04.08.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The high cost of Battistelli’s tyranny
Summary: The EPO has become so rogue that it might as well be renamed the Euthanasia-Prodding Organisation
SOMEONE has sent us “an interesting article about the [European patent] office,” to quote his or her own description of it. The EPO is no stranger to scandals and corruption, so we are not surprised to learn that yet more suicides are being reported.
The original article is in French and behind a paywall, but we have acquired a full text version [PDF] which we can publish in full if it is translated to English (fair use).
Sadly, nobody has come forth with a translation (we asked in numerous places for 4 days now), so if anyone is reading this right now, please kindly consider helping with this. The translation needn’t be perfect, just readable and accurate enough to pass muster (not mislead). █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Microsoft, Red Hat, Security at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image courtesy of Red Hat
Summary: Old news is ‘new’ again, as Microsoft-friendly media decides to keep knocking hard on the reputation of Free software, using words rather than substance
A YEAR ago there was a curious (first of its kind for Free/Open Source software) “branding” of a 2-year-old FOSS bug by a Microsoft-linked firm that did not even find the bug. An engineer from Google had found it and sought to responsibly disclose it so as to patch it properly before the Microsoft-linked opportunists blew off the lid and called it “Heartbleed”, set up a Web site to ‘celebrate’ the bug, and even made a professionally-prepared logo for it. This whole “Heartbleed” nonsense — however serious it may have been for a day — was blown out of all proportions in the media and tarnished the name of Free software because it was so ‘successfully’ marketed, even to non-technical people. It was a branding ‘success’ which many firms would later attempt to emulate, though never with the same degree of ‘success’ (where success means bamboozling the public, especially non-technical decision-making people).
“Microsoft must be laughing quite hard seeing all that media manipulation.”“Dear journalists,” I said earlier today in social media (Diapora), “bugs don’t have birthdays. Stop finding excuses to bring “Heartbleed” BS (MS name for old bug) to headlines.” I spoke to one author about it and challenged him for floating these “Heartbleed” logos and brands yet again. To us it seems quite evident that Microsoft keeps attacking Free software and GNU/Linux like no time before; it’s just more subtle and hidden in more sophisticated ways. The person who heads the incognito firm that’s known only for the “Heartbleed” brand (they control the brand) came from Microsoft (he was head of security there) and also from the FBI, whose stance on encryption is widely known by now; they actively seek to break security of software, so knowing about the 2-year-old OpenSSL bug would make sense. Some reputable media reports said that the NSA had known about this bug for about a year before it was known to the public and the NSA cooperates with the FBI on breaking software security, sharing personal (illegally intercepted) data, etc.
Anyway, the same publication (as above) also floated the “Heartbleed” nonsense in another article today. Would they do just about anything to keep it in headlines? Even a year later? They are now citing some firm called Venafi (never heard of it before), which basically relies on misleading misuse of statistics. It’s FUD from a company that tries to make money from perceived dangers and accentuates these dangers in an effort to acquire clients. What kind of ‘journalism’ is this? incidentally, Black Duck is now joining the list of such parasitic companies, with new hires and multiple press releases, so clearly it’s a growth area and the Microsoft link is easy to see. It is FUD season again this spring as more publications now float this whole nonsense. This is hardly journalism, it’s just throwback.
Thankfully enough, Red Hat demonstrates what “branding” of FOSS bugs practically means, even using the image above. There is no correlation between the naming of bugs and their severity, but press coverage sure loves a good brand. This is an important (albeit belated) response from Red Hat to “branding” of a FOSS bug by Microsoft-linked firms like the one behind “Heartbleed”.
“It’s been almost a year since the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability,” says Red Hat, “a flaw which started a trend of the branded vulnerability, changing the way security vulnerabilities affecting open-source software are being reported and perceived. Vulnerabilities are found and fixed all the time, and just because a vulnerability gets a name and a fancy logo doesn’t mean it is of real risk to users.”
Well, Microsoft folks sure squeezed everything they could from this bug, seeking to discredit not just OpenSSL but the whole development process of Free software (due to just one small bug, or a few lines of code). And Microsoft still pretends that it is warming up to Open Source? Who are these frauds kidding?
There’s a lot of companies which continue to use platforms with back doors, such as Windows, but the Wintel-oriented media would rather we just obsess over this one bug from one year ago (which was patched as soon as it became publicly-known).
We are rather disappointed to see a decent journalist like Sean Michael Kerner, along with colleagues at eWEEK, swallowing the bait and serving to promote the misleading claims to advertise this company that controls the “Heartbleed” brand, among other opportunists (like fish swimming around a shark for some leftovers). Microsoft must be laughing quite hard seeing all that media manipulation. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Microsoft, Security at 5:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Black Duck ups the ante on Free software-hostile messages, embeds FUD in the media almost instantaneously
THERE IS an attack on Free software going on, but it’s shrewdly disguised as ‘concern’ for Free software. We are led to believe that not proprietary software with back doors is the problem but Free software that may have bugs, especially bugs that users don’t bother to patch despite having the ability (or freedom) to do so. It’s free.
The other day we wrote about Black Duck entering the security FUD market, targeting Free software, as one ought to expect (it had already done the compliance FUD, neglecting to mention EULA-related issues in proprietary software). To repeat some facts for the uninitiated, Black Duck was started as an anti-GPL company, by its very own admission. Very shortly after hiring a parasite, whose company exploits security fears, Black Duck’s scope of FUD expands further and there’s an effort in the media to advertise this.
“Taft, who often promotes Microsoft PR, doesn’t mind covering something that seemingly relates to Free software if it makes Free software look bad.”Darryl K. Taft, a booster of Microsoft, already helps this anti-GPL company (Black Duck) by doing this Microsoft-esque advertising at this very moment. Taft, who often promotes Microsoft PR, doesn’t mind covering something that seemingly relates to Free software if it makes Free software look bad. No wonder Black Duck came from Microsoft. Other Microsoft boosting sites like TechFlash promoted this nonsense and spread it to media with broader reach. Watch how they wrongly describe Black Duck: “Burlington-based open-source software firm Black Duck software is making big bets on helping to make open-source software more secure for companies”
Black Duck is most definitely not “open-source software firm”, it is an anti-Open Source software firm whose products are proprietary, with software patents that relate to them. This is the kind of openwashing that has become so common when it comes to proxies of Microsoft (Microsoft works together with Black Duck, it’s not just that Black Duck came from Microsoft).
Black Duck, as we noted the other day, had hired a key person from Veracode, whose output is mostly FUD even today. Right now it promotes itself in CBS and other networks by saying some nonsense about a nonsense buzzword (“Internet of Things”) that means nothing in particular. To quote the CBS tabloid: “In a new report released by enterprise security firm Veracode, researchers discovered during testing of common, household IoT devices that security is not up to scratch — paving the way for exploits, data theft, robbery and potentially even stalking.”
That is just some embedded marketing for a FUD firm, one whose co-founder is now inside Black Duck.
Truth be told, Black Duck is trying to diversify or re-brand itself ‘pro-security’ as it did ‘pro-compliance’, but actually, what it really is about should be FUD. It uses fear, spreads existing fear to sell, creates more fear to sell, and overall it makes Free software look bad.
IDG is another large network that helped Black Duck advertise itself the other day. The headline is misleading because it says “Black Duck’s mission: To seek out insecure open source code in the enterprise”.
No, Black Duck’s mission is to sell its proprietary software by telling the press, enterprises etc. that Free software is not secure and needs some ‘medicine’ (Black Duck’s proprietary snake oil).
Here are the press releases from Black Duck [1, 2]. Clearly enough there is a media manipulation campaign going on and some journalists — other than Microsoft boosters disguised as ‘journalists’ — have already fallen for it. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 4:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Classic cruelty
Summary: Very insensitive Microsoft layoffs show that it is Microsoft that’s the greatest enemy of its own employees, not the company’s competition or its critics
THROUGHOUT the day today Techrights received a lot of support from former Microsoft staff, which now knows what Microsoft is really like (having become victimised). A post of ours from earlier this year went viral, reaching perhaps 100,000 people.
“Microsoft fired its previous Chief Privacy Officer for suggesting real privacy…”The context of it all and what got it all started was a post of mine about the latest Microsoft layoffs. “Acquisitor of Nokia’s mobile phone business,” said Microsoft-friendly media, “technology firm Microsoft is planning major reductions to its IT department. The cuts are to be included in the 1,050 jobs that last August the company announced would be culled from its Finnish operations.”
Notice the date. This is how Microsoft celebrates Easter in Finland, having just recently fired many Chinese on Chinese New Year. It’s part of a trend of sadistic Microsoft layoffs, often disguised as anything but layoffs. People from Microsoft have told me that the work environment is getting worse, as more employees get squeezed into smaller offices and some are laid off without being accounted for (contracting tricks with no assurances of continuation).
Microsoft dropped a real privacy officer, which says a lot about Microsoft’s real attitude towards privacy. Microsoft only ever needs to pretend to care about privacy (e.g. using a show trial in Ireland for media manipulation) while creating back doors in their products. Anything else cannot be tolerated.
Microsoft fired its previous Chief Privacy Officer for suggesting real privacy and the existing Microsoft “Chief Privacy Officer” is doing it ‘right’; he has just dropped privacy (news from 5 days ago) and then sought to justify it. “Microsoft chief privacy officer,” according to this article, is the very opposite of pro-privacy. It’s just like heading “trustworthy” computing for Microsoft, meaning the very opposite of what it’s called.
Microsoft wants to hire sociopaths, retain liars, and get rid (fire) those who don’t fit such criteria. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I adore Linux because I can do what I want on it. My first PC way back in 1994ish was an Apple something. It was fun, and then I got an IBM PC running Windows 3,1 and DOS 5. Windows was useless, so I spent a lot of time in DOS. Then I learned about Linux and never looked back. And Windows is still useless, and Apple is too confining. They both have their little walled gardens, and their primary purpose is lock-in and to keep selling you junk whether you want it or not, and whether or not it’s any good. They think they retain ownership of your stuff that you have purchased, which is a concept that needs to die.
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Desktop
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Windows 7 – 33.8%
Mac OS X – 21.5%
Linux – 20.5%
Windows 8 – 19.5%
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Server
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Gene Kim: It’s called “The DevOps Cookbook,” and it was actually supposed to come out before “The Phoenix Project.” The goal of the book is to put into context the cultural norms, principles, and observed patterns in high-performing organizations that enable fast flow of features from dev to ops while preserving world-class reliability and stability. For me, I think the big surprise three years into this project is that it’s as much about organizational learning as it is about key performance measures.
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Cloud is the next big front for some serious tech warfare and CoreOS just got the much needed ammunition.
First things first. CoreOS is a company that offers a solution with the same name. And this solution is an extremely light and minimalistic operating system based on Google’s Chrome OS (or you can also call it a fork).
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds is mostly known for developing the Linux kernel, but he’s also the one who made Git, the distributed revision control system that’s used today for numerous projects, including the kernel. The project just turned ten years old, and Linus made some comments about this fact.
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Git has come a long way in the 10 years since Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the first version of the now-popular distributed revision control system. For example, the addition of pull requests came three years after the original release, according to Atlassian. And over time it has added more collaboration tools, code review tools, integration to continuous integration systems, and more, recalls Qt Project core maintainer and software architect at Intel, Thiago Macieira.
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Radhika Hirannaiah, is currently working as an intern at OpenDaylight. She received a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University in 2014. Her interests include Software Defined Networking (OpenFlow, OpenDaylight etc), Voice over IP, wireless and working on open source software projects.
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Systemd’s logind and systemctl components have added support for rebooting to the EFI firmware setup. Running systemctl –firmware-setup (or accessing via systemd’s logind interfaces) will cause the system’s firmware UEFI setup utility to show at next boot as another alternative to just hitting DEL/F2 at boot time or newer distributions that add a boot menu entry to GRUB2 for EFI firmware configuration. Of course, this will only work for newer systems that were originally booted in the EFI mode.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s more improvements in Mesa Git to talk about this week for Intel open-source customers, including those still on older “Gen4″ graphics hardware.
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FreeGLUT, the open-source replacement to GLUT for handling system-specific setup tasks like windowing system configuration and OpenGL initialization, now is natively supported on Wayland.
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Chris Wilson of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center hasn’t yet managed the xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX release, but over in kernel-space, he’s just published a set of 70 new DRM patches for the Intel kernel driver.
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The Khronos UK Chapter is holding a meeting at the LLVM conference happening one week from today at the Goldsmiths University in London. Vulkan, SPIR-V, and OpenCL 2.1 will be the primary discussion items for the event lasting the afternoon.
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If you’re not on the NVIDIA 349 Linux beta but rather an older version of NVIDIA’s binary Linux driver, today they released the 346.59 bug-fix release as the latest in their long-lived series.
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Tom Stellard of AMD has landed initial support into the AMD GPU LLVM back-end for the assembler and supporting inline assembly.
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Benchmarks
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It’s been a while since last running any Linux file-system tests on a hard drive considering all of the test systems around here are using solid-state storage and only a few systems commissioned in the Linux benchmarking test farm are using hard drives, but with Linux 4.0 around the corner, here’s a six-way file-system comparison on Linux 4.0 with a HDD using EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and even NTFS, NILFS2, and ReiserFS.
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Applications
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The Qt Installer Framework allows for offline and online installers for Windows, Linux, and OS X. This framework is focused on Qt’s needs but can also be used by other applications as an installer/updater.
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The application is very simple, lightweight and doesn’t get in your way. In fact, it doesn’t even come with a GUI by default and instead, it only shows an entry in the Ubuntu Sound Menu which allows you to play various relaxing sounds like forest, storm, rain, wind, night, fire, coffee shop or sea.
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For any object moving through a fluid, forces are applied to the object as the fluid moves around it. A fluid can be something like water, or even something like the air around us. When the object is specifically designed to maximize the forces that the fluid can apply, you can designate these designs as airfoils. A more common name that most people would use is a wing. The shape of a wing, or airfoil, determines the forces that are applied to it when it moves through a fluid or the air. These forces also depend on the speed of motion through the fluid and the direction of flow around the airfoil.
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In fact, I spent the last month porting Choqok bits from Qt 4 to Qt 5, but I also fixed minor bugs you discover when doing this kind of work. Regressions could happen, so please report them and we’ll fix them!
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darktable 1.6.4 has been released recently bringing a wide range of improvements, support for new cameras, new white balance presets, new noise profiles, and several updated translations.
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It will probably be a cold day in you-know-where before we ever see a native version of iTunes for Linux. Apple just isn’t interested in supporting Linux. But you actually can run iTunes in Linux via WINE, and if that doesn’t float your boat then there are some native Linux alternatives to iTunes that are worth considering.
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Most of patool seems to work as command-action-target format, so extracting a file — just about any compressed file, I might add — is as simple as patool extract file. The extension of the file appears to be irrelevant to patool — if I rename a file to show a different extension, it manages to extract it anyway.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s so damn good to see Humble back on form with a true Humble Indie Bundle, we just gained access to new games too!
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We announced the Humble Indie Bundle 14 game sale initiative at the beginning of the month, a great occasion for Linux, Windows, and Mac gamers to get their hands on a fabulous collection of cross-platform games.
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Tripwire have announced that Killing Floor 2 will be released on the 21st of April into Early Access, but we have it confirmed Linux is not in the initial release.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The Enlightenment crew at Samsung have released their first alpha version of the upcoming EFL 1.14.0 library set.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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NetworkManagerQt is officially a Frameworks now. As a consequence the repository has been renamed from libnm-qt to networkmanager-qt and NMQt version number now follows Frameworks version number (currently 5.8.0).
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In February 2015 the Plasma developers met in the Blue Systems office in Barcelona to discuss and plan out where we would take Plasma over the duration of the next year. The sprint consisted of active Plasma developers and visual designers from around the world, from Canada to India.
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The digiKam development team has announced a few hours ago, on April 7, the immediate availability for download of the digiKam Software Collection 4.9.0 image viewer and organizer application for the KDE desktop environment.
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We have released another plasma-nm version for KDE 4. It’s possible that this release will be the last one, because every distribution is now switching to Plasma 5 and given our irregular releases it’s possible that current distributions wouldn’t pickup the updated version anyway. I’ll keep backporting fixes from Plasma 5 to our KDE 4 branch if possible, so if you want to keep running on KDE 4 from some reason, you will still have a way how to get at least some fixes. There is also a new release of networkmanager-qt for KDE 4, which is required for below mentioned OpenConnect fixes.
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A Linux user has started an LKML discussion over compiling the kernel with -O3 for driving performance improvements out of a more-optimized kernel binary.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GTK+ development team has announced the immediate availability for download of the first maintenance release of the GTK+ 3.16 GUI toolkit used in the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment.
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GNOME 3.16 was released last week and is the result of more than 30000 commits by over 1000 persons, I am always impressed by those numbers, thank you all!
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GNOME/GTK+ developers are finally preparing themselves to drop support for Microsoft Windows XP.
While Microsoft no longer offers public support for Windows XP and most modern software has done away with XP support, GNOME’s tool-kit continues to support Windows going back to XP. It’s been discussed before about dropping XP and this discussion has resurrected once again.
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Papyros is a new Linux distribution designed around a Material Design framework, and it promises to be one of the most interesting releases in the Linux ecosystem. After a month that brought no news about its progress, the devs explained that the project is not dead, but alive and kicking.
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Ubuntu developers are preparing to launch the last OTA update for the current branch of Ubuntu Touch RTM, and they are also working to change the base of the system to 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).
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Reviews
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There are people out there that will want all of the verbose options, giving access to every available installation option but maybe there could be a general installer and a custom installer to make it easier for the masses.
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Void is an independent distribution and offers a rolling release approach to package management. There are many Void editions we can download. There are Void images for the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi computers along with builds for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 machines. In addition, there are spins of Void for specific desktop environments and we can download images for Cinnamon, Enlightenment, MATE and Xfce flavours. I decided to begin my trial with the 64-bit Cinnamon build of Void. The download for the Cinnamon image is 454MB in size.
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New Releases
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With pleasure SalentOS Team announces the release of SalentOS 14.04.2.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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The set has been spiced up with the latest Long Term Support (LTS) sources that I took from KDE Applications 14.12.3, specifically the newest versions of kde-workspace, kdelibs and kdepim. Essentially, I have used the exact same sources from which I built my KDE 4.14.3 packages for Slackware-current before.
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Red Hat Family
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Pat Riehecky from the Scientific Linux development team has announced today, April 7, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second and last Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Scientific Linux 7.1 operating system.
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Besides the speeches, 170 1-hour breakout sessions are planned. Breakout sessions are presentations by industry experts on topical issues. Some speakers include Thomas Cameron, John Shakshober, and Matt Hicks. A Partner Pavillion will be open showcasing many of Red Hat’s partners and their wares. Labs will let attendees test out Red Hat’s latest tech. For those wanting still more add-ons include in-depth training courses with expert instructors and certification exams in Red Hat OpenStack. Developers can attend DevNation for “a week of keynotes, technical sessions, BoFs, evening programming events, and more” with folks from some of the top tech companies around.
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Speaking to ChannelBuzz.ca ahead of the company’s North American Partner Conference here, Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president of global channel sales and alliances at Red Hat, described a shift in the conversation his company and its partners are having with their customers. Gone are the days of convincing customers that open source is “for real” in the enterprise. Now everybody’s got an opinion on open source – not just Linux, but other major projects as well, most notably OpenStack. Now, they want to know more, and that means partners have to know more.
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Fedora
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DNF is the next-generation Yum and after being available for the past few Fedora releases, with Fedora 22 it’s ready for prime-time. Kevin Fenzi last week started a mailing list thread about dnf replacing yum and dnf-yum. DNF is installed by default as part of the “core” group, DNF-Yum is also installed by default, Yum is still installed so if something still depends directly on it or a user manually wants it, and the Yum RPM package now requires dnf-yum.
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Using the XFS file-system as the default within an LVM has been part of the Fedora Server technical spec while with Fedora 22 it’s finally happened. The default layout for Fedora Server 22 installations is using XFS atop LVM while /boot is outside the LVM setup.
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Debian Family
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As a follow-up to my post about bootstrapping arm64 in Debian, we’ve had more hardware given to Debian for us to use in porting and building packages for arm64. Applied Micro sent me an X-Gene development machine to set up and use. Unfortunately, the timing was unlucky and the machine sat on my desk unopened for a few weeks while I was on long holiday in Australia. Once I was back, I connected it up and got it working. Out of the box, a standard Jessie arm64 installation worked using network boot (dhcp and tftp). I ran through d-i as normal and installed a working system, then handed it over to the DSA and buildd folks to get the machine integrated into our systems. Easy! The machine is now up and running as arm-arm-03.debian.org and has been building packages for a few weeks now. You can see the stats here on the buildd.debian.org site.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical revealed details about Oxide vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This update brings a few fixes, but it’s nothing all that important.
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Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is about to be released in a little over two weeks, and the developers have announced that they settled on Linux kernel 3.19.3, a couple of days before the kernel freeze.
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Every once in a while Ubuntu developers made improvements to the Unity desktop environment, but that usually happens for new Ubuntu releases, like 15.04 for example. That doesn’t stop them from porting those improvements to older releases, such as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
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Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Firefox 37.0.1 has been recently released, coming with important bug-fixes. Not long after that, Canonical has patched it and added it to the default repositories of all the supported Ubuntu systems.
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The much requested Unity feature to always show the menus, which is already available in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet for almost three months, has been backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
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In recent months we’ve covered an Ubuntu tablet with a 1TB hard drive, another sketchy Ubuntu tablet, and other awkward devices looking to ship Ubuntu in tablet/mobile form without any support from Canonical. There’s yet another tablet to talk about today.
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Details about a Mailman vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS that has been found and fixed were published in a security notice by Canonical.
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Flavours and Variants
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Uri Herrera from Nitrux S.A. recently announced the immediate availability of Nitrux OS 4.15 Linux operating system that is currently used in their NXQ mini PC unveiled a couple of months ago.
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CompuLab is working hard on the MintBox Mini. SMT (Supervised Manufacturer’s Testing) was done, and they’re now soldering, testing, starting mechanical assembly and packing of the units.
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The name of the next Linux Mint 17.2 release has been chosen and it’s going to be “Rafaela.” The project continues with the feminine names, so the new code name should be no surprise.
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Ostensibly, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have significantly permeated our society, yet their integration in our educational system has not been achieved. The glaring disparity among students who are ICT literate and those who are not, is evidence of this. Understandably though, there are several priorities and challenges that may be responsible for the slow progress in this area. Fortunately for us, we have a few Liberians in our educational system who possess the dynamism needed to bring significant changes. However, these changes must parallel those of the global community’s. In doing so, we will effectively be eliminating one of the barriers that young Liberians graduating from high school face when they submit applications for employment; the ubiquitous, “must be computer literate” listed as a job requirement. In today’s article, I will discuss how EDUBUNTU, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), can help us integrate ICTs in schools to achieve some level of equilibrium with regard to basic ICT literacy among Liberian students.
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Embedian has launched a SMARC COM that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX6, and offers up to 2GB RAM, 4GB eMMC, -40 to 85°C operation, and a Mini-ITX baseboard.
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Phones
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The Jolla community has put together an application called Jolla Communicator that allows users to send and receive messages on Ubuntu, which connected to a Sailfish OS-powered smartphone.
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Android
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Back in January HTC announced they’d miss the deadline they set themselves for the HTC One M8 Android 5.0 Lollipop update, but since then we’ve received plenty of good news as it’s rolling out to multiple carriers in the United States. It first kicked off for owners back in January, and over the past few weeks has continued to arrive for more and more proud owners.
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We all know there are good reasons why Android will never be rolled out as efficiently as the way Apple rolls out new versions of iOS. That said, surely the process can be better than it is right now… can’t it?
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Motorola has begun rolling out the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Moto G Google Play Edition (GPE), and it is possible that other versions of the phone could receive the update anytime soon.
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Check the Amazon Instant Video splash page and you’ll see the news: You can officially stream videos from Amazon to your Google Android tablet. I say “officially” because tech savvy folks may have already sideloaded, or manually installed, the phone version some time ago. But for the mainstream masses who typically get their apps from the Google Play Store — a smart move for security reasons — this is new.
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The mobile companion game for Mortal Kombat X is available for download on both iOS and Android. Mortal Kombat X Mobile can be downloaded for free (with in-app purchases) on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, according to Hardcore Gamer. The Mortal Kombat X Mobile is the full Mortal Kombat X experience built for mobile devices.
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There are many Android fans who aren’t enamored with Chrome OS. They cite lack of apps for the latter, and the wealth of features that make up the great utility of the former. There has long been speculation that Google will eventually merge the two platforms into one OS. I hope that never happens.
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What is a smartwatch, and what can it do? The Apple Watch arrives in a landscape filled with things for your wrist. How does it stack up? Great in some ways, and not so wonderfully in others. Let’s look at the closest competition and see.
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Owners of the Google Play Edition of the HTC One M7 and M8 should stay tuned for Android 5.1.
In a tweet late Tuesday, HTC vice president of product management Mo Versi said that “approval for both M8 & M7 GPE versions have been granted by Google for 5.1 OS. OTA out shortly!” That means an over-the-air update should reach both models soon if it hasn’t already. The Google Play Editions of such phones come with pure Android, which excludes any customizations typically made by the manufacturers.
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Itching to make your shiny new Android Wear watch really yours? You’re in luck — Google’s curating not only the best watchfaces to throw on your teensy wrist-display, but some of the handsome watchbands you should lash onto it too. Android Wear product manager Jeff Chang pointed out new (and mostly leather, sadly) straps available from E3 Supply Co., Worn & Wound and Clockwork Synergy in a post on the Official Android Blog earlier today. Thing is, you can’t actually buy these accessories straight from the Play Store proper — you’ll still have to mosey on over to each retailer’s site to lay claim to your next bit of wrist candy so the approach isn’t exactly as seamless as we would’ve hoped.
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We’re going to take the scenic route in getting to the point today. If you don’t want to wait, you can go down to the bottom where it says, “The moral of the story…” But the point of today’s exercise is that we in the decentralized FOSS realm are a creative bunch, and in that creativity is our strength.
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Etsy attributes recent accomplishments in data center efficiency in large part to using the Facebook-developed, open source HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), according to software engineer Dan Miller on Etsy’s blog. Etsy is an extremely popular marketplace for handmade, vintage and unique items. The company is expected to IPO soon.
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Open source, popular as it has been, has hardly killed off proprietary software. While margins and new license revenues have suffered across the enterprise software spectrum, it is the cloud, more than open-source software, that is to blame (or thank, depending on whose stock you own). Yes, open source built the cloud, but it is the cloud that gets all the credit (and cash).
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Events
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Open source developers can create an immense amount of value for any company that relies on open source software by giving it the ability to direct and influence aspects of the open source community. This allows the company to shape the tools they rely on and make them better fit company needs, a phenomenon otherwise known as “scratching their own itch.”
Although an open source developer’s primary skill is writing good code, their value extends far beyond technical skills. Adopting open source practices requires participation in diverse communities that have a number of stakeholders who each have their own itches to scratch. Open source developers find themselves in a complex position that requires them to be experts not only in their technical field, but also in communication and collaboration.
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To defend against targeted attacks based on spoofed emails he proposed to detect whether the writing style of an email corresponds to that of previously seen emails of the presumed contact. In fact, their research shows that they are able to tell whether the writing style matches that of previous emails with very high probability.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Behind the bug A bug in the most recent version of the Chrome allows miscreants to crash browser tabs simply by embedding a link with a malformed URL in the HTML of a page.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla issued the Firefox 37.0.1 update, which disables the opportunistic encryption feature that was just introduced in Firefox 37.
Mozilla has had a change of heart regarding opportunistic encryption—for now. The company rolled out its open-source Firefox 37 Web browser on March 31, with one of the key new features being a capability known as opportunistic encryption. However, due to a security issue related to opportunistic encryption, Mozilla disabled the feature in the Firefox 37.0.1 update released April 3.
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SaaS/Big Data
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I’ve been involved in the ASF since 2005 when I got involved in the Apache Nutch project. I was a PhD student at USC taking Search Engines class and also working at NASA JPL. My final project in the class was an RSS parsing plugin (NUTCH-30) that got integrated. It was a budding, awesome community, and I got more and more excited after my patch and started helping out on the lists. I also saw a big use for Nutch and what eventually became Hadoop at NASA.
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This weekend, NASA is hooking up with IBM’s BlueMix cloud platform in an unprecedented development effort. More than 10,000 developers, scientists, entrepreneurs and students in 62 countries will work in tandem on a code-a-thon aimed at building technology for space exploration. Here are more details.
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PLUMgrid, which focuses on virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack cloud deployments, has announced the latest SDN software PLUMgrid Open Networking Suite 3.0 for OpenStack with new operational tools, features for dynamic routing, and expanded service insertion for third party virtual, physical and container based appliances. Based on OpenStack Juno, PLUMgrid ONS 3.0 is Red Hat certified with RHEL OSP 6.
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Barzan Mozafari, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), will be giving a talk on the predictability of performance in database systems at the OpenStack Live conference in Santa Clara, California on Tuesday, April 14.
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Education
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This February, EBSCO Information Services announced plans to provide funding and technical assistance for contributors to the Koha open source ILS platform. Led by the Koha Gruppo Italiano (KGI)—founded by the American Academy in Rome, American University of Rome, and the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce—with development support from ByWater Solutions, Catalyst IT, and Cineca, the partnership will enable an upgrade of Koha’s core search engine to Elasticsearch, the popular open source, multitenant-capable full-text search engine.
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Funding
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It is my sad duty to inform the community that Chris Yeoh passed away this morning. Chris leaves behind a daughter Alyssa, aged 6, who I hope will remember Chris as the clever and caring person that I will remember him as. I haven’t had a chance to confirm with the family if they want flowers or a donation to a charity. As soon as I know those details I will reply to this email.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This year the GNU Cauldron Conference is going to be held in Prague, Czech Republic, from August 7 to 9, 2015.
The GNU Cauldron Conference is a gathering of users and hackers of the GNU toolchain ecosystem.
Meaning that if you are interested in projects remotely related to the GNU C library, GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger or any toolchain runtime related project that has ties with the GNU system you are welcome!
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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“Open Access: Is a national licence the answer?” is a proposal by David Price and Sarah Chaytor of University College London for a mechanism to provide full access to everyone within the UK to all published research. It was published on 31 March 2015 by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) whose director, Nick Hillman, wrote the foreword.
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Programming
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April Fool’s Day is well behind us, so all the pranks should be over, right? I ask because today, Google announces that it is making its Santa Tracker project open source on GitHub. The fact that it is open source is great, but the timing is odd. The last thing I expected to read about in April is friggin’ Santa Claus, but here we are.
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Christmas may be a distant memory by now and the thought of Christmas 2015 might seem just as distant, as April has only just begun. However, it seems Christmas is not too far away from Google’s mind today, as the Search giant have just opened sourced their popular Santa Tracker software. If you are unfamiliar with Santa Tracker, then it is rather self-explanatory. Each year, around about Christmas time, Google releases its Santa Tracker offering the ability to track Santa while he is out and about and delivering his presents to all the boys and girls. That said, the tracker software is not just for tracking Santa and this is why last year Google released the Tracker as early as December 1st.
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Performance on these kinds of questions is at best a discrete skill that can be improved through practice, eliminating their utility for assessing candidates. At worst, they rely on some trivial bit of information or insight that is withheld from the candidate, and serve primarily to make the interviewer feel clever and self-satisfied. They have little if any ability to predict how candidates will perform in a job.
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The Guardian has published an open appeal to Tory and Lib Dem voters to vote Labour in Dundee West. I think that tells you all you need to know about the Red Tories and their priorities. It is also a new low in journalism even for the fanatic and increasingly desperate Severin Carrell, who is a total disgrace to his profession. The costs of publishing the Guardian ought to be counted against Marra’s election expenses: this is not journalism in any sense, merely a puff piece for a candidate.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Nasir al-Din Shah, Shah of Iran from 1848-1896, sold Baron Julius de Reuter the right to operate all of Iran’s railroads and canals, most of the mines, all of the government’s forests, and all future industries. The famous British statesman Lord Curzon called it “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of.” Iranians were so infuriated that the Shah had to rescind the sale the next year.
[...]
Our rhetoric on Iran seems nonsensical: Do U.S. leaders actually believe Iran would engage in a first nuclear strike on Israel or the U.S., given that would lead to a quick and devastating retaliation from those well-armed nuclear powers?
Even conservative U.S. foreign policy experts know that’s incredibly unlikely. They’re not worried that we can’t deter a nuclear-armed Iran — they’re worried that a nuclear-armed Iran could deter us. As Thomas Donnelly, a top Iran analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, put it in 2004, “the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a nightmare … because of the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon U.S. strategy for the greater Middle East. … The surest deterrent to American action is a functioning nuclear arsenal.”
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Finance
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Fox News’ campaign of misinformation surrounding food assistance programs may be continuing to influence GOP legislation, as lawmakers in both Missouri and Kansas consider measures addressing “fake problems” within their state’s benefit programs.
Republican lawmakers in Kansas recently introduced legislation restricting where recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, formerly known as “welfare”) can spend their money and what they can buy. The bill would limit the daily spending allowance to $25 and ban recipients from using benefits at psychics and tattoo parlors. Another measure, introduced by the House GOP in Missouri, will similarly limit how recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly knowns as “food stamps”) can use their benefits, prohibiting them from buying “steak, seafood, soda, cookies, chip[s], and energy drinks.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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There is nothing like a journalistic plane crash to inspire newsroom loudmouths to jump on their desks and lecture colleagues about the collapse of standards and crow that they’re such exemplars of the craft that never in a trillion years could they or their publication be snookered by a fabulist, a hoaxer, a dissembler or a liar.
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The author accuses news outlets of doing exactly what he himself and the U.S. mainstream media in general does when reporting about foreign policy issues such as Ukraine: they “systematically [regurgitate U.S. propaganda, spread] lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories.” The advantage they have is that they don’t need to translate anything. Apparently for Rohac an article written in Russian has to be Russian propaganda. It’s that simple: Russians are just not producing any honest journalistic content. This argument about texts being “directly translated from Russian sources” is not only weak, it is xenophobic.
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Censorship
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Nintendo’s never-ending desire to control how YouTubers review its games or do “let’s plays” has been laughable from the start. From the trust-destroying agreement YouTubers had to enter into in order to get access to visual content to the beauracratic nightmare individuals had to wade through just to get a video approved for monetization, the whole thing started off on messy footing. And the biggest issue in all of this: Nintendo still can’t seem to grasp that these YouTubers are giving the company free advertising. Gamers love the kinds of videos these YouTubers produce. They use them to make purchasing decisions, to become interested in new games, and to fuel word-of-mouth advertising that no trumped up ad campaign could ever possibly hope to achieve. Why make any of that more complicated by creating an approval system for the videos? And, more importantly, why take away the incentive for fans to promote your games by demanding a share of their YouTube revenue?
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This seems to happen every political season. When he was a Presidential candidate, John McCain got annoyed at YouTube taking down political videos based on copyright claims. During the last Presidential election, a Mitt Romney TV ad featuring President Obama singing an Al Green song was taken down via a copyright claim. And now, 2016 Presidential candidate Rand Paul has discovered that his announcement speech from Tuesday morning has been taken down.
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Privacy
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The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.
For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.
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Rand Paul’s campaign kickoff just concluded with a rousing speech by the libertarian-leaning U.S. senator from Kentucky in which he promised that his first act as president would be to stop the NSA’s illegal spying on American citizens. He vowed to win the White House while clutching the Bill of Rights in one hand and the Constitution in the other.
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Bill Binney, a former U.S. National Security Agency employee turned whistleblower, is on a mission to expose the agency’s domestic spying programs and violations of constitutional rights.
In an interview with AJ+’s Dena Takruri, Binney discusses why he thinks President Barack Obama is “violating the public trust” and what Americans can do to protect themselves from unwarranted surveillance.
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The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.
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The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), under approval from the top echelons of the Department of Justice, ran a secret, extensive phone metadata bulk collection program for over two decades, amassing billions of records, according to a new report published Tuesday in USA Today.
This database had previously been revealed to a lesser extent earlier this year, but neither its operational details nor its scope had been revealed until now.
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Note that it actually makes sense to use a one-time pad in this instance. The message is a ten-digit number, and a one-time pad is easier, faster, and cleaner than using any computer encryption program.
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Data brokers, which track browsing habits to sell to third parties, are not governed by any laws stating what can and can’t be done with the data. But they are not the same as hackers, who could theoretically access information about membership to porn sites. Vice said hackers would be more likely to sell the credit card information than release it online for no gain.
Neither brokers nor hackers have a vested interest in creating Thomas’s nightmare vision of a searchable porn-user database. But that doesn’t mean the data isn’t out there. Even a browser in incognito mode will send tracking information to data brokers that according to one privacy researcher is “all sitting in a database somewhere”.
Vice said that shouldn’t surprise internet users: “It’s a truth about the modern internet that just about anywhere you go, you’re being tracked.”
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TrueCrypt’s relative clean bill of health last week has now spawned a new focus on existing alternatives to the open source encryption software, namely VeraCrypt and CipherShed.
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ORG supporters are invited to our General Election Training run by ORG staff on how we can make an impact this election! We’ll give you all the knowledge you need to be confident and effective digital rights activist this election.
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An Australian court has ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over details of customers accused of illegally downloading a US movie.
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Civil Rights
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Hours after police removed an illicit bust of Edward Snowden from its perch in a Brooklyn park on Monday, artists replaced it with a hologram.
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John Oliver’s Monday night interview of Edward Snowden — which in 24 hours has been viewed by 3 million people on YouTube alone — renewed all the standard attacks in Democratic circles accusing Snowden of being a traitor in cahoots with the Kremlin. What’s most striking about this — aside from the utter lack of evidence for any of it — is how identical it is to what Nixon officials said to smear the last generation’s greatest whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg (who is widely regarded by Democrats as a hero because his leak occurred with a Republican in the White House).
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The Intercept revealed last month that it is quite easy to be deemed a “suspected terrorist” at airports in the United States. A leaked checklist used by the Transportation Security Administration shows an expansive list of “suspicious signs” for screening passengers, including yawning, fidgeting, whistling, throat clearing and staring at one’s feet. All of these, according to the TSA, are considered behaviors that indicate stress or deception. Well now The Intercept has revealed who the program actually targets: not terrorists, but undocumented immigrants. Taking a five-week period at a major U.S. airport, The Intercept found that 90 percent of all those arrested were detained for being in the country illegally. Not a single passenger was arrested or suspected for ties to terrorism. The overwhelming detention of undocumented immigrants bolsters criticism that government screening programs have targeted passengers with racial profiling. We speak to the reporter who broke this story, Jana Winter.
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As the economic landscape in China continues to shift, an awakening working class is demanding fair treatment and higher wages—and the movement is picking up steam.
The Associated Press on Monday highlighted the emerging resistance to workplace exploitation and authoritarian government policies that has steadily grown over the past four years, with numbers of strikers doubling annually since 2011 until they reached more than 1,300 last year.
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The police department in Erie County, New York fought hard to prevent the New York Civil Liberties Union from obtaining records about its use of a controversial surveillance tool known as a stingray.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Following copyright threats from large media companies a Kiwi ISP has taken down its VPN service. Lightbox, MediaWorks, SKY, and TVNZ had threatened legal action against services that bypass geo-restrictions on sites such as Netflix and Hulu. Other ISPs offering similar products are currently standing firm.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The peak lobby group for American pharmaceutical manufacturers has been given privileged access to negotiations for a major regional trade pact that could see the cost of medicines skyrocket in Australia.
Public health advocates and business groups are concerned that pharmaceutical giants will be able to advance their commercial interests in the once-in-a-lifetime pact through their seat at the negotiating table, while the details are kept secret from the Australian public.
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The draft of the investment chapter published by Wikileaks last week outlines the controversial investor‐state dispute settlement mechanism which would allow foreign corporations to sue governments in offshore tribunals.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.07.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux Australia Hacked and CoreOS Hearts Kubernetes [Ed: a dozen news articles today, even in corporate news/Web sites, about one single server getting cracked because it's "Linux Australia"]
In a post to the Linux-aus mailing list Saturday The Linux Australia Council informed members and conference attendees that due to a server breach personal information could be compromised. The March 22 hack was discovered two days later when steps were taken to “minimize the immediate damage.” Elsewhere, CoreOS has joined the race to Kubernetes and folks are still buzzing about the Wired.com quote saying Open Source Windows is a possibility.
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The president of open-source software user group Linux Australia has called on registered attendees of the organisation’s conferences for the past three years to change their passwords after it was discovered that the server hosting its conference management system had been breached.
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Desktop
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Linux PC retailer ZaReason has released one of its first computers with an Intel Broadwell processor. The ZaReason Zini 1550 is a tiny desktop computer which sells for $549 and up.
It’s based on Intel’s NUC mini PC platform, but unlike some NUC systems, the Zini 1550 comes with memory, storage, and an operating system which means you should be able to start using the computer almost as soon as you plug it in.
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As you’re getting used to Linux (potentially as your new main operating system), you’ll eventually try to find a way to efficiently manage your music. iTunes comes to mind because it’s been the most popular way to manage music over the years, but you’ll quickly find out that iTunes isn’t available natively on Linux. Plus, better ways exist to manage your music now that it’s 2015.
However, that doesn’t automatically mean that you won’t be able to manage your music the way you want to. There’s plenty of other ways to keep tabs on your music library. Here’s six great ways to get it done.
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If I plan on being productive I can’t listen to ‘regular’ music. It distracts me. I start singing along or get reminded of a different track, so end up poking around my library and… Well, that’s that.
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One Czech technical high school partnered with the Linux Professional Institute on courses and certification. Red Hat has been hiring up a storm in the Czech Republic.
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Google recently grabbed a lot of headlines for its new Chromebit, a Chrome OS computer in a HDMI stick. That’s fine, but Google and Asus are far from the first to put a computer on an HDMI stick. That honor goes to FXI Technologies Cotton Candy, which released it first model in 2012.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds 10 years ago today released Git after it was clear BitKeeper was no longer an option for the Linux community. He assessed other existing revision control systems and decided none would do. Ultimately, he decided he would just write a new one, so he went away for a weekend and came back with another hole in one. Most people know Linus created Linux, but many don’t know he is the mastermind behind what has become the most popular revision control system in software development today. If you ask him which is his crowning achievement, he’ll say “do I have to have just one?”
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Git will be celebrating it’s 10 anniversary this month. It’s yet another contribution of Linus Torvalds to the world in addition to Sub Surface and Linux. Jennifer Cloer of The Linux Foundation interviewed the father of Linux and presented us with a very comprehensive story behind Git.
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Linux Kernel 3.18.11 has been recently released with number of bug fixes and improvements for ARM, ARM64, s390, PowerPC, x86, MicroBlaze, and SPARC architectures and Updates to the NILFS2 and FUSE file systems. All Linux Kernels 3.18 users are urged to upgrade to Kernel 3.18.11 as soon as possible. Here is how you can manually upgrade to Kernel 3.18.11.
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Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing today, April 6, the immediate availability for download and testing of the seventh and last RC (Release Candidate) version of upcoming Linux 4.0 kernel, as well as the fact that the final version of Linux kernel 4.0 will be unveiled in two weeks from today, around April 19, 2015.
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It’s coming a day later than anticipated, but the seventh weekly update for the Linux 4.0 kernel is now available.
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Linus Torvald’s mailing list announcement mentioned the changes over the past week were small albeit the release delay was due to the holiday. Linus confirmed he’s planning to ship Linux 4.0 next weekend, ~12 April. However, that might be delayed as he’s planning to travel next week and that could complicate his opening of the merge window for Linux 4.1. So if he decides against the release next weekend due to the travel complications, Linux 4.0 might not be officially released for two weeks.
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Since announcing our Intro to Linux course for free on the edX platform a year ago, we’ve been working on doing a variety of things to make Linux learning and access to tour training and certification programs more accessible to all.
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Recently there was some discussion about ways to ease the tired backs of kernel maintainers. Apparently the merge windows are times of great labor, and some folks wanted to alert contributors to some preferable code submission habits.
There were a variety of ideas, and Kevin Cernekee summarized them in patch form, but one key idea was that none of this advice really could be treated as etched into stone. Linus Torvalds and Theodore Ts’o, in particular, pointed out that maintainers all have their own ways of doing things, and that no general rules could be relied on universally to produce repeatable results.
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Graphics Stack
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Nvidia had the pleasure of publishing today, April 6, an update to its Long Lived Branch of the Nvidia video driver for GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris operating systems, version 346.59.
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Applications
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I am pleased to announce that after months of work a new release of GNUstep’s IRC client, TalkSoup, is ready!
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Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
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It’s been an interesting two weeks, talking about and looking into why text-to-speech (TTS) is such a mess in Linux. I’ve spoken with seventeen of you; seventeen who know a bit about software programming. “A bit” is a purposeful understatement. Some of you have forgotten more about software programming than I will ever know. That being the case, I have learned a bit about why TTS in Linux is next to worthless. For those who are just joining into the conversation, let me catch you up quickly.
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Proprietary
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IT administrators who use Linux servers now have access to a backup and disaster recovery from a trusted industry solution with today’s release of StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® SPX. This addition to the StorageCraft Recovery-Ability™ solution offers Linux users reliable backup, protect, migrate and – most importantly – recovery for virtual and physical Linux servers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the day Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the first version of the Git distributed revision control system. Thousands of open source projects now rely on this popular software development tool, which fuels the growth of the collaborative development model that now dominates tech innovation.
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`Alternative Toolbar` is a Rhythmbox plugin which replaces the default Rhythmbox toolbar with a client-side decorations (header bars) toolbar or a compact toolbar that can be hidden.
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Games
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The free modification for Half-Life 2 ‘Transmissions: Element 120′ is in need of people who can help port it to Linux.
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Outlast, a first-person horror game developed and published by Red Barrels on Steam, has been released on the Linux platform.
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…the game has been patched with Mac and Linux support…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In a blog post on April 6, 2015, Boudewijn Rempt laid down the plans for the next major release of the best open-source digital painting software, Krita 3.0, which will be ported to Qt5.
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The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.9.0. This release includes a new sets of bugs fixes from Maik Qualmann who maintain KDE4 version while KF5 port is under progress.
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Reviews
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Parsix GNU/Linux 7 is a feature-rich rendition of the GNOME desktop that you must take for a spin regardless of how you feel about the GNOME desktop.
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New Releases
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David Cortarello announced on April 6 that the second maintenance release of Kwort Linux 4.0, an open source distribution based on the CRUX operating system and designed to be robust, extendable, and clean, is now available for download.
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As the title says Kwort 4.2 is out there in the wild 
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Screenshots
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Gentoo Family
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At many of our readers’ request, today we start a new series of screenshot tours that will track the changes implemented in the Sabayon Linux distribution, a rolling-release operating system based on Gentoo.
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Arch Family
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Other than the hardware-specific issues, I’ve been amazed by how well Arch Linux works, given that it doesn’t have release cycles, or a big team with a lot of money supporting and marketing it. I’ve heard only 30 developers maintain the core Arch packages, with most of them having a full-time job doing something else! At the same time, it shouldn’t be a total surprise things work so well because free software doesn’t just fall off a turnip truck:
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Ballnux/SUSE
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We reported a few days ago that the April update of openSUSE Tumbleweed will switch to the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment by default. Today, we have some more news regarding the transition to KDE Plasma 5 in openSUSE.
openSUSE Tumbleweed/Factory is a rolling-release version of openSUSE, where all the new technologies get implemented before they land in the main openSUSE distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Thousands of Expected Attendees to Talk about the Future of Enterprise Technology, Including Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Linux Containers, Big Data, Mobile, and Beyond
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His 19 followers would lead one to believe that Salo’s presence in the community is small. And yet, in the past year alone, he made 845 contributions – over two or so per day. As of writing, his contribution streak has lasted only two days, but his longest one – between the lead up to new year’s and the early weeks of January – lasted almost two weeks.
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The list is compiled based on objective criteria set by CRN, taking into account each vendor’s investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support, and communication. Vendors are assessed using the information that they provide in their completed applications. 5-star recipients were selected based on the information provided in their award applications, and how it matched up to the aforementioned criteria.
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NethServer is a free, Open Source, CentOS based all-in-one Linux server distribution, specially designed for small offices and medium-size enterprises. NethServer offers number of built-in modules that can be used to turn any systems into a mail, Web, Proxy, DNS, FTP, Cloud, IDS, Samba, or VPN servers instantly within few minutes. Just forget the step by step and comprehensive installation steps, because we can install the modules of our choice with a ‘single click’. It comes with a built-in powerful and modern web interface that simplifies the common administrative tasks. Since it is based on popular CentOS distribution, NethServer is very powerful, solid, secured distribution. We can regularly get security fixes, updates from the official CentOS repositories as well.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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For the Debian GNU/Linux community, there has long been an idiom that has often been repeated about release dates. That idiom is that, ‘it’s done when it’s done.”. At long last it would appear that the next major milestone release of Debian, version 8.0 also known as ‘Jessie’ is *almost* done.
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I recently spent some time updating my systemd knowledge and decided to put together some slides that I’ll use for a lecture. I’m interested in feedback about things that are missing, unclear, etc. Available on slideshare, as PDF, and as LaTeX source.
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Derivatives
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.6.2
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A Softpedia user informs us today that there is an old bug in the current Ubuntu releases that affects the way Wine apps are working on the distribution. The issue being related to the Compiz compositing manager.
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There are a ton of community projects for Ubuntu Touch, and some of them are really interesting, like the upcoming Unity Tweak app that is being built right now by a developer.
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There are plenty new features that 15.04 family has to offer. The question is which is the most expected? Let’s vote for that!
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AliExpress has a Chinese Cube table for sale that runs Ubuntu Linux. The 11.6-inch tablet is dubbed Cube I7 and promises to offer either the Ubuntu Kylin or Windows 8 operating systems, according to the screenshots and information presented on the website.
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UbuTab is a tablet supposedly built to take advantage of both Android and Ubuntu Touch operating systems and promises some great hardware components. The tablets should start shipping mid-April, but there is a problem. Ubuntu developers have no knowledge about the possible implementation of Ubuntu Touch on the tablet.
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The new machines start off at $949 (around £639, or AU$1,240) and come with Ubuntu 14.04 installed in addition to an Intel Core i5 Broadwell processor and 8GB of RAM that offers a boost compared to the XPS 13 range.
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Ubuntu developers usually plan beyond what they are working on at any particular moment, and it looks like they are finally taking an important decision regarding the presence of Python 2 libraries and dependencies, which might be solved for the Ubuntu 15.10 launch.
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Details about a number of Firefox vulnerabilities and a new Firefox in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been revealed by Canonical, and the company has pushed a version of the software into the repositories.
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The first ‘production’ smartphone running the Ubuntu operating system is finally here. Designed and marketed by the Spanish company BQ (not to be confused with the Chinese company BQ Mobile) and made in China, the first Ubuntu Phone is based on the 4.5-inch BQ Aquaris E4.5, which normally ships with Android 4.4. Included with the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition are two copies of the quick-start guide (in four languages each, one of the eight being English), a charger (with a built-in two-pin continental mains plug) and a 1-metre USB-to-Micro-USB cable. A comprehensive User Manual is available for download from the BQ website. The list price for the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, which is only available in the EU, is €169.90 (~£125).
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Flavours and Variants
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elementary OS is definitely one of the stars of the Linux ecosystem right now and with good reason. It’s one of the most beautiful operating systems out there, and you would think that that’s enough, but there are as many reasons to hate it as there are to love it.
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MintBox Mini is a mini-PC designed and built by CompuLab. The new system was just made available and the first batch is already sold out.
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Inforce unveiled a tiny “6501 Micro SoM” that runs Android on a quad-core 2.7GHz Snapdragon 805 SoC, and offers A/V, camera, USB, serial, and wireless I/O.
Inforce Computing’s 6501 Micro SoM taps the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoC used by its Inforce 6540 Pico-ITX SBC, but in computer-on-module form. The 50 x 28mm module, which is supported with an Inforce 6501 Development Kit, is claimed to be the “world’s smallest Snapdragon module for embedded applications.” Last September, Intrinsyc announced an 82 x 35mm, SODIMM-style COM based on the Snapdragon 805 called the Open-Q 8084 SOM, which is similarly supported with a carrier board.
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Seco has released a commercial SBC spun from the original i.MX6-based open spec Udoo hacker SBC, adding eMMC flash and subtracting Arduino compatibility.
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Allwinner unveiled a Cortex-A7 based SoC for smart connected cameras that integrates its HawkView image signal processor, and supports Linux and “Camdroid.”
Allwinner jumped on the ARM Cortex-A7 spec early, using it for its popular, low-priced system-on-chips like the Allwinner A10, dual-core A20, and quad-core A31. Like the A10, Allwinner’s new “V3″ SoC has a single Cortex-A7 core, in this case clocked to 1.2GHz. However, Like a number of TI’s Linux-focused, DSP-based DaVinci SoCs, the V3 is designed for camera applications. It follows Allwinner V-Series SoCs including the quad-core, Cortex-A7 V10 and Cortex-A8-based V15.
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For anyone who doesn’t have Microsoft on their agenda, there is an option to save $40 and get a preinstalled Linux flavour instead. The Intel Compute Stick is up pre-order at $150 for the Windows-powered version, or $110 if you opt for Ubuntu.
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Phones
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Android
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Verizon has just announced that it is rolling out an Android 5.0 Lollipop update to users of Samsung Galaxy Note 4. The latest software version, N910VVRU1BOAF, is said to have everything that Lollipop can offer.
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Android TV devices have left a lot to be desired so far. Back at CES Razer showed off a device that should finally do justice to Android TV. The Razer Forge TV is a beast of a set-top box, and you can pre-order it right now from Amazon. Razer is typically known for their gaming products, which is precisely what makes this device so great.
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The much anticipated LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is finally here and slowly arriving for more and more owners, but the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is also causing problems for many. The update initially started outside of the US for unlocked devices, and then earlier this month the LG G2 in the US finally received Android 5.0 Lollipop, starting with Verizon.
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Google’s Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop update has been rolling out slowly for several and we’re finally starting to see Google make a big push with the roll out. With that in mind, we want to take a look at how the Nexus 5 Android 5.1 update has been performing on Google’s aging former flagship. This is our Nexus 5 Android 5.1 review.
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Before you ask, yes, this article is basically just another excuse for me to use Android Police’s favorite device abbreviation, LGGP83GPE. (That’s the short-lived Google Play Edition of the LG G Pad 8.3, from way back in 2013.) According to at least one Twitter user and, hey, my own tablet, the LGGP83GPE is getting its Android 5.1 update right about now. If you’re running stock software, head to the usual spot (Settings>About tablet>System updates) to check for yours.
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The speculation about Google merging Chrome OS and Android has been a constant over the last few years. Why does Google have two separate systems when everyone else is merging? Why doesn’t Chrome just get folded into Android? Google has to kill one of them off. It’s odd that the tech world insists on Highlander rules – there can be only one. But the truth is that Google can bring them closer and closer together, and create a seamless experience for us, and it doesn’t need one to assimilate the other in order to do that.
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It’s been a long wait, but we promise you — it’s worth it. HTC One M8 owners on AT&T had to sit back and watch as the other “Big 4″ carriers in the US pushed out Android Lollipop to the device.
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Owners of the HTC One M8 phone on AT&T should be on the lookout for a shot of Android Lollipop as of Tuesday.
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Good news if you have an LG G Pad 8.3 Google Play Edition tablet: The Android 5.1 software update is in the air, waiting to be installed on your device. Android Police notes that the new version became available for the slate on Monday. Google updated and posted the software for many of its own Nexus devices a few weeks ago. If you have one of those, you can download and install the Android 5.1 factory image directly from Google here.
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Last week, Google published its comeback. The company’s “Android Security 2014 Year in Review” report shows that less than 1% of Android devices have any malware. Google scans Active Android devices with a product called “Verify Apps,” which seeks out viruses, ransomware, or other “potentially harmful applications” (PHAs).
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Google has launched a tool that lets Android apps run on any machine that can run its Chrome browser.
The software, called Arc Welder, acts as a wrapper around Android apps so they can run on Windows, OSX and Linux machines.
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Phone maker HTC has been apparently working on a new system codenamed “Cello” that links up with everything from navigation to night vision in a bid to provide a much more robust alternative to Google’s Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
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In October when Google announced the brand new Android 5.0 Lollipop update many manufacturers promised quick updates, and that included Motorola. Google’s been busy pushing updates to Nexus users, as well as a new Android 5.0.2 and Android 5.1 update to fix some bugs, and today we’ve learned the Moto G is getting Android 5.1 Lollipop for some.
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If you own an Android phone, that also means you have a Google account. Google would like you to know that this account isn’t just there for show — it’s there to unlock a bunch of cool services on your smartphone. To help out Android newbies, Google has created a whole page dedicated to “78 things you didn’t know you could do with Google” to provide users with the basics they need to help them get the most out of Google’s services.
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Google’s own director of engineering for Android Wear gives us a glimpse at what devices he carries, how he sets up his home screens, and what apps he can’t live without.
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“To have GitHub cohost their first conference outside of the US in Wellington is a strong endorsement of our tech capability.”
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As a digital immigrant who has, without sometimes knowing why, gone down he android path for my devices, I’m inherently drawn to the open source philosophy.
In a sense, at a time when public participation in democracy is lessening, it is events such as this that continue to hold the flame for non-secrecy and more sharing in society.
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Open source’s influence extends far beyond sharing code, but this aspect sometimes goes unappreciated. For example, I previously wrote about how the special way of developing and collaborating associated with open source has come to also reflect many DevOps best practices, from transparency to iterative fast releases. I’d argue that it is many of these same default behaviors that are helping to make the Internet of Things a hot topic today.
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Events
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Fedora Jam is coming to Linux Fest North West in Bellingham, Washington, April 24th to 26th. If you are a friend of Fedora, sign up on the wiki and participate in our booth. Or if you are a musician, come by to try out Fedora Jam, we will have a guitar, keyboard and other instruments to try out. We will have Fedora shirts at the Friday game night, show your Fedora pride during the fest.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is working on a new feature called Tracking Protection that is helping users identify and block websites that collect personal data despite the fact that the browser has the “Do Not Track” policy enabled.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As part of the OpenStack Live conference next week in Santa Clara, California, she’ll be delivering a three hour tutorial on OpenStack networking architecture and concepts, along with her colleague Faan DeSwardt.
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At one point, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more. Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR are leading the pack among these Hadoop-focused companies.
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Funding
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Every time I hear of another great open source project shutting its doors, I hold my breath in hopes it will be forked. Sadly though, this isn’t a great plan for all projects. Sometimes these projects are rich in users but poor in developers. In this article, I’ll explore this issue and what can be done to keep open source projects funded.
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Google has a vested interest in CoreOS bringing Kubernetes to the enterprise, with Google Ventures investing $12 million in Tectonic.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This post from 2011 is no longer applicable; nongnu submissions have been accepted again for some years, as detailed in later news items.
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Public Services/Government
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The Basque Parliament is planning to overhaul its workflow, wishing to increase its use of digital identity and electronic signature solutions. The Basque Parliament is using Sinadura, an open source eID tool developed by Zylk, a Bilbao-based open source IT service provider. The parliament now wants to combine this with more applications, the company says.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Qatar Digital Library is soon set to reach some 500.000 images, and it’s increasing by the minute. You don’t want to miss this great (and free) source of information.
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Open Data
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The German federal government has launched an online platform where anyone can submit ideas for open data. After four weeks (later this month), the online phase will be closed and all the ideas will be collected.
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The Vienna Municipal Department of Land Surveying, MA 41, has made all of its geodata available for free. This data includes multi-purpose (surface) maps, orthophotos, terrain models, structure models, and surface models, all part of the Geodata Infrastructure.
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Open Access/Content
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Let’s start with an explanation of the digital humanities. The digital humanities is where traditional humanities scholarship—or, the academic study of arts, language, history, and the like—meets the digital age. By using technology in new and innovative ways, digital humanities scholars can create research projects that explore topics in ways that were not possible (or were extremely laborious undertakings) before computers.
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A group of Rutgers-Camden students are celebrating what they see as a huge step toward the university offering an alternative to traditional — and traditionally expensive — textbooks.
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I see that in “journalists” questioning Blair, nobody asked the obvious question, which is who was paying for this particular speech.
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I wondered how on earth they got an audience so completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion, and the answer was not hard to find. The audience has been selected “based both on current opinion polls and the last general election result.”
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Health/Nutrition
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A lobbyist for Monsanto claimed that it was safe to drink “a quart” of the company’s Roundup pesticide, but pointedly refused to try even a sip when offered a glass during an interview with French TV before storming off the set.
Patrick Moore told a Canal+ journalist that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s most widely used weed killer, was not responsible for an increase in cancer rates in Argentina.
“You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you,” he insisted.
When the journalist informed him that a cup of the herbicide was prepared for him, Moore bristled, saying: “I’m not stupid.”
But when pressed by the interviewer if the substance was dangerous, Moore replied: “It’s not dangerous to humans.” He added that many try to commit suicide by drinking Roundup, but “fail regularly.”
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is poised to become the first top-tier presidential candidate from either party to make marijuana reform a major campaign issue.
Paul, who will announce his White House bid on Tuesday, has argued forcefully that states should be allowed to adopt their own policies on the use of medical marijuana without fear of federal interference.
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Security
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A new version of the popular Tor software that enables anonymous communication between computers around the world was released today, April 7, in order to fix two security issues discovered in the previous versions.
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The operator of an underground marketplace hosted within the Tor network has reported a flaw in Tor that he claims is being used for an ongoing denial of service attack on the site.
The problem, which is similar to one reported by another hidden site operator in December on the Tor mailing list, allows attackers to conduct a denial of service attack against hidden sites by creating a large number of simultaneous connections, or “circuits,” via Tor, overwhelming the hidden service’s ability to respond.
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Jonathan LeBlanc of PayPal is on a mission is to replace the password with something more secure and easier to use.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Last week, at a crucial moment in nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, the New York Times published an op-ed by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” As I pointed out at the time, the Times accidentally undermined him by linking one of his key claims to an explanation of why that claim was wrong. After I asked about it, the Times changed the link.
Bolton’s many other factual mistakes, detailed below, have also not been corrected — on top of which, Bolton failed to make a relevant disclosure about his paid work for a group that advocates the overthrow of the Iranian regime. It’s worth dwelling on these problems a bit given that Bolton’s perspective has a significant constituency in Congress — which could still derail the accord the White House is closing in on with the Iranians.
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With the end of the Obama presidency just around the corner, discussions of his administration’s foreign policy legacy are already well under way. But one central element of that policy has received little attention: the Obama administration’s dramatic acceleration of U.S. weapons exports.
The numbers are astonishing. In President Obama’s first five years in office, new agreements under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program—the largest channel for U.S. arms exports—totaled over $169 billion. After adjusting for inflation, the volume of major deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion. That also means that the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II.
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Transparency Reporting
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I had not realised that Julian had so much Scottish ancestry or quite so recently. After independence, he will definitely be entitled to a Scottish passport!
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board recently recycled many of the same claims it made in a 2009 editorial titled, “California’s Man-Made Drought.” Right-wing website Hot Air dubbed the drought “California’s ‘man-made’ environmental disaster.” And when potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina described the drought as “a man-made disaster” during an appearance on Glenn Beck’s radio show, Beck demanded to know why “we don’t hear that story on the news at all,” while Rush Limbaugh declared that “there is a man-made lack of water in California,” and “[Fiorina is] right.”
No, these media figures haven’t suddenly seen the light on climate change. Instead, they’re using the historic drought as an opportunity to baselessly attack environmental policies.
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A fire has broken out at a Russian nuclear submarine during repair work at a shipyard in Severodvinsk. The cause of the fire is believed to be related to welding work on the sub.
The United Shipbuilding Company confirmed the incident, adding that nobody was hurt in it. According to the the shipyard’s spokesperson, the submarine’s nuclear reactor was shut down and its weapons unloaded before the repair started.
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A Moscow radio station published a picture showing smoke billowing from the submarine.
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A Russian nuclear submarine has caught fire in a shipyard, according to news agency RIA Novosti.
The 500m-long (1,640ft6) 949 Antei was being repaired on in Zvyozdochka shipyard in Russia’s northern province of Arkhangelsk, according to Russian news agency reports.
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Russian news agency Interfax cited a separate source as saying there were no weapons on board the submarine and other news agencies said the fire had started during welding, causing insulation materials to catch fire.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Experts in military and veteran suicide issues are criticizing National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent for claiming that veterans are committing suicide because they believe President Obama “is the enemy.”
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The reaction from fans — and readers — might have been different if any of the reporters had asked actual security experts about the efficacy of metal detectors at preventing terrorism. Because as I found in researching the topic for Vice Sports (9/23/14) last fall, there’s no evidence that walkthrough metal detectors at airports or ballgames make anybody safer — and reason to believe they may even make us less safe.
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Censorship
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The UK’s attempts to filter the Internet of all of its naughty bits are nothing if not amusing, whether it’s the nation’s porn filter architect getting arrested for child porn, or the complete and total obliviousness when it comes to the slippery slope of expanding those filters to include a growing roster of ambiguously objectionable material. The idea of forcing some kind of overarching structure upon porn consumption in the UK is another idea that never seems to go away, whether it’s requiring a “porn license” (requiring users to clearly opt in if they want to view porn) or the latest push — mandatory age checks.
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Privacy
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Microsoft has reversed its position on the contentious Do Not Track (DNT) browser feature, saying Internet Explorer will no longer send DNT signals to websites by default.
“Put simply, we are updating our approach to DNT to eliminate any misunderstanding about whether our chosen implementation will comply with the W3C standard,” Microsoft chief privacy officer Brendon Lynch said in a Friday blog post.
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Over the past few years we’ve followed the saga of TrueCrypt. The popular and widely used full disk encryption system got some attention soon after the initial Snowden leaks when people started realizing that no one really knew who was behind TrueCrypt, and that the software had not been fully audited. Cryptographer Matthew Green decided to lead an effort to audit TrueCrypt. A year ago, the team released the first phase, finding a few small vulnerabilities, but no backdoors and nothing too serious. This week the full audit was completed and again finds no evidence of any backdoors planted in the code.
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On the second floor of a narrow brick building in the London Borough of Islington, Edin Omanovic is busy creating a fake company. He is playing with the invented company’s business cards in a graphic design program, darkening the reds, bolding the blacks, and testing fonts to strike the right tone: informational, ambiguous, no bells and whistles. In a separate window, a barren website is starting to take shape. Omanovic, a tall, slender Bosnian-born, Scottish-raised Londonite gives the company a fake address that forwards to his real office, and plops in a red and black company logo he just created. The privacy activist doesn’t plan to scam anyone out of money, though he does want to learn their secrets. Ultimately, he hopes that the business cards combined with a suit and a close-cropped haircut will grant him access to a surveillance industry trade show, a privilege usually restricted to government officials and law enforcement agencies.
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The Department of Homeland Security aims to increase its domestic human intelligence collection activity this year, the Department recently told Congress.
In a question for the record from a September 2014 congressional hearing, Rep. Paul C. Broun (R-GA) asked: “Do we currently have enough human intelligence capacity–both here in the homeland and overseas–to counter the threats posed by state and non-state actors alike?”
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Let me make something clear: I am pro dick pic. I mean, who doesn’t love the occasional consensual staring contest with a one eyed bandit? When Edward Snowden told everyone to keep taking dick pictures on Last Week Tonight, he was making an important point. Governments are meant to be accountable to people and controlled by them in democracies. Leaving aside any specific analysis of how much or whether America is really a democracy, Snowden’s message is profound and valid. We should have that freedom, and we have it by practicing that freedom at our governments. But we should be on a dick pic strike nevertheless.
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Civil Rights
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Previously, Zeman said that his visit to Russia would be a “sign of gratitude for not having to speak German in this country.” He also intended to pay tribute to the memory of 150,000 Soviet soldiers who died liberating Czechoslovakia.
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Barrett Brown, the brash journalist and former member of Anonymous who was sentenced in January 2015 to over five years in federal prison, had his e-mail privileges suddenly revoked, seemingly for corresponding with journalists.
On Sunday, Brown’s supporters published his account of the punishment, describing how he suddenly lost access to his prison-supplied e-mail account on March 31. In the ensuing days, Brown attempted to contact various prison officials to get further information, including someone named “Trust Fund Manager Coleman.”
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Malaysia has passed a controversial anti-terrorism bill, which the government says is needed to tackle the threat from Islamic extremists.
The bill reintroduces indefinite detention without trial – something the prime minister had repealed in 2012.
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April 5th marked the five year anniversary of WikiLeaks publication of the Collateral Murder Video. The footage of a secret US military video depicted an Apache helicopter killing Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists. It provided an uncensored view of modern war for the world to see. The light that shone in the darkness was the conscience of a young woman. Chelsea Manning (formally Bradley Manning) is now serving 35 years behind bars for her great public service.
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April 5 marked the five-year anniversary of the release of the Collateral Murder video by WikiLeaks. The shocking footage showed the entire world the 2007 US Apache attack helicopter airstrike on Baghdad that killed 12 people – including two Reuters staff members – and injured two small children.
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On 1 April 2015, Barack Obama signed into law an Executive Order “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities”
Media reports speculated that the new powers granted by this Executive Order would enable executive authorities to confiscate cryptocurrency holdings and even prohibit donations to Edward Snowden’s defence fund.
Since news of the Executive Order came to light, the bitcoin account for Edward Snowden’s official defence fund experienced a significant surge in donations , due at least in part to this post on reddit. We have received over 200 separate donations this month, including a single donation of 8.49 bitcoin, or over 2000 US dollars.
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US President Barack Obama has issued an executive order authorising the Treasury Secretary to enact sanctions against those whom it deems to have “have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for” cyber-related crimes.
Reuters reports that even US lawmakers consider the order “surprisingly broad”, and investigative journalists are concerned about its wide-ranging scope.
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Vulnerable young boys were taken from a children’s care home in Belfast in the 1970s, trafficked to London and abused by powerful figures who were part of a Westminster pedophile ring, a victim has claimed.
Richard Kerr, a victim of child sex abuse at the Kincora care home for boys, told Channel 4 News he also suffered abuse at London’s Elm Guest House and Dolphin Square.
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ANOTHER official at the National Democratic Assembly (Al Wahdawi) has been arrested for allegedly criticising military action in Yemen.
Deputy secretary general Mohammed Al Motawa was yesterday accused of spreading false and malicious information about Operation Decisive Storm, led by Saudi Arabia and nine allied countries, including Bahrain.
The coalition countries launched air strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen on Thursday after Shi’ite militias sought to topple the Yemeni government led by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
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A Pakistani judge on Tuesday ordered that criminal charges be filed against a former CIA lawyer who oversaw its drone program and the one-time chief agency operative in Islamabad over a 2009 strike that killed two people.
Former acting general counsel John A. Rizzo and ex-station chief Jonathan Bank must face charges including murder, conspiracy, terrorism and waging war against Pakistan, Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court ruled. A court clerk and a lawyer involved the case, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, confirmed details of the judge’s ruling.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.06.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The original objective in starting the compilation was to dispel the FUD that Linux does not have the necessary software to compete with Windows. Over time, the aim of the compilation was to enable Linux users, whatever their level of computing experience, to identify software of all types that is worth exploring. With the huge range of open source software available, there is simply not enough time for users to evaluate every application even within a single category of software.
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Thus far, no member of Linux Australia has expressed outrage or otherwise negative feelings about the organization’s handling of the matter. In fact, they lauded the president for transparency and disclosure. Let this be a lesson in server administration, then: sometimes even when you think you’ve covered all your bases, you haven’t.
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Desktop
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So today I pulled the cables from my main Linux desktop, plugged them into the Windows machine and hit the power button, just to see if it would still boot for a few days — long enough for me to prepare a couple of returns. Because the machine is old and hadn’t been started for a year, I fully expected the hard drive to fail during boot. Unfortunately, it booted, and in a few minutes I was greeted by the Windows splash screen.
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Server
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CoreOS’s first plan was to bring container-enabled Linux to the cloud. The company is still working on that, but with its new program Tectonic, it’s upped its game. The company is working on bringing Google’s container management system, Kubernetes, to the enterprise.
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Kernel Space
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While the Linux 4.0 kernel hasn’t even been released yet, there’s already a number of items we’re looking forward to seeing with Linux 4.1.
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Ten years ago this week, the Linux kernel community faced a daunting challenge: They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Software Configuration Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge the following week with Git. Today Git is used for thousands of projects and has ushered in a new level of social coding among programmers.
To celebrate this milestone, we asked Linus to share the behind-the-scenes story of Git and tell us what he thinks of the project and its impact on software development. You’ll find his comments in the story below. We’ll follow this Q&A with a week of Git in which we profile a different project each day that is using the revision control system. Look for the stories behind KVM, Qt, Drupal, Puppet and Wine, among others.
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With the systemd developers pursuing their vision for how distributions/software should be distributed, more Btrfs specific functionality is being added to the init manager.
As systemd’s grand plans involve the use of the Btrfs file-system for having per-user and per-app Btrfs sub-volumes and take advantage of other features (like snapshots) presented by this next-generation Linux file-system, systemd is starting to see more code specifically for handling Btrfs features.
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Of the well known operating systems in the world, Linux has had the distinct reputation of being installed almost anywhere there is a processor to be found. Of course, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, but running Linux on any computer possible has always been an exercise in skill and a cause for bragging. While Canon’s digital cameras are not exactly as esoteric as refrigerators and washing machines, getting Linux to run on these more often than not very closed devices can open up a world of possibilities.
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Early adopters are using unikernel technology to run websites, critical systems infrastructure, cutting-edge research or to operate as a network appliance. MirageOS, for example, is serving as a successful testbed for cutting-edge research at the University of Cambridge and other academic groups, while Galois’ clients use The Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine (HaLVM) for a number of network services and functions.
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Graphics Stack
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While the Radeon, Nouveau, and LLVMpipe/Softpipe drivers have already supported the OpenGL ARB_clip_control extension, the Intel (i965) driver now finally supports this OpenGL 4.5 extension too.
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Following Intel’s development of NIR as the new intermediate representation for Mesa and the Raspberry Pi graphics driver switching to NIR, the Freedreno Gallum3D driver as the open-source user-space GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno now has NIR support too.
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Benchmarks
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Last week I discovered The Fan Club’s Experiments page. It reminds me of the Debian Experiments community on Google+. I like the concept of trying out all kinds of different things and reporting back to the community on how it works. I’ve been meaning to do more of that myself so this is me jumping in and reporting back on something I’ve been poking at this weekend.
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Applications
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For users of the vim text editor interested in new syntax highlighting options, meet color_coded.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’ve recently witnessed a lot of discussions around using load balancers and FreeIPA on the user’s mailing list, and I realized there is a lot of confusion around how to use load balancers when Kerberos is used for authentication.
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Wine or Emulation
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Following Friday’s release of Wine 1.7.40, the equivalent Wine-Staging update is now out with a few extra changes.
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Games
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Freedom Planet is a rather quirky looking platformer with tons of action, motorcycles, cats, and lots of other random junk.
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Making the rounds on the Internet this weekend is that BioWare — which is owned by EA Games — has released their first open-source project.
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The Unvanquished development team had the pleasure of announcing today, April 6, the immediate availability for download of a new Alpha build of their FPS (First-person shooter) game for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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For those still living in the GNOME 2 days, the MATE Desktop 1.10 has arrived for Easter.
The MATE Desktop 1.10 release has more work on porting to GTK3, adds GObject introspection support, provides many RandR fixes, adds a new org.mate.desktop GSettings schema, and has numerous other changes.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A lot has been happening on the KDE side of openSUSE… this post summarizes what’s been going on so far.
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Talked about recently were the KDE Plasma 5 transition plans for openSUSE and coming out today are more details on the planned switch.
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In terms of the Plasma 5 upgrade in openSUSE Tumbleweed, the developers feel that with the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.3 release there is “the level of quality expected from the default openSUSE desktop” and so for this milestone is when they plan on making the switch.
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Krita 3.0 is going to be the first Qt 5.x-based Krita. April 13th, 2006, we ported Krita to Qt 4. Seventeen days after porting started, I could publish Krita 2.0 runs!”
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For users of KDE’s Krita digital painting / raster graphics editor, the Qt5 port of the program won’t be fully ready for at least another half-year, but it’s being done right.
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Linux, originally developed as a free-to-use operating system, is growing more powerful, capable, and user-friendly by day. Currently there are a large number of Linux versions, called distributions or “distros” for short, available in the market, each followed by a large group of users and developers who are working to further enhance the product. To identify the best fit for your organization, it’s important to know the capabilities and limitations of these distros.
The Linux operating system is basically a kernel or a wrapper over the physical hardware that enables applications to interact with the underlying processing machinery. Since it is open source, organizations are free to use its core elements to build and release their own distros. A large number of organizations have already developed several flavors of Linux distros targeting different audiences and adding flexibility and choices based on their requirements.
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New Releases
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Jacque Montague Raymer had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the MakuluLinux Unity 8 computer operating system. This is the first ever edition of the MakuluLinux distribution to use the Unity desktop environment from the upstream Ubuntu Linux OS.
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4MParted, a Linux distribution based on the 4MLinux and GParted, has been upgraded and is now ready for download and testing.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, was proud to announce recently that the upcoming Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 operating system would ditch the regular Calamares installer in favor of the another one called Thus, which will boast a wide range of improvements.
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Red Hat Family
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According to Matt Asay, it’s time for Red Hat to step up and make OpenStack work for the enterprise. Do you agree?
[...]
For example, CEO Jim Whitehurst explained that half of its OpenStack sales were six-figure deals (though how he answered the question implied that a significant chunk of every deal involved professional services to make OpenStack work), and CFO Charlie Peters called out that several of Red Hat’s top-30 deals included an OpenStack component.
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Debian Family
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WhyTheName is a very useful Debian wiki that explains the name of most packages found in the operating system and teaches readers some cool new facts.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is almost ready to offer the next generation of its Unity environment for the desktop, and it will be accompanied by Mir, their brand-new display server. One of the community’s biggest worries was that GTK apps will have a problem running on the new desktop, but that issue won’t be a problem.
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Ubuntu for phones has been officially released and it’s running on Bq phone in the wild, not to mention the thousands of Nexus 4 devices, but not many people know that it also comes with an integrated default firewall.
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Cube’s $399, Ubuntu-based “i7-CM” tablet has an Intel Core M CPU and an 11.6-inch HD display. Meanwhile, an Ubuntu-driven “MJ Tech” tablet has broken cover.
A Chinese company called Cube, owned by Ele Technology, has begun selling an Ubuntu Linux-based version of its Windows-based i7 tablet. The Cube i7-CM appears to be one of the first tablets to run the Ubuntu Touch UI extensions.
As first reported by CNGadget, and picked up by Liliputing, the i7-CM starts at just $399 at AliExpress, compared to $581 for the Windows version. The 11.6-inch tablet is notable for running on one of Intel’s new 14-nm fabricated Core M processors. Meanwhile, at least two other Ubuntu tablets are also in the works, including a model from MJ Technology.
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The Ubuntu MATE developers are preparing for the launch of the latest 15.04 branch of the operating system. One of the features to be present in Ubuntu MATE 15.04 is Compiz integration, and one of the developers has put together a video showing all the cool stuff to be available.
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If iOS, Windows and Android tablets are not to your liking you might be interested in a new Ubuntu tablet in the form of the Cube i7-CM that launches in China this week priced at around $399.
Even though the Ubuntu tablet is launching in China international shipping is available, but be warned the $399 price is limited to launch and is expected to rise to an as yet unspecified higher price later on its been revealed.
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We’re not far from the final release of Ubuntu 15.04. So it’s a good time to take a peek at the changes and new features in Canonical’s latest version of Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 15.04 might be somewhat underwhelming for those expecting tons of new features. There are some important changes, but most of them won’t be apparent to desktop users.
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Unity 8 is not ready for regular use, but Canonical is improving it all the time. Users need to know that despite all the important changes and improvements announced for the Unity 8, it won’t be terribly different from the current implementation.
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Ubuntu developers are working hard to improve the battery life the Ubuntu Touch operating systems, and they are preparing for the launch of a new major update that should provide better performance in this regard.
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Flavours and Variants
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A new update has been announced for the nOS Ubuntu-based Linux operating system that uses the KDE4 desktop environment. nOS is a rolling-release distribution, but new ISO images are being released by the nOS development team at the beginning of each month for those who want to install the operating system on new computers.
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OSMC is the successor of Raspbmc and Crystalbuntu, created and maintained by Sam Nazarko. It is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 license. It aims to be simple and easy to use, with no knowledge of Linux needed. This is because the system is managed through the OSMC interface. If you want to experiment, there are the complete Debian repositories available containing more than 30,000 packages.
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It look a little longer than expected, but Intel’s Compute Stick PC is up for pre-order through some online stores.
The stick-sized computer is available from Newegg with Windows 8.1 on board. If you’re the type that always spells “Microsoft” with a dollar sign, Newegg is also selling the Linux version for $110. Liliputing reports that it comes with Ubuntu 14.04. The price for the Linux Compute Stick was supposed to be $89, but we’ve yet to see it anywhere for that cheap.
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The palm-sized device will be available in both Windows and Linux flavors, both of which will come with an Intel Atom Z3735F processor (Core M version in the cards), HDMI output, full-size USB 2.0 port, microSD card reader, microUSB port (for power), Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, and Bluetooth 4.0.
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A Softpedia user has brought to our attention that the Intel Compute Stick mini computer, which was unveiled by Intel at CES 2015 back in January, is now available for pre-order on several retail websites, including Amazon, Newegg, and Zones.
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Phones
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My wife recently got a new phone which left the Nexus 4 she had been using previously up for grabs. I had been itching to give Sailfish OS a try on a piece of modern hardware for some time now so I took this as an opportunity to load it up on the now extra phone.
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Android
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Android 5.0 Lollipop has so far been rolling out for smartphones but it seems that Samsung is expanding that now to tablets.
Samsung has apparently started seeding the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS to Samsung Galaxy Tab S10.5 LTE units though it may be for a select number of regions only.
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But since Android lets app makers do certain things that Apple prohibits, there are a few exclusive options that stand out.
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Android: The rollout of Android Auto is one of Google’s slowest, and unless you have a Lollipop phone and an expensive aftermarket head unit, you can’t use it. If you’d rather skip the expensive car modifications, AutoMate can give you a similar dashboard experience with just your phone.
Inexplicably, Android Auto has not officially been released in a simple app form that any old phone in landscape mode could use. While AutoMate is not official in any way, it does many of the same things, including controlling your music player, getting directions, and reading your texts aloud.
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Up until recently, Xposed only supported devices running Android 4.4 or earlier, but in February Xposed developer Rovo89 released Xposed Framework for Android 5.0. Now there’s an unofficial build that works with (some) devices running Android 5.1.
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OnePlus launched the OnePlus One last year, a high end smartphone that offered an excellent value to the consumer. A couple of days ago OnePlus announced OxygenOS, an operating system based on Android Lollipop 5.0.2, available for OnePlus One owners.
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Google made strides in 2014 to improve Android security, but a large number of legacy users might not see the full benefit.
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The fact is, though, hard data now shows that Android is not a target of hackers, and even in the case of the security vulnerability that PaloAlto Networks identified, no reports of actual hacks arrived. In a new report released by Google, the remarkable news has emerged that fewer than one percent of Android devices had a potentially harmful application installed last year.
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Verizon has begun rolling out the latest Android 5.0 update for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and in addition to all of the features and improvements you would expect to get with a Lollipop upgrade, it also adds support for VoLTE.
This Lollipop upgrade includes Samsung’s latest TouchWiz software for the Note 4, which has been redesigned slightly to better match Google’s Material Design guidelines.
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Amazon Prime Instant Video finally supports Android-powered tablets, almost 7 months after making its Android debut. The service, which offers thousands of movies and TV shows to Prime subscribers, is available through the Amazon Appstore.
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Arne Exton, the creator of numerous distributions of Linux that are available for download on Softpedia, was happy to inform us about his latest creation, RaspAnd, a custom OS that allows you to run the Android 5.1 Lollipop mobile operating system on a Raspberry Pi 2 computer board.
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Welcome to this week’s best Android apps roundup. As ever, prices are correct at the time of writing, and (Free + IAP) means the app is freemium and uses in-app purchases.
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The problems with iOS 8 have stretched on for months. Come on, Apple!
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Sony Mobile already started rolling out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update for the Sony Xperia Z2 and Sony Xperia Z3 series in the Baltic and Nordic regions mid-March, but the mobile manufacturer has not sent out the updates to other countries yet.
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Although iOS scored widget support last year, Android is still the undisputed king of widgets. Naturally, those who swear by Google and Android have tinkered with these; in the meantime, those heavily investing into customization are certainly always searching high and low for a new widget that will give a whole new flavor to their Android screens.
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We knew it was coming, and over the weekend it finally arrived: OnePlus has officially released the custom-made OxygenOS flavour of Android that will be powering the company’s handsets and devices in the future.
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When Android 5.0 Lollipop was released last year, it was filled with bugs and customer complaints started to pour in. Google rolled out Android 5.0.1 Lollipop and Android 5.0.2 Lollipop to try to fix the issues, but those were not enough.
Google started rolling out Android 5.1 Lollipop in March, as a bigger maintenance update that looks to address the several issues that plagued the initial release of Google’s latest mobile operating system.
Android 5.1 Lollipop improves the overall stability, battery life and performance of Android devices compared to the previous release. Most of these changes are under the hood, but there are also several new features that Android 5.1 Lollipop brings.
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The unexpected Huawei Watch appears to be the best Android Wear device ever made. To further build up hype around the device ahead the Apple Watch launch, the company published 12 things “you need to know” about the Huawei Watch on its community pages.
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Michael Bryzek saw open source playing a big role in his company’s IT infrastructure, right from the start.
The CTO and co-founder of online retailer Gilt Groupe, Bryzek built the eight-year-old members-only shopping site using the Web framework Ruby on Rails, the Linux operating system and the object-relational database system PostgreSQL — all open-source tools.
He says open source doesn’t have the “friction” — that is, sticking points like contractual limits — that typically come with commercial products. He also says his engineers can be more creative and innovative with open source.
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Jay, a javascript wallet framework developed for NXT, has just released their open-source, trustless web wallet, which may be the easiest way to make NXT transactions yet.
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Events
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ApacheCon is coming up, and within that massive conference there will be a glimmering gem: a forum dedicated to Spark.
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But one change that has become especially noteworthy is the degree to which Apache Spark has captured the attention and excitement of the industry.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. has announced the availability of Piston CloudOS 4.0, which is billed as “an operating system for the modern data center that transforms clusters of commodity servers into a single unified environment.” The platform can purportedly deploy OpenStack in minutes, and CloudOS 4.0 also lets users deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal, with forthcoming support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.
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Piston Cloud Computing has announced a move beyond OpenStack for its Piston CloudOS 4.0, an operating system for the data center that transforms clusters of commodity servers into a single unified environment.
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The company was founded in 2011 by Chris Kemp, who had been chief technology officer for IT at NASA where he helped create OpenStack. Kemp left NASA to push OpenStack forward. As Kemp explained to Tech Republic in the fall of 2014, “I wanted the project to live on beyond the work we were doing … I knew that if we could open-source this work under a very flexible open-source framework, and really get a community gathered around contributing to it, the project could live on.”
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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At the outset, one needs to appreciate that the word “Religion” is related to the Abrahamic faiths more. Eastern spiritual traditions, which find their beginnings in Hinduism, are neither faiths nor religions. Hinduism is an amalgam of various spiritual traditions. The ways are different, the goals are different and the very way of looking at man, divine and life is different. Open Source, personal, subjective, experiential and not fixed in history via a person or event. Now, let us look at what is on offer from Hinduism. Something that is fundamental to human well being.
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BSD
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OpenBSD 5.7 is planned for release in less than one month and it will be presenting a number of new features for this security-minded BSD operating system.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Whatever you do…..don’t get beat up over your Energy Management strategy. GNU remotecontrol is here to help simplify your life, not make it more complicated. Talk to us if you are stuck or cannot figure out the best option for your GNU remotecontrol framework. The chances are the answer you need is something we have already worked through. We would be happy to help you by discussing your situation with you.
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GCC 5 is expected to be formally released later this month and it by far is looking to be the most exciting GNU Compiler Collection update yet! GCC 5 has amassed a ton of exciting open-source compiler features over the past year.
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The XKCD webcomics are funny because they are usually right on the money, with just a side dish of ridiculousness. The latest one is called Operating Systems and encompasses everything that is done wrong in this world, with just a single drawing and small, smart text about Richard Stallman.
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Public Services/Government
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With an aim to reduce project costs, the government has decided to give preference to open source software (OSS) over proprietary in e-governance procurements.
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Federal and state agencies must make it mandatory for suppliers to give OSS a preference over proprietary or closed source software while responding to requests for proposals. “Suppliers shall provide justification for exclusion of OSS in their response,” according to the policy statement posted to the website of the Ministry for Communication & Information Technology.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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As part of the mission’s education outreach program, children in UK schools will get the chance to write code to run their own applications in space. The Pis will each have a specially made sensor board attached in order to access data on the space station’s atmosphere. Schools will get the chance to run experiments in their own classroom and compare the results from space, or just make interesting applications to run on the space station. We’re really excited to see what the young minds of Britain come up with, and what they can learn from turning their ideas to a reality by programming the boards.
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One hundred years after the mass killings of Armenians, US band System of a Down is taking the fight for remembrance beyond politicians to the world’s music fans.
The Los Angeles-area hard rockers, who have sold more than 40 million albums since the mid-1990s, are of Armenian descent and are preparing a European tour to culminate in a public concert on April 23 in Yerevan, the band’s first performance in Armenia.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Leaders of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency were effusive about the new technology.
It was the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, they told Congress. So powerful it could detect a baseball over San Francisco from the other side of the country.
If North Korea launched a sneak attack, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar — SBX for short — would spot the incoming missiles, track them through space and guide U.S. rocket-interceptors to destroy them.
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At least nine people from a single family were killed when what appeared to be an airstrike by the Saudi-led military coalition struck a home in a village outside Sana, Yemen’s capital, officials said Saturday.
Village residents gave a higher toll, saying that as many as 11 members of the Okaish family, including five children, were killed in the bombing on Friday. The airstrike may have been intended for an air defense base about a mile and half away, a Yemen Interior Ministry official said.
Bombings attributed to the coalition have killed dozens of civilians since the start of the Saudi-led air offensive intended to cripple the Houthis, a Yemeni militia that has gained control of Sana and other parts of Yemen in the past eight months.
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The real story behind America’s 30-year Cold War with Iran
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The real reason the Bush White House had abandoned the opening to Iran was that the CIA and the Pentagon desperately needed to replace the Soviet threat as justification for continuing Cold War levels of appropriations.
To head off deep cuts in the CIA budget, the agency’s new director, Robert M. Gates, had identified Iran and the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a new threat. Just two weeks after Gates became director in November 1991, a “senior administration official” was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying that relations with Iran would remain in the “deep freeze,” because of Iran’s “continued support for international terrorism” and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
That comment dovetailed with the argument Gates made in pubic testimony to fend off deep budget cuts. Testifying before the Defense Policy Panel in early December, just two days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gates said the “accelerating proliferation” of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems were “probably the gravest concern” among post-Cold War threats.
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Transparency Reporting
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The CIA’s internal document designations seem to bear some resemblance to the NYPD’s use of its “SECRET” stamp — which is deployed arbitrarily and without oversight to declare certain documents out of the reach of Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. If the CIA feels exemption b(5) gives it the best chance to keep documents out of the hands of journalists like Jason Leopold. it can slap these designations on as many papers as possible and mention its predetermination in FOIA lawsuit declarations.
Second, Boasberg’s refusal to challenge even a single exemption assertion by the CIA isn’t particularly good news, considering his recent appointment to the FISA court. While he has pushed back on government secrecy in the past, he’s also been just as likely to grant its wishes. Considering he’s replacing FISA Judge Reggie Walton — one of the few FISA judges to openly question surveillance tactics and hold the NSA accountable for its abuses — this latest decision seems to indicate his appointment is a downgrade in terms of government accountability.
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Finance
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But Will’s claim about Reagan’s job creation record is disingenuous. As Business Insider pointed out, Reagan’s so-called million job month in September 1983 was simply an outlier inflated due to nearly 675,000 striking communication workers returning to work…
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ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
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Censorship
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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is calling for a ban on social media once again.
A spokesperson for this office said on Monday that a prosecutor has ordered Internet providers to block sites that include YouTube and Twitter, which is extremely popular in the country.
The request comes after photos spread online showing militants holding a prosecutor hostage at gunpoint last week during a takeover of this courthouse office. Prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz, who investigated the death of a teenager who was hit by a police gas canister fired during nationwide anti-government protests in 2013, died last week in a shootout between police and the Marxist militants.
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A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.
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Twitter and YouTube are blocked once again in Turkey as of today, April 6, following the mass circulation of photos of a hostage crisis that ended with the death of a government prosecutor. According to Hurriyet Daily News, authorities have also blocked 166 websites that posted the photos.
Although Facebook was initially blocked for the same reason, the block was lifted after the company complied with Turkish officials’ orders to remove the offending images.
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Privacy
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You now need an army of spies, analysts and police to watch the security cameras, check on the spies and watch for people jumping fences. This is not about the bad thing you first objected to any more. It’s now about jumping fences to get to places that have been made unreachable by them, checking on spies for telling lies, dealing with corruption among your informers, suppressing all the “SJW”s who whine about the loss of freedom and undermining your political opposition who are equally clueless about blocking fields but can see that what you are doing is hugely unpopular.
Congratulations! Your attempt to stop something your supporters disapprove of by mandating the impossible has created a police state. It doesn’t matter how bad the thing you were trying to stop is; people probably agree that it’s a bad thing.
By mandating the impossible, you caused collateral damage that outweighed any benefits, and by associating it with a thing no-one dares defend in public you were able to accidentally destroy society without opposition. And you didn’t notice because you never do for walks in the fields.
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On his HBO program last night, John Oliver devoted 30 minutes to a discussion of U.S. surveillance programs, advocating a much more substantive debate as the June 1 deadline for renewing the Patriot Act approaches (the full segment can be seen here). As part of that segment, Oliver broadcast an interview he conducted with Edward Snowden in Moscow, and to illustrate the point that an insufficient surveillance debate has been conducted, showed video of numerous people in Times Square saying they had no idea who Snowden is (or giving inaccurate answers about him). Oliver assured Snowden off-camera that they did not cherry-pick those “on the street” interviews but showed a representative sample.
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Microsoft has updated its ‘Do Not Track’ policy, which will no longer be a default setting in its browser, thus giving third parties like advertisers a free hand in deciding whether to track the user or not, unless the option has been turned on manually.
The ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT) setting in browsers specifies whether the user wants his or her browsing information to be available to third parties such as content providers and advertisers, who gather it so they can learn about a person’s interests and habits.
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A controversial Transportation Security Administration program that uses “behavior indicators” to identify potential terrorists is instead primarily targeting undocumented immigrants, according to a document obtained by The Intercept and interviews with current and former government officials.
The $900 million program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, employs behavior detection officers trained to identify passengers who exhibit behaviors that TSA believes could be linked to would-be terrorists. But in one five-week period at a major international airport in the United States in 2007, the year the program started, only about 4 percent of the passengers who were referred to secondary screening or law enforcement by behavior detection officers were arrested, and nearly 90 percent of those arrests were for being in the country illegally, according to a TSA document obtained by The Intercept.
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Dressed in reflective yellow construction gear while working under the cover of darkness early Monday, a small group of artists installed a tribute to NSA-leaker Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park.
The Snowden bust stands atop a column at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a site built to honor more than 11,000 American prisoners of war who died aboard British ships during the American Revolutionary War.
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A group of artists secretly installed a 100-pound sculpture of government leaker Edward Snowden in a New York City park early on Monday morning, though it was taken down by city officials later in the day.
The handful of people wearing yellow reflector vests and hard hats snuck into the park and, in the predawn hours, attached the massive bust of a neatly coiffed Snowden wearing his trademark square-rimmed glassed onto the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Brooklyn, which honors soldiers imprisoned in the Revolutionary War.
In a statement provided to city blog Animal, which also produced a short video about the installation, the activists said that the effort was meant to reinvigorate the focus on the leaker and the massive government surveillance that he exposed.
“We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies,” they told the website.
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A trio of anonymous artists and helpers installed a bust of Edward Snowden in Brooklyn Monday morning.
The 100-pound statue was hauled into Fort Greene Park just before dawn, according to ANIMALNewYork, which originally reported the story.
The idea for the statue came from two artists and was made by a West Coast sculptor. Snowden leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to mainstream media in June 2013. He was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property and currently lives in Russia.
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NYPD says the art prank is under investigation
New York City has removed a statue of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden erected by a group of artists in a Brooklyn park.
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“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” viewers got a surprise during Sunday’s show when the British satirist interviewed a man he described as “the most famous hero and/or traitor in recent American history:” NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
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Civil Rights
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Eight San Francisco police officers implicated in sending and receiving racist and homophobic text messages have been suspended and are expected to be fired, according to news reports.
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The Bureau of Prisons’ contempt for the First Amendment has been on full display this week.
Journalist and activist Barrett Brown pled guilty to offenses stemming from YouTube videos he uploaded containing a threat directed at the FBI, emails from hackers he redacted and laptops found in a kitchen cabinet that he hid from authorities. He was sentenced to five years and three months in jail on January 22.
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On Tuesday March 31, I used the inmate computer system to send an email to a journalist of my acquaintance in which I inquired about getting him in touch with another inmate who was interested in talking to the press about potentially illegal conduct by BOP officials. When I tried to log in to the system one hour afterwards, I received a message reading: “Denied: You do not have access to this service.” I asked our Counselor Towchik about this and he called another office, from which he apparently received a vague explanation to the effect that they were “working on it”, which we took to understand that this was a system maintenance issue; he told me to return to his office later that afternoon. I did so, and he told me that several people were having issues with the system and that he would make further inquiries, and that if necessary he would bring the technical staff over to our unit the next day to discuss it with us, assuming the problem had still not been fixed. The next morning I reached my mother by phone and learned that apparently everyone on my message contact list had received an automatic email to the effect that my messaging privileges had been temporarily suspended, but I reassured her that it was merely a mistake. When I met again with Towchik, however, he conceded that the problem didn’t seem to be technical after all and that I should ask Trust Fund Manager Coleman about it at lunch. Failing to find Mr. Coleman, I met that afternoon with Unit Manger Ivory, who checked my files but could find no reason why my access should have suddenly been suspended and also advised me to meet with Mr. Coleman. At some point that day, my attempts to log in started to prompt a different message stating: “This account is on suspension until 4/1/2016 11:59:59 pm (from portal 16)”. At the next lunch period on Thursday, April 2nd, I was unable to locate Mr. Coleman, but laid out my problem to the associate warden who told me to return in five minutes, when Mr. Coleman would be present.
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People in the West tend to have a monolithic view of Iran. But there’s a lot more to the country than the mullah-led theocracy, and it often gets ignored. And national pride is alive and well.
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A petition launched in Venezuela opposing President Barack Obama’s latest sanctions and the labelling of Venezuela as a national security threat has topped 8 million signatures, it was announced Sunday.
President Obama issued an executive order March 9 declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.”
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro thanked the supporters who backed the call for Obama to “repeal the decree” through his Twitter account.
The signatures will be handed in during the Summit of the Americas which starts later this week in Panama and will be attended by all the nations in the hemishphere.
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On March 19th, there was a ruling [pdf] in a case in a federal district court in Vermont, brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Scribd, saying that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applied to the internet, and thus Scribd had to comply with the ADA. The specific concern is whether or not a website is a “place of public accommodation.” Three years ago there was a similar ruling against Netflix (also brought by the National Federation for the Blind), which we noted had some troubling aspects to it. Since then, there have been a number of cases that have gone the other way. And, indeed, just this week the 9th Circuit appeals court upheld a lower court ruling [pdf] saying that Netflix does not need to comply with the ADA.
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The Scotsman claims that the police had first removed the vehicle and then replaced it, and this explains the mystery of why the gun was so far from the car after McRae’s remarkable two shot “suicide”. For me, that adds just another level of improbability to so very many. How, inside a car, you shoot yourself in the head in such a way that the gun falls out of the window, seems problematic. The car was crashed over a burn; how you order that with the suicide is peculiar.
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The “difficult and personal” decision of whether folks like these can decide if you can shop at a store or not.
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Fox News misleadingly slurred immigrants with legal permission to work in the United States as “illegals” during a segment highlighting attempts by disadvantaged school districts around the country to boost bilingual education initiatives.
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 10:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Debunking the myth of Microsoft as a US company or even an international company, as opposed to globalist (lacking loyalty to anything but its own bottom line)
Microsoft is not a US company but a globalist company when it comes to taxes. It just doesn’t want to pay taxes and this new article calls out Microsoft for hiding money in offshore account so as to avoid tax. The headline names Microsoft although Microsoft is no longer unique in the area of technology. It’s just the worst. To quote the opening part: “So it is with companies that keep massive stockpiles of cash in foreign countries in order to avoid paying US corporate tax rates. In fact, the only thing that prevents this issue from being relentlessly bleak is the absurdity of what some of these companies get away with. For example,according to the advocacy and lobbying group Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), American corporations claim to have earned so much profit selling goods in tax-free zones like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda that the figure amounts to 16 times these countries’ total GDPs — which defies reality.”
Microsoft basically evades not only US tax. It evades tax everywhere. It’s globalism; it’s the plutocrats’ sovereignty (broderless and above international regulations).
Apple and Microsoft, as the article above goes to show, have more offshore cash and pay lower foreign tax rates than most any other Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft and taxes are two words that only go hand in hand when it pertains to taxation of users of Windows, Office, etc.
Considering how Microsoft helps the US government (among other governments) spy on US citizens, one cannot consider it a US company. It helps espionage against US citizens, which is inherently against US law. This is done not just because Microsoft loves and embraces surveillance but because it wants lucrative government contracts all around the world and it is willing to betray users of its software for these contracts, even in Russia, as we showed half a decade ago. Microsoft even works for Putin when it suits its agenda, helping to imprison Russian dissents by framing (through surveillance) and misuse of law enforcement privileges, however unjustified. Microsoft is loyal to nobody except Microsoft and lobbying operations such as the Gates Foundation, which helps Bill Gates evade tax and rapidly increase his personal wealth.
Microsoft has just dumped ‘Do Not Track’, showing that Microsoft has perhaps grown tired of pretending to care about privacy. Only a fool would ever choose a ‘cloud’ for government, especially a proprietary software ‘cloud’ from a foreign company that engages in espionage activities or at least facilitates them. Using a Web browser from Microsoft is worse than reckless.
Microsoft likes to pretend to be a national company in every nation by creating subsidiaries like “Microsoft UK”, but it’s a lie and a sham. There is an ODF debate in the UK at the moment. Microsoft pretends to be an ODF company and a British company after attacking it through British proxies (like partners), though we’ll soon see how that worked out. Microsoft once tried to frame ODF as anti-American, as if Microsoft itself was pro-American (it’s pro-whoever-pays-Microsoft). As Glyn Moody pointed out the other day, the latest moves seem to make it likely that Microsoft will get altogether dropped, at least Microsoft Office. “Back in July last year,” says Moody’s article, “I wrote about an incredible opportunity for the open source world. After years of disappointments, and despite the usual lobbying/threats by a certain large US software company [Microsoft] against the move, the Cabinet Office announced that it was officially adopting the Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents. At the time I exhorted everyone involved to do their utmost to make this work, since it was the biggest chance to show that open standards and open source were not just viable as a government solution, but actually better than the alternatives.”
Moody just calls or alludes to Microsoft as “a certain large US software company”, but not naming it is playing into Microsoft’s hands and Microsoft should not really be described as a US company, it’s just a pariah that views itself — much like Gates himself — as Napoleonic and thus above every international law.
As Moody put it at the very end, “there’s no timetable for this development, which means it might be a while before we can actually use this software. Still, it’s further testimony to the fact that the ODF ecosystem is one of the most exciting places in free software at the moment. Much of that can be attributed to the boost given by the UK government’s high-profile decision to adopt the format last year, for which it deserves recognition and our thanks.”
The sooner the world recognises how Microsoft views the world, the more swiftly it will unburden itself from abuse, including systemic looting (tax evasion, taxes on citizens), extortion (e.g. with patents), and bribery. █
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