10.07.13
Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 2:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Windows exposes users
Summary: More revelations about how the NSA is cracking down on the act of committing anonymous speech
IT IS no secret and it is no longer just “theory” territories when one alleges that opposition to war is almost like “terrorism” in the eye of state-employed spooks. If you are against CIA drone strikes, for instance, then you are treated as one of the ‘threats’ and ‘adversaries’ [1]. The same goes for people who oppose the NSA [2], which is breaking many laws anyway. People are being harassed (with their families) [3] and even arrested [4] for merely criticising the spies [4] (there are many other excuses for harassing and jailing such people).
A person has just explained how a telecom helped the government spy on him and Snowden’s leaks have just revealed that the Tor crack we wrote about [1, 2] was actually the work of the US government and it requires that the users use Tor on Microsoft Windows [5-7].
Remember this: Windows is developed with ‘help’ from the NSA. They are not even hiding it. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A top secret NSA document provides context for yesterday’s abusive detention of Baraa Shiban
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Earlier this month, OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends were detained for hours by US Customs and Border Protection on their way home from Canada. Everyone being held was a US citizen, and no one received an explanation. Sarah tells the story of their detainment, and her difficulty getting any answers from one of the least transparent agencies in the country.
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An NSA presentation released by Edward Snowden contains mixed news for Tor users. The anonymizing service itself appears to have foxed US and UK government snoops, but instead they are using a zero-day flaw in the Firefox browser bundled with Tor to track users.
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Yesterday a new classified NSA document was leaked by Edward Snowden – titled ‘Tor Stinks’ in which ideas were being kicked around for identifying Tor users or degrading the user experience to dissuade people from using the Tor browser.
The NSA had a very hard time while tracking down all Tor users and monitoring their traffic, especially since Tor servers are all over the world, but they make tracking easier by adopting the following techniques:
By running their own hostile Tor nodes
Using zero-day vulnerability of Firefox browser
By tracking user’ browser Cookies
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According to new revelations from data pilfered by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has for years been going after users of Tor.1
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software at 2:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More examples of moves that characterise pursuit of software freedom and independence
The stampede towards Free (as in freedom) software — software that respects autonomy and national sovereignty that is — is visible for all to see in Europe (except perhaps in the UK with its 'special' USA/NSA relationship). Some of the latest examples are the French Gendarmerie [1], the government of Portugal [2], and the European Parliament [3], which recently made headlines because the NSA was spying on it (surveillance by bugging, no better than British spying on Belgian allies [4], perhaps preceding litigation [5]). Let’s hope that the surveillance scandals help remind citizens and their governments that without Free software there is no hope for privacy and self determination. Potential politicians can be spied on and ousted/shamed retroactively by selected ‘leaks’ (or smears) if their positions on certain policies are not in line with the foreign spies’ (or their bosses). It’s called espionage and it’s commonly treated as the most effective way to remotely disrupt distant parties. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Using an open source desktop lowers the total cost of ownership by 40%, in savings on proprietary software licences and by reducing costs on IT management. Using Ubuntu Linux massively reduces the number of local technical interventions, says Major Stéphane Dumond. “The direct benefits of saving on licences are the tip of the iceberg. An industrialised open source desktop is a powerful lever for IT governance.”
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The government of Portugal wants to increase its use of open source ICT solutions and open ICT standards, aiming to rationalise its IT and reduce costs, says André Vasconcelos from the Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA). “To allow comparing open source and proprietary solutions, we’ll make it compulsory to calculate the TCO over 4 years, including for maintenance, licences, migration and productivity.”
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The European Parliament is increasingly turning to open source, according to a report by the parliament’s IT department. This type of solutions are mostly used for development, for application servers and web content management. Open source is also available to those members of the parliament using a laptop configured by the IT department.
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Today Big Brother Watch, working with the Open Rights Group, English PEN and German internet activist Constanze Kurz, has announced legal papers have been filed alleging that GCHQ has illegally intruded on the privacy of millions of British and European citizens.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 2:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Don’t mistake hens for eggs
Summary: Remarks on crediting the Linux project rather than the GNU project for what’s clearly the success of the latter (preceding Linux by 8 or so years)
HAVING spent the past week or so collecting positive GNU/Linux stories, I could not help but notice that nobody — almost nobody at all — even bothers to mention the GNU project. It’s the project which Linux essentially came from or got famous through.
Introductions to Linux tend to leave out the “GNU” [1] almost as though the “Linux way” [2] simply means not the equivalent of “UNIX way” but UNIX without all the software tool that GNU developers had replicated one by one for 8 years before Linux even existed. This is unjust. It’s “Linux” which gets the credit for going out to space (more along those lines in [3]), even though it’s usually Debian GNU/Linux that gets deployed outside of Earth after Windows failure. For the uninitiated, Windows failed ISS by catching malware. GNU/Linux does not have such issues [4] and it’s mostly –if ever — used for detecting and analysing malware [5]. Academics and even part-time Mac users choose GNU/Linux for technical advantages [6,7] and for some it is clear that GNU/Linux has won [8], with more people willing to give it a try [9].
Don’t let marketing people twist the success of the GNU project as a success of “Linux” (as in the kernel). This is definitely deceiving and it helps distract people from the philosophy that the operating system really came from, driving us further away from the goals.
Users may not care about “ideological camps” [9], but this is about the name, not the ideology, which users will be free to explore or ignore. GNU Hurd 0.5 is out now [10] (it predates Linux) and the Free Software Awards are still showing that there is more to GNU/Linux than Linux [12]. Glyn Moody recalls the early days of GNU [13] as it’s the 30th anniversary of the project [14] and the FSF, the steward of GNU, is hiring [15]. While the GNU project is three decades old [16,17], Software Freedom Day is only a decade old [18], and the GPL, a cornerstone of GNU which Linux embraced after being proprietary, is still proving to be popular [19], just like the software itself [20].
Don’t buy the media hype. The revolution came from GNU, not Linux. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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As most of you that are regular visitors to this site know, we not only write about Linux (opinions, tutorials and reviews) but we offer comprehensive training that can take anyone from a complete “Linux newbie” to someone who is prepared for their Linux Professional Institute Certification Exam as well as a career in the industry.
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No, Planetary Resource isn’t kidding. It’s working on using Linux, open-source software, and commercial off-the-shelf hardware to build the first robotic asteroid miners.
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Jack Wallen believes Linux is more secure than other platforms, but it’s only as secure as the packages installed.
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Getting infected by malware is easy. You just have to open a suspicious file, or visit a malicious website, and boom, your computer is infected. On the other hand, analyzing and reverse engineering malware is a much difficult task that only experts can do with specialized tools. If you are one of those who are curious about how malware works, there is a Linux distro that comes with all the necessary tools for you to analyze malware.
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I still use Linux on my main PC because I enjoy the flexibility and power it offers.
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That’s a big deal. In August, Jon Peddie Research predicted that Bohemia’s ARMA III would drive more than $800 million in PC hardware sales all by itself, and JPR estimates the total market for PC gaming hardware to hit nearly $18 billion in 2013. That’s a lot of quarters, and it’s all funneled toward Windows machines.
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We have all been there. Our first attempt at Linux. And we have all forgotten it. The human mind does a wonderful trick of glossing over less glamorous details, forgetting boring ones, heightening trauma and success, making us believe that our journey to becoming special, i.e. Linux users, was a fairly trivial man-it-up ordeal. We have long lost the touch with reality, which is, most people have no darn clue about operating systems, especially not one named Linux.
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It’s hard for new users to understand the perspective and ideological camps behind free and open source software because there is nothing else like it in the world. Insisting that someone adapt immediately to the ideals put forth by FOSS is, in my opinion, an unrealistic expectation. When someone is new to a group or community, demanding they adhere to a set of rules they don’t understand can be overwhelming. In my opinion, a welcoming stance from the community members followed by a path of self discovery is what develops new users into the strongest supporters of free and open source software.
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GNU Hurd has been hailed as the replacement for Linux kernel and 16 years later the developers have managed to release yet another update, 0.5.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today announced the opening of nominations for the 16th annual Free Software Awards.
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The first announcement about the GNU project appeared in September of that year, beginning Stallman’s long journey to recreate the community of hackers he had found then lost at MIT.
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Just one day after the celebrated GNOME 3.10 release came the first updates. Mutter, Mutter Wayland, and GNOME Shell were updated today to fix some undetected bugs in the release yesterday. On top of the release, Gnomers will be celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the GNU operating system.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a full-time senior systems administrator.
The ideal candidate will be a well-rounded GNU/Linux systems administrator who enjoys learning and problem-solving. (S)he will be familiar with the free software community and how it works, and will be more interested in making a substantial contribution to software freedom and having employment consistent with ethical ideals than obtaining the highest salary.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The broader context of “world domination” (which in itself implies tyranny)
Summary: Why GNU/Linux domination should not be mistaken for the instantaneous triumph of liberty and justice
GNU/Linux is by far the most dominant reliable hosting platform, suggest new figures [1]. This should not be interpreted as though “Linux owns the Internet” [2] as some people put it, but it does show that those who wish to host material — even harmful material like Facebook or NSA honeypots — choose GNU/Linux. Sure, GNU/Linux can be used to drive society forward, e.g. with Scientific Linux [3], but let’s remember that GNU/Linux is itself a tool — a modifiable tool whose licence ensures it is subjected to outside scrutiny and free continuity. But it is clear that GNU/Linux domination is not enough; and that’s where ethics and the F word Stallman speaks of (freedom) come into play. Techrights promotes a lot more than just GNU/Linux “world domination”. In the coming years we shall expand our scope of coverage to better align with this premise. Some coverage might not be purely technical, either. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Of Netcraft’s ten most reliable hosting company sites for June of this year, eight are Linux and two are FreeBSD
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Most of those heavyweights champions of “Free as in Freedom” software are the same companies currently under scrutiny for the privacy risks of their business models, and for making the kind of spying and abuses exposed by E. Snowden much easier to implement.
That list should be titled “How corporations (and governments) own way too many data about people, also thanks to Linux”, and Free Software in general. Luckily, the same software may also be used to build alternatives without those problems, yet really usable by people with just the skills to use Facebook or Gmail.
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Millions around the world, both scientists and non-scientists, use Scientific Linux, an operating system developed for particle physics.
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Posted in Site News at 1:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An observation regarding the state of GNU/Linux (plus FOSS) in the alternative media and a call for action
Audiocasts (or “podcasts” for those who prefer this more common term) are a convenient medium with which to pass information to drivers or people who work around the house and cannot face a monitor. For some it’s a way of occupying oneself while doing exercise like running. Not many people would sit down for two hours staring at a static screen in order to just listen to a stream of audio (unless multi-tasking). For the producers, an audiocast can be a lot of work or very little work, depending on how it’s produced. If there is prior planning or even full scripting, many attempts and a lot of preparation may be needed. Otherwise it can be as simple as picking up a microphone and having a conversation, perhaps post-editing for some extra polish.
In October 2010 — that’s three years ago — Tim and I started working on a show called TechBytes. This show is still alive, but its format has changed over the years. The frequency of shows too has changed. Looking around us for an assessment of the state of GNU/Linux audiocasts, things do not look so good. Some shows have gone totally silent, some went quiet, and only few remained as active as before. A year after we were a feature on FLOSS Weekly Leo Laporte officially stepped out of FLOSS Weekly (other hosts were/still are [1] tested and some left thereafter). Some nice shows simply went away, leaving mostly a bunch of small/new players, new diluted forms of Linux/UNIX shows from Jupiter [2], Ubuntu-centric shows [3-5], and Tux Radar, which is only a few years old [6-8]. Some of the shows that I have been following for years are no more or rarely anymore (maybe a few episodes are released per year or once in a few years). This is not a good thing and taking into account the closure of key sites like Groklaw we should seriously think what can be done to save independent pro-Free software press/media. Without it, we have no public voice.
There is a certain apathy if not active denial/cognitive dissonance over the demise of GNU/Linux- and Free software-friendly (even Open Source-centric) topics in the corporate media. A lot of sites that used to thrive and a lot of matters which occupied the mainstream media are no longer there, or are hardly ever there. This does not mean that GNU/Linux and Free software are going away; they are actually widespread and popularised more than ever before. They are becoming an industry standard. But we sure have a problem when even companies that purport to have embraced “Linux” are openly promoting DRM, censorship, binary blobs, and even remote-accessible back doors (for our ‘protection’). If the ideas that accompany Free software are not out there for people to absorb lobbyists of companies like Apple and Microsoft can take advantage of it and revoke progress. Please try to support sites which continue to spread the message of Free software because without media presence, ideas can be weakened or altogether vanish. The problem is not specific to multimedia; even paper publications and digital publications are going away. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developer, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.
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This week’s episode wraps up our presence at Ohio Linux Fest 2013.
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In this episode: No more Groklaw and no Ubuntu Edge. ZTE’s Firefox phone sells out quickly on eBay, and the exFAT filesystem is now open source. And as usual, we also have discoveries, challenges, brains and a ballot!
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In this episode: Encryption is dead, but there are lots of great games in the new Humble Indie Bundle. FreeBSD ditches GCC and Intel clashes with Ubuntu. We’ve got some great discoveries, we dust down the old wheel of misfortune and discuss your opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 12:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Like putting a racing car in some lane with a 30-mile speed limit
Summary: Nvidia shows how technical superiority of GNU/Linux is being impeded by an artificial need for downward ‘parity’ with Windows
ABOUT a year ago, Finnish comedian Linus Torvalds (strange sense of humour) received some desired (or conversely, unwanted) publicity after he had used his carte blanche for cursing — the thing which people like Richard Stallman don’t have. He gave Nvidia the finger. Maybe this was fruitful, but the point of the matter is, it helped show that Nvidia was behaving badly towards Linux, despite trying to sell many Tegra boards (to be sold with Android/Linux on board). “Nvidia cripples Linux drivers because of Windows,” claims a new article [1], requiring no benchmarks such as [2] but only an understanding of how Nvidia makes its drivers. This was known in prior years (they try to match the sides even to the detriment of Linux), but the example cited is new. Nvidia basically neglects Linux or treats it like a second-class citizen at best, even when it’s technically better. Nvidia would like to change these perceptions, so it is liaising with Red Hat [3] and competing with Nouveau [4] on decent drivers which can be confirmed not to have NSA back doors (X.Org Server is free software [5], the driver from Nvidia is not). Nvidia must be feeling the pressure from Radeon [6], which is moving forward. Frankly, the right thing to do right now is boycott NVidia and buy from its competition, notably AMD. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The company have reportedly crippled their Linux drivers to ensure parity with Windows. An Ubuntu user discovered that after an update to Nvidia’s non-free drivers his system was restricted to support only three monitors. The user wanted to connect 4th monitor using two GTX 560Ti graphics cards with a SLI connector.
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In several articles now there’s been a performance regression found in GpuTest’s Plot3D with the older Mesa 9.1 release doing better than Mesa 9.2.
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Jerome Glisse has long been involved with open-source Linux graphics drivers, but in recent months he hasn’t announced any major breakthroughs like in past years. However, at Red Hat they have struck up a partnership with NVIDIA to work on a new device-agnostic API for the Linux kernel that can benefit the graphics drivers.
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While the Nouveau driver has been developed entirely through reverse-engineering the NVIDIA binary blob and is largely developed by community-based developers (many of whom are students), they have made a lot of progress in recent months in pushing forward with new features and functionality for this open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.
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While most developers are focused around new innovations for Wayland (or Mir), there’s still life ahead for the X.Org Server in maintaining legacy support and other cases where the xorg-server will not die for years to come. In improving the X.Org Server, Adam Jackson at Red Hat has been working on rewriting the GLX portion of the X.Org Server.
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AMD developers working on the Radeon X.Org driver (xf86-video-ati) have enabled GLAMOR acceleration support by default at build time.
GLAMOR provides 2D acceleration on the Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” GPUs and newer Radeon GPUs via OpenGL rather than implementing the 2D hardware acceleration by hand with EXA in the DDX driver. While HD 7000 series hardware is now common place and the RadeonSI driver maturing well in recent months, GLAMOR is now being enabled by default at build time for the xf86-video-ati driver.
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Quality of life for ordinary people is reduced by the spreading of Microsoft lock-in, especially in the public sector
THE NHS is a wonderful thing. Here in the UK few people will die simply because they’re poor. But one common criticism of the NHS is inefficiency. Everything seems to exceed the preallocated budgets and companies like Microsoft get handed on a plate millions if not billions (pounds) of taxpayers money to contribute to defunct systems. The NHS, quite infamously, is dependent on Microsoft and it shows.
The British press often neglect to mention Microsoft’s role in NHS computer failures. This is utterly sloppy journalism and we should demand that journalists call out Windows for fingers to be pointed at the right direction. Here is a new example where “Active Directory glitch blamed for IT failure at Scottish hospitals”. Active Directory is Microsoft and it’s mysterious stuff if not vandalism to put such a thing in a hospital. What are they trying to bring into the hospitals? Viruses?
iophk, who highlighted the above, also sent this new one from the British press, noting: “Windows? It does mention a reboot” (not Microsoft’s trademark yet).
Windows? Well, yes, because it’s almost definitely Windows and just like Active Directory, which would usually require Windows, failure is only to be expected. Currently in my daytime job we are urged to embrace Active Directory in a particular environment and that is the only part which necessitates Windows, interfering with GNU/Linux harmony. Wherever there is Windows there tend to be errors and no simple remedies.
Having just reported BT connection issues (these issues have gone on for days), I found myself spending no less than 5 minutes just explaining to the “technical support” staff that there is something in this world other than Windows. She wasted a long time going nowhere as she repeatedly asked me to run winver after I had said I use GNU/Linux. Then I demanded to speak to the boss, who was a lot more helpful (there is a physical fault with my line — not my operating systems — which he could confirm).
Anyway, the point is the matter is, the British government and companies it helps run (or vice versa) are suffering from some kind of Windows addiction syndrome and it’s all of us ill (or disconnected) people who pay the price for it. The British police and the British army are also using Windows (very dangerous to national sovereignty), quite famously, unlike the French [1]. This country’s love for Microsoft in the public sector is like nowhere else in the world and it really ought to change.
The bottom line is, expect nothing that Microsoft spreads to be reliable because reliability is just not the goal. It’s a business decision driven by the need for lock-in, control over the user, and all sorts of conglomerates like the copyright cartel. Consider for a moment DRM or even UEFI ‘secure’ boot, which pretends to be about security but in reality does everything to jeopardise national security. It is sad to learn that Parted Magic, a tool often used to dodge Microsoft Windows, is now reluctantly embracing UEFI just so that people can boot into it at all and then remove/relocate Windows (I very recently had to do this). “According to the developers,” says SoftPedia, “a few issues with the new Secure Erase GUI have been corrected and Parted Magic now boots normally when Secure Boot is enabled in uEFI.”
UEFI ‘secure’ boot is just another classic example of technology being introduced not for the benefit of users but for business interests of a cartel of companies (the UEFI Forum in this case). As is the case with many other governments, the British government is strongly influenced by corporations through their lobbyists and the consequences are laid bare for us to see. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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France’s National Gendarmerie — a national law enforcement agency — is now running 37,000 desktop PCs with a custom version of the Linux operating system, and by summer of next year, the agency plans to move all 72,000 of its desktop machines to the open source OS.
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Posted in Site News at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Plans for site operation and publication from present until Christmas
LAST year in September — and for part of August too — this site was mostly inactive. The sole reason was absence from my computer (away on vacation). For the early part of September and also part of August this year the same was true. Yes, this year is similar to last year because of my personal life. But accompanied with hardware issues that forced migrating to a laptop (with associated expenses being time and money) September turned out to be a slow month for Techrights. I did not even spend so much time online. There was physical work to be done on the house. This will hopefully change, but right now we’re left with many thousands of news stories that have not yet been mentioned or covered. The reasonable way to proceed from here is to first deal with present news and when time permits go backwards in time and catch up with important news that was inevitably missed (mostly in September). Daily links would not be actual if we gathered news that is weeks old, so temporarily we shall deal with news per topic, bringing together about a month or two of news. When all that is done — some time before Christmas hopefully — regular site operation will resume (daily links included) and several more interviews with Richard Stallman will be published.
Next month this site turns 7 and the recent inactivity oughtn’t be interpreted as lack of interest, just a misfortune coincidence of many bad (also also good) things. █
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