, browser-only platform — a complaint often applied to Firefox OS — while others warn that Google is co-opting and subjugating Linux, a process already begun with Android.
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Google is all geared up to push Chromebooks to students in the US. They have uploaded a new ad on YouTube targeting students. The video titled Chromebook: For Students shows student lockers and a very clear text ‘everything a student needs in a laptop’.
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Server
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With the rise of containers as an alternative to virtual machines in Linux environments, IT organizations that make that shift will need a way to potentially manage thousands of containers. Looking to become one of the vendors that not only supplies those Linux containers but also manages them, Docker today announced it has acquired Orchard Laboratories Ltd.
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Kernel Space
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Fresh off the release of ACPI 5.1 by the UEFI Forum, Linux developers are updating their support against this latest revision to the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. In particular, ACPI 5.1 is supposed to help out ARM.
While accessing the ACPI/UEFI specifications still require jumping through some hoops, the ACPI 5.1 update is reported to fix major gaps in supporting ACPI on ARM. Hanjun Guo has already laid out patches for providing Linux ARM64 support compliant with the ACPI 5.1 specification. ACPI 5.1 has “major changes” to the MADT, FADT, GTDT, and _DSD for bettering up this non-x86 platform support.
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Eric Searcy is the IT Infrastructure Manager at the Linux Foundation. Here he tells us how he got started as a sysadmin and at the Linux Foundation, describes his typical day at work, and shares his favorite sysadmin tools, among other things.
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Aric Gardner is a Linux Foundation SysAdmin who works on the OpenDaylight collaborative project. Here he tells the story of how became a sysadmin, shares his specialty in scripting and automation, and describes a typical day at work, among other things.
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Graphics Stack
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While the Radeon R9 290 series is now mature in the marketplace, the open-source Linux driver support has lagged. The Hawaii support had been broken for months (no working 3D on the open-source driver, but will work under the Catalyst Linux driver) and the few open-source AMD developers weren’t tasked with fixing it over not being sure why it wasn’t working and having no immediate business cases for fixing the support. Fortunately, with a bug comment made tonight, it seems things might be in order.
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Applications
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I’ve gotten a little tired of typing out ls vimwiki/ | shuf -n1 all the time, and that’s usually proof positive that it’s time to give it an alias. So it’s in my .bashrc now as “tokolosi,” and here’s what the little demon dragged home today:
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The Calibre software provides some important functions for its users, like the ability to read, edit, and manage eBooks. The developer has issued a new update and the new version brings a few major features.
Even if people mostly use Calibre for converting eBooks from one format to another or as a reader, the application is also capable of editing books as well. This new function was implemented recently and the developer is still adding features and fixes for it.
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Photocrumbs has served well as a working name for my spare-time coding project. But the time has come to give my forgetful photo publishing PHP script a proper name. It took me a while to come up with a good name. I wanted a short and catchy name that reflects my deep interest in Japan. While trawling the web, I stumbled across the Japanese white-eye bird called mejiro in Japanese. It’s small, it’s cute, and it has a short name that sounds unmistakably Japanese — in other words, exactly the name I was looking for. So here it is, Photocrumbs is now Mejiro.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A while ago, we’ve announced our plans to add Linux support as one of the features of our digital platform, with 100 games on the launch day sometime this fall. We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by, and absolutely no reason to wait until October or November. We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. It’s not about them, after all, it’s about you. So, one of the most popular site feature requests on our community wishlist is granted today: Linux support has officially arrived on GOG.com!
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“The year of the Linux desktop” is a phrase people have tossed around with increasing irony since the nineties, but it was never going to arrive explosively. Linux has slowly grown and spread into homes through friendly distributions like Ubuntu and Mint, installed as easy and safer alternatives to Windows or to freshen up old duffers (my netbook is Minty fresh now). Games have followed.
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If you have been following our coverage of the gaming scene, then you might remember us speculating on the possibility of Good Old Games (GOG.com) going to introduce Linux games. A few days following that article, GOG actually confirmed that they did indeed plan on getting Linux as another platform where they would introduce games regularly and promised about a 100 games by fall of this year. Now it seems that GOG managed to push their worker elves and the penguin folks hard enough that they are ready to release about 50 of the promised games for Linux.
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The game is set to release on Linux, Mac, Windows, Xbox One, PS4 & Wii U simultaneously. More information can be found over at the Project Tools website, along with the different game packages.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I’m sorry to bring bad news, but after trying to fight some last minute bugs in the new Gmail resource today, I realized that pushing the resource into KDE Applications 4.14 was too hurried, and so I decided not to ship it in KDE Applications 4.14. I know many of you are really excited about the Gmail integration, but there are far too many issues that cannot be solved this late in 4.14 cycle. And since this will probably be the last 4.x release, shipping something that does not perform as expected and cannot be fixed properly would only be disappointing and discouraging to users. In my original post I explained that I was working on the Gmail integration to provide user experience as close as possible to native Gmail web interface so that people are not tempted to switch away from KMail to Gmail. But with the current state of the resource, the effect would be exactly the opposite. And if the resource cannot fulfil it’s purpose, then there’s no point in offering it to users.
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With the Plasma 5.0 release out the door, we can lift our heads a bit and look forward, instead of just looking at what’s directly ahead of us, and make that work by fixing bug after bug. One of the important topics which we have (kind of) excluded from Plasma’s recent 5.0 release is support for Wayland. The reason is that much of the work that has gone into renovating our graphics stack was also needed in preparation for Wayland support in Plasma. In order to support Wayland systems properly, we needed to lift the software stack to Qt5, make X11 dependencies in our underlying libraries, Frameworks 5 optional. This part is pretty much done. We now need to ready support for non-X11 systems in our workspace components, the window manager and compositor, and the workspace shell.
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KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has provided an update regarding KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 support for Wayland as an alternative to running on an X11/X.Org Server.
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The work on revisiting and expanding the Human Interface Guideline on tooltips has begun. If there’s something that has always bothered you about how tooltips in KDE Applications and Plasma look and feel consider to join in. The work is still in its early stages, so now would be the best time to voice your concerns. [https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=121892]
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Cutelyst uWSGI plugin now has support for –thread, which will create a QThread to process a request, however I strongly discourage its usage in Cutelyst, the performance is ~7% inferior and a crash in your code will break other requests, and as of now ASYNC mode is not supported in threaded mode due to a limitation in uWSGI request queue.
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from today on, the master branch of kate.git is KF5 based.
That means, for the next KDE applications release after 4.14, Kate will use the awesome KF5 stuff!
The KTextEditor framework is already in a good shape and most active KatePart development is since months pure KF5 based.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GUADEC 2014 is almost upon us, and we are talking to the three keynote speakers who are lined up for this year’s conference. Nathan Wills – LWN editor, typeface designer and author – is one of these keynote speakers. His talk, titled Should We Teach The Robot To Kill, addresses issues relating to Free Software and the automative industry. We caught up with him to find out a bit more about this fascinating subject, as well as his views on Free Software conferences.
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We’re halfway through 2014, and a handful of Linux distributions have already made a big splash in the community. Which distributions are the best ones for this year? Let’s take a look.
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Kali Linux 1.0.8, a more mature, secure, and enterprise-ready version of BackTrack Linux, has been announced by Offensive Security and brings support for EFI systems, among other updates and changes.
The developers of Kali Linux 1.0.8 took advantage of this version change and decided to make other improvements to the operating system, although you will need a user account to see exactly what has been modified.
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In today’s news feeds is MakeUseOf.com’s top five Linux distributions for 2014. One of their picks is said to vulnerable to attack and the proof has been posted. In other news, GOG.com has rolled out support for 50 DRM-free Linux games. And finally tonight, Fedora 21 has been delayed.
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Red Hat Family
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Oracle sees continued potential for growth as it rolls out its latest Linux distribution release.
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Fedora
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for July 22nd, 2014:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is working on the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 (Utopic Unicorn), but its developers are also trying to improve some technologies that haven’t made it just yet to the desktop version, such as Unity 8 and the Mir display server.
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Canonical has revealed details in a security notice about an acpi-support vulnerability in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system that has been found and corrected.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS…
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The first stable point release update to the Long Term Support Ubuntu 14.04 is now available.
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Canonical is working in parallel at both the desktop and the mobile versions of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Touch already using Unity 8 and Mir as default, since the development branch was based on Ubuntu 13.10.
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Recently, the developers have implemented the Kernel 3.16 RC3 as default on the unstable branch of Ubuntu 14.10, scheduled for release on the 23rd of October, 2014.
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Over the past two years we’ve come to really grow fond of the design of the Raspberry Pi. It’s almost iconic in a way, and we don’t think we’re the only ones to believe this: as you can have see with the Banana Pi review on the previous page the layout is almost identical to the standard model B.
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TinyGreenPC launched a Raspberry Pi and Linux based digital signage player that runs on just 7 Watts, and offers optional WiFi and an OPS interface.
The Pi Media Player is one of the most power-efficient signage players on the market, according to TinyGreenPC, a subsidiary of UK-based embedded manufacturer and distributor AndersDX. It helps that the 7 Watt, Raspian Linux-enabled signage player runs on a Raspberry Pi.
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Three Bulgarian engineers who co-founded a firm called StorPool – which builds a virtual SAN using the aggregated storage of Linux KVM servers – are aiming to expand the reach of their three-year-old project.
Boyan Ivanov, CEO, Boyan Krosnov, chief product officer, and Yank Yankulov, the chief tech officer, started the firm in November 2011 with $261,600 seed funding. In February this year they raised an undisclosed amount of cash in an A-round. We’d guess it’s in the $1m – $2.5m area.
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Phones
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Android
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Disney movies have the uncanny ability to make us laugh, cry, and dance with joy at the same time. Whether you are a young kid or an adult, these films have a special place in many people’s hearts. Apart from winning many Oscars, these movies have garnered fans across all generations. From overbearing grandmas to unapologetically brash kids, Disney movies are so irresistible that they can make anyone laugh or cry. That’s why today we have for you a list of some of the best Android apps out there that are made for Disney fans.
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About 10 years ago, when I got my first mobile phone, I hardly knew anything about its operating system or its processor. Even its screen size didn’t matter. I was just happy to have a ‘mobile’ phone.
Today, the mobile phone paradigm has shifted from feature phones to smart phones. When people consider purchasing a new mobile phone, they examine its operating system, its configuration, and its screen size. Increased attention to these details can be attributed to technological advancements—and, more importantly, to the slew of new mobile operating systems available today. In this highly competitive market, Android has obtained about 80 percent of the global market share, making it the clear leader among mobile operating systems.
What makes Android so popular? Why has the mobile market swung toward Android lately? Let’s take a quick look at how Android has achieved this, as well as the role of open source in the Android story.
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OnePlus have developed quite a buzz over the last few months with the release of their first device the OnePlus One. Part of the allure is the incredibly low asking price of $300 – which is typically half the cost of its on-spec rivals. However another feature which has greatly attracted attention is the OnePlus One comes with CyanogenMod (CM) custom ROM as stock out of the box.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Today Google announced Chrome Beta has received a relatively major update. Chrome Beta is the testing version of Chrome. To all purposes it is the same as Chrome although the Beta version incorporates all the small tweaks and experimental aspects Google are testing. By using the Beta version the user gets a first glimpse at features which quite likely will be available on the standard Chrome and also provides Google with the necessary test data.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla recently released Firefox version 31, and now this updated version of the Fedora default web browser is available for download in Fedora 20.
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SaaS/Big Data
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SAP may not be on every individual user’s radar, but the company is a giant global force in running enterrprise back-end systems, new forays into the cloud and other new platforms, and managing enterprise class applications. Now, SAP has announced that it is committing to Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, providing a clear path forward for an open cloud ecosystem.
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Yesterday, we released ownCloud 7. You might have read that somewhere on the internet – it was widely announced and broadly picked up. If you do not have ownCloud yet, you really should try it now, and if you are one of the people happily using ownCloud for a while, update soon!
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced that the second Release Candidate version of LibreOffice 4.2.6 is now available for download and that users can test it.
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Education
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In the world of the Internet, where everything is so easily available, it seems like all technology is a benefit to online learners. For those who aren’t able to use the available traditional resources for various reasons, open source technology specifically is a huge boon. Let me share my seven-year journey of using open source and how it helped me add more value to both my personal and professional lives.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Nginx, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Nginx Web server, is out today with a new release of its Nginx Plus server. The Nginx Plus r4 release provides users with new security and load balancing features.
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BSD
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After more than a half-year in development and working on tens of thousands of lines of code, Pkg 1.3.0 has been released by FreeBSD developers.
Pkg 1.3.0 introduces a new solver to automatically handle conflicts and dynamically discover them, pkg install can now install local files and resolve their dependencies via remote repositories, sandboxing of the code has happened, improved portability of the code took place, the pkg API has been simplified, improvements to the multi-repository mode, and a ton of other changes and fixes took place.
More on the pkg 1.3.0 release for improved package management on FreeBSD can be found via this mailing list post.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In some ways we have actually made improvements to the Unix Philosophy with Richard Stallman’s GPL. We also have a mostly standardized graphical system with the X Window System. I can’t find any overt references to sharing of source code from the early days of Bell Labs but it clearly did happen even if it was de facto
rather than de jure.
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We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of GNU Guix, version 0.7.
This release is an important milestone for the project since it is the first to provide an image to install the GNU system from a USB stick.
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Public Services/Government
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The United Kingdom recently made an announcement about its decision to adopt the Open Document Format (ODF) as its in-house standard for all new documents. And now, Microsoft has lost another important fight in yet another European city.
Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city, has ditched Microsoft Office in favor of LibreOffice.
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Licensing
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Karen Sandler is a veteran of the free and open source software world. Having completed an engineering degree, she has worked as a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, was Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and recently accepted a position as Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I interviewed Karen via email to ask her about her background and insight into various issues in the free and open source world.
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Openness/Sharing
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Recently I had the opportunity to watch a soccer game (football to the majority of the world). This game was one of the most amazing displays of team effort I’ve ever had the privilege of watching. (Here’s an obligatory link if you don’t know to which game I refer). Almost every score was predicated with a series of passes and touches by various players. There was a level of unselfish play and team spirit I don’t often see when observing professional sports.
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Benetech started out in the 90s without even understanding the meaning of the term open source. They just “needed an easy way to interface with different voice synthesizers” to develop readers for people who are blind and “shared the code to be helpful.”
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Programming
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PHP 5.5.15, an HTML-embedded scripting language with syntax borrowed from C, Java, and Perl, with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in, has been released and it’s now available for download.
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The battle started when a government-hired crew tore down the metal cross atop the one-room church in this village surrounded by rice paddies last month.
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Science
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As the world celebrates the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, a revelation has come to fore that during the Cold War race to the moon between the US and the former USSR, the former had “kidnapped” a Soviet mooncraft in the 60s called Lunik, studied it in detail and returned it intact.
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Security
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Personally, while I still think the DHS is an unlikely sponsor for this project — the National Security Agency (NSA) or NIST seem like its more natural home — I think the SWAMP sounds like a very useful one-stop for anyone wanting to double-check their pre-production code for errors before release.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Judicial Watch announced today that on June 17, 2014, it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the United States Department of Defense (DOD) to obtain records of communications relating to its May 2, 2011, FOIA request for bin Laden death photographs and videos (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Defense (No. 1:14-cv-01027)).
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The birth of the armed-drone program underscores two central ironies. First, the weapon that the U.S. deployed so eagerly after 9/11 was a hot potato that it juggled around internally beforehand. (Indeed, the George W. Bush administration devoted most of its lone pre-9/11 cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda—convened on Sept. 4, 2001—to wrangling about the drone program.) Second, for a program now so widely criticized in the Muslim world for killing civilians, pre-9/11 policy makers were actually driven toward armed drones because the more traditional alternatives involved unacceptable risks of collateral damage.
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The UK, which has carried out over 300 drone strikes in the country, has consistently stated it is aware of only one incident in which non-combatants died: a March 2011 strike that killed four farmers. In December 2013, three months after the Watapur strike, then defence secretary Philip Hammond reiterated this claim in a Guardian op-ed.
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On the afternoon of September 7 last year, in the Watapur region of Afghanistan’s Kunar province, a farmer named Miya Jan heard a buzzing overhead. He looked up to see a drone, he told the Los Angeles Times, and minutes later, he heard an explosion.
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Afghanistan has been targeted by more drone strikes than any other country in the world, yet almost nothing is known about where those attacks took place, or who they killed.
A new study by the Bureau’s drones team, published today, examines the official opaqueness that surrounds drone operations and explores how outside organisations – such as the Bureau – might be able to lift this veil of secrecy.
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An 80-year-old local Navy veteran is facing a potential year in prison if convicted of charges stemming from his involvement in an anti-drone protest at a New York Air Force base in April.
Andrew Schoerke, of Shaftsbury, is a retired U.S. Navy captain and a member of Veterans for Peace Will Miller Green Mountain Chapter. On April 28 he was part of a group of 300 protesters at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base which shares space with the Syracuse Hancock International Airport in Syracuse, New York.
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On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan. – See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/07/187788/grandmother-gets-year-prison-taking-picture%E2%80%A8#sthash.34Km49MC.dpuf
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On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan. Dozens have been sentenced, previously, for peaceful protest there. But uniquely, the court convicted her under laws meant to punish stalkers, deciding that by taking pictures outside the heavily guarded base she violated a previous order of protection not to stalk or harass the commanding officer.
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“Do you honestly believe that this land is yours because God said so?”
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The supporters of CUFI moved up the convention center escalators and took their seats for a plenary session. Onstage were the first guests, all recognizable from Fox News—Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol, onetime CIA director James Woolsey, and the Council on Foreign Relations fellow Elliott Abrams, a presidentially pardoned veteran of foreign policy disasters on two continents. Sitting right next to them was John Hagee, the burly Christian Zionist pastor who founded CUFI in 2006 He leaned into a microphone, passionately explaining why supporters of Israel should not be tricked by casualty reports.
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Iraq’s security forces have killed at least 75 civilians and wounded hundreds of others in indiscriminate air strikes on four cities since June 6, according to Human Rights Watch. The New York-based human rights watchdog says it documented 17 airstrikes, the majority in the first half of July, in which barrel bombs were used.
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More than 50 former Israeli soldiers have refused to serve in the nation’s reserve force, citing regret over their part in a military they said plays a central role in oppressing Palestinians, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
“We found that troops who operate in the occupied territories aren’t the only ones enforcing the mechanisms of control over Palestinian lives. In truth, the entire military is implicated. For that reason, we now refuse to participate in our reserve duties, and we support all those who resist being called to service,” the soldiers wrote in a petition posted online and first reported by the newspaper.
While some Israelis have refused to serve in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, the military’s structure is such that serving in any capacity forces one to play a role in the conflict, said the soldiers, most of whom are women who would have been exempted from combat.
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In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.
The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.
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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he’s worried there’s a perception of the United States “disengaging” from global affairs.
Gates, who also once headed the CIA, says he recognizes the ocean-to-ocean diplomacy the Obama administration has been carrying out in the Mideast and Eastern Europe and other world hot spots like Africa.
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“Rise of the Politics of Fear”: “The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson’s “Great Society”.
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“I think Russia saved us in Syria. If we had rushed in surface-to-air missiles to the Syrian opposition and they were then stolen by ISIS and they were now shooting down civilian airliners it would have been a different story,” Baer said.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Since the political crisis erupted in Yemen in 2011, the country has begun to move towards democracy. Many challenges remain in the country, wracked by civil unrest and widespread water and food insecurity, says Bishow Parajuli, the UN World Food Programme’s representative in Yemen.
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Plans for a cable car attraction and a shopping and entertainment complex mean the Grand Canyon is facing the biggest threat in its history, the US National Parks Service claims
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Finance
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Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme relied on reams of fake trading documents to fool regulators for decades.
Now he may be the victim of a forgery himself, after a U.S. judge on Wednesday denied a bizarre motion supposedly filed by Madoff that claimed the U.S. int
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Democratic congressman Jim Himes was on C-SPAN early this morning, and was on the receiving end of an angry complaint by a Republican caller over basically everything that anyone has ever said negatively about the Obama administration in the past four-plus years. Himes’ response? Suggesting this person maybe not watch so much Fox News.
The caller, Bob, went on a rant about issues from Benghazi, the NSA, Fast & Furious, Syria, Obamacare, the EPA, the government shutdown, Eric Holder, Van Jones, et cetera, et cetera. He concluded, “Any other president would have been laughed out of office right now.”
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Most members and staffers of the US House of Representatives won’t be able to edit pages on Wikipedia for more than a week. Administrators of the popular Web encyclopedia have imposed a 10-day ban on the IP address connected to Congress’ lower house.
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Privacy
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Apple has “inadvertently admitted” to creating a “backdoor” in iOS, according to a new post by a forensics scientist, iOS author and former hacker, who this week created a stir when he posted a presentation laying out his case.
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Privacy has always been one big issue when it came to using smartphones, but no one knew precisely why. Many of us feared social networks and apps that required private information and payed less attention to the actual device and its OS system. It would seem Apple’s iOS features a so called “backdoor” that allows agencies like the NSA to have almost complete access to every iOS running device. Forensic scientist and writer Jonathan Zdziarski, presented some slides at the HOPE conference in New York, in which he proved that, in general, the iPhones are well secured, specially the iPhone 5S that runs iOS 7, but they will never be protected from the government or Apple itself.
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APPLE has shed some light on the diagnostic capabilities in its iOS operating system, in a response allegations that it purposefully installed a “backdoor” on its mobile devices.
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A US researcher has mounted a very strong case that Apple has deliberately left security holes in iOS. Apple’s response is underwhelming.
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A key government document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the Obama administration does not require “concrete facts” or “irrefutable evidence” to brand Americans or foreigners as suspected terrorists.
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The 166-page “sensitive security information” document that details how the government decides whether someone should be on a terrorist watchlist has been leaked to the press.
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The Intercept on Wednesday published the U.S. government’s 166-page rulebook that guides the creation of its famous internal “terrorist watchlist.”
Both the Bush and Obama administrations have resisted spelling out how individuals, including its own citizens, wind up on the list, or how they can be removed. The registry supplies the names for the no-fly list that has grounded many a confused traveler, and includes thousands of names of those who are merely suspected of possibly having ties to others who may themselves be suspected of ties to terrorism.
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“Immediate family of suspected terrorists,” according to Scahill and Devereaux, such as “their spouses, children, parents or siblings,” may be placed on a list “without any suspicion that they themselves are engaged in terrorist activity.”
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As Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux point out in their analysis, the document is positively Kafkaesque, allowing agencies to add you to the watchlist if you are suspected of associating with a person who is suspected of being under suspicion of being a terrorist — and “terrorist” has been redefined to include “people who damage government property,” and people who seek to “influence government policy through intimidation.”
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As writers and artists, we join PEN American Center in urging Congress to act to end mass surveillance. We recognize the need for strong protections for U.S. national security, and acknowledge that such measures will sometimes entail difficult tradeoffs. However, the NSA’s shockingly broad and indiscriminate surveillance programs threaten our most cherished democratic ideals and violate our constitutional and international human rights to free expression and privacy. The Washington Post’s recent report that nine out of 10 individuals whose communications are being intercepted are not the intended targets of investigation underscores the total lack of proportionality of NSA mass surveillance, and the need for reform.
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Canadian government officials requested subscriber information from telecoms at least 1.13 million times per year between 2006 and 2008, according to documents obtained by e-commerce law expert Michael Geist.
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In early April, Sen. Charles E. Grassley summoned FBI officials to his Capitol Hill office. He said he wanted them to explain how a program designed to uncover internal security threats would at the same time protect whistleblowers who wanted to report wrongdoing within the bureau.
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Civil rights group Liberty is representing MPs Tom Watson and David Davis in a fresh case challenging the UK government’s recently passed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill.
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After recent comments in Moscow by Edward Snowden about the extent to which private telecoms data is used by the UK and US governments, you might have expected British lawmakers to think twice about the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers bill.
A yarn attributed to Sean McBride recounts an interview from the 1950s when, while serving as Irish Foreign Minister, a journalist asked him: “What about the role of British Intelligence in Dublin?”
“If the British had some intelligence, that’d be great,” replied the man who once led Amnesty International.
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A vulnerability broker published a video demonstrating one of several flaws it has found in the privacy-focused Tails operating system, which is used by those seeking to make their Web browser harder to trace.
Exodus Intelligence of Austin, Texas, said its short clip shows how the real IP address of a Tails user can be revealed using the flaw. The company said it hoped publicizing its findings would serve as a warning to users about putting “unconditional trust” in a software platform.
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Putting aside certain rhetorical devices that have cropped up in this debate, like name-calling or guilt-by-association, let’s examine some of Shava’s points to see if we can take the conversation in a constructive direction.
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The co-creator of a system designed to make internet users unidentifiable says he is tackling a “bug” that threatened to undermine the facility.
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Max Schrems’s case against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is likely to have profound implications
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Whether you think NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor, you have to admit: The guy knows how to keep his information secure.
The fact that Snowden isn’t sitting in Guantanamo right now with ankle cuffs and a bag over his head demonstrates his ability to avoid detection.
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Dutch intelligence services can receive bulk data that might have been obtained by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) through mass data interception programs, even though collecting data that way is illegal for the Dutch services, the Hague District Court ruled Wednesday.
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The Dutch intelligence services AIVD/MIVD may exchange information with the US NSA…
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John Napier Tye, a former State Department official, says Americans’ data remains vulnerable until executive order that provides NSA with a path to collect data is reformed
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An independent privacy watchdog agency announced Wednesday that it will turn its focus to the largest and most complex of U.S. electronic surveillance regimes: signals intelligence collection under Executive Order 12333.
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A deal between the Senate and the Obama administration on NSA reform legislation may be in sight. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board will get an earful from privacy advocates today. The House passed a bill to reauthorize the satellite TV law STELA, but the Senate has more ambitious plans for the must-pass legislation. Yahoo pays a visit to the FCC to talk about net neutrality.
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Angela Merkel’s old mobile phone is an icon of our time. A Nokia 6210 Slide – it was accessed and monitored by the US spy agency the National Security Agency.
The US monopoly over much of the world’s information and communication technologies gave the NSA – piggybacking on a complicit private sector – one-click instant access to her policy musings and personal whims.
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But Dark Mail takes the extra step of cloaking your email’s metadata, which includes the subject line and the ‘To’ and ‘From’ fields. That way, spies can’t easily identify who’s sending emails.
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Since the Snowden revelations, it has become clear that email as a basic internet protocol is essentially insecure, and other options — texting, messaging apps, and the like — are not much better.
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Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note.
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I arrived in Berlin last week, hoping to see something rare: A country that is prosperous, well-governed and even happy, if only because it had just been crowned champion of the football World Cup.
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The decision comes in response to Snowden’s NSA revelations, and follows two recent cases of German officials accused of spying for the U.S.
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Germany will monitor US and UK agents as part of its long discussed counter-espionage ’360 degree view’ plan, shifting its focus from China, Russia, and Iran, according to local media.
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Germany’s intelligence services have been instructed to add the US embassy in Berlin to its list of surveillance targets in retaliation for US spying on the German government and communication.
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Tensions between the U.S. and Germany over American intelligence gathering could have a decisive impact on whether the European Union adopts harsher sanctions on Russia.
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Willie contends, “Here’s the big, big consequence. The U.S. is basically telling Europe you have two choices here. Join us with the war against Russia.
Join us with the sanctions against Russia. Join us in constant war and conflicts, isolation and destruction to your economy and denial of your energy supply and removal of contracts. Join us with this war and sanctions because we’d really like you to keep the dollar regime going.
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We’re all too familiar with the bulk collection of cellphone metadata—information on whom you contact and when—that Edward Snowden revealed. However, Executive Order 12333 from 1981 (thanks, President Reagan) allows the NSA to collect the actual content from phone calls and Internet communications if they are amassed from outside U.S. borders. John Napier Tye, former section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, recently wrote about this issue in The Washington Post.
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Bitcoin is safe, except when it is not. It can become not safe when the devices that hold them are compromised. Just as bitcoins stored on an exchange are only as secure as that exchange, bitcoins stored on your computer or cell phone are only as secure as those devices.
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Advertisers really want to track you. Your browsing history is one of the best clues as to what ads you are most likely to see. Perhaps more nefariously, advanced tracking methods can help other entities (like the NSA) know what privacy-oriented web surfers are doing on the web.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has authorized a new law that forces Internet companies conducting business in the country’s borders to store Russian citizens’ data there, further tightening the government’s grip on Russians’ online activity.
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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi opposed ending bulk collection of telephone records by the NSA in 2013, and in 2014 tells President Obama that no Congressional approval is needed in order to take action in Iraq.
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The NSA sits at the nexus of violations of both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments with a legal dodge called Parallel Construction.
Parallel Construction is a technique used by law enforcement to hide the fact that evidence in a criminal case originated with the NSA. In its simplest form, the NSA collects information showing say a Mr. Anderson committed a crime. This happens most commonly in drug cases. The conclusive information is passed to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who then works backwards from the conclusion to create an independent, “legal” body of evidence to use against Mr. Anderson.
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Given the importance of the privacy rights established in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, which include an explicit right to the protection of personal data, the EU institutions’ actions were appropriate. The treaties that underpin the EU’s authority further emphasise that the Union’s international relations must be “guided by” basic democratic principles and respect for human-rights laws.
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No-nonsense German police on July 10 searched the home and office of a military employee who is accused of passing sensitive secrets to the U.S. government. Just before this event, there was an announcement that a member of German BND intelligence has been arrested, accused of selling an estimated two hundred documents to the CIA. They reportedly contained details of investigations by a German parliamentary panel into the vast electronic surveillance of European populations by the NSA, which included hacking Chancellor Merkel’s cell phone.
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The new system, called OpenPDS, protects your privacy while still letting apps access information they need to work.
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Move over Edward Snowden, there’s a new surveillance whistleblower on the scene. His name is John Napier Tye and he’s warning Americans about illegal spying. John Tye claims he filed a complaint with the State Department before leaving. In other words, he’s no leaker like Edward Snowden.
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Bill Binney worked at the National Security Agency nearly three decades as one of its leading crypto-mathematicians. He then became one of its leading whistleblowers.
Now 70 and on crutches, both legs lost to diabetes, Binney recalls the July morning seven years ago when a dozen gun-wielding FBI agents burst through the front door of his home, at the end of a cul-de-sac a 10-minute drive from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.
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So Google reminds us that it has invested heavily in security, including encrypting data as it moves between datacentres, and is now looking towards securing stuff by other people on the Internet.
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People don’t tend to vote on foreign policy. But reflecting on the crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and Iraq that followed him as he headed to the West Coast for a fundraising swing, President Barack Obama acknowledged that they’re adding to an anxiety that’s feeding cynicism that could hurt his party in the midterms.
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Given recent German indignation about the National Security Agency, it has been easy to overlook the fact that for decades the German government has cooperated extensively with the NSA on surveillance activities. But after a high-level meeting in Berlin this week, this long-standing but veiled cooperation may have a firmer legal and political base.
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You’ve probably heard about Tor. Technically speaking, it is a global mesh of nodes, also known as relays, which encrypt and bounce traffic between client computers and servers on the Internet. That encryption and bouncing of traffic is done in such a way, that it is practically impossible to know who visited a web site or used a network service in general. To put it simply, anytime I choose to surf the web using Tor it’s impossible for the administrators of the sites I visit to know my real IP address. Even if they get subpoenaed, they are just unable to provide the real addresses of the clients who reached them through Tor.
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Civil Rights
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Europe’s top human rights court ruled Poland violated the rights of two terror suspects by allowing the CIA to secretly imprison them on Polish soil from 2002-2003 and facilitating the conditions under which they were subject to torture.
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Europe’s top human-rights court ruled Thursday that Poland allowed the CIA to detain two terrorism suspects at a secret prison on its territory where they were exposed to “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.”
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The court ordered Poland to pay $175,000 to Zubaydah and $135,000 to Nashiri.
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Europe’s top human rights court condemned Poland on Thursday for hosting secret CIA prisons, saying Warsaw knowingly abetted unlawful imprisonment and torture of two Guantanamo-bound detainees.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of a Palestinian and a Saudi national locked up in a US “black site” for several months in Poland in 2002-2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where they are still being held.
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In the first rulings of their kind, the European Court of Human Rights found Poland liable for enabling the CIA torture of two suspected terrorists in a forest north of Warsaw, and letting them be sent to Guantanamo Bay to potentially face a “flagrantly unfair trial” by military commission.
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Europe’s top human rights court has ruled that Poland violated the European Convention on Human Rights by allowing the CIA to imprison and torture two alleged terrorists on Polish soil.
The court in Strasbourg, France, said that Poland failed to stop the “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment” of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, who were taken to Poland in 2002.
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A US man was left gasping for air for almost two hours after his lethal injection execution went wrong, leading to calls for the return of the firing squad.
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A heartbroken woman is suing the city of St. Clair Shores and police after officers shot her dog dead in November. The encounter was filmed by the cops’ dashboard camera.
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Governments are a key offender, he stresses, advising use of HTTPS and OpenPGP to block software-based security threats
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Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding, while eschewing extrajudicial killings, says the United States lacks the moral authority to cite human-rights abuses as reasons to withdraw support from the Jamaican security forces. Golding complained that the US has a long history of carrying out heinous actions against other countries, and the drone strikes which are aerial vehicles remotely controlled by CIA operatives are tantamount to extrajudicial killings.
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The truth about renditions and detentions at the island of Diego Garcia has to be revealed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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There are many ways to tackle the issue of online piracy and Louisiana State University has decided on its approach. At the bottom end, offenders will experience a temporary Internet disconnection, with repeat offenders receiving fines and potentially career-damaging notes on their education records.
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A leading YouTube entrepreneur is facing legal action for alleged copyright infringement in her videos.
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The British government has now decriminialised the piracy of films, music and games – meaning that users caught downloading and sharing pirated material will no longer be fined or prosecuted.
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In a blatant act of democracy that would make Mussolini spin in his grave, the UK government reluctantly conceded that if everybody does it, it probably shouldn’t be a crime.
Instead, as a nod to the intellectual monopoly gangsters, those dastardly “pirates” (i.e. everyone) will receive four spam letters a year from the Content® manufacturing industry, in a futile attempt to convince the rigidly bored audience to pay for Hollywood’s increasingly derivative and uninspiring garbage.
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Send this to a friend
07.24.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Earlier this month, Home Depot began selling MakerBot’s Linux-based 3D printers in a handful of stores across the U.S. after a 3-month trial run online. The big box pilot is not only testing consumer appetite for 3D printing hardware, but also the viability of open source design among a general population of consumers.
Together with the Replicator printers’ relatively small size and price tag, MakerBot’s design software and online Thingiverse community lower the barrier to creation and sharing for thousands of professionals and hobbyists alike. As a result, the MakerBot open source design community has quickly grown – though not without some difficulties.
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Desktop
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If Google have not had their hands full with the official announcement of the soon-to-be released Android L, as well as Android TV, Auto and Wear it now seems Chrome OS is also on the agenda to receive a full overhaul.
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Schools purchased more than 1 million Chromebooks — budget laptops that run Chrome OS — in the second quarter of 2014, Google announced on Monday.
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Schools bought more than 1 million Chromebooks in the second quarter of 2014. Today’s guest blogger, David Andrade, the CIO for the Bridgeport Public Schools district, which serves 23,000 students in Connecticut, shares why they selected Chromebooks. Learn more about going Google and follow our Google for Education Google+ page to see a selection of tips from David.
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Chromebook sales have risen sharply over the past several months, according to a recent report from research firm NPD. Chromebook sales in the commercial channel increased 250 percent compared with the prior year and accounted for 35 percent of all U.S. channel notebook sales during the January-May period. Chromebooks, in other words, were extremely popular during the period and continue to be so. Exactly why and how Chromebooks have been achieving such sales success, however, are not so readily known. When the devices, which run Google’s Chrome OS Web-based operating system, were first announced, many market observers believed that they had little chance of winning a significant share of the PC market. And that seemed to hold true in the first couple of years after Chromebooks hit the market in mid-2011. But the latest data shows that Chromebook sales are adding to the competitive headwinds that Windows notebooks are experiencing these days. This eWEEK slide show looks at the impact that rising Chromebook sales is having on the U.S. PC market.
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Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Chrome operating system has grown to become a legitimate third platform in the personal computer market behind Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows and Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Mac OS, new data show.
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Server
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If all goes according to plan the QEMU 2.1 release will happen next week but before that can happen some last-minute testing is encouraged with the new release of QEMU 2.1-rc3.
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The council of the German city of Munich continues to support the city’s open source IT strategy, and opposes the newly elected mayor and a deputy mayor, reports Heise, a German IT news site. CSU party members of the deputy mayor shrug off his negative comments as “an irrelevant individual opinion”.
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The open source engine Docker announced Wednesday that it has acquired London-based Orchard Laboratories, makers of the Orchard and Fig applications. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
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Kernel Space
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Bjorn Helgaas, the PCI subsystem maintainer for the Linux kernel, sent in a very early Linux 3.17 kernel merge window pull request due to being on holiday the next few weeks.
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The large set of 22 patches for supporting the EXT4 file-system on non-volatile DIMM memory is now up to its eighth revision.
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Once in a while someone points out a POSIX violation in Linux. Often the answer is to fix the violation, but sometimes Linus Torvalds decides that the POSIX behavior is broken, in which case they keep the Linux behavior, but they might build an additional POSIX compatibility layer, even if that layer is slower and less efficient.
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For now, the kernel patches are not that big to make the Linux godfather too unhappy, but Linus Torvalds has announced that he will keep an eye on the development process and he will call the developers names, if things go on the wrong way.
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Improvements to the CPUfreq ondemand governor could lead to faster performance in low to medium workloads with the Linux 3.17 kernel while also consuming less power overall.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel has introduced BPTC texture compression support to Mesa and specifically their Intel HD Graphics driver along with the Mesa software rasterizer.
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Libinput, the input library designed for use by Wayland compositors and other environments for having common input device handling on Linux, is out with a significant update.
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As the first part of an upcoming series of tests benchmarking the latest open-source and closed-source Linux graphics drivers for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware, here’s some benchmark results for several recent Radeon GPUs when tested on the current Git version of the Linux 3.16 kernel and a recent Mesa 10.3-devel snapshot.
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Just hours after Intel added BPTC texture compression support to Mesa and their DRI driver, frequent Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin added BPTC support to Gallium3D and wired it up for the “NVC0″ Fermi/Kepler Gallium3D open-source NVIDIA driver.
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As brought up in the discussion following yesterday’s article about Intel adding BPTC support to their Mesa driver, several Phoronix readers are filled with happiness over Mesa nearly support not just for the OpenGL 4.0 specification but also OpenGL 4.1 and 4.2 aren’t far out of reach.
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One month ago Linux developer Eric Anholt left Intel to work at Broadcom. Eric, a long-time contributor to the open-source Linux graphics stack, is now tasked at Broadcom with developing a DRM driver and Mesa/Gallium3D driver for Broadcom’s “VC4″ graphics hardware, which is found within the Raspberry Pi.
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Chris Wilson announced the release this morning of the xf86-video-intel 2.99.913 driver as the latest development version in the nearly year-long process of releasing xf86-video-intel 3.0.
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Benchmarks
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For those wondering about the modern performance cost of using KVM on Ubuntu Linux for virtualizing a guest OS, here are some simple benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 14.10 in its current development stage with the Linux 3.16 versus running the same software stack while virtualized with KVM and using virt-manager.
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Applications
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QEMU, a generic open source emulator and virtualizer that can run OSes and programs made for a different machine, is now at version 2.1.0 RC3 and is getting much closer to a final release.
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GitLab, a fast, secure, and stable solution based on Ruby on Rails & Gitolite and distributed under the MIT License, is now at version 7.1 and is ready for download.
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Cantata 1.4.0 can be compiled with KDE support or as a pure Qt4 application. It’s been a few months since the previous release and quite a few changes have been made in the meantime.
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The open source Xen Project believes it has made it easier than ever to “compile your own cloud” with the release of MirageOS v2.0, which simplifies and optimizes deployment of cloud-based apps running on the Xen virtualization hypervisor.
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The open source Xen Project believes it has made it easier than ever to “compile your own cloud” with the release of MirageOS v2.0, which simplifies and optimizes deployment of cloud-based apps running on the Xen virtualization hypervisor.
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While NetworkManager has already supported the IPv6 protocol for some months now, several IPv6-related improvements were pushed to its code-base on Wednesday.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve has been poaching Linux developers for years and there’s no sign of them slowing down, but in fact are still hiring.
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While the Unigine Engine sadly hasn’t fully rode the Linux gaming wave with there still being very few games powered by this visually stunning engine that has supported Linux for many years, they are at least finding commercial success in other areas — namely around simulation and industrial licenses. One of the company’s recent endeavors is with a driving simulator.
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An upcoming MMO in the Warhammer series is set to gain a Linux version thanks to comments made from the lead developer.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today in Linux news, Bruce Byfield says the best Linux desktop continues to be KDE’s Plasma. Steven Ovadia at My Linux Rig snagged a short interview with Jack Wallen. eWeek has nine reasons Linux rules on supercomputers. And venture capitalist Sonatype says most companies don’t audit Open Source software components they’re using for vulnerabilities and security flaws.
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One of the most disliked features of the early KDE SC 4 releases was the developers’ attempt to establish the semantic desktop. The tools to further this goal are Nepomuk and Akonadi. While Nepomuk tries to interconnect meta data from different desktop applications, Akonadi is a service that stores and retrieves data from PIM applications like mail, calendar and contacts. Together, they pave the road to allow users to find data, structured and connected by tags, ratings and comments, covering different file formats. On top of that, Strigi performs the indexing that enables users to find data with simple search terms in KDE’s file manager Dolphin.
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There are two versions of Netrunner available. This article looks at the Standard Release which is based on Kubuntu 14.04. The other version is a rolling release based on Manjaro.
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The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is among the most popular and long-lived open-source desktop environments for Linux and Unix users. Dating back to 1996, KDE is one of the earliest Linux desktop environments, predating the GNOME desktop environment, which got started in 1999. KDE has gone through multiple evolutions, the most recent being KDE Plasma 5, which was officially released on July 15. With the Plasma 5 desktop, KDE is providing users with both under-the-hood enhancements and user-facing improvements. Plasma 5 is powered by the open-source Qt 5 cross-platform user interface framework. Hardware acceleration for graphics is now supported with the OpenGL graphics API. With Qt 5 and OpenGL, Plasma 5 is able to provide users with not only improved graphics performance, but also a more fluid user experience. Plus, the new Kickoff application launcher enables users to rapidly find and access applications and content on a system. KDE as a desktop environment is available on multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, KaOS and openSUSE. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of KDE Plasma 5.
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On February, I wrote a blog post entitled “Leveraging the Power of Choice“, in which I described an idea I had discussed with Àlex Fiestas about making it easy for users to choose between different Plasmoids for the same task (e.g. different application launchers, task managers, clocks, …). At the time of my writing the blog post, Marco Martin already had ideas about how to implement the feature, though he said that he wouldn’t have time to implement it before the Plasma 5.0 release. Shortly after Plasma 5.0 was released, Marco started implementation as promised. We decided it would make sense to start a thread in the VDG forum to collect ideas for the UI’s design. Together with several other forum users (most notably rumangerst and andreas_k) we fleshed out the design, which currently looks like this:
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New releases of the GNOME Shell and Mutter are available today in preparation for the GNOME 3.13.4 development milestone this week.
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Black Lab Linux 5.1 Alpha 2, a distribution that aims to rival Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, is now ready for testing.
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Quelitu, a multilingual operating system based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Lubuntu LTS, which aims to power antique computers and to replace all the recent Windows releases, is now at version 14.04.
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This move includes updates or rebuilds of the packages that are related to xorg, the linux kernel and graphics drivers, as well as various other packages that were updated in the meantime and are made available now. In total, more than 400 packages are moving to stable.
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has advanced to version 4.2 Beta 2 and is available for download and testing.
OpenELEC devs usually wait until a new version of XBMC Gotham is officially released, but this time they have jumped the gun a little and they’ve released an update for their distro. Interestingly enough, it’s based on XBMC 13.2 Gotham Beta 2, but regular users will have to wait for the official announcement on that one.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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In case you didn’t hear already, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Linux 7 as the latest version of its Linux OS cloned from the open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 code-base.
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Oracle has supported Linux almost from day one. But it wasn’t until 2006, when Larry Ellison got into a disagreement with Red Hat, that Oracle decided it had to have its “own” Linux distribution — a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, Oracle Linux. It’s eight years later, and Oracle is still copying RHEL with its release of Oracle Linux 7.
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For each new Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, a new version of Oracle Linux is never far behind, and RHEL 7 is no exception.
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Today in Linux news, Oracle Linux 7 was released today. Softpedia.com reports that Tails now features a “Windows 8 camouflage mode.” MakeUseOf.com has five reasons to love Deepin and LinuxUser & Developer has a review of the Banana Pi. This and more in tonight’s Linux news review.
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The move seems odd at first glance since the Mountain View startup fashions itself as the “number one” pure-play provider of software and services for OpenStack, a community-led project aimed at establishing a common standard for cloud environments. That goal runs counter to Oracle’s vertically integrated platform approach, which consists primarily of homegrown components. To make matters more confusing, Oracle recently introduced its own distribution of the free platform that competes directly with that offered by Mirantis.
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To provide customers and partners with an opportunity to review their cloud frameworks and experience how they can deliver cloud innovation within their organizations
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Fedora
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Users of Fedora 21/Rawhide, Arch Linux, or other bleeding edge distributions where DRI3 is in play with the Intel Linux graphics driver, be forewarned about possible regressions.
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The elections for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) Summer 2014 Special Election have concluded, and the results are shown below.
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Beginning in 2011, Red Hat began providing assistance to the fledgling Fedora ARM distribution. I was Red Hat’s project manager for this initiative. Back then it was a humble secondary architecture under the stewardship of Seneca College. Seneca was working on an OS distribution for the Raspberry Pi, a promising educational tool. Red Hat partnered with Seneca, provided resources to advance development and helped build a community, the open source way. Though Linux had been used on ARM for many years, kernel ports tended to exist in different source trees. Likewise, many userspace packages had been written without multi-core, thread-safe ARM code, so there was a lot of work to be done.
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Due to many of the Fedora 21 changes/features not being ready in time, the release schedule has been pushed back by three weeks.
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Debian Family
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I used to be quite the Linux enthusiast, trying new distributions almost daily, keeping up to date with news and software versions, just generally participating in the whole scene, though as a technical know-nothing really. I kinda got tired of it after a while and decided to settle on one distribution that would be low on bandwidth needs, extremely stable, and able to do all the things, admittedly a rather limited array of things, that I need it to do. I had been playing with Debian GNU/Linux’s Wheezy iteration (yes, they use “Toy Story” character names) since late 2011, when it was still the “testing” version, and noticed after a year or so that it was in a frozen state, largely set for final release, which ultimately happened, in typical molasses-slow Debian fashion, in early May of 2013. So I guess I’ve been using it as my one and only OS for the better part of two years, rarely if ever booting into any of the dozen or so other distributions I still have installed or into Windows 7. I have it fine tuned to my liking and it does every single thing I need it to do. It’s been reliable and stable, exactly as expected.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, for long pursued a single dream — that of acheiving a unified family of experiences on smartphones, tablets, PCs, and TVs through one operating system and one interface, Unity, which will adopt to the connected device. As Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu’s founder said at last year’s OSCon, “Convergence is the core story. Each device is great, but they should be part of one family. On any device you’ll know what you’re doing. One device should be able to give you all the experiences you can get from any one of them.”
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Linaro is growing fast so I am currently focused on management and development processes. Together with the technical leads and the project managers, my goal is to keep high levels of efficiency within the Group while growing, keeping the Free Software culture that has made Linaro so successful.
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Does the first of the true Raspberry Pi clones have what it takes to come out from the shadow of its highly-successful inspiration?
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Phones
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Sailfish OS is a new venture by ex-nokia employees which aims to bring a new independent partner friendly mobile operating system to wireless devices. However, as the mobile ecosystem today is quite fragmented, a new OS brings in a lot of work for developers to port the new OS in their existing devices. The Sailfish OS team knew this problem and have come out with a Hardware Adaptation Dev kit which will help developers to port and run Sailfish OS on any device capable of running Cyanogen Mod 10.1.x.
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Android
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I have no doubt that the next generation of premium smartphones and tablets will be based on 64-bit processors. To provide the power and features needed for new features such as UltraHD video, LTE-Advanced, and 3D products (such as Google’s Tango), mobile devices will need a big boost in processing power.
New 64-bit SOCs such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor are expected to begin shipping this year, and the first products are expected to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2005, just in time for the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.
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Taking photos with an Android phone can be a very satisfying endeavor. Or it can be a study in frustration and ruined photo opportunities. Why? Because while all Android devices are powered by Google’s GOOGL +0.33% OS, phone makers are free to develop their own camera apps, adopting or omitting photo features as they see fit. Simply put, some companies do this better than others. One of the best ways to improve your photography experience then, is to use a third party camera app instead of the one that came installed on your phone.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There are also a number of other Linux-based tablets out there which do not rely on Android. Most any tablet computer which is capable of running an x86 version of a Windows operating system, for example, can be upgraded to a Linux distribution of your choice, with a number of graphic interface options available. Some distributions are now targeting other architectures as well.
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The Android 4.4.3-based Nvidia Shield Tablet won early praise with its Tegra K1 SoC, Kepler-based graphics, new stylus, and WiFi Direct gaming controller.
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In our most recent The VAR Guy poll, we asked you whether you thought open source would take on a larger role in cloud computing. Based on reader responses, it looks as though open source has a bright future in the cloud computing sphere.
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Open source hardware has truly changed my life. It allowed me to launch my own business. “How so,” you might ask? Well, let’s take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?
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Do you love free and open source software? Would you like to help make it better, but don’t have the technical skills to know where you can jump in and help out? Here is a fantastic opportunity!
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Matt Asay is dead wrong to call the current era of the software industry “post open source,” as he did in InfoWorld last week. We are currently in the open source age, enjoying all the practical flexibility that open sources licenses bring. What may be confusing him is that people are no longer obsessed with arguing about software freedom — they take it as given.
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Company officials want to bring the benefits of networking innovation from Google and Facebook to the broader enterprise space.
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Certainly, the Internet of Thing goes beyond connected television, surveillance cameras, smart gadgets and wearable technology. And as the adoption of the Internet of Things increases and becomes widespread in several different markets, issues on its lack of interoperability and integration cost have been raised along with its consistent escalating growth. Nonetheless, innovators from all over the world try to create different solutions such as Hypercat, in an attempt to bridge these gaps. At the IoT 2014 Conference held in Singapore, Juha Lindfors, Co-founder of OpenRemote USA, spoke about a case study on Open Source Approaches to IoT Solutions. During the presentation¹, Linfords pointed out three points that prove the value of this openness in ensuring the success for the IoT – Interoperability, Integration and Ecosystem.
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Like many of the great games programmers from the 1980s, when open source software entrepreneur Freddy Mahhumane describes his background formal education doesn’t really play much of a part in it.
“I wasn’t good at much at school,” he says, “Except for computers and programming.”
Born in Mpumalanga, Mahhumane moved to Gauteng at the age of six and lived variously in Kempton Park and Thembisa while he was growing up. Sitting in front of a group of business hopefuls at the inaugural Startup Grind Johannesburg, he sounds almost embarrassed by the trappings of success.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is proving the Web is a powerful gaming platform by creating new technologies and developer tools that enable game creators to port their popular titles to the Web. One of the trailblazers using these technologies is Trendy Entertainment, which is leveraging Emscripten and asm.js to bring its highly popular Dungeon Defenders title to the Web. Trendy announced today it will release a version of Dungeon Defenders Eternity featuring the same visuals and gameplay as the native desktop version, but available on the Web at near native speeds. Later today, the full game will be available to buy on Steam.
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Canonical has published details about a number of Firefox vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, and release a new version of the Internet browser in the repositories.
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As you may know, both Firefox 31.0 and Thunderbird 31.0 have been added to the default repositories of Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and derivative systems.
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The details were unclear back in late June, but it looked like Mozilla may have been playing some role in delivering a competitor to Google’s popular Chromecast dongle, with Mozilla’s based on the Firefox OS platform. The rumors abated shortly after they arose, but some people missed the fact that Mozilla confirmed the news in a recent blog post, noting the following: “Mozilla is working with Panasonic to develop next generation SmartTVs running Firefox OS, and Abitcool will launch an HDMI streaming device later this year that allows the user to fling content from compatible mobile or Web apps to an HDTV.”
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Among others, it comes with an enhanced search bar, allowing the users to carry targeted searches in the search engines directly from the new Favorites tab, the users now get access to the most visited websites by clicking on the thumbnails, some features for developers have been implemented and the memory management of the browser has been improved.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Enterprise adoption of OpenStack is taking off, and value-added security solutions for the open source cloud computing operating system are close behind. This week, Catbird announced version 6.0 of its cloud security platform, which it describes as the channel’s first “security policy automation for private and hybrid cloud environments.”
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The best cloud is the one that you own. Once ownCloud was founded I never used public cloud offered and hosted by a company to keep my files. I do use Dropbox and Google Drive, but the primary purpose is to share files with a set of people. With each release ownCloud is becoming a very serious contender to these commercial offerings when it comes to file storage, syncing and sharing. OwnCloud Documents are already an impressive alternative to Google Docs and offer full ODF support which is missing from Google Docs.
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The seventh version of ownCloud has been released this morning with some interesting new features for this personal, open-source cloud software.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city, has saved 1 million euro by migrating all its desktops to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools. “Free software and open source in general is now an established part of the city’s comprehensive digital policy, and the open model promotes economic development and employment in the region”, according to a study published by the Open Source Observatory and Repository today.
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CMS
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Businesses working in web development are invited to Sunderland Software Centre to learn more about how they could benefit from using Drupal
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Education
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Working on open source puts CS students at the heart of the software industry. Open source enables everyone involved to work in development and create new infrastructure and designs without being forced to start from scratch. And unlike in school, where a project might just be theoretical, or relevant only in context of the class, an open-source contribution makes immediate impact on the ecosystem.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Well, this is surprising. SAP had been pushing forward with bringing its enterprise software suite to the cloud for some time. But no one expected to see SAP really putting its muscle behind the open source cloud and that’s exactly what they’re doing.
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Colosa has rolled out a new version of its open source business-process management (BPM) and workflow platform, ProcessMaker, which is available in the form of both a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and a software download that users can install directly on their bare-metal or virtual servers.
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Funding
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Though organizations that produce nonprofit software have long been granted tax-exempt status, the Internal Revenue Service recently denied it to two applicants. One had waited more than four years for a determination—and found the reasons for denial alarming.
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The report comes a few months after OpenStack Foundation was denied a nonprofit 501(c)(6) designation. (A 501(c)(3) designation is generally set aside for groups with charitable, literary, or educational goals; a 501(c)(6) generally applies to business groups.)
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PredictionIO, the open source machine learning platform, has received a big boost with the announcement of $2.5 million in seed funding, which it plans to use to make its automated data interpretation and prediction platform widely available to open source developers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser, a lot of people know this browser but it seems few used. It is a free software like Mozilla Firefox but Icecat main advantage is the ethical one because does not distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons.
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Public Services/Government
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Europe should encourage the market for free source software solutions, using public procurement and by making open standards mandatory, recommends a French parliamentary committee. Using free software is strategic as it increases IT security, reduces economic dependencies and fights rent-seeking by closed source software vendors. To avoid straining innovation, the committee also advises against European patents on software.
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The ECI Register lists all Open Initiatives. Each Initiative promotion site provides a link “vote” that point to an OCS in production. The ECI Register provides also detailed information about how to launch an Initiative and the requirements to prepare your Online Collection System.
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Openness/Sharing
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In a shocking move last month, Tesla “open sourced” its patents, while more recently, pharmaceutical companies have adopted aggressive patent lawsuits reminiscent of the tech industry.
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Open Data
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In a deal centered on combining NoSQL data storage with cognitive, natural-language Big Data discovery and analytics, FoundationDB and DataRPM have announced a partnership that will bring their platforms together.
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The EU has just issued a tender document for what is likely to be the world’s biggest Open Data project.
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Open Access/Content
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Aimed at providing teachers with educational materials by making them open and competitive, OpenCurriculum, which launched in Pittsburgh, curates and organizes material from sites such as teacher blogs and lesson material publishers. Teachers can create lesson plans and more through OpenCurriculum.org.
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Today I was proud to receive the Open Access Advocate Award from BioMed Central – recognising those who have promoted open science through their work.
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Open Hardware
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Open Garden is an Arduino-based DIY kit that has everything you need to create a connected, automated garden. It’s a product of Cooking Hacks, the online IoT component store and open source hobbyist community run by Libelium (See our interview with Alicia Asín Pérez the CEO and co-founder here).
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Open-source means that a program, firmware, or hardware is free to the public, with the encouragement to improve the product, so long as they don’t sell the improved/updated version and continue the openness. While this seems counter-intuitive to making money, many companies have found success in the model – I would argue that manufacturers could see a new market open up from business models like this.
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Small, child-like Poppy robot takes two days to assemble and program from open-source, off-the-shelf and additive manufactured components.
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Programming
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Cisco is putting substantial resources behind its DevNet developer effort, which is supported at the highest levels of the company.
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A C-like language with all the OO trimmings, garbage collection, strong data types, and excellent string processing makes a powerful tool for Web programming.
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Security
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Developers of Tor software believe they’ve identified a weakness that was scheduled to be revealed at the Black Hat security conference next month that could be used to de-anonymize Tor users.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is about to come out with a smartphone app that will help people carry out boycotts against Israel, according to the International Business Times. The beta version of this app is slated to be ready in the near future.
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The whole point of such efforts is to look like they are unofficial, just everyday people chatting online…
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Some lives matter more than others, apparently.
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When the Navy shot down Iran Air 655 over the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing all 290 people on board (Extra!, 7/88), the Times editorial (7/5/88) insisted that “while horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident. On present evidence, it’s hard to see what the Navy could have done to avoid it.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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New Study Shows Americans Have “The Highest Amount Of Doubt About The Conventional Wisdom Of Climate”
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Finance
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The Detroit Water Project, a platform to help donors pay the delinquent water bills of people in Detroit, started with a Twitter conversation.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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For months, supporters of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have insisted the John Doe criminal probe into his 2012 campaign is “baseless,” because the alleged coordination under investigation did not involve ads that expressly told viewers to elect Walker or vote against his opponent. As long as an ad doesn’t include such express advocacy, Walker and his allies have claimed, it is beyond the reach of Wisconsin campaign finance law.
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Censorship
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A few weeks ago, an anonymous internet user was able to acquire and subsequently extract a website blacklist used by Germany’s Federal Department of Media Harmful to Young Children (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien [BPjM]). This un-hashed list was posted to the user’s Neocities blog, along with some analysis of the blacklist’s contents and a rundown on the minimal protective efforts used for the list.
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The vast majority of new broadband customers in the UK are opting out of “child friendly” filters when prompted to install them by service providers.
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Privacy
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You’ve installed apt-transport-tor to help prevent targeted attacks on your system. Great! Now you want to build Debian packages using cowbuilder, and you notice these are still using plain HTTP.
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The Tails operating system is one of the most trusted platforms in cryptography, favored by Edward Snowden and booted up more than 11,000 times per day in May. But according to the security firm Exodus Intelligence, the program may not be as secure as many thought. The company says they’ve discovered an undisclosed vulnerability that will let attackers deanonymize Tails computers and even execute code remotely, potentially exposing users to malware attacks. Exodus is currently working with Tails to patch the bug, and expects to hand over a full report on the exploit next week.
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Hot startups don’t often stake their reputation for innovation on how well their technology works with Microsoft Office, but that’s exactly what Dropbox is doing today. The file-syncing service, one of the most valuable venture-backed private companies on the planet, is rolling out several Office-related features for businesses, including full-text search of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, among other file types, and the ability for multiple users to simultaneously edit Office documents via Dropbox.
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Civil Rights
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In particular, Human Rights Watch examines the extent and impact of law enforcement’s use of terrorism informants, who can both steer people into attempted acts of violence and chill religious or civic behaviour in the communities they penetrate.
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The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.
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Three months ago, the conversation about Nigeria’s kidnapped girls was electric online. Now, much of the digital chatter around the girls has faded. On April 15, more than 200 girls were taken from their school in Chibok by the extremist group Boko Haram. Nearly 60 girls have managed to escape their captors since then, but the majority of them are still being held.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When a call to cancel Comcast service descended into “a stunning display of hysteria and desperation,” pretty much everyone who listened to a recording of the phone call agreed: it was painful to listen to.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Last year Adobe announced a shift away from boxed products in favor of a cloud-based subscription model. Now the U.S.-based company says that not only does it have more than 2.3 million cloud subscribers, but it has also seen a drop in piracy. Exactly how much is “hard to measure” but Adobe products still lead the way with pirates.
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In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online.
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Lawsuit-happy porn studio beats a “poor sap” whose pleas of ignorance fail.
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Megaupload’s legal team has asked the federal court of Virginia to place the cases filed by the music and movie companies on hold till April next year. The request comes after the extradition hearings of Kim Dotcom and his colleagues were postponed in New Zealand.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Continued criticism of the Gates Foundation’s lobbying and masquerading, with more journalists brave enough to highlight the corruption
THE Gates Foundation is pretty clever scam which is not used for much other than tax evasion and lobbying, as well as tax-exempted investment in companies which it lobbies for, under the guise of ‘charity’. Gates is not unique in that regard; other plutocrats, including the Koch Brothers, use similar loopholes that are accommodated by a government they habitually bribe (the Republic is plutocrats-led). There is a new article titled “The Koch Brothers vs. Bill Gates” and it says: “The Gates Foundation is the world’s largest, at $37 billion in assets, according to its tax filings. That number alone makes it far, far larger than any single or cumulative Koch gift. Some may argue Gates spends money on philanthropy, not politics; but Gates has actually perfected the practice of using nonprofits to influence politics. Leftists claim to hate this tactic—witness the manufactured rage and proposed Internal Revenue Service regulations aiming to curb politics-minded conservative nonprofits—but it seems they actually just hate when it’s used against them.”
What has been quite evident is that Gates bribed lots of nonprofits in order for them to help him lobby for a profitable (to him) agenda, not only in education but in many other areas. Dealing with education for the time being, Salon has published the article “Bill Gates needs to drop his Common Core obsession”. It says: “The billionaire’s latest little fixation is catching hell on all sides. Here’s why he’s better off simply moving on”
Well, it’s all about profit, using (exploiting) “the children”. We have written about this for years and now it has become acceptable to speak about it in corporate media. Valerie Strauss from the Washington Post (where Gates’ close friend and wife used to be on the broad of directors) explains “How Microsoft will make money from Common Core (despite what Bill Gates said)” and other sites cover that also. To quote: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has used up over $200 million in an effort to push the Common Core Standards Initiative in the last couple years.
“On the Microsoft Web site, a webpage dated April 22, 2014 entitled “Tech Essentials for Testing Success” describes in considerable detail how schools using computer-based, Common Core-aligned tests will now need to spend a bunch of money — on Microsoft products.”
Here is an article which names American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one among very many groups that Bill Gates bribed in exchange for lobbying. To quote: “Though the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) received millions of dollars in funding from the private Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development of the Common Core standards, the union will begin its annual convention in Los Angeles Friday with the announcement that it will award grants to assess the standards and write others to replace them.”
This is what the Gates Foundation is for. It’s for lobbying, with profit at the bottom line.
The plutocrats’ rag, Forbes, almost properly explains that ‘charity’ by plutocrats is tax evasion with PR (aside from ‘charity’ for PAC). Read this between the lines:
The Berkshire Hathaway CEO’s latest gift of more than 21.7 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway class B stock — valued at $128.98 per share at Monday’s close — decreases his personal fortune from $65.9 billion down to $63.1 billion. He slips one spot on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people, moving into 4th behind clothing and real estate magnate Amancio Ortega.
So it’s the virtual giveaway, it is a game of stocks/shares. To people like these, it it important to be perceived as generous whilst actually hoarding ad infinitum. With publications like Forbes (glorifying the super-rich) they actually succeed at fooling a lot of people. Let’s hope this will change in the coming year. Their perception management Jihad sure faces obstacles in the age of the Internet. █
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Posted in Patents at 2:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Going back to physical, backing away from “abstract”
Summary: Even patent lawyers finally acknowledge that the incentive to file software patent applications has been reduced, as the scope of patents on software has been noticeably narrowed and they are harder to acquire, let alone enforce in a courtroom
DESPITE the CAFC‘s push for expanded scope of software patents, the SCOTUS ruled in favour of new limits, whereupon the USPTO began rejecting software patent applications, among other things like rejection of software patents in the courts. This was wonderful news!
An article by Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP’s Intellectual Property Practice Group (i.e. patent lawyers) said that the USPTO had “Preliminary Examination Guidelines” for software patents after the SCOTUS ruling. To quote:
Following closely on the heels of the Court’s decision, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued guidelines for the examination of patent applications claiming abstract ideas. The guidelines are preliminary and the USPTO indicates that it will issue additional guidance after further consideration of the Court’s decision and public feedback.
This article was also published here.
Holland & Knight LLP (patent lawyers publishing behind paywall) wrote that the US “PTO Provides Examiners with Guidance on Software Patents in Light of U.S. SC Ruling” and Glaser Weil IP File said: “Though recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have not provided much help, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s efforts to more closely scrutinize software patents is reducing the incentive for patent applicants to seek vague, broad claims, experts told USPTO officials at a forum Tuesday.”
There are also new articles about it, written not by patent lawyers.
The signifiance of the above articles is that even patent lawyers finally acknowledge that software patents are facing news limits. Weeks ago they worked hard to deny it (we gave dozens of examples), hoping that the SCOTUS ruling would go away or go unnoticed.
Steph writes about the patent lawyers’ propaganda rag, IAM ‘magazine’, calling them “silly”. She says: “A while back you published this article about a study that came out, touting the damage that patent trolls do to start ups. OK, not necessarily start ups, but “entrepreneurial activity”. And not necessarily “patent trolls”, but NPEs/PAEs/Euphamisms-of-the-Month.” █
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Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML at 1:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Only “Microsoft as the standard” is the ‘standard’ Microsoft is willing to accept, as its response to the Cabinet Office’s judgment reveals
AT THE BEGINNING of this week we learned that the British (UK) Cabinet Office, a highly influential department with technology imperatives, did the correct thing by no longer requiring British citizens to become clients of Microsoft (and users of expensive spyware) to merely communicate with their government. The Cabinet Office “goes open source” is how one news site put it, but ODF, the OpenDocument Format, is not necessarily about Free/Open Source software. ODF is about many applications working together, not via formats that are designed around a single application and its various versions (that’s what OOXML is).
Techrights did not break this news. It was Andy Updegrove who did, along with Cabinet Office. Quoting Updegrove:
The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.
The Cabinet Office stated:
The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.
Not too shockingly, as one ought to expect, the following day Microsoft attacked this decision. despite claiming to have ‘embraced’ ODF. “Microsoft attacks UK government decision to adopt ODF for document formats” said one headline, stating: “Microsoft has attacked the UK government’s decision to adopt ODF as its standard document format, saying it is “unclear” how UK citizens will benefit.
“The Cabinet Office announced its new policy yesterday, whereby Open Document Format (ODF) is immediately established as the standard for sharing documents across the public sector, with PDF and HTML also acceptable when viewing documents.”
“Turning its back on Microsoft Office’s native formats, the UK government has adopted the Open Document Format for all its sharable documents,”
writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, but if Microsoft is really all about openness, then Microsoft should welcome this decision, not attack it. It is quite revealing that Microsoft is not really interested in fair competition, interoperability, and openness.
“UK government makes “big step forward” on open document standards,” said the headline from Opensource.com (Red Hat).
We already wrote so much about it and warmed the Cabinet Office about Microsoft’s abusive responses, which include trying to get people fired, bribing some other people, using (or exploiting) disabled people to attack people’s rational decisions, and so on.
Dr. Glyn Moody wrote about “Massachusetts ODF fiasco a decade ago” and said about this important milestone: “Let’s Not Mess it up””
While celebrating this great news, I really want to emphasise Bracken’s point about managing the switch properly. We can be absolutely certain that Microsoft will fight this decision in every way possible. It will certainly seize on any problems that arise during the implementation as “proof” that it was the wrong choice. That makes it crucial that the open source community do everything in its power to aid the Cabinet Office here.
One particular area that concerns me is cross-compatibility. I’m hearing stories about difficulty in transferring ODF files from LibreOffice to Apache OpenOffice, with formatting of things like tables being messed up in the process. This is completely unacceptable: one of the benefits of adopting an open standard is the ability to swap in and out different applications. If that theory proves impossible in reality, we have a huge problem.
I would therefore like to entreat all the open source projects and communities that work on ODF to get together and sort this out. In the wake of the fantastic – and brave – move by the Cabinet Office, providing full interoperability among open source implementations must be a priority.
Yesterday’s news is truly a unique opportunity to show the power of open standards, to promote the benefits of open source, and to bring about its wider dissemination both in government, and among home users. The price of failure here would be extremely high: yet more years in the wilderness, as happened after the Massachusetts ODF fiasco a decade ago. So let’s not mess it up.
The Mukt, which covered this important development. delivered yet another call for Google to adopt ODF as the default document format, ending Google’s cowardly approach towards document formats.
We feel as though we played some role in the above (being among hundreds of people who wrote to the Cabinet Office). We not only wrote a lot about it and also wrote to the Office itself almost a dozen times, engaging in a discussion with members of staff. █
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07.23.14
Posted in Microsoft at 3:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another quick look at Microsoft’s horrible state of affairs and why it has virtually nothing to do with Nokia
The pure fiction that Nokia and Microsoft are the only aspect to be debated in amid the layoffs discussion was covered here before. It is coverup, it is ‘damage control’, and it is successful PR. There is no lack of analyses, e.g. [1,2,3]. Here is Ahonen saying that “Elop authors another moronic memo”. Based on him, a third of those to be laid off have nothing to do with Nokia. “First,” he said, “my deepest sympathies to the 12,500 former Nokia staff who now carry Microsoft business cards, who will be fired. Its nearly half of what was left of ‘The Division Formerly Known as Nokia Mobile Phones” after all the layoffs that Elop’s mismanagement at Nokia caused in the previous four years. I did warn that the layoffs would not end, when the Microsoft purchase of Nokia was announced and as we’ve seen, the division has been producing ever more losses and ever shrinking market share. The solution by the new CEO Nadella at Microsoft is predictable as its harsh: more layoffs. I had hoped that Microsoft would have endured these highly skilled specialized labor for longer, letting them try to find some remedy to the handset business or assist other Microsoft hardware (or mobile) evolutions but no. The new CEO has spoken. And as new CEO, now is the right time to make the big cuts. Microsoft has never seen this kind of mass layoffs before, and as the whole corporation, the cuts are about one in ten employees. But they are almost exclusively inside the Nokia handset part. And unfortunately for Microsoft’s mobile unit, Elop still gets to keep his job (for now).”
Microsoft has already used Nokia to make antitrust complaints against Google and Android in Europe. Andrew Orlowski has this update on it:
Industry sources have confirmed to The Reg that the European Commission is once again prodding Google’s Android contracts with phone makers. Preliminary letters, sent out a month ago, merely ask the phone makers if they find anything in Google’s contracts restrictive.
Windows revenue is decreasing despite squeezing of customers who are locked in. This does not look good for Microsoft and some sources speak of new work limits. “After announcing a big round of job cuts,” says this article, “Microsoft issued new policies concerning contract workers and how long they can work for the software giant.” These are the hallmarks of a company in collapse.
The layoffs at Nokia are actually Microsoft layoffs but there are also purely Microsoft layoffs. Microsoft has been trying to paint it as a Nokia issue using an ugly memo which gets slammed as follows: “Well, congratulations to Satya Nadella and the Microsoft HR and communications teams, because you’re stealing from the best—or maybe you all took the same course in corporate doubletalk and truthiness as part of your MBA programs. Microsoft this morning announced far and away the largest round of layoffs in its history, and Nadella’s e-mail drips with that familiar mixture of faux sympathy and non-information that is so typical of carefully managed corporate communication.”
As there are many dead products at Microsoft, so it should not be surprising that Microsoft also kills Android endeavours from Nokia. “Citing lack of interest,” says this new article, “Lenovo pulls 8-inch Windows tablets from the US,” so Windows is not a viable alternative, that is for sure.
“Detractors further derided Windows 8 as a misguided attempt to be all things to all people that actually ended up pleasing nobody,” said this other new article, so there is consensus on this. “In China, Windows Phone saw a collapse from 3% to o.6%,” says this report and even a Microsoft booster, Preston Gralla, calls BS on claims of the Bill Gates- and Microsoft-funded Gartner Group. Meanwhile, reveal the words of Bill Gates, there may be an attempt to import cheaper labour. As Sen. Jeff Sessions put it, “Super billionaires aren’t happy apparently… They declare we need to import more foreign workers. Mr. Gates says we need to let more and more people into our country to take those kinds of jobs.” See more here or here. Apparently, Bill Gates is now a writer for the New York Times, a paper for the plutocrats, by the plutocrats, cheapening the 99%.
It is fine for everyone around the world to share jobs. What’s not fine is using globalisation for a race to the bottom, as Microsoft did with criminal lobbyists such as Abramoff in the past, amid Gates’ immigration policy hijack (we covered it years ago).
Microsoft announced layoffs but said nothing about the temps it had been hiring to hide shrinkage of the company for years. There was a puff piece/PR from CNN [1, 2], to which there was a response in Pogson’s blog.
For those who want what Nokia would have offered if it weren’t for Microsoft, there’s Jolla, which has just reached another 1.0 milestone [4,5]. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Now look at Nokia. That ‘struggling’ Nokia which in 2010 still sold its smartphones running on the ‘obsolete’ Symbian system. Nokia in 2009 sold 67.8 million smartphones. Did Nokia lose sales to Apple in 2010? Did that number go down while Apple’s iPhone grew so much? No. Nokia grew. Really? Yes reallly. Nokia’s smartphone sales grew to 103.6 million units (the final, corrected number by Nokia financial reports). Nokia’s smartphone sales during calendar year 2010 grew 35.8 million units !!! The gap between Apple and Nokia smartphones was not narrowing during 2010. Apple was not catching up to Nokia. Nokia smartphone unit was the global juggernaut totally crushing its competition – and yes – the numbers are indisuputable, the gap between Apple iPhone and Nokia smartphones was GROWING during 2010, not shrinking. Apple was not ‘catching up’ to Nokia, Nokia was indeed ‘pulling away’ from Apple (and from Blackberry and from Samsung etc). And Nokia did this profitably, and its smartphone unit produced a Nokia-record profit by Q4 of 2010. Nokia was not losing, The numbers are crysta-clear if you can do basic math. Nokia was clearly winning the war.
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When Microsoft swallowed half of Europe’s biggest tech company, it was only a matter of time before it spat something out. And so it has, ending Nokia’s thirty-year roller-coaster ride.
However, the decision will make tens of million of its customers take a look at Android – surely the last thing Microsoft wanted to happen.
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“I told you so” is a refrain that’s oft-heard here in the Linux blogosphere, and more often than not it refers to some fleeting Microsoft tie with FOSS that subsequently goes wrong.
The latest example? It’s a doozy. Redmond not only is laying off many, many thousands — most of them in its ill-fated Nokia unit — but also abandoning its short-lived support of Android through the Nokia X line of phones.
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Months back, we had Sailfish OS released on Nexus 4, in very alpha stage while many things didn’t work and after any update they got better and better and more stuff started working.
Now though, Jolla is asking YOU to port the OS to your Android device (Running Cyanogen Mod 10.1.x) while it’s hot.
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This week Jolla has finally released their Hardware Adaptation Dev Kit (HADK) publicly to make it easier for enthusiasts/developers to port the Sailfish OS platform to new Android smart-phones.
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07.22.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Russia’s parliament is preparing new rules in a bid to cut its reliance on foreign technology suppliers after U.S. sanctions against some of the country’s largest companies, a move that could hurt sales at vendors such as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)
The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to require government agencies and state-run enterprises to give preference to local providers of software and hardware, according to a document from the commission for strategic information systems obtained by Bloomberg News. The paper addresses criteria for tender processes such as favoring products that don’t have imported, licensed components.
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GNU/Linux has been in the pipe for a while but US sanctions on Russia may bring GNU/Linux to the front burner. I can see them also accelerating trade I can see them also accelerating trade with China. If China ramps up production of computers with GNU/Linux to serve the Russian market, China will be better positioned to help out every other country squirming under the weight of Wintel and NSA probing the world’s IT.
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As long as there have been jobs, there have been people sitting in pubs complaining about them. The Linux Format team had been meeting in The Salamander in Bath to do just that since long before I joined. It was a safe place that served good ale, and it provided a safe, warm place to moan over a pint. But there’s only so much moaning you can do before you have to quit, which, being men of action, is what we did.
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Desktop
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NPD reveals that Chromebook sales are exploding and Microsoft is starting to get worried.
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Google has shown off a candidate for a new Chrome OS user interface.
Dubbed “Athena”, the new UI appeared fully grown from the head, and Google+ page, of Googler François Beaufort.
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If Google have not had their hands full with the official announcement of the soon-to-be released Android L, as well as Android TV, Auto and Wear it now seems Chrome OS is also on the agenda to receive a full overhaul.
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Server
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The latest TOP500 List of the fastest supercomputers in the world helped many in the technology community understand what open-source aficionados have known for years: Linux has quickly become the operating system of choice in the high-performance computing (HPC) market, growing from relative obscurity 15 years ago to powering 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world. But its appeal is found in more than cost or choice. Here are a few of the main reasons Linux has grown to own the lion’s share of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems, with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the United Kingdom, with 30; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23—combined. Japan also increased its showing, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list. HP has the lead in systems and now has 182 systems (36 percent), compared to IBM, with 176 systems (35 percent). HP had 196 systems (39 percent) six months ago, and IBM had 164 systems (33 percent) six months ago. In the system category, Cray remains third with 10 percent (50 systems).
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.16-rc6, which is a ‘bigger’ than rc5, with a note that he will start getting grumpy if he notices that people aren’t serious about trying to calm things down this late in the release cycle.
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The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.13, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking the release of another update in this branch.
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Clint Savage is a system administrator for the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects. Here he discusses the new technologies he’s been digging into lately, his favorite part of the job, and fond memories of a weeklong hackfest with his coworkers.
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The Bang-bang thermal governor remains under discussion on the kernel mailing list after patches for it originally appeared a few months back. Bang-bang will hopefully be ready for an upcoming kernel release (Linux 3.17?) and the latest technical discussion about it can be found via the LKML archives.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.4.
Mesa 10.2.4 is the next iteration in the series and implements the OpenGL 3.3 API. This means that some drivers might not support the specifications for the latest Mesa. This build integrates quite a few fixes and changes and it’s one of the biggest releases in the last few months.
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Aside from upstream work to the GLAMOR acceleration code itself that’s now part of the X.Org Server, Keith Packard has been working on the GLAMOR hook-up for the xf86-video-intel DDX driver.
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Earlier this month AMD published an open-source HSA Linux driver for exploiting the potential of their much-promoted Heterogeneous System Architecture. This driver, now known as the “AMDKFD” driver, is up to its second revision and continues being analyzed by developers on the mailing list.
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Sebastian Dröge has announced the immediate release of the GStreamer 1.4 stable series that adds on new features over the existing GStreamer 1.x stable branches while still keeping up to its promise of 1.x API/ABI stability.
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Benchmarks
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Those wishing to see the Raspberry Pi B+ performance benchmarks with a Debian Linux host, the results are available from 1407220-BY-1407183GL47. To see how the results compare against your own Linux systems, with the Phoronix Test Suite you simply need to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1407220-BY-1407183GL47 to conduct a quick, fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison.
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Applications
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The Xen Project has announced the release of Mirage OS 2.0, which they describe as “the industry’s first software framework that unifies cloud and embedded deployments behind a safe, secure programming language, allowing developers to seamlessly build systems that span both embedded devices and public cloud services.”
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In addition, GnuTLS is now offered as an alternative to OpenSSL, persistent camera configuration has been implemented, and users can now switch video sources during a call.
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With so many flavors of Linux and the awesome apps in their repositories, finding the right app for getting things done can be tough. In our annual Lifehacker Pack for Linux, we’re highlighting the must-have downloads for better productivity, communication, media management, and more.
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Vuze, a BitTorrent client previously known as Azureus, which is built on Java, has been upgraded to version 5.3.0.1 Beta 46 and is now ready for testing.
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VueScan 9.4.35, an easy-to-use replacement for the software that usually comes with scanners and that supports most flatbed scanners, printer/scanners, and film scanners, has been released and is now available for download.
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No matter how much I love Plex, there’s still nothing that comes close to XBMC for usability when it comes to watching your network media on a television. I’ve probably written a dozen articles on Plex during the last few years, so you know that’s tough for me to admit. Still, no matter how many Plex-enabled devices I might buy (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, phones, tablets, Web browsers), I run XBMC on all my televisions. The interface, when coupled with a back-end MySQL database, is just unbeatable.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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We’ve never been shy about our love for open source games. But, we recognize that explaining how open source principles like sharing, transparency, and rapid prototyping apply to both digital and non-digital gaming activities can be difficult.
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Out There is like a Choose Your Own Adventure version of FTL. Originally developed for iOS and Android, it sees you drifting in a spaceship in an unexplored galaxy which changes with every playthrough. Your fuel and oxygen supplies are finite, your hull is not particularly strong and you have to travel from solar system to solar system attempting to find your way home.
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I’m a begrudging Linux user, specifically Ubuntu. It’s the result of being too cheap to buy software like Photoshop and too ethical to just steal it like everybody else. As a result I get to enjoy all the benefits of free software, including the attempts to develop the “perfect” portable console, like the DragonBox Pyra.
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Toxic Bunny HD, a 2D platformer developed and published by Celestial Games on Steam, will receive a Linux version soon.
The game was released on the Steam for Windows service a few days ago, and now the developers are considering a port for the Linux platform as well. The information about a Linux version hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s still interesting to see it pop up so soon after the official launch.
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Today in Linux news, Geary 0.7.0 was recently released despite the programmers’ troubles with the IRS. Debian released an update the 6.0 branch of their old stable Linux distribution. A new Duke Nukem enhanced compilation game has hit beta. “GCC 5.0 is expected next year” and Linus is getting grumpy! And finally today, two new Mint 17 reviews round out the Linux news on this Monday July 21.
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CRYENGINE, a game engine developed by Crytek, was announced for Linux a short while ago and it looks like the activity in the Steam database is picking up, but the future of this great technology hangs in the balance.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The developer of Evolve OS, Ikey Doherty, has made a new desktop environment called Budgie Desktop and released a new version of it.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Qt is already a dominant technology in may industries such as IVI systems in cars, recently we covered Dropbox’s switch to Qt. Google has also joined the Qtness (cuteness). The company published VoltAir, a single and multi-player game, on Google Play Store. It’s an open source game which is built using Qt.
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From ratpoison to Unity, I must have tried just about every Linux desktop environment available. The best Linux desktop, in my view: my main computer continues to run KDE’s Plasma. No other alternative can match its design philosophy, configurability, or its innovations on the classical desktop.
Nor am I alone in my preferences. At a time when the Linux desktop offers six main alternatives (Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, Mate, Unity and Xfce), KDE Plasma consistently tops reader polls with an average of 35-40 percent. In such a diverse market, these figures indicate a broad appeal that other Linux desktop alternatives can’t match.
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Let’s picture the scenario we had a few days ago where there were lots of projects with three “live” branches, i.e. KDE/4.13, KDE/4.14 and master.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) have announced that version 3.13.2 is now available for download and testing.
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All the 4MLinux operating systems have really small sizes, but the Rescue Edition is actually bigger than most of the other flavors. There is a very good reason for that size and it all has to do with the integrated packages. The OS could have been a little bit smaller, but the developer would have been forced to remove some important applications.
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I think Zorin OS 9 Core is a decent system, and those who it is aimed for, literally Windows migrants, will find everything they want in this operating system.
As this is an LTS edition, it will be supported for a long time. It means you can install it on your computer and forget about upgrade problems, as well as forget about the Microsoft empire.
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New Releases
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“UberStudent is developed by a professional educator who specializes in academic success strategies, post-secondary literacy instruction, and educational technology. It has been designed around a core academic skills approach to student success—the research and writing, reading, studying, and self-management skills that are essential to all students,” reads the official website.
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 delivers new levels of flexibility and cost advantages through powerful features such as erasure coding and cache tiering
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This article is based on a talk I gave at DockerCon this year. It will discuss Docker container security, where we are currently, and where we are headed.
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Fedora
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The Anaconda OS installer used by Fedora, RHEL and their derivatives have been many times criticized for its memory requirements being bigger than memory requirements of the installed OS. Maybe a big surprise for users who don’t see too deep into the issue, no surprise for people who really understand what’s going on in the OS installation and how it all works. The basic truth (some call it an issue) about OS installation is that the installer cannot write to physical storage of the machine before user tells it to do so. However, since the OS installation is quite a complex process and since it has to be based on the components from the OS itself there are many things that have to be stored somewhere for the installer to work. The only space for data that for sure doesn’t contain any data the installer shouldn’t overwrite or leave some garbage in is RAM.
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Debian Family
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I keep Debian stable at work for my desktop and servers (well, some of them are still in oldstable, thanks LTS team!!), and I have testing in a laptop that I use as clonezilla/drbl server (but I had issues, next week I’ll put some time on them and I’ll write here my findings, and report bugs, if any).
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A new Linux distribution is looking to overcome the limitations of Debian on ARM, by running both Linux apps and Android apps in native mode.
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Developers at TurnKey Linux have come out with a new Debian based distro for Bitcoin lovers. Named as BitKey, this distro boots from a read-only CD or a USB drive and allows you to check your bitcoin wallet, sign and do transactions over a secure network.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While we maybe living in a post-PC era, there is no denying the fact that the desktop OS still matters. Mac OS X is an operating system that is still ahead of Ubuntu when it comes to the race towards the number one desktop. Apple knows that, and that is why they seem to have put a lot of work in making Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” as good as their mobile operating system, which is iOS. The goal here is convergence. Apple wants to build an ecosystem in which the desktop, the mobile, and the wearable operating systems work seamlessly together in harmony. This is the same thing Microsoft is aiming for and so is Google. And yes, Shuttleworth’s brainchild Ubuntu is shooting for the same thing by working really hard on the next iteration of the open-source OS. But, with all these efforts, can Canonical match up with its competition?
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Canonical’s Rick Spencer, the VP of Engineering, has done away with the “Community Manager” role in favor of a new “Community Team Manager” position that’s now filled by Canonical’s David Planella. Additionally, the rest of the community team (Michael Hall, Daniel Holback, and Nicholas Skaggs) now all carry the title as community managers.
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Ubuntu Touch – also known as Ubuntu for devices or Ubuntu Phone – is a mobile operating system which is currently in beta. However, if you own a supported Android device, you can try it out right now. Here’s how to install Ubuntu for devices.
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Flavours and Variants
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There are features (on the installer) that need to be implemented and several rough edges on the desktop that calls for more polishing, but in general, this is one desktop distribution that I think you should, at least, take for a test drive.
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The open-source software revolution is coming to the car. Most in-vehicle infotainment systems sold today use proprietary software, with the underlying code tightly controlled by automakers and by a few major software providers, such as Microsoft Corp. and Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems. Now the auto industry is exploring open-source operating systems such as Linux more seriously than ever, hoping that sharing the work and making code available to all will lead to more rapid development cycles, lower costs and happier drivers.
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Phones
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Mobile devices have edged out PCs when it comes to Chinese online browsing, an official government agency in the People’s Republic said on Monday.
For the first time more Chinese folk are plugging into the internet using phones or tablets, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said (PDF in Chinese), according to a Reuters report here.
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Ballnux
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Android 4.4.2 KitKat update continues for a number of Samsung devices including Galaxy Note 2.
Samsung Galaxy Note 2 was launched in August of 2012 and was initially powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
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They say all good things come to those who wait and it seems like the G3 was quite worth the wait after all. With a launch price of Rs 47,990 for the 16GB version, the G3 is here for to satiate your flagship hunger. Here’s our review of LG’s flagship after a week’s usage.
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Android
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NVIDIA announced this morning their new Shield Tablet and Shield Controller. The new Shield Tablet is a $299 Android tablet that’s great for gaming and is mighty powerful with using the Tegra K1 SoC.
With being powered by the Tegra K1, the CPU and graphics performance is mighty powerful for the tablet with its Kepler-based GPU and four Cortex-A15 processor cores. The Shield Tablet has an 8-inch, 1920 x 1200 display and the WiFi version with 16GB of storage is going to sell for $299 USD.
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Smartwatches are still a fairly new category. Google revealed its big Android Wear initiative at its I/O developer conference in June. The company is hoping to do for smartwatches what Android proper did for smartphones. Rumors suggest Apple is also working on a smartwatch of its own, but the company hasn’t announced anything yet.
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As businesses look beyond BlackBerry for smartphone security, Samsung and Google step up to the plate. Knox integration is coming in Android L.
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Electric Objects has achieved Kickstarter funding for its Android-based EO1, a wall-mounted, 23-inch HD signage computer for displaying digital art.
New York City based Electric Objects is one of several companies reinvigorating the wall-mounted digital picture frame form-factor with more affordable prices, smartphone access, and other modern amenities. Like Framed, which is based on Windows Embedded, Electric Objects’s EO1 picture frame has easily surpassed its Kickstarter funding goals. There are still 17 days left, however, to get in on discounted pricing, including $299 for a May 2015 release, or $499 (the eventual retail price) for a wooden-framed version, or a beta test model due in Jan. 2015.
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Linux.com is teaming up with The New Stack to do a survey about what you think are the most popular open source cloud projects.
The next-generation of the enterprise is being built now with open cloud technologies. Your choices will help identify and recognize the most popular open source projects that are defining the new way to build and manage applications and systems.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the release of Privacy Badger beta. This comes roughly three months after the alpha version was released.
Privacy Badger is a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome that’s designed to stop “advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.” And it’s designed to require zero configuration to use. Just install and forget it!
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organization fighting against illegal surveillance programs in the courts. It also contributes to a open and secure internet by funding the development of software like HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is today announcing a new Open Wireless Router initiative today at the HOPE X conference.
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Scott Wilson agrees that open source matters because of open code, but just as important is the process in which the code is made. Open development of code is in the social nature of many programmers, hackers, documentors, and project managers. So, what is it about open development?
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The active talk of Open Source Technologies took root in Uganda during the mid 90s when a few enthusiasts started experimenting with the use of software like Linux which was in its infancy back then.
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Fans of the typewriter remain a vehement group. They view the typewriter as something really special, a tool which makes the connection between languages. One of the attractions of a typewriter is that it offers a distraction-free alternative of modern day methods for producing a document. They challenge the writer to concentrate on what really matters – the content. They force the writer to think.
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But open source has of course progressed and been adopted widely albeit in more ‘back office’ circles. It is hard to talk about the growth of big data analytics applications without mentioning Hadoop, while the rise of NoSQL databases has flourished such that even Facebook recently announced its own Paxos algorithm-based project called Apollo.
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It was such a challenge for the initial Open Source promoters to break through onto the corporate scene and later the Government. The rampant piracy of software that existed then (and still exists) made most software consumers disregard the issues that were being raised by the Open Source Software community against the blind adoption of proprietary systems.
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Events
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I’ll be presenting an updated version of my Crash Course on Open Source Cloud Computing presentation at OSCON 2014. I have some new material on Docker and SDN along with the latest updates on cloud software. Here’s the official excerpt:
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Hadoop is steadily making its way into many enterprises, thanks to its ability to surface unique insights from very large data sets. It power and success as an open source platform are a direct result of the fact that it can perform analytics that go beyond what traditional analytics platforms are capable of. All of this came to the fore at the Hadoop Summit held recently in San Jose, California.
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Web Browsers
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Choosing the best Linux browser for your needs requires just a bit of homework: Web browsers for the Linux desktop have evolved over the years, just as they have for other popular desktop platforms. With this evolution, both good and bad revelations have been discovered. Revelations from new functionality, to broken extensions, and so forth. In this article, I’ll serve as your guide through these murky waters to help you discover the best in Linux browsers.
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Chrome
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If you’ve been wondering why the battery life on your Windows laptop or tablet seems so lousy, your Chrome web browser might be to blame – and it may have been sapping your system’s juice for years.
A documented bug in the source code for the Chromium open source project seems to account for the mysterious power drain that some users of Google’s web browser have been experiencing.
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If you’re a regular user of the Google Chrome browser, you probably know that the nightly builds and beta channel versions often incorporate cutting-edge features that you can’t get in the stable release. These features also often foreshadow what will soon arrive in the stable release.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application.
The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It’s been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that’s not exactly Mozilla’s fault.
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The Firefox 31 web-browser is out this morning with new features.
New to Firefox 31 is improved download security by trying to block known malware (based upon Google’s functionality in Chrome), a search box has been added to the new tab page, a new certificate verification library, HTML5 WebVTT support for video playback with subtitles, and various developer-focused improvements.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Two recent, excellent, blog posts have touched on a topic I’ve been wrestling with since May’s OpenStack Summit: What is the role of the Product Management function, if any, in the OpenStack development process?
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Databases
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Firebird 2.5.3, a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms, has been released after a long hiatus.
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BSD
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We’ve known for a while that LLVM 3.5 has been under plans for a release in August now with just being days away from the start of the month, we have a better idea for the release schedule.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hello. I am a rising Third Year law student at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas, TX. I am working hard to master the technical aspects of law, electronics, and software. My current interests involve protecting individuals and investigating new technology, particularly in the communications field by utilizing licenses for authorship, art, and inventions. Prior to law school, I attained a bachelor’s degree in History at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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This release contains a major change in central parts of the code and should be considered beta quality. As always it passes the testsuite, so most functionality clearly works.
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Public Services/Government
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Over 170 primary schools and secondary schools in Geneva are switching to Ubuntu for PCs used by teachers and students, which were earlier using a proprietary software. The move has been successfully completed for all the primary schools. For the rest 20 secondary schools, the migration is expected to be completed by the next academic year.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Big data. It’s one of the most pervasive buzzwords in today’s technology world. But it’s impossible to deny how deeply data touches all aspects of not just our lives but also business and industry. The amount of data collected about everything is staggering—a typical transatlantic flight generates 30 terabytes of data about the engines alone!
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Open Access/Content
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Colleges and faculty seeking a streamlined way to develop higher education syllabi may want to become test pilots in an open source project under development at Utah State University’s Center for Innovative Design & Instruction. A team led by Product Development Manager George Joeckel III is creating Salsa, a Web-based application that instructors can use to create “styled & accessible learning service agreements.”
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Programming
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Debate is currently raging in the open-source PHP community over what the number will be for the version of PHP that will succeed the current PHP 5.x series.
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Recently I was updating my dotfiles, because I wanted to ensure that media-players were “always on top”, when launched, as this suits the way I work.
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GNU Compiler Collection developers are beginning to come to a consensus that GCC 5.0 will be released in 2015.
While GCC 4.10 is the current release under development since the GCC 4.9 debut this spring, GCC 4.10 will likely be relabeled as GCC 5.0. There’s a fresh thread on the GCC mailing list that talks about GCC version bikeshedding.
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Recently I’ve been looking over the Zooniverse citizen science project and its source code on github, partly because it’s interesting as a user and partly because I thought writing an Android app for Galaxy Zoo would be a good learning exercise and something useful to open source.
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Science
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We’re at a particularly hyper-partisan moment in our country. As such, one would think the existence of a scientific consensus on a policy issue would offer the mainstream media a welcome oasis from the mirage of social media myths and the desert of dueling soundbites that all too often crowd out informed comment. Using such a consensus as a no bullshit baseline, an objective journalist could more honestly explore opposing arguments, measure them against evidence, and judge their veracity. This is no small thing, because if modern journalism is to continue to live up to its Constitutional promise, it can’t merely be about telling the who, what,whenand where of the world anymore, it must go beyond that to explain the how and why.
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Recently declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) present a clearer picture of the all-encompassing and wide reaching efforts to win the Cold War’s Space Race.
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Health/Nutrition
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If your kid was born in Indiana after 1991, chances are his or her blood and DNA is one of an estimated 2.25-million specimens currently stored in an undisclosed state warehouse.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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We are still reeling today. Territory that was once within the multi-ethnic, multi-state, multi-religious Ottoman Empire is again engulfed in conflict and war, stretching from Libya to Palestine-Israel, Syria, and Iraq. The Balkan region remains sullen and politically divided, with Bosnia and Herzegovina unable to institute an effective central government and Serbia deeply jolted by the 1999 NATO bombing and the contentious independence of Kosovo in 2008, over its bitter opposition.
The former Russian Empire is in growing turmoil as well, a kind of delayed reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with Russia attacking Ukraine and violence continuing to erupt in Georgia, Moldova, and elsewhere. In East Asia, tensions between China and Japan ― echoes of the last century ― are a growing danger.
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It is probably safe to assume that most Americans do not think of their country as an empire. As a conservative in my younger years, I might have even labeled the suggestion as anti-American, rationalizing to myself: Sure, we may have strategic military bases around the world and we may use force at times, but it is only for benevolent purposes. We get the bad guys, give the country back to the good guys, and we leave. The US does not try to rule the world.
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The increasing use in recent years of unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs or drones, has spurred innovation and provoked concern. UAVs, which the U.S. Air Force now calls RPAs, or remotely piloted aircraft — a reminder that humans control them — can fly in places where the risk to a pilot would be too great to justify a manned mission. It is the use of armed UAVs to carry out what the U.S. government calls “targeted killings” on foreign soil of individuals believed to pose a serious terrorist threat to the United States that has spurred criticism, concern and debate, in the U.S. and abroad.
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using armed drones to search out and kill people considered enemies of the United States. This operation is being carried out without any congressional oversight — but one congressman plans to do something about that.
Representative Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) has introduced the Drone Reform Act (H.R. 5091). The bill is aimed at returning authority for the deadly unmanned aerial devices to the Pentagon.
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Why are so many children dying in Gaza? The answer is surprisingly simple.
According to the CIA World Factbook, about half of the Strip’s population is under the age of 18. The median age in Gaza is just 18 and a few months. With the elder population amounting to an almost-negligible percentage, young children are easily the most vulnerable.
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With hundreds of largely civilian Palestinians dead, Israel’s attempts at crippling Hamas in the Gaza Strip have resulted in grim headlines and news broadcasts around the world. Regardless of whether or not Israel is winning on the ground in Gaza, it is slipping in its worldwide battle for hearts and minds.
It stands to reason, then, that friendly intellectuals are stepping forward to present their justifications for Israel’s actions. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, for example, toured a Hamas tunnel and dined with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before describing him as “a reluctant warrior,” echoing Israel’s official position that Hamas is forcing the Israeli Defense Forces to bomb civilian areas.
Unfortunately, some of these defenses invite rather unflattering comparisons.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thane Rosenbaum, a senior fellow at New York University’s law school, outlines what he sees as Israel’s “moral dilemma” of whether or not to strike suspected Hamas targets also populated by civilians.
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The horrors of war and conflict have been overwhelming this past week. Four boys, aged 9 to 12, all cousins, were killed in Israeli bombings in Gaza just minutes after they were playing on the beach, thinking that the sandy shores were safer than their streets.
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The video emerged on Monday. It appears to show a man searching for his family amid the rubble of Gaza, apparently during a ceasefire. He is shot by a sniper. For a while he lies there, moving awkwardly. Then he is shot again.
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The drones usually deliver targeted assassination ordnance; small rockets that explode in confined spaces – like front rooms or cars. If they hit cars, they can kill the occupants in the front seats while leaving the back-seat passengers with minor injuries and burst eardrums. Drones also deliver the ‘knocks on the roof’.
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More than 560 Palestinians have been killed in the 14-day battle with Israel. Burying the bodies has become more difficult and dangerous with each passing day.
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The Israeli campaign is “legally and morally legitimate, and they probably need a couple more days to achieve that which they set out to accomplish,” Hayden, a retired Air Force general, said Tuesday.
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The mayhem began in the early hours of Sunday morning in Shejaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, where Israeli forces battled with Hamas militants. Terrified civilians fled, sometimes past the bodies of those struck down in earlier artillery barrages. By dusk it was clear that Sunday was the deadliest single day for the Palestinians in the latest conflict and the deadliest for the Israeli military in years.
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Massive demonstrations have taken place all over the UK against the continuing massacre in Gaza. There appears for the last three decades, to be a massive gulf between the attitude of the population of the United Kingdom towards the continuing genocide of the Palestinians, and the attitude of the political class across all mainstream political parties.
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After leaving the British diplomatic service because of my commitment to Human Rights, and horror at their abuse by the US and UK in the “War on Terror”, I applied for a job at Human Rights Watch. I travelled to New York for a job interview, which was chaired by Kenneth Roth. Rather to my surprise, it revolved almost entirely around Israel, and whether I would agree with the proposition that Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis were a major threat to human rights, which HRW should work against.
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33,000 feet is 1000 feet above the restricted flight altitude (see image below). The request of the Ukrainian air traffic control authorities was implemented.
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The U.S. media’s Ukraine bias has been obvious, siding with the Kiev regime and bashing ethnic Russian rebels and Russia’s President Putin. But now – with the scramble to blame Putin for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down – the shoddy journalism has grown truly dangerous, says Robert Parry.
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The footage shows that one of the members of self-defense troops suddenly saw a teddy bear which apparently belonged to a child who was among the 298 passenger on board the Malaysian jet.
“We want those bastards to see whom they shot down,” the man said, “Do you see?” meaning that there were innocent children who died in the crash.
Then he carefully put the toy back to a heap of other items that used to belong to the passengers. After that he took off his cap and marked himself with a sign of the cross paying the tribute to the memory of the victims of the catastrophe.
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Pro-Russian forces have removed large parts of MH17, and then substituted or altered them before returning to the site. This is extraordinarily important.
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The immediate cause of the MH17 disaster was a missile shot by pro-Russian forces who mistook it for one of the military aircraft they had been regularly shooting down. It is a terrible tragedy – and tragically not unique. There have been several such events in my lifetime, including the USS Vincennes incident and the Soviet downing of a Korean airliner.
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Finance
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New Labour has officially voted to support austerity, benefit cuts, government spending cuts, Trident missiles and rail privatisation, and done so without serious internal opposition.
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The Blairs seem to crave money because it is there. As the gap between the wealthy few and the rest widens, their fortune is hard to justify
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After noting that “in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 63 percent of respondents said the US is on the wrong track,” Altman insists that “despite the pessimistic mood, America is experiencing a profound comeback.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Newly-obtained documents show that the billionaire Koch brothers’ political giving is much more expansive than has previously been known.
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Social media and policy are both fields in which great promises provoke even greater fears. Every claim that the Web 2.0 is a voice for democratic levelling of hierarchies is countered by alarm over unwarranted governmental surveillance; with every use of social media for grassroots political change comes yet another revelation about the NSA. The moral ambiguity inherent in those situations isn’t helped by the sheer information overload and multitude of ‘experts’ confronting new entrants to any debate.
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Censorship
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Last year, the website Extortion Letter Info (ELI) was slapped with an extraordinary “gag order” forcing it to remove more than 2,000 posts related to Linda Ellis, a writer who has a long record of sending copyright demand letters over “The Dash,” a poem Ellis claims she composed in 1996.
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Privacy
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A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month.
The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website.
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There’s some buzz in security circles today after it came out that a session at the upcoming Black Hat Conference entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” by Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin (both of whom work for Carnegie-Mellon University and CERT) had been pulled from the conference at the request of CMU.
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All the critical material in an 81-page 2011 FISC opinion on NSA surveillance has been declassified and made public, a federal judge ruled, rejecting the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s request for an unredacted copy.
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Boring Carnegie-Mellon University lawyers have scuppered one of the most hotly anticipated talks at the Black Hat conference – which would have explained how $3,000 of kit could unmask Tor hidden services and user IP addresses.
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On 10 July 2014, the UK Government announced emergency legislation in the form of the Data Retention and Investigations Powers Bill (“the Bill”), which would require communications service providers (“CSPs”) to retain communications data for up to 12 months. This was the result of a European Court of Justice decision declaring European Directive 2006/24/EC incompatible with Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The Directive was introduced in the wake of the 2004 and 2005 terrorist attacks to allow governments to prevent future attacks.
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Bill Binney worked at the National Security Agency nearly three decades as one of its leading crypto-mathematicians. He then became one of its leading whistleblowers.
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Last October, President Dilma Rousseff was to be the first Brazilian leader to attend a White House state dinner in two decades. Instead, angered by revelations that her phone calls and email had been intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA), she became the first leader to cancel a state dinner hosted by a U.S. president, lambasting U.S. surveillance as a violation of international law and a “totally unacceptable” infringement of Brazil’s sovereignty.
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A new chapter in the U.S.-Germany spying scandal drastically threatens the United States’ relationship with Germany. As U.S. and German leaders bicker over intelligence collection practices, they are ignoring the most costly casualty — a landmark U.S.-EU trade deal slated to boost the transatlantic economy out of its post-recession doldrums.
After two German officials were arrested on charges of spying for the United States, Germany ordered the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country. This story ripped open painful wounds from the NSA-spying scandal that had barely begun to scab over, when leaked documents revealed that the United States had spied on German citizens and tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal phone.
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We’ve written a few times about Executive Order 12333, which we’ve described as “the NSA’s biggest loophole.” It’s the unchecked power, created entirely via executive order, for the NSA to do anything it wants to spy on anyone — including Americans — so long as that data is collected overseas. Remember how the NSA had hacked into Google and Yahoo’s datacenters? That was done overseas under EO 12333, allowing them to do whatever they wanted with that information — content and metadata — with no oversight at all. For all the talk about how the NSA is bounded by oversight from “all three branches” of government, that’s clearly not the case. Everything happening under EO 12333 is mostly considered to be only controlled by the Executive branch, which created the order in the first place. There are no reports to Congress about it, and even Dianne Feinstein has admitted that the Intelligence Committee doesn’t touch any of the surveillance done under EO 12333.
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Stingrays and other cell surveillance tools have been used in the U.S. for years without the knowledge of the public or even defense attorneys and judges.
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A federal judge in New York has ordered a search warrant that allows law enforcement to search through a Gmail account as part of a criminal investigation.
The court decision is likely to spark a new chapter of debate in the saga of privacy rights and data collection of individual Internet users. The judge allowed the search of email from users under investigation of crimes that include money laundering.
Other judges reportedly hold a different point of view than Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein regarding the issue. Up until this point, warrants haven’t been issued for a search through private citizens’ email to collect data in a criminal investigation.
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Prompted by Snowden leaks, the office of the director of national intelligence is attempting damage control by promising new programs meant to promote “diversity and tolerance.”
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It almost seems as if President Obama has run into nothing but trouble overseas, facing criticism over electronic eavesdropping, drone strikes and his handling of regional conflicts. Yet the image of the president, and of the United States, have suffered little harm, according to a Pew Global Attitudes survey.
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John Napier Tye, a former State Department section chief for Internet freedom, is calling on the government to answer questions related to a recent op-ed published by the Washington Post.
Tye specifically calls the NSA’s surveillance operations abroad conducted under Executive Order 12333, a threat to American democracy, saying that the executive order in question “authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons.” Executive Order 12333 was signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981 and established guidelines for intelligence community activities taken abroad, including the collection of signals intelligence for surveillance purposes.
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#NIMROD Kamer, a London-based satirist and journalist, brought his individual reporting style to Nassau this month to investigate the story that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is listening and recording all cellular phone calls made in the Bahamas.
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Yo is surprisingly popular and growing fast; last week the company received another $1.5 million in venture capital after getting an initial $1m last month. The ultimate goal is to build out an entire Yo network to try and rethink how notifications work. It’s a particularly good example of the tech industry building a seemingly-ridiculous solution to a small problem that contains the germ of a much bigger idea within it. Yo might succeed or it might fail, but for the moment it’s pretty fun to play with.
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In October 1998 in a bid to gain the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli team led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to blackmail President Bill Clinton with tapes of Clinton and then-intern Monica Lewinsky. When Clinton brought Israel’s request for Pollard’s release to CIA Director George Tenet, Tenet threatened to resign on the spot should Clinton cave and release Pollard. Clinton ultimately declined the Israeli request, though he would consider it once again before the end of his term.
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Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden has asked a Swiss lawyer to explore the possibility of the United States fugitive coming to Switzerland.
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Time for many professionals to upgrade their information security
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British intelligence is permitted to go further in surveillance than similar agencies in other Western countries, according to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who spoke of GCHQ’s lack of oversight in a recent interview to the Guardian.
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One of the architects of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping technology told a radio host today the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, has “direct access” to the NSA’s domestic spying data and was likely using it to target the tea party.
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Edward Snowden says that U.S. surveillance failed to stop the men suspected of planting bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon even though Russia provided them with intelligence.
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Chinese telecom and smartphone manufacturer Huawei has reported revenue rising 19 per cent in the first half of the year with sales jumping to 135.8bn yuan (£12.8bn or $21.9bn).
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A former Obama administration official calls attention to unaccountable mass surveillance conducted under a 1981 executive order.
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With Australian Security Intelligence Organisation chief David Irvine this morning insisting to a Senate committee that data retention — under “active consideration” by the government — was crucial to intelligence-gathering and Australians had nothing to fear from it, it’s time for a clarifier on exactly what data retention is and the concerns it raises.
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Over the weekend, two of the most famous whistleblowers in U.S. history, Edward Snowden and Pentagon papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, sat down at the HopeX hacker conference in New York to discuss how technology can empower dissent and protect your privacy.
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Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, whose leaks of classified documents rocked the public and exposed the US government’s illegal activities four decades apart, both appealed to hackers and security pros attending the HOPE X hackers conference in New York on Saturday to continue to thwart government access to citizen data and create a safer environment for whistleblowers to make their revelations.
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A former State Department executive came forward on July 18 to warn against how the United States government is using an executive order issued by President Ronald Reagan to collect data from Americans, especially when they are located outside US borders. And, even though President Barack Obama’s administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, he does not believe he will be one of the victims. But is he already?
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It is crucial in today’s security climate to begin classifying data and networks in a new way, based not just on levels of sensitivity but on shelf life and the realities of our evolving computing landscape.
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But fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented by using standard Web browser privacy settings or using anti-tracking tools such as AdBlock Plus.
The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5 percent of the top 100,000 websites. Most of the code was on websites that use AddThis’ social media sharing tools. Other fingerprinters include the German digital marketer Ligatus and the Canadian dating site Plentyoffish. (A list of all the websites on which researchers found the code is here).
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In a world of always-on connectivity, Internet of Everything and Internet of Things, where most devices now have an embedded computer, the risk posed by hackers tampering with them cannot be overlooked.
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During a nearly 90-minute discussion at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference (HOPE) on Saturday, in which Snowden participated via Google Hangouts, the whistle blower said he wants to work on tools that help people better protect their privacy.
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apt-transport-tor 0.2.1 should now be on your preferred unstable Debian mirror. It will let you download Debian packages through Tor.
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Why is it critical to have a close watch and what is so outrageous about this agenda?
“data flows… including financial services”. Please learn more about the SWIFT scandal to get an idea why this is unacceptable.
Why would European governments consider “requirements to use local network infrastructure or local servers”? Why wouldn’t Estonia like its egovernment services to be hosted in Russia?
The data flow debate relates to the recent surveillance scandals, and the post-snowden world. Having your data on European servers won’t help against criminal actions of partner countries. What it does achieve is data governance by your jurisdiction and preventing undesirable lawful access of a foreign government – as in the SWIFT scandal. There the US government dared to spy on the most toxic European data you could imagine, financial and stock market transaction data collected by the SWIFT processing agency, data mirrored on US servers. The US President B. Obama openly discussed the data flow topic with the Export Council and we hear from IBM that thankfully “Froman got it tied down in the trade agreement.”, that is TTIP.
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But don’t panic – Apple’s backdoor is not totally open for all, guru tells us
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A SECURITY EXPERT has bravely revealed that Apple has purposefully included backdoors in its iOS mobile operating system that could be exploited by law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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Using the hidden services that bypass the encrypted backup protection don’t require the use of developer mode and many of them have been present in iOS for five years. Zdziarski, who designed many of the initial methods for acquiring forensic data from iOS devices, said there also is a packet capture tool present on every iOS device that has the ability to dump all of the inbound and outbound HTTP data and runs in the background without and notification to the user.
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Snowden is not sitting silently on the sidelines in Russia and continues to participate actively in the debate about privacy in the modern world.
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When it comes to same-sex marriage, last year’s Supreme Court ruling that the federal government must recognize legally married gay and lesbian couples has led to a string of lower court decisions striking down state marriage bans.
It’s “the gift that keeps on giving,” says Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer who won the case on behalf of New York widow Edie Windsor.
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However, in a landmark decision by Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in a case filed by Freedom Watch Inc. for me and my clients Charles and Mary Strange, the court found that the NSA’s surveillance programs have proven essentially worthless in combating terrorism. Instead, their “almost Orwellian” tyranny over American citizens appears to be the real purpose, at least in practice. The Stranges had a family member, an NSA cryptologist, who, among 30 others, died at the hands of Taliban terrorists in a mysteriously unexplained helicopter crash with 17 Navy SEALs shortly after the capture and assassination of Osama bin Laden.
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Civil Rights
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A Libyan dissident is to appeal to three of Britain’s most senior judges to reject a high court ruling in favour of the government that he cannot sue MI6 for its role in abducting and secretly flying him to Tripoli, where Muammar Gaddafi’s security forces tortured him.
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A former Libyan Islamist commander who says he suffered years of torture by Muammar Gaddafi’s henchmen after British and US spies handed him over to Libya appealed on Monday against a ruling blocking legal action against the British government.
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Government is seeking ‘impunity from its own courts,’ says lawyer of victims.
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Ahead of a legal intervention by Amnesty International and others in the rendition case of the Libyan national Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, Amnesty International is warning that the UK government is “scraping the legal barrel” with its arguments in the case.
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Today’s demonstration of post-brutality scrambling is brought to you by the California Highway Patrol. First off, we’ll take a look at the “alleged” brutality, which looks incredibly similar to non-alleged brutality. (Apologies for the watermark the person who recorded the incident slapped all over the video.)
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The official in the United Kingdom, who is tasked with reviewing terrorism legislation, has released a report warning about the breadth of terrorism laws and how they could be used to criminalize journalism.
Citing the case of David Miranda, journalist Glenn Greenwald’s husband who was detained at Heathrow Airport under the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000 last year, David Anderson QC recommended changing the definition of terrorism in the law.
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The definition of terrorism in current UK law is too broad and should be narrowed to avoid “catching” journalists, bloggers and hate criminals, a top lawyer said today.
David Anderson QC, who is Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, argued during an interview on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme this morning that the word “influence” should be removed to prevent the wrong type of offences being caught up in terror law.
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UK anti-terrorism laws are so broadly drawn they are in danger of catching journalists, bloggers, and those it was “never intended to cover” the counter-terrorism watchdog has said.
David Anderson QC has called on the Government to revisit its definition of terrorism in his annual report published today as the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.
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When news recently broke of NSA spying on prominent Muslim Americans, most people were far from shocked. If anything, it was expected. After all, these individuals have Muslim names, either advocate on behalf of the Muslim community or speak on Islamic-related issues, and have some sort of connection to ‘that part of the world.’ Unlike previous NSA spying revelations that generated extreme outrage across the board, this latest development appeared to impact only, you know, ‘those people’ (though the larger implications are much greater).
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Criminal prosecution is likely to be expanded on Americans involved in recruiting and supervising activities of German officials spying for the US intelligence, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas told Welt am Sonntag.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Microsoft was tying up PC companies as partners, making it a condition of receiving Windows that they also swallow IE. If it owned the PC makers, it owned the web, or so Microsoft believed. Netscape was trying to figure out how to get around Microsoft while also attempting to become more than “just” a browser-maker.
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If you think your company has nothing to fear from ‘slow lane’ Internet, think again
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Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.
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The net neutrality debate has been underway for many years now, but more recently it has entered the mainstream. The main arguments in favor of preserving net neutrality — that it creates a level playing field that allows innovation, and prevents deep-pocketed incumbents from using their financial resources to relegate less well-endowed startups to the Internet slow lane — are familiar enough. But PC World points us to a fascinating paper by Sascha D. Meinrath and Sean Vitka in the journal “Critical Studies in Media Communication” that offers a new and extremely important reason for defending net neutrality: that without it, it will be hard to fight back against blanket surveillance through the wider use of encryption (pdf).
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DRM
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While cloud computing platforms make headlines every day now, including leading open source platforms such as OpenStack, it’s still true that cloud computing is a young science. There is a premium on reliable, mature tools for the cloud, and a real need for tools that can usher in better security. Also, it’s true that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The “Digital Economy Act lite” programme of sending spam “education” emails announced under a voluntary agreement between copyright industry bodies and ISPs is to roll out.
The four big ISPs – BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and Sky – are set to surveil their customers and send out emails under the scheme called Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (Vcap).
The controversial Digital Economy Act, forced through in the dying days of the Gordon Brown Government set out a similar scheme, but it has not been enacted.
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One of the most common (and false) arguments against sharing culture is that “the artist has a right to get paid when you enjoy something”. This is totally false.
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