12.10.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s a customized Linux OS on a bootable drive so that you can surf the internet without leaving a trace on the host PC.
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Server
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If you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone.
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Kernel Space
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Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I’ve grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor.
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Applications
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In the past I’ve wrote an article about the commands du and df that can respectively give you information about the Disk Usage and the Disk Free of your Linux computer.
I personally use both of these commands a lot of times at work to check file system and/or directory, but I also understand that on a desktop with Linux you could use something more graphical to see the status of your partitions or directories, so today I’ll show you some programs that can achieve this goal: baobab, cdu, ncdu, JDiskReport and Filelight.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In Star shipping Inc. you take the role of the captain of of a cargo ship traveling between star systems to trade goods and commodities in strive to become the richest star ship captain in the galaxy.
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The Legends of Aethereus developers announced a few days ago that the upcoming Legends of Aethereus RPG game will be available for Linux-based operating systems.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Konqui, the cute and friendly dragon has been the KDE mascot for the last 10 years. The dragon is shy and you won’t see him often on KDE systems. KDE forum admin Neverendingo is planning to give the shy dragon an image makeover. He is organizing a design contest with the Krita community.
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Slim Glow is one of the top five themes for the KDE Plasma desktop which has been in development since KDE 4.0. Developer Ivan Čukić has released a new version of this theme which is currently available on kde-look.org and will be part of the KDE 4.10.
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In the computer there is a precise hierarchy with regard to the memory, according to their speed and size.
On a computer there are basically three types of memory: the hard drive, the RAM and the processor cache. These memories can be ordered according to the characteristics above, and then, in a hypothetical pyramid, we find at the bottom the hard drive (slow but with a lot of space, in the order of terabytes) in the center there is the RAM (fast, but with little space in the order of gigabytes) and the top there is the cpu-cache (fast but extremely small, ranging from kiloByte to megabytes).
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Don’t like Windows 8′s new interface? Sick of Ubuntu Unity and the new ads that come along with it? Maybe it’s time to create your own, ideal operating system with just the features you want. Arch Linux can make it happen: it lets you build your own personal, killer Linux distro from the ground up.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The OpenMandriva community is moving on. The statutes of the “OpenMandriva Association” have been sent to the French authorities and the incorporation process has thus started. At the same time, preparations are ongoing to migrate both the actual development environment of the distribution and the entire community infrastructure. On top of this, the development environment is not just migrated to another server, it is being upgraded to ABF and Git.
We have thus embarked into an ambitious migration plan and I would like to thank all the teams of developers, sysadmins, infrastructure and communication of the OpenMandriva project who are working hard towards making this a reality.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is now accepting nominations for its seventh annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, which will be presented at Red Hat Summit taking place June 10-14, 2013 in Boston.
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RBC Capital reaffirmed their outperform rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in a research note released on Monday morning. They currently have a $64.00 price target on the stock.
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Debian Family
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* Record number of participants for Mini DebConf Paris
* Debian on smartphones: a feasibility analysis
* Official Debian images on Amazon Web Services
* Reports from latest BSPs
* Other news
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Filesystem Tree Lens is an Unity Lens that enables users to easily and quickly find files and folder in their filesystem, directly from Unity Dash.
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English may be the uncontested lingua franca of most development communities in our (post-?) Pax Americana age. But for developers who prefer working in other languages, the Ubuntu world has taken a big step toward making it easier to contribute without understanding English. That’s a particularly smart move for an open source project such as Ubuntu. Here’s why.
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The Ubuntu Minecraft Lens is an Unity Lens that allows Minecraft players to easily and quickly search most items and tools found in the game.
Right clicking the results will display a recipe and some other handy information. At the moment, the Lens has various issues that you should check out here.
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Flavours and Variants
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Even as Ubuntu Linux 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” continues to make headlines following its release back in October, work is proceeding in earnest on its successor, Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail.”
On Thursday, in fact, version 13.04 of the popular Linux distribution entered alpha – a stage that typically gives fans of the open source operating system an early glimpse at what’s to come.
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Phones
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Right now, it seems that iPhone and Android phones are the main kinds of mobile phones and will be forever.
After all, Microsoft has spent billions to develop and promote the Windows phone, but it’s not exactly selling like hotcakes (four million in the third quarter this year, as opposed to Apple’s 23 million and Android’s 123 million).
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Android
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In an official press release Sony Mobile have confirmed that they will be extending partnership with Box until 31st December 2013. They have also confirmed that almost all the Xperia smartphone and Sony tablet users can now grab free 50GB cloud storage for life,
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While the majority of Africa’s mobile phones are more basic talk-plus-text feature phones — recent figures from analyst ABI Research suggest 3G connectivity accounts for 11 percent of the continent’s overall mobile subscriptions vs. GSM’s 62.7 percent – 300,000 of these $50 Android smartphones have been sold in Kenya, according to Wales and African carrier Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore. The pair were speaking at Vodafone’s Mobile for Good summit taking place in London today.
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I have been a developer for a number of years (yes, it’s a large-ish number) and I’ve worked on teams that have developed software on commercial platforms, on teams that have used a mixture of open source and commercial components, and on teams that have used primarily open source. Overall, I’ve developed (no pun intended) a preference for using open source tools and components whenever it’s feasible. Here are some of the reasons why I prefer to develop with open source code:
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of products, has explained why developers should have an interest in Firefox OS.
“If you’re looking to build and develop mobile software without the 30 percent toll [Apple charges], Firefox OS will appeal to you,” he told a room filled with about 75 developers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On Friday I wrote an article responding to a post by Richard Stallman. Over the weekend both posts caused quite a flurry of discussion; thank-you to everyone who contributed constructive feedback.
In my post I referred to Richard’s position as seeming a bit ‘childish‘ to me.
As with every post that I write, I reflect carefully over the words I write before and after I press the publish button. In all of our writing our words affect the thoughts and feelings of others, and I think this resonates even more-so in the Free Software and Open Source world where we all put so much passion and time into what we do as volunteers as well as for those lucky enough to do this as a career too.
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Richard Stallman (RMS),the Father of Free Software doesn’t like Ubuntu Linux. Stallman posted a scathing diatribe against Ubuntu on Friday.
“If you ever recommend or redistribute GNU/Linux, please remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute,” Stallman wrote. “In your install fests, in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.”
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Since Microsoft Office price per seat per year for businesses is around $75 two public administrations in the German cities of Freiburg and Munchen decided to switch to OpenOffice. One of them went well while other one did not do so well. The Unsuccessful transition occurred in Freiburg. Their calculations went like this – $75 per year per computer for public administration, which for as many as 2,000 users per year is $ 150,000. However, after five years, although they saved on the prices for licenses, they have spent $600,000, with a disgruntled employee who complained about the incompatibility of file formats. To make things worse, they returned to Microsoft Office, which was at the first year cost of at least half a million dollars.
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A clear majority 36 to 20 councilors and city councilors in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.
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I am very proud today to call myself a European, and to be here in Oslo for the EU’s Nobel Peace prize ceremony. The European Commission is collecting information and updates here. What I want to say is that when I started school in 1946 – yes! – just after the end of the Second World War, I could never imagine that we as a continent would be in this position today. A family, united in democratic values, and more prosperous that seemed possible throughout most of our lives.
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There are “many good examples of municipalities, states, and countries’ ministries changing expensive, heavy and closed proprietary software for free and open-source software,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. This move by Freiburg, then, “is more than odd. 100 percent of the people that commented on the Internet have said: ‘Why didn’t they move to the newest LibreOffice or OpenOffice!? It’s insane!’”
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Former US President Jimmy Carter has slammed American drone strikes in other countries, stating that killing civilians in such attacks would infact nurture terrorism.
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Nearly 30 years after a former CIA money changer was murdered by a homeless bag lady, new details have emerged that suggest he may actually have been assassinated.
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Cablegate
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‘Now I understand why the Swedish police and prosecutors don’t travel to the UK to interrogate Assange’, writes Paragraf editor-in-chief Dick Sundevall. ‘They’d have to close the case and declare that no crime has been committed.’
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Barnes elaborated later on that she thought Manning stood for count naked on purpose, to be provocative, despite his record of consistent good conduct throughout his chilling stay at Quantico. If Shane had bothered to stay for the next 6 hours, he would have seen a haughty low-rank Chief Warrant Officer with a chip on her shoulder (she was the most junior person to ever run a brig; if anything bad happened to Manning, it would ruin her career; etc.), who flouted prison regulations in favor of her own “personal opinion.”
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One of the first things that will strike you about The Wikileaks Tapes is the unique style that citizen journalist Cathy Vogan brings to interviews.
The two-disc DVD The WikiLeaks Tapes brings together a wide range of interviews by Vogan with dozens of people on the subject of WikiLeaks.
From a sound base of knowledge on the subject matter, Vogan delves in to what matters most, the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks by Western governments, including Australia’s.
There really are some quite amazing interviews here, especially when you consider the filmmak
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There was a time, not long ago, when Arvind Kejriwal was being billed as the ‘Julian Assange of India’. Perhaps this was born of the sense that Kejriwal’s record of launching high-decibel ‘exposes’ of alleged corruption, which were lapped up by the media, echoed Assange’s periodic WikiLeaks exposes of US cables that chronicled in merciless detail the diplomats’ observations on the ways of the world, and the shadowy side to American and foreign governments’ dealings.
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This is a small working embassy. It has managed to provide one room about 15 feet by twelve feet for Assange to live and work in. He eats and sleeps there. It has little natural light so he looks pale and thinner than he was a few months ago. He presents a confident, optimistic front to visitors but the strain of constant confinement must be telling on him. There have been reports that he has a chronic breathing problem. He keeps busy running WikiLeaks, fighting legal actions and planning for his and WikiLeaks’s future. In one-way it is worse than imprisonment, for there is no telling when it will end.
All right then. Why doesn’t Assange end it himself? Why doesn’t he hand himself over to the Swedish authorities and return to Sweden and fight the allegations against him. Not so simple. Assange has every reason to fear that once they got their hands on him, Swedish authorities would turn him over to the US. The evidence that the US seeks to extradite and prosecute Assange is substantial.
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Finance
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An outspoken regulator lashed out at a $1.5 million settlement between Goldman Sachs and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — calling the deal a steal for the Wall Street bank.
Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, described the cash amount as “puny” and “a slap on the wrist” when compared to the whopping $8.3 billion trade at the center of the case.
In 2007, a Goldman trader hid the outsize trade as the market unraveled.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.
“Who Is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars,” read Time’s October 15 cover. With a setup like that, one might have hoped for a bold break from the campaign pack, an acknowledgment that facts matter, and that politicians who run on a record of resisting reality should be exposed.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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Scahill cites several former intelligence officers to make this point. “A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying, it’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program,” he quotes retired career CIA case officer Philip Giraldi as saying. The CIA, adds Giraldi, “is a killing machine now.” (Q: When wasn’t it?) And retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang opined Petraeus “wanted to drag them (CIA) in the covert action direction and to be a major player.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Yesterday morning, I wrote about the closed-door International Telecommunications Union meeting where they were working on standardizing “deep packet inspection” — a technology crucial to mass Internet surveillance. Other standards bodies have refused to touch DPI because of the risk to Internet users that arises from making it easier to spy on them. But not the ITU.
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Over the past several months a group of coders have been working hard on the new “Mega” which is scheduled to launch January 20 2013, exactly one year after Megaupload was shut down.
Today, Dotcom revealed the look of the new Mega, showing off the new encryption feature, the registration screen and a new file manager.
Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom says the new site is the result of many years’ expertise in the file-storage business.
“It’s special because seven years of experience have been turned into the perfect cloud storage solution. It scales infinitely. It provides up- and download acceleration and resume in the browser thanks to the latest HTML5 technology,” he says.
The encryption part pictured below is perhaps the most exciting feature unveiled thus far. Before users upload their files to Mega they will be encrypted using the AES algorithm. Advanced security, but based on code that will be open source.
“File transfers and storage are encrypted with military strength and you don’t have to take our word for it, that part of the code is open,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.
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The European Union has set out its position in the looming fight over control of the internet, arguing that it should ‘stay open and global’.
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DRM
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Q It’s nearly 30 years since you started work on the GNU operating system, which went on to become GNU/ Linux, one of the leading examples of free and open source software collaboration. Yet Apple and Microsoft still loom large. How do you feel the free software movement is faring?
The free software movement has advanced tremendously but proprietary user-subjugating software has also spread tremendously. I would say the free software movement has gone about half the distance it has to travel. We managed to make a mass community but we still have a long way to go to liberate computer users.
Those companies are very powerful. They are cleverly finding new ways to take control over users. Nowadays people who use proprietary software [programs whose source code is hidden, and which are licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder] are almost certainly using malware. The most widely used non-free programmes have malicious features – and I’m talking about specific, known malicious features.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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They had a month—and now it’s over. Any California mobile-app developers who don’t have a privacy policy obviously available to consumers need to get one and fast. If they don’t, they could be facing potentially massive fines: up to $2,500 per app download.
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Major German publishers with Axel Springer AG as the leader of the gang have for years demanded a law that would force all commercial web services such as search engines or aggregators like the German-Techmeme equivalent Rivva to pay a license fee for automatically processing and displaying headlines or snippets.
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After three months in solitary confinement Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be released from custody. The prosecutor suspects Gottfrid of being involved in several hacking and fraud cases but he has yet to be charged in any of these cases. The Pirate Bay founder will now be transferred to a new prison which he will leave as a free man in five months if no new charges are brought against him.
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In In re BitTorrent Adult Film Copyright Infringement Cases, defendant Doe 1′s motion for leave to continue to proceed anonymously was granted.
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12.09.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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While there is the Wine project to run native Windows binaries on Linux (and other platforms), there’s a new open-source project that’s emerging for running Apple OS X binaries on Linux in a seamless manner.
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Desktop
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Among major computer hardware makers, Dell continues to show growing signs of having a cohesive, far-reaching strategy surrounding open source. We’ve reported on the company’s work with Canonical to bring Ubuntu-based systems to both India and China, including an expansion of this effort. Dell also recently announced its Ubuntu laptop, part of its “Project Sputnik” effort, targeted at developers. And, Dell is offering new laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pre-loaded. According to the latest reports, we’re going to see more open source-friendly moves from Dell going forward.
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Server
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Scientists at Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Ontario have successfully created a virtual human brain that can do some of complicated tasks like copying a drawing, image recognition, counting, answering questions etc. The brain requires 24 gigabytes of RAM to work and is powered by a Linux-based supercomputer. Even with this sheer power, the machine takes 2.5 hours of processing for one second of simulated time.
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Kernel Space
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The advanced Butter/Better/B-tree Filesystem, Btrfs, is still labeled as experimental in the Btrfs Wiki and on Oracle’s Btrfs page, though the Oracle page looks outdated. Btrfs is an advanced copy-on-write filesystem with a lot of great capabilities: snapshotting and rollbacks, checksumming of data and metadata, RAID, volumes and subvolumes, online defragmentation, compression, and online filesystem check and repair. Snapshots are always interesting to me; they’re not backups, but a fast way to restore a system to a previous state. With Btrfs users can manage their own snapshots in their home directories. Btrfs supports filesystems up to 16 EiB in size, and files up to 16 EiB as well. (Which may be almost enough to store all the cute kitten photos on the Internet.)
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For those interested in Non-Unified Memory Access performance under Linux, here’s an independent performance comparison that puts the mainline kernel against three other NUMA kernels.
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Last month marked the release of Upstart 1.6 for the init daemon primarily used by Ubuntu. Coming out nearly one month later is Upstart 1.6.1 to deliver on some additional work.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA is still working on a way to implement buffer-sharing for their closed-source Linux graphics driver.
NVIDIA still isn’t permitted to properly use DMA-BUF for buffer sharing between their binary driver and the open-source graphics drivers for being able to properly support the NVIDIA Optimus technology. GPL-only kernel symbols are blocking NVIDIA from tapping DMA-BUF and there’s a few kernel developers who don’t want these symbols to be used by NVIDIA’s blob.
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Applications
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Two years ago, looking for a Linux “to do list” manager that met my needs, I settled on Korganizer. It worked well, until the upgrade to KDE 4. I find the new Korganizer is more clumsy to use, presents less information on screen, and is unappealing to my eye. But the final straw was last month, when I tried to print a to-do list…and found out that it would only print the first page of the to-do list, no matter what I tried.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Linux for Steam might not be ready for mass consumption just yet, but we’re now able to get an idea of what system requirements will be for some of the platform’s games. Valve has updated select titles with Tux-friendly specifications.
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Numerous events this year have foreshadowed Valve directly entering the PC hardware game, but boss Gabe Newell made it official during a red carpet interview at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards. The software developer and proprietor of digital distribution store Steam has a plan to sell custom PC gaming machines to geared toward competing with next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
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While I’ve been part of the Valve Linux beta program from the beginning, I had to refrain from sharing any benchmarks and other performance-related figures while the Valve Linux developers worked out any early bugs. With the huge expansion of their Linux beta program this week, Valve is now getting fairly comfortable with the state of their Linux binaries. As such, I was informed last night by Valve that I’m now allowed to go ahead and begin publishing the performance data on Phoronix.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Konqui the friendly dragon has been KDE’s mascot for over ten years. It’s time for a new look!
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I’m happy to announce that Trojitá, a fast IMAP e-mail client, has become part of the KDE project. You can find it below extragear/pim/trojita.
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GNOME Desktop
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Before Thanksgiving I’ve caused some uproar and made people doubt our incurable stubbornness by first announcing the release team decision to drop fallback mode (*), and then that we’re going to be looking at supported extensions as a replacement (*). Some have been calling this ‘classic’ mode – I’m using the term ‘legacy’ here, since ‘classic’ may raise some false expectations.
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A few weeks back GNOME developers announced that GNOME 3.8 would no longer include the fallback mode. When users roared up, developers found a way to co-exist peacefully with them – a fallback-like mode made mostly of specialized extensions. Matthias Clasen blogged today of some of the progress of what he now dubs GNOME Legacy.
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With the support of Gnome fallback going away and users backlashing to quit Gnome, developers have decided to create a separate session for those users who like old style desktop. This session, known as Gnome legacy as now, will be able to retain some design of Gnome 2.x – like drop down menus, minimize and maximize buttons and more. Gnome 3.8 will be the first release without the fallback mode, but you will be able to switch to Gnome legacy from the GDM login screen.
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There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.
That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.
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The ZevenOS developers have decided to bring their users an “early Christmas present” with the release of version 5.0 of their Linux distribution. ZevenOS 5.0 introduces what the developers term “a touch of BeOS” to its Xfce desktop. This mostly consists of theming Xfce with a distinct BeOS-like look. In line with this, the distribution focuses very much on multimedia applications and ships with most of the popular codecs.
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New Releases
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ArchBang 2012.12 is out in the wild!!! If you are already running ArchBang smoothly on your system then you don’t need to install the new release. This 2012.12 release is a full systemd version with our latest set of minimal packages and Openbox for the competent Linux user.
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ArchBang 2012.12 was released this weekend as the latest version of the Arch Linux derivative distribution that is very lightweight and ships with the OpenBox window manager.
ArchBang 2012.12 is the project’s first release where there is a full systemd version following upstream Arch Linux moving with systemd back in October. Aside from the 2012.12 release using systemd, the packages have also been updated for the minimal packages shipping with the Linux OS. OpenBox continues to be the window manager on the front-end for providing a clean lightweight experience.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the global open source solutions provider, has announced the certification of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 for SAP business applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is a continuation of the companies’ joint work on virtualisation and an expansion of SAP’s certification of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 platform release. The certification marks the latest milestone in a 15-year alliance formed to help simplify deployments of SAP applications on physical Red Hat servers, in virtualised environments or in the cloud, bringing new choice to enterprises worldwide.
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Fedora
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A while back I wrote about getting the MATE desktop (which is the fork of the widely used Gnome 2 desktop), on Fedora 17.
It worked, but it had a couple of minor flaws, and I ended up going with Gnome 3 and tweaking it to get it like Gnome 2. It took some work, and it’s not perfect — for example, there are minor font issues where text doesn’t quite fit exactly in some window areas. Regardless, the issues are minor enough that they are hardly noticeable.
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To adjust the rate at which how fast software updates are forced onto users, some Fedora and Red Hat developers have made a “Software Collections” proposal. The purpose of Software Collections is to allow users to install a package and choose between different versions of RPM-packaged software in parallel at run-time.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu developers and users have brought back up the matter of zRAM and using it as part of the default Ubuntu Linux installation in some intelligent manner.
First of all, for those not familiar with zRAM, it’s a Linux kernel module (formerly called compcache) that tries to better system performance by using a compressed block device in RAM in an effort to avoid swapping/paging on disk. The zRAM kernel feature is intended for systems with low amounts of system memory. With the Linux 3.8 kernel, the zRAM feature will leave the kernel’s staging area.
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The Ubuntu Answers Lens is an Unity Lens that allows users to easily and quickly find answers to common questions directly from Unity Dash.
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Flavours and Variants
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If you’ve been following my blog (or my updates on Google+) then odds are you know I currently have my hands on two ARM devices (plus a third in the mail) I am working on creating Bodhi Linux images for. With this in mind I’ve decided I am going to start maintaining a generic ARMHF root file system to make creating Bodhi Linux images for new ARM devices easier for myself and others.
You will always be able to find the latest copy of this file system on Bodhi source forge page here. The default user name is armhf and the default password is bodhilinux. The default user has sudo access by default.
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The Linux Mint Developers have published the release candidates for Nadia’s KDE and XFCE editions. These releases are meant for testing and bug fixing. This will be followed by the stable releases of these flavors, hopefully as soon as critical bugs get fixed.
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The first alpha builds for Kubuntu and Edubuntu are now available for download. While there are test releases, the main Ubuntu branch will not release any milestone builds. This is to increase the quality of builds and reduce total milestones. Users can opt for daily builds though, which are updated everyday and may be highly unstable for use.
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Canonical will no longer be funding the Kubuntu project, Blue Systems is now the primary sponsor. Blue Systems is known for producing the Netrunner distribution which is originally based on Kubuntu. Blue Systems seems very interested in the future of Linux, and KDE in particular. Check out the links below to learn more about Blue Systems, and the exciting Netrunner operating system.
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The YouTube video shows how the Raspberry Pis are assembled on an assembly line. A pick and place machine, capable of placing 25000 parts in an hour, starts the work. The PoP assembly then places the connectors, RAM and the processor in the boards — 6 boards at a time. All this is done mechanically, and finally inspected by a human being through a computer.
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Phones
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Android
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Organisations planning to give users access to curated collection of Android apps can now do so with their Google Apps account, after the advertising giant quietly threw the switch on what it has poetically dubbed “The Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps”.
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The latest build of Android 4.2 has brought a considerable amount of improvements to Google Now functionality.
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XBMC 12 is getting closer and closer, with the latest beta adding on the Raspberry Pi support from the previous one
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Ubuntu developers continue investing a great deal of time and resources on ensuring the Linux distribution runs smoothly on the Google Nexus 7 tablet.
The latest achievement announced on Friday for the Ubuntu Linux developers working on the Nexus 7 port is that the new Google tablet can now handle running the latest Ubuntu 13.04 state. Ubuntu 12.10 previously ran on the Nexus 7 tablet, but now Ubuntu 13.04 is up to par. This announcement was made on the ubuntu-devel list.
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I’ve long said that we need to modernise copyright for the digital age: many of the rules have been in place since before things like YouTube, Facebook or data-mining techniques even existed. And, no matter what perspective you bring to the debate, it is obvious that the current fragmented rules in Europe and elsewhere have created frustrations.
It’s right to provide reward and recognition for artists: but the current copyright system sometimes doesn’t do that as well as it could. Often, in fact, it makes it harder for you to legally access your favourite content. And in many ways it closes us off from digital opportunity, whether it’s the chance to explore innovative new business models, or new ways to conduct lifesaving scientific research.
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Five out of six developers today use or have used open source tools or deployed open source software in their projects, a recent Forrester Research study revealed.
But in which software categories? The top five, according to the recent survey, are operating systems, web servers, relational database management systems, IDEs and software configuration management tools.
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Intel has released an open source tool designed to improve firms’ handling and analysis of unstructured data.
Intel said that its GraphBuilder tool would aim to fill a market void in the handling of big data for computer learning. Currently available as a beta release, the tool allows developers to construct large graphs which can then be used with big data analysis frameworks.
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The Ubuntu-powered laptop recently released by Dell’s Project Sputnik has generated a lot of buzz, especially in the open source community. Now, many Linux enthusiasts are hoping to see a continued expansion of Dell’s open source hardware lineup. And according to Project Sputnik lead Barton George, they may not be disappointed. Here’s what he had to say about Dell’s future open source strategy in a recent interview.
As longtime observers of the open source channel know, Dell’s relationship with the Linux community has been rough at times. As the only major OEM that offers Ubuntu pre-installed on consumer-class laptops and desktops, Dell has paid significant attention to the Linux demographic, which most other big-name hardware manufacturers have entirely ignored. Still, the company’s inconsistent selection of Ubuntu PCs and lack of full-scale marketing initiatives for them have left some open source fans less than ecstatic.
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At Cisco’s Financial Analyst meeting today, CEO John Chambers articulated his plan to innovate and grow. It’s a plan with multiple components, including leveraging more networking programmability and Software Defined Networking (SDN).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is continuing to double down its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business with the Firefox OS mobile operating system, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets. There have been many updates on the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform here, and Flickr galleries of screenshots of the young operating system have provided peeks at development.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The contrast between the approach taken in the two cities is striking. Freiburg — a smaller city administration — focused on cost cutting. It recognized there would be one-off costs to pay from template and macro migration, as well as user training, but it stuck with Windows desktops, retained certain existing applications, and even allowed some staff to opt out of the migration entirely and keep using Microsoft Office. It seems there was a limited uptake of migration training, too. The result was an environment with both OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Office 2000 in use throughout the attempted migration.
Because Office 2000 did not support the OpenDocument format standard, this guaranteed a flow of documents in the formats used by both office suites, maximizing opportunities for incompatibility. By all accounts, the city stuck with those old versions of both Office and OpenOffice.org and allowed the mixed environment to persist throughout. No two word processors can ever be 100 percent compatible with each other’s file formats; only a well-defined, standard format implemented by both stands any chance of interoperability. Unsurprisingly, staff ran into problems with document compatibility; equally unsurprising, the crew blamed the “new” software for the problems.
Looking at the numbers (see my article in ComputerworldUK for more details), it appears that the expenditure in Freiburg was dominated by the idea of cutting licensing costs. I may be missing it in the reports, but I couldn’t find any sign of investment in the open source software itself. The report — and the subsequent PR from Freiburg — talks about the “uncertainty” of the OpenOffice.org software (forked to create LibreOffice, abandoned by Oracle, then repurposed by IBM and others at Apache) but makes no mention of investment in the software.
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CMS
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Between pictures of the president using Twitter and Vice President Joe Biden at Costco, the White House blog recently featured a little note advocating the use of open source in government. It is interesting to see how Barack Obama uses social networks, and a post about Biden at Costco feels a little bit like the White House just scooped The Onion — a shirtless photo would have been too much to hope for, but the author may have been able to slip in at least one Pontiac reference. But the White House making a point of name-checking open-source software touchstones is also worthy of note.
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Public Services/Government
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A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.
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Governments should encourage the use of free and open source software, recommends Unctad in a report published on 28 November. The United Nation’s trade and investment body says that an increasing uptake of open source will help to develop an innovative domestic software market. It also makes public organisations less dependent on large-scale software manufacturers.
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Openness/Sharing
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Coffee, often cited as the second most highly traded commodity in the world, is deeply personal for many. Every coffee drinker has their favorite brand, blend, and brew method. Years ago I considered myself a coffee fan, but the coffee I was drinking was so loaded with cream and sugar that it barely resembled the beverage. I purposefully weened myself off of the additives and learned the unfortunate truth that most coffee served in the United States has gone stale before the consumer reaches for their wallet. After a long search for the freshest cup, I decided to roast my own.
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California Community College faculty, administrators, a team of professionals and the 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM) are meeting this weekend to transform textbook production and costs, a project aimed to save students millions of dollars and revolutionize the way educational materials are compiled and delivered.
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Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
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Earlier this year, the JOBS Act passed Congress with widespread bipartisan support, and was signed into law by the President. There were a few different pieces involved, but one that got plenty of attention was the opening up of crowdfunding for equity (i.e., owning actual shares in a company). In the US, you can’t do a crowdfunding campaign that results in giving ownership in the company. Until the JOBS Act passed, that was considered a form of a public offering, which is a highly regulated area, in which you have to file all sorts of documents with the SEC, get an underwriter, go on a road show, all that fun stuff. But for smaller businesses looking to raise some money, this doesn’t make much sense. The JOBS Act opened up a small sliver of space in which smaller companies could raise a little bit of money in exchange for equity. The SEC actively opposed the whole thing from the beginning, but once the bill was law, it was also tasked with setting up the rules for how it would work to limit possible fraud.
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Programming
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The London hospital that treated Prince William’s pregnant wife Kate condemned on Saturday an Australian radio station that made a prank call seeking information about the duchess, after the apparent suicide of a nurse who answered the phone.
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Earlier this evening, after a day of legislative bickering that seemed interminable, the D.C. Council finally delivered what urban professionals, libertarians, Megan McArdle and all the myopic little twits have demanded for months: Uber, the luxury sedan-on-demand service, is totally legal in the District of Columbia.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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On December 6, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) posted on their website that a day earlier it had conducted ‘Pollux,’ the U.S.’s 27th subcritical nuclear experiment since signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Pollux was a first-of-its-kind subcritical test involving a scale model nuclear warhead primary (this fact wasn’t mentioned in their press release, see Annex below).
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The three branches of our government have united to destroy US civil liberties in the name of a hoax, “the war on terror.”
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A Senate committee is close to putting the final stamp on a massive report on the CIA’s detention, interrogation and rendition of terror suspects. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, called the roughly 6,000-page report “the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted.”
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… killed Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also an American citizen.
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Cablegate
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Wikileaks uncovered the story. Why didn’t we hear much about it in the news?
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The latest chat excerpts, which were presented during closing arguments, came from Manning’s personal laptop computer, reports the Washington Post. Prosecutors said they show that Manning and Assange collaborated to steal and publish over 700,000 documents filled with state secrets. The publication of those secrets caused “extreme harm” to the United States, according to the prosecution. Capt. Ashden Fein said Assange did more than simply accept documents from Manning.
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The decade-long clandestine U.S. “war on terror” has spawned a parallel, escalating campaign to stop leaks of information about intelligence activities to the news media. During the first four years of the Obama administration, investigations of spy agency employees have proliferated. Six current or former officials have been prosecuted for unauthorized disclosures of information, more than in all previous administrations combined.
The pressure to keep quiet is intensifying. The director of national intelligence has expanded the use of lie-detector interrogations in leak investigations. His office is studying how all 16 U.S. civilian and military intelligence agencies handle “non-incidental contacts” with the news media, presumably interviews and background briefings. Pentagon officials have been ordered to monitor news media for disclosures of classified information.
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Ecuadoran Ambassador Ana Alban told a small group of reporters that Assange took time to settle, but has now got used to his restricted living arrangements.
“If you have a guest in your house, you want to make sure that he’s all right,” she said.
“You can imagine how difficult it can be to have fresh air and to have sun and space.
“In the beginning it was quite difficult, but now it’s fine.”
The ambassador was speaking as French leftwing politician Jean-Luc Melenchon met with Assange.
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Amidst growing criticism, including an editorial from the newspaper’s public editor, the New York Times sent reporter Scott Shane to cover military court proceedings in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier currently being prosecuted by the government for allegedly providing classified information to WikiLeaks.
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The New York Times’ named Margaret Sullivan as its fifth Public Editor in September of this year. As the successful candidate for the job her duty is to investigate “matters of journalistic integrity” by working “independently” and “outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper.”
So far, and with very few blemishes, she has done an exemplary job. She recently scrutinized her boss Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s choice to hire former BBC Director General Mark Thompson as the Times’ new CEO. Regarding the pedophilia scandal that has rocked that public institution and that Thompson oversaw for part of his career, Margaret asked “How likely is it that he knew nothing?” She also wrote that “It’s worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job.”
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THE lawyer David Coombs rarely speaks publicly outside the courtroom. He says that his client, Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, prefers it that way.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, South African Professor Patrick Bond, an analyst and activist on climate change, told the Inter Press Service as the United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change met in Doha.
The talks took place in the capital of Qatar from November 26 to December 7.
“The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity,” Bond, the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS. “The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences … and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives.”
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How times have changed. Ten years ago the United States was looking at importing natural gas via massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, yet to be built. Now the country appears to be getting ready to significantly increase exports of LNG.
A long-anticipated federal study released Wednesday for public comment concluded that the economic benefits of significant natural gas exports outweighed the potential for higher energy prices for consumers. The Obama administration has repeatedly said the study would be central to its decision on whether or not to approve expanded exports.
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Environmental activists seem elated that the Obama administration may tackle climate change in its second term. In order to determine where climate change fits into the priority ranking of our nation’s most important agenda items, it seems worthwhile to step back and take stock of the quiet but tremendous progress that the U.S. has already made in reducing carbon emissions
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Finance
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Big news yesterday in the United Kingdom, where the citizenry surveyed its domestic banking system and discovered that it couldn’t find a single person trustworthy enough to put in the top job at the Bank of England. So they went to Canada and stole that country’s central banker, Mark Carney, who just happens to be a former Goldman, Sachs executive – he was once Goldman’s managing director of investment banking.
Carney’s appointment may be seen as an admission that the British banking sector is now so tainted, only an outsider can be trusted to govern them. Almost all of the major English banks have been dinged by ugly scandals. The LIBOR mess, in which banks have been caught messing around with global interest rates for a variety of sordid reasons, has most infamously implicated Barclays, but the Royal Bank of Scotland is also a cooperator in those investigations.
Meanwhile, HSBC has been accused of laundering billions of dollars of Mexican drug money, a monstrous mess that recalls the infamous Bank of New York scandal of the late Nineties involving Russian mob money; officials have described the HSBC culture as “pervasively polluted.” And the British bank Standard Chartered is now being forced to pay $330 million to settle claims that it laundered hundreds of billions of dollars on behalf of Iran.
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As promised, here is an update from Laser Haas in his diligent fight for justice. Unfortunately for him AND for ALL OF US, our judicial system as with all branches of our government does not want to take any action against those, too big to fail or those in the 1% with the money to buy lobbyists and influence government, who seem to rule our country.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and CIFG Assurance North America Inc. retained a mediator as the two companies seek to settle a lawsuit in New York state court in Manhattan, according to a filing.
The insurer sued Goldman Sachs in New York State Supreme Court in August 2011, accusing the New York-based investment bank of making misrepresentations in connection with the securitization of a portfolio of 6,204 mortgage loans.
The two sides have participated in one mediation session and have scheduled another for Dec. 19, according to a document filed in court yesterday.
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Shares of Macau-based casinos got slammed in the last day amid reports of the mainland cracking down on the junket operators that ferry rich players into high-roller rooms.
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Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today’s indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown’s in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to another. This is scary to anyone who ever links to anything.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Today in Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder and his GOP controlled lame-duck legislature pulled a fast one, introducing and then ramming through the House and the Senate so-called “right to work” legislation. The bill was introduced at 11 a.m., passed the House at 5 p.m. by a narrow margin and the Senate at around 6:00 p.m. When the process is complete and the bill is signed, Michigan will become the 24th right to work state.
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Censorship
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Every few months, it seems, we hear about yet another attempt in Europe to implement the absolutely ridiculous idea of the “right to be forgotten.” We wrote about it in 2010, 2011 and again earlier this year. It’s a silly idea for a variety of reasons. The general idea is that someone, say, who has committed a crime, but is then rehabilitated / served his time / whatever, deserves a “fresh start” and the stories of the crime and punishment should be erased from publications. Europeans who support this wacky idea argue that it’s a form of a privacy right. But that’s ridiculous. It has nothing to do with “privacy” at all, as the fact that someone committed and convicted of a crime is a public fact, not private info. Telling people (and publishers) that they can’t talk about factual information, or even leave available factual stories written at the time just seems completely offensive to anyone who believes in the basic idea of free speech.
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Privacy
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The Wall Street Journal has been looking at this issue, and in its latest reportit says companies are increasingly connecting consumers’ real-life identities to where they hang out online.
The newspaper cited a Georgia man shopping for a car who input his name and contact information on a car dealer’s website.
While this data went to the dealership, it also was transmitted to a company that tracks the online movements of people shopping for vehicles. The company then was able to pair the man’s personal information with an analysis of the automotive websites he had visited and hand over all of this data to the car dealer, which could use it to more easily land a sale.
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Computer security millionaire John McAfee’s surreal flight from Belizean law enforcement came to an end this week when he was detained (and then hospitalized) in Guatemala, as has been widely reported. A piece of the story that hasn’t been included in much of the reporting is how authorities figured out that McAfee — who was wanted for questioning in the shooting death of his neighbor — had fled Belize for Guatemala. McAfee’s location was exposed after he agreed to let two reporters from Vice Magazine tag along with him. Proud to finally be in the thick of a story rife with vices — drugs, murder, prostitutes, guns, vicious dogs, a fugitive millionaire and his inappropriately young girlfriend — they proudly posted an iPhone photo to their blog of Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro standing with the source of the mayhem in front of a jungly background, saying, “We are with John McAfee right now, suckers.”
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In the past three years, 294 public organisations have faced action over their use of the database containing details of car registrations and driving licenses.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Big Brother Watch, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) disclosed that the organisations were overwhelmingly local authorities, but included Sussex Police and Transport for London.
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The new standards outline requirements for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology in future systems — a technique for snooping into the web content with legitimate uses all too often used by repressive regimes to identify and punish dissenters or preemptively censor online communication through fear of reprisal. However, while setting technical standards, ITU made practically no mention of the user implications of the technology, nor did it outline guidelines for appropriate use.
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Civil Rights
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A federal appeals court is refusing to reconsider its August ruling in which it said the federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued.
The original decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this summer reversed the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program.
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DRM
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In a recent interview with New Internationalist Magazine, Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Foundation and GNU, criticized the restrictions imposed by Apple devices on its users.When asked about the malicious features that non-free programs have, Stallman bashed Apple for spying on its users and restricting their freedom.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Open Rights Group has reached the funding goal of £5,000 to fund the legal case defending the decision to keep private the personal details of O2 and Be Broadband customers asssociated with over 6000 IP addresses.
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I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do.
What struck me most was seeing that people have tattoos of the Creative Commons logo—it’s a passionate gesture and conveyed a social force that inspired my creation of the three images you see in the photo above. I refer to them as “Creative Commons personification,” “Share,” and “The Creative Commons Ship,” respectively.
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In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties.
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The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of Republicans in the House of Representatives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Congress re-convenes in January. The incoming chairman of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by several Republican members of Congress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advocating reform of copyright law. They asked that Khanna not be retained, and Scalise agreed to their request.
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The creators of the Creative Commons licensing suite are celebrating the licences’ tenth birthday. As part of the festivities, local groups are organising events all over the world from 7 to 16 December. The organisation behind Creative Commons was founded in 2001 and produced and published the first set of licences in December of the following year. The organisation was founded by, among others, law school professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig, with the goal of giving both creators and consumers of content more freedoms than are usually afforded under traditional copyright licences.
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Over the past few days, Sega has been forcing YouTube users to remove uploaded videos of the Sega Saturn RPG Shining Force III lest their entire channels get shut down. While this is not an altogether uncommon practice for a company trying to protect its IP, the fact that Sega is targeting just specific content is rather curious. In any case, it’s pretty damn heartless.
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Well, Sega has apparently decided to buck their trend of being mildly annoying to their fans… by upping the ante and going full-blown fan-screw-crazy. They have apparently been going on a YouTube video take down blitz for anything related to their Shining Force franchise to somehow protect an upcoming PSP release in the series from being… well… maybe they think that… no, that doesn’t work… you know what? I don’t know what the hell they’re afraid of, but they’re pooping all over a bunch of fan videos.
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Details of the top secret international spy agency ring known as Echelon will have to be produced after a new judgment in the Kim Dotcom case.
The internet tycoon was also cleared to pursue a case for damages against the police and the Government Communications Security Bureau in a judgment which has opened the Government’s handling of the criminal copyright case for its harshest criticism yet.
The order for the GCSB to reveal top secret details came as the High Court at Auckland ruled the spy agency would now sit alongside the police in a case probing the unlawful search warrant used in the raid on Dotcom’s north Auckland mansion.
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We’ve covered how often DMCA notices seem to be sent improperly, taking down others people’s work, but it’s also true that we see people send DMCA notices on their own work pretty often. TorrentFreak has done a great job detailing many cases where Hollywood’s biggest and most famous studios have been issuing DMCA takedowns on their own movies, as well as their own movie promotional pages. Among the takedowns are ones from Lionsgate taking down authorized versions of a film on iTunes, Amazon, Blockbuster and Xfinity.
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Last week, we covered the comedy of errors that played out in the Florida courtroom of Judge Mary Scriven, where it became clear that there were no attorneys willing to put their reputations at risk by associating themselves with the porn trolling firm Prenda Law. A local Florida attorney told Judge Scriven that he had been brought into the case by Prenda, but now wanted out of the case. Prenda itself denied any involvement in the case.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“There must be 50 reasons to prefer GNU/Linux over ’8′ — all of them sufficient for one or more groups of users,” asserted blogger Robert Pogson. “Where GNU/Linux appears on retail shelves, a significant number of consumers do choose it — we saw that all over the world when ASUS brought out its netbook with Linpus GNU/Linux, and we see it in Brazil today, where GNU/Linux outsells M$’s OS at Wal-Mart.”
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I’m not saying Linux is the best thing to use for everyone. I am saying, however, that it may be better for you than what you’re using now.
Linux is different from Windows or Mac OS X in some fundamental ways.
For thousands of people, these differences are a reason to choose Linux
over its alternatives. Are they for you? Read on to find out!
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Desktop
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Rumors began circulating earlier this year that Dell might be developing a laptop specifically designed for developers. Then Barton George, Dell’s Web Vertical Director, began blogging about Sputnik, a “scrappy skunkworks project” that would combine the XPS 13-inch laptop with the Ubuntu 12.04 Linux distribution.
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In recent posts, we’ve been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Now that these systems have been in the wild for a few weeks, reliable reviews are appearing, and, users are liking them.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Imagination Technologies has published a set of 44 patches that add in over 28,000 lines of new code to the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Everpad is a tool that allows Linux users to use the popular Evernote service with a native client. The developers have recently released version 2.3 of the client, which supports Evernote’s most important functions such as the creation and editing of notes in multiple notepads, attachments, and organisation with tags. The latest release also supports dragging and dropping of files to attach them to notes. Images are automatically embedded inline with this method.
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Whether you’re moving to a paperless lifestyle, need to scan a document to back it up or email it, want to scan an old photo, or whatever reason you have for making the physical electronic, a scanner comes in handy. In fact, a scanner is essential.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Games in the Steam store have begun listing Linux system requirements, hinting that the client is making good progress towards a wider release.
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Pier Solar HD has more than hit its Kickstarter funding goal, bringing in $231,370 at the end of the campaign this morning. People were sufficiently piqued by the idea of an HD remake of a present-day Genesis RPG to not only get developer WaterMelon Co. to its $139,000 goal, but to exceed every stretch goal set by the developer.
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Teleglitch is a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. The game takes place in procedurally generated military research & training complex that has a different map every time you play. Our mission is to give players like you a chance to walk in the dark corridors, gripping their gun and few last rounds of ammunition. To play with finger on the trigger, high on adrenaline. We want to give you the, paranoid, sweaty, and bloody hard kind of fun.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I have been kept very busy during the last six months with Homerun, spending little time on Gwenview. Luckily Gwenview received several contributions from other developers during this cycle, so Gwenview 2.10 (from KDE SC 4.10) features some significant improvements.
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The KDE Project has announced a few minutes ago, December 5, the immediate availability for download of the fourth and last maintenance release of KDE Software Compilation 4.9.
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Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.
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As promised in this week’s Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here’s our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine.
Our annual distro competition is as close to a tradition as we get here at LXF Towers. We do it because we love distributions – we love their variety and the way that so much changes over the course of a year. If you want to see what conclusions we came to last year, for example, check out our previous feature, The best Linux distro of 2011.
But if we restricted our comparisons to the same old dominant stalwarts, our yearly parade of victors would look more like political oscillation than a reflection of Linux distribution development. Which is why this year we wanted to do something different…
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There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I’ll come across one that seems especially intriguing.
That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that’s based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Today I performed the easiest Mageia install ever. It was on an Acer netbook (an Inspire One D257-1408 that came pre-installed with the curse of Windows 7 Starter).
The machine packs an Intel atom N570, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB HD. When I first saw it, my worry was the strange keyboard configuration: there are functions scattered all over the keyboard. Besides, I still had the usual concerns: Graphics server and effects, Wi-fi, sound, and the SD card reader.
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Red Hat Family
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ManageIQ, the leading provider of IT Cloud Management ™ solutions, today announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. ManageIQ support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 provides customers with unified monitoring, management and automation capabilities that are quick-to-deploy and easy-to-use, reducing the cost and complexity of enterprise virtualization and cloud computing.
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Less than a year after a major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, Red Hat has upgraded the software to offer more advanced storage capabilities.
Released Wednesday, RHEV 3.1 allows administrators to make snapshots and clones of running virtual machines. And, in a technical preview mode, RHEV 3.1 supports storage migration for virtual machines (VMs), in which the backup disk image of a running VM can be moved from one SAN (storage area network) to another without stopping the running VM, said Chuck Dubuque, Red Hat product marketing senior manager for Red Hat virtualization infrastructure.
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Fedora
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It was decided at today’s FESCo meeting to not disable the mounting of /tmp as a tmpfs file-system by default for the forthcoming Fedora 18 Linux release.
For months the Fedora developers have been planning to mount /tmp with tmpfs for putting the temporary directory in RAM/SWAP volatile memory as it will lead to less disk reads/writes, potentially save power / better the performance, not preserve temporary data across reboots, and other benefits.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After reading this book I can say that I have a better understanding on how this Ubuntu operating works. The nice thing about this book compared to other books on Ubuntu that cover how to use Ubuntu, is this books covers not only these topics, but goes over why and how Ubuntu came into being and thoroughly teaches the readers how the Ubuntu community runs and operates.
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Over the Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Cyber Week madness, I managed to pick up a new laptop that, as it turns out, is decently Linux-friendly, so I thought I’d share my findings with you! As it turns out, I have a tendency to ramble on, so enjoy this 14+ minute video! Click “Read More” to see it.
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A quick update for our Ubuntu readers using Foobnix: the player has a new PPA, so remove the old one and add ppa:foobnix-team/foobnix-player instead.
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Project Sputnik, Dell‘s innovative initiative for building a high-end, open source laptop, launched a week ago with the release of an XPS 13 “Developer Edition” laptop powered by Ubuntu Linux. But Dell’s far from done on this front, according to Barton George, the brain behind the project. In an interview, he explained where Project Sputnik — and Dell’s open source channel strategy more broadly–might be headed next. Read on for what he had to say.
The Sputnik laptop released last week was the product of an effort that began about six months ago, when George floated the concept of creating a laptop tailored for programmers to the Dell Innovation Program. Sputnik was the inaugural project for the Innovation Program, which Dell established earlier this year to help inspire innovative product ideas from company employees.
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The Ubuntu development cycle moves up a notch as the first alpha release of what is to become Ubuntu 13.04, Raring Ringtail, and images for Edubuntu 13.04 and Kubuntu 13.04, are released to the public. A decision has been made by the developers to reduce the number of milestone builds and switch to daily and fortnightly quality tests. Raring Ringtail will be continuously updated and new daily images will be released over the coming months to test it. There will not be a milestone release of Ubuntu 13.04 until 28 March 2013, and that will be a “FinalBetaRelease”. Rather than there being an Alpha 1 image, users should download the most recent daily image and use that.
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Flavours and Variants
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Every release KDE users are treated like red-headed stepchildren over there at Linux Mint. We wait and wait… Fortunately, Clem announced the Release Candidate today, which means version 14 with KDE should be along any time now. It comes with most of goodies outlined earlier and we’ll miss the showstopppers that prompted a quick update.
Clement Lefebvre today announced Linux Mint 14 RC with KDE 4.9.2. Like the others, this release is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and includes Linux 3.5, Xorg X Server 1.13.0, and GCC 4.7.2. KDE 4.9.2 in Mint includes improvements such as enhanced Dolphin metadata, New “Change Directory To” upon drop in a Konsole, and Kwin got lots of quality and performance improvements. Kontact received many bugfixes and performance improvements too and Workspaces now have MPRIS2 support.
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Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.
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There’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite ARM development board right now: it’s cheap, silent, and exceptionally power efficient. The Raspberry Pi makes an excellent choice for low-energy applications like personal servers, routers, firewalls, environmental monitoring setups, etc, etc.
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Texas Instruments released a real-time operating system developed entirely in-house for its microcontrollers. TI will offer the code for on a royalty-free, open source basis, aiming to ease the path to market for its customers.
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Phones
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Android
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merging markets are where it’s happening these days in IT, especially in the mobile segment. According to Gartner [1], smartphone sales to emerging markets grew at a 63 percent rate in Q3 compared to 46 percent globally. Not surprisingly, the new wave of mobile Linux platforms [2] like Jolla’s MeeGo-based Sailfish OS, Mozilla’s Firefox OS, and The Linux Foundation-hosted Tizen, are initially targeting these same, “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP) consumers.
By the time they reach market, however, they may find that another Linux-based OS has beaten them to the punch. Android is leading the way in low-cost smartphones, and increasingly, tablets, aimed at the new, budget-conscious middle classes in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other developing nations.
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Samsung has really gone far ahead in the Android Smartphone Segment and left manufacturers such as HTC struggling. Even though HTC produced some stunning phones in 2012, its financial condition has been on a continuous decline over the past year. After barely managing to remain profitable HTC is planning to change it fortune in the first half of 2013.
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Great news for all the Android Fanatics in India, Android App Expo is going to be held in Bangalore on January 5 2013. Android is having a very good run in India where, affordability of Android smartphones has led to huge adoption of this open source OS, over throwing steeply priced iPhones and almost dead Symbian powered Nokias.
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Samsung announces the opening of its first Samsung Mobile Store in Paris, a unique place for Samsung experience with expertise. Dedicated to mobility, Samsung Mobile Store has conceived and designed as a showcase of the latest technological innovations. Hands-on experience, advice and customized solutions: this new space is open to all, individuals and professionals.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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For anyone who has ever used his or her Android tablet and wished that it could double as a desktop-style device, PengPod has a product just for you. Ars Technica reports that the new PengPod tablet, which runs both Android and Linux, has met its crowd-sourced fundraising goals and will so on sale in January for $120 a 7-inch model and $185 for a 10-inch model. According to Ars, the tablet will be able to “dual-boot Android 4.0 and a version of Linux with the touch-friendly KDE Plasma Active interface.” Overall, the tablet received funding of nearly $73,000, or around 49% more than the $49,000 that the company had been seeking.
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The Archos GamePad is now available in Europe for €149.99, with a North American release scheduled for early Q1 2013. As the name suggests it combines physical gaming button controls and a patented mapping tool that allows you to link the virtual controls of any game to physical controls.
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Vaadin, the company behind the GWT-based web framework of the same name, has published a report on the future of Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based web framework that includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. Google had appeared to scale back its own GWT development efforts following its shift in focus towards Dart as an alternative to JavaScript and, earlier this year, had promised to create a more open development process. This resulted in the formation of a steering committee, which includes Google representatives as well as developers from Red Hat and Vaadin and which will be responsible for the future development of GWT.
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Since 1938, the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., was the center for the United States Army’s research efforts in ballistics and vulnerability/lethality analysis. That remained the case until 1992, when BRL was disestablished and its mission, personnel and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
But during the decades of providing support to the nation, BRL quickly became involved in the move toward modern computing. Indeed, nearly 70 years ago, BRL unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — ENIAC, the world’s first operational, digital computer.
The development of this computer was driven by the Army’s need to speed calculation of firing tables. And ever since the development of the ENIAC, ARL has provided the U.S. military with unprecedented scientific computational capabilities.
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Transcends upgrades Rifidi open-source RFID software, introduces new appliances, reader; Napa Valley’s AuburnJames Winery to test RFID-enabled pallets; ADR’s Automated Workforce Monitor service initiated at Texas construction sites; Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ parking lot uses TagMaster RFID tags; Toshiba certifies Omni-ID UltraThin IQ 400 and IQ 600 RFID labels; Intellitix intros RFID MiniPortal.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.
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Databases
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SkySQL’s CEO Patrick Sallner, Percona’s co-founder Peter Zaitsev and MySQL AB co-founders Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson have come together to announce the creation of the MariaDB Foundation. “The time is right for an independent organisation to safeguard the interests of MariaDB users and developers as we head towards MariaDB 10″, said Axmark. According to the announcement made at the Percona Live conference in London, the organisation has secured a pledge of one million euros from the foundations two initial sponsors and is seeking other sponsors.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.6 open source office suite is now available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.
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The LibreOffice developers from The Document Foundation have released LibreOffice 3.6.4, an incremental update to the open source office suite that fixes over 60 bugs. The fixed bugs include problems with the office suite’s RTF support, display problems with Hebrew font symbols, and several crashing problems. Bugs in the LibreOffice UI were also addressed, such as check boxes that would not retain their state, resetting configuration dialogs, and sorting of tables in the Calc spreadsheet application that did not work correctly.
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Semi-Open Source
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John Newton has had an influential career in the content management market, having co-founded and led the development of Documentum, subsequently acquired by EMC. Today Newton is chairman and CTO at open source content management firm, Alfresco. I grabbed him on the phone for a Q&A.
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…now with partial access to its source code.
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Funding
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The Picket Project, an open source effort to create a new crowdsourcing software, launched on Indiegogo this week with the goal of funding their initial software release. This is the final push in the launch of their platform. The software was developed to tackle large, complex political problems in a new, innovative way. The Picket Project Platform allows engaged citizens to build their own solutions by connecting and building on related, similar ideas.
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Project Releases
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Longtime users of Ubuntu Linux may already be familiar with open source Ekiga, which used to be the default Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) client in that popular Linux distribution, but late last month the telephony software got a major update.
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Public Services/Government
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Talend, a global open source software leader, announced today it has received a favorable advisory ruling from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency around the government’s ability to purchase open source software. The CBP has determined that software products are compliant with the Trade Agreement Act (TAA) when that software is manufactured in a designated country through numerous, complex and significant activities including key product research, writing the specification and architecture, and the actual software build – even if the majority of its source code was created in a non-designated country.
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Openness/Sharing
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Over the last months, I became more and more aware of the “open” movement. “Open” as in open access, open source, open data, open science.
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We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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You might get confused with the name of a musical band group but here we will talk about a serious technology. The framework is inspired by Ruby on Rails that makes use of Groovy language which is a dynamic and agile scripting language. The syntax is somewhat very similar to that of Java. In fact, you can use groovyc just like javac to produce bytecode files. Also, Groovy integrates with Bean scripting framework, which allows you to embed any scripting engine into your Java code. It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the “coding by convention” paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer.
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Standards/Consortia
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An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM’s Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner.
Edwin Vane of Intel Canada has called for comments on his proposal to develop a Clang-based tool using the LibTooling library for automatically transforming C++ code-bases to take advantage of modern C++11 features without needing any manual code rewriting.
Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) of Islamabad Police has arrested ten men for their alleged involvement in pilfering petroleum products, selling these in open market without permission and also recovered diesel and petrol worth Rs270,000 from them, the police spokesman said on Thursday.
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So, what else is new with the CIA? Susan Rice was loaded in the boat just like one of my favorite people was.
Colin Powell was supplied with false information about weapons of mass destruction when he was ambassador to the U.N., and the result was a war that should have never been fought. Add to that the Vietnam War, which started on false information supplied by the CIA about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and I didn’t hear any complaints from the Plutocrats.
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The Central Intelligence Agency for a few years has operated a group focused on examining how climate change could affect U.S. National Security. But, recently, the desk has been shutdown, which some environmentalists say is because of opposition from Republicans in Congress.
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Former priest of Vishwa Hindu Parishad Jugal Kishore Shastri created headlines last year when he claimed before a court in Lucknow that American intelligence agency CIA had funded the entire operations of the Ram Lalla movement for the VHP.
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The congressional inquiries into who was responsible for the tragic loss of life in Benghazi continue and may not be resolved for some time. I would like to address the CIA’s role in the loss of life.
It was reported it was a chaotic situation and the CIA responded in 24 minutes. During this time, the CIA tried unsuccessfully to obtain machine guns from pro-Libyan forces. When CIA reinforcements were dispatched from Tripoli, Libya’s capital, to the Benghazi airport, it took several hours to obtain permission and find vehicles.
How many exercises did the CIA hold involving all parties to coordinate responses in any emergency? Did these exercises identify areas of risk and develop contingencies and back-up plans to eliminate confusion?
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The drone Iran says it captured appears to be a U.S.-made ScanEagle, Pentagon spokesman George Little said, in a change from the initial U.S. rejection of the Iranian claim.
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Do you view your life as an American more important than the lives of those in other countries? That is the view of many politicians in Washington today, including President Obama. Since Obama took office in 2008, more than 2,500 people in Pakistan and other Middle-Eastern countries have been killed by the use of drones, which are unmanned missile-firing planes. The President continued the usage of drones after President Bush left office to continue seeking out terrorist groups, but he also expanded the usage by a lot.
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If there’s one thing authority figures hate, it’s anything that goes counter to the narrative and/or puts their pet projects in an unfavorable light. A New York City artist is learning this the hard way after he and some friends took aim at the police department’s drone program, plastering the city with satirical ads touting the “safety” provided by the new eyes in the sky.
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Model of unmanned device appeared in picture to have crashed into ground near library
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…one of the inventors had regrets about selling ScanEagles to the military
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The term “unmanned aerial drone” might strike a bit of fear into your heart when you see the live tracking map of the USA that’s been made available this week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but not to worry – not all of them are flying overhead right this minute. Instead this is a map that’s the result of the EEF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that covers the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)’s full knowledge of unmanned flights across the United States and what you’re looking at is a tracking of project licenses rather than actually flying objects. That said, this map is exciting in its coverage for our greater understanding of unmanned drone flight projects as initiated by state and local law agencies, universities, and US Military operations.
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AR Drones can be much, much more than awesome toys. Just recently, we’ve see how the (relatively) inexpensive and versatile flying robots have been used as research tools, but the sky’s the limit as to what you can do with them, so to speak. DroneGames, which took place over the weekend in San Francisco, tasked programmers with hacking the UAVs in the most interesting and creative ways possible.
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The Pentagon’s top lawyer has resigned and says he will return to private practice.
Cablegate
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The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has confirmed that the US diplomatic cables about the alleged criminal past of Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, leaked through the whistle-blowing site, are fully authentic.
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When Julian Assange rapped on the door of the Ecuadorian embassy in June, he had probably packed no more than a weekend bag. Five months later and purportedly suffering a nasty lung infection, the world’s most wanted Australian is not only in need of a little vitamin D, but also lacking good company.
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A FORMER US Marine Corps commander has argued a vague regulation gave him discretion to maintain strict conditions on the army private charged in the WikiLeaks case, after a psychiatrist determined the soldier was no longer a suicide risk.
James Averhart testified on Thursday, the eighth day of a pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning.
The hearing is to determine whether the conditions of Manning’s 2010 imprisonment at a base in Virginia – including confinement alone in a cell at least 23 hours a day – amounted to illegal pretrial punishment, possibly warranting dismissal of the case.
Finance
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On October seventeenth (O17), a group of about 10 occupiers gathered outside 15 Central Park West, the address of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s multi-million dollar condo. Occupy Goldman Sachs was born. In the model of sleepful protests, they set up camp across from the building’s main gate. They brought sleeping bags, signs, food, cameras…and have not left the area since.
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In a move that surprises just about nobody, Governor Rick Snyder announced at press conference this morning that when anti-union Republicans send “Right to Work for Less” (RTWFL) legislation to his desk, he will sign it.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Despite two separate Wisconsin courts striking down the state’s voter ID law as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, the state legislature’s incoming Assembly Leader, Rep. Robin Vos, has pledged support for amending the state constitution to require ID at the polls — despite hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents not having ID and no significant evidence of voter fraud in the state. Vos is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair for Wisconsin; Wisconsin’s voter ID law, like many of those introduced in recent years, echoes the ALEC “model” voter ID Act.
Censorship
Civil Rights
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ric Pickles may not have the most glamorous job in Westminster, but he has delivered an early Christmas present for civil liberties campaigners.
The last Labour Government changed the law to give local authorities powers, originally intended for the Environment Agency to tackle serious fly-tipping, to go through people’s bins. Now the Secretary of State for Local Government has announced that no longer will council inspectors have the right to enter your property and rifle through your bin.
Internet/Net Neutrality
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Don’t be fooled by the opaque wording above. If that request was put into practice, service providers get to prioritize certain types of Internet traffic and “the sending party”—a network generating content, like Netflix, Youtube, and maybe even Google or Ars—has to pay for the privilege of reaching consumers. Although opinions differ on whether free, unregulated markets are the universal solution to all problems, it’s hard to argue against the success of this model in the case of the Internet. Even in places with limited broadband competition, the amount of bandwidth users get for their money has increased at rates far beyond those of any other industry.
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If you ask the folks who had a hand in the creation of the Internet, odds are you’ll get a very different read on a regulation idea likely to turn into a lightning rod for controversy at a highly anticipated meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union.
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We recently made the case against a proposal to institute a “sender-pays” rule for Internet interconnection. The idea was submitted by European telecom incumbents and it’s under discussion at this week’s International Telecommunications Union confab in Dubai. Telecom incumbents love this because it could force Google, Netflix, and other major Internet services to pony up more cash. They argue they need these revenues to fund network upgrades and keep the Internet working smoothly.
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We’ve noted that among the proposals being pushed this week at the ITU’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) are a few that are solely designed to divert money from innovative internet companies to stodgy old telcos who haven’t adapted. The ITU has defended such proposals as being about sharing revenue more fairly, which tends to be a warning sign for most folks that failed organizations are about to take money from successful ones. Indeed, a number of proposals have suggested a form of “sending party pays” infrastructure for peering, claiming that such a system was successful (via the ITU) for telco buildout, and so they could do the same thing for the internet. Of course, this leaves aside the vast differences in how the networks work and where they came from — and how a “sending party pays” internet system would almost certainly lead to a balkanized and fragmented internet.
DRM
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David sez, “We all hate seeing the way computers are depicted in TV shows and movies. Magic boxes that can do the impossible and it only gets less realistic when the subject turns to hacking. There is though one upcoming movie that aims to tackle this subject with realism and while telling a damn interesting story.. it’s The Root Kit and it is on Kickstarter right now. With less than 3 days left to succeed.”
Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Continuing our series of posts concerning the Republican Study Committee report on the problems of the copyright system and how to fix them (which it quickly retracted under industry pressure), today we’re going to explore the second “myth” that author Derek Khanna helped debunk: that “copyright is free market capitalism at work.” We’ve already covered the first myth, about the purpose of copyright, as well as responded to various responses to the report by copyright maximalists.
That response feeds nicely into this post, because the whole argument that copyright is “free market capitalism” depends almost entirely on the key claim of maximalists: that copyright is property, full stop. However, as we noted in our response, copyright has both property-like attributes and many non-property-like attributes. And it’s when you look at the actual market that you have to recognize that those non-property-like attributes start to stand out. The only way you can argue that copyright is free market capitalism at work is to flat out ignore the ways in which copyright is unlike property.
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Groups representing European publishers, writers and collective management organisations are urging the European Commission to support their interests as it considers initiatives on copyright policy this week. The groups asked the Commission to back stronger copyright and resist calls for greater exceptions and limitations to copyright.
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We recently mentioned that Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University was publishing a book about the “free market case for copyright reform,” called Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess. It’s now available at Amazon. They also have a free chapter available on the site. Brito was kind enough to send me an advance copy of the short book, and it’s a worthwhile read.
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Send this to a friend
12.05.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We’ve covered using Google Drive on Linux with third-party software, but why bother jumping through those hoops? You can use a cloud storage service that officially supports Linux instead – several of Google Drive’s competitors do.
Google may be leaving Linux users out, but other services like Dropbox, Ubuntu One, SpiderOak, and Wuala don’t ignore Linux users. They even offer more storage and other useful features, such as local encryption of your files.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, December 4, the immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.
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Graphics Stack
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One week after NVIDIA published 2D open-source driver code for their Tegra 2 ARM SoCs, which is applied to the Tegra DRM driver that will premiere with the Linux 3.8 kernel, code has now emerged for supporting the NVIDIA Tegra driver within the libdrm component.
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Applications
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As a Linux user, you have plenty of photography applications to choose from: digiKam, GIMP, Rawstudio, Darktable, just to name a few. However, if you are just dipping your toes into the world of photography, you might want to keep things simple, and start with a less complex tool for managing and tweaking your photos. In this case, consider gThumb. This image viewer packs several powerful features which make it a perfect tool for managing photos and retouching them.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps. He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer. He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center. Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce. The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map. Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.
I remember when Google Earth got big. I was already into Linux so I went through the rigmarole of getting it to work on Linux. In actuality, it wasn’t much work although it wasn’t installed in the usual manner. I played with it for a few days, but I was already past the age of caring too much about geography. I would have loved Google Earth when I was in elementary school and I used to marvel at my globe and peruse atlases. It certainly would have been interesting to grab the update on the day the Soviet Union collapsed. Rather than have an out of date globe or map I’d have an up-to-date resource. Of course, that does go back into the whole political thing – when Google decides to show this or that disputed region as belonging to someone they are, in a sense, making a political statement. And they make another one – they tend to show country names as written in that country in addition to English.
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The two most recent releases of Kubuntu, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, have both received a new update for KDE, pushing the version number up to 4.9.4.
The announcement was made today on kubuntu.org and lists 71 bug-fixes, major improvements to Dolphin file manager and Kontact PIM as well as stability improvements. Improvements to the 55+ available translations have also made this release.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME project took an important step when Matthias Clasen announced that it would support a set of extensions that would re-create the GNOME 2 desktop. Many observers, including me, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Katherine Noyes immediately interpreted the news as proof that GNOME was turning itself around and finally starting to listen to users.
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Privacy Panel arrived today in GNOME Control Center, and is one of the three new Panel (Privacy, Search, Notifications) we will get on the next GNOME. But there is also a re-designed Power Panel, and there are many improvements for Wacom, Users (added History Logs), Wireless, Bluetooth..
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New Releases
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Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: “one of our flagship puppies”.
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I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0 and thank you all for funding this release.
In this release we made the switch from our deskbar tool to the xfce4-panel ‘deskbar’ mode which introduces many new features just like extensible plugin support and the ability to more flexibly configure your desktop.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 1 has now reached EOL (end of life) and will not receive any further security or bugfix updates.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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RHEL 6.4 provides users with improved security enhancements as well as a number of new Microsoft-enabling features. The new RHEL beta update follows RHEL 6.3, which debuted in June and provided users with enhanced virtualization scalability.
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Fedora
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The beta of Fedora 18 has been released, and here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find in it. This release has been dubbed “Spherical Cow.” Apparently, the Fedora developers have decided to follow in the footsteps of Apple and Ubuntu by using cute animal names for their operating system releases.
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There have been a number of threads about how the new Anaconda UI is unintuitive or hard to use. So many that I thought maybe there was something to the claims. Maybe working on Fedora for the past many years and being involved constantly for the past year and a half has skewed my opinion so much that I wouldn’t even recognize something being hard to use. So I decided to find a couple people that don’t work on Fedora and have never done a Fedora install at all. That is to say, I used my family as guinea pigs.
Now, before you shout and rant about this, I am not claiming this is a scientific study. I’m not pretending this is somehow valid User Experience interaction data. This is is just me wanting to observe what happens when you sit someone down in front of a newUI screen and ask them to complete a default install. I found it interesting. If you don’t, then that’s cool with me. That’s why I gave the short answer at the top. OK, onto my experiment.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Many people believe Ubuntu revolutionized dpkg package management with its Ubuntu Software Center. And there is no question, Software Center is certainly user friendly by most people’s standards.
But is it truly good enough for the masses?
In this article, I will look at the current state of Ubuntu software management, how far software management has come since Ubuntu first came out, plus where I think Ubuntu software is headed.
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So, I’ve blogged a few times randomly about getting ZFS on GNU/Linux, and it’s been a hit. I’ve had plenty of requests for blogging more. So, this will be the first in a long series of posts about how you can administer your ZFS filesystems and pools. You should start first by reading how to get ZFS installed into your GNU/Linux system here on this blog, then continue with this post.
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The Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope is an Unity Scope that allows users to easily search the Thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms or words. It uses the same API as the Dictionary app.
The best part is that Ubuntu Thesaurus Scope allows you to search words right from Unity home, without accessing a Lens first.
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If you’re running Ubuntu and want the same look and feel for your system, it won’t take much to make it happen
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu Satanic Edition 666 is a Linux distribution based on two different versions of Ubuntu, 10.10 and 11.04, and comes in two distinct flavors.
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Husband and wife-led team developed a board game offering customisation abilities which encourages players to experiment with programming at 24-hour hackathon in Leeds
[...]
…Dhajan developed a Pi operating system to replace the Pi’s Linux.
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It’s a rare product indeed that surpasses expectations as utterly and thoroughly as the Raspberry Pi did this year.
Conceived as an educational tool that would be used in teaching kids to program, the device has since gone on to inspire countless new uses that must surely boggle the minds even of its creators.
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Phones
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There was certainly a loud buzzing on the internet regarding Nokia’s recent moves. Nokia is certainly on the spotlight since people are watching what they will do next. After all, the company practically vowed revenge and plans to take the number 1 spot in mobile phones once more.
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Android
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After accepting a phone upgrade from my service provider, I decided to embark on a mission of investigating some new Android software and for the first time found myself genuinely keen to download a game. The game in question – Zookeeper. Why? Because its probably the one game I wasted months of my life to on the Nintendo DS (before giving over ownership of aforementioned DS to my kids)
So now I’m presented with the “adult” version of the same DS title. I say adult because by my reckoning anything that goes on my phone is just as acceptable for adults to play as anyone else and I can fully justify wasting hours of time on a tile matching game featuring cute animals as long as its on my phone.
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Announced on Tuesday for Google Apps customers, the Google Play Private Channel lets IT shops build their own applications and distribute them to employees on the Google Play store without making the apps available to the general public. “Whether you’ve built a custom expense reporting app for employees or a conference room finder, the Google Play Private Channel is designed to make your organization’s internal apps quick and easy for employees to find,” Google Play Product Manager Ellie Powers wrote in a blog post. “Once your company has loaded these internal apps using the Google Play Developer Console, users just need to log in with their company email address to browse the Private Channel and download apps.”
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Yesterday’s WSJ.com video “Tablet Wars: How Are People Using Tablets?” had a shocking statistic: 98% of the web traffic from tablets comes from Apple’s iPad. Further, most of mobile commerce is from Apple’s iPhone:
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There are plenty of great Android tablets on the market now that weren’t around even a year ago. If you’re looking for one to wrap up for someone special, get your game on, or get some work done, you have plenty of options. Earlier last week, we asked you which models you thought were the top of the class, and then we took a closer look at the five best Android tablets. Now we’re back to crown the overall winner.
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Amazon has introduced Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a special bundle available only on the new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD that brings books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows—into one easy-to-use service for kids ages 3-8.
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Let’s say you’re a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive.
You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.
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Conceptually straightforward and easy to work with, Storm makes handling big data analysis a breeze.
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Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm’s API with a small demonstration app.
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Events
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open2012, Maven’s upcoming conference at the Computer History Museum on December 11th, 2012, seeks to bridge that gap. open2012 will bring leaders of the Open Innovation movement to Silicon Valley to highlight their successes and discuss areas of pain. The event will feature keynote addresses by Venture2 and Procter & Gamble, Open Innovation case studies by Intel, Strategyn, Boston Consulting Group, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, panel discussions including Roche, SAP, Agilent, Wrigley, GSV Capital, and Citi Ventures, and company presentations by BrightIdea, NetBase, Spigit, Inno360, competIQ, and many more.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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I guess you all know about the upcoming Firefox OS, but what you might don’t know is how easily you can run it in GNOME and play with it.
Its Apps and Interface is made totally by WEB Technologies (CSS JavaScript, HTML) and I think it could easily catch up with Apple’s and Google App Stores. Besides we all have bored to listen and talk about Google 
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SaaS
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Databases
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The MySQL community in exile made a significant announcement yesterday in London at the Percona Live conference. The three main companies investing in the MariaDB fork of MySQL joined with leaders of the MySQL development community to unveil the MariaDB Foundation, intended as a home for serious, commercially backed development of future versions of the popular open source SQL database. Already enjoying substantial commercial backing, the new foundation is seeking further participants and aims to elect a representative board in two months.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Even as traditional enterprise IT vendors come under pressure from modern cloud and open-source applications, these old-school businesses have one strategy that is the gift that keeps on giving: Enterprise licence agreements.
Not only do ELAs help to shield vendors from pricing pressure from open-source alternatives, they also increase friction for those anxious to swap out ageing applications and infrastructure for better alternatives. But how long can ELAs block customers from embracing the future of IT?
[...]
Matt Asay is vice president of corporate strategy at 10gen, the MongoDB company.
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Healthcare
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The Veterans Affairs Department will establish a separate repository for its fully open source Gold Disk version of its VistA electronic health record system to assure a common software baseline compared with the 133 instances of VistA operating at its hospitals and clinics across the country.
VA also will put in place a software testing platform, standards supporting open source development and documentation of open source community outreach planning, according to a Nov. 27 announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.
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Business
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As an end consumer looking at the cloud space, there are two major types of clouds to choose from: open source clouds, championed by the likes of Citrix and Rackspace, and closed clouds, characterized by Amazon, HP and Google. There are reasons that the two types of cloud technology are differentiated, whether from a functional or marketing perspective, but in the end which is better for an end consumer’s business?
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One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The OpenACC 1.0 API has been public for more than one year as an open standard to simplify parallel programming on CPUs and GPUs, but to this point it’s basically only backed by commercial compilers. OpenACC is similar to OpenMP in terms of using PRAGMA compiler directives and special functions for tapping multiple CPU cores in an easy and straight-forward manner with C/C++ and Fortran code, but unlike OpenMP, OpenACC is also aware of GPUs.
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Public Services/Government
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Open government means different things to different people. Is it about transparency, collaboration, or participation? Maybe it’s a combination of all three? If you listen to Tim O’Reilly speak about open government, he’ll tell you about his vision of government as a platform.
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You say sure. When she returns the screwdriver a couple days later, your friend mentions that she made an improvement: now it works with both Phillips and flat head screws. Another friend hears this and asks if he can take a look, too. When he returns the screwdriver, it’s been upgraded again: now it’s a power screwdriver. Then a third friend gets excited and adds some extra speeds and a better battery.
This situation sounds improbable, but it’s how open source software development takes place.
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Draft legislation proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to overhaul federal information technology has drawn opposition for its section on open source software adoption.
The draft (.pdf) would require the Federal Chief Information Officers Council to issue guidance that mostly reaffirms open source’s status as a commercial item under federal acquisition regulations, but it would also create a governmentwide open source software approval process to address “issues such as security and redistribution rights.”
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Openness/Sharing
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…using open-source principles.
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Programming
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I have been having an absolute blast of a time testing out a new operating system for this article. It is called Haiku OS. It is not a Unix or Linux based operating system, but rather an operating system based upon BeOS.
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Beneath the placid surface of Amazon, authors and reviewers have been in a ferment this fall. After several well-publicized episodes involving writers soliciting or paying for reviews, the retailer seems to be cracking down on log-rolling. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of book reviews have been killed. Amazon has not explained exactly why.
One possible target: authors who have sent gift certificates to reviewers to buy their books. While it’s easy to see the potential for abuse here — “Here’s a $100 gift certificate. Buy a copy of my novel for 99 cents and keep the change” — some writers argue it is no different than sending a physical copy of a book to someone, which is what publishers do in the offline world and therefore is allowed by Amazon. At least, the line between the two is blurry.
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Hardware
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Security
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A hacker by the name of Kingcope has found another security problem with the popular MySQL database. Using an already well-known characteristic of the database’s user management, it is possible to significantly increase the speed of a brute force attack. “Brute-forcing” typically involves trying out a huge number of possible passwords in order to guess the actual password of the user. Each password would be presented to the login process which can take time, and when thousands of passwords need to be processed, that time can become substantial.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Once completed, the DIA will have approximately 1,600 so-called “collectors” the world over who will be “closely aligned” with the CIA and elite military commando units. As the Washington Post notes, “an unprecedented total for an agency whose presence abroad numbered in the triple digits in recent years.”
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The Alameda County, California, sheriff’s office has been forced to suspend the purchase of a surveillance drone after constitutionalists and activists slammed the agency with concerns that the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle would violate privacy protections.
Sheriff Gregory Ahern had asked the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to approve a $31,646 grant to purchase a drone. The money was part of a $1.2-million grant handed out by the California Emergency Management Agency.
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The legality of drone strikes was a recurring theme among panelists speaking on national security and armed conflict at the 22nd Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law, held Friday at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C.
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…our country’s invidious use of drone warfare.
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They had met with anti-drone activists and relatives of the 760 civilians murdered by U.S. drones.
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Cablegate
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In failing to send its own reporter to cover the fascinating and important pretrial testimony of Bradley Manning, The New York Times missed the boat.
Over the past several days, as compelling testimony over the harsh treatment of this 24-year-old Army private turned whistle-blower (or illegal informant, depending on your point of view) flooded the media zone, The Times was notably absent.
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Julian Assange is wasting little time while shut inside Ecuador’s embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder has recently released a book called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. The book consists chiefly of the transcript of a conversation between Assange and three others. In a nod to openness, he has chosen not to offer the ebook version on Amazon. Instead, the book is being sold exclusively on reKiosk, a self-described uncensored portal.
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Julia Gillard was tipped off by the US government that the WikiLeaks cable dump would be embarrassing for her and the federal government, prompting the Prime Minister to make the claim the group had acted “illegally” in 2010.
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We welcome the call by Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and Archbishop Desmond Tutu for an immediate stop to the US persecution of private Bradley Manning who is accused of allegedly disclosing information to Wikileaks resulting in the exposure of atrocities by the US military in the name of the US people.
We likewise call on the Nobel Laureates in Sweden this week to take a stand for global justice and support a resolution for the freedom of Julian Assange.
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As the alleged source of many of the most vital WikiLeaks reports of the past several years, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning shed considerable light on how the United States has prosecuted the Iraq and Afghan wars. Other State Department cables reportedly leaked by Manning conveyed vital information about U.S. foreign policy.
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Last week, in a Grisham-like courtroom scene, Bradley Manning—the Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks—testified publicly for the first time since his arrest in May of 2010. For more than five hours, Manning described the two months he spent in a “cage” inside a dark tent in Kuwait and the nine months that followed in 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement on a Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. In one theatrical moment, Manning got up from the stand and paced inside a 6 by 8 tape outline on the courtroom floor to demonstrate the size of his prison cell. In another, he donned the suicide smock he had to wear.
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WikiLeaks number two and the official spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organization, Kristinn Hrafnsson spoke with the Voice of Russia regarding the recent ruling by the European Parliament regarding the extra-judicial economic blockade by US based financial institutions who are in violation of international and European law in their continued blockade of the organization. Mr Hraffnsson also spoke about Bradley Manning equating his detention to torture and when asked about WikiLeaks, promised more releases to come.
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Finance
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The real threat to the middle class is not there, it’s in the erosion of the programs I just mentioned. That is to say, it’s in the attack on the public schools, it’s in the squeeze on higher education, it’s in the threat to Social Security. When you look at housing, you have a very large unambiguous loss. Millions of people have been displaced, but many, many more have lost the capital value of their homes. They won’t be able to sell and retire on the proceeds.
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After the backlash from this year’s Budget, the Chancellor has been quick to stress once more that we are all in this together. This was a joke in 2010. It is a sick joke today. Some window dressing measures will not compensate for slicing 5% off the top-rate of income tax – paid by the richest 1% – back in March. That measure alone gave an extra £42,500 a year to anyone earning over £1m annually.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A new report by the International Forum on Globalization details the role of David and Charles Koch in undermining international talks to address the rapidly escalating problem of climate change. As the United Nations meets in Doha, Qatar this week, the goal is to create a framework in which the governments of the world make internationally binding commitments to cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep climate change within the agreed threshold of 2C.
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The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward obtained an audio recording of a conversation between David Petraeus, the general turned CIA Director who recently resigned in the midst of a sex scandal, and Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland. The conversation took place in spring 2011 in Kabul, during the time that Petraeus was the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. McFarland is a national security analyst for Fox News and has a long resume working for GOP administrations going back to Reagan.
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Privacy
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Obviously we never thought that we would be joining in with all of the media that has amassed after the announcement of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy. However the Duchess has found herself embroiled in a data protection scandal.
Extraordinarily, a prank call made by Australian 2Day FM radio presenters to King Edward VII Hospital enabled them to obtain intimate medical information about the health of Catherine. The presenters pretended to be the Queen, Prince Charles and, most bizarrely, corgis in order to attempt to get Catherine live on air. The transcript shows that, despite a very unconvincing performance by the presenters, a nurse gave private details of Catherine’s condition.
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Relief is on the way. Cellphone users are sending more text messages than ever, but increasingly they are free — thanks to the Internet. While that is good news for consumers, it could cost the world’s wireless companies tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue.
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European data stored in the “cloud” could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe’s strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.
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If you travel to China or Russia, assume government or industry spooks will steal your data and install spyware.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The BPI have this afternoon confirmed to us that they have asked ISPs to unblock PromoBay.org as the organization responsible for maintaining the list of sites blocked under the injunctions to block the ThePirateBay.se.
On Monday, ORG wrote to Virgin, BT, O2, TalkTalk and Sky to ask them why the PromoBay.org is being blocked. Virgin confirmed to ORG that the site was supplied to them as a domain to be blocked.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.04.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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…nearly 1.3 million Android devices were activated daily,
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If you operate solely in the world of proprietary software, it’s easy to think that Microsoft‘s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) emerged as the preeminent remote-access solution a long time ago. But in a sign that the battle for this niche is hardly over–and that cross-platform compatibility is key to winning it–Splashtop, an alternative to RDP, recently announced support for Ubuntu Linux in its desktop streaming platform, making it easier to access Ubuntu PCs from anywhere.
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Desktop
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Dell announced its Project Sputnik earlier this year to a warm if not ecstatic reception. The firm had preloaded Linux onto its consumer machines before but they were hard to find and on forgettable machines. However with the XPS 13 the firm is not only loading Linux on its most high profile laptop but showing that Microsoft’s operating system isn’t the only choice in town for OEMs and consumers alike.
From a Linux community perspective, Dell’s XPS 13 comes with Intel’s ultrabook branding, which might mean little to those who actually read and understand specifications but means a lot to the customer in the street who is bombarded with Intel’s ultrabook marketing message. Dell might be pitching its Ubuntu XPS 13 laptop as a developer’s machine rather than one for Facebook and Youtube users, but that isn’t a bad idea in the long run either.
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The Chromebooks have landed. They cannot be considered a toy or an experimental fad by Google, any longer. Now they are here to stay as the new and revolutionary intelligent terminals of the Cloud Centric Age. In the past, we used to installed all apps in our computers, and run them locally. For that we needed faster and faster PCs with more and more memory, both ram and hard disk.
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Kernel Space
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FlashFire is a buffer-based write reordering layer for SSDs on Linux, which can lead to greater disk performance for flash-based storage devices.
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Graphics Stack
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Shortly after improving the HyperZ support in R300g, Marek Olšák has now enabled HyperZ support by default for ATI R500 (Radeon X1000 series) GPUs.
The R300/R400 GPUs don’t yet have HyperZ support enabled by default until sufficient testing has been completed, but the HyperZ support can be toggled via the RADEON_HYPERZ environment variable. The newer Radeon GPUs with the R600g Gallium3D driver also don’t yet have usable HyperZ support enabled by default. HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that’s been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer.
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Unvanquished, one of the few open-source games that actually has good art assets, saw its tenth alpha release this weekend. The first person shooter derived from the ioquake3/XReaL engine has improvements to its OpenGL 3.x renderer, initial x32 architecture support, and other enhancements.
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AMD has released yet another beta Linux beta driver for the Catalyst 12.11 series.
While there isn’t any official change-log for Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 compared to the earlier 12.11 Linux betas, it’s now available for download from AMD.com.
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The Linux Kernel A-synchronous I/O support has been receiving some performance improvements and clean-ups that should soon be merged to mainline.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Splice, a unique and very interesting puzzle game created by Cipher Prime Studios, will be arriving on Linux in the near future.
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Guild Wars 2, the MMORPG, recently came out on the PC and everyone, including us, loved it. It’s also making its way over to Mac.
We recently had a chance to sit down and sit with the MMO’s game director, Colin Johanson. We asked him if we’ll be seeing a Linux port anytime soon, and he said that while the team has “talked about it”, they “won’t be working on it in the near future”.
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Desktop Environments
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Global warming has even forced worms to make adjustments.
A group of French earthworms have migrated to Ireland owing to the rise in global temperatures, according to a new study published in the RoyalSociety Journal Biology Letters.
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But it’s not just Microsoft. GNOME, once the leading Linux desktop, is rapidly fading into the background because of bad design choices in GNOME 3.x. What’s going on?
I think the problem is that far too many people have forgotten UI 101 — make it easy — despite the availability of the handy acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid).
Since back when Microsoft was still calling its brand-new interface Metro, I saw Windows 8 as a disaster in the making. My biggest complaint was with the cartoonish and annoying tiles. Made for touchscreens, they’re fairly usable when you’re holding a small device at, say, a 45-degree angle. But when the touchscreen is a monitor sitting on a desktop at something closer to 90 degrees? That results in a phenomenon called gorilla arm, a situation blamed for the failure of touchscreens on the desktop as long ago as the 1980s.
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After reading Andrew’s excellent Roundup on alternative desktops (p30), I’m not sure how I feel about the way desktops are going. I’m still surprised, for example, that both Gnome and KDE developers made such massive changes to their desktops, when for many years the old versions had worked brilliantly. KDE 4.9 is stable, but it still takes a lot of effort to make the environment your own.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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Sometimes, you notice that writing an OS is like playing chase: sometimes you open the latest MS system, and go “Uhm… Where did I see that before?”, and sometimes you proudly show the results of hours of work, and what you get is “Heh, everyone else did that ages ago!”
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Anybody who’s talked with me about running Linux on the desktop within the past year has almost certainly gotten an earful about Cinnamon. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the basic description: clean, beautiful, fast, and traditional desktop environment.
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As 2012 nears its cold, wet conclusion*, we’re asking you to look back over the past year and let us know which distro you think deserves the award “Best distro 2012″. If you’re nominating a distro that’s had more than one release, let us know which one.
Raspbian and Android Jelly Bean are a couple of less-conventional ones that have caught our eye. Security-focused distros such as Tails and Qubes are becoming increasingly important in a digitally-hostile world. Mint continues its relentless march towards world domination. Mageia has had a great year while Ubuntu has had it’s ups and downs. System Rescue CD protects you from Zombies (honest). Fedora and OpenSuse have continued to deliver. Zorin seems to be attracting interest, as does Rosa. Arch continues to be perfect (if you believe Graham). Gentoo earned a perfect 10 in an LXF review … the list goes on.
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New Releases
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It’s out! Slacko is one of our flagship puppies, built with the latest Woof from Slackware 14.0 binary packages. It is all-puppy right through, with the advantage of binary compatibility with Slackware 14.0 and access to the Slackware package repositories.
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Red Hat Family
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Electronic hardware buyers may soon get access to a variety of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) products already embedded.
The world’s top Linux software developer and services provider is looking to expand the reach of its Linux and JBoss products through a distribution agreement with global hardware distributor Avnet.
Financial terms of the agreement, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed.
Red Hat will work with Avnet Embedded, which is part of Avnet (Nyse: AVT).
The Raleigh-based firm hopes the Avnet deal will better connect it with original equipment manufacturers and independent software vendors who work with Avenet across the Americas.
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On December 4th, Red Hat announced the release of the next beta for its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 is now available. According to the company, the release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, and storage as well as productivity tools.
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Fedora
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In the beginning, the Installer was all. If you wanted to upgrade a Red Hat / Fedora system you downloaded the CD images, burned them all to CDs, and sat around swapping disks in and out until your system was upgraded. What fun!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If your ear has fallen within the radius of a supermarket or shopping mall’s sound system anytime since October then you’ll know that the festive feel-good season of Christmas is all but upon us.
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Flavours and Variants
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There may be a lot of users who would want to use the light-weight Cinnamon desktop instead of Unity on Ubuntu systems, without switching to Linux Mint. Developer Robert Bennett has spinned a Linux distro for such users.
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I have been playing around with the Raspberry Pi (Pi) for two months now. I started by installing Raspbian on a spare 4 GB memory card. I also had a wireless Wifi dongle and a wireless keyboard-mouse lying around. I plugged the WiFi dongle and the dongle for the wireless keyboard-mouse in the two USB ports of the Pi and when I plugged in my spare mobile charger into the Pi’s power input, the Pi booted. I felt lucky to see the display on the TV without any hassles. So far all in all, out of the box experience and all I had bought was the Pi. I already had the other stuff lying around. It was fun to see something on TV that I am used to seeing on a computer monitor.. The next thing I did was fire up the Python interpreter and tweeting the output of os.uname( ).
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Phones
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Most of us will be aware of the story behind Jolla by now. The company has been founded, and is mostly staffed by, former Nokia employees, from the Maemo and MeeGo teams. While the company is not a subsidiary in any form and doesn’t have any of the rights to any Nokia products, it’s easiest to think of Jolla as a continuation of the team behind open source Maemo products like the N900.
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Android
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If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on XBMC for Android but weren’t thrilled at the idea of compiling it yourself or suffering through a nightly, the team behind XBMC have taken the wraps off of an official beta release that you can try.
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It was not that long ago that a leading-edge tablet device was a fairly big deal. Family members would ask where the tablet was; the house clearly wouldn’t contain more than one of them. What followed, inevitably, was an argument over who got to use the household tablet. But tablets are quickly becoming both more powerful and less expensive — a pattern that a few of us have seen in this industry before. We are quickly heading toward a world where tablet devices litter the house like notepads, cheap pens, or the teenager’s dirty socks. Tablets are not really special anymore.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Not satisfied with the current crop of Android tablets and the restrictions Google often places on its mobile OS? Finally, the Linux army has its own portable, touch-screen option.
As of this morning, PengPod, a spin-off of a Florida-based importing company, officially closed its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for its line of open Linux and Android-based tablets and mini-PCs on a stick.
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This Thanksgiving break was a fun and relaxing one, but as usual, Mira (my 7-year old daughter) had her “I’m bored!” spells one day. After trying to get her to draw, color, paint, read, etc. I tried something new. We went outside and looked at interesting things. The Moon was pretty that evening. Then came the question:
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If you’re looking for a great Android tablet, there are plenty on the market to choose from—many more than there used to be, and they’re only getting better. That doesn’t mean all of them are worth your money, or worth buying for someone else who wants a new tablet. This week we asked you which Android tablets you thought were the best of the best, and here are the top five based on those nominations.
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We took the fourth-generation iPad, the Google Nexus 10 and the Microsoft Surface and put them through the paces to determine which tablet is the best for everyday tasks.
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Google turned heads this summer when it released its Nexus 7 tablet. Together with Asus, the company produced a solid Android tablet that offered an affordable price tag, nice design and smooth performance to rival the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. But can the company do it again with a 10-inch version to take on the reigning leader, the Apple iPad?
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Last month, Jos Poortvliet’s job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle.
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Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.
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Web Browsers
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After a long, quiet period of Microsoft dominance, the PC browser market has been broken wide-open again in recent years, with Firefox and Chrome challenging Internet Explorer, and Opera sniffing at the margins.
Earlier this year, in fact, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer in one major measurement of browser market share, in what was hailed as a watershed moment for the new browser wars.
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Chrome
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Quick, which major Internet browser does the best job of weeding out attempts from phishers to take control of your personal information? The answer is Google Chrome, according to a new report from NSS Labs. In addition to finding that Chrome stood out at foiling phishers, the report also found that the number of malicious, phishing-connected links online is growing very rapidly.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has presented a demonstration of what it hopes to achieve with future social features in Firefox that make use of the new WebRTC capabilities in the browser. The Social API and its sidebar interface were integrated into Firefox 17 and the latest beta version of the browser adds WebRTC functionality which gives the browser the ability to transmit voice, video and data. Mozilla’s demonstration shows how the Social API, working with WebRTC, allows for richer video-, audio- and image-based social networking and collaboration.
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Top officials from both Google and Mozilla are loudly objecting to proposed changes to international telecommunication rules, slated to be discussed this week in Dubai as part of an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference. In a piece published on CNN.com, Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet freedom guru and considered by some to be a “father of the Internet,” writes: “Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn’t even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba…Some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas.”
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SaaS
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Cade Metz has an interesting historical look back at how Amazon evolved from online bookseller to dominant player in the cloud. Meanwhile, many analysts note that Amazon’s lead in the cloud is as substantial as Microsoft’s lead in PC software was in the 1990s. The AWS re:Invent conference drove home the fact that while we’re hearing a lot about OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, open source cloud platforms don’t have the adoption yet that Amazon has.
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Databases
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A recently published security vulnerability in the MySQL open source database has been met with fixes by the developers of the open source MariaDB fork. The updates take care of the CVE 2012-5579 buffer overflow problem, which an attacker could use to crash the database server or execute arbitrary shell code with the same privileges as the database process. The MariaDB developers say that another vulnerability (CVE 2012-5611), despite being reported separately, is just a duplicate of CVE 2012-5579.
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MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.
Specifically, “the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities.”
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CMS
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The Obama administration has recently announced that it is developing a legal framework for drone warfare. It is now technically possible for a “pilot” sitting behind a computer terminal in Nevada or Virginia, with a few keystrokes, to eliminate virtually any person on the planet. But simply because it is technically possible does not make it a good idea, or a legal one. What legal principles should govern the use of drones to kill people?
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t…arget rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.
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Funding
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Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm’s ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.
The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over £18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as “Investor Growth Capital” as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.
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BSD
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The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.2 is the second feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Users running NetBSD 5.0.3 or earlier are encouraged to upgrade to either NetBSD 5.2 or NetBSD 6.0, depending upon their specific requirements.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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One month after Git 1.8.0 was released, Git 1.8.1 is now being prepared with several new features as well as fixes.
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Public Services/Government
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The City is also releasing the app’s underlying source code as part of an open source project in order to encourage others to build on it. The new app is the latest way L&I is striving to be a more transparent, accountable, and customer friendly agency.
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Licensing
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Meanwhile, the folks at Renesys look into just how difficult it is to cut a country off from the internet, and whether other countries are at risk of the same sort of thing. Basically, it comes down to how decentralized the internet is in various countries — and in many countries there isn’t much decentralization. As Renesys notes, some countries have just one or two telcos who handle all internet traffic to and from the world. Those countries are easy to cut off. Renesys helpfully provides a map:
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.
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Open Hardware
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My evangelism brings about positive change, but as much of it is done despite the community as is done with their cooperation. It’s emotionally difficult, it leaves me in a bad mood, and it uses up what would otherwise be paid time. Why am I doing this to myself? I care deeply about Open Source. But I am increasingly unconvinced that my involvement in it is good for me.
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In its continuing mission to build a “Wiki Weapon,” Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 assault rifle and tested it to failure — on video (embedded below). The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun.
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Programming
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If you’re starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you’ll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you’re not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here’s an overview of some of the more popular options.
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Science
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Health/Nutrition
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US judge says tobacco firms must spend their own money on a public campaign admitting deception about the risks of smoking
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Monsanto’s marketing efforts pull imagery of an idyllic world of cooperation, support…downright hippy-esque harmony between the largest seed and pesticide company in the world and millions of struggling farmers. But the controversial manufacturer known for the toxic glyphosate-based Roundup and widespread genetically modified and hybrid seeds, paints a much different picture than what’s really going on in the fields.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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He rejects this, and both activist groups and the Tibetan government-in-exile say the self-immolations are protests against tight Chinese control of the region and religious repression.
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State officials confirm Israel started to ease restrictions on civilians; sailing limit for fishermen extended. Farmers allowed to visit land near security fence. Hamas’ Marzook says group won’t stop smuggling weaons into Strip
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Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern promised Tuesday to prohibit the use of a remote-controlled aerial drone…
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“The real reason for most of these strikes has been to protect a regime in Pakistan or Yemen,” Zenko said.
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“Legal, ethical, and wise” is how the Obama administration chooses to describe drone warfare…
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Sindh High Court Bar Association (SHCBA) here Monday condemned US drone attacks in Pakistani territories…
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A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs on Tuesday, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to state media, as the civil war closed in on President Bashar Assad’s seat of power.
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An open letter to the president to end his lethal — and ever-expanding — drone wars
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Rarely does the release of a data-driven report on energy trends trigger front-page headlines around the world. That, however, is exactly what happened on November 12th when the prestigious Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) released this year’s edition of its World Energy Outlook. In the process, just about everyone missed its real news, which should have set off alarm bells across the planet.
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The United Nations sounded a stark warning on the threat to the climate from methane in the thawing permafrost as governments met for the second day of climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
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Satellite measurements show flooding from storms like Sandy will put low-lying population centres at risk sooner than projected
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The recent UK flooding caused terrible damage and waste, yet many insurers insist that things must be put back as they were
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Finance
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An effort by three U.S. senators to add an Internet sales tax amendment to a military spending bill has failed, at least for now.
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Corporations are doing well. Workers, not so much. That could be the opening of just about any discussion of the American economy at least over the past couple years since corporations recovered from the great recession while workers didn’t. But that’s because there are always new specifics coming out to illustrate the point. Like this: after-tax corporate profits were a record share of the gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012. Wages were the smallest share of GDP they’ve ever been.
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In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst of a major natural disaster. But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1 Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity.
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The “fiscal cliff” plan Republicans offered today could hit the middle class to preserve tax breaks for the rich
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Coffee chain sparks fresh concern over business practices amid fears low-paid staff will bear cost of potentially increased tax bill
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Trustees for creditors left unpaid after the biggest banking failure in U.S. history say they suspect Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) of targeting Washington Mutual Inc., in a naked short-selling scheme.
If those suspicions prove out, the alleged wrongs could translate into a damage award for those still looking for money from Washington Mutual’s Chapter 11 case, according to papers filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In 2012, the total spending of outside groups — the Super PACs and dark money nonprofits which spend money to influence elections, but do so separately from campaigns — amounted to about $1.3 billion.
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The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore, vindictive winner. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like creating the promised 250,000 jobs and improving Wisconsin’s economy? Apparently not.
Yesterday, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), who will again become the State Senate Majority Leader in January, inexplicably launched a vicious attack on the under-funded and under-staffed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.). Why? Because he disagreed with some of their rulings and said the non-partisan board, composed of six retired judges (two of whom were at one time Republican legislators and two others who were appointed to the board by Republican Governor Scott Walker), delegated too much authority to the professional staff whom he said issued opinions in favor of Democrats.
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Privacy
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The small box inside Amanda Hubbard’s chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.
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The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.
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Civil Rights/Sppoks
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Former member of the US Congress, Cynthia McKinney on Tuesday criticised CIA and FBI as well as other law enforcement agencies of the US for violating its constitution, national and international laws and human rights throughout the American history.
McKinney was speaking at a seminar titled, ‘US Justice System: Dynamics and Practices’, chaired by former secretary foreign affairs M. Akram Zaki and was also addressed by Sara Flounders, co-Director, International Action Centre and former senator Barrister Saadia Abbasi.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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he International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.
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Copyrights
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Several BitTorrent sites including Torrentz and Fenopy have had their .EU domains put on hold by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. The new status for the domains, forcibly applied by EURid within seconds of each other yesterday afternoon, suggests that legal action against them might be pending and prevents the owners from making changes.
[...]
Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.
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Many, many posts and discussions have taken place here at Techdirt about content providers and their love of windowed releases. A point frequently made is that there would likely be a lot less piracy and a lot more purchasing if these 30/60/90 day rental/PPV/premium cable windows were eliminated on new releases. Another frequent target are premium cable providers and their original offerings, which suffer from long delays between original airings and their appearance on retail shelves.
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Porn trolling has never been a glamorous business. But as judges, bar associations, and others have gotten wind of just how sleazy the porn-trolling business model is, trolling law firms have faced more and more obstacles. One trolling firm hit a new low on Tuesday, when an exasperated federal judge in Tampa, FL, threw out its copyright infringement case.
In a surreal court session, Judge Mary Scriven grilled several individuals with ties to Prenda Law, a law firm that specializes in copyright trolling, and its alleged client, a porn company called Sunlust Pictures. (We say “alleged” because Prenda now claims, unconvincingly, that it was never involved in the case.) It quickly became obvious that no one in the courtroom had any significant ties to the supposed plaintiffs, or even knowledge of who they were. So Judge Scriven dismissed the case for, among other things, “attempted fraud on the Court” for sending a “representative” to court who knew next to nothing about the company he was representing.
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lately about piracy and how to combat it, including some pretty radical measures. But I believe most people glance over some of the positive effects that piracy has. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging it and I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. Piracy is only a symptom of something more: whether it’s bad business models, restrictive markets, or economic problems. And I think my own story proves this point.
I was born in Romania, a country that had just gone through a revolution and was re-becoming a democracy. We, as a society, were just remembering what democracy was and how a free market works. We were just seeing what major technological breakthroughs had happened in the last 30 years in the west while our own country and populace had remained uninformed and technologically inept.
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Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.
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I’ve been tossing around a longish blog post about some of the controversy concerning the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) over the past month or so, but haven’t had a chance to put it all down in a blog post. I did, however, wish to pick up on a small thread that got a brief spark of attention from some people who don’t seem to understand legal stuff in the slightest. It started with musician David Lowery (you may remember him from past nonsensical rampages) claiming that Section 5 of the bill muzzled free speech and thus violated the First Amendment. This isn’t just wrong. It’s completely backwards. But the language and history here is a bit complex, so let’s dig in a bit.
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Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it’s run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and… doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute “an exclusive bundle” of extra, related, content. That’s still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.
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The latest News Corp press release says that the Daily, its standalone daily iPad newspaper, will “cease standalone publication”.
The newspaper had a high profile launch in February 2011, but had apparently struggled to pay its way — recent reports suggested the losses were looking like $30 million a year, and rumors that Rupert Murdoch would kill the publication have been around since at least early summer.
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Jay-Z has since referred to it as “genius” and expressed how honored he was to see it happen. EMI, which controlled the Beatles’ rights, felt differently, sending cease-and-desist letters to tons of sites that had the mp3s. In response, folks on the internet planned Grey Tuesday for February 24th, 2004 — a day of digital civil disobedience, where lots of sites would distribute the mashup album. EMI, still not understanding what it was dealing with, sent off more cease-and-desist letters to any site that had indicated that it would participate. End result? Even more interest in the whole thing.
Of course, since then, Danger Mouse has gone on to be an in-demand guy in the recording industry (among other things, he’s one-half of Gnarls Barkley, who of course had a massive hit with the song “Crazy” a few years ago). EMI later admitted that The Grey Album didn’t “harm” them at all, but still defended the decision arguing, pointlessly, “it’s not a question of damage, it’s a question of rights.”
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Ah, this is what you get when you build up ideas around the idea that every bit of content must be “owned.” You may have heard the somewhat heartwarming story last week of NYPD Officer Lawrence DePrimo, seeing a homeless man in NYC without any shoes on, buying the man some boots and giving them to him. Without either man being aware of it, a tourist from Arizona, Jennifer Foster, saw this happening and took a photo of the situation.
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In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?
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Send this to a friend
12.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Competition in automotive technology has long been about who’s got the most horsepower, the best towing capacity or the fastest acceleration. These days, though, it’s all about having the slickest infotainment systems and most-connected cars.
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Desktop
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Kernel Space
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From the ‘Thank You Microsoft for *allowing* Linux on Windows 8 hardware?!’ files:
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This week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile is with John Stultz. Based in in Portlandia, John works for IBM and is on assignment with Linaro. His love affair with Linux began in 1997, and he’s never looked back.
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Graphics Stack
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Marek Olšák has fixed up the HyperZ support within the R300 Gallium3D driver so that it’s working properly for more applications. R300 HyperZ is finally in a state where he may be looking to enable the feature by default.
HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that’s been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer. Benchmarks of HyperZ show that it can certainly improve the OpenGL frame-rate for gaming, but within the open-source Radeon Linux drivers the HyperZ support has been buggy for new and old hardware.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Everyone by now should know about Humble Bundle, they used to be a provider of great DRM FREE and cross platform (Linux, Mac and Windows) indie games including games like Osmos, Aquaria,
Psychonauts, World of Goo etc.
A lot of people including myself used them as shining examples of how things should be done – cross platform, drm free, buy once get all platforms and even support charity! Now is not the case.
They launched a THQ Bundle which has AAA games (that’s not the issue) the issue is that the games are DRM-bound, tied to one service (Steam), not cross platform and from a developer who even supported some rather shady internet bills.
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Steam Greenlight is the entry point for new games to be released on Steam. Steam Greenlight is a system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers can post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution.
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Most Ubuntu users would have heard about Family Farm, its one of the most popular games and possibly one one of the first commercial game to be available on Ubuntu Software Center. The company behind Family Farm, Indie Studio Hammerware, have released its sequel, Goodfolks which is also available on Linux platform.
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The ET: Legacy project is an open-source initiative that seeks to create a fully-compatible client and server for the award-winning Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.
It was in August of 2010 that id Software open-sourced Enemy Territory along with Return To Castle Wolfenstein. In writing yesterday about XReaL and OpenWolf game engines that do have compatibility with Enemy Territory, there were interesting comments within the forums.
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Desktop Environments
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Climate advocates celebrated after winning nearly every Congressional race they targeted during the national elections, including four of the “Flat Earth Five” climate deniers in the House of Representatives. But with the balance of power essentially the same in Washington, many rightly worried that little would change moving into the 113th Congress.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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Giovanni Campagna today released the first version of GNOME Weather (v0.1), a small application similar to Clocks written in Python3. Its current state is very basic, and you can only select a region from a drop-down auto-complete list, and Weather will display the weather of the next 5 days, from yr.no (Norwegian Meteorological Institute).
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“GNOME is a big boy and was the preferred DE for many experienced users, as well as classical GNU/Linux distributions’ default DE,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. “So, there must be a compromise between the developers’ avant-garde ideas and what power users need and want to use.
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New Releases
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RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it is expanding the reach of its embedded software program through a new partnership with Avnet Embedded, a business group of Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc., (NYSE: AVT). Avnet Embedded will offer flexible, integrated systems based on Red Hat Embedded Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions to its large base of OEM and independent software vendor (ISV) partners throughout the Americas.
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Fedora
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Google Chromebooks are one of the hottest devices in the market. These devices allow you to boot into a cloud oriented environment where you can seamlessly manage all your music, documents and files on the cloud, on the go. The advantages are many. The device boots up fast and works great as long as you have Internet connectivity. You don’t need to fear about hard drive crashes or data loss as it is stored on the cloud and accessible via your Google account from any device.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The name of Dell’s Project Sputnik may not exactly conjure images of cutting-edge computer technology. But the laptop that the endeavor has launched is certainly no piece of outdated space junk. Targeted at developers and based on Ubuntu Linux, the machine potentially represents a new kind of direction for Dell (NASDAQ: DELL). Will the company, long derided by some open source fans, now fully enter the good graces of the Linux community?
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A developer by the name of AndrewDB is currently in the processing of modding Ubuntu Linux so that it runs on inexpensive PCs-on-a-stick powered by Rockchip RK3066 processors.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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You take your smartphone everywhere, so it knows a lot about you: where you are, who you’re with, what you’re listening to, even whether you’re standing or sitting. To make the most of this, Media Lab alumni Nadav Aharony, Cody Sumter and Alan Gardner have developed Funf, an open-source Android platform that simplifies data collection and lets developers create apps that tap into this huge cache.
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The cheapest Android tablet I’ve ever seen costs $20, with a $2 per month unlimited data plan, and I’m holding it right now. It might not just change the tablet market. It might change the world.
The Ubislate 7ci, also known as the Aakash2, is the latest gadget from Datawind, a Canadian company that’s spent seven years trying to find the ideal market for some really neat data-optimization technology. On devices like the PocketSurfer and PocketSurfer 2, Datawind showed that it can display desktop Web pages quickly with low-cost devices on super-low-bandwidth networks like 2G GPRS. But it never gained major market traction in the Western world, especially as 3G and 4G networks have spread.
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Nokia has been clear in its plans to develop solutions for its HERE Maps service, which has already launched on the App Store (to muted reviews).
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According to older rumors the Galaxy S IV would have a full HD AMOLED display, a quad-core cpu,the latest version of android, a 13 megapixel camera and the screen size would be 5.0”
Our insider could not confirm the specifications at this moment! He only knows the new project name called: Project J for the next Galaxy.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Android/Linux lovers are whooping it up now that a startup called PengPod reached its crowdfunding goal.
PengPod promised to ship affordable 7- and 10-inch tablets if it could raise $49,000 by today.
With a few hours left, PengPod has raised almost $60,000.
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Mumbai-based Wishtel today said it will launch computing devices, tablet PC and net books, starting at $50 later this month.
The company has developed a Linux-based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablet and net book PCs, it said in a statement.
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So I was on the Kernel Panic Ogg cast last night (the episode should be for download later this weekend). While we where discussing a number of things related to Bodhi our ARM port and tablet interface came up. ARM hardware is a very different beast from your normal x86/64bit devices. Meaning even if you have functional kernel drivers for a given device – you still often need a seperate file system images for each device you wish to be easily installable on.
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WishTel announced the launch of the world’s cheapest Linux-based tablet PC, “PrithV”. Designed and manufactured in India, and priced at US$50, the tablet is designed to serve all the global education needs.
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A $100 tablet that can run both Android and Linux is on the verge of becoming a reality. We wrote about the “PengPod” last month when its creators were seeking $49,000 on a Kickstarter-like site called Indiegogo. The project’s deadline expired last night, with the PengPod getting a healthy $72,707 from more than 500 contributors.
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Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as “SOA,” but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source’s demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being “faux-open source” with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code).
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Web Browsers
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Databases
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SkySQL and Monty Program release the MariaDB Client Library for C and MariaDB Client Library for Java Applications
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Oracle had better watch its back. There’s a new(ish) database player on the market that wants to eat its lunch; dinner, breakfast and dessert too, for that matter.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn’t be more different. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this, it’s “go the whole hog or not at all”.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open source Business Intelligence and data integration company Pentaho has pushed some additional product releases to SourceForge web-based source code repository this week.
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Programming
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A software research project being funded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with its Cyber Fast Track program is looking at ways for providing a flexible and integrated security infrastructure by using LLVM for dynamic and static security tasks.
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Please stop saying “This is the thin end of the wedge. Once legislation is introduced, it will grow.” You are possibly the best informed and, if not the most powerful, certainly the most vocal lobby in this country. It’s not like additional legislation will slip past you.
Please stop saying “There is already adequate protection in the law.” You know full well this protection is only available to those with money, time, knowhow and connections. I was having a beer with a buddy last night, who used to work in the tabloid press. He tells me that the single deciding factor in running or not running a less than well founded story is usually the subject’s financial ability to sue.
Please stop saying “We are special. We perform a vital public service. We should be protected.” The same applies to doctors, pharma companies, lawyers, police, farmers, the fire service, pilots. They are all, quite rightly, regulated. A badly put together article might leave me dissatisfied. A badly put together gas boiler can leave me dead. The imposition of professional standards in a fact of modern life.
Please stop saying “We have already changed. It will be different this time.” You sound like a recalcitrant abusive alcoholic begging his wife in hospital not to press charges.
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The Hollywood Reporter has the somewhat amusing cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t use various social media tools to make promises you can’t back up. Hip hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie apparently lost his laptop recently while on tour in Germany. He then went on YouTube and posted a video offering $20,000 if anyone returned the laptop. He noted that the laptop contained music and videos that he wanted back. Another video was posted later with a message that reads: “In the interest of retrieving invaluable intellectual property contained on his laptop and hard drive, Mr. Leslie has increased the reward offer from $20,000 USD to $1,000,000 USD. He also tweeted the same info directly, saying: “I raised the reward for my intellectual property to $1mm.”
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Science
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All free schools will be forced to present evolution as a comprehensive and central tenet of scientific theory, ministers have announced, following lobbying by senior scientists concerned that Christian-run institutions could exploit loopholes in the rules to present creationism as a credible theory.
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Health/Nutrition
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Today, the Government Accountability Project’s (GAP) Food Integrity Campaign (FIC) is praising President Obama for signing into law the strongest federal whistleblower protections in history. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) passed the House of Representatives in late September and the Senate earlier this month. This long overdue legislation overturns many loopholes and provides critically important upgrades to weak, current protections.
This law’s enactment plays a significant role in food safety oversight, as it better protects those workers charged with enforcing food safety laws – including U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarians and inspectors, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees. Over the past several years, FIC has heard from countless federal whistleblowers who desperately want to expose food industry wrongdoing or threats to public health, but chose to stay silent for fear that existing whistleblower protections will not effectively shield them from retaliation.
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We all should be aware of the dangers posed by the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The eight countries known to possess nuclear weapons have 10,000 plus nuclear warheads. And, especially post-Fukushima, we now understand firsthand the potential danger of nuclear power plants, many which are aging and highly vulnerable to natural disasters. As of August 2012, 30 countries are operating 435 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. Sixty-six new nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries.
But how many of us know about the current manufacturing and active use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons? DU (Uranium 238) is a radioactive waste by-product of the uranium enrichment process. It results from making fuel for nuclear reactors and the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.
In a frightening adaptation of the “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy in manufacturing, which seeks to use waste in the manufacturing process to create other “useful” products, militaries around the world have come up with the “brilliant” idea of taking DU and making “conventional” weapons with it.
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During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.
These activists weren’t just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said: “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.”
Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.
Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business in “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037310_Barack_Obama_Monsanto_lobbyist.html#ixzz2Dv0TB5GX
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I am at a loss to explain how, even in the 60′s or 70′s, an unsupervised kid was able to walk into anyplace where one could see Cherenkov radiation with their own eyes, at such a short distance. I understand that water is a good radiation shield, and don’t believe that I received any significant radiation exposure. This experience left me, for my lifetime, more sanguine than the average person regarding radiation hazards.
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Security
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In August, the Australian Parliament passed a new cybercrime bill that increased the powers of law enforcement to require Internet service providers to monitor and store their users’ data.
The country’s privacy advocates were up in arms. One of them was Asher Wolf (a pseudonym), a 32-year-old who had built up a following on Twitter for tweeting news about WikiLeaks and the Occupy movement and who cared deeply about online privacy. A friend of hers, @m1k3y, tweeted that in light of the new legislation, maybe now was the time to have an “install-the-crypto-apps party,” referring to the programs for computers that help protect a user’s privacy. Wolf half-jokingly agreed: “Let’s get together in the backyard with some chips,” she said, “let’s have a CryptoParty.”
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Israel’s reported to be planning to use long-range Heron drones to launch pre-emptive strikes on ballistic missiles in Iran from Azerbaijan.
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However, Israel being the recipient of more than $3 billion in U.S. aid annually, much of it in arms, has given rise to an asymmetric warfare that has gone largely unregulated and unchallenged; a governing principle in which both the U.S. and Israel carry out indiscriminate drone attacks against vaguely identified “militants” or “combatants.”
Unmanned aerial vehicles, referred to as drones, have become the predominant means for carrying out targeted attacks, which U.S. military experts gladly tout as “surgically precise” and effective for “minimizing” collateral damage and civilian casualties.
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Progressive filmmaker Robert Greenwald details his experiences interviewing the Pakistani victims of U.S. attacks
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We all knew it was coming, but the ACLU has the docs to prove it’s about to start happening here: The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is trying to buy a drone aircraft in part to spy on people.
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President Obama has an opportunity to name a director of the Central Intelligence Agency who will re-establish the C.I.A.’s commitment to objective and balanced intelligence and rebuild the Office of the Inspector General, which has been severely weakened by the Bush and Obama administrations.
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Please, Mr. President, no macho men, politicians, policy wonks, admirals or generals. The new C.I.A. director should be a seasoned, professional intelligence officer capable of taking the agency in a different direction – back to basics.
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Britain has MI6 super-spy James Bond, who recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first cinematic adventure; the US has the Central Intelligence Agency. Since its inception in 1947 the agency has been the backdrop for dozens of films and television series and, regardless of geopolitical trends, the movies and shows keep coming.
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Frustrated commercial drone companies say the Obama administration is falling further and further behind in meeting congressional demands to clear the path for full integration into American airspace by 2015. Billions of dollars of investments as well as commercial applications for drones could be caught up in the delay, they warn.
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“We could have made sure he turned himself in. If [he] was guilty of any crime, then arrest him, put him on trial.”
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It’s thought the missile could penetrate the bunkers and caves believed to be hiding Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.
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Staff consisted of CIA paramilitaries who were working in cooperation with the local militia. The ambassador would not be privy to operational details and would only know in general what the agency was up to. When the ambassador’s party was attacked, the paramilitaries at the CIA base came to the rescue before being driven back into their own compound, where two officers were subsequently killed in a mortar attack.
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A war veteran who claims he was falsely arrested, beaten, and almost died due to neglect in an Oakland prison has launched legal action against the jail, claiming his pleas for help were ignored.
Kayvan Sabeghi, 33, was arrested during an Occupy rally in Oakland, California, in November last year. Video footage shows him being beaten with batons and he suffered a lacerated spleen which his attorney Dan Siegel says almost killed him after he was left without treatment for 18 hours in prison.
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Instead, it has often targeted enemies of allied governments in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan.
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Syria sole country to employ deadly mines in 2012; US among few countries still maintaining right to produce them
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The latest in a series of leaks purporting to show Iran’s efforts to design a nuclear warhead emerged this week in the form of an Associated Press exclusive about a diagram of the blast dynamics of a bomb said to be three times the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
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Why was he killed when he could have been easily captured? wonder family, neighbors of suspected al-Qaida operative
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Eight important al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a record number of 122 drone strikes which were carried out by the CIA in Pakistan in 2008.
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Israel plans to use unmanned drones it deployed in Azerbaijan to preemptively strike Iranian missile sites in the event of a war, the London-based Sunday Times reported.
The report comes amid mounting speculations that Israel may launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities next year, in which case the latter would retaliate by firing Shahab-3 and other long-range missiles at the Jewish state, while Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Gaza militants would follow suit.
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The FAA is set to select six unmanned system test sites.
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The wave of fiery protests inside Tibet continues unabated with reports of another self-immolation protest today in Bora region of Sangchu region in eastern Tibet.
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Cablegate
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OVER the past 2½ years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed late last week, when the 23-year-old US army private, who is accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, testified at his court martial about the conditions of his detention.
The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures he endured, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced them as ”cruel and inhuman”. President Barack Obama’s State Department spokesman, retired air force colonel P.J. Crowley, resigned after condemning Manning’s treatment. A prison psychologist testified last week that Manning’s conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantanamo Bay.
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The government psychiatrist charged with evaluating Pfc. Bradley Manning during his early detention at the military brig at Quantico told the judge at a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday that his recommendations for the Manning’s treatment were repeatedly ignored by the Marine guard unit responsible for him.
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Thursday, November 29th, Bradley Manning testified for the first time since his arrest two and a half years ago in Baghdad. Today also marks the two-year anniversary of the first front pages around the world from Cablegate, an archive of 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables — messages sent between the State Department and its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions around the world. In collaboration with a network of more than 100 press outlets we revealed the full spectrum of techniques used by the United States to exert itself around the world. The young intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was detained as an alleged source.
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FORT MEADE, United States / Maryland: Two of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning’s former prison guards have denied abusing him in custody, and described an incident in which the US Army private suddenly burst into tears.
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For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
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Obama said that Manning’s treatment was “appropriate and meeting our basic standards.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This morning, a group of students and alumni delivered over 1,000 signatures to University of Wisconsin Foundation President Mike Knetter demanding that the university divest its holdings from the fossil fuel industry. The activists point to science that shows the industry is slowly cooking the planet and divestment, or “hitting them where is hurts,” as a moral imperative.
As the students gathered on a December day which will top 60 degrees, Elisa Collins Zinda carried her one year-old daughter strapped to her back and talked about why she was there. “I hope my daughter will be able to build a snowman some day,” she said.
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In an attempt to deal with the 206 million gallons of light crude oil erupting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, BP unleashed about 2.6 million gallons of Corexit dispersants (Corexit 9500A and Corexit EC9527) in surface waters and at the wellhead on the sea floor. From the beginning the wisdom of that decision was questioned. I wrote extensively about those concerns in “BP’s Deep Secrets.”
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Finance
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Twelve students barricaded themselves inside an eighth-floor room at the top of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at noon on Monday to urge the school not to begin charging tuition to undergraduates.
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Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.
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On paper, Glenn Hadden seemed to be the ideal person to run a large bond trading operation at Morgan Stanley when he was hired in early 2011. Mr. Hadden, a former Goldman partner, was one of the most profitable bond traders on Wall Street.
But there was more to his story than just stellar financial results. He had left his previous employer, Goldman Sachs, after questions about his trading activity. And now, Mr. Hadden is under investigation over his trading in Treasury futures while at Goldman, according to a regulatory filing.
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Today the chancellor confirmed that there will be no real change at the Bank of England. There will be no change to the Treasury and Bank of England’s obsession with inflation targeting and “price stability”. Above all, he confirmed that there will be no reining-in of the banks; that banks will not be re-structured – to separate the retail and investment arms, and ensure that banks are no longer too big to fail.
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Matt Yglesias passes along this remarkable chart from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Parker showing that 88 percent of all the profit growth in the S&P 500 this year has been concentrated in ten firms in a grand total of two industries: technology and finance. In particular, seven of the ten firms are financial companies. Keep this firmly in mind the next time some Wall Street titan complains yet again that Obama hates banks and is out to destroy them. This is not a sign that Obama has done anything serious to hurt the financial industry; it’s a sign that America’s bankers are comically thin-skinned whiners.
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Israel will not transfer tax and tariff funds its collects for the Palestinians this month in response to their successful bid for upgraded UN status, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Sunday.
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Incredulous that Wall Street investment bankers and billionaire CEOs have descended on Washington in the midst of ongoing budget talks to tell Americans that they should “lower their expectations” when it comes to the security of their retirement and future health care, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday to call out the audacity of corporate-minded millionaires and billionaires, calling them the new “face of class warfare” in the United States.
“I find it literally beyond comprehension, that we have folks from Wall Street who received huge bailouts from the people of our country—from working families in this country—because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior, which Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits.”
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It seems outrageous that powerful, ruthless “vulture funds” can threaten action which may result in “an end to Argentina’s recovery” and a fresh round of turmoil in the global financial market (Comment, 26 November). Another aspect is the legitimacy of debt incurred by regimes that are not democratically elected. If an individual borrows vast sums of money and spends it on the high life and doesn’t repay it in their lifetime, it is right that creditors can use the law to go after all the funds and assets of the estate. It would not be right if they could use the law to go after the children and grandchildren of the debtor, forcing them to live in penury to pay back money they did not borrow nor benefit from. It seems the same logic applies when vast sums are borrowed by a corrupt dictator and the citizens of the country are forced to pay back the debt.
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It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.
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In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.
Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.
The reason that we suddenly got large deficits was the economic downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance. We also had temporary measures that included tax cuts such as the payroll tax holiday and various spending programs that further raised the deficit.
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A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies
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A campaign to radically reform and open up the secretive workings of the powerful local authority governing the City of London has been launched by a diverse group whose supporters include activists from the Occupy movement, clerics and the Tory MP David Davis.
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As low-wage service jobs become the new normal for millions of families, we should rethink the balance of power between fast-food workers and their corporations
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The EPA surprised quite a few people on Wednesday when it announced sanctions on BP related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP won’t be allowed to get any new government contracts until it cleans up its act, the agency said.
This was announced in a short press release that wasn’t really very specific about what that penalty means in practice. It could bar the company from new contracts for as long as 18 months—and potentially longer, if there are ongoing legal proceedings against the company. And it’s not just BP’s Gulf of Mexico affiliate—this suspension applies to all of BP’s affiliates, barring the company from billions of dollars in potential future contracts.
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MI6 passed up an opportunity to kill a senior leader of al-Qaeda because lawyers advised them they would be breaking the law, it can be disclosed.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Insulting God will no longer be a crime in the Netherlands after the Dutch parliament decided to revoke a decades-old blasphemy law from the statute books.
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Privacy
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AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.
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Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.
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…nations now posses “turnkey totalitarianism”.
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In the wake of former CIA Director David Petraeus’ sex scandal—uncovered largely through the disclosure of explicit e-mails between him and his mistress—the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a new amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on Wednesday.
The bill as it stands now (PDF) would require a warrant by law enforcement agencies before they can go digging through e-mail, social networking posts, and other data stored on cloud-based services. If it passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the president, it would mark an important shift in privacy protection for electronic communications. As we’ve reported for some time now, those protections (or lack thereof) are woefully out of date.
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Changing the behaviour of citizens to reduce the demand placed on public services is now a top priority for both central and local government. From voting or volunteering more, to simply accessing council services online, new habits must be developed to meet the financial challenges the government faces.
With direct human-to-human contact being replaced with human-to-screen interaction, local government websites have a central role to play in delivering that change in behaviour. But behaviour change is fundamentally a soft skilll; you do it with emotions, not excel spreadsheets. So how do you put the human back into that virtual relationship?
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When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.
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Civil Rights
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A Colombian journalist, Guillermo Quiroz Delgado, died in a hospital after suffering head injuries while in police custody.
Police claim that he sustained the injuries after falling from a police vehicle. But his family and colleagues believe he was beaten and thrown from the truck.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not happy that the government might have to actually convict a suspected terrorist of a crime before locking them up forever and throwing away the key. So he’s working on an amendment to the pending defense bill that would make it clear that if the government thinks you’re a terrorist, it can put you in prison without ever having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you so much as vandalized a dive bar bathroom wall.
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I don’t want to check that “Caucasian” box. To me, it says “hey, I’m white, go get the other guys”.
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Human rights tribunal hears allegations of abuse and low pay against clothing companies that supply high street stores
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Islamic clerics on Afghanistan’s Ulema Council are the country’s religious authorities, but their opinions on questions of Islamic law are treated as guideposts rather than legally binding decrees.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.
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This article arises from Future Tense, a joint effort of Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate that looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and for society. On Thursday, Nov. 29, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of Internet governance. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation’s website. The event will also be streamed live.
The Internet is often seen as a place of chaos and disorder, a borderless world in which anonymous trolls roam free and vigilante hackers wreak havoc. But as a crucial United Nations conference on the future of telecommunications looms next week, there are fears governments are secretly maneuvering to restructure and rein in the anarchic Web we have come to know and love, perhaps even ushering in a new era of pervasive surveillance. So just how real is the threat of change and what might it mean?
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The United States faces “the cyber equivalent of the World Trade Center attack” unless urgent action is taken, a former U.S. intelligence chief warns.
John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of the National Security Agency under President Clinton and then as director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush and President Obama, told the Financial Times (subscription required) that such an attack would cripple the nation’s banking system, power grid, and other essential infrastructure.
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We await with interest the report from the joint committee on the draft Communications Data Bill, and trust the committee has properly considered the substantial evidence submitted. The debate is hotting up, with Theresa May pitching hard in the Sun.
We are very interested to see if the Committee took a look at the submission by Caspar Bowden on page 102 of the written evidence highlighting the testimony given by Peter Davies (Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre), in support of the draft Bill. Mr Davies gave an example of a murder case in Lincolnshire in which increased data retention could have helped.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Auckland has seldom hosted a more globally important meeting than the nine days of negotiations that start today on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
The TPP offers the most promising advance of free trade since the failure of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round. Regional free trade treaties are a poor substitute for a global agreement but when they are based on the same principles and open to all countries that can meet their standards, they are the next best thing.
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Copyrights
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Guardian readers may have followed the industrial dispute that played out in New Zealand over The Hobbit. This dispute arose because a union of performers (Equity) sought to exercise its members’ internationally recognised rights to collectively bargain. It was nothing more and nothing less. What played out was an unexpected journey of misrepresentation, led partly by the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers, but particularly by the New Zealand government.
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Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source licenses as “copyleft” licenses. Indeed, the idea of a license that grants perpetual rights to copy, modify, and distribute a work—and requires licensees to attach the same terms to any downstream work—certainly feels like the antithesis of copyright law’s protectionist character.
Yet open source licenses (in their current forms) rely on copyright law. Copyright law supplies the bundle of statutory rights that empower the “keep it open” requirement of an open source license. Without copyright law, an author would have to find another legal theory to prevent others from, for example, taking a developer’s code and hiding it behind technological walls. And what do you sue for when someone violates the terms of an open source license? Copyright infringement (among other things).
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Reports from TorrentFreak that the legitimate website PromoBay.org is being blocked by several UK ISPs highlights some of the problems with website blocking as a strategy and practice.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.02.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We have long been familiar with NetApplications’ web stats. Sorting out all the bias is tough. Today I tried a new tack. For the users who know they have choice, how many use GNU/Linux?
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You don’t need an anti-virus program on Linux: I’ve said it before, but Don’t Surf in the Nude started because of an interest in internet security, so I can’t resist trying out anti-virus programs in Linux.
I noticed today that Comodo has produced a Linux anti-virus program with real-time scanning. Files are checked as they are accessed or created- for example as they are downloaded from the Internet.
I couldn’t resist trying it out. They’ve created the Windows AV experience on Linux, but like crime in multi-storey car parks, it’s wrong on so many levels.
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If you see the immense success that Linux, Firefox, Android and other software have achieved over the years, it’s all thanks to the power of open source. What makes open-source software so great is that it is a result of selfless work of thousands of developers from around the world, who, in their free time, volunteer to create or help build their favorite applications.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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For the past several months there has been work on vhost-blk, an in-kernel virito-blk device accelerator. This kernel-based accelerator can provide measurable speed-ups for disk/block device access by virtualized guest machines.
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Unfortunately, the rules stipulate only legal United States residents over the age of 18 are eligible, and that current members who renew are excluded; this promotion is only available to new members.
These caveats are disappointing but ultimately moot; the reason to join is to directly support and promote the work of the Foundation which includes direct backing of Linus Torvalds himself. Individual membership is $USD 99 and student membership is $USD 25.
Whether you win the $75 gift card or not, the Linux.com store can hook you up with t-shirts, hats, mugs and accessories relating to your favourite free open source operating system.
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Graphics Stack
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With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.
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With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.
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With a number of commits made to the mainline Mesa repository recently that concern the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for pushing OpenGL onto the CPU, here are benchmarks of the very latest Mesa Gallium3D development code from and AMD FX-8350 Vishera Eight-Core CPU when using both LLVM 3.1 and LLVM 3.2 SVN.
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Wayland 1.0.1 was just released ten days ago but Kristian ended up deciding to release Wayland/Weston 1.0.2 ahead of schedule. The reason for the early releases are due to important bug-fixes and “stable releases are cheap.” The original plan was to release v1.0.2 after the Weston Test Suite landed.
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A handful of memory-related issues were plugged up yesterday in Mesa thanks to the Coverity static code analysis tools.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In an intervirew with Cheerful Ghost, star Linux developer Ryan “Icculus” Gordon said that Unity3D game engine and Steam coming to Linux are good foundations to an awesome 2013.
Ryan has brought numerous game projects and tools to Linux and he has also been working with Humble team. Below are some excerpts (full interview can be read from here):
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On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today’s tech moguls.
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The open-source Alien Arena game is going to see a major update soon that will enhance its renderer and bring other improvements. Alien Arena 7.65 is this exciting game update that’s forthcoming.
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With November coming to a close, here’s some statistics on the most popular content on Phoronix this month.
During this month, while I may be stepping down from publishing roles here in the near future, on Phoronix I published 206 news articles (an average of more than six Linux/hardware/open-source news items per day) and 22 full-length featured articles. This brings the tally to more than 7,300 news articles and over 2,200 featured articles/reviews since founding the site eight years ago.
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While this week saw the release of the Doom 3 BFG source-code and word that a Sauerbraten update and a major Alien Arena advancement advancement are forthcoming, what’s the state of the impressive XReaL open-source game engine and the similar OpenWolf engine?
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- Ryan believes that Valve coming to Linux is specifically because of the Windows Store found in Microsoft Windows 8. This is a large part of it as when I was first to report back in April on Gabe Newell’s distaste for Windows 8.
- Also good for Linux gaming have been Humble Bundle, Unity game engine on Linux, and Kickstarter seeing lots of Linux-friendly work.
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We’re really happy to announce that we’ll soon be opening IndieCity up to Linux systems, so we’re on the look-out for people with Linux games and applications who’d like to be a part of the launch line-up. If you are such a person, or you want to point us in the direction of someone who is you can email us at Enquiries@IndieCity.com.
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Ouya, one of the most popular Kickstarter project, has stuck to its deadlines. The team has posted an update on the official blog that the units will start shipping on scheduled date December 28th. These units are for those developers who backed the project on Kickstarter.
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Desktop Environments
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As a Linux user, I’ve learned to appreciate the differences of doing things using the different desktops available.
I started thinking of how one can see going from point A to point B in KDE and GNOME and I could not help to find some amusement in this metaphor.
Ready for the ride? “How do I go to B? Let me count the ways:”
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Martin Gräßlin, the well known KWin developer, has written a new blog post explaining why if you’re wanting to play Valve’s Source Engine games or the other new native Linux games you should be using KDE Plasma.
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This alpha is special because it is the alpha released the day after rasterman’s birthday.
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Recently there has been a lot of buzz about non-composited fallback modes in various Desktop Shells and of course I have been asked several times about the fallback modes in KDE Plasma workspaces and whether they would be removed, too. Now instead of answering the same question again and again I decided to write a blog post to discuss the situation in more detail.
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I took some time this evening to relax in a quiet, empty house by plonking away at the Plasma Active Alarms app UI. I’m still not 100% satisfied yet, but it’s getting a lot closer.
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Last post was about a new QML component available in Plasma workspace 4.10 with an important design pattern that comes with it: Lazy loading everywhere when possible.
Next couple of posts will be about other new and old components and the UX concept behind them.
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These days we are celebrating a special anniversary. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of KDE e.V., the organization behind the KDE Community.
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GNOME Desktop
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Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.
The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.
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Owen Taylor has written a new blog post about avoiding jitter in composited frame display. Owen — along with help from Kristian Høgsberg — made improvements to the algorithm for compositor frame timing as used by GNOME’s Mutter compositing window manager and also Wayland’s Weston.
The basic algorithm up to this point was when receiving damage, a redraw should be scheduled immediately. If a redraw is scheduled and the system is still waiting for the previous swap to complete, a redraw should be done when the swap completes. This algorithm though doesn’t work out ideally when showing content that runs at a fixed frame-rate that is less than the display’s frame-rate, such as displaying video content at 24/30 FPS on a 60Hz display.
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What do you think of the GNOME desktop and the recent changes? You have a chance to share your opinions on the GNOME free software project by participating in the 2012 GNOME User Survey.
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Well, well, well… what do you know, after all the fuss about the GNOME Fallback mode being removed from the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, it looks like the GNOME developers decided to implement a similar mode for all you GNOME 2 nostalgics out there.
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GNOME Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t bumped to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) who is also senior maintainer at udisks.
Already there are many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, though it is still far from completed.
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The portable Linux distro that you can modify yourself is getting a long awaited update, with KDE 4 and more
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New Releases
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On December 1, Pierre Schmitz proudly informed Arch Linux users that the usual monthly release install medium, Arch Linux 2012.12.01, is now available for download.
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Today the OS4 team is pleased to announce the much anticipated update of OpenDesktop 13 with OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 . With this release we bring new features and bug fixes to OpenDesktop. OS4 OpenDesktop 13.1 still continues to revolutionize the linux user experience with an excellent interface, easy to use applications and comes with new options to enhance your OS4 user experience. Superior Functionality with some great new options.
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After two months of upgrades and bugs fixes, a new version of Parted Magic is ready for release.
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Patrick Verner announced a couple of hours ago, November 30, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_11_30 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.
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We finally have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the aptosid 2012-01 “Θάνατος” release, shipping in the following flavours:
* KDE-lite, amd64, en/ de, ≈635 MB.
* KDE-lite, i686, en/ de, ≈630 MB.
* KDE-full, amd64+i686, en/ de (cz, da, es, fr, it, ja, nl, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, uk through liveapt) ≈2.1 GB.
* XFCE, amd64, en/ de, ≈515 MB.
* XFCE, i686, en/ de, ≈510 MB.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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We are sorry to announce today, December 1, that the Mageia 1 operating system has reach end-of-life (EOL) and it is no longer supported.
Announced last year, on June 1, 2011, Mageia 1 was the first Mageia release and it was supported for 18 months.
Starting with December 1, the Mageia foundation stoped “feeding” its first born operating system with security/critical fixes and software updates!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is pushing Ubuntu in so many different directions. On the desktop, it has introduced Unity; on the server, it’s pursuing state-of-the-art ARM and cloud platforms; and it’s even trying to get Ubuntu on to mobile phones and televisions.
Trying to keep track of how all this is going, how it all fits together and what’s coming next is a full-time job… which is why we spoke to Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, whose job it is to keep track of everything.
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Flavours and Variants
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I have been using Ubuntu since 2006 and I always felt that it is one of the easiest to use distro, especially for new Linux users. That was in the past. Nowadays, when people ask me for recommendation, I would certainly recommend Linux Mint over Ubuntu, and here are the reasons.
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I do realize Xfce is not for everyone, and I used to be one of those people. And I still think the environment is a little rough round the edges. But there are no cardinal issues, nothing that cannot be resolved in about 10 hours of quick coding. And that would truly make this release outstanding to the max. Xubuntu Quetzal is a damn fine version. It cannot get the highest mark, because it needs to work on those little quirks, but 9.8/10 is an extremely good achievement. Honestly, do try this one, you will not be disappointed.
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My bottom line: If you’re considering buying an Internet TV streaming box this holiday season, choose a Roku.
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As a research operating system, Plan 9 has a bunch of really weird, but useful features. For one, everything about a computer running Plan 9 is distributed; the memory can be running on one machine, the processor on another, and the display can run on yet another machine. This modularity gives Plan 9 the honorable title of, ‘more Unix than Unix’.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Mumbai-based Wishtel today said it will launch computing devices, tablet PC and net books, starting at $50 later this month.
The company has developed a Linux–based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablet and net book PCs, it said in a statement.
“Our objective as a technology and manufacturing company is to create affordable range of products that can contribute to society by extending education for free and without boundaries,” Wishtel CEO Milind Shah said in a statement.
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NEW DELHI: Mumbai-based Wishtel said it will launch computing devices, tablets and netbooks, starting at $50 later this month. The company has developed a Linux-based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablets and netbooks, PCs, it said in a statement.
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PetStore.com revealed a new look with enhanced features and search technology last week when the online pet supply store relaunched its website on the open source Magento platform. The 13-year-old e-commerce company had previously run its online retail operations using an in-house website technology environment.
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Open Source software has been at the heart of modern financial institutions and capital markets for several years. The Open Source model for developing software is now also taking root in the Financial Services sector thanks in part to the OpenMAMA collaborative effort run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
OpenMAMA is an effort to build an open source implementation of the MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API) that financial services companies use for passing data across messaging applications. OpenMAMA was first announced in 2011. The OpenMAMA project includes big names in the financial services sector such as Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan and NYSE Technologies, among others.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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All the way back in 2008, Mozilla brought Private Mode (aka Porn Mode) to Firefox 3.1. Over the last four years, not a whole lot has changed in Firefox’s implementation of private mode, but that might change with Firefox 20 in 2013.
Currently when a user enters Private Mode, a new browser window spins up in Firefox (it works the same for Google Chrome’s Incognito mode). The problem with Firefox is that the Private Browsing mode can only operate with the one Private window – that is users cannot concurrently have a regular Firefox window and a Private Browsing Firefox Window open at the same time.
Firefox 20 could change that model (maybe)
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Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has announced on his blog that the organisation is joining the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Silver member. Aas points out that Mozilla has already been involved in several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups and that supporting ISOC is a logical next step. ISOC provides organisational and administrative backing to the IETF and other entities that are involved in the stewardship of the global network. It has 55,000 members in 90 chapters around the world and over 130 organisation members.
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SaaS
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CMS
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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The Surface Pro, Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet/laptop for the enterprise, may offer too little goodness for too much money.
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Every technological advance is greeted as some point during its life cycle (usually as it approaches ubiquity) by the disgruntled arguments of people who prefer older things or methods. Never has this been more prevalent than in the digital era. People diss mp3s for their sonic limitations, which is fine, but then they go a step further, claiming the “real” way to listen to music involves using other, older technology. There’s an emphasis on the physicality of the product, as if it were somehow more “real” simply because you can leave greasy fingerprints on it, thus lowering its resale value.
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Health/Nutrition
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popular announcements when no one’s listening—like, you know, the days leading up to Thanksgiving. That’s when the Obama administration sneaked a tasty dish to the genetically modified seed/pesticide industry.
This treat involves the unceremonious end of the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the US seed market, which it had begun in January 2010. It’s not hard to see why DOJ would take a look. For the the crops that cover the bulk of US farmland like corn, soy, and cotton, the seed trade is essentially dominated by five companies: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow. And a single company, Monsanto, supplies nearly all genetically modified traits now so commonly used in those crops, which it licenses to its rivals for sale in their own seeds.
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Australia has become the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
From now, all tobacco company logos and colours will be banned from packets.
They have been replaced by a dreary, uniform, green/brown, colour accompanied by a raft of anti-smoking messages and photographs.
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Security
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Back in September, we posted a leaked version of a draft for a cybersecurity executive order that the White House had been passing around, mainly to try to force Congress into passing a cybersecurity law. With the last ditch attempt by Senator Harry Reid to move that process forward failing, it took exactly a week for the White House to revise its draft exec order, and start passing it around on November 21st. And, today, that new draft leaked as well. You can see the full draft here or embedded below.
It’s basically more of the same. It insists that there’s a problem without providing any real evidence of that. Much of the order focuses on increasing information sharing among and between different government agencies. As expected, it’s designed to encourage private companies, who are “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” to “participate, on a voluntary basis, in the Enhanced Cybersecurity initiative.” This is part of what had people so concerned about the various bill proposals: whether or not companies would get broadly defined as “owners and operators of critical infrastructure” and then be forced or pressured into sharing private information, all in the name of “cybersecurity!”
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Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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At Cybercom, a component of Strategic Command, he is responsible for planning, coordinating and conducting operations and defense of the Defense Department’s computer networks.
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The man was Aldrich Ames, the CIA mole who had been spying for the KGB for six years. Grimes didn’t know it then, but she came to suspect Ames as the investigation went on. When the group was scrutinizing lists of people for who might be the mole, their choices in an informal straw poll were weighted by points. Of everyone on their list, Ames got the highest score as the most likely candidate. Eventually, the FBI opened a full investigation, Ames was arrested in 1994, pleaded guilty and is now serving a life term in prison. His motivation appears to have been simple greed.
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He pleaded guilty to abusive sexual contact and a gun charge.
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The Syrian regime was the only government in the world to lay new landmines this year, campaigners said Thursday as they issued an annual report on the use and effect of the devastating weapons.
Mark Hiznay, the editor of the report for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), said the finding is a significant change from last year, when four governments laid mines, and represents the lowest number since the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty was signed in 1997.
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More than 3,000 people have been killed in Pakistan by drone strikes.
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Cablegate
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But the one foremost on some people’s minds was: How will the U.S. react when other countries with drones start taking out American targets?
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Question: Why is it OK for the U.S. to not only have a drone program, but also to use it, often times illegally, to bomb the crap out of folks (suspected terrorists as well as civilians) in Central Asia, but it’s not at all cool for China to develop the same technology?
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It is difficult for journalists to verify the casualties from drone strikes since the government forbids foreign journalists from travelling to the area without a military escort and the Taliban often seal off the sites of strikes.
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Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, may testify today at a pretrial proceeding for the first time since he was arrested in May 2010. Manning could face life in prison if convicted of the most serious of 22 counts against him. His trial is expected to begin in February.
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Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights is an FDL contributor and also Julian Assange’s lawyer. He was in court for Bradley Manning’s testimony this week, and appears on The Real Network News with Paul Jay today to discuss it.
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We’ve called him a “seed-spilling sex creep,” a “pale nerd king,” and “a real-life The Matrix extra,” so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a phone interview on the condition that we speak only about the book. I agreed, which was a lie.
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PFC Bradley Manning choked back tears during a second day of testimony at a hearing before his military trial as he claimed he didn’t tell his family about the conditions of his confinement at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., because he did not want them to worry.
He also expressed concern that doing so could lead to an end to visiting privileges for his family.
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That story — itself considered of such little importance by AP that it didn’t even by-line the piece (perhaps the agency didn’t send a reporter either, but simply picked up snippets from other sources) — reduced the entire motion, and the long, intricate, systematic government attack on Manning’s psyche, to a matter of petty petulance on Manning’s part, a whiner’s attempt to weasel out of what’s coming to him.
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During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.
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During a televised interview Thursday, CNN host Erin Burnett—one of the network’s star establishment bootlickers—tried to get Julian Assange to incriminate Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks source whose detention conditions were investigated in court this week.
Burnett moved quickly from an opening discussion of Assange’s new book, Cypherpunks, to the subject of his relationship to Manning. For allegedly passing cables to WikiLeaks, Manning “could end up spending the rest of his life in jail,” Burnett said. “Do you feel any guilt about that since the information the U.S. government says he stole was published by you?” she asked Assange.
“The case [that was heard this week] is not about whether Bradley Manning allegedly stole cables or not,” Assange said. “The case is about the abuse of Bradley Manning” during his 2-year-long detainment, a portion of which United Nations investigator Juan Mendez described in March after a 14-month investigation as “cruel” and “inhuman.”
“Why was he treated that way?” Assange asked. “Well, his lawyer argues, and many others who have followed the case argues [sic] it was ordered to coerce him into a confession that would bring down me or bring down WikiLeaks… That’s the case that’s ongoing now. And that case is a reflection of the decay in the rule of law.”
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“Since 2010, Western governments have tried to portray WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation, enabling a disproportionate response from both political figures and private institutions,” he wrote in the Huffington Post.
“It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better,” he said, citing some of the once secret State Department cables that his site disclosed.
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Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg praised the Wikileaks release…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A newly released study finds that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are disappearing three times faster than they were two decades ago, the latest evidence supporting the existence of global warming.
The study was published in the journal Science and is considered an extremely accurate portrayal of ice melts in these polar regions. According to the paper’s authors, the rapid polar ice melting has caused an increase in sea level that may become problematic to low coastal regions.
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Finance
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Regulators are worried about the explosive growth of shadow banking, and they should be. Shadow banks were at the heart of the last financial crisis and they’ll be at the heart of the next financial crisis as well. There’s no doubt about it. It’s simply impossible to maintain a system where unregulated, non-bank financial institutions are able to create their own money (credit) without oversight or supervision. The money they create–via off-balance sheets operations, securitization, repo or other unmonitored mega-leveraging activities–feeds into the economy, creates artificial demand, lowers unemployment, and fuels growth. But when the cycle slams into reverse (and debts are no longer serviced on time), then thinly-capitalised shadow banks begin to default one-by-one, creating a daisy-chain of counterparty bankruptcies that push stocks into a nosedive while the economy slips into a long-term slump.
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Censorship
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An Austrian operator of Tor servers—that were used to anonymously route huge amounts of traffic over the Internet—has been charged with distributing child pornography. This comes after police detected illegal images traversing one of the nodes he maintains.
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Obviously, there are reasons to investigate possible child porn distribution, but it still seems ridiculous that law enforcement still seems skeptical of tor exit nodes and assumes that they must be used for nefarious intent. This isn’t the first time of course. Last year, here in the US, ICE seized a tor exit node as well. While it eventually returned the equipment, it warned the guy that “this could happen again.” And, of course, just this week, we wrote about a German case where a court actually held someone responsible for the transmission of encrypted traffic on a tor-like system.
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I had really thought that we’d reached the point where lawyers working for large, well-known companies recognize just how incredibly stupid it is to file lawsuits against websites that criticize them. Sure, a decade ago or so, it was common for big companies to go after so called “sucks sites” or “complaints sites,” often alleging trademark infringement. But, at some point, many of them realized that (a) trademark complaints were a dead end since there was no confusion and (b) that these lawsuits only drew a lot more attention to the sites in question. Apparently, however, there are still some throwback lawyers working for United Continental, and they’ve decided to go after a popular passenger complaints site that goes by the creative domain Untied.com.
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The UK government must legislate to establish a new press “self-regulation” body — independent of both publishers and politicians but overseen by media regulator Ofcom — because newspapers have “wreaked havoc” in the lives of innocents, says the nine-month inquiry report in to the culture, practice and ethics of the business.
Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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Late on Wednesday, just as Americans were taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced its intention to change the feedback process for the policies which govern use of its service.
For the last few years, as I’d mentioned in Wired a few months ago, Facebook held sham elections where people could ostensibly vote on its policy changes. Despite lots of responses (the most recent Site Governance vote got far more people participating than signed the secession petitions on the White House website), Facebook never promoted these policy change discussions to users, and the public has never made a substantive impact on site governance.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Syria lost two major links with the outside world on Thursday as the largest commercial airport in the capital canceled flights because of fighting nearby and Internet access disappeared across the country, perhaps signaling an impending escalation by the government against the uprising, opponents of the Syrian government said.
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An unprecedented debate over how the global Internet is governed is set to dominate a meeting of officials in Dubai next week, with many countries pushing to give a United Nations body broad regulatory powers even as the United States and others contend such a move could mean the end of the open Internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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After snapping up film rights for $5 million, Universal is upset over a porn movie it says is a “rip-off, plain and simple.”
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Still, the thing that strikes me about this — and which isn’t mentioned in the filing at all — is that Fifty Shades, itself, actually came out of a “pornographic adaptation” of the Twilight series. In fact, while those behind Fifty Shades have sought to erase this history, it does seem like a relevant point. Fifty Shades was pornographic Twilight “fan fiction,” which was later rewritten to scrub it of references to Twilight. While Fifty Shades’ author, EL James, her agent and publisher all like to claim that the Twilight fan fic James wrote and the eventual Fifty Shades book are really different works, someone compared the two using a plagiarism checker and found them to be 89% similar.
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Almost half of the UK’s internet users aged twelve and over cannot say with confidence whether or not the sources of online content they use are legal or not, according to new research by OfCom. The study is the latest in an ongoing series of reports by the government’s media regulator attempting to identify trends in online copyright infringement before the ‘graduated response’ system for tackling online piracy set out in the Digital Economy Act is enacted.
Of the 5099 people surveyed between May and July this year, 47% weren’t able to distinguish with certainty between legal and illegal services, while only 16% actually admitted to accessing unlicensed content, and only 8% said they relied on illegal sources of music.
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Malt points out that there are several legal services, most of which are inexpensive, including ad-funded streaming services which give listeners access to thousands of tracks for free. (“Inexpensive” is, of course, relative. Ofcom’s study shows that music retailers and streaming services would convert a majority of casual infringers by cutting prices 50-70%. resulting in 2-3x the number of purchases.)
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A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.
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The saga of Cindy Garcia and her attempt to get The Innocence Of Muslims trailer off of YouTube continues. If you’ll recall, Garcia is one of the actresses who performed in the controversial almost-film “Innocence of Muslims”, which sparked protests throughout the Arab world. Since the protests and media blitz began (as opposed to since the flim’s trailer was released), Garcia has been trying to get the YouTube video taken down by throwing the proverbial legal kitchen sink at proverbial legal kitchen-everyone, including claims that she was duped by the flimmakers and that she owned a copyright on her portion of her performance. Buttressing her argument was her claim that she never signed any kind of release for the film.
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Send this to a friend
11.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“The vast majority of us can do with smaller and cheaper computers,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “It’s obvious to anyone that a smartphone is a PC for most purposes, and all we have to do is add a larger screen, a keyboard and printing to do just about anything possible with larger more expensive PCs. I have no doubt that the future holds mostly all-in-one PCs with everything in the keyboard or mouse.”
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Eben Upton, a key player in the Raspberry Pi’s genesis, said out-of-work graduates should get busy with computers in their spare time if they want to land a job. And he didn’t mean logging into Facebook.
Speaking in a Google Hangout video chat conference call thing, Upton drew on his years of hiring newbies at chip giant Broadcom and his time teaching computer science at Cambridge University.
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Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for sub-Saharan Africa, today announced it has added the product sets of NetFort to its portfolio.
“NetFort addresses the business need to monitor what users are doing across their networks,” commented Jan-Jan van der Vyver, Managing Director of Linux Warehouse, “and complements our existing data centre stack.
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(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 29, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, applauds the release of the flagship report “The Information Economy Report 2012: The Software Industry and Developing Countries” by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The report provides specific recommendations on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for national policy makers and includes two examples of the value of LPI’s training and certification programs for ICT development.
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Desktop
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In our recent ZaReason UltraLap 430 review, Ars alum Ryan Paul lamented that even though putting Linux on laptops is easier today than ever, it’s still not perfect. Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working. Major OEMs aren’t yet putting forth the same concerted effort to build and support laptops with Linux as they are their more high-margin servers.
[...]
The XPS 13 used in the Developer Edition features a number of upgrades over the pilot Project Sputnik hardware, including an Intel i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge CPU and 8GB of RAM (the pilot hardware used Sandy Bridge CPUs and had 4GB of RAM). The Developer Edition also comes with a 256 GB SATA III SSD, and retains the pilot version’s 1366×768 display resolution. The launch hardware costs $1,549 and includes one year of Dell’s “ProSupport.” Additional phone support options aren’t yet available.
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This is the XPS-13 at $1549 in “developer version”. It’s an “Ultrabook”TM with that other OS. I guess it’s a nearly optimal notebook with GNU/Linux although I would prefer Debian GNU/Linux instead of Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
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Linux fans may recall the excitement that greeted the launch of Dell’s “Project Sputnik” earlier this year.
Made possible through an internal skunkworks effort, the project aimed to create an Ubuntu-preloaded laptop targeting developers, in particular, with what Dell has called a “client to cloud” solution.
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Do you want a serious—I mean serious—developer laptop? Then Dell and Ubuntu have the system for you in the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.
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Dell has launched an Ubuntu version of its attractive XPS 13 ultrabook. The ultrabook is aimed at developers, offering them “the essentials they want” bundled up in a Linux-harboring device. The laptop is available for purchase now from Dell starting at $1,449. You can also nab a Windows version of the machine if Ubuntu isn’t your thing.
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What once was just an internal skunkworks project, Dell’s Project Sputnik has taken off with the release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition. The thin and light darling of the Ultrabook crowd is now shipping with a Precise Pangolin Ubuntu build pre-installed, along with feature-complete drivers that ensure maximum peripheral compatibility right out of the box.
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Dell has launched its Ubuntu laptop for developers in the US. The project, which was first announced in May, uses an XPS 13 Ultrabook as the base for a customised Ubuntu 12.04 installation that is aimed at application developers and systems administrators. Dell has worked with Ubuntu sponsor Canonical and various hardware manufacturers to provide support for the hardware, and the system ships with additional features such as the sputnik command that allows developers to easily replicate their development environment on other machines.
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Server
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According to IBM’s 2011 Annual Report, by September 2015 fully 50% of IBM’s profit is expected to come from its software group (SWG). On the surface, this is surprising, because software is a distinct minority of IBM’s total revenue. In 2011, SWG’s $25B represented less than a quarter of IBM’s revenues earned. Here is IBM’s revenue broken down by business unit (Finance and Other are omitted here).
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The latest update of Rocks codename Emerald Boa is now released. Emerald Boa is available for CentOS 6.3 (Rocks 6.1). Rocks 5.6 will be released when CentOS 5.9 becomes available The Rocks-supplied OS rolls have all updates applied as of November 27, 2012.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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We interview Jordan Brock from indie development house Hit the Sticks about Just Tactics which is a cross-platform turn-based strategy game.
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Kernel Space
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LXF: Has the Linux desktop failed because there’s too much choice? [Laughter]
Linus Torvalds: I don’t think the desktop is doing too well, and there’s technical reasons. You’ve probably seen my rants about how, to some degree, I think the desktop is going in the wrong direction, but the big reason is normal people don’t want to install an operating system. You can’t get a desktop unless you have pre-installs, and that hasn’t happened. There are cases where, if you knew where to look, you could get Linux pre-installed if you bought Dell. But, realistically, nobody has done pre-installs.
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Thousands of people contribute to Linux every day. As our annual “Who Writes Linux” paper reports, individuals from around the world are writing millions of lines of code every year. Equally important are the hundreds of companies supporting Linux every year, from sponsoring Linux kernel development to collaborating on technical initiatives to supporting The Linux Foundation.
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Linux 3.7 supports ARM64, the processor used in the Raspberry Pi, and Intel’s SMAP security feature. The next kernel release will also include new tools for tracing processes and improved collaboration with Microsoft’s hypervisor.
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In addition to the Samsung Exynos ARM SoCs being really attractive right now due to the impressive performance of the A15-based Exynos 5 Dual, the hardware is also nice for its open-source DRM graphics driver that keeps advancing.
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Rocks, the RHEL/CentOS-derived operating system focused upon supporting Linux on real and virtual clusters, has delivered on its 6.1 release.
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Graphics Stack
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After earlier this week delivering a 12-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison with the open-source Linux Gallium3D graphics driver, being published today is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side. Tested for this article were eight NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from multiple hardware generations while using the very latest open-source Nouveau driver code.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Recently I asked Ryan C. Gordon some questions about his work in porting games, the current state of gaming in Linux, and where he sees it in the future. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work, Ryan has been involved in porting many games and other software to Linux and Mac OSX. Most recently he has been working with the folks at Humble Bundle to ensure their games are cross-platform.
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The game tells the story of Hoston, a young botanist who is on a quest to save his father from a mysterious illness. Along with his two best friends Alina and Edessot, the three friends embark on a quest seeking a rare herb to cure the illness of Hoston’s father. Little do they know, it is the beginning of a winding journey that unravels his father’s past and the mystery of Pier Solar and the Great Architects.
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Follow the story of an atypical robot hero set out to rescue his robot-girlfriend, and in turn save the city and defeat the bad guys.
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If you are an Indie game fan or a developer, you must have heard of IndieCity. IndieCity is an online Indie game store that allows developers to publish their own games and earn revenue/donations in return. Much like Steam, it had a client that users can use to download and play the games. But unlike Steam, people at IndieCity have announced that they will bring their own client to Linux, and its before their Mac version.
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Desktop Environments
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We’ve taken you through a tour of Window Managers in Linux, and now it’s time to show you the Window Manager’s bigger brother: the desktop environment, or DE for short. With a sea of choices out there, we can see where Linux newbies might feel a bit overwhelmed. Catch us after the break and we’ll show you some of our favorites, along with a few honorable mentions.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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While Qt 5.0 is hopefully being released in December, Digia has announced today the release Qt 4.8.4.
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The development on KDE 4.10 is is on full swing (we have created a KDE 4.10 update page) and today the KDE project leader Aaron Seigo announe that the upcoming release of KDE will change how window grouping is handled in the task manager.
Currently multiple windows are grouped together in the task manager and this is indicated by a black arrow and a small number showing the number of multiple windows open.
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Last Tuesday (November 27, 2012) was the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning and presented a video interview with emeritus board member Mirko Böhm. Today, we focus on the present with interviews with two current KDE e.V. Board members, Lydia Pintscher and Cornelius Schumacher. On the bottom, we’ve got a nice puzzle for you. And next week, we’ll present an impression of the day to day activities of KDE e.V.
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Hello ROSA users and just KLook fans. I have some great news for you. Several days ago we published on the our build system build system – ABF a new version of KLook with the many improvements. Most of these improvement have made in KLook architecture, so you will not see many visible changes, but you will felt them.
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Thanks to Windows 8 and Valve, GNU/Linux may finally become a first class citizen for the gaming industry. So which desktop should be your preferred for Linux gaming? I will answer that question but first see how different is KDE when compared with it’s cousins Unity and Gnome Shell.
Martin Gräßlin, a lead KDE developer, addresses some queries around a topic bugging Gnome and Unity users – the fallback mode. I recommend reading his ‘abridged’ post. Here I am picking the points that I found interesting for our readers. The questions is: will KDE retain the fallback in 4.10 and after?
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Qt lead developer Lars Knoll has announced the release schedule for version 5.0 of the C++ GUI framework. According to this schedule, Qt 5.0 is due to arrive before the end of the year. The first “major” release in eight years was originally planned to be released in summer 2012, but its arrival has been delayed by the main developers’ move from Nokia to Digia.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME is changing, as every community driven project, GNOME is involved in a daily evolution.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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I graphed the Gentoo Developer Web of Trust, as motivated by the (outdated) Debian Web of Trust.
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Red Hat Family
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According to all Linux distribution packages, Oracle Linux has a much smaller footprint than the Windows Server operating system. This means that if you want to maximize your storage space on a server, Oracle Linux could be a good option for you.
While it does not run on many older x86 machines like some of the really small Linux distributions, there is an Amazon E3 Cloud package for Oracle Linux that can be used if you are planning on using Amazon’s very capable cloud based storage environment.
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Fedora
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The Fedora 18 release date has been delayed about half dozen times in last couple of months. Other than a few snide remarks, Fedora has mostly been given a pass since one of the features causing delays is the new installer – and no one wants that too early. However, the release team recently released Fedora 18 Beta, giving users a preview.
Fedora 18 should be sporting a new package manager currently dubbed DNF, a fork of Yum 3.4. Yum and DNF will be included in Fedora 18, but early plans are to remerge the two eventually. One of the advantages of DNF for end users is increased performance and simplified operation. Check out Fedora’s wiki for more technical information on DNF and the underlying library Hawkey.
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Debian Family
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Veteran Debian developer Bdale Garbee will give the third keynote at the Australian national Linux conference next year.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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he developers of Linux Mint 14 haven’t forgotten about their users and are porting some of the features for the previous 13 release.
Linux Mint 13 is an LTS or Long Term Support. This means that it benefits from five years of security updates. Why not benefit from other great features implemented in Linux Mint 14?
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If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi.
This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the output through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.
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Phones
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Android
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I recently made a post comparing the specs of the A10 based MK802 to the RaspBerry Pi. For those who are unaware the MK802 is a low cost, Android based media PC you can pick up on Amazon for less than 40 USD. A little over a month ago I replaced my desktop sized media computer with an MK802 – today I would like to share with you my thoughts on the device.
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A job ad posted by Nokia on employment network LinkedIn sees the company looking to hire a senior engineer to work on new mobile devices and software, but they’re not Windows Phones. It’s for Linux. Which is the core of Android.
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The pair of Motorola smartphones will see a Jelly Bean update starting the first week of December.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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PengPod plans to start shipping 7 and 10 inch tablets with support for Linux as well as Google Android in January. The company, founded by Neal Peacock, has been raising money to help support software development for the tablets — and Peacock just wrote in to let us know the project has surpassed its initial $49,000 fundraising goal.
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Whether you prefer open source or proprietary technology, there’s no shortage of virtualization hypervisors to choose from these days. With so many options, which solutions are enterprises selecting, and where will momentum in this channel lead in the future? I recently spoke with virtualization expert Jon Braunhut, who offered a lot of interesting observations and predictions on this topic based on his experience as chief scientist at KEMP Technologies.
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Geeks often describe programs as being “open source” or “free software.” If you’re wondering exactly what these terms mean and why they matter, read on. (No, “free software” doesn’t just mean that you can download it for free.)
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Beyond the most radically geeky segments of society, few Americans are likely to have thought of software when they counted their blessings this Thanksgiving. For most people, computers are hardly in the same category as food, shelter and loving friends and family. That said, a recent blog post got me thinking about the software projects and people to whom I do owe personal gratitude. My list comes a bit belatedly, since Thanksgiving 2012 has come and gone, but here are the five items that top it.
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Whether you want to monitor your network bandwidth, secure your network against malware, or setup a simple mail server, there’s an open source or free software available for the job. Presented here are more than 40+ of them
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Here’s a fun experiment (if, like me, you’re a huge nerd): take an open source policy from your agency, company, whatever, and strike out the words “open source.” Bam, you now have a much more sensible and reasonable “software” policy.
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Web Browsers
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Using HTTPS doesn’t just mean that your traffic is encrypted—encryption is only half of the story and it’s useless without authentication. What good is it to encrypt something between two parties if you can’t be sure of the identity of the person to whom you’re talking? Consequently, being able to serve HTTPS traffic means you must posses a cryptographic certificate attesting to your identity. Acquiring such a certificate requires you prove your identity to one of many Certificate Authorities, or CAs.
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Chrome
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Google has updated the Stable, Beta and Developer Channels of the desktop version of its Chrome browser with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The Stable Channel update closes seven security vulnerabilities, three of them rated High, and includes bug fixes. New stable Chrome versions for iOS and Android have also been released and include minor improvements. The iOS version of the browser now supports Apple’s Passbook application.
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Mozilla
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Seamonkey is not the first name that comes to mind when you talk about browsers. Nor is it a fourth. In fact, it’s not even a browser. But then, in those terms, neither is Opera. Seamonkey is an all-in-one cross-platform Internet suite, a collection of Web-facing programs all bundled into a single product. Worth your time? Perhaps, we will discover today.
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hroughout its history, Mozilla has supported innovation on the web by investing in people and its own development. Today Mozilla is moving to the next stage in its evolution, formally investing in a mobile startup that could help to enable its nascent FirefoxOS platform.
Mozilla is participating in a $25 million series C funding round for Everything.me, which is an HTML5-focused mobile startup. Mozilla is joining the venture team of Telefonica Digital as well as SingTel Innov8 in the funding round.
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While the phone Firefox OS was running on couldn’t take advantage of a mobile data network, the developer was able to tether that phone to another one. Obviously, this being pre-alpha software, things didn’t work as well or as smoothly as in the final version. But even in that early form and running on underpowered hardware, Firefox OS showed promise.
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Mozilla is trying to fix a problem that’s bugging its Android users running Firefox. Since Adobe doesn’t support Flash for Android or any other mobile devices, Firefox users were not able to play H.264 encoded videos.
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Databases
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Widenius told The Reg he’s scared about the future of MySQL. He said he is concerned that if the database giant further breaches its commitments to the EU, it will produce an irreconcilable fork: with MySQL at Oracle going one way and those extending MySQL – such as Widenius’s MariaDB and Facebook and Twitter – going another.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Kohei Yoshida is a well-known individual on the LibreOffice project. To many, he is considered as one of the core group of developers who have contributed to the steady development and code improvement of the project, and one of the leaders of the calc component. Kohei takes a little time out from his busy schedule to let us know a little more about himself and why the LibreOffice project appeals to him.
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CMS
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Healthcare
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VA is continually evolving the health care we deliver to Veterans, from enhancing treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to enabling clinicians and patients to use mobile devices to improve care. The VA Innovation Initiative (VAi2) supports this constructive evolution by tapping the talent and expertise of individuals inside and outside of government for creative solutions and providing a method for new ideas to be evaluated, tested, and deployed.
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Business
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The Open Source CRM project Zurmo has released Zurmo Version 0.8.0, which allows users to send emails directly from within the application.
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Semi-Open Source
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Ah, open source … so free, so transparent, so egalitarian, but not always. Increasingly, vendors are slapping the label “open source” on products that do not offer customers the freedom and control originally intended and instead lock them in, reports Simon Phipps at InfoWorld.
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Funding
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Acquia, a U.S. startup that advises enterprises on open source content management system Drupal, said it has raised $30 million from Investor Growth Capital and other venture firms to finance its expansion.
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So, please consider supporting one or two of your favorites projects. On my side, I’m installing Ubuntu, just to buy Uberwriter, and I have contributed a little with Ubuntu at the time of downloading it. And I have already made my very small contribution to the Debian Handbook.
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New round of funding will help build and expand the operations of open source enterprise content management system vendor Acquia.
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A focus on young people in the open source world is just starting to become a priority, and we’re also starting to see more larger corporations demonstrating their commitment to open source. Open source is indeed spreading as more and more people understand the value of the open source way.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Today PLOS Computational Biology launched a collection of seven existing Software articles which present novel biological insights on an open access platform and break new ground by sharing the open source software that enabled the featured discoveries. This combination of Open Access and Open Source can only help push the development of computational biology’s many diverse fields – and create a model for other scientific disciplines.
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Open Hardware
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Build Your Own Arduino-Powered Bicycle Lights, Turn Signals, and Odometer for Safe Night RidingBuild Your Own Arduino-Powered Bicycle Lights, Turn Signals, and Odometer for Safe Night Riding Riding a bicycle at night is a bit dangerous, but electronics blogger Jenna DeBoisblanc shows off how to build a system that includes turn signals, a strobe light, speedometer, and brake lights to keep you safe.
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Programming
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The LLVM compiler infrastructure is frequently talked about on Phoronix whether it be about its Clang C/C++ compiler or one of the innovative use-cases for LLVM such as with the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver or as a JIT engine within some free software projects like Mono. However, for those that don’t understand much of the internals of LLVM, here’s a brief overview.
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Some of the would-be cool kids of software say we are in the “post open source” world. Several weeks ago, James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, put it this way on Twitter: “younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github.”
But as Outercurve Foundation’s CTO Stephen Walli replied, “promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software transmitted diseases.” Since then, I have heard more and more people mention this trend of regarding the copyright and collaboration terms of a project as irrelevant bureaucracy. Appealing as it may be to treat the wisdom of the years as pointless, doing so creates a problem for the future.
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Genode OS, the very interesting research operating system, is out with a new release that boasts some interesting features.
Genode OS is one of the early non-Linux operating systems that ported Gallium3D and GEM for its graphics drivers, provided a Gallium3D LiveCD, and then grew ambitions to become a general purpose OS. In its latest release it was ported to ARM and picked up other features, but now it’s been even more improved.
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If there’s one valuable thing Twitter holds, it is the company’s vast treasure trove of billions of tweets. It is an opus of thoughts and utterances, all made in real time, that make up the company’s most precious asset — the “interest graph.”
Twitter knows this. And for years now the company has had agreements with a number of third-party companies, giving them access to the “firehose,” or the raw stream of Twitter data flowing through the company’s pipes. These companies comb through the scores of tweets to find meaningful insights, and resell that information to companies across multiple industries. It’s a “big data” economy, built entirely around Twitter’s never-ending flow of information.
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Hardware
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In a piece called Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it SemiAccurate reports that Japan’s PC Watch has reliable, but unidentified reports that Intel has told OEM’s that Intel will decline to offer pluggable processors for the Broadwell architecture (which will appear after 2013′s Haswell architecture.) Instead OEMs will recieve ball grid array multi-chip modules (BGM MCM). These modules will be installed onto the motherboard by soldering, effectively making the CPU part of the motherboard.
Readers please remember that this isn’t an Intel press release. This news is only off-the record reports from manufacturers who have been talking to Intel. Intel also has a history of changing their plans.
It could all be speculation because it would be silly to solder a very expensive processor onto a cheap motherboard. What’s more likely is that in 2014 Intel will focus on delivering hi-frequency Haswell chips for the desktop, while it reserves the next-generation Broadwell chips for low-power applications. This would explain the rumors of why there will be no socketable Broadwell chips. So, Intel simply skips a single generation for the Desktop sockets. No more, no less.
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Health/Nutrition
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A study published this week in the Environmental Science & Technology journal, “Novel and High Volume Use Flame Retardants in US Couches Reflective of the 2005 PentaBDE Phase Out,” reveals that 85% of couches purchased in the United States between 1985 and 2010 contain chemical flame retardants. The most prevalent include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), tris (1-3-dichloroisopropyl) phosphate (TDCPP), and the newer Firemaster 550 (FM 550) mixture, as well as tris (4-butylphenyl) phosphate (TBPP), which according to the study has not been reported to be used as a flame retardant until now.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Drone crashes at overseas civilian airports have increased significantly over the past two years, according to a new report by The Washington Post…
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This can’t go on. American drones have taken lives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines. Meaningful public review of this most secretive of government programs is long overdue. We don’t need a new rule book; we just need the existing rules — international human rights and humanitarian law — to be applied.
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Warren, who the court said was a rising star in the agency, was accused of drugging and then sexually assaulting a married Muslim woman while working as a high-level official for the U.S. embassy in Algeria in 2008. He targeted the woman because he believed her religion and local customs would keep her from reporting the assault, the sentencing judge concluded, according the ruling. Later that year, the woman reported Warren’s conduct to an official at the embassy, according to the ruling.
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W
ith the new vacancy on the fifth floor at Langley, a robust debate has resumed over whether the Central Intelligence Agency should continue trending toward paramilitary activity and targeted killings, or return to its traditional focus on sending spies to recruit agents and collect human intelligence. The controversy was foreseen as early as 2003, when Robert Kaplan essentially argued one side of the discussion now underway. He pointed to the “old rules” whereby small groups of men overthrew large governments, and asserted that future technological developments will “make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.” His contention: Such acts are morally preferable to war, and that “the war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified.”
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Judicial Watch announced today that it has received documents from the U.S. State Department pertaining to the targeting and assassination of U.S. born terrorist Anwar al-Aulaqi by a U.S. drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011. In 2010, President Obama reportedly authorized the assassination of al-Aulaqi, the first American citizen added to the government’s “capture or kill” list, describing the radical Muslim cleric as “chief of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”
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Bottom line: It is fraught with discrepancies and outright contradictions, and it gives a good sense of why the number of civilian casualties in general is such a disputed subject.
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That’s an astonishingly low rate of civilian deaths. And it’s fiercely contested by researchers who have tracked the CIA drone program.
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A recent opinion piece in The Daily Athenaeum declared that the Obama administration’s continued use of the drone strike program, originally developed and implemented under President Bush and expended by President Obama, is unethical, given the civilian casualties attributed to the strikes and the legal questions raised by several international figures.
This piece represents one side in the debate involving a subject that has been gaining increasing attention in the national consciousness since the past election.
Although those opposed to the program raise very valuable questions, they generally fail to provide viable alternatives. The question they raise about the authority of a government to carry out military operations within the borders of another sovereign country, especially without that country’s consent, is an issue of utmost importance if the United States is to have any hope of achieving tangible victories in the upcoming phases of what is commonly called “the war on terror.”
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…jailed for protesting drone strikes.
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It seems to me to be flat-out wrong to take out people who pose a threat to us, killing alongside these presumed threats their families and neighbors.
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“This waste of money is even more shameful when you consider millions and millions of Americans out of work or losing their homes and here’s ‘Mr. Green Jeans’ Obama spending money to duplicate what’s already being done by his own government and the private sector,” said political consultant Mike Baker.
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The Columbia study is quick to critique the drone data compiled by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, yet it devotes negligible attention to potential shortcomings in the Bureau’s reporting. The study repeatedly applauds the Bureau’s investigative practices, analysis criteria and the breadth of its sources. It offers the most guarded criticism, writing only, “we do not agree with the Bureau’s analysis of media sources in all cases.” Upon reading Columbia’s “Counting Drone Strike Deaths,” one is led to conclude that the Bureau’s casualty estimates are both methodologically rigorous and empirically sound.
[...]
Columbia only analyzed reports for 2011, but had they continued on with their research, they would have found that these problems pervade the Bureau’s reporting on strikes from 2004 through 2012.
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As President Barack Obama enters his second term, the nation will likely scrutinize the president’s actions to improve the economy and implement certain “Obamacare” initiatives while foreign policy takes the backseat. Obama’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan, however, is unmistakably the biggest failing of his administration thus far and deserves more attention.
The drone strikes, which began under former President George W. Bush in 2004, use unmanned weapons to remotely target hostile militant leaders. The technology is fairly new, and carries extreme risks, as the drones have proven to be very dangerous to civilians. Since Obama took office, as many as 53 civilians have been killed in attacks directed toward militants. The number of militants in Pakistan who died in drone strikes since 2009 is 2,681.
The definition of militant is not without question. The president defines “militants” as “all military-age males in a strike zone.” It is an utterly transparent tactic to lower the number of reported civilian deaths. Because of the murky definition of “militant” it is hard to know exactly how many actual civilians are killed by drone strikes.
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Donilon’s statement also came about a month after United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson announced in a conference at the Harvard Law School that the UN Human Rights Council will form early next year a unit that will investigate drone attacks that also caused civilian deaths.
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The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had “every right to defend itself.”
In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.
The facts, however, suggest otherwise.
From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks. Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.
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Cablegate
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Looking beyond the Assange/WikiLeaks case, it’s worth noting that, unless one clings to a relatively neutered view of leadership, be it in the nonprofit sector or elsewhere, it is only risk-takers who possess the capacity to change a collective worldview. That kind of leadership can be obnoxious and hard for others to take—so much so, in fact, that many won’t recognize it as leadership at all. But without the risk-takers, where would we be? Have you taken any risks lately? Were they worth the price you may have had to pay?
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As a Canadian, perhaps I should feel a surge of patriotic pride now that Mark Carney has been designated the new head of the Bank of England – quite a step up for the current governor of the Bank of Canada. There is no question that Mr. Carney is a market-savvy guy (he did, after all, work for the vampire squid), and his experiences as Chairman on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) suggests that he is sensitive to the ongoing systemic risks present in our increasingly complex global banking system.
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An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history has testified that he felt like a doomed, caged animal after he was arrested in Baghdad for allegedly sending classified information to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.
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In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks to Democracy Now! from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months. Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. “Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. … Our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade.” Assange also speaks about his new book, “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” “The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies,” he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. “The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward,” Assange says. “Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States.
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In the glittering Knightsbridge district, in the heart of London, just behind the famous Harrods department store, there is a red-brick building guarded day and night by Scotland Yard agents and by one or two large police vans equipped with cameras keeping a watchful eye. Refuge has been taken here at the Ecuadorian Embassy by the man who infuriated the White House and diplomats all around the world, by exposing war crimes and secret deals: Julian Assange. It is in this embassy that l’Espresso met the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up in this building since the 19th of June. A hundred and sixty-five days, in addition to the eighteen months he spent under house arrest forced to wear an electronic manacle around his ankle.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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When it comes to progress on climate change negotiations, the best thing for Canada to do is to stay home and stop sabotaging the process, says the leader of the Green Party.
“Canada continues to be a country that pushes other countries to do less. Our role is not just an embarrassment, it’s reckless and brings our once good national reputation into disrepute,” argued Elizabeth May at a news conference in Ottawa today.
World governments are in Doha, Qatar working out a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of this year. Canada announced it was pulling out of the Kyoto process last year but is still officially involved in the Kyoto process until Dec. 15.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Five registered non-profits run by super-lobbyist Rick Berman’s for-profit PR firm, Berman & Co., are the target of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint filed this month by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
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A press release from a conservative think tank criticizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provides crucial insight into how the organization works — and helps illustrate that while ALEC says its purpose is to facilitate an exchange of “practical, state-level public policy issues,” it sells access by the private sector to lawmakers and essentially sells policymaking to the highest bidders. The release documents how the “exchange” that happens at ALEC is more like a stock exchange rather than a free marketplace of ideas.
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Censorship
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As a Russian immigrant whose grandparents were killed by Nazis, Irina Chevaldina appreciates the First Amendment better than many Americans.
That is why she is refusing to back down against one of the richest men in Miami, Raanan Katz, a minority owner of the Miami Heat who also owns more than 6,000,000 square feet of retail space in Miami.
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If Parliament votes on the press, the press isn’t free. To split hairs between statutory underpinning and statutory regulation is not an acceptable distinction in a free and democratic country.
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Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.
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The Internet has always been guided forwards by collaborative, open approaches. We believe that these approaches are one of the reasons why the Web has become and remained the wonderful, powerful and empowering place we know today. In the coming weeks, this successful model of governing and shaping the future of the Web will be at risk.
Today, we’re launching a kit of tools and resources to inform and mobilize the Internet community about what’s happening at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and support people in taking grassroots action. Mozilla stands behind transparency in Internet governance, but a free and open Internet depends on you.
On December 3rd, nations from around the world will be meeting in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a meeting of the ITU. These governments will be meeting behind closed doors to determine if an old treaty will be amended to allow countries the power to more fully regulate and control the structure of the Web.
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Remember Raanan Katz? The Florida real estate mogul and part-owner of the Miami Heat, made some news earlier this year for suing Google and a blogger for copyright infringement after the blogger posted an “unflattering” photo of Katz. Katz, who was clearly annoyed at the blogger — a former Katz tenant who is (to put it mildly) not a fan of Katz — for blogging critical stories about Katz (including highlighting some earlier lawsuits Katz had been involved with and posting the related legal documents). In addition to suing for defamation, Katz purchased the rights to the “unflattering” photo the blogger, Irina Chevaldina, had posted of him, and then sued for copyright infringement. Google was included on the case for refusing to take down the photo. While Google was later dropped from the case (one assumes that someone somewhere finally realized that, perhaps that end of the suit wasn’t going to end well), Katz has continued his case against Chevaldina.
Earlier this month, the judge in the case signed off on a ridiculously broad injunction against Chevaldina, that not only says that she can’t “trespass” on Katz’s properties, but that she can’t blog anything that is intended to “otherwise cause harm” to Katz. That doesn’t seem even remotely constitutional. Criticizing someone is protected speech, even if it may (or is intended) to cause harm to someone’s business. And the “trespass” injunction may seem like no big deal, especially since trespassing is already illegal. But, in this case, the court has indicated that by “trespassing” they mean that Chevaldina cannot even go to any of the properties that Katz owns — which includes stores and shopping malls.
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Privacy
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We’ve written a few times about how the FBI has been doing a bang up job foiling its own terrorist plots, so we’re a bit skeptical every time we see headlines of some giant “terrorist bust.” Almost every time, once you dig into the details, it involves some gullible, confused suckers who had no actual connection to terrorists, but were led along by FBI agents and informers until they were “convinced” to take part in a “plot” that was entirely concocted by the FBI. The latest headline-grabbing case of “arrested terrorists” actually appears like it may have slightly more substance, however, in that they may have actually had some sort of connection to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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The trial of former CIA agent and whistle-blower John Kiriakou has prompted many Americans to strongly criticize the Obama administration and its lack of oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Kiriakou, who uncovered the torture program that was started under President Bush and continued under President Obama, will face 30 months in jail and lose his government pension. Since his trial began in April, whistle-blowers such as Kirk Wiebe and William Binney, both of whom worked at the National Security Agency and then left because of mismanagement and corruption, have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar data processing and analysis systems.
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Civil Rights
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The only reason to redact is embarrassment.
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A Senate committee on Thursday unanimously backed sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
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nited States (US) State Department spokesperson on Thursday demanded Pakistan to release Dr. Shakil Afridi, a CIA spy who helped in locating al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in Abbotababad, a garrison town of Pakistan.
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Yesterday I attended the first of the Department of Justice’s Advisory panel meetings on the new Data Protection regulation laws being proposed at the EU.
The new laws are already the subject of intense lobbying and pressure. The key changes are designed to strengthen the privacy rights of citizens, in several ways:
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A couple of months ago, Julian Sanchez wrote about the ridiculous situation in which he filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to reveal the latest semi-annual report from the Justice Department concerning how it was implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. As we’ve been discussing, for a while, how the FISA Amendments Act broadly expanded the ability of federal law enforcement, in particular the NSA, to spy on everyone. While there is some language that suggests it’s only supposed to be used on foreigners, it’s been revealed that there is a secret interpretation of the bill, that likely allows them to use a loophole (plus the secret interpretation) to collect and review tons of data on Americans. The FAA is up for renewal, and it’s likely that Congress will rush through a five year extension — despite overwhelming evidence that many in Congress don’t know how the NSA is interpreting the bill (and even making statements that directly contradict the evidence of how the bill is being used).
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Once again, this seems to raise questions about the process here — and how much of it really has to do with law enforcement officials being careful… and how much of it is purely political, seeking to hide damaging information that might impact the FAA renewal.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way.
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Earlier this summer, we wrote about Syria briefly deleting itself from the internet. We wondered about the logic behind this, seeing as other countries who attempted this — namely, Egypt and Libya — had regime change follow quite closely after such a decision. Furthermore, not too long ago, reports were that the Syrian government was trying to use the internet to get its own story out. Of course, a lot has happened in Syria in the interim. So perhaps views have changed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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It turns out that this holy grail of nicknames is apparently worth suing over, at least in the eyes of a musician. Apparently Mark Durante, a man that the TMZ link describes as a “1980s musician” (meaning he made his bones before Kevin Durant could tie his own shoes), claims he had trademarked the term “Durantula” long ago and has been using it to sell mechandise for years. As such, he is taking Durant, along with Durant’s private company, Nike, and Panini America Inc. (ostensibly so that the trial will be catered with delicious sandwiches), to court over the mark.
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Copyrights
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HONEY OBSESSED anthropomorphic bear Winnie the Pooh made headlines this month for all the wrong reasons.
Pooh, of Pooh Corner, the Hundred Acre Wood, has apparently carved out something of a niche for himself as a model and no longer stresses about honey, attempts to cheer up a donkey, or takes an interest in the machinations of a piglet. Nay, instead he is lending his face to children’s laptops these days.
One of those laptops was confiscated from a nine year old girl this month, simply because she might have downloaded one CD.
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About ORG: a digital rights campaigning organisation. We care about the impact of technology and technology policy on our rights, on society and the public. We work across privacy, government surveillance, open data, and freedom of expression.
We were founded in 2005 and are sustained by around 1,500 paying supporters and grants from institutions like Open Society Foundation, Sigrid Rausing and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.
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Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.
“The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies,” the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague.
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Thank you for your letter on November 23rd, 2012, (which we have reposted below in its entirety, minus your contact info) in which you mistakenly suggest that Techdirt has infringed the copyrights of your company, Human Synergistics, via its post from October 5th, 2012, entitled Copyright As Censorship: Author Removes Blog Post After Being Threatened For Quoting 4 Sentences. First of all, it is astounding that you do not appear to recognize the irony of threatening us over a blog post that goes into detail as to why someone else’s use of a tiny snippet of your company’s work was quite clearly fair use under US copyright law. In fact, it leads one to wonder if you even read the post in question before sending your letter.
Even if we ignore the question of whether or not that original blog post by Patti O’Shea constituted fair use, I can assure you that Techdirt’s use is fair use. Furthermore, your claim that a lack of permission to quote your silly exercise (solely for the purpose of explaining your overaggressive use of copyright law to censor people against your own best interests) is somehow “a direct violation of our copyright” is absolutely false. It is not just false, but an exaggeration of the rights you hold under copyright law — a situation called “Copyfraud” by legal scholar Jason Mazzone.
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Over the past few days, a post concerning copyright claims began making the rounds on Facebook, presumably written in response to the news that Facebook would no longer be letting its users vote on site policies. This announcement arrived with the news that Facebook would also be combining profiles across various other services like Instagram.
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The simple fact that this semi-viral post is completely wrong shows how colossally screwed up our current copyright system is. People are still under the impression that copyright needs to be “declared” (usually with the © symbol). Many also seem to think that if they “declare” copyright and trot out a million limitations, everyone approaching their copyrighted content is obliged to follow every stipulation. Facebook users are picking up the clues that maximalists are dropping and cobbling together legal-sounding threats with nothing behind them. What Facebook users really want isn’t the same thing maximalists want. Behind this flawed statement is the feeling that Facebook “gave” users a place to share their photos, etc. with friends and family, but now it wants to turn uploaded content into marketing tools.
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We know that when music streaming services became available in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, illegal downloads were halved. The BPI’s obsession with punishing illegal download sites blinds it to the fact that Google plans to launch a far better way of dealing with them: not through extrajudicial censorship in the form of doctored search results, but simply by offering something that people are happy to pay for. The UK recording industry should be embracing new ventures like Google Play Music wholeheartedly, not using them as bargaining chips in its pointless fight over search results.
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