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06.18.15

Links 18/6/2015: Red Hat Results Imminent, Tor Browser 4.5.2

Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Small is beautiful – free software column

    Free software, like the web, is promoted by corporations when it is useful to their profit margins. Many disparate organisations collaborate and contribute to GNU/Linux and other free and open source software projects, because they are beneficial to their bottom lines and seldom for altruistic reasons. Contributing to GNU/Linux reduces development costs and encourages open standards. open standards are useful because they reduce barriers to entry for technologies that were ‘not invented here’.

  • Server

    • Mi Amiga: One Michigan School District’s Three-Decades-Old Hero Computer That Still Manages HVAC Today

      As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve worked most of my professional life in the tech industry, specifically working for a managed services consultant in Chicago. One of the things we do is advise our clients on hardware rotations. Client machines, like desktops and laptops for instance, are typically recommended on a four to five year rotation. Because, let’s face it, a five year old computer is either functionally worthless or is probably hanging onto a single strand of twisted copper before crapping out entirely, amirite?

    • 1980s computer controls GRPS heat and AC

      A 30-year-old computer that has run day and night for decades is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools.

    • 5 steps to becoming a quality Docker contributor

      But getting started on a new codebase can be daunting. Docker has many, many lines of code. Fixing even the smallest issue can require reading through a lot of that code and understanding how the pieces all fit together.

    • LUCI4HPC

      The software described in this article is designed for a Beowulf-style cluster. Such a cluster commonly consists of consumer-grade machines and allows for parallel high-performance computing. The system is managed by a head node and accessed via a login node. The actual work is performed by multiple compute nodes. The individual nodes are connected through an internal network. The head and login node need an additional external network connection, while the compute nodes often use an additional high-throughput, low-latency connection between them, such as InfiniBand.

    • Linbit Launches New Synchronous Server Storage Software

      DRBD9 provides enterprise Linux users with synchronous server storage replication including support for native remote direct memory access, or RDMA, and OpenStack integration.

    • Linode introduces KVM to help it move away from Xen

      The upgrade to KVM is very easy to carry out, on a Xen Linode’s dashboard, there is a link on the right sidebar titled ‘Upgrade to KVM’. Once you do the upgrade you should then be switched over to KVM. If you want to set your account to default to KVM for new Linodes just go to your Account Settings and set the ‘Hypervisor Preference’ to KVM, any new Linodes you create will be KVM. On a 1GB instance, one user reported the downtime to be between 8-9 minutes while he switched to KVM.

  • Kernel Space

    • The Creator of Linux on the Future Without Him

      The conversation, combined with Linus Torvalds’s aggression behind the wheel, makes this sunny afternoon drive suddenly feel all too serious. Torvalds—the grand ruler of all geeks—does not drive like a geek. He plasters his foot to the pedal of a yellow Mercedes convertible with its “DAD OF 3” license plate as we rip around a corner on a Portland, Ore., freeway. My body smears across the passenger door. “There is no concrete plan of action if I die,” Torvalds yells to me over the wind and the traffic. “But that would have been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago. People would have panicked. Now I think they’d work everything out in a couple of months.”

    • Linus Torvalds: Linux Kernel Would Be OK in a Couple of Months If I Die
    • Linux Kernel 3.12.44 LTS Brings Many Updated Drivers, EXT4 and x86 Improvements

      On June 16, Jiri Slaby informed us about the immediate availability for download of the forty-fourth maintenance release of the Linux 3.12 kernel, a long-term supported (LTS) branch.

    • The Linux Foundation opens scholarship program — will you apply?

      Are you happy with your life? Maybe you are stuck in a dead-end job. Maybe you are unemployed and living on your mom’s couch. Hell, maybe you just need to enhance your skills for your current job. You know you need to make a change, but you keep putting it off. What is a smart path to take?

      Linux. Yes, careers involved in Linux are in high demand. Getting certified in some way is not only personally rewarding, but also improves your employment potential by bolstering your resume. If you do not have money for such a thing, I have good news — you could get a scholarship from The Linux Foundation. In other words, you can get a free education and certification. Will you improve your life by applying?

    • Learn KVM and Linux App Development with Linux Foundation Instructor Mike Day

      Linux Foundation instructor Mike Day is an expert in Linux hypervisors and led IBM’s work on the Xen and KVM hypervisors as a Distinguished Engineer. But he came upon his calling almost by accident, having been “thrown into the project with colleagues who had worked on hypervisors for more than a decade,” he said.

      “It was a real challenge for me but not too long after that I became viewed as an expert on the subject,” said Day, who now teaches KVM and Linux developer courses for Linux Foundation Training.

    • diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

      When you run a program as setuid, it runs with all the permissions of that user. And if the program spawns new processes, they inherit the same permissions. Not so with filesystem capabilities. When you run a program with a set of capabilities, the processes it spawns do not have those capabilities by default; they must be given explicitly.

    • Linux Foundation Beefs Up Scholarship Program

      The Linux Foundation Training Scholarship Program provides funds to applicants who otherwise would not have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses. It attempts to help developers, IT professionals, and promising students to build Linux careers and contribute to shaping the future of the operating system and the enterprise.

    • Linux Foundation Calls for Submissions for Expanded 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program
    • 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program is now Accepting Applications
    • Who’s Afraid of Systemd?

      Last year, the free software community was full of debates about systemd, the system manager that replaces init, the process that boots a Linux system. Now that systemd is uneventfully running the latest releases of major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, you might imagine that opposition to it is melting away — but you’d be wrong.

      Instead, casual references on social media show that the rumors are as common as ever. And while you don’t hear much recently about Devuan, the anti-systemd fork of Debian, it is still trudging towards a release while making the same arguments as ever.

      The situation is not unique. Some free software circles have always seemed to require an enemy. For instance, in the first decade of the millennium, it was Mono, an adaptation for Linux of Microsoft’s .Net. Hundreds of thousands of words were written denouncing Mono, yet today it attracts no attention, although it is still available in repositories.

      Perhaps, too, free software users are becoming conservative as they age, as indicated by the user revolts against GNOME and KDE. Yet no precedent comes close to the viciousness of attacks on systemd, or had so little foundation, either.

    • Understanding Systemd
    • What will be the future of Linux without Linus?

      Linus: I’ve never been much of a visionary — instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short time frame of ‘issues in the next few months’. I’m a big believer in that the ‘details’ matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own.

    • [Reposted] The creator of Linux OS is calm about the future
    • If I get hit by a bus, Linux will go on just fine says Linus Torvalds

      Just a few days after asking the Linux community to let him take a break, Linus Torvalds has said the project he kicked off 1991 can now get along without him.

      He was, characteristically, blunt in his recent interview with Bloomberg, saying Linux would survive his death.

    • Another angle… Linux: a future without Torvalds [reposted in Ireland]
    • Will Linux survive the death of Linus Torvalds?
    • Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him
    • Linux Top 3: Linux 4.1 delayed 1 Week, Kaos and Clonezilla Update

      Linux 4.1 is going to take a little longer than some of its predecessors, with Linus Torvalds release a rare eighth release candidate on June 14.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Cinnamon 2.6 – a Linux desktop for Windows XP refugees

      Cinnamon is best known as one of the two default desktops for Linux Mint, which is fast approaching its next major update. Mint 17.2 will include the brand new Cinnamon 2.6, just released, when delivered later this year.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME’s Music Is Getting Some Major New Features

        There is more to GNOME than just the desktop environment. GNOME is a stack of apps, and many of those applications are constantly improved and worked on. Allan Day, one of GNOME’s designers and developers, detailed some of the changes that are being made to the Music app.

      • Examining the design patterns

        I wanted to share a brief update on the Outreachy project that Gina and I are working on, where Gina is preparing for a usability test in GNOME.

        So far, we’ve been in an “information gathering” mode, where she has been learning about some of the basics of usability testing. In our next step, Gina will now start doing an analysis in preparation for a usability test.

      • Plans for GNOME’s apps

        I’ve been a bit quiet about GNOME’s applications of late. This isn’t because nothing has been happening, though – quite the opposite. We’ve been steadily working away behind the scenes, and our application designs have evolved considerably.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Further Adventures in Calculate Linux

        I’ve been experimenting in Calculate Linux lately because it offered a modern KDE without systemd or selinux installed by default, and perhaps a bit because of my nostalgia for Gentoo. Things got off to a rocky start, but after ironing out most of wrinkles and I’m finding myself right at home. I think you could too.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • Why I use Gentoo Linux (and if you develop software you should too)

        I first discovered Gentoo Linux when I left Oracle/Sun in 2010, gave up my Mac and decided to experiment with creating a mac-like desktop experience on Linux. The initial reason was the optimizations you can do to squeeze every bit of performance out of your hardware (I’d bought a cheap Lenovo laptop).

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Switching Over To GCC 5.1.1

        The current stable version of GCC 5, GCC 5.1.1, has been added to openSUSE Factory and in turn will see all packages rebuilt against this new compiler and this will become the default compiler in the openSUSE Tumbleweed snashot due out later in the week.

      • Default compiler for Tumbleweed updating to GCC 5

        The newest GNU Compiler Collection was checked in today to openSUSE Factory, which is the rolling development code base for Tumbleweed, as the default compiler, so all packages will be rebuilt against GCC 5 and the next Tumbleweed snapshot will include GCC 5.1.1

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux Switches to GCC 5 as Default Compiler

        On June 16, the openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, had the great pleasure of announcing that the Tumbleweed version of the openSUSE Linux operating system has moved to the 5.x branch of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection).

    • Red Hat Family

      • Minio Lands $3.3M Seed Round To Build Out Open Source Storage Project

        When venture capitalists open their wallets and hand out $3.3 million for a seed round, you have to figure the new company has some industry veterans with startup experience, and such is the case with Minio, an open source cloud storage product being built by veterans from Gluster.

        Gluster was purchased by Red Hat in 2011 for $136 million.

      • Ravello Empowers Open Source Community With Free Smart Labs on AWS and Google for Red Hat Certified Engineers
      • Rackspace’s Carl Thompson Named 2015 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year
      • Red Hat (RHT) to Release Quarterly Earnings on Thursday
      • Rite Aid, Red Hat, Smith & Wesson earnings in focus
      • Red Hat Earnings Expected to Rise

        Optimism surrounds Red Hat, as it gets ready to report its first quarter results on Thursday, June 18, 2015. Analysts are expecting the company to book a profit of 27 cents a share, up from 24 cents a year ago.

      • Is Red Hat’s (RHT) Q1 Earnings Likely to Surprise Estimates?

        Red Hat reported strong results in the last quarter with both earnings and revenues surpassing the respective Zacks Consensus Estimate.

      • Fedora

        • antiX, Debian, Fedora, and More

          The Fedora Wiki got a new entry last month that makes one wonder if Fedora really wants users at all. If folks complain it’s because they didn’t read the information provided or don’t understand what they’re reading. Users are too dumb or lazy to file bugs reports and would rather complain than test “every possible feature and/or configuration switch.” Hardly anyone bothers to read the source code or its license and, if they do, they’d rather complain than write the code to fix whatever their complaint is themselves. If they do write the fix and it’s not committed, then they’ll complain rather than learn from it. Folks are going to complain, so just ignore it.

        • Fedora 22 review – Fiascoed

          And so, without any application testing, any customization, desktop effects, resource usage testing, and some other bits and pieces, we must bring the Fedora Twenty-Two KDE review to a halt. Because the distro is dead, and it can’t cope with some simple updates and installs. Really a shame. It reminds me that Fedora is a testbed. But it used to be quite stable recently, and now, we’re back in 2010.

          I really am disappointed. I wish I had some better news for you, but this release simply doesn’t cut it. It’s riddled with bugs, even when it works, and then it stops working. Slow, laggy, average hardware compatibility including Nvidia problems, a less than ideal presentation layer, all in all, a rushed edition with no soul or passion. You can’t fake those. Grade we must, and so Fedora 22 gets a very feeble 2/10. See you around.

        • A Quick Look At Fedora 22 “XFCE” | What’s New
        • Fedora 22 – workstation – Gnome – Do not disturb

          Fedora 22 comes with the newest version of Gnome – 3.16. You’ve probably heard about this already. The new version brought quite a few shiny changes, a major one of which was a brand new notification area. You don’t have a notification bar at the bottom any more, your notifications now come up at the top with the calendar. It’s really neat! More information can be found in the release notes here.

        • Testing rawhide apps using xdg-app

          An important aspect of xdg-app is application sandboxing, which will require application changes to use sandbox-specific APIs. However, xdg-app is also a good way to deploy and run non-sandboxed (or partially sandboxed) regular applications.

        • Contribute to pkgdb2

          Pkgdb2 is the application managing in Fedora, who is allowed to access which git repo containing the files necessary to build the packages present in the distribution.

        • IRC on Hubs

          Still, since the idea for hubs is also to help new contributors get integrated more smoothly into the Fedora community, an effective way to message people did seem like it would be valuable. Since the team/project hubs will have the ability to include an embedded IRC channel, using IRC to send private messages seemed logical. But Fedora Hubs is not an IRC client – it will use IRC to send private messages between users and to enable the channel discussions, but every channel must be directly associated with a hub and the messaging interface will only support messages between Hubs users, not to anyone external. This is an active design choice that Mo and I made, based on the concept of keeping the hub as the central organizing principle of this app in order to help fend off scope creep.

    • Debian Family

      • Chrome, Debian Linux, and the secret binary blob download riddle

        “Anyway, I haven’t said that banning such software from Debian would be the only solution… but at least these incidents come far too frequent recently, so apparently something needs to be done at Debian level to pro-actively prevent future cases/compromises like this.”

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Portable wireless speakers run Linux on a Raspberry Pi

      Axiom’s portable wireless 150W speakers stream music from the web, mobile devices, or USB, and include a WiFi access point and a 9- or 18-hour battery pack.

      Speaker and home theater manufacturer Axiom has found Kickstarter success with its AxiomAir wireless speaker system, which has surpassed its $75,000 goal to reach $121,000, with 25 days to go before the July 12 deadline. Two dozen $475 packages were still available at publication time. Other packages go for $497, said to be more than $300 under the retail price, or $950 for a two-pack, among other discounted combo packs.

    • PowerPC based IoT gateway COM ships with Linux BSP

      The rugged Arcturus “uCP1020″ COM for IoT/M2M gateways runs Linux on Freescale’s QorIQ P1020, with up to up to 64GB eMMC, three GbE ports, and a baseboard.

    • Official Raspberry Pi Case starts at $8.59

      The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the first official case for the Raspberry Pi, which exposes all ports and features a clip-on lid for adding HATs.

      A variety of third-party enclosures for the Raspberry Pi have become available over the years, but the vendors no doubt realized the Raspberry Pi Foundation would eventually build one of their own. The time has come, with the unveiling of the “Official Raspberry Pi Case.”

    • Linux-based Sierra Wireless IoT module has 3G or 4G radios

      Sierra Wireless unveiled a Cortex-A5 based “AirPrime WP” IoT module with 3G or 4G radios, plus a modularly expandable, open-source “mangOH” carrier board.

      We’ve seen plenty of low-power, Linux-ready Internet of Things computer-on-modules, mostly based on Qualcomm’s MIPS-based Atheros SoCs. The Linux-based AirPrime WP modules from Sierra Wireless instead tackle IoT and industrial M2M with integrated cellular radios. A 3G HSPA+/EDGE/GPRS/GSM version called WP75xx is due in the fourth quarter while a WP8548 version that adds 4G LTE is due in Q1 2016.

    • Finally, an official Raspberry Pi case has been released!

      Rejoice Pi fans! The team behind Raspberry Pi have announced an official case for the Pi 2 Model B and the Pi Model B+. The case was announced today on their blog and is available from all the main Pi retailers for a cheap £6 (which works out to about $9).

    • Raspberry Pi Open Source Wireless Speakers Hit Kickstarter (video)

      Axiom Audio has this week unveiled a new range of wireless speakers they have added to their existing range that are powered by the awesome Raspberry Pi mini PC.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Stockmann to sell Academic Bookstore

    Stockmann announced on Thursday a plan to sell off its Academic Bookstores to Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier Books. In accordance with the newly inked letter of intent to sell, the bookstore will continue to operate in connection with the department store chain after the acquisition.

  • UK Anti-Doping agency to issue statement over Mo Farah

    UK Anti-Doping are to issue a statement on Thursday, which will respond to newspaper claims that Mo Farah missed two drugs tests leading up to the London Olympic Games in 2012.

    A report in the Daily Mail says the double Olympic champion missed one test in 2010 and another after joining forces with coach Alberto Salazar the following year.

    Salazar, who manages the Nike Project in Oregon, is currently under suspicion after a TV documentary made allegations against the 56-year-old with regards to doping abuse.

  • Science

    • The 100-year-old scientist who pushed the FDA to ban artificial trans fat

      No one was more pleased by the Food and Drug Administration’s decision Tuesday to eliminate artificial trans fats from the U.S. food supply than Fred Kummerow, a 100-year-old University of Illinois professor who has warned about the dangers of the artery-clogging substance for nearly six decades.

      “Science won out,” Kummerow, who sued the FDA in 2013 for not acting sooner, said in an interview from his home in Illinois. “It’s very important that we don’t have this in our diet.”

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • US Navy Soliciting Zero Days

      The National Security Agency may find and purchase zero days, but that doesn’t mean it’s sharing its hoard with other government agencies such as the U.S. Navy, which apparently is in the market for some unpatched, undisclosed vulnerabilities of its own.

      A request for proposal posted last Wednesday—which has since been taken down—to FedBizOpps.gov was a solicitation by the Naval Supply Systems Command seeking a CMMI-3 (Capability Maturity Model Integration) contractor capable of producing operational exploits that integrate with commonly used exploitation frameworks, the RFP said.

    • Tuesday’s security advisories
    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Your data is at risk if you are running iOS or Mac OS X

      Six university researchers from Indiana University have revealed that Apple’s password manager, Keychain, is susceptible to hackers. If exploited, the flaw would give a hacker access to the users passwords. The really worrying thing here is that Apple has known about the issue for months and still hasn’t managed to issue a fix.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Superabundant bird decline mirrors Passenger Pigeon

      One of Eurasia’s most abundant bird species has declined by 90% and retracted its range by 5000 km since 1980 a new study shows.

      Yellow-breasted Bunting Emberiza aureola was once distributed over vast areas of Europe and Asia, its range stretching from Finland to Japan. New research published in the journal Conservation Biology suggest that unsustainable rates of hunting, principally in China, have contributed to not only a catastrophic loss of numbers but also in the areas in which it can now be found.

  • Finance

    • Jeb Bush: Next President Should Privatize Social Security

      Jeb Bush thinks the next president will need to privatize Social Security, he said at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday — acknowledging that his brother attempted to do so and failed. It’s a position sure to be attacked by both Republicans and Democrats.

    • RBS payment failure could last days

      About 600,000 payments that failed to enter the accounts of RBS customers overnight may not be completed until the end of the week, the bank has said.

      Payments of wages, tax credits and disability living allowance were among those that failed to be credited to accounts.

      RBS initially said some payments were “missing”, but it had now identified and fixed the underlying problem.

      Delayed payments would be processed “no later than Saturday”, it said.

    • Why Obama’s Trade Deal May Come Back From the Dead | Interview with Richard Wolff

      Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace from Watching the Hawks interview Professor Richard Wolff about the House vote to reject the Trans Pacific Partnership and where this massive trade deal will go from here.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Truth Avoided by Mainstream Media Liars

      So here is a challenge to the Sunday Times, BBC and rest of the mainstream media.

    • Typography Is Why Jeb’s Logo Is Worse Than a Piece of Crap

      Jeb! is fine, as far as logos go. It’s uninspired, sure, but it gets the job done. But as a piece of typography, it’s crap.

    • British attack on Edward Snowden foiled by real journalists

      I woke up on Sunday and checked the news as I usually do. “British spies ‘moved after Snowden files read’” exclaimed the BBC, probably hoping to whip up anti-Russian/Chinese sentiment, immediately I rolled my eyes, surely revealing mass spying to the billions being spied upon is more important than a few spies having to be moved.

      After reading the headline, I was left puzzling, I was sure that Snowden handed everything he had over to journalists. A day later my understanding of the issue had been confirmed, Glenn Greenwald said that Snowden doesn’t have access to the documents anymore and hasn’t been able access them since they were handed over in 2013.

  • Censorship

    • European Court strikes serious blow to free speech online

      The Estonian courts had found that Delfi AS, the news portal, should have prevented clearly unlawful comments from being published in the portal’s comments section, even though Delfi had taken down the offensive comments as soon as it had been notified about them. When Delfi lodged a complaint with the European Court, the Court concluded unanimously that the domestic courts’ findings were a justified and proportionate restriction on Delfi’s right to freedom of expression.

    • Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments

      In a surprise decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg has ruled that the Estonian news site Delfi may be held responsible for anonymous and allegedly defamatory comments from its readers. As the digital rights organisation Access notes, this goes against the European Union’s e-commerce directive, which “guarantees liability protection for intermediaries that implement notice-and-takedown mechanisms on third-party comments.” As such, Peter Micek, Senior Policy Counsel at Access, says the ECHR judgment has “dramatically shifted the internet away from the free expression and privacy protections that created the internet as we know it.”

    • UAE man faces $68,000 fine for swearing on WhatsApp

      Swearing at someone via WhatsApp in the UAE could land you with a $68,000 (£45,000) fine, under a new law.

      Those living in the country could also face jail, and foreigners deportation.

      The new law was brought to light when the UAE’s supreme court ordered the retrial of a man fined $800 for the offence, arguing the fine was too lenient.

  • Privacy

    • Belgian privacy watchdog sues Facebook ahead of summit

      Privacy will be on the docket at a Belgian court on Thursday — and Facebook will be the defendant.

      The Belgian Privacy Commission has sued Facebook and will take the world’s largest social network to court on Thursday for allegedly violating privacy laws both in Belgium and in the European Union. Speaking to Belgian news outlet DeMorgen, the country’s chairman of the Privacy Commission William Debeuckelaere said that Facebook’s behavior “cannot be tolerated.” He added that he hopes the court will force Facebook to change its privacy practices.

    • Adjusting to a World Where No Data Is Secure

      Imagine a piece of information that would be useful to store digitally if it could be kept secure, but that would do more harm than good if it ever fell into the wrong hands. With Friday’s news that “hackers have breached a database containing a wealth of sensitive information from federal employees’ security background checks,” just that sort of fraught information has arguably been exposed to hackers.

    • UK Police Carry Out Facial Scans Of 100,000 People Attending Music Festival

      The ostensible reason for this massive surveillance is to catch people who steal mobile phones, but that really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The database that the 100,000 faces were matched against was “custody images from across Europe”, but it seems improbable that criminals would travel all the way across Europe to this particular music festival in the hope that they might be able to relieve a few spaced-out musicgoers of their phones. Nor was general criminal behavior an issue: apparently, last year there were just 91 arrests with 120,000 people attending. It’s more likely that the facial scans were born of a desire to see if the hardware and software were capable of capturing such large numbers and comparing them with the pan-European database.

      [...]

      It’s easy to see this kind of technology being rolled out ever-more widely. First at other music festivals — purely for safety reasons, you understand — and then, once people have started to get used to that, elsewhere too. Eventually, of course, it will become routine to scan everyone, everywhere, all the time, offering a perfect analog complement to the non-stop, pervasive surveillance that we now know takes place in the digital world.

    • Strong Encryption and Anonymity Are The Guardians Of Free Expression

      EFF has signed on to a joint civil society statement welcoming the groundbreaking report supporting encryption and anonymity by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye. The Special Rapporteur will present the report on June 17th at the 29th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

    • Bruce Schneier: Sure, Russia & China Probably Have The Snowden Docs… But Not Because Of Snowden

      Given all the fuss over the ridiculous article this past weekend — which has since been confirmed as government stenography rather than actual reporting — security maven Bruce Schneier has written up an article making a key point. It’s quite likely that the underlying point in the article — that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have access to the documents that Snowden originally handed over to reporters — is absolutely true. But, much more importantly, he argues, the reason likely has almost nothing to do with Snowden.

    • China and Russia Almost Definitely Have the Snowden Docs

      Last weekend, the Sunday Times published a front-page story (full text here), citing anonymous British sources claiming that both China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents. It’s a terrible article, filled with factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims about both Snowden’s actions and the damage caused by his disclosure, and others have thoroughly refuted the story. I want to focus on the actual question: Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents?

      I believe the answer is certainly yes, but that it’s almost certainly not Snowden’s fault.

    • Government faces call to review ‘self-destruct’ email policy

      The Government is facing calls to review a little-known policy under which Downing Street emails “self-destruct” after three months.

      Any messages which David Cameron’s aides fail to save and store are automatically deleted – a practice that campaigners claim is designed to thwart later freedom of information requests.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Amazon Bans Kodi/XBMC App Over Piracy Concerns

      Amazon has removed the popular media center Kodi from the app store claiming it facilitates piracy. The software, formerly known as XBMC, doesn’t link to or host any infringing content, but third-party add-ons are giving the software a bad reputation.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Big changes coming to IKEAHackers

        Some months ago I received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that my site IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights. In that letter they asked that I agree to voluntarily transfer the domain name IKEAhackers.net to them, failing which they reserve the right to take any legal action it deems necessary against me.

    • Copyrights

      • BMI song lawsuits make rounds in Jersey bars

        That mistake could cost this restaurant to the tune of several thousands of dollars for each of the four songs that Broadcast Music Inc. claims the venue played one Friday night in May 2014.

      • Publisher Strips Hergé’s Heirs of Millions of Dollars in Rights to Tintin Drawings

        The heirs of Hergé, the creator of the popular Tintin comics, were dealt a crushing blow in Dutch court this week. In a shocking decision, the court ruled that they do not have the rights to the iconic boy reporter character.

        The ruling hinged on the unexpected production of a long-lost 1942 document in which Hergé, whose real name was Georges Remi, transferred the Tintin rights to his publisher, Casterman.

      • MPAA: Google Assists and Profits from Piracy

        The MPAA is refusing to hand over documentation discussing the legal case it helped Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood build against Google. According to the Hollywood group, Google is waging a PR war against Hollywood while facilitating and profiting from piracy.

      • Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm Loses Hacking Appeal

        Following the largest case of its type in Denmark, in October 2014 Gottfrid Svartholm was found guilty of hacking IT company CSC. The Pirate Bay founder immediately appealed but after a technically complex hearing a jury at the High Court today unanimously upheld the decision of the lower court.

      • Neil Young, Donald Trump Spar Over ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ Use

        When Neil Young released his anthemic track “Rockin’ in the Free World” off 1989′s Freedom, the song quickly became a rallying cry in post-Reagan America for “American values” and the fall of communism. With George H. W. Bush still settling into his presidency, Young criticized the president’s ideology, specifically referencing Bush’s “thousand points of light” comment and blasting Republicans for what he felt was a disregard toward the lower-class.

06.16.15

Links 16/6/2015: Cinnamon 2.6 Released, Chromixium OS 1.0 Review

Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is there a civic hacker in you?

    There is a civic hacker in you! He or she is in there… I promise! Today, technology has evolved into a perfect storm of open source tools, code, social networks, and lots of data. Civic technologists thrive on all of these getting together with like-minded hackers and turning all these sources into useful applications, websites and visualizations.

  • DevOps is 90% change and 10% technology

    Jen Krieger used her first computer in the early 80s and maintained a strong interest in technology ever since. She started her career as a financial analyst and eventually moved into IT where she gained expertise in software development and releases. Jen has worked with many development methods, from waterfall to Agile.

  • Open Source Initiative & LibreItalia Partner to Raise Adoption of Free and Open Source Software

    The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) announced today that Associazione LibreItalia, a non-profit organization working to reduce the digital divide and tear down barriers to digital citizenship throughout Italy, has joined the internationally recognized steward of open source as an Affiliate Member.

  • Struggling With Facebook Organic Reach Decline? Try This New Open Source Social Networking App

    If you have been burnt by the decline of the organic reach of your Facebook pages, you may consider trying something different, although of course it’s hard to replace a website that has become such an integral part of our lives.

  • Events

    • Deutsche OpenStack Tage 2015

      The presentations are conducted in German, so it’s mainly interesting for German people. There are several OpenStack and also Ceph related talks on the schedule, including a work shop on Ceph. As far as I know there are still tickets available for the conference.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Why open source cloud is ready for prime time

      With open-source cloud endeavours, it’s not so much a question of maturity as it is figuring out which offering is the best fit for your organisation. As Amanda McPherson, chief marketing officer at the Linux Foundation points out, “Open source and collaboration are clearly advancing the cloud faster than ever before. Just consider the many OpenStack distributions and ecosystem emerging around Linux containers that didn’t even exist a year ago. Yet, as the open source cloud evolves so quickly, it can sometimes be difficult for enterprises to identify the technologies that best fit their needs.”

    • Nutanix: The Move From a VM to a Container is Unnatural, a Challenge of New Platforms

      If a new stack is to take root in the modern enterprise, then something has to give. Not only must an old infrastructure make room for a new way of work, but the new stack must open itself up to the prospect of interoperability and co-existence with something that, at least in our frame of reference, is no longer new.

    • Mesosphere and Typesafe Align Behind New Spark Distribition for DCOS
    • How to have a successful OpenStack project

      It’s no secret that OpenStack is becoming the de-facto standard for private cloud…

    • Datto SIRIS customers can now use ownCloud

      Datto, a company that offers data backup and recovery solutions are teaming up ownCloud which will allow Datto customers to securely sync and share enterprise files. Initially the ownCloud secure file sync and share capabilities will come to Datto’s SIRIS product line.

    • What you missed in Big Data: Open-source power

      The central role of the open-source movement in analytics rose back to the surface last week after LinkedIn Inc. released another one of its internally-developed data crunching technologies under a free license to help promote emerging use cases. And in particular, performing real-time business intelligence at the kind of scale where the traditional databases typically used for the task fall short.

  • Databases

    • Open Source No Threat To Oracle Corporation, Deutsche Bank Says

      Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) won’t experience a risk any time soon from open-source software vendors, an analyst said Monday.

      Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead said vendors, like privately held MongoDB Inc., “don’t represent a near-term threat” to Oracle, which is set to post results Wednesday.

    • How open source is eating into Oracle et al revenue pie

      Bloomberg recently reported how Oracle is heavily leaning on its existing customers as it sees a slump in new product sales. Not just the smaller companies, big players are also moving away from fancy products with big price tags and choosing open source software. As open source becomes increasingly reliable, the threat looms large for Oracle and the likes. The report shows that Oracle’s sales of new software licenses have declined for seven straight quarters compared with the same period a year earlier. It heavily relies on revenue from update and maintenance contracts more than from new business.

  • Licensing

    • Why Greet Apple’s Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?

      Apple announced last week that its Swift programming language — a currently fully proprietary software successor to Objective C — will probably be partially released under an OSI-approved license eventually. Apple explicitly stated though that such released software will not be copylefted. (Apple’s pathological hatred of copyleft is reasonably well documented.) Apple’s announcement remained completely silent on patents, and we should expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent grant. (I’ve explained at great length in the past why software patents are a particularly dangerous threat to programming language infrastructure.)

    • I Do Not Agree To Your Terms

      Let me get this straight, Apple: you send me an e-mail outlining the terms under which you will redistribute my content, and you will just assume that I agree to your terms unless I opt out?

      This makes typical clickwrap EULA nonsense look downright reasonable by comparison. You’re going to consider me bound to terms you just declared to me in an e-mail as long as I don’t respond? That’s completely crazy. You don’t even know if I received the e-mail!

      I’m conflicted about this. On one hand, the whole reason I have an RSS feed for this blog is to make it easy to access it in a variety of ways. The RSS feed exists precisely so it can be used by programs like this, which take the content and display it to the user. I don’t like the idea of showing ads next to my content in this situation, but I’m pretty sure I have no right to control that. If I didn’t want people taking my blog and putting it in an app and showing it to people that way, I wouldn’t have a feed.

      On the other hand, Apple isn’t just taking my feed and displaying it. They’re shoving terms and conditions at me, and unilaterally assuming that I agree to them unless I take explicit steps to respond and say that I don’t.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Best practices to build bridges between tech teams

      Robyn Bergeron makes life awesome for people participating in the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana communities. Passionate about improving ease of development and deployment of infrastructure and applications, she tirelessly advocates for end-users of open source projects, which why her current title is Operations Advocate at Elastic.

      She has been a sysadmin, program manager, and business analyst, and has an ongoing role as mother of two stellar kids. Her most recent gig was as the Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat, where she herded cats through several releases of the Linux distribution.

    • #BIO2015: Open-source biopharma R&D improves late-stage success

      The open-source model for biopharma R&D yields better results when it comes to late-stage success, according to a new report released by Deloitte at this week’s BIO convention in Philadelphia. Collaboration, even with competitors, helps usher a drug into successful development.

    • Open Data

      • High hopes for open web portal for NY State

        On March 11, 2013 New York State launched open.ny.gov which is dedicated to increasing public access to data. The state hopes to spark innovation, foster research, provide economic opportunities, and increase public participation in state government. Officials hope this increase in transparency will better inform decision making throughout the state.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • NY Times Disregards Times Staffers’ Advice On Avoiding Term “Climate Change Skeptic”

      A June 13 New York Times article about the pope’s forthcoming climate change encyclical failed to follow leading Times staffers’ recommendations by using the term “climate skeptic” to refer to those who blatantly deny established climate science.

      The Times article stated that the Vatican’s stance on climate change has “rankled … climate change skeptics, who have suggested that Francis is being misled by scientists[.]” It added that “a group of self-described climate skeptics, led by the Heartland Institute” organized a protest of the Vatican’s position in Rome, and described Marc Morano, a member of the Heartland delegation to Rome, as a former “aide to Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and climate change skeptic.”

  • Finance

    • The American middle class isn’t coming back — it’s going to die with the Baby Boomers

      It’s no secret that the American middle class has been on the ropes for a while now. The problem isn’t just a crippling recession and an economic “recovery” that has mostly gone to the richest one percent, but the larger shifting of wealth from the middle to the very top that’s taken place since the late ‘70s. Add in things like the dismantling of unions that has accelerated apace since Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic controllers, and we’ve seen the middle class more solid in places like Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia, and begin to grow in a number of nations even while it shrinks here. Economists like Thomas Piketty thinks the process is inevitable with global capitalism, while others – the equally wise Joseph Stiglitz, for example – think the balance can be restored if we can find the political will.

  • Censorship

    • ‘Sunday Times’ Files DMCA Takedown Against ‘The Intercept’

      The Rupert Murdoch controlled Sunday Times of London finds itself embroiled in controversy today, over both a front page article that appeared in the paper yesterday and a related DMCA Notice it issued against the U.S. based political website The Intercept.

      The Sunday Times article, with the headline “British Spies Betrayed to Russian and Chinese,” carries the byline of Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman and expands on a news story spreading across the UK on the pulling of some intelligence operators from Russia and China by the UK government over fears that they might have been compromised by information leaked by Edward Snowden.

      This article prompted an article published last night on The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald: “The Sunday Time’ Snowden Story is Journalism at It’s Worst — and Filled With Falsehoods.”

      The Intercept article, which attempts to detail alleged inaccuracies in The Sunday Times article, has prompted Times Newspapers Ltd., the owner of the Times, to circle the wagons and issue a DMCA takedown notice in the U.S. The notice indicates that The Times takes exception to the posting of a photograph of yesterday’s Times front page, as well the inclusion of a handful of quotes from the Times article — all of which would appear to be covered under U.S. “fair use” copyright provisions.

  • Privacy

    • Mega Publishes First Transparency Report

      After 2.5 years of operations the Mega cloud storage service has published its first transparency report. Aimed at inspiring confidence in how the company deals with complaints and protects privacy, the document reveals that Mega takes content down faster than Google and a maximum of 0.165% of users have been suspended.

    • The Pulitzer Prize In Bullshit FUD Reporting Goes To… The Sunday Times For Its ‘Snowden Expose’

      None of it was true, but it was part of a concerted effort by administration officials to smear Ellsberg as a “Soviet spy” and a “traitor” when all he really did was blow the whistle on things by sharing documents with reporters.

      Does that sound familiar? Over the weekend, a big story supposedly broke in the UK’s the Sunday Times, citing anonymous UK officials arguing that the Russians and Chinese got access to all the Snowden documents and it had created all sorts of issues, including forcing the UK to remove undercover “agents” from Russia. That story is behind a paywall, but plenty of people have made the text available if you’d like to read the whole thing.

      There are all sorts of problems with the report that make it not just difficult to take seriously, but which actually raise a lot more questions about what kind of “reporting” the Sunday Times actually does. It’s also worth noting that this particular story comes out just about a week or so after Jason Leopold revealed some of the details of the secret plan to discredit Snowden that was hatched in DC. Even so, the journalism here is beyond shoddy, getting key facts flat out incorrect, allowing key sources to remain anonymous for no reason, and not appearing to raise any questions about the significant holes in the story.

    • Reporter Who Wrote Sunday Times ‘Snowden’ Propaganda Admits That He’s Just Writing What UK Gov’t Told Him

      So we’ve already written about the massive problems with the Sunday Times’ big report claiming that the Russians and Chinese had “cracked” the encryption on the Snowden files (or possibly just been handed those files by Snowden) and that he had “blood on his hands” even though no one has come to any harm. It also argued that David Miranda was detained after he got documents from Snowden in Moscow, despite the fact that he was neither in Moscow, nor had met Snowden (a claim the article quietly deleted). That same report also claimed that UK intelligence agency MI6 had to remove “agents” from Moscow because of this leak, despite the fact that they’re not called “agents” and there’s no evidence of any actual risk. So far, the only official response from News Corp. the publisher of The Sunday Times (through a variety of subsidiaries) was to try to censor the criticism of the story with a DMCA takedown request.

      Either way, one of the journalists who wrote the story, Tom Harper, gave an interview to CNN which is quite incredible to watch. Harper just keeps repeating that he doesn’t know what’s actually true, and that he was just saying what the government told him — more or less admitting that his role here was not as a reporter, but as a propagandist or a stenographer.

    • The Police Are Scanning the Faces of Every Single Person at Download

      For most of us, festivals are a way to escape our invisible prisons of technology. “I’m not taking my iPhone to Glasto,” you mutter to your pal, “I’m going off the grid.” Who can blame you? For just a few days, you want to enjoy yourself in a priceless disconnected moment of Gaymers fuelled euphoria. Up until very recently, you could be granted that small civil liberty, but this weekend at Download, new technology is being trialled by Leicestershire Police that could change the way your carry yourself at major events.

    • I read all the small print on the internet and it made me want to die

      So why do we spend so much of our time ignoring the thousands of words of legally binding “end-user licence agreements” (EULAs, if you like) legally-binding contracts we agree to every day? Is it even possible to read the T&Cs for everything a typical person does? Is there any value in reading all this anyway?

      “The biggest lie on the internet is ‘I have read and agree to the terms and conditions’,” says security expert Mikko Hyppönen. Setting out to prove his point, Hyppönen’s company F-Secure set up a free WiFi hotspot in the heart of London’s financial district in June 2014.

    • White House’s internal encryption struggle is hypocrisy at its finest

      Ask any two people in government today their stance on encryption and you’ll almost certainly get very different (and often opposing) answers.

      As the White House pushes for greater encryption across federal sites to help better protect data flowing between a user’s computer and the federal agency, other factions in government want to weaken the encryption used by installing “backdoors” for law enforcement uses.

    • Encrypted connections coming soon for all Wikipedia readers

      As of right now, the data that moves between Wikipedia.com and most users is unencrypted, which increases the chances that someone else may be eavesdropping on you. That, however, is about to change: On Friday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it’s moving its sites toward HTTPS by default, so that all data transferred between you and its servers will be encrypted.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • From Piracy to Prosperity: Inside the New Artist’s Toolbox

        For years artists had grumbled about record labels, cable networks and distributors controlling them, restricting their artistic freedom, and taking more than their fair share of the coffers. Napster offered a new way for artists to reach their fans. While the labels and networks condemned this as “piracy,”many artists detected the first ripple of a new revolution.

      • Innocent Cox Subscribers Dragged into Piracy Lawsuit

        As the result of a rather broadly interpreted court order, many innocent Cox Communications subscribers have been dragged into a piracy lawsuit. The account holders are involved because their current IP-addresses were used to download infringing content in the past, but some weren’t even a Cox subscriber at the relevant time.

06.15.15

Links 15/6/2015: Linux Final RC, Kodi Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

06.13.15

Links 13/6/2015: IPFire 2.17 is Out, OpenMandriva Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top 5 Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Exchange

    Choosing an open source messaging server can save you money and admin time without losing out on features. Take a look at what our favorite alternatives to Microsoft Exchange have to offer.

  • Enterprises Flocking to Open Source Software

    Open source software is not a trend; it is here to stay. Debating the value of open source software (OSS) on technical considerations is a moving target. Determining the costs of implementing and using open source makes for a more stable argument. The initial software may be free, but learning, implementing, improving, connecting to, and operating it is not free. When you acquire OSS you will have more responsibilities than if you acquired closed product software from a vendor.

  • We Is Us — OPNFV & ETSI Accelerate NFV Adoption

    One question increasingly raised throughout the SDN/NFV community is, “Why are there so many groups associated with NFV/SDN?” While the answer is subject to debate, no one should be surprised that NFV and SDN are far too pervasive for any single organization and/or industry body to control.

  • How OPNFV and ETSI NFV are Advancing NFV Adoption

    ETSI was the birthplace of the NFV concept in 2012, and OPNFV was launched just two years later with many of the same members to help bring NFV from specs to reality using open source methodologies. Marc Cohn, who is an active participant in many open communities including OPNFV, OpenDaylight and the Open Networking Foundation, recently published an article for SDxCentral about how OPNFV and ETSI continue to work in tandem to accelerate NFV adoption.

  • LinkedIn Open Sources “Pinot” for Powerful Data Analytics

    When it comes to new open source tools that can make a difference, it’s wise to look to some of the tech companies that regularly open source their own in-house platforms and tools. Just witness Netflix, which has open sourced troves of useful cloud utilities. Facebook and Google have release a lot of useful tools as well.

  • Los Angeles County voting to shift from inkblots to open source

    Los Angeles County is home to a burgeoning technology industry. It boasts a roster of high-profile companies including Hulu, Snapchat, and Tinder. As of 2013, it offered more high-tech jobs than other major markets in the country, including Silicon Valley and New York City. Come election time, however, its residents cast their votes by marking inkblots on ballots that resemble Scantron forms.

  • Events

    • CFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes Hollywood

      Linux and FOSS make cameo appearances throughout the TV and film world, and lately we’ve been treated to the GNOME vs. KDE tête-à-tête in the USA Network’s pilot of a show called “Mr. Robot.” This scene piqued my interest enough to watch the pilot, which was a mix of downright scary and mildly interesting portrayals of tech types at various levels in the overt and covert tech-company hierarchy, wrapped in painfully mediocre dialog (why can’t Aaron Sorkin just write everything? Is that too much to ask?). SPOILER ALERT: The subtext of a psychologically wrecked, socially castrated hacker protagonist — the one using GNOME — is grating enough, but this stereotype is far and away eclipsed by the world domination seemingly at the fingertips of the suit using KDE, which he displayed at the end of the pilot. And we though it was Redmond seeking to take over the world when it’s really…KDE?

    • In Search of SELF in the Queen City

      Right away I ran across Brian Proffitt, whom many of you will remember from his days covering Linux and FOSS for news sites or from the time he spent at Linux Today. These days he’s all but given up journalism for real work, at Red Hat. However, the presentation he’s giving on Sunday here at SELF has a writerly ring to the title: “It’s Metaphors All the Way Down.”

      I also had a chance to talk with Deb Nicholson with the Open Invention Network, who’ll be giving a talk on Saturday about software patent litigation. Funny thing, patents were hardly mentioned in our conversation. Mainly we talked about tech corporations under the headings: the good, the bad and the pure evil. If anyone sees Clint Eastwood, tell him I have a movie idea…

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • My Frustration with Mozilla

        I recently decided to stop using Firefox as my main Browser. I’m not alone there. While browser statistics are notoriously difficult to track and hotly debated, all sources seem to point toward a downward trend for Firefox. At LQ, they actually aren’t doing too badly. In 2010 Firefox had a roughly 57% market share and so far this year they’re at 37%. LQ is a highly technical site, however, and the broader numbers don’t look quite so good. Over a similar period, for example, Wikipedia has Firefox dropping from over 30% to just over 15%. At the current rate NetMarketShare is tracking, Firefox will be in the single digits some time this year. You get the idea. So what’s going on , and what does that mean for Mozilla? And why did I choose now to make a switch personally?

      • Get bug squashing, Mozilla increases bounty payments: Linux Wrap

        Mozilla have decided to shake up the way they make payments with regard to bug squashing, in the statement they said “The bounty for valid potentially exploitable critical and high security rated client security vulnerabilities will be between $3000 and $7500 (USD) cash reward. The bounty program encourages the earliest possible reporting of these potentially exploitable bugs. A bounty may be paid for some moderate rated client security bugs at the discretion of the Bug Bounty Committee. If a bounty is paid for a moderate rated security issue, the amount will be between $500 and $2000 (US), depending on the severity of impact for the issue as determined by Bug Bounty Committee.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Building a platform

      From the very beginning ownCloud has had bigger ambitions then just being a file sync and share tool. This is apparent from the name ownCloud. Today, we have more than our documents and photos online. Our social networks and shared thoughts, our appointments and shopping lists, audio and video conversations all happen and are stored somehwere ‘in the cloud’, all connected. You can comment on a song you like for others to see or share an appointment with co workers. ownCloud means to give you a chance to bring all that back under your control!

  • Databases

    • Oracle’s rising open source problem

      While a number of factors are at play in Oracle’s stumbles, one of the most persistent is the rise of open-source databases, both relational and non-relational (NoSQL), as a recent Bloomberg article posits. As Powa Technologies CEO says, “They scale and operate extremely well, and they don’t cost anything.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • BSD

    • Securing OpenBSD From Us To You

      I’m going to talk today about signify, a tool I wrote for the OpenBSD project that cryptographically signs and verifies. This allows us to ensure that the releases we ship arrive on your computer in their original, intended form, without tampering.

    • Smallwall 1.8.2 Released To Let Monowall Live On

      This past February, Monowall announced the end of development as one of the most popular FreeBSD-based network/firewall focused distributions. For those still searching for a new replacement, Smallwall 1.8.2 has been released as the successor to Monowall 1.8.1.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Swift 2.0 is open source, ApacheCon: Big Data, and more open source news
    • 3DPrinterOS Goes Open Source for Their Cloud Client

      If you’re that kind of development monster, you can now find the source code for the cloud client here on GitHub.

      This cloud client already sports support for the majority of desktop 3D printers, and through the GNU Affero General Public License, it’s being shared.

    • Create a ‘soft’ 3D printer with the open source Circular Knitic

      While the uses for additive manufacturing at home seem to be increasing on a seemingly daily basis, there are still some items in the home that haven’t been able to be created due to the lack of suitable technologies. Among others is the ability to fabricate soft objects using digital fabrication tools.

    • Bristol creatives create an open source, portable, WiFi-enabled Kinect
    • Ouya’s potential acquisition, Steam’s Summer Sale, and more open gaming news

    • Open Data

      • The Citadel reveals open data findings

        The United Nations has proactively researched and promoted open government data across the globe for close to five years now. The Open Data Institute maintains that open data can help “unlock supply, generate demand, and create and disseminate knowledge to address local and global issues.” McKinsey & Company report that “seven sectors alone could generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value as a result of open data.”

        There is no doubt that open data is an important public policy area—one that is here to stay. Yet, for all the grand promises, scratch beneath the surface and one finds a remarkable paucity of hard empirical facts about what is and isn’t happening on the ground—in the real world of cities where most of us increasingly live and work.

      • “Dutch government hampers re-use of Chamber of Commerce data”

        The Dutch government has prepared a new Trade Register Law that will effectively forbid free re-use of the register data of its Chamber of Commerce (Kamer van Koophandel, KvK). In response to an internet consultation, Stefan de Konink, open data proponent and founder of the OpenGeo Foundation, wrote an open letter to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Security and Justice, asking the Dutch government to reconsider its new policy.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo to step down

    Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo is to step down after coming under pressure following lacklustre results.

    Mr Costolo will remain on the social network’s board after the move on July 1, the company said on Thursday night.

    Twitter’s shares jumped 7.8pc in after-hours trading following the announcement, after closing flat at $35.84 during the day.

    Mr Costolo will be replaced in the interim by co-founder Jack Dorsey, chairman of Twitter and chief executive of Square, the mobile payments company he founded in 2009. He will also continue in both those roles.

  • Twitter’s Strategy Remains Unclear Even After CEO Resigns

    Investors applauded Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s resignation. But did they jump the gun?

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto and the Subjugation of India

      After a study of GMOs over a four-year plus period, India’s multi-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended a ban on GM food crops stating they had no role in a country of small farmers. The Supreme Court appointed a technical expert committee (TEC), which recommended an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM crops until the government devised a proper regulatory and safety mechanism. As yet, no such mechanism exists, but open field trials are being given the go ahead. GMO crops approved for field trials include rice, maize, chickpea, sugarcane, and brinjal.

  • Security

    • OpenSSL Patches Logjam Flaw to Foil NSA Snoopers
    • OpenSSL releases seven patches for seven vulns
    • Who’s afraid of DNS? Nominet’s new ‘turing’ tool visualises hidden security threats

      UK domain registry Nominet has shown off a striking new visualisation tool called ‘turing’ that large organisations can use to peer into their DNS traffic to trace latency issues and spot previously invisible botnets and malware.

    • “Don’t Hack Me! That’s a Bad Idea,” Says Eugene Kaspersky to APT Groups
    • Russian Software Security Lab Hacked, Indirectly Links Attack To NSA
    • Israel, NSA May Have Hacked Antivirus Firm Kaspersky Lab

      Moscow-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, famous for uncovering state-sponsored cyberattacks, today dropped its biggest bombshell yet: Its own computer networks were hit by state-sponsored hackers, probably working for Israeli intelligence or the U.S. National Security Agency. The same malware also attacked hotels that hosted ongoing top-level negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

    • The Massive Hack on US Personnel Agency is Worse Than Everyone Thought

      Last week, the human resources arm of the US government, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admitted that it had been victim of a massive data breach, where hackers stole personal data belonging to as many as 4 million government workers.

    • Feds Who Didn’t Even Discover The OPM Hack Themselves, Still Say We Should Give Them Cybersecurity Powers

      We already described how the recent hack into the US federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) appears to be much more serious than was initially reported. The hack, likely by Chinese state hackers, appear to have obtained basically detailed personal info on all current and many former federal government employees.

    • China-linked hackers get data on CIA, NSA personnel with security-clearance: report

      China-linked hackers appear to have gained access to sensitive background information submitted by US intelligence and military personnel for security clearances that could potentially expose them to blackmail, the Associated Press reported on Friday.

      In a report citing several US officials, the news agency said that data on nearly all of the millions of US security-clearance holders, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and military special operations personnel, were potentially exposed in the attack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

    • Second OPM Hack Revealed: Even Worse Than The First

      And yet… this is the same federal government telling us that it wants more access to everyone else’s data to “protect” us from “cybersecurity threats” — and that encryption is bad? Yikes.

    • Dossiers on US spies, military snatched in ‘SECOND govt data leak’

      A second data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management has compromised even more sensitive information about government employees than the first breach that was revealed earlier this week, sources claim. It’s possible at least 14 million Americans have chapter and verse on their lives leaked, we’re told.

      The Associated Press reports that hackers with close ties to China are believed to have obtained extensive background information on intelligence-linked government staffers – from CIA agents and NSA spies to military special ops – who have applied for security clearances.

      Among the records believed to have leaked from a compromised database are copies of Standard Form 86 [PDF], a questionnaire that is given to anyone who applies for a national security position, and is typically verified via interviews and background checks.

    • Officials: Second hack exposed military and intel data
    • Senate Quickly Says ‘No Way’ To Mitch McConnell’s Cynical Ploy To Add Bogus Cybersecurity Bill To NDAA

      Earlier this week, we noted that Senator Mitch McConnell, hot off of his huge flop in trying to preserve the NSA’s surveillance powers, had promised to insert the dangerous “cybersecurity” bill CISA directly into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As we discussed, while many have long suspected that CISA (and CISPA before it) were surveillance bills draped in “cybersecurity” clothing, the recent Snowden revelations that the NSA is using Section 702 “upstream” collection for “cybersecurity” issues revealed how CISA would massively expand the NSA’s ability to warrantlessly wiretap Americans’ communications.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Protocols of the Hackers of Zion?

      When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday afternoon, he boasted about Israel’s “robust hi-tech and cyber industries.” According to The Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu also noted that ‘Israel was making great efforts to diversify the markets with which it is trading in the technological field.’”

      Just how diversified and developed Israeli hi-tech innovation has become was revealed the very next morning, when the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs, which claims more than 400 million users internationally, announced that sophisticated spyware with the hallmarks of Israeli origin (although no country was explicitly identified) had targeted three European hotels that had been venues for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

      Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk.

    • US wronging of China for cyber breaches harm mutual trust

      Out of ulterior motives, some US media and politicians have developed a habit of scapegoating China for any alleged cyber attack on the United States. Such groundless accusations would surely harm mutual trust between the two big powers of today’s world.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • WaPo Thinks if You Knew What You Wanted, You’d Want Lindsey Graham

      In a column headlined “The most interesting presidential candidate you’re not paying any attention to,” Cillizza bemoans the fact that “Graham is an asterisk—or close to it—in polling in every early state (except for his home state of South Carolina) and nationally.” Graham, he writes, is “generally regarded as a cause candidate, with that cause being to represent the most hawkish views on foreign policy and national security against attacks by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.”

    • Germans conflicted about the Bush brand

      Jeb Bush, kicking off a six-day European tour, will pay tribute on Tuesday to America’s alliance with Western Europe, calling it “as relevant as the day it was founded” and arguing that our long-time allies want a more engaged United States.

      Only here in Germany, that is not exactly so.

      Germans are conflicted about the Bush brand. While Jeb’s father is still lionized for helping to unify the country after the Cold War, his brother remains tremendously unpopular due to the Iraq War, viewed by most here as a singly American disaster.

      But more than that, Germany is increasingly indifferent to the United States as a whole; uncertain whether these two world powers have much in common any more or even still really need one another.

    • Report: CIA Director Secretly Briefed Israeli Intelligence Officials on Iran Nuclear Deal

      Relations between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been increasingly chilly, with Netanyahu appearing in March before Congress in Washington D.C. to denounce U.S. negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Making tiny earthquakes to understand fracking-driven quakes

      In some places, notably Ohio and Oklahoma, the injection of used fracking fluid in deep disposal wells appears to have produced a significant uptick in earthquake activity. The earthquakes are mostly much too small to be felt at the surface, but a magnitude 5.6 quake in Oklahoma was large enough to cause some damage in 2011.

      This has made lots of news because of its scale, but it’s not our first experience with injection-triggered earthquakes. It’s a concern for geothermal power designs that inject water to depths where it can turn to turbine-driving steam, for example. And in the future, it could be a concern for efforts to store carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs.

    • California drought: Largest water cuts in state’s history ordered by state regulators

      California state regulators have ordered farmers and others to reduce their water consumption, with the largest cuts in the state’s history.

      The State Water Resources Control Board ordered over 100 water rights holders to stop all pumping from three major waterways in one of the country’s prime farm regions.

      Economists and agriculture experts say that the cuts are expected to have little immediate impact on food prices, with the growing of some crops to shift to regions with more water in the short-term.

  • Finance

    • Why Does Obama Want This Trade Deal So Badly?

      The political battle over the enormous, twelve-nation trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership keeps getting stranger. President Obama has made the completion of the deal the number-one legislative priority of his second term. Indeed, Republican opponents of the T.P.P., in an effort to rally the red-state troops, have begun calling it Obamatrade. And yet most of the plan’s opponents are not Republicans; they’re Democrats.

      Obama’s chief allies in his vote-by-vote fight in the House of Representatives to win “fast-track authority” to negotiate this and other trade deals are Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan—not his usual foxhole companions. The vote may come as soon as Friday. The House Republican leaders tell their dubious members that they are supporting Obama only in order to “constrain” him. Meanwhile, Obama is lobbying members of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose support he can normally count on, tirelessly and, for the most part, fruitlessly. “The president’s done everything except let me fly Air Force One,” Representative Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told the Christian Science Monitor this week. Nonetheless, Richmond said, “I’m leaning no.”

    • What Big Pharma wants from the big trade deal

      On Wednesday, a few pages from the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement were published by Wikileaks and reported on by the New York Times. They seemed to indicate changes that go against the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry, eliminating language that sought to guarantee drug companies “competitive market-derived prices” when they sell overseas.

      But the pharmaceutical industry has been lobbying lawmakers on the TPP since the beginning, and shaping far more than this one section of the agreement, according to Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America foundation and author of “The Business of America Is Lobbying.”

    • Revealed: The true scale of Tony Blair’s global business empire

      The scale of Tony Blair’s globe-trotting is exposed for the first time in secret documents that suggest the taxpayer is paying up to £16,000 a week to help the former prime minister build his business empire.

      Documents seen by The Telegraph contain details of Mr Blair’s travels around the world, accompanied by a squad of police bodyguards, flying on private jets and staying in five-star hotels.

      The files suggest Mr Blair has used identical trips to carry out both private business meetings and talks in his capacity as Quartet Representative to the Middle East – leaving him open to accusations of a potential conflict of interest.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Murdochs’ Generational Culture Of Corruption

      In announcing that his sons James and Lachlan will be largely taking control of his sprawling media company, press baron Rupert Murdoch did what observers always knew he wanted to do: pass on to his children the worldwide conglomerate that he’s built over the last five decades. In the United Sates, of course, that means handing over to his sons one of most important and influential voices in right-wing media and far-right politics, Fox News.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Israel exonerates itself over Gaza beach killings of four children last year

      Israeli investigation says missile attack that killed boys aged between nine and 11 was ‘tragic accident’ in findings contradictory to journalists’ reports from scene

    • The Killing of Children

      This denial of the truth and claim of victimhood extends to the accusation of anti-Semitism trumpeted at every critic, including this one, despite the fact that I have the highest respect for the immense cultural and scientific achievements of the Jewish people. Israel is a different question entirely.

      It is this absolute divorce of propaganda from reality that makes Tony Blair an ideal figurehead. Blair has now become head of a Council of Europe (loosely) linked body which claims to exist to promote tolerance, but in fact exists entirely to promote extreme Islamophobia and to shut down criticism of Israel. And it is a further sign of the estrangement from reality of the influential Israelis behind Blair’s appointment that they believe Tony Blair will influence public opinion positively in their favour. A remarkable example of confirmation bias.

    • Criminally Yours: Safety, But At What Cost?

      For years, just being a young African-American or Hispanic male in New York meant getting stopped randomly. Most of the people stopped not only had committed no crime to justify the stop, but, once frisked, had no contraband, weapons, drugs, etc. A few fish may have been caught in this over-inclusive net, but (to extend the metaphor), of the ones thrown back, how many were affected by the intrusion? My guess — all of them.

      Getting stopped by police for no reason hurts. Not only your time, but your sense of security. Bad feelings well up, suspiciousness of cops, a sense of insecurity when you walk down the street, a feeling that anything can happen at any time by the people posted there to protect you.

    • Trouble Not Over for Florida Parents of 11-Year-Old Taken in CPS Dispute

      Yesterday I ran an interview with the Florida mom whose children were removed from their home for a month after a neighbor reported the family to Child Protective Services because their 11-year-old son was left outside by himself for 90 minutes.

    • Court: Iowa Residents Have Right to Be Drunk on Front Porch

      The right to be drunk on the front porch of a private home was endorsed Friday by the Iowa Supreme Court, which said a woman can’t be convicted of public intoxication while standing on her front steps.

      Patience Paye, 29, of Waterloo based the appeal of her 2013 case on the contention that her front steps are not a public place so she can’t be charged with public intoxication.

    • Fast Track

      I am delighted that a judge yesterday ruled that the Fast Track asylum appeals system is illegal. It is the most appalling abuse, specifically designed to limit the capacity of individuals in life threatening circumstances to properly develop and present their legal case and put it before a judge. The system of putting law-abiding people, often families, into detention harsher than our harshest maximum security prisons, allowed just one hour a day out of a tiny cell for exercise, is a minor inconvenience compared to the fundamental denial of proper right to justice. The recent unjust deportation of Majid Ali was just the latest of a series of fast track cases I have encountered. Nadira has finished the script of a short film about a tragic couple, based on substantial research of true stories of fast track detention, and is developing the production.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Court Denies Requests to Keep New Net Neutrality Rules From Taking Effect on Friday

      In the months since the Federal Communications Commission voted to regulate the Internet like a public utility, opponents of the new rules have clamored to keep them from taking effect this Friday.

      On Thursday, those opponents were disappointed as a federal judge denied their requests to stay the rules while litigation proceeds against them. The court did grant an expedited hearing of the case, meaning it could be argued as soon as the fall or early winter.

    • Sneak attack! Congress’ plan to kill Net neutrality

      The FCC’s Net neutrality rules are slated to go into effect today, but the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday launched a sneak attack that could strip the agency of its ability to actually enforce the regulations that protect an open Internet.

      The rules approved by the FCC in February and published to the Federal Register in April reclassify broadband as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act and prohibit ISPs from throttling content or implementing paid prioritization schemes that would create Internet fast lanes.

    • Facebook will favor posts in News Feed based on time friends spend looking at them

      Facebook is about to get a much better idea of what you do and don’t like in your News Feed — even if you don’t click the like button. The company is about to start measuring how long you look posts, photos, and comments in your feed. The thinking is, if you linger on a status update and read a couple of comments, you probably are interested in that content. And if you’re interested in that update, your friends would probably like to see it as well.

06.11.15

Links 11/6/2015: Linux in DARPA Robotics Challenge, Fedora 22 Scientific

Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux vs GNU/Linux – A Reader’s Response

    What’s in a name? I think it is bigger than a name. Whatever the name might or might not be, I for one am very grateful to everyone involved. One small plea, I get an impression that not enough people make donations to software producers. I suspect even small donations would be appreciated from time to time. Whatever the name it is a remarkable movement.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • StackIQ Has New Open Source Linux Server Provisioning Tool

      StackIQ is now offering an open source version of Stacki (short for “Stack Installer”), a Linux server provisioning tool. StackIQ initiated the open source project with the goal of providing systems administrators with a tool to install Linux at high speed. Stacki is a streamlined version of the base installer from StackIQ’s flagship product StackIQ Boss.Z

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 340: VeraCrypt

      Randal and Aaron are joined by Mounir Idrassi to talk about VeraCrypt. VeraCrypt is a free disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is based on TrueCrypt 7.1a.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Call For Translators: coala!

        coala is a code analysis framework designed to ease the task of static code analysis for both users and developers. In the last months the coala community has been growing more and more active so we’re able to get even better code out to the world of free software.

      • Outreachy week 2 – personas

        I am honored to work with Gina this cycle on usability testing, as part of Outreachy and GNOME. We are off to a great start. I wanted to share Gina’s excellent description of personas, and how they are used in usability testing.

  • Distributions

    • Calamares 1.1-RC1 Distribution Installer Released

      Version 1.1-RC1 of the Calamares Linux distribution installer framework is now available. This distribution-independent installer has garnered the interest of Manjaro, Kubuntu, and others seeking to make a more unified, better Linux installer. With Calamares 1.1, more features are coming.

    • New Releases

      • Calculating the Test Drive

        I’ve been thinking of looking around for a new distribution, not that Mint hasn’t been a wonderful and stable system. Sabayon 15.06 was released last week and looked attractive in Jeremy Garcia’s screencast and screenshots. Neil Rickert tempted me with his notes on Tumbleweed 20150608 and the IgnorantGuru made OpenBSD sound doable. But I think I’ll check out Calculate Linux.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • My install for June

        I have been doing monthly installs of Tumbleweed, mainly to test out the installer. For June, I installed the 20150608 snapshot. I used the DVD installer (written to a USB), and this was for the 64-bit version.

    • Red Hat Family

      • CEO: Red Hat could outgrow Red Hat Tower in two years

        “It’s been fast,” says CEO Jim Whitehurst, adding that, at this pace, Red Hat Tower will be at capacity in two years. “We thought it would take a lot longer than that.”

      • CentOS 7 Linux 64-bit Vagrant Box Available Now

        Karanbir Singh had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of 64-bit (x86_64) images for the Vagrant open-source and cross-platform virtual development environment creation software.

      • Red Hat Updates JBoss Enterprise App Platform for Faster, Simpler DevOps and Hybrid Cloud Projects

        To help companies get the most from their cloud adoption, the latest upgrade to Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform adds features across the lifecycle to make it far easier to bring Java apps – and Java skillsets – to the world of hybrid clouds.

        The release of the latest edition of JBoss EAP (version 6.4) comes as the cloud is triggering big changes in how Red Hat’s customers are developing and deploying applications, Mike Piech, Red Hat’s vice president for middleware told IDN.

      • Red Hat: Beware of scary OpenStack support

        A SENIOR MANAGER at Red Hat has warned the community of the importance of ensuring that OpenStack users have sufficient, qualified support for their infrastructure.

        Alessandro Perilli, general manager for cloud management strategy at Red Hat, made the point in a blog post this week entitled Beware scary OpenStack support.

      • The hidden costs of embargoes

        It’s 2015 and it’s pretty clear the Open Source way has largely won as a development model for large and small projects. But when it comes to security we still practice a less-than-open model of embargoes with minimal or, in some cases, no community involvement. With the transition to more open development tools, such as Gitorious and GitHub, it is now time for the security process to change and become more open.

      • Red Hat Summit, syslog-ng, Docker containers

        Based on user feedback and website stats a large part of syslog-ng users are running it on the Red Hat family of operating systems: Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and other RHEL derivatives. This is true both for the syslog-ng Open Source Edition and the syslog-ng Premium Edition. This is only one of the reasons that this year BalaBit is a sponsor of the Red Hat Summit and will be present with a booth. You will be able to ask BalaBit engineers about syslog-ng or any other software from our IT security portfolio: Shell Control Box, our privileged activity monitoring software and even our upcoming user behavior analytics software, Blindspotter. There are several interesting new features in syslog-ng to discuss: language bindings to Java and Python are coming to syslog-ng OSE 3.7, while Perl and Lua will stay in the syslog-ng incubator. The new, Java-based Elasticsearch destination helps to create a high performance Elasticsearch syslog-ng Kibana (ESK) stack. Kafka support is also coming, which is a high-performance distributed messaging system. It is gaining popularity as a centralized interface because it can consolidate a wide range of enterprise log data for downstream processing.

      • Change is brutal, even in an open organization

        Change management is one of the most popular topics in business literature, and something I first encountered during my evening MBA studies while I was working at Red Hat. The most surprising thing that I learned in business school, which I continue to think of often, is the fact that so many organizational change initiatives fail (some say more than 70%; my professor said 90%), despite the fact that we have a well documented and proven formula for their success. Do 70% of leaders of change initiatives forget to read the book?

      • Notable Session Mover: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

        A notable mover in today’s trading session is Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) as the stock opened the most recent session at 78.82 and at the time of writing the last Bid was at 78.30. In the current trading session the stock reached as high as 78.97 and dipped down to 78.11. Red Hat, Inc. Common Stock, a NYQ listed company, has a current market cap of 14.35B and on average over the past 3 months has seen 1358910 shares trade hands on a daily basis.

      • Red Hat: Don’t Cloud Over the Importance of Support

        A few months ago when Nebula folded, and then again this month when tech titans IBM and Cisco announced high-profile purchases of OpenStack-focused companies, we drove home the point that the OpenStack scene is starting to consolidate. Eventually, there will only be a few players of any significance, and I’ve made the point before that support will be the big differentiator as enterprises increasingly deploy OpenStack.

      • Fedora

        • HP Linux Imaging and Printing 3.15.6 Adds Support for Fedora 22

          HP was happy to announce earlier today, June 10, the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release of its HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing) 3.15 software.

        • Fedora 22 Scientific

          As you can see, the new home for Fedora Scientific looks amazing. The “Featured Applications” section features the most important and useful tools in Fedora Scientific. I think that is a great idea. Everyone associated with it, thank you very much.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian-branded USB keys

        I’ve had some 8GB USB keys made, with the Debian swirl and text. By buying a reasonable number, I’ve got what I think is a good price for nice high-quality keys (metal body with a solid loop for attaching to a keyring). I’m now selling these for 7 pounds each, and I’m planning on bringing some to DebConf 15 too, where they’ll be 10 EUR.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Is Now Rebased on Linux Kernel 4.0.5

            Canonical, through Joseph Salisbury, has announced the summary of the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place on June 9, 2015, which concerns their activity on the Linux kernel packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.

          • Canonical Patches Five Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

            After releasing kernel updates for the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems, Canonical announced on June 10 the immediate availability of a new kernel update of its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) distro.

          • Ubuntu’s MAAS (Metal as a Service) 1.7 Update to Arrive Soon with Many New Features

            Canonical, through Andres Rodriguez, has recently announced that the 1.7 version of their MAAS (Metal as a Service) software that brings the language of the cloud to physical servers will arrive soon with multiple new features.

          • New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10, and 14.04 LTS

            After having announced the immediate availability of a new and important kernel update for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, Canonical has announced that the Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10, and 14.04 LTS distros have also received new kernel updates.

          • First Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 Stable Version Is Out

            Snappy Ubuntu Core is a new version of Ubuntu, designed to work with transactional updates and aimed at clouds and embedded devices at least for now. A stable version, this new OS has been released by Canonical and joins the other flavors in the 15.04 cycle.

          • Unity 8 to Correct the Online Search Features from Unity 7

            The search in Unity has been the source of serious debates in the past few years, but that should change dramatically with the new Unity 8, which no longer needs the current privacy tab that is available in the options.

          • Ubuntu 15.10 Is Now Based on Kernel 4.0.5, But the System’s Final Version Will Use Kernel 4.1

            Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has recently announced that Kernel 4.0.5 has been made the default kernel of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, being already used on the daily images.

          • Vimix Icons Another Great Lightweight Icon Set for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

            Vimix icon set is elegant, modern, lightweight designed for Linux desktop. It offers flat type style with a minimal use of shadows for depth. This icon theme is based on two icon sets are Numix Circle and Paper icons by snwh. Since this icon theme based on two icon sets, the creator recommends that install those icons as well to get enhanced and greater experience. Vimix icons offers two panel theme so if you are using dark theme then you can select Vimix dark and if you are using light theme then you can select light version. It is compatible with most of the Linux desktop environments such as Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Lxde, and others. For this icon theme most of the application icons available, still if you found any missing icon or bug in this set then report it. Ambiance Blackout Colors theme used in following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change themes/icons.

          • System76 unveils hardcore Serval WS laptop running Ubuntu Linux

            If you are a Linux user looking to buy a computer, System76 is one of the best manufacturers to target. Rather than buy a Windows machine and formatting the drive to install your favorite distro, the company’s machines come pre-loaded with Ubuntu. Even cooler, its laptops do not have the Windows logo on the super key, instead having the Ubuntu logo. Even if you are a fan of a different distro such as Fedora, supporting a Linux-focused seller is good for the overall community.

          • WIN! The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition

            The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition’s slim design and 4.5 inch screen are perfect to experience Ubuntu’s edge interactions and Scopes.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux powers DARPA Robotics Challenge winner

      A Xenomai Linux based robot from Korea’s Team KAIST called the DRC-Hubo won the $2 million DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, one of only three bots to complete the course on time.

      Judging by Silicon Valley’s reigning “Failure rocks!” mantra, this week’s DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals held earlier this week in Pomona, California, was a resounding success. Of the 23 teams that entered the event, which simulated a disaster response scenario, only three accomplished all eight major tasks in the allotted eight hours. The pit crews were kept busy with a field littered with falling robots.

    • Logic Supply Announces Linux-Compatible Fanless PC with Unparalleled Features

      Logic Supply, a renown industrial and embedded computer manufacturer, which you might remember from an article we wrote last week that the company sells Ubuntu-powered industrial and embedded systems, has announced recently that they will release a new series of ventless and fanless PCs with unmatched mix of performance, reliability, and I/O.

    • Raspberry Pi stays sky high in 2015 Hacker SBC Survey

      Last month, LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation’s Linux.com community website sponsored a 10-day SurveyMonkey survey that asked readers of both sites to choose their favorite three Linux- or Android-based open-spec single-board computers. This year, 1,721 respondents — more than twice the number from the 2014 survey — selected their favorites from a list of 53 SBCs, compared to last year’s 32.

    • DRC-HUBO Run Linux and It Just Won the DARPA Robotics Challenge

      The DARPA Robotics Challenge is now over, and the competition has been won by a team from South Korea with a robot called DRC-HUBO. It’s not hard to imagine that the robot is actually running a modified Linux distribution.

    • Top 10 Linux and Android Hacker SBCs of 2015
    • Top 10 Best Hacker SBC Boards of 2015

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Corporate Russia to have a Secure Tizen Smartphone by the end of 2015

          The Tizen Smartphone has been released in India, Bangladesh and soon Sri Lanka, but there is another country that has firm Interest in Tizen, Russia. The federation has a historical mis-trust of Google & Apple and could find a new alternative to BlackBerry for its secure Corporate needs.

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • DT Exec Pressures Vendors on Open Source

    One of Deutsche Telekom’s virtualization experts has said operators must pressure vendors into adopting open source practices or face the risk of depending on a single supplier for critical infrastructure.

  • SourceForge Not Making A Graceful Exit

    If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

  • SourceForge under fire again for Nmap page [Ed: SourceForge says that's not the case]
  • Open Sourcing Pinot: Scaling the Wall of Real-Time Analytics

    Last fall we introduced Pinot, LinkedIn’s real-time analytics infrastructure, that we built to allow us to slice and dice across billions of rows in real-time across a wide variety of products. Today we are happy to announce that we have open sourced Pinot. We’ve had a lot of interest in Pinot and are excited to see how it is adopted by the open source community.

  • Facebook open sourcing mobile bug analyzer Infer

    Among the apps within Facebook’s portfolio already using Infer include the standard Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

  • Facebook Open-Sources Infer To Help Developers Identify Bugs Before They’re Shipped

    Facebook today announced that it is open sourcing Infer, a static program analyzer the company uses to find bugs in mobile code before it’s shipped. Internally, the company uses this tool to analyze the Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and others.

  • Open Source Groups Release SDN and NFV Software

    Things are moving smartly forward in the world of upstart, disruptive networking technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), as open source stewards in both camps have come out with new software releases.

  • Events

    • How TYPO3 meetups help improve the technology, community, and business

      Peer-production is one of the strengths of open source projects. TYPO3, a self-organized project without corporate backing, always lived from the spirit of sharing ideas, work, and values. It’s not by accident that one of our core values is, “Inspire people to share.” Over the years, as a result of the massive success of TYPO3 as a product, core team members became increasingly decoupled from the work with clients. Instead, they focused on the core development. On one hand, this transition was great because it means a lot of people have contributed their time and passion into the product. But on the other hand, the change brought disadvantages.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • ownCloud 8.0.4 Brings Better Support for Internet Explorer 8 and 9

      ownCloud had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of the ownCloud 8.0 DIY (Do It Yourself) open-source self-hosting cloud storage solution.

    • Bright Computing Offers Guided Private OpenStack Deployment Solution

      Are you looking for an automated, guided way to deploy OpenStack? Some people feel daunted relying on nothing but documentation, and want a wizard-style approach to a new software installation. That’s exactly what the folks at Bright Computing are banking on. At the recent OpenStack Summit, they showed off Bright OpenStack, billed as a complete, standalone OpenStack private cloud solution. It even features a wizard to guide you through installation.

  • Databases

    • Dutch land registry opens up to Postgresql

      The Dutch Kadaster (Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency) has switched to using Postgresql for four of its major business solutions. “Open source allows us to deliver services at lower costs”, says Paul Schluck, one of the database administrators at the land registry.

    • Postgresql to detect nuclear explosions

      France’s nuclear energy and defence research institute CEA is looking for help with maintenance of Postgresql, an open source relational database management system. The institute this week published a call for tender, aiming to design a seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic and radionuclide monitoring system, as part of its task to monitor compliance to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

    • The NoSQL and Hadoop disruptive open source dividend

      Beyond the LAMP stack, open source technology for development of enterprise class applications has arguably become mainstream, especially in modern databases like NoSQL and Hadoop based systems. They are unlocking huge value.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Enables GTK3 VCL Plug-In Building By Default

      With the newest LibreOffice Git code, the GTK3 support code compiling is enabled by default. However, this is just building for the GTK3 VCL plug-in. At run-time, the GTK3 usage is still disabled by default. A –disable-gtk3 option is available for those not wanting to build with the GTK3 support.

  • Business

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD As A Linux Desktop Replacement

      I recently tried out OpenBSD as a possible answer to recent Linux engineering. I thought I’d share my notes here on my results, from a beginner’s and Linux user’s perspective. (I tried FreeBSD briefly before as well.) If you’ve used OpenBSD more extensively on the desktop, your feedback on any of this is welcome too – I’d like to know what you think of my opinions, you being a longer-term user.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Union’s 5-year roadmap for IT and open source

      While the DSM does not explicitly state it, to achieve a lot of these objectives, open standards will be essential. While many parts of the strategy are explicit in their proposed actions, this section has been written in broad strokes. For this reason, open source/open standards proponents must stay engaged both to help steer the DSM toward a positive outcome and for fear that the DSM may instead seek to secure the “free flow of data” via mandating contractual requirements and cumbersome and problematic data ownership definitions.

  • Licensing

    • Wayland’s MIT License To Be Updated/Corrected

      Bryce Harrington sent out the patches today for the in-tree license text to be updated. He clarified the situation a few weeks after the matter was brought to the attention of Wayland developers with the FAQ and license text not matching.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Google Made Its Secret Blueprint Public to Boost Its Cloud

      Craig McLuckie took the idea to Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s global network of computer data centers, and Hölzle didn’t like it.

      Together with two other engineers in Google’s Seattle office, McLuckie wanted to recreate Borg as an open source project. Borg is the sweeping software tool that drives everything from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps, letting the company carefully parcel computing tasks across that global network. For years, it was one of the company’s best kept secrets. And McLuckie wanted to share its blueprint—or at least some of it—with the rest of the internet.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C Adopts new Software and Document License

      W3C today adopted a new Software and Document License, an update to the W3C Software License, as the default permissive license in cases such as relicensing of unfinished specs where W3C has decided to use a permissive license. The Software and Document License, compatible with the GPL, permits copying and modification with attribution (by inclusion of a reference to the original W3C document), and can be used in W3C Community Groups, among other venues. All work that W3C has previously made available under the prior W3C Software License is also made available under the new Software and Document License.

Leftovers

  • Mesosphere Datacenter OS available on AWS, coming to Azure soon

    DCOS is designed to help enterprises unlock the next generation of scale, efficiency and automation. The Mesosphere DCOS pools datacenter and compute resources, givesIT operators a much simple administration model, and improves developer velocity with more modern abstractions and APIs for writing distributed system.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • VIDEO: Making Polluters Pay Us Is Step 9 to Save the Economy

      Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.

      Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions tons of it every year.

      Businesses don’t pay that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us—in the form of more extreme weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it.

      We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.

  • Finance

    • ‘Say Anything’ Time to Pass Fast Track

      Yes, folks, it’s desperation time for the supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). To get this sucker through, they will say anything, because, hey, making stuff up for the cause always sells in official Washington.

    • Thoughts on Greece

      I have witnessed IMF prescriptions in developing countries which have had abysmal results. Forcing African countries to break up their electricity utilities between producers and distributors in order to favour private electricity producers, has been an absolute disaster. It has simply meant that disproportionate percentages of electricity revenue – and effective tax subsidy of electricity prices for the majority population – has been diverted into the capacious pockets of international financiers and bankers. I have no doubt the result has been less electricity generated. I don’t even want to discuss the IMF’s immoral insistence that in Africa the very poor have to pay for clean drinking water.

    • As currency dies, Zimbabweans will get $5 for 175 quadrillion local dollars

      Zimbabweans will start exchanging ‘quadrillions’ of local dollars for a few U.S. dollars next week, as President Robert Mugabe’s government discards its virtually worthless national currency, the central bank said on Thursday.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Rupert Murdoch Reportedly Stepping Down As 21st Century Fox CEO

      Rupert Murdoch is preparing to step down as the CEO of 21st Century Fox, according to CNBC, planning to hand control of the media conglomerate to his son, James.

      CNBC, citing unnamed sources in the mogul’s family, said the announcement will come soon though it’s not clear when Murdoch would step aside.

    • James Murdoch Reportedly Taking Over As CEO Of Fox News’ Parent Company

      Rupert Murdoch is reportedly planning to step down as CEO of Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox “and hand that title to his son James,” according to CNBC. James Murdoch previously resigned his role as the head of News International — which published several tabloids and newspapers abroad — amid the widespread scandal over phone hacking at News of the World, a since-shuttered UK tabloid he oversaw. As part of the fallout from that scandal, Murdoch also resigned his position as chairman of UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

    • Rupert Murdoch preparing to step down as Fox CEO: reports

      Rupert Murdoch, the 84-year-old chief executive of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc, is preparing to step down and name his son James as successor, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing sources close to the Murdoch family.

  • Censorship

    • Reddit censorship results in mass exodus to Voat.co

      Reddit, which has long billed itself as “the front page of the Internet” is facing a massive revolt by its members due to perceived censorship. The folks running Reddit have removed a number of subreddits and that’s what sparked the revolt and the mass exodus to Voat.co.

    • Will Reddit Revolt Against Ellen Pao?

      There are early indications that the Reddit admins may have finally crossed the Rubicon on the road to alienating their user base. User activity on their main competitor, Voat.co had been rising steadily since social media censorship became an issue during the #GamerGate controversy, but in the past few hours their figures have skyrocketed. At the time of writing, there are over 3,700 active users on Voat’s alternative to /r/fatpeoplehate —almost double its number of subscribers.

  • Privacy

    • UK intelligence agencies should keep mass surveillance powers, report says

      UK intelligence agencies should be allowed to retain controversial intrusive powers to gather bulk communications data but ministers should be stripped of their powers to authorise surveillance warrants, according to a major report on British data law.

      The 373-page report published on Thursday – A Question of Trust, by David Anderson QC – calls for government to adopt “a clean-slate” approach in legislating later this year on surveillance and interception by GCHQ and other intelligence agencies.

      However, Downing Street hinted that David Cameron was unlikely to accept one of his key recommendations: shifting the power to agree to warrants from home and foreign secretaries to a proposed new judicial commissioner.

      The prime minister’s spokeswoman said the authorities needed to be able “to respond quickly and effectively to threats of national security or serious crime”, which appears to suggest ministers are better positioned to do this than judges.

    • Fake mobile phone towers found to be ‘actively listening in’ on calls in UK

      More than 20 “intrusive” fake mobile phone towers that eavesdrop on public conversations have been found active in the UK, the first time the technology has been detected in the country.

      The IMSI catchers, also known as Stingrays, have been found to be operating in London, but the Metropolitan Police have refused to say who is controlling them or what is being done with the information they are gathering.

    • Fake mobile phone towers discovered in London: Stingrays come to the UK

      Fake mobile phone masts that can be used to eavesdrop on telephone conversations without users being aware have been discovered in London by Sky News. IMSI catchers, also known as “stingrays” after a US company that makes such devices, have been widely used in the US for years. They work by sending out a signal that tricks a mobile phone into connecting with the stingray, rather than a legitimate base station, allowing information to be gathered about the device and its conversations by carrying out a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.

    • Anderson review: “It is time for a clean slate”

      The UK’s Independent Review of Terrorism Legislation has said, “it is time for a clean slate” when it comes to surveillance law in the UK. In his report published today, David Anderson QC condemned the current legislative framework as, “fragmented, obscure, under constant challenge and variable in the protections that it affords the innocent”.

    • Study: Surveillance will cost US tech sector more than $35B by 2016

      A new study says that the U.S. tech industry is likely to lose more than $35 billion from foreign customers by 2016 because of concerns over government surveillance.

      “In short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies,” the authors of a new study from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation write.

    • Exclusive: U.S. tech industry appeals to Obama to keep hands off encryption

      As Washington weighs new cybersecurity steps amid a public backlash over mass surveillance, U.S. tech companies warned President Barack Obama not to weaken increasingly sophisticated encryption systems designed to protect consumers’ privacy.

      In a strongly worded letter to Obama on Monday, two industry associations for major software and hardware companies said, “We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool.”

      The Information Technology Industry Council and the Software and Information Industry Association, representing tech giants, including Apple Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, IBM and Microsoft Corp, fired the latest salvo in what is shaping up to be a long fight over government access into smart phones and other digital devices.

    • The Computers Are Listening: NSA Won’t Say If It Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk

      When it comes to the National Security Agency’s recently disclosed use of automated speech recognition technology to search, index and transcribe voice communications, people in the United States may well be asking: But are they transcribing my phone calls?

      The answer is maybe.

      A clear-cut answer is elusive because documents in the Snowden archive describe the capability to turn speech into text, but not the extent of its use — and the U.S. intelligence community refuses to answer even the most basic questions on the topic.

      Asked about the application of speech-to-text to conversations including Americans, Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said at a Capitol Hill event in May that the NSA has “all sorts of technical capabilities” and that they are all used in a lawful manner.

      “I’m not specifically acknowledging or denying the existence of any particular capability,” he said. “I’m only saying that the focus needs to be on what are the authorities the NSA is using, and what are the protections around the execution of those authorities?”

      So what are those authorities? And what are the protections around their execution?

  • Civil Rights

    • Veteran police officer in Des Moines, Iowa, shoots unarmed Ryan Bolinger through car window

      A police officer in Des Moines, Iowa, shot an unarmed man dead on Tuesday evening, after he got out his vehicle and started “walking with a purpose” towards her car.

      Police officer Vanessa Miller, who has seven years’ experience, shot 28-year-old Ryan Keith Bolinger, after he led her and Ian Lawler, another senior officer, on a slow chase through the city streets.

    • Concocting a Crime-Ageddon to Promote Police Power

      The New York Post, the notorious right-wing tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, inspired a media stampede of stories highlighting increases in New York City’s crime statistics. The hysterical headline “You’re 45% More Likely to Be Murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan” (5/26/15) served as a springboard for other local media outlets to question if the city was suddenly a crime-ridden hellhole under Mayor Bill de Blasio–presented by the Post as a liberal on policing.

    • Tolerance and Tim Hunt

      You can’t tolerate that which to you is inoffensive. Toleration necessarily implies putting up with people who hold views or exhibit behaviour which you do not like. The hounding of Professor Tim Hunt from his University position is an exhibition of extreme intolerance.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • House Tries To Use Appropriations Bill To Kill Neutrality Rules, Strip FCC Authority And Funding

      For most of the last few months the House has been holding a series of “investigative” hearings into the FCC’s passage of net neutrality rules. On the surface, the hearings claim to be aimed at ensuring the FCC is operating transparently and within the confines of its authority, but in reality the hearings have been about one thing: publicly shaming the FCC for standing up to deep-pocketed campaign contributors like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Of course this never-ending “fact finding mission” has accomplished absolutely nothing in relation to finding notable facts, but it has proven useful in riling up a base utterly convinced that net neutrality rules destroy the Internet. All on the taxpayer dime, no less.

      [...]

      Obviously these lawsuits could go on for several years, and well into the term of a new Administration, one many House members hope would then strike the rules from the books. Of course much like the never-ending hearings shaming the FCC, this is largely a partisan patty cake show pony, since it won’t be signed by the President. Still, it’s very sweet of the House to be so incredibly worried about consumers and the health of the Internet that they’ll work tirelessly to protect ISPs’ god-given right to abuse the lack of last mile broadband competition.

    • Net neutrality rules to go into effect after court rejects bid to block them

      In what FCC chairman Tom Wheeler calls ‘a huge victory,’ the rules will go into effect Friday despite a handful of lawsuits challenging them

  • DRM

    • EC opens antitrust probe into Amazon’s iffy e-book agreements

      THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (EC) has opened yet another investigation into Amazon and is this time probing the company’s allegedly questionable e-book distribution agreements.

    • Antitrust: Commission opens formal investigation into Amazon’s e-book distribution arrangements

      The European Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation into certain business practices by Amazon in the distribution of electronic books (“e-books”). The Commission will in particular investigate certain clauses included in Amazon’s contracts with publishers. These clauses require publishers to inform Amazon about more favourable or alternative terms offered to Amazon’s competitors and/or offer Amazon similarterms and conditions than to its competitors, or through other means ensure that Amazon is offered terms at least as good as those for its competitors.

06.10.15

Links 10/6/2015: New Krita/Calligra and Clonezilla

Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Blockstream to Release First Open Source Code for Sidechains

    Blockstream has announced it will release an open source codebase and testing environment for its signature sidechains project.

  • Huawei Certified to Offer Apache Spark Open Source Big Data Processing Framework

    Huawei, this week announced that it has become the first global ICT vendor to obtain certification by Databricks for distribution of the Apache Spark open source big data processing framework. Databricks, a company founded by the creators of Spark, has developed the “Certified Spark Distribution” program to highlight and recognize third party vendors distributing Spark. Leveraging the high-performance big data computing architecture and the complete ecosystem of Spark, the Huawei-Spark platform is designed to help customers realize the full potential of data assets to drive agile operation and business innovation.

  • Teradata to Advance Big Data Analytics with Support for Presto Open Source SQL Query Engine

    To help users extract insights from data lakes,Teradata has made a multi-year commitment to contribute to Presto’s open source development. Based on a three-part roadmap, Teradata’s says its contributions will be 100% open source under the Apache license and will advance Presto’s code base, scalability, iterative querying, and ability to query multiple data repositories.

  • Why an open web is important for India

    Priyanka Nag is a technical writer for Red Hat and Mozilla Rep from India. Priyanka has been contributing to open source projects for the past four years. She started by editing Wikipedia pages, and then was introduced to Mozilla during an event at her college. She says that Mozilla was love at first sight, and soon after she became a Mozillian, she was hooked on the project. Now Priyanka is also a regular speaker at community events in India. I recently caught up with Priyanka to learn more about her work in the Mozilla Community and her thoughts on the importance of the open web in India.

  • What TODO means for open source community

    Open source software is not just meant for still-struggling start-ups that can’t afford to pay the licensing fees for proprietary software, and budget-conscious, modest small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) hoping to cut down on IT costs. This was proven in late September when several major companies – running the gamut from technology, right through to retail and media – came together to form the TODO project.

  • 8 excellent open source data visualization tools

    Data visualization is the mechanism of taking tabular or spatial data and conveying it in a human-friendly and visual way. There are several open source tools that can help you create useful, informative graphs. In this post we will take a look at eight open source, data visualization tools.

  • Wine Will Migrate Away from SourceForge

    If you’re reading the news lately, you might know that the SourceForge project hosting website has been accused of hijacking open-source software that have been abandoned by their maintainers or did not have some activity for an extended period of time.

  • The Cloud vs. Open Source

    For years, Linux and free software were perceived as threatened by cloud computing, the online storage of data. However, over the last few years, something ironic happened — free software became a major player in cloud computing.

  • Events

    • Graphics Microconference Accepted into 2015 Linux Plumbers Conference

      Although the Year of the Linux Desktop has yet to arrive, a surprising number of Linux users nevertheless need graphics support. This is because there have been a number of years of the Linux smartphone, the Linux television, the Linux digital sign/display/billboard, the Linux automobile, and more. This microconference will cover a number of topics including atomic modesetting in KMS, buffer allocation, verified-secure graphics pipelines, fencing and synchronisation, Wayland, and more.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla responds to Firefox user backlash over Pocket integration

        Pocket is a service for managing a reading list of online articles (it allows you to save stories, videos, and websites to check out later). Pocket is already offered as a Firefox add-on, and although Mozilla was developing a homegrown Reading List feature for the browser, the company decided to simply integrate Pocket directly into Firefox.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Cisco, IBM Bet Big on OpenStack

      Cisco and IBM are doubling down on OpenStack, hoping “the result lets them develop a solution that will scale. Neither company is yet willing to abandon OpenStack, and both feel there’s still a solution in it someplace,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. By acquiring Piston Cloud Computing and Blue Box Cloud, they “may correct some of the problems with OpenStack, which should improve penetration.”

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Rancher Labs is the Latest to Cash in on Container Technology

      Container technology remains red hot and VC money is flowing toward it. Rancher Labs, a startup developing Docker infrastructure software, has announced $10 million in Series A funding from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. “With the rapid adoption of container technology, the company’s open source software has grown in popularity by allowing organizations to run containers in production, across any cloud,” Rancher Labs’ leaders have stated.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Dutch government agency switches core services to open source

      Public administrations that switch to open source regain financial scalability, says Jan-Taeke Schuilenga, IT architect at DUO, the Dutch government agency managing the financing of the country’s educational institutions. “We had reached the limit of proprietary licence possibilities. Switching to open source gave us freedom of choice.”

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Licensing Standards that Include Code: Heads or Tails?

      Once upon a time, standards were standards and open source software was open source software (OSS), and the only thing people worried about was whether the copyright and patent rules relating to the standards would prevent them from being implemented in OSS. Actually, that was complicated enough, but it seems simple in comparison now that OSS is being included in the standards themselves. Now what?

      If this sounds unusual and exotic, it isn’t. In fact, code has been creeping into standards for years, often without the keepers of the intellectual property rights (IPR) Policies governing the standards even being aware of it.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Republicans Trashed Democracy in Michigan. Now They Want To Trash It in Your State, Too.

      One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself—all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

    • 5 Ways Powerful People Trick You Into Hating Protesters

      Let’s say that tomorrow you are elected Secret Ruler of the USA, a position that gives you total power over the government, economy, and the culture at large — everything that hippies refer to as “the system.” Now, your first job is to not get beheaded by rioting peasants, which means your first job is really to maintain “stability” (i.e., “keeping things mostly the way they are”).

      Immediately you’ll find that you’re facing a never-ending stream of protests from disgruntled groups who say they’re being treated unfairly or otherwise getting left out — this group over here is upset that somebody got abused by the police; this other bunch is demanding better wages or something. How do you handle it? Sure, you could crush their movements with an iron fist, using violence to kill, intimidate or arrest their most vocal members. But that can backfire, often turning them into martyrs and proving them right in the process — you’ve seen Star Wars; somebody always finds the exhaust port.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Why Did It Take the Pentagon a Month to Figure Out Its Files Were Compromised?

      Edward Snowden’s leaks exposed a federal government unable to protect its most sensitive secrets.

    • Feds Must Encrypt Government Websites by Dec. 2016

      The White House now requires all publicly accessible federal websites and services to use a secure HTTPS connection.

      Government agencies have until Dec. 31, 2016 to comply with the new HTTPS-Only Standard directive.

      Unencrypted HTTP connections “create a vulnerability and expose potentially sensitive information about users,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott said in this week’s announcement. That includes data like browser identity, website content, search terms, and other user-submitted details.

    • Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court’s decision on spying

      The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

      The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

    • French Surveillance Bill: Public Liberties Abandoned as Senators Cast Disastrous Vote

      The Surveillance Bill was adopted today by the French Senate with 251 votes for, 68 against and 26 abstentions. This bill was fast tracked and discussed under the pressure of a government wielding the argument of an extreme terrorist risk to impose massive spying of the French population with expansive purposes. It will put France under a surveillance all at once diffuse, intrusive, indiscriminate and without effective control. La Quadrature du Net bitterly regrets the blindness of the French Parliamentarians and calls on citizens not to give up on their liberties.

  • Civil Rights

    • Six lies they told me about the anti-Israel boycott

      The bulk of recent incidents concerning the anti-Israel boycott, which are mainly symbolic for now, could have served as a warning sign. But a mixture of nationalistic and false statements is blinding the Israeli public and preventing a real discussion of the issue. Here are a few examples.

    • British tourist Eleanor Hawkins arrested for naked photo on top of Malaysian mountain

      A British woman arrested in Malaysia for posing naked on top of a sacred mountain has been named as Eleanor Hawkins.

      The 24-year-old Southampton University graduate from Derby was detained on Tuesday at Tawau airport, as she was flying out from the island of Borneo to the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

    • Theresa May Condemns Majid Ali and Defies Scotland

      Despite numerous representations and an Early Day Motion signed by the large majority of Scotland’s MPs, Theresa May has ordered that Majid Ali, a Glasgow City College student, be deported back to almost certain torture and probable death in Pakistan in just twenty minutes from now. I attended the demonstration on his behalf yesterday at the Scottish Office.

      Majid is a member of the much persecuted Baloch minority. Two of his immediate family have been “disappeared” by the Pakistani military since his asylum application was submitted. There is no doubt that given the numerous MP’s who have raised his case, and the well-supported early day motion, civil servants will have put the decision to May personally. She was however not even prepared to grant a delay for a look at the evidence. May is very likely not merely pandering to the racist UKIP voting electorate – she is on the far right of politics herself. The callous sacrifice of Majid Ali is proof, if any more were needed, that this Conservative administration is nothing to do with Cameron’s purported “compassionate conservatism.” They are the nasty party indeed.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Commission Tries to Rip Citizens Off Net Neutrality

      The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

    • EU digi-chief to meet ministers and sort out the net neutrality thing

      Gaffe-prone Gunther H-dot, Europe’s digital chief, has waded into the net neutrality debate once again, but has vowed to sort everything out in a meeting with national ministers next Friday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • EU vice-president: Copyright legislation is “pushing people to steal”

        Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, has admitted that EU copyright law is “pushing people to steal,” because they seek out illegal copies of works that are not available to them legally because of the widespread use of geoblocking in Europe.

      • Elsevier Cracks Down on Pirated Scientific Articles

        Academic publishing company Elsevier has filed a complaint at a New York District Court, hoping to shut down the Library Genesis project and the SciHub.org search engine. The sites, which are particularly popular in developing nations where access to academic works is relatively expensive, are accused of pirating millions of scientific articles.

      • Kim Dotcom’s MegaNet Preps Jan 2016 Crowdfunding Campaign

        Kim Dotcom’s dream of a people-powered, censorship-resistant Internet will rely on the goodwill of supporters to get off the ground. In an announcement this morning, the entrepreneur confirmed that his MegaNet project will seek equity via a crowd-funding campaign set to launch on the January 2016 anniversary of the raid on Megaupload.

06.09.15

Links 10/6/2015: BQ’s Second Ubuntu Phone on Sale, Desura and Bankruptcy

Posted in News Roundup at 6:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Warning: Don’t Download Software From SourceForge If You Can Help It

    “SourceForge are (sic) abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past,” according to the GIMP project. Since 2013, SourceForge has been bundling junkware along with their installers — sometimes without a developer’s permission.

    Don’t download software from SourceForge if you can help it. Many open-source projects now host their installers elsewhere, and the versions on SourceForge may include junkware. If you absolutely have to download something from SourceForge, be extra careful.

  • SourceForge: The end can’t come too soon

    Fifteen years ago, the deep tech side of the Internet was a vastly different place. Geek news aggregator Slashdot was the place to go for all the latest IT and open source news and discussion, and SourceForge was the spot for open source project hosting and distribution. Much like MySpace, it seemed that these two stalwarts of the open source community would reign forever.

    Much like MySpace today, these two sites now live mainly on the margins, and at least in the case of SourceForge, that’s been of its own doing.

  • SourceForge Tries to Win Back Trust of Open-Source Developers

    After drawing the ire of the open-source community over the past couple of weeks, SourceForge published a blog post today explaining how it will generate ad revenue going forward.

    The online software repository landed itself in hot water after it was found to be bundling adware with free and open-source software downloads, most notably the Windows version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).

  • 10 Open Source Docker Tools You Should Be Using

    You may have heard of this thing called Docker. You know, the one which has fostered over 20,000 open source projects (including orchestration tools and management frameworks) and over 85,000 Dockerized applications?

  • Apple to tailor Swift into a fully open-source language – for Linux, too
  • Apple may regret its choice of a permissive open source license for the Swift programming language

    The whole Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright infringement litigation would never have happened if Google had adopted Java under the GPL (the license under which Sun Microsystems already made Java code available before being acquired by Oracle), but it feared that copyleft would prevent its device makers from differentiating through proprietary add-ons.

  • Apple To Open-Source & Support Linux With Its Swift Programming Language
  • Apple to open source Swift programming language

    Apple brought out the big guns, from CEO Tim Cook to musical performer Drake, but perhaps the loudest reaction at the company’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference Monday in San Francisco resulted from news that the Swift programming language is being open sourced.

  • Apple Announces Swift 2, Open Source for iOS, OS X and Linux

    Apple today announced Swift 2, the latest version of its programming language for iOS, OS X and watchOS with all-new Whole Module Optimization technology. Apple executive Craig Federighi also announced that Swift will be open source and made available for Linux later this year.

  • ​Docker certification program eyes long-term partnerships

    Docker has dominated the container business since it first exploded on the scene. Now, with its new certification program, Ecosystem Technology Partner (ETP), it’s trying to turn its current momentum into long-term partnerships.

  • Proof of Concept: Dell OPNFV Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  • It Is Rocket Science! NASA Releases Abundance of Free Code

    This week, NASA released its second annual Software Catalog, a giant compendium of over 1,000 programs available for free to industry, government agencies, and the general public. The Software Catalog contains the actual advanced engineering and aeronautics codes NASA engineers purpose-built for their daily work.

  • Events

    • Announcing Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon: Core

      A year and a half ago, we forged a partnership with the Apache Software Foundation to become the producer of their official ASF events. The ASF has long blazed a trail of innovation in open source and our work with them has yielded results in successful developer collaboration and events. It’s been a great partnership, in our opinion, led on our side by my colleague Angela Brown.

    • Mautic Association Extends Global Reach with Open Source Initiative Affiliate Membership

      The Mautic Association provides resources and a network for people to connect and grow both personally and professionally through collaboration and co-creation.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • New Fixes Released For PostgreSQL Open Source Database

      Every once in a while, a software developer releases a long-awaited update to much fanfare and user enthusiasm…and then it bombs miserably. We’re not saying that’s what happened with PostgreSQL, but just in case you didn’t love the way it runs after you updated it last, the publisher has released a new update that addresses most of the necessary bug fixes from the last update.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Why the Ubuntu developer portal moved to DjangoCMS

      Canonical has used a variety of content management systems throughout the years, including Drupal and Zope, and a large number of our websites have run on WordPress; in fact, many still do. Our developer portal was one of these standard WordPress instances, which worked well enough for a simple website that didn’t get very heavy traffic, but we began to outgrow it. The launch of the Ubuntu phone project, and its accompanying SDK for app development, meant that this site was going to start getting a lot more attention—from a very different audience—and it needed to do a lot more than it currently did.

  • Funding

    • Rancher Labs Raises $10 Million for Docker Container Cloud Tech

      Virtualization startup Rancher Labs today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. Rancher Labs’ founders are well-known in the cloud industry as the founders of cloud.com, which was sold to Citrix and evolved to become the Apache CloudStack cloud platform.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Now Supports Parallelized Kernel Module Building

      Matthew Dillon’s latest addition to DragonFlyBSD will help those that build out the full kernel themselves: parallelized kernel module builds. This change for developers allows the the kernel build process to be multiple times faster when doing a full kernel build.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Pragmatism in the History of GNU, Linux and Free/Open Source Software

      If you ask a lot of people why Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel that he wrote became one of the most prominent open source projects of all time, while Richard Stallman’s GNU project has received much less attention beyond hacker circles, they’ll tell you the difference has to do with Stallman’s excessive commitment to an uncompromising ideology. Is that really accurate?

    • Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer added to license list

      We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer(HPND). The HPND is a simple permissive license, compatible with all versions of the GPL. The HPND is actually more of a template, allowing developers to select a few options, such as whether to include a disclaimer.

  • Licensing

    • 5 Practical Ways for Legal Counsel to Advise Developers on Open Source

      As an essential member of an open source compliance program’s advisory board, legal counsel provides numerous services to ensure a company’s products comply with open source copyright and licenses. They provide approval around the use of FOSS in products, for example, advise on licensing conflicts, and advise on IP issues associated with the use of FOSS. (See the previous article, 5 Essential Duties of Legal Counsel in an Open Source Compliance Program.)

  • Programming

    • HHVM Is Now Running Even Faster, Beating PHP7 By Wider Margins

      The Facebook team working on the HHVM project for being a faster PHP interpreter and powering their Hack language have just come out of a two-week, open-source performance lockdown. Over the past two weeks they focused on making strides to make HHVM’s compelling performance even better.

    • BFP Proposed To Become A First-Class Backend In LLVM

      When it comes to taking advantage of the Linux kernel’s (e)BPF in-kernel virtual machine, LLVM has served as the compiler of choice for targeting this virtual machine

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Dutch MP wants sanctions to enforce open standards

      Public administrations that continue to ignore the policy to implement open standards in their ICT solutions should be fined, says Dutch MP Astrid Oosenbrug. “Public administrations should come to grips with open data, open standards and open source. With all their talk about regaining the trust of their citizens and creating a participatory society, public administrations should take a cue from open source communities.”

    • Sweden refines specifications of open standards

      Sweden’s governmental procurement specialists at Statens inköpscentral are fine-tuning the list of ICT standards that public authorities may use as mandatory requirements when procuring software and ICT services. The procurement agency is working with standardisation specialists at the University of Skövde, to check which ICT standards are truly open.

Leftovers

  • Queen Elizabeth II Will Visit Bergen-Belsen, Former Concentration Camp In Germany

    For the first time, Queen Elizabeth II will travel to a former Nazi concentration camp on her trip to Germany this month, the Associated Press reported Monday. In addition to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot, died, the queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will visit Berlin and Frankfurt during the June 23-26 trip.

  • Lord Janner claim investigated by Police Scotland

    Police in Scotland are understood to be investigating claims Labour peer Lord Janner abused a boy there in the 1970s.

  • Science

  • Security

    • How secure is your email?
    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Dangerous minds: Are maths teachers Australia’s newest threat?

      Australian academics who teach mathematics may need to run new ideas by the Department of Defence before sharing them or risk imprisonment.

      Some academics are set to become much more familiar with the department’s Defence Export Control Office (DECO), a unit that enforces the Defence Trade Control Act 2012, Australia’s end of a 2007 pact with the US and UK over defence trade.

    • Why the “biggest government hack ever” got past the feds

      In April, federal authorities detected an ongoing remote attack targeting the United States’ Office of Personnel Management (OPM) computer systems. This situation may have gone on for months, possibly even longer, but the White House only made the discovery public last Friday. While the attack was eventually uncovered using the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Einstein—the multibillion-dollar intrusion detection and prevention system that stands guard over much of the federal government’s Internet traffic—it managed to evade this detection entirely until another OPM breach spurred deeper examination.

    • U.S. Army public website compromised

      On Monday afternoon, the site was disabled after it displayed messages including, “YOU’VE BEEN HACKED” and “YOUR COMMANDERS ADMIT THEY ARE TRAINING THE PEOPLE THEY HAVE SENT YOU TO DIE FIGHTING,” according to NBC News.

      The U.S. Army confirmed to CNN the web page had been compromised.

      “Today an element of the Army.mil service provider’s content was compromised. After this came to our attention, the Army took appropriate preventive measures to ensure there was no breach of Army data by taking down the website temporarily,” spokesman Brig. Gen. Malcom B. Frost said in a statement.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Senators Introduce Legislation Calling For Mandatory Data Collection On Police-Involved Shootings

      If you’re looking for the number of citizens killed by police officers, don’t ask the government. It just doesn’t know. The DOJ is nominally in charge of compiling this information, but it has not made anything resembling an honest effort to do so.

      To begin with, it has mostly ignored the federal law ordering the compilation of stats on excessive force by law enforcement officers. And it has ignored this for the last 20 years. To make things worse, it has turned over the duty of collecting data on police-involved shootings to the FBI, which has even less interest in ensuring the comprehensiveness of its “collection.”

    • According To The Government, Clearing Your Browser History Is A Felony

      The “do something” resulting from the Enron scandal was Sarbanes-Oxley. To date, the law has done very little to curb corporate fraud — its intended target. But it has become a handy tool for prosecutors looking to stack charges against defendants far removed from the financial world.

    • Why we need anonymity on the Internet — even if it hurts

      I had a friend once who told me that after being abused by a stranger over the phone, she never picks up from numbers she doesn’t have in her phone. In fact, her phone doesn’t even ring. If somebody who doesn’t know wants to get in touch, she says, they can send her a text. She told me that her life improved dramatically after that decision: no more abuses, telemarketers, unwanted phone calls, ever. It’s an important lesson for me too: if an anonymous person is attacking you, you can always ignore them. What gives them power, is your responses. This way, everybody wins — and the trolls eventually will get bored of being ignored.

    • The encryption ‘access’ debate heats up

      Even as the US government bids adieu to Clipper Chip, an infamous episode that influenced the cryptography debate for years, there is renewed focus in a number of quarters that it should not repeated.

      The most recent evidence comes from a new report from the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). A Special Rapporteur, David Kaye, was appointed to look into the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communications. In preparing the report—which will be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council later this month—he drew from research on international and national norms and jurisprudence, and received input from governments and civil society.

  • Civil Rights

    • For AP, Being Shot by a Cop Makes You a Suspect

      No, the “incidents” raising concerns have not involved black “suspects.” Freddie Gray was not a suspect, nor Akai Gurley. Tamir Rice and John Crawford held toy guns, and Ferguson officers evidently “suspected” Michael Brown of nothing more than not walking on the sidewalk. A number of those killed have been “suspected” of being mentally ill and in need of help.

      As a matter of fact, the presumption by law enforcement—and media—that any black person involved in an altercation with police must be a criminal suspect is part of the outrage driving public protest.

      Telling, too, that in its description of police killings in the news over the last several months—including one officer who went free after leaping on top of the car of two unarmed black people and firing dozens of bullets into them, and another who saw all charges dropped for a putting a bullet through the head of a 7-year-old girl sleeping on her living room sofa—the only thing AP sees fit to describe as “violent” are the protests.

    • Ayaan Hirsi Ali vs. Jon Stewart: Islam, liberals, and the media’s dangerous double standard

      Progressive critics enamored of the semantically fraudulent junk label “Islamophobe” are de facto aiding the assassins of free-thinkers, abetting the oppressors of women, and shielding razor-happy butchers slicing off the clitorises of little girls. And at no time do they betray the ideals for which they supposedly stand more than when they call ex-Muslims living in the West “Islamophobe.”

      To understand why, let’s examine the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. No one exposes the faulty thinking, moral incoherence and double standards pervading the Western liberal reaction to Islam better than this Somali-born, self-professed “infidel” and “heretic.” Herself a survivor of female genital mutilation, civil war and forced marriage, and, for more than a decade now, the object of Islamist death threats, Hirsi Ali deserves the respect of all who cherish free speech, equality between the sexes, and the right to profess the religion (or no religion) of one’s choosing.

    • Lawsuit Claims Sheriff’s Dept. Perfectly Fine With Arresting Person 70 Lbs. Lighter And Six Inches Shorter Than Suspect Sought

      Towns is now suing the Clay County Sheriff’s Department for this mix-up, which resulted in some jail time for a crime he didn’t commit. His claim that his ID was stolen is backed up in the court filing, which includes a report made to another sheriff’s department in 2011. That report includes him informing the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Dept. that someone using his name and ID was cited for shoplifting earlier that year. He finally turned himself in to the Clay County Sheriff’s Dept. in 2013, presumably to clear the whole thing up. Obviously, that plan didn’t work.

    • Six inches too short, 70 pounds too light, he’s arrested in Clay County mistaken identity case

      A Jacksonville man and the State Attorney’s Office say that the Clay County Sheriff’s Office arrested the wrong man in a case involving stolen cologne and missed court appearances.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Daniel Ek: Spotify and free music will save the industry, not kill it

        The music streaming pioneer has come under fire from critics such as Taylor Swift for giving away songs. Now he faces a new challenge from Apple

      • Team Prenda Gets Hit Hard With Contempt Sanctions For Lying To Court

        It looks like Team Prenda has been smacked around once again. This is in the Lightspeed case — which is one of the rare earlier cases where they were actually representing a real third party, rather than a made up entity that they really owned themselves. This was the case where they tried to drag Comcast and AT and T into the lawsuit and it all failed terribly. If you don’t recall, in late 2013, the district court smacked them around as judge Patrick Murphy clearly figured out what was going on: “The litigation smacked of bullying pretense.” Yup, you got that right. The defendant, Anthony Sweet, represented by Prenda killers Booth Sweet, asked for attorneys’ fees and got them at the end of 2013, with the court ordering Team Prenda to pay up $261k, saying that Team Prenda “flat-out lied” to the court.

      • Netflix: the crumbling borders of geolocation and the thieves who happily pay for what they “steal”

06.08.15

Links 8/6/2015: Red Hat Upgraded, Debian 8.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 4:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Debunking 4 misconceptions about open source software

    Misconceptions range from the belief that open source is not secure enough for businesses, since it is community-based, to misunderstandings about the availability and quality of technical support. While some of them have been propagated since the early days of open source, enterprise-ready offerings today provide the same, if not higher, levels of security, capabilities and reliability as proprietary counterparts.

  • 2/3 Internet Exchange Points use Czech open source router

    Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Internet Exchange Points are now using BIRD, an open source router solution maintained by the Czech CZ.NIC Association, taking first place from proprietary routers.

  • 3 Financial Companies Innovating With Open Source

    The financial industry is on the verge of an open source breakthrough, say three companies on the cutting edge of the trend. Traditionally very secretive about their technology, banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies have begun in the past few years to talk about how they use open source software in their infrastructure and product development. They have also been steadily increasing their contributions to upstream projects in the form of user feedback and code. And some companies have initiated their own open source projects or released portions of their own code to the open source community.

  • Open-Source NFV Group Launches First Software Release

    The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project has rolled out “Arno,” an open-source platform that group officials said will give users and developers a framework for testing NFV efforts, checking out basic NFV uses cases and trying out virtual network functions (VNFs). The growing demand among telecommunications vendors and other organizations for ways to more quickly adopt and implement NFV is driving the OPNFV’s efforts, according to Chris Price, technical steering committee chairman and open-source manager for software-defined networking (SDN), NFV and the cloud for network vendor Ericsson.

  • NASA Releases Source Code for Its Software Tools

    NASA has released the source code for a complete set of software tools that that cover pretty much everything from aeronautics and propulsion, and from system testing and handling.

  • Events

    • SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

      From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

    • Open education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation

      When I started working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we set out to revamp the website and add learning materials for educators. In the mean time, we wanted to get a few resources out in time for Hour of Code week, so we wrote them on GitHub for easy sharing. It’s easy to get started writing with markdown, and it made collaboration straightforward. Despite all being new to GitHub, the education team really liked the way this worked and wanted to stick with the method, so we did.

  • BSD

    • Call for testing: OpenSSH 6.9

      OpenSSH 6.9 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This release contains some substantial new features and a number of bugfixes.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Indian government includes open source in RFPs

      The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has asked that open source software-based applications be included in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for all new procurements. Note there is not a plan at this time to replace existing proprietary systems with open source software.

    • Estonia: A Model for e-Government

      The bold plan is a logical step forward in an unprecedented roll-out of e-government services that began in 2000, when Estonia introduced a public system for electronic tax filing. In 2002, Estonia introduced a universal electronic identification card with digital signatures, which every citizen gets at the age of 15. The ID cards and signatures have become the keys to nearly universal access to government information and services as well as private-sector services in health care, banking and education, and law. In the years since, the Estonian government and industry have put more and more functions online, all connected by a nationwide data backbone called X-Road.

    • New case studies proof competence gvSIG’s GIS tools

      Four case studies published the past weeks by the gvSIG community show the usefulness of this suite of open source Geographic Information Systems. The cases detail the gvSIG use by public administrations in Spain and Italy, to collect, manage and analyse information on gas pipelines, to create hiking trails, examine city commerce, and plan public transport networks.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source “MMO for makers” aims to crowdsource manufacturing design

      Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including “mods” that leverage the games’ simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.

  • Programming

    • A Heterogeneous Execution Engine Might Make Its Way To LLVM

      An intern from Qualcomm’s Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he’s hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project.

    • C++ at a functional programming event

      In the end, I decided to talk about functional reactive proramming in C++ which will be a thrilling and enticing tale of event-based systems and the power of reactive streams. I’ll also cover some fun new things we are to expect from C++17 that are bringing even more functional programming concepts than we have in the current standard

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Labour Call Unemployed “The Work-Shy”

      I just read the Guardian’s account of today’s Labour leadership hustings, and they are not Tory Lite, they are Tory High Octane. Supporting Tory benefit cuts, calling the unemployed “the work-shy”, defending £9,000 a year tuition fees, supporting Trident and falling over themselves to reject autonomy for the Scottish accounting unit. But what I find even more astonishing is that the Fabian Society audience were lining up afterwards for selfies with Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and according to the Guardian nobody wanted a photo with Jeremy Corbyn, the one decent human being there.

    • Urgent: TTIP Vote – Please Write to Your MEPs before Wednesday

      There is a very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday…

    • Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

      My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering.

  • Censorship

    • Lawyer who sued EFF blames Ars readers for hacking, defamation

      Atlanta IP lawyer Sanford Asman isn’t happy that CaseRails CEO Erik Dykema won’t hand his company’s name over to him—in fact, he’s filed a trademark lawsuit over it, just as he said he would last month.

      Asman believes that CaseRails is infringing his trademark rights to CaseWebs and CaseSpace, two websites that house his own litigation-management software. In fact, Asman believes any Web-based legal software with “case” in its name should be under his purview.

  • Privacy

    • The Mass Surveillance of US Public Continues as USA Today Declares It Ended

      And that points to a bigger problem with declaring that the NSA’s data collection has “ended”: The same data will still be collected, only it will be held in phone company computers rather than the NSA’s computers. The NSA will still have access to the data, only having to get an OK from the FISA court–a notorious rubberstamp that operates in secret. As NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe told FAIR, “It’s more of a psychological maneuver to make us all feel good than a true constraint.”

  • Civil Rights

    • LAPD officer convicted in videotaped beating of handcuffed suspect

      A Los Angeles Police Department officer was convicted Friday in connection to the videotaped beating of a female suspect who was struck in the throat and crotch in a patrol car.

      Officer Mary O’Callaghan, an 18-year veteran, was accused of felony assault under the color of authority in a 2012 incident largely captured on a patrol-car camera. The 35-year-old victim, Alesia Thomas, died later that July evening. Medical examiner officials said cocaine intoxication was a “major factor” in the Los Angeles woman’s death.

    • Save Majid Ali

      Glasgow City College student Majid Ali faces torture and death if returned to Pakistan. Majid Ali’s brother and other members of his immediate family have been taken and I am afraid very probably murdered by the Pakistani authorities as part of their relentless persecution of the Baloch people and desire to wipe out Baloch national identity. The UK Home Office intends to deport Majid. The people of Scotland must defend him.

    • Saudi court upholds blogger’s 10 years and 1,000 lashes

      Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court has upheld the sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment on blogger Raif Badawi, despite a foreign outcry.

      Speaking from Canada, his wife Ensaf Haidar told the BBC she feared his punishment would start again on Friday.

      Badawi was arrested in 2012 for “insulting Islam through electronic channels”.

    • There is no justice: What cops and courts get wrong about the human brain

      Neuroscience explains why our justice system keeps sending innocent people to prison — and letting guilty ones go

    • Kalief Browder, 1993–2015

      Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

      In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

      Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

      [...]

      Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.

    • Left Divided as Violence and Protests Derail Mexican Elections

      Mexico’s latest elections are threatened by drug cartel violence, social protests, and the mass resignation of election officials. The left, which in the past has succeeded in rallying a third or more of the nation’s voters for a single party, goes into this election deeply divided, prompting expectations of a win for the ruling party.

    • On Equality

      A good rule of thumb is that if we feel the views of others are offensive, they probably feel our own views are offensive as well, a view they are completely entitled to when they do not act on it to harm us. If we wish to have our freedom to own and express our views protected, we must also actively respect — preferably protect — the rights of others to the same freedom.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Commission Tries to Rip Citizens Off Net Neutrality

      The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

  • DRM

    • Apple Music and the terrible return of DRM

      My Amazon Echo just arrived, months after I pre-ordered it. I’d totally forgotten about it until I got a ship notification the other day, and then it was there, a strange little tube promising yet another peek at a future that never seems fully within grasp.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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