05.28.15
Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The future promises to bring us many things: solar powerered hoverboards, giant underground cities on Mars, and slightly less painful dentistry. But what about in Linux? How do you think our operating system will look like in 10 years? Maybe we’ll all be controlling our Wayland-powered Gnome 18 desktops via eye movement trackers, or perhaps the long-established desktop metaphors will ultimately win and not much will drastically change.
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The Intel Compute Stick has begun shipping, a tiny device that plugs into any HDMI TV or monitor and turns it into a fully-functioning computer. This low-power PC ships with Windows 8.1 or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, though at the moment the Windows version is first to market with the Ubuntu Compute Stick not widely shipping until June. I have an Intel Compute Stick at Phoronix for testing.
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Linux is one of the most astoundingly functional and utilitarian Operating Systems around when it comes to working from the command line. Need to perform a particular task? Odds are there is an application or script you can use to get it done. Right from the terminal. But, as they say in the good book, “All work and no play make Jack really bored or something.” So here is a collection of my favorite pointless, stupid, annoying or amusing things that you can do right in your Linux Terminal.
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Desktop
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On Linux there are a few open source alternatives to the Thunderbird email client. There’s Evolution, KMail, Claws-Mail, Alpine (if you’re really old-school), and a handful of other clients (most of which, don’t live up to anyone’s expectations). There’s also a new kid on the email block. That kid is the brainchild of Yorba. Meet Geary, the new default IMAP email client for the GNOME desktop (and the likes of Elementary OS Freya).
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Dell has been moving a lot of interesting moves lately and it’s focusing on the Linux side of the business, which can only be a good thing for the open source platform.
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Security
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Security researchers have published proof-of-concept code for a major router vulnerability leveraging a popular Linux kernel driver that could be used by hackers to compromise millions of connected devices.
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Last year was news about Russia wanting to design its own processors to be less reliant upon Intel and AMD. The initial “Baikal” processor was expected to be based on ARMv8 but it turns out now that it’s a MIPS design.
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Linux/Moose allows cybercriminals to skim unencrypted information about users’ social media accounts that then can be used to sign up those individuals as social media followers for people and businesses that pay for followers, according to James Quin, senior director of content & C-suite communities at CDM Media.
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Kubuntu/Canonical Feud
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To me there seems to be a lot of similarities between above and personal experience with moderating. Basically: don’t moderate in threads you’ve participated in because you’re biased. If you think you’re unbiased, guess again and have fun dealing with the fallout if you still take a decision. I thought a few times that I really could be unbiased and was proven wrong each time.
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The Ubuntu Community Council has made a rather troublesome discovery regarding the accounting of $143,000 in donations. From the looks of it, no one knows how this money was spent.
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By now, you’ve probably met the donate page on Ubuntu, the one you see when you go to download an Ubuntu ISO. This donation page has led to a schism between the Ubuntu Community Council and Jonathan Riddell, the ‘leader’ of the Kubuntu project. All stemming from a perceived lack of transparency regarding donations made to Canonical.
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Jonathan’s questions to the CC about a legal issue and that of funds donated to the flavors were not personal, but done on behalf of the Ubuntu community, and on behalf of us, the Kubuntu Council and the Kubuntu community as a whole. We are still concerned about both these issues, but that pales in comparison to the serious breach in governance we’ve experienced this past week.
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He has also stated his intent to leave the Ubuntu community. “I also wish to extend my personal apology to the Kubuntu community for keeping this private for as long as we did. Generally, I don’t believe such an approach is consistent with our values, but I supported keeping it private in the hope that it would be easier to achieve a mutually beneficial resolution of the situation privately. Now that it’s clear that is not going to happen, I (and others in the KC) could not in good faith keep this private.”
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I’m disappointed in the way the Ubuntu Community Council has handled this and I think the way they treated Jonathan is appalling, even taking into account that he could’ve communicated his grievances better. I’m also unconvinced that the Ubuntu Community Council is at all beneficial to the Ubuntu community in its current form. The way it is structured and reports to the SABDFL makes that it will always favour Canonical when there’s a conflict of interest. I brought this up with two different CC members last year who both provided shruggy answers in the vein of “Sorry, but we have a framework that’s set up on how we can work in here and there’s just so much we can do about it.” – they seem to fear the leadership too much to question it, and it’s a pity, because everyone makes mistakes.
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Canonical has a community team that interacts with the users and Nicholas Skaggs is part of that team. He wasn’t involved in the discussions regarding Jonathan Riddell, but he posted a lengthy post on his blog explaining what is the Community Council and why it’s important to respect its decisions. One phrase, in particular, is very interesting.
“So please respect the authority of our community governance structure. Respect those who serve on both councils. Not satisfied? We vote again on Community Council members this year! Think we should tweak/enhance/change our governance structure? I welcome the discussion! I enjoyed learning more about ubuntu governance, and I challenge you to do the same before you let your emotions run with your decisions”, wrote Nicholas Skaggs.
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I’m very happy to join the Kubuntu Team and look forward to supporting the project through contributions in my spare time.
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You too can let folks know that you support Jonathan Riddell just like the Kubuntu Council has by tweeting with hashtag #ISupportJonathan or using this nifty banner on social media.
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A storm of accusations, claims, and furious counterclaims has hit the Ubuntu penguins, with a community cleaved of its head following allegations of unsavory behavior.
Long-time Kubuntu dev Jonathan Riddell has been dismissed as head of Kubuntu and removed from all positions of responsibility within the Ubuntu community.
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It truly saddens me to see all this FUD being thrown around, by folks that up till recently I had great respect for.
Couple things that do not sit well with me at all.
1) Absolutely zero communication to the Kubuntu Council about the “issues” with Jonathan prior to the shocking “request”.
2) The Kubuntu Council asked (repeatedly) for one thing: proof. This still has not been provided.
So what was suppose to happen here? Evidently bow down, walk away and happily work away silenced.
This is NOT the open source / FLOSS way. At least not to my understanding. Perhaps I have misunderstood the meaning all these years.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Wayland 1.7.93 and Weston 1.7.93 are now available, a.k.a. the second release candidates to Wayland 1.8.
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Benchmarks
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Yesterday I ran some fresh tests of Intel Ivy Bridge on the latest Mesa Git code to see if the performance has changed much recently for the slightly-older generation of Intel HD Graphics. Today I’ve done some similar tests in kernel-space with the Linux 4.1 kernel.
I ran benchmarks from the same Core i7 3770K system while testing the vanilla Linux 3.19, 4.0, and 4.1 Git kernels and running various graphics tests to see if there’s been any recent i915 DRM kernel changes affecting the Ivy Bridge graphics performance.
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From an Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 system with the Linux 3.19 kernel, I ran some tests on an Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge desktop system in our labs. Compared was the stock Mesa 10.5.2 on Ubuntu 15.04 against Mesa 10.7-devel Git as of this week.
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Applications
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Samba, the world’s most used software solution for accessing shared Windows directories over a network in GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, has been updated to version 4.2.2.
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The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.1.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
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Midnight Commander (MC) is a text-based Command Line Interface (CLI) program. It is particularly useful when a GUI is not available but can also be used as a primary file manager in a terminal session even when you are using a GUI. I use Midnight Commander frequently because I often have need to interact with local and remote Linux computers using the CLI. It can be used with almost any of the common shells and remote terminals through SSH.
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As a reminder, Cinnamon 2.6.3 has been recently released, adding only fixes to the previous release from the Cinnamon 2.6 series.
Among others, the use-system configuration key has been split into three different keys, the calendar applet is not properly refreshed, the pidgin tray icons have been updated, the on-screen keyboard has been enhanced and the date format setting is now respected in the notification applet. The full changelog can be read here.
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Boomaga is an open source virtual printer software, having support for the most popular printers, via CUPS and Gutenprint.
Unlike CUPS and Gutenprint which provide drivers for printers, the Boomaga virtual printer enables the users to view the document before printing, adjust the margins of the page, manage the number of documents per page, export the to be printed files as PDFs and others.
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Indicator Netspeed Unity is an Ubuntu AppIndicator which displays the current network upload / download speed on the panel. Despite its name, it should work with any panel that supports AppIndicators.
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System administrators are aware as how important their systems security is, not just the runtime of their servers. Intruders, spammers, DDOS attack, crackers, are all out there trying to get into people’s computers, servers and everywhere they can lay hands on and interrupt the normal runtime of services. Being able to identify tools and techniques to harden your systems is a key play on securing your systems. Moreover, choosing the right tools is a matter of experience. You should try most of them, or perhaps the ones that are popular. I chose free and open source software because, if I want to, I can check the applications source code and see for myself how did programmers wrote the software, how did they manage to keep the software easy to understand etc.
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Though Linux is often seen as being immune to malware it’s still important to have protection, partly because Linux malware does exist, even if it’s rare, and partly to prevent the passing on of viruses to more vulnerable operating systems like Windows and Android.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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This past week I’ve been reading up on a variety of B-tree algorithms. These have been around since the early 1970s and are extremely common in all sorts of software, so one might expect that after 40+ years of continuous use of such a simple concept that there’d be very little to talk about, but it’s quite a vast territory. In fact, each year for the last two decades Donald Knuth has held a public lecture around Christmas-time about trees. (Yes, they are Christmas Tree Lectures. 
Some of the papers I’ve been reading were published in just the last few years, with quite a bit of interesting research having gone on in this area over the last decade.
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You may be aware that Debian has switched from SysV to systemd as the init system. As a result systemd is the default init system for the recently released Debian 8.
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Games
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We wrote about the game when developer Sparweed was looking for beta testers in September. I took part in the beta, along with a Steam friend, and was able to play it then. The game was very prone to crash for no apparent reason at the time though, and it also had several other issues, including problems with input and the Steam overlay. Thankfully, the game is in a much better state now, and after playing for about half an hour yesterday, neither I nor my friend encountered any of the issues we experienced before.
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I bought Hero of the Kingdom and was going to just give it a quick test before writing it up, but before I knew it an hour had flown by. The premise is that your farm has been burned down by bandits, and not having anywhere to stay, you go out on a quest to find your father. Along your way, you meet all sorts of people who will help you find your way, as long as you help them with various tasks. The story isn’t deep and the writing is simple stuff, but it has its charm and is definitely serviceable.
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So this just happened! It would appear that Valve just took the decision, without asking users first, to change the Tux logo with the SteamOS one on both the Steam website and the desktop client.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As Bastien hinted in his last blog post, we now have some new test firmware for the ColorHugALS device. The ever-awesome Benjamin Tissoires has been hacking on an alternative device firmware, this time implementing the Sensor HID interface that Microsoft is suggesting vendors use for internal ambient light sensors on tablets and laptops for Windows 8.
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I unfortunately have some terrible news, Marco Pesenti Gritti passed away last Saturday in London, after a long fight against cancer. He was with his family and in good medical hands. He leaves behind his girlfriend Daniela and 4 year old daughter Daniela. I had the chance to say goodbye last week, and convey thoughts and support for his coworkers, current and passed.
I was lucky to have worked with Marco for many years at litl, on a very broad range of projects, and had the chance to count him as a good friend. He was the most passionate and dedicated hacker I knew, and I know he was extremely respected in the GNOME community, for his work on Epiphany, Evince and Sugar among many others, just like he was at litl. Those who knew him personally know he was also an awesome human being.
We will try to help his family as much as we can. He will be sorely missed.
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GNOME’s Mutter window manager was updated to v3.17.2 today as the latest development version in the road to GNOME 3.18.
Of importance to Mutter 3.17.2 is that it now supports X11/Wayland clipboard interoperation. Now the clipboard contents from copying and pasting can be done between native X11 and Wayland applications, which previously wasn’t possible up until now for those running a mix of X11 and Wayland programs on the desktop.
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Gnome is a great great desktop environment that offers an elegant and simplified Linux experience. These are the 5 best distros for Gnome that offer it as the default DE.
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The GNOME Project is about to release the second development release towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.
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The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier software that is used by default in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, including Ubuntu, has received a new update in preparation for GNOME 3.17.2.
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Cinnamon developers have just released a new version of the desktop environment today, 2.6.3. The packages are now available for testing in Linux Mint 17.1 and Linux Mint Debian 2, via the Romeo unstable repository.
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Modern Linux distros are designed to appeal to a large number of users. As a result, they have become too bloated for older machines or systems with limited resources. If you don’t have several gig of RAM to spare and an extra core or two, these distros may not deliver the best performance for you. Thankfully, there are many lightweight distros that you can use to breathe new life into older hardware.
But there’s one caveat when working with lightweight distros – they usually manage to function with limited resources by cutting away just about everything you take for granted, such as wizards and scripts which make everyday tasks easier.
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New Releases
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Clonezilla Live is a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that lets users back up their systems and perform other kinds of maintenance work for the OS. New updates are released all the time, and the main packages are always getting upgraded to newer versions.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The Paris-based company behind the Mandriva Linux distro has gone into liquidation.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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An estimated 45,000 students from a province in Indonesia have enhanced their education and computer-usage knowledge through a pilot program using Linux and openSUSE that is expected to become a nationwide educational program.
From 2009 to 2014, the project called “Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Utilization for Educational Quality Enhancement in Yogyakarta Province” used openSUSE and created material with Linux to enhance educational quality and equality in Yogyakarta Province schools.
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Slackware Family
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I am trying to keep up with a monthly release of KDE 5 (Plasma5) packages for Slackware-current. So far, so good, and every month I have been able to make a significant difference. Today the KDE developers released an update to Plasma 5 while earlier this month you could have noticed updates for Frameworks and Applications. Time for some new packages for Slackware land!
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has announced Cloud Suite for Applications, an accelerated way to develop, deploy, and manage applications at scale using open source technologies. The new cloud offering helps enterprises reduce silos and enable more efficient OpenStack cloud deployments. Through the platform, Red Hat is offering IaaS, PaaS and management in an open environment, supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the ability to leverage certified hardware of choice.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat CloudForms 3.2, the latest version of its award-winning solution for managing private and hybrid clouds. CloudForms 3.2 delivers innovative management features that enable customers to automate the deployment and management of OpenStack infrastructures, using advanced management instrumentation available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release (based on OpenStack Kilo).
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Jim Whitehurst
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Want a job at Red Hat? If so, prepare to buy your interviewer coffee, lunch and maybe even the petrol needed to drive to the coffee shop.
That’s what happened to the company’s CEO Jim Whitehurst when he was interviewed by his predecessor Matthew Szulik.
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In a brand-new book, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst explains what he’s learned from leading the largest open source company and how the lessons can be applied
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In The Open Organization, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst presents a compelling, modern alternative to the traditional, top-down hierarchy of business organization. I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitehurst for TechCrunch.com in early 2012, and the seeds of many of the ideas in the book were clearly present even then. Reading The Open Organization felt, in some ways, like the conclusion to that interview.
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In my line of work, I get a lot of questions. Most of these are along the lines of “What’s it like to be CEO of an open source company” or “Where do you see technology moving over the next year?”
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 was released on Tuesday, luckily avoiding a deadline setback. Users who upgrade to the new release should be able to expect a new package manager which will be faster than the YUM which it, DNF, is replacing.
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As was the case with Fedora 21, Fedora 22 is available in cloud, server and workstation editions. Underpinning all three editions is the new Linux 4.0 kernel, which was first released on April 12. Among the big new features that the Linux 4.0 kernel introduces is live kernel patching.
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This article will walk through the process of upgrading Fedora 21 to Fedora 22 with use of Fedora Updater tool called FedUp.
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If you’re currently running a Xen hypervisor on a Fedora release before 22, stay put for now.
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Peter Robinson has announced that Fedora 22 for AArch64, a community-driven and -built operating system, has been released and is now available for download.
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THE FEDORA PROJECT, Red Hat’s community arm, has announced the arrival of Fedora 22, the latest version of its open source Linux OS.
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The Fedora Workstation edition is a reliable, user-friendly, and powerful operating system for your laptop or desktop computer. It supports a wide range of developers, from hobbyists and students to professionals in corporate environments. Fedora 22 Workstation builds on the previous initial release of Fedora 21 Workstation, providing a set of enhancements designed to boost your workflow and help your productivity.
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In a sentence, it’s another winner in a long line of winners from Fedora.
If you’re a Fedora user, you’ll love Fedora 22. If you’re not a Fedora user and want to try it, it’s worth the effort to get it to where you want it. The caveat here is that you may have to tweak it a bit to do what more mainstream distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu do out of the box. If you’re up to it, then go for it.
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This is a reminder email about the end of life process for Fedora 20.
Fedora 20 will reach end of life on 2015-06-23, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 22, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 20 collection.
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Chapeau is a Linux distribution based on the Fedora workstation edition, and its developers are working to release a new version that is based on the latest Fedora 22 that was just released.
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Fedy, previously named Fedora Utils, is an open-source post install tool that helps the users to enable support for multimedia codecs, install new fonts, install Adobe Flash Player, Oracle Java, Atom, Brackets, Oracle Java plugins, Android Studio and other important software which is not available via the default repos. Also, the tool provides the users a way to disable unnecessary services, add sudo permissions to some users or enable automatic login.
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Now that the Fedora 22 Linux has been released, it is time to upgrade your old Fedora 21 installations. As such, we can announce today that the Fedora Project developers have prepared some neat instructions and an awesome tool that will help you get started.
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The latest version of Fedora, the Linux distribution that helps shape the features that make it into Red Hat’s (RHT) open source platforms, is out this week, sporting updates in the realms of containerization, server databases, file storage and the GNOME desktop.
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Dear Fedora fans, we are sorry to inform you today, May 28, that the Fedora Project will drop support for the Fedora 20 Linux operating system starting June 23, 2015, as the distribution reaches end of life (EOL).
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Fedora 22 was released earlier this week, and if you are running Fedora 21, you will probably want to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Fedora. Luckily, there is a tool called FedUp that is easiest way to upgrade to Fedora 22.
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It was barely more than a month ago that Red Hat made Fedora 22 available in beta form. If you’ve been holding out for a final release, today is your day — Fedora 22 received its final coat of polish is now available in three different editions.
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Fedora 22 was released two days ago with many added and improved features. As we all know, Fedora is upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is commercially supported by Red Hat, Inc. It is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Since Fedora 22 comes up with plenty of new features, one of the notable feature is DNF.
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Debian Family
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Debian 8.1 is planned for release on next Saturday.
Debian developers are aiming to have Debian 8.1, the first point release to “Jessie”, out on 6 June.
Adam Barratt confirmed the imminent Debian 8.1 plans via this mailing list post from Sunday.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition users will be happy to know that the next major software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system from Canonical will arrive sometime in the middle of next week.
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HP Laptops with Ubuntu 14.04 Available for Purchase Now, £100 Cash Back Limited Offer
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Aura from Entroware is new mini-PC powered by some very powerful hardware and shipping with either Ubuntu 15.04 or Ubuntu MATE 15.04.
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Canonical has been working on a way to ensure that Ubuntu Touch users have an easy time moving from one branch to another, and they have implemented a solution for this problem.
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The NVIDIA Shield Tablet is a gaming device built by Nvidia that has very specific user niche, but a user of this tablet managed to run Ubuntu on it; not the mobile version, but the desktop one.
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For those who came in late, Nvidia wanted its tablet as a gaming device with a specific user niche.However But it seems that Popescu Sorin has managed to run the full version of Ubuntu with all its touch screen goodness.
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As expected, Canonical was present at the OpenStack Summit 2015 event that took place in Vancouver, British Columbia between May 18-22.
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The development cycle for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) seem to be going smoothly and Canonical is already tracking a new Linux kernel, 4.1, which will eventually get released by Linus Torvalds.
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Canonical is preparing for the launch of the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition in Europe and it looks like Bq is also preparing to release a new phone on the European market as well.
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Canonical will be kicking off June by making some announcements with their partners for new Ubuntu Phones in Europe.
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A new NTFS-3G vulnerability-related patch has been published for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), and it looks that an annoying problem has been closed, finally.
Some of the Ubuntu users might remember that just last week a patch was released for an NTFS-3G vulnerability that could have allowed the library to overwrite files as the administrator. NTFS-3G is the component that deal with read/write NTFS driver for FUSE.
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As a reminder, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf is scheduled for release on the 22nd of October 2015, for now being in its early development stages, only daily builds being available.
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Canonical now facilitates the users to easily switch from one Ubuntu Touch development branch to another, without having to flash the phone. Despite the fact that installing Ubuntu Touch is not difficult, backing up and restoring data can be annoying.
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At the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was debating an initial public offering for Canonical Software, Ubuntu’s commercial division. The news was interpreted as a sign of success in many circles, but whether making Canonical a public company would be a wise move seems doubtful at best.
As reported by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Canonical has been considering the idea for several months, but has not yet made a definite decision. Yet the idea has been raised because of the success of Canonical’s OpenStack consulting division, which has apparently become the first Canonical venture to become profitable, and includes partnerships with Microsoft and VMWare. “We now have a story that the market will understand,” Shuttleworth is reported as saying.
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Ubuntu TV was one of the early attempts from Canonical to branch out on other platforms, and it showed great promise, but it didn’t get anywhere. The project is currently shelved, but it’s interesting to see that Canonical was thinking about convergence long before they started to publicize it.
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Canonical recently released the Ubuntu 14.04 Long-Term Support (LTS) which is the first Ubuntu LTS project in two years. The Long Term Support (LTS) will be supported for five years by Canonical and is a free alternative for expensive Windows Operating System (OS). Ubuntu released the 12.04 back in 2012 but the 14.04 is more stable, reliable and cost effective. It is a good option where large scale deployments are required.
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As a reminder, the first two Ubuntu phones are developed by Bq and Meizu. The Bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition has been already available in all the European countries, but the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition can be ordered only in China, for now.
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Canonical have sent out an email to some people saying that they are invited to a Hangout on Monday June 1 to hear the announcement of a new BQ device running Ubuntu Touch. BQ already released the Aquaris device earlier this year. In the email it also says that the Ubuntu MX4 will be available in Europe ‘very soon’.
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Flavours and Variants
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The first edition of Linux Mint Debian will reach EOL status (end of life) in January, 2016, and users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.
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Micro/sys’s compact, rugged “SBC1654″ SBC runs Linux on an i.MX515 SoC and offers a Spartan-6 FPGA, dual MIPI-CSI camera inputs, and dual 10/100 Ethernet.
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Ka-Ro’s SODIMM-style “TXA5″ COM runs Linux on Atmel’s SAMA5D42 SoC, offers Ethernet, LCD, USB, GPIO, and serial I/O, and supports industrial temperatures.
The TXA5 is the first Atmel-based member of the Ka-Ro Electronics family of “TX” COMs. Most of Ka-Ro’s COMs have used Freescale processors, and many have been sold under the Strategic Test label, including the i.MX283-based TX-28S from 2012.
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I’ll admit it, I was skeptical about how useful smartwatches might be. But after wearing and using a smartwatch, I found it to be as useful as my smartphone — although usefulness is highly dependent on the features and capabilities of each individual smartwatch.
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The “Internet of Things,” or IoT, has the potential to change the way we interact with the devices and objects in our homes and lives.
The IoT is the idea that all of the devices and gadgets that you interact with could be connected to the internet.
To make this work, the “things” would need sensors, actuators and a way to connect to the Internet. And software to run them, of course.
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NASA has long had an interest in Linux and other open source technologies, and has used Linux in a variety of systems, including the R2 humanoid robot now at work at the International Space Station. With its International NASA Space App Challenge, the space agency is tapping into the maker gestalt to come up with new ideas, as well as inspire future space engineers. In this year’s two-day Space App Challenge hackathon, which ran April 10-11 in 133 cities around the world, NASA greeted participants with over 25 challenges split into Earth, Outer Space, Humans, and Robotics categories.
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Phones
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Finnish mobile upstart Jolla, whose linux-based Sailfish OS is marketed as a more flexible alternative to the dominant platforms of Android and iOS, is stepping up its push to win friends and influence mobile users in the BRICS cluster of emerging markets — ahead of the release of Sailfish 2.0 this summer, which will be the first version of its OS that OEMs can license.
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Android
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Smartphones and cars can focus on what each one does best with the arrival of this new dashboard connection technology.
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Reviewers say it trounces old-school in-car navigation systems
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General Motors will allow Apple and Android smartphone owners to connect with MyLink infotainment systems in 14 of its 19 Chevrolet models beginning later this year, CEO Mary Barra announced Wednesday at the Code tech conference in Southern California.
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The first production car model integrated with Android Auto has rolled off the shop floor — and it is a Hyundai 2015 Sonata.
On Tuesday, the South Korean automaker announced the launch of Android Auto within its production vehicles, starting with the 2015 Sonata with Navigation model.
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And that’s how Android Auto, Google’s infotainment interface that can be installed in just about any new car, led me to the western edge of San Francisco, where I ate my sandwich, drank my soda, and watched the waves.
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When it comes to the update of Android 5.0 (also known as Android L or Lollipop), it has been very slow to rollout on even the newer models of Android handsets and tablets. None have been more slow to roll out to users than the Android Lollipop update for the Sony Xperia and Samsung Galaxy Series. This is what we know about the Lollipop update for both phone series with carriers like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
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I love my Android phone. Coming from an iPhone, I found the level of control with Android to be far superior to what I experienced with iOS. For me, it was the applications that sold me on Android. In this article, I’ll be sharing my must have Android applications. These apps range from critical to making life easier and everything in-between.
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The question is: Can people be happy with a simple smartwatch when there are more advanced, albeit complicated, ones? Right now, Android owners looking for a watch should focus on Pebble, but if Google ever gets its act together and streamlines the Android Wear user experience, Pebble’s days could be numbered.
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Remember App Ops? Back in Jelly Bean 4.3, the feature could be accessed by resourceful users to switch on or off permissions for individual apps. By KitKat 4.4.2, the feature was completely hidden from users. Google’s explanation was that App Ops was never meant for public consumption – it was devised for internal debugging only. But users had gotten a taste of granular app permission controls and wanted more.
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If this sounds familiar, it should. This is Google Now.
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Chevrolet is putting big support behind both Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto for its 2016 fleet of cars and trucks. The company has announced that 14 models in all will be compatible with the in-dash software powered by iPhone and Android smartphones, respectively. Chevy claims this tops all other automakers.
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As we approach the end of May we approach the start of the Samsung Android 5.1 Lollipop release. With that in mind, we take a look at everything we know so far about Samsung’s upcoming Android 5.1 Lollipop update for Galaxy smartphones.
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Google announced the existence of Android Pay back in March at Mobile World Congress, but details were fairly slim at the time. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome, and Apps, called it an “API layer” that would let other companies support secure payments for Android both in apps and in physical stores, but how exactly it would work remained unclear. However, one day before Google I/O kicks off, we’re learning more — The New York Times just revealed some new details on Android Pay.
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Are you ready to watch ALL THE PIXELS? You certainly are if you’ve got a fancy 4K TV – the new top-of-the-line industry standard is begging for content, and Netflix is at the front of the queue. The streaming service has been offering some of its home-grown shows like House of Cards and Daredevil in 4K resolution to subscribers of a premium $12-a-month plan. Now you can access that sweet “UltraHD” video on Android TV… if you’ve got compatible hardware.
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Google is expected to expand its services deeper into wearable devices and the Internet of Things on Thursday and Friday during its Google I/O developers conference, which may include a reboot of the now-defunct Google Glass smart visor that it debuted at the 2012 convention.
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With Android, it’s a numbers game. Plain and simple. You want choice in devices, Android gives you that. Sure, it’s a bit of a minefield and you might come across some brands that you’ve never heard off, or incredibly convincing fakes that run a fully working version of Android (no counterfeiter has managed to successfully load a dodgy version of iOS on to a device yet).
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Unlike the Chromecast, which uses Google’s proprietary casting technology, Lenovo Cast is built on Miracast and DLNA, the standards that are available in most modern Android devices (sometimes under the Miracast option and other times under Wireless Display). It completely mirrors your phone or tablet’s display, acting like a wireless HDMI connection between them and the TV. On the downside, if your device’s screen turns off you’ll see nothing on the TV, but on the upside, Miracast is less reliant on WiFi networks so it should work where the Chromecast usually stumbles like hotel rooms for example.
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It looks like SourceForge has taken over the account of GIMP user Jernej Simončič who was maintaining the Windows version of the project.
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SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP’s lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an installer replete with advertisements.
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GIMP is not the only program. According to Ars Technica, a SourceForge staffer appears to have taken control of the SourceForge repository for all these projects:
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The release of the Genode OS 15.05 Operating System Framework is now available and it’s quite a sizable release.
Genode OS 15.05 is shipping with a new AHCI driver, new audio drivers ported from OpenBSD, new SD-card drives, platform support for the i.MX6, and multi-touch support.
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DocHive is an open source Ruby on Rails project for capturing data from image-based PDFs. Created for journalists and other professionals who need a more efficient way to extract meaning for tedious data, DocHive is in development and ready for testing in the community.
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Women are drastically underrepresented in the open source movement. Of the open source contributions made in 2013, only 11 percent were made by women, according to a survey of the open source community.
Girl Develop It wanted to change that. That’s why the nonprofit partnered with civic hacking group Code for Philly last year to launch a summer-long open source fellowship for women. Fellows said the program helped them find their place in the tech community.
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There is one project called the LHC Open Network Environment (LHCONE) that was originally conceived to help with operations that involved multiple centers. To understand this, though, I have to explain the structure of the data and computing facilities.
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In my last article for Linux.com, I explored a few ways newcomers to open source projects can get started. While there are many resources to explore open source project communities, choosing which project to contribute to can still be a quite daunting task. You could go searching in the more than 23 million repositories on GitHub, the world’s largest source code hosting platform. But there are better ways. This article is meant to be a short guide to help novice open source practitioners more easily identify the first project they’d like to contribute to.
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At the end of last month, I had the unique opportunity to participate with a few of my work colleagues on the US2020 RTP STEM EXPO. About 500 students from North Carolina interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) showed up to the event. My colleagues and I gathered around a couple of tables and chatted with students, teachers, administrators, and parents about open source, open hardware, and programming.
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Open-source software makes the computer code at its heart publicly accessible. This in turn means that anyone can update it or change it to suit their own needs. Closed-source, or proprietary software, remains the property of its original authors, who are the only ones legally allowed to copy or modify it. So Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a closed-source product, but if you are reading this article on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, you are making use of an open-source product. The authors of those browsers have made the source code available to you, and – if you were so inclined – you could view the code, copy it, learn from it, alter it and share it. But read to the end before you dive in.
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With a swarm of developers from around the world converging on San Francisco’s Moscone Center tomorrow for Google I/O, Twitter wants them to keep the company’s real-time social platform at the top of mind. This afternoon it announced that its developer tools for integrating Twitter into Android apps have been open-sourced, with the projects now hosted publicly on Github.
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The Intercept and its publisher First Look Media strongly believe in the benefits of free and open source software — in part because we rely on such software every day. To keep our journalists and sources safe, we use secure communication tools like the data-encryption system GnuPG, the Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, the SecureDrop communications platform, and the secure calling and texting app Signal. To publish on the web, we use the GNU/Linux operating system; the Apache web server; OpenSSL, a web encryption library; WordPress, the open-source blogging engine; and Piwik, which tracks web traffic. The list goes on.
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With Ice Cream Sandwich, Google introduced Roboto to the world. Since then, the family (designed by Googler Christian Robertson) has expanded to include a set of slab serif fonts, and has even seen a major revision introduced with Android 5.0 last year.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Providing security in OpenStack is not as easy as simply deploying a firewall and enabling antivirus. Many additional controls need to be deployed.
Security is a key concern across all sectors of modern IT and is often noted as a primary barrier to adoption for cloud computing. Security was a key focus of many sessions at the OpenStack Summit, which ran from May 18 to May 22 in Vancouver, B.C. Several sessions covered how to properly deploy and configure OpenStack clouds securely. Security is also being baked into the development of OpenStack itself though a number of different initiatives.
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Databases
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The intensifying competition in the NoSQL world is driving Basho Technologies Inc. to move up the value chain with a new platform promising to provide a unified environment for storing and processing the growing amounts of unstructured data entering the corporate network. It’s the latest realization of the tried and true one-shop-stop approach to differentiation in the enterprise.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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THE DOCUMENT FOUNDATION, curator of the LibreOffice suite, has announced LibreOffice Viewer for Android.
LibreOffice Viewer is the first native application from the group to offer Open Document Format documents.
The term ‘Viewer’ should be emphasised at present, as the Foundation acknowledges that it is not ready for “mission critical tasks” in edit mode, and indeed users have to opt in to editing within settings.
It is an important first step, however, and the community is already working on a fuller version that offers more of the expected features.
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CMS
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For rapidly growing organizations, global expansion introduces hosts of new challenges. As you are spinning out more sites, you will likely be opening the door to new regional sites featuring local translations. In this scenario, a content management system (CMS) with multilingual capabilities isn’t just a nice feature to have, but rather a necessity.
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Education
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OPALS is licensed under a GPL license, and libraries can elect to support it on their own hardware or have it hosted by Media Flex in the United States, or by Bibliofiche in Canada and internationally. Media Flex hosts nearly two thirds of the 2,000 libraries worldwide currently using OPALS. The other third are self-hosted and supported by MediaFlex.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is a feature release, focused primarily on the continued development of traits. This release succeeds v0.2.4, which was released 07 Aug, 2014.
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Project Releases
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A test build of Blender 2.75 was released this past week and it will be of interest to a lot of open-source designers and artists.
Blender 2.75 notably has added initial support for OpenCL on AMD Radeon GPUs with the Cycles Rendering. The AMD OpenCL support is coming as the Cycles compute kernels have finally been split into smaller kernels, so they now compile and work for AMD GPUs. However, the AMD OpenCL stack failing to work with transparent shadows due to a compiler bug. The AMD OpenCL improvements for Blender was work led by AMD that we previously covered on Phoronix.
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The Blender Foundation has informed users today, May 27, about the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta test build of the forthcoming Blender 2.75 open-source and cross-platform 3D modelling software.
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Licensing
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The Symphony Foundation joins the growing number of technology companies that are embracing open-source licensing for better industry collaboration. The Symphony Foundation will use the Apache License 2.0, which allows for the broadest use and adoption of Symphony code adaptations, and will be open to the community in early 2016.
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Openness/Sharing
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Over the nearly two decades that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has spent inventing things, he’s figured out that one of the most important ingredients of new ideas is something closer to play—experiments taken on not to profit immediately, or to develop a product, but because they’re flat-out fascinating. It’s what he figured out at MIT Media Lab, where he first became Internet Famous after his correspondence with a Nike customer service representative over getting the word “sweatshop” stitched into his sneakers went viral. And it’s what he promoted at the Brooklyn art and technology nonprofit where he built Eyebeam OpenLab, an open-source research and development space for artists.
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Open Hardware
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We believe the Cubic SoC board has a lot more performance and capability than other similar products out there (e.g., Arduino or Raspberry Pi) and — using the Cyclone FPGA’s pin migration capability — adding additional hardware resources by building the same board with a larger capacity FPGA is possible. All that processing power does, however, come at a price premium, probably retailing for sub-$200, which we believe is still very accessible for many hobbyists and commercial product developers.
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Exiii, which consists of graduates from Sony’s manufacturing industry including Gentu Kondo, Hiroshi Yamaura, Tetsuya Konishi and by Akira Morikawa – have concluded the first iteration of their Open Source HACKberry bionic hand and have just released all of the design files online for others to use in creating their own bionic hands using a 3D printer and some basic hardware components – including an existing smartphone for the onboard computer.
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One exciting thing about 3D-printed prostheses is that the designs are all freely available open source and constantly evolving. Holmes-Siedle is particularly interested in tensioning, and the fishing wire that acts as tendons in the prosthetic hands. He made some changes to the basic design of Joe’s hand and within minutes of sharing his new designs online, other volunteers around the world were printing, testing and giving feedback on the adjustment. He’s now working on a new revision based on what he’s learned.
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For many people, technology assists and augments our lives, making certain tasks easier, communicating across long distances possible, and giving us the opportunity to be more informed about the world around us. However, for many people with disabilities, technology is not an accessory but essential to living an independent and quality life.
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Examined through the lens of accessibility, open hardware brings a lot of advantages, such as letting people with disabilities use readily available hardware that others use regardless of ability. Open hardware’s basic tenets in openness and usability allow for the creation of more customized, personalized assistive technology devices that fit a user’s needs. Open hardware allows for features to be added or removed as an individuals’ needs change with age and ability, extending the life of their device. The availability of parts, detailed guides, and tutorials on various single-board computers (SBCs) and components, ease of repair, and affordability are all profound qualities that are not only wanted, but needed in AT. Also, since open hardware is not locked behind proprietary controls and patents, there’s no requirement to use insurance or obtain medical permission to alter, modify, or change the state of what is truly owned by the person—in this case, their own assistive technology device.
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Standards/Consortia
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The 6th May 2015, the European Commission published a communication to the European Parliament, the Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions councerning a new Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe.
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Administrators increasingly outnumber faculty, and they’re weighing down higher education.
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So my message to TV Licensing is this: Good. Lets go to court. Lets have a court hear how I’ve written twice, let a court see my payment already made and my in date license; and then let the court hear my counter claim for the waste of my time and loss of earning incurred from attending. I’ll donate any award from the court to a local food bank.
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Science
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Scientists in labs across the globe are busy perfecting computer chips that can be implanted in the human brain.
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Security
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Lead software security engineers, security consultants and others tasked with repelling cyber-threats can expect to earn six-figure salaries per year.
Salaries for security tech professionals can greatly exceed the baseline for IT professional salaries, according to a report from Dice, the IT jobs portal.
Lead software security engineers, directors of security, security consultants and others tasked with repelling cyber-threats can expect to earn six-figure salaries per year, so long as their skills, experience and certifications prove to be a match for demanding roles that are continuously evolving, the report noted.
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Great, so because whoever is in charge of managing that electronic billboard couldn’t be bothered to take the advice any competent technology person who came across the setup, of which there must have been at least one, the great people of Atlanta were treated to one of the most disgusting images in human existence. I’m generally loathe to blame the victim, but the owner of a public-facing billboard must have some culpability when it comes to securing their display. And I say that there was at least one person who warned them about this, because at least one has come forward publicly.
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Ever had a job where you had to constantly look over your shoulder and were hesitant to make decisions because you could be blamed for them? It’s not fun. I once found myself in such a situation, but fortunately, it didn’t last too long.
In the late aughts, I worked for a large national bank that was acquired by an even larger national bank. Our bank still ran our own IT operation, but we engaged with the larger bank’s incident management team for any major problems. Part of my job supporting our Retail Bank organization was incident coordination.
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Glitch causes iOS to choke when certain non-Latin script is sent in a text message, causing the device to crash
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The discovery last week of another major flaw in TLS was announced, nicknamed “Logjam” by the group of prominent cryptographers who discovered it. It’s getting so hard to keep track of these flaws that researchers at INRIA in France created a “zoo” classifying the attacks (which is not yet updated to include Logjam or the FREAK attack discovered in March). Despite the fact that these attacks seem to be announced every few months now, Logjam is a surprising and important finding with broad implications for the Internet. In this post I’ll offer a technical primer of the Logjam vulnerability.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Yes, the news that the former British prime minister has quit his job as a peace envoy for Quartet after eight years has been met with the sort of reaction you’d expect. At least: the sort of reaction you’d expect on Twitter. Which is a mixture of mirth, relief and irony…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan has now weighed in on The Times’ misleading article advancing baseless industry allegations that the EPA illegally lobbied on behalf of clean water protections. But while Sullivan recognized that the article has some significant problems, she nonetheless defended it as a “solid story” overall.
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Other investors are likely to follow Norwegian fund’s move out of coal-based investments, due to its size as the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund
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Finance
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Because capitalism is so regularly defined as “a market system,” we may consider first the actual nonequivalence of capitalism and markets. Capitalism became the dominant economic system in England in revolt against feudalism there in the 17th century. Capitalism spread from England to the western European mainland and thereafter to the rest of the world. However, capitalism was neither the first nor the only system to utilize markets as its means of distributing resources and products. In the slave economic systems that prevailed in various times and places across human history, markets were often the means of distributing resources (including slaves themselves) and the products of slaves’ labor. In the pre-Civil War United States, for example, masters sold slaves and cotton produced by slaves in markets. Thus, the presence of a “market system” does not distinguish capitalism from a slave system.
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That’s one way to put it, and the article, by “Women at Work” columnist Claire Cain Miller, puts it that way repeatedly. Women are paid less in Chile as a “result” of the law that requires employers to provide childcare for working mothers. Maternity leave measures “have meant that” European women are less likely to achieve powerful positions at work. Policies intended to mitigate the penalty women pay for their traditional “dual burden,” the Times says, “end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place.”
The workplace repression of women is described as the “unintended” impact of family-friendly policies. Sure, such impacts weren’t intended by the policies’ drafters, but that makes it sound as though there were no conscious human beings behind decisions to pay working mothers less or not to hire women. It isn’t the policies that “make it harder” for women, but the male-centric management structure’s unwillingness to integrate those policies into the way work is done. Why not say that?
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McCarthy is the type of investor that KKR and its private equity competitors including Blackstone Group LP and Carlyle Group LP are increasingly courting. Family offices and their advisers manage an estimated $4 trillion, including for the newly rich in Silicon Valley and China, Midwestern entrepreneurs and old money in Europe.
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Sterling fell on Thursday after data confirmed that the UK economy grew at 0.3 per cent in the first quarter compared with the previous three months, disappointing those who had expected a higher reading.
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In a significant omission, one of the European Parliament’s key committees, INTA, has not called for the rejection of the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in its TTIP report, which will be voted on by the full European Parliament on June 10. Although neither today’s vote, nor the plenary next month, has any direct effect on the negotiations, it is regarded as an indicator of the mood of the MEPs, and of how any eventual vote on ratifying TTIP might go.
The second-largest party in the European Parliament, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, published a position paper on ISDS back in March, which said: “we have made it clear that we do not see a need for its inclusion and have called for it to be excluded when negotiations for the investment chapter start.” It appears that S&D MEPs initially held onto this position in INTA, but as the result of what the Greens MEP Michel Reimon calls a “dirty last-minute deal” between the main political parties, they voted to drop all mention of ISDS from the committee’s final report.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Surely Wehner remembers that after the first half of Clinton’s first term, Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate for the remainder of his administration—exactly as happened under Obama. There were 30 Democratic governors when Clinton took office, and 19 when he left; there were 29 when Obama took office, and currently there’s 18.
It’s true that Obama has been been bad news for his party—but as FAIR has long pointed out, that’s true of Clinton as well. An honest appraisal of the administrations of both Clinton and Obama, with their emphasis on deficit-cutting and corporate-friendly trade deals, reveals both Democrats to be establishment centrists—and centrist politics, contrary to what the punditocracy would have you believe, do not have a particularly winning record at the ballot box.
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Privacy
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Overdue modernisation of the way the authorities monitor criminals and terrorists – or a Snooper’s Charter eroding our basic liberties? The proposal outlined in the Queen’s Speech to “modernise the law on communications data” will divide opinion. But prepare for another long battle over the way that law is framed and the balance it strikes between privacy and public safety.
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The Open Rights Group (ORG), which campaigns against increased surveillance, is convinced this is the return of the so-called Snooper’s Charter, with increased powers of data collection and retention aimed at the entire population, coupled with attacks on encryption.
The ORG’s executive director Jim Killock thinks the bill will have two aims – codifying existing practices by the intelligence agencies uncovered by Edward Snowden and expanding data retention by ISPs.
But he believes that the increasing use of encryption by the likes of Google and Facebook means that ordering ISPs to store their customers’ data won’t be enough: “There’s going to be a very interesting discussion about whether government can break encryption or order companies to break it.”
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According to documents obtained by the ACLU, the FBI briefly had a crisis of (4th Amendment) conscience while putting together its license plate reader program. How it talked itself out of its privacy concerns remains secret, as do any policies or guidelines addressing potential privacy issues. All we have so far is a heavily-redacted email in which the FBI’s General Counsel is noted as struggling with the issue.
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The German BND and the American NSA are not so different in the end, especially regarding their objectives and actions. The NSA might be better equipped technically and the BND signs formally correct contracts. In any case, this shows again that we can not trust that suggestions like “Schengen-Routing”, data storage in Germany only or even German inventions like “De-Mail” serve to protect the privacy of communications and data.
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The Queen’s Speech, delivered this morning at the opening of UK parliament, has confirmed earlier indications that the Snooper’s Charter is on its way back, with the UK government promising that “new legislation will modernise the law on communications data.”
An analysis in The Guardian claims this new legislation will also include “an extension of the powers of the security services in response to the surveillance disclosures by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,” although no sources are given for that information.
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The old joke goes “George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a ‘how to’ manual.” But that joke is increasingly less funny as the UK really seems to be doing everything it can to put in place Orwell’s fictitious vision — just a few decades later. Right after the election a few weeks ago, we noted the government’s plan to push forward with its “extremist disruption orders” (as had been promised). The basic idea is that if the government doesn’t like what you’re saying, it can define your statements as “extremist” and make them criminal. Prime Minister David Cameron did his best Orwell in flat out stating that the idea was to use these to go after people who were obeying the law and then arguing that the UK needed to suppress free speech… in the name of protecting free speech. Really.
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A sophomore honors student at Flower Mound High School who posted online some of the photos he took as part of his yearbook class, has been forced by school administrators to take down the photos. Anthony Mazur, 16, is on his school’s yearbook staff, and over the past year has been learning about photography- focusing mostly on sports photography. Mazur posted his best photos on Flickr, and had even been successful at selling a few of them to the parents of his subjects, until school administrators threatened him with in-school suspension or loss of privileges unless he removed them all.
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Hass declined to answer our followup questions about how the AUP applied to the situation, since his work was related to a class project (yearbook), and since photographs taken at public events have no legal expectation of privacy, or whether Brown threatened him with expulsion, confiscating money, or reporting him to the IRS.
Although the Mazur family is fighting the decision, Anthony says he is undeterred. He has since obtained his own camera, and is continuing to photograph sporting events, where he says he has the same access as other members of the public, and members of the media. “They’re not going to stop me, I’ll keep doing what I love,” said Anthony.
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The operator of 8chan says the bandwidth of millions of Hola users is being sold for reuse, with some of it even being used to attack his site. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Hola founder Ofer Vilenski says that users’ idle resources are indeed utilized for commercial sale, but that has been the agreement all along.
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Civil Rights
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Some months back, we noted that something odd was happening in Japan: online gaming cheaters were being arrested. Yes, arrested. Not arrested in a virtual sense, not banned from games, arrested as in picked up by police and charged with a crime. This, in case you are undecided on the matter, is insane. Cheating and online gaming have been a virtual arms-race for going on forever and generally it’s been on the gaming companies to win that war. If they can use law enforcement as a new ally, the implications could be scary, especially when it’s quite easy to levy accusations of cheating and when simply finding ways to exploit an advantage within a game is often times mistaken for cheating as well.
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In an unsurprising move, Steam has replaced the Linux icon of “tux” with their own SteamOS icon. I completely understand why they did this, but it does make things confusing.
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If you’re more worried about the government spying on you than you are about the government losing “valuable surveillance tools”—well, I guess AP is not the news service for you, then.
One such PATRIOT Act preservation effort is labeled a “compromise” by AP—Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr’s proposal to extend the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic phone records until 2017—in what AP calls a “transition.”
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The FBI had somebody wearing a wire at the London Olympics to capture the FIFA corruption taking place in the margins. What were the British authorities doing? Nothing.
Britain prides itself as having in London the world’s leading financial centre. Substantial assets, both financial and real estate, from FIFA corruption are located in London. But Britain has taken over the crown from Switzerland as the major financial destination which will always protect ill-gotten wealth.
Alisher Usmanov played a major role as bagman for the corrupt Russian World Cup bid, particularly with delegates from FIFA’s Asian Confederation. His place as Britain’s third richest resident is very obviously based on extreme Russian corruption and he rose to power and wealth solely with the use of gangster muscle and contacts he gained and expanded while serving a prison sentence for blackmail. But he is a billionaire and beloved by the City of London so there is no danger of him ever being investigated in the UK.
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With some of the recent news stories about how cheating, or other crimes, committed in virtual settings is resulting in real-world legal consequences, I’m sort of surprised the media hadn’t picked up on this story before. Apparently back in the summer of 2012, two teenagers, Patrick Nepomuceno and Michael Stinger, ran a scheme in Blizzard’s Diablo 3 in which Stinger would send out a link to another player that allowed Nepomuceno to take control of the player’s computer, force the player’s character to drop all of his/her valuable virtual game items, and then Stinger would scoop them up.
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Israel Shimeles operates a food truck (SUSPICIOUS!) and moved those items to his parked car to make more room in his truck. He has since apologized and calls his own actions “stupid.” That’s the world we live in today, where a propane tank and a pressure cooker laying in plain sight in a parked vehicle results in destroyed property and apologies from the person who’s now out a pressure cooker, propane tank and rear window.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Back when Verizon sued to overturn the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules, the telco argued that the FCC was aggressively and capriciously violating the company’s First and Fifth Amendment rights. According to Verizon’s argument at the time, broadband networks “are the modern-day microphone by which their owners engage in First Amendment speech.” Verizon also tried to claim that neutrality rules were a sort of “permanent easement on private broadband networks for the use of others without just compensation,” and thereby violated the Fifth Amendment.
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Imagine you’re on the phone with your doctor, discussing a very sensitive and private matter that requires your full attention. Suddenly in the middle of a sentence, your mobile phone provider injects a recording saying you’ve used 90 percent of your minutes for the month and to press 1 to contact customer service, and repeats the message until you either hit 1 or hit 2 to cancel.
Or you’re on a call with a buddy, talking about your favorite sports team. Suddenly you get several text messages with “special offers” from companies that sell jerseys and other sporting goods.
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While net neutrality may have recently found its way into the Merriam Webster dictionary, it still hasn’t managed to find its way to Europe. Most assumed that the EU would have passed net neutrality protections long before the States, so the FCC beating the EU to the punch surprised more than a few people. That was especially true if you’d been watching some of rhetoric coming out of the EU over the last few years.
[...]
The EU’s net neutrality bill began in 2013 when Kroes introduced a proposal for a Telecoms Single Market (TSM), or a single piece of regulation covering all telecom issues across the EU. That proposal was slowly but surely boiled down to just two major proposals: one aimed at eliminating wireless roaming between EU nations to reduce consumer rates, and one focused on enshrining net neutrality into law. Like initial efforts in the States, however, this proposal was packed with all manner of loopholes pushed for by major telecom carriers, worried their ability to abuse limited last-mile competition would come to an end.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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For the last few years, we’ve been covering a long (now complete) saga concerning the status of the copyright on Sherlock Holmes. A few years ago, we wrote about the odd state of the copyright according to the Conan Doyle Estate — which insisted that the character was not in the public domain in the US (even as it is in the public domain in many other countries). That’s because, while nearly all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works were published long before 1923, a final set of 10 stories were published after. The Estate erroneously argued that as long as any part of Sherlock Holmes was under copyright, all of it was. In 2013, a scholar of Sherlock Holmes sued the Estate to argue otherwise. And despite the silly fears of the Estate, both the district court and the appeals court rightly explained how copyright law works to the Estate, noting that all of the early works are in the public domain, and the only copyright that may be maintained is in the marginal creative additions in those final 10 works. The appeals court even went so far as to argue that the Estate was abusing antitrust laws in demanding fees from everyone. And the Supreme Court refused to review the case.
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Send this to a friend
05.27.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Today we are releasing a research paper about a malware family that primarily targets Linux-based consumer routers but that can infect other Linux-based embedded systems in its path: Dissecting Linux/Moose. This blog post will summarize a few elements of the full report.
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Why should you be lugging around a bulky PC when you can get a decent computing power in a box no wider than 5 inch or a stick as big (or small) as the Chromecast?
Linux has become a dominant force in the consumer space, thanks to Google’s Chrome OS and Android. While both Android and Chrome OS are Linux-based distributions, they can’t run a majority of applications written for the traditional Linux-based distributions such openSUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu.
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An $89, peer-to-peer “Brease” private file server on Kickstarter features four USB 3.0 ports, a GbE port, 256-bit AES, mobile support, and media streaming.
Dutch startup Brease is more than halfway to a $90,000 Kickstarter funding goal for the Brease private file server. Packages are available through June 16, starting at $89, or $119 for the functionally identical Black Thunder Edition, both of which ship in Feb. 2016. An internally identical anodized aluminum Onyx Edition goes for $199, but ships in Dec. 2015.
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Desktop
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‘Resist gratification’, says super-GNU-man freedom fighter
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Croatia is gaining in usage of GNU/Linux. That TFA was written shows the awareness of a lack of availability of IT. All that is needed to bridge the digital divide is for Croatian schools to catch up with and to exceed the rest of society in using GNU/Linux, the right way to do IT in education. Croatia needs to treble its IT in schools. That isn’t going to happen with Wintel. With FLOSS it is possible and can be done within a few years for no extra expenditure. With a little extra effort the change can be done in two years.
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Gartner researchers report that worldwide Chromebook sales are set to reach 7.3 million units in 2015, a 27 percent jump from the 5.7 million units sold last year.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While many Linux desktops using the open-source Mesa graphics drivers are shipping with OpenGL ES 1.x/2.x support, this mobile/embedded version of OpenGL isn’t enabled by default within Mesa.
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Intel developers in particular have been trying to wrap-up OpenGL ES 3.1 support within Mesa. That work is getting closer to finally being realized.
Intel developers have been working hard on GLES 3.1 enablement in Mesa but it didn’t make it for Mesa 10.6. As of writing this article, the outstanding OpenGL ES 3.1 extensions still needed to be finished for Mesa include ARB_arrays_of_arrays, ARB_compute_shader, ARB_framebuffer_no_attachments, ARB_shader_image_load_store, ARB_shader_image_size, and ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object. Most of these OpenGL extensions have been started but not yet completed.
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Benchmarks
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Yesterday data access to LinuxBenchmarking.com was opened, the public results viewer to the immense amount of test data — primarily the Linux kernel, LLVM Clang, and GCC — collected on a daily basis within the new server room. Here’s some numbers behind it.
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Applications
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APT (Advanced Package Tool) is the default package manager of Debian, Ubuntu and their derivative systems.
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APT (Advanced Package Tool), a set of core tools inside Debian that make it possible to install, remove, and keep applications up to date, is now at version 1.0.9.10 and it’s available for download.
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A few days ago the Scribus team quietly tagged Scribus 1.5.0 in SVN. This release is a preview / testing release, but it provides an interest look at the next stable release: 1.6.0. No release date or schedule is known for 1.6.0. For those uninformed, Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing suite.
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Proprietary
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As you may know, Vivaldi is a Chromium-based open-source internet browser, built by the Opera founder. It did not reach a stable version yet, but it is already usable.
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On May 26, Opera Software, through Marcin Mitek, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of a new development build of the upcoming Opera 31 web browser.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Humble Artifex Mundi Mobile Bundle has been released, and it incorporates a large number of games from the Artifex Mundi sp. z o.o. publisher. Despite the name of the collection that hints only at the mobile platform, almost all titles are also available for Linux users as well.
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Ride the Bullet is an action game developed and published on Steam by Jordan Sendar also received a Linux version and is now available for purchase.
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Audiosurf 2 is the sequel to the smash hit music game Audiosurf, and as the name suggests you do literally surf the music. The sequel is available day-1 on Linux thanks to having a build during the Early Access time.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Xfce’s Power Manager was getting behind the times, but it has been updated and ported to GTK+ 3.14. As you can imagine, this is an important update, and it packs other changes as well.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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When I became interested in Linux and open source. I found Krita, it had everything that I needed for a digital painting. For me it is important to repeat that feeling like you paint using traditional materials.
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Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.3.1. Plasma 5.3 was released in January with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
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The KDE Community has just revealed that Plasma 5.3.1, the desktop for the KDE project, has been made available, and it comes with a large number of changes and various small fixes.
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Scott Kitterman exposed the email exchanges today of the Ubuntu Community Council informing Jonathan Riddell that due to his aggressive, confrontational behavior towards some within the Ubuntu community and Canonical, he should step away from “all positions of leadership in the Ubuntu Community for at least 12 months.” His leadership positions should be put aside for both Ubuntu and Kubuntu while he would be able to keep his upload/commit rights and still participate as a member of the Ubuntu community.
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So this has just happened. Scott Kitterman, a Debian developer and member of the Kubuntu Council, has decided to make public some emails where it would appear that members of the Ubuntu Community Council ask Jonathan Riddell to step down from his position as a Kubuntu Project leader.
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I’d like to thank all the Kubuntu members who just voted to re-affirm me on the Kubuntu Council.
Scott Kitterman’s blog post has a juicy details of the unprecedented and astonishing move by the Ubuntu Community Council asking me to step down as Kubuntu leader. I’ve never claimed to be a leader and never used or been given any such title so it’s a strange request without foundation and without following the normal channels documented of consultation or Code of Conduct reference.
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Here is all that we have to share in terms of background information. The Ubuntu governance goals demand that “Decisions regarding the Ubuntu distribution and community are taken in a fair and transparent fashion”. To that end, here is all the correspondence between the Ubuntu Community Council (UCC) and the Kubuntu Council (KC). In this post, I am, on behalf of the KC, merely trying to provide data.
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Friction between the lead Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell and Ubuntu reached extreme temperatures on Monday when the Ubuntu Community Council (UCC) asked Riddell to step down from the position of Kubuntu Leader.
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While Qt 5 has so many compelling advantages over Qt4, for those still running the older version of the Norwegian toolkit, version 4.8.7 of Qt4 is now available and it ships with tons of changes.
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I am happy to announce release of Qt 4.8.7 today bringing over 150 improvements and bug fixes. Qt 4.8.7 provides important security updates, better support for Mac OS X 10.10 and many requested error corrections. As a patch release, it does not add new functionality and maintains full compatibility with previous Qt 4.8.x releases.
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On May 26, the Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the seventh maintenance release of Qt 4.8.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers are hard at work these days to release the second milestone for the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.
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The GNOME developers are hard at work these days to release the second milestone for the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.
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The GNOME Project released version 3.17.2 of Disks, better known as GNOME Disk Utility. This utility contains several significant improvements and new features, for example D-Bus is now activatable and the appearance of the volume grid has been refined.
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Every time a new, promising GNU/Linux distribution is announced, the community is on fire testing, helping, and contributing to make it the best ever, the next-gen, everything they’ve ever dreamed of.
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Penetration testing gurus Offensive Security have made their popular Kali operating system available for Docker-addicted system administrators.
Developer Mati Aharoni acted on a request from a user who asked for a Dockerised image of the Kali penetration testing system platform.
“Last week we received an email from a fellow penetration tester, requesting official Kali Linux Docker images that he could use for his work,” Aharoni says.
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New Releases
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We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.2.0, the first release in v3.2 stable series.
This release is built with musl libc and is not compatible with v2.x and earlier, so special care needs to be taken when upgrading.
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Natanael Copa has been happy to announce today, May 26, the immediate availability for download of the Alpine Linux 3.2.0 operating system, which includes several attractive new features.
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Steven Shiau, the creator of the Clonezilla Live and GParted Live projects, has made available a new version of the GParted Live distro, as announced on May 26 by Curtis Gedak.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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An anonymous reader has pointed out that Mandriva is currently being liquidated (page in French). The company brought in €553,000 in 2013, but that is seemingly not enough to keep it going in 2015. It is a sad end for a company that has been pursuing the desktop Linux dream since 1998.
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I think that it is sad that the Mandriva star twinkles no more in the OS universe, but it is good that other distros can continue with its legacy: Mageia, OpenMandriva Lx and, up to a certain extent, PCLinuxOS.
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Mandriva, a French purveyor of desktop Linux, is being wound up, after becoming totally incapable of supporting usual performance (TITSUP), financially at least.
The liquidation notice suggests the company’s 2013 was around €600,000 and that the company has between 10 and 19 staff.
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It is with sadness in our hearts that we inform you today, May 27, about the termination of the French Mandriva company, which is currently in the process of being liquidated, according to a notice posted on the societe.com website.
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It also had some success in Malaysia.
But by 2012, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy, a situation that had happened several times since its early days, in 1998.
It was saved for a few more years by Jean-Manuel Croset, who joined as COO in 2011 and soon after became CEO.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSE, the well-known Linux company, may not have the OpenStack cloud reputation of rivals Canonical, Red Hat, and Mirantis, but it offers one thing that no one else does: It’s public-cloud agnostic.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is letting another one of their developers focus on improvements to Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.
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Red Hat has announced Cloud Suite for Applications, an accelerated way to develop, deploy, and manage applications at scale using open source technologies. The new cloud offering helps enterprises reduce silos and enable more efficient OpenStack cloud deployments. Through the platform, Red Hat is offering IaaS, PaaS and management in an open environment, supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the ability to leverage certified hardware of choice.
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The open organization trumps the traditional corporate structure because it is about putting innovation first, says Jim Whitehurst, author of ‘The Open Organization’ as well as the CEO of Red Hat.
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Fedora
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You can now download the Fedora 22 Linux operating system ahead of the official announcement, which will be published on the Fedora Project website later today.
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Quite a few people are going to be installing Fedora 22 in the coming days, searching for things in the software center and not finding what they want. This is because some applications still don’t ship AppData files, which have become compulsory for this release. So far, over 53% of applications shipped in Fedora ship the required software center metadata, up from the original 12% in Fedora 21. If you don’t like this, you can either use dnf to install the package on the command line, or set gsettings set org.gnome.software require-appdata false. If you want to see your application in the software center in the future, please file a bug either upstream or downstream (I’ve already filed a lot of upstream bugs) or even better write the metadata and get it installed either upstream tarball or downstream in the Fedora package. Most upstream and downstream maintainers have shipped the extra software center information, but some others might need a little reminder about it from users.
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The Fedora project has announced that Fedora 22 is finally available for download for all the new flavors, Workstation, Server, and Cloud.
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Fedora 22 Workstation was released today and it ships with the latest stable GNOME 3.16, a new default package manager and other interesting changes. Let’s take a look at what’s new!
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We started not long time ago, just a few days after F22 Beta release and it was challenging to finish all the work for these websites, collect informations from Spin SIGs, get legal approval, make new translation resources and and and.
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If you didn’t notice, Fedora 22 was released today. Today I refreshed the Fedora 22 OS Template I made for OpenVZ and uploaded it to contrib. For fun, I thought I’d build a MATE Desktop GUI container right in front of your eyes… and then connect to it via x2go. Enjoy!
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Red Hat’s new Fedora Linux comes with a better desktop, but the real improvements are in the cloud and server updates.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The development for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) is moving forwards and developers have already added some packages from the GNOME 3.16 stack, which will make quite a few users happy.
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From the creator of the RemasterOS Linux and K-Mint Linux distributions, we’re introducing you today to the Black GNOME Linux distro, based on the latest Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
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UBUNTU creator Mark Shuttleworth issued a call to arms this month to developers of all Linux desktop environments to work together to bring their applications to a converged platform that will run Ubuntu on phones, tablets and PCs.
In a video address to kickoff the Ubunt Online Summit, Shuttleworth said convergence was rapidly transforming personal computing.
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Mark Shuttleworth thinks the only way private clouds can compete in the long run with public clouds is with by offering similar pricing.
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Ubuntu Edge was the superphone from Canonical that never raised the money it needed to become a reality, and the community is still asking about it, two years later. The truth of the matter is that not making the Ubuntu Edge phone is probably the biggest mistake the company ever made.
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Canonical has added some of the GNOME 3.16 packages in their Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf system, but the changes will not be spotted by the regular user.
The problem is not with the updated applications, but with an upgraded GTK version, which may really affect the system. Before implementing apps by default, Canonical patches them to work well with Unity, basic on the philosophy that an app that works well does not need to get updated.
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So instead of hurling insults at the confused penguin nestlings, I have decided to help by giving you my own guide on how to make Ubuntu beautiful. Please note there are many ways to do this, this is just my way and because I detest the Dock-style launchers (bottom of the screen) do not ask me about them.If I wanted a Mac I would buy a Mac and use their Docking feature. Who am I kidding here, If I wanted a Mac, I would not be able to afford a Mac.
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Flavours and Variants
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Here’s the problem. For the last couple of years or so we’ve been using Mint’s Xfce edition of Maya (that would be version 13 for those who read the box scores) on nearly all of the machines here at FOSS Force. As Maya will be supported until 2017, we had absolutely no plans to make any upgrades until then, as taking time out for the tedious process of upgrading our machines isn’t one of my favorite things to do — and I’m the one who’d be doing the upgrading.
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Faytech’s “FTA20″ SBC runs Linux or Android on an Allwinner A20, and offers I/O including HDMI, VGA, LVDS, GbE, and WiFi, with optional Bluetooth and GPS.
The FTA20 is the second generation SBC for Shenzhen-based display vendor Faytech, which offers capacitive touchscreens ranging up to 21.5 inches for the SBC. Unlike the many Allwinner A20 SBCs designed for the hacker community, the FTA20 offers a wider variety of standard and optional features, and is designed for industrial use.
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Phones
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After its $25 phones fail to dent the dominance of Google and Apple, the Firefox backer will try to compete using technological superiority — and maybe by adding key Android apps, too.
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Android
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Do any of the following scenarios apply to you? A – you have a few hundred apps installed, and managing them is an absolute nightmare, but you don’t want to let go of any. B – you used Spotlight on iOS once, and kind of liked it better than using Google search on Android. If the answer’s yes, give App Search Plus a try. Its feature list is just this one little thing – “really fast app search”.
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Google I/O 2015 is likely to see plenty of updates and some new releases, with Android, Chrome and the Internet of Things the likely stars
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It’s likely Android M will be shown off but not actually launch yet. That’s OK, there are plenty of improvements to see for both Android and Chrome in the coming months.
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Announced almost exactly one year ago, Android Auto is Google’s attempt to bring the smartphone’s capabilities to a car while minimizing driver distraction. The system has been available on third-party navigation systems since earlier this year, but starting today, it is available for the first time in a production vehicle, the 2015 Hyundai Sonata. Dealers will be able to update Sonatas equipped with the optional navigation and tech package with Android Auto starting today, while owners will be able to perform the update themselves later this summer.
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The Apple Watch is, despite its many talents, a watch first and foremost. Rival Android Wear watches, which made a debut last year, are still frustrating wrist-top computers that happen to tell the time.
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Samsung has been thinking up new ways to transform smartphones into laptops. In a patent application filed last week, first spotted by Patently Mobile, Samsung describes a mobile device that runs Android and is able to switch over to Windows when inserted into a dock. Individually, these ideas aren’t new — dual-OS devices and docking smartphones have been tried a number of times over the past several years — but they haven’t been put together in a particularly straightforward way. Of course, this is only a patent application, so there’s no guarantee that Samsung will actually make it.
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The Nexus 5 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update is currently rolling out to owners of the former flagship and today we want to take a initial look at how the update is performing on the Nexus 5. This is our early Nexus 5 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop review.
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In 2005, software engineer Hiroshi Lockheimer got a call from Andy Rubin, his former boss at Danger Research, the creator of the Sidekick (aka Hiptop), the first truly web-savvy smartphone. Rubin was now at Google, which had recently acquired his new startup. Lockheimer was working on Internet TV software for Microsoft, after stops at Palm and Good Technology.
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After a week cruising around with Android Auto, I’m convinced this is the future of in-dash technology. Taking the software design out of the hands of car makers and putting it in the hands of phone makers should have happened long ago.
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Open source innovation has not only revolutionized the software and biotech industries — it’s completely changed the way we think about creativity. To be derivative is now a form of being creative. That is, in order to do something new, we don’t have to build something new — we can use existing and emerging forms, made available through open access, and do something new with them. This promotes a democracy in the innovation game: with open source services, there is no discrimination against persons or groups or against fields or endeavors.
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Andrey Petrov spoke at a Sourcegraph open source meetup about lessons learned from his successes and failures creating open source projects.
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Designed by Christian Robinson, the Roboto font files were first released in 2011 under the Apache license. Now, the company is organizing the files and the font production toolchain into a fully realized open source project on Github.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The system works fine otherwise and can be accessed via ssh, but restarting kdm doesn’t help to fix it, it just changes the pattern. Anyway, as explaining a toddler he cannot watch his favourite youtube cartoons because suddenly the computer screen has become an abstract art work is not easy I quickly decided to downgrade.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman is the President of the Free Software Foundation and also the founder of GNU or GNU’s Not Unix! operating system that contains only free software. One of his constant claims is that GNU/Linux is a misnomer and that it shouldn’t be used. In fact, he’s now saying that the GNU operating system is often called Linux.
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Openness/Sharing
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An EU-funded research project wants to find regulations and other obstacles that hinder digital Do-It-Yourself companies. A consortium of universities and research institutes in Manchester, Milan, London, Thessaloniki and other cities intends to help small enterprises benefit from digital DIY, help policy makers and prepare teachers and educators.
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Open Data
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One of the themes at the AGIT 2015 conference will be Open Government and geo-data infrastructures. According to the organisers, the availability of standardised open government services has increased the importance of government geo-data infrastructures, taking the opportunities for using geo-information to a new level. Discussions will focus on questions like what value can be created by building a European ‘spatially-enabled society’ as part of the European knowledge society, and what are the challenges and prospects with regard to cloud computing.
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Despite pledges by the G7 and G20 to boost transparency by opening up government data, fewer than 8% of countries publish data sets in open formats and under open licences on public sector budgets, spending and contracts.
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Open Hardware
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Hubble is an open source, mid-level laser cutter designed to be affordable, versatile, and hackable. Hubble was created to fill the current gap between amazing, entry-level projects, like MicroSlice, and the expensive, proprietary laser cutters on the market.
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Programming
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As the number of applications and APIs connected in a cloud-driven world rises dramatically, it becomes a challenge to integrate them in an elegant way that will scale in terms of the clarity of architecture, run-time performance, complexity of processes the systems take part in, and the level of maintenance required to keep integrated environments operational.
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Standards/Consortia
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Share-PSI workshops bring together government departments, universities and standards organisations to “identify what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t practical, what can and can’t be expected of different stakeholders”, the project website states.
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Security
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However, it’s unusual to see PoS malware distributed through spam, like in the case of NitlovePOS, especially as part of a larger, indiscriminate campaign. This suggests that cybercriminals seek to exploit cases where employees use Windows-based PoS terminals to check their email or perform other risky activities.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Now, there’s no actual evidence that any of this is anything more than deranged ranting, yet here we are: Millions of casual news observers who scrolled through western media this weekend came away thinking ISIS is plotting to acquire a nuclear bomb, kill the president and prostitute his wife.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The amount of global e-waste — discarded electrical and electronic equipment — reached 41.8 million tonnes in 2014, according to a new United Nations University report.
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Finance
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ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Total and BP pour funding into projects to unlock oil reserves – despite scientists warning they will lead to climate change disaster
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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EU plans to regulate hormone-damaging chemicals found in pesticides have been dropped because of threats from the US that this would adversely affect negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), according to a report in The Guardian. Draft EU regulations would have banned 31 pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that have been linked to testicular cancer and male infertility.
Just after the official launch of the TTIP negotiations on 13 June 2013, a US business delegation visited EU officials to demand that the proposed regulations governing EDCs should be thrown out in favour of a further “impact study.” Minutes of the meeting on June 26 show Commission officials saying that “although they want the TTIP to be successful, they would not like to be seen as lowering the EU standards.” Nonetheless, the European Commission capitulated shortly afterwards.
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Privacy
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I was wrong. So was most of the media
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A group of 35 top academics have published an open letter calling on the UK government to ensure “the Rule of Law and the democratic process is respected as UK surveillance law is revised.” This comes in response to the UK government previously turning to draft “Codes of Practice” and “clarifying amendments” to extend its surveillance powers, rather than using primary legislation that is subject to full parliamentary and public debate. Interestingly, the letter includes signatories both for and against such extensions, working in the fields of law, media, policy, and technology.
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Civil Rights
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The espionage trial of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian opened behind closed doors in Tehran on Tuesday, 10 months after he was arrested at his home in the Iranian capital.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The negotiations on Net Neutrality comes to the end in June with next and probably final trialogue expected on 2nd of June. Until now, the different documents received from the negotiations1 have shown a very weak position of the Members of European Parliament (MEPs), abandoning the improvement on Net Neutrality that had been brought by the previous legislature. If the MEPs do not take this last chance to save Net Neutrality, it would have a critical impact on the way Internet is functioning, on the citizens’ fundamental rights and on further regulations adopted within the so-called Digital Single Market.
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At the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Jan Koum, chief executive of WhatsApp, made an announcement that would cause much unease 4,000 miles away in New Delhi. “We want to make sure people always have the ability to stay in touch with their friends and loved ones really affordably,” he said. “We’re going to introduce voice on WhatsApp in the second quarter of this year.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A federal court in Oregon has signed off on a highly peculiar judgment against a Dallas Buyers Club pirate. Citing “financial hardship,” the woman doesn’t have to pay the $7,500 in costs and fees as long as she promises not to download any infringing material in the future, and removes any and all BitTorrent clients.
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Rightscorp, the piracy monetization company that works with Warner Bros. and other prominent copyright holders, goes to great lengths to reach allegedly pirating subscribers. The company offered Cox Communications a cut of the piracy settlements if they agreed to forward their notices, the ISP revealed in court.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.26.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The “battle” between Windows and Linux is more of a fictional one, and it has been raging on for the past couple of decades. It wasn’t really a battle, despite what each side was saying, but that will undoubtedly change when Linux clearly becomes a force to be reckoned with.
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The history i want to share with you is how that “marble Tux” happens. Yes, it was a production machine that you see in the picture and was running in every place in Brazil for at least 10 years.
So, a 25 years old boy, in this case me, the guy typing now, who was working in a ILOG graphical toolkit partner suddenly decide to look for Linux jobs, it was out of university for 1 year, but was already infected for the open source and Linux for more than 3 years, and thought it can be done.
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If you present someone to the Linux world as GNU/Linux, you spend the next fifteen minutes trying to explain GNU. It’s difficult to explain in just a few minutes, it’s difficult to pronounce and it confuses the new Linux user. However, I make it a practice to bookmark websites that explain what GNU is and why it’s critical to Linux, and I tell people why it’s important to read about the subject when they have time.
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Earlier this year CompuLab announced the Fitlet PC as a tiny, fanless, Linux-friendly PC. The Fitlets are finally starting to ship at scale and recently I received one of the AMD-powered Fitlets that’s preloaded with Linux Mint. Here’s a quick look at the Fitlet.
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Today at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, we are pleased to announce that CoreOS Linux – the lightweight operating system that provides stable, reliable updates to all machines connected to the update service – is included in the OpenStack Community App Catalog.
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Desktop
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Google Chrome OS has been developed on the Chrome browser which has become hugely popular and successful. Google, which has also made the OS capable of running Android apps and games, recently launched three Chromebooks (laptops that run on the Chrome OS) made by three different manufacturers in India targeted at different segments of consumers with attractive price tags. Here’s a peek under the hood of Xolo Chromebook, priced at Rs. 12,999.
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Server
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Intel explains that its aim was NOT to make ‘yet another general-purpose Linux distribution’; and so, as such, while it has included ‘many’ software components from the OpenStack Foundation, but it chose (among other decisions to cull) not to include a GUI or printing support.
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Kernel Space
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Work/life balance is important. But important enough to slow development of a tool on which a fair slab of the world relies every day?
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While Linux 4.1-rc4 was late, the fifth release candidate to the Linux 4.1 kernel is back out to being on Torvalds’ usual Sunday release schedule.
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Right back on the Sunday schedule, the Linux kernel 4.1 Release Candidate 5 version has just been announced a few minutes ago by none other than its creator, Linus Torvalds.
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Willy Tarreau, the maintainer of the 2.6 kernel branch, announced a few minutes ago the immediate availability for download of the sixty-six maintenance release of Linux kernel 2.6.32 LTS.
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I’m back on my usual Sunday schedule, and rc5 is back to its usual size after a small bump in rc4.
Things continue to look pretty normal. We’ve got about two thirds driver updates (gpu, infiniband, sound, networking, scsi, thermal), and almost half of the remainder is networking updates. The rest is mostly arch updates and some filesystem fixes. But all of it is pretty small.
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As reported yesterday a serious bug is present in Linux Kernel 4.0.x which is related to filesystem corruption. Developer Neil Brown released a fix to solve this issue.
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The open source platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), OPNFV Project, has received major backing from EMC and VMware. EMC joins as a Platinum member, along with others such as AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia, Vodafone and ZTE. VMware joins as a Silver member.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest Mesa 10.5 point release, Mesa 10.5.6, is now available.
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Emil Velikov has announced the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release of the Mesa 3D graphics library used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux.
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While Mesa still is only officially at OpenGL 3.3 compliance, a lot of OpenGL 4.x extensions continue to be worked on by open-source developers interested in advancing the free software graphics drivers.
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Benchmarks
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Ever since Raspberry Pi was introduced to the world, the consumer market for inexpensive, pocket-size mini computers has been growing rapidly. The huge popularity of these tiny computers in the mainstream stems from a variety of DIY projects powered by these affordable hardware, as well as many readily available open-source software packages.
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Applications
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Rygel, an open source and free media server solution distributed as part of the GNOME desktop environment, has reached version 0.27.1 on May 25, an unstable version that will be part of the GNOME 3.17.2 development release.
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Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.
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Grive was an unofficial, open source command line Linux client for Google Drive. I say “was” because the tool no longer works due to Google changing it’s API recently and Grive not being maintained any more (there are no commits on its GitHub page since May, 2013).
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Shotcut is a new, free and open source video editor for the Linux platform, and it comes with a large number of features, some of which are Linux-only.
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After several years of hard work, the Scribus Team has recently been proud to announce the immediate availability for download of Scribus 1.5.0 for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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Proprietary
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On May 25, the Google Chrome development team, through Anthony Laforge, announced the immediate availability for download (and update) of a new stable build for the popular Google Chrome web browser.
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Some of you may have already realized this, but Google has pushed out a refreshed Hangouts Chrome app for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The new app is actually quite great, so if you’re a Hangouts user, you should update.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I was immediately interested in Convoy when I originally heard about it, but was sad when there was no Linux support. The good news is they now have a Linux test build available to the public.
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The Steam for Linux environment is a very different one now, more than two years after the official release of the client, and it seems that things are looking up. In fact, six out of the most played ten games on Steam also have Linux support.
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Humble Weekly Bundle: Adventures! 2 is a new selection from Humble Bundle that integrates a few Linux games, and it will be available for the next few days.
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Linux and Mac OS’s numbers dwindle even further in Steam’s latest hardware survey.
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A key factor that could change that, however, is Steam’s own Linux-based operating system, SteamOS, which is built off of the Debian 7 distribution.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The xfce4-power-manager 1.5.0 update is a big release! Xfce4-power-manager 1.5.0 is ported over to using the GTK3 tool-kit rather than GTK2, has also been ported to using GDBUS, has dropped its LXDE panel plug-in with upstream focusing upon LXQt, and there’s also various other improvements with this new Xfce power manager release.
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Xfce4-power-manager version 1.5.0 was released today and I have updated that for rawhide and F22. Apart from bug fixes, there are one or two nice UI changes (shown in the screenshots).
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I’ve known about Krita for a long time, I might have first heard about it around the time I started to complement my GIMP work with MyPaint for painting. Since I exclusively draw in Linux, the open-source painting world is something I try to keep in touch with.
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Today is officially the first day of coding for this year’s Google Summer of Code. For the next three months I will be working on bringing animation to Krita. There’s a lot of work ahead, but I have a solid plan to work with.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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After that Cesar Fabian started the code contribution part, because all of them were interested in GNOME developer technologies. We started with glib, based on the GLIB Website. He explained us that Glib is a GNOME library written in C. We did a couple of examples: Hello Word and Lists of Fruits, using glist. Glists are linked lists that use the type void *. It was also explained values and basic types like gboleean where ONE represents TRUE and the rest of values are FALSE .
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Debarshi Ray, a renown GNOME developer, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development release of the GNOME Online Accounts component of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.
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The GNOME Project is hard at work these days preparing for the release of the second milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release later this year on September 23.
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As reported the other day, the GNOME Project is hard at work to release the second milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, and that several components already started appearing on the main FTP servers.
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Eye of GNOME, the default image viewer software used in the acclaimed GNOME desktop environment, has recently been updated and distributed as part of the unstable GNOME 3.17.2 desktop environment.
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Out of the talks, the most interesting talk I have seen, I think, was the one from Iwan S. Tahari, the manager of a local shoe producer who also sponsored GNOME shoes!
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Between May 25 and August 24 students all over the world will partake in Google Summer of Code. GSoC sees work being done on new and existing open source projects.
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In the last year or so, I’ve noticed that rolling-release distributions are becoming more and more popular among Linux users, and even big names like Ubuntu are considering the switch to a rolling update development model, but I think all operating systems should use the rolling release model.
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New Releases
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On May 25, François Dupoux had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release of his SystemRescueCd 4.5 distro.
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The Waha Project has had the great pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the final version of their Waha Linux 8.0 distributions designed specifically for the Arab community.
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Arne Exton, the creator of numerous GNU/Linux distributions, had the pleasure of informing Softpedia the other day about the immediate availability for download of a new build for his SlackEX 14.1 Linux distribution based on Slackware 64-bit.
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Webconverger, a Linux distribution used for deployment in places like offices or Internet cafes, or any other setting that users might only need web apps, has been upgraded to version 30 and is now available for download.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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It has been recently brought to our attention that the text-mode and graphical installer used in the well-known Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux operating systems will be soon ported to the Python 3 programming language.
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The Fedy open source graphical utility that helps Fedora Linux users tweak their installations has recently been updated with a revamped user interface and support for the Fedora 22 distro.
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Debian Family
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Recently Plex Plex Home Theater was updated to 1.4.1 with fixes for some errors, in particular concerning the new music handling introduced in 1.4.0. As with 1.4.0, I have compiled PHT for both jessie and sid, both for amd64 and i386.
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I have uploaded a preliminary version of the texlive-bin based on the 2015 sources (plus the first fixes) to the Debian archive, targeting experimental. As there are four new packages built from the sources (libtexlua52, -dev, libtexluajit2, -dev) the packages have to go through the NEW queue, which at the moment is an impressive 500+ entries long (nearly top in total history). But ftp-masters are currently very active and I hope they continue for some time.
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Lunar rebased our custom dpkg on the new release, removing a now undeed patch identified by Guillem Jover. An extra sort in the buildinfo generator prevented a stable order and was quickly fixed once identified.
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Derivatives
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The Parsix Project has recently announced that their Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (Nestor) distribution will reach the end of its life support in the coming weeks, urging users to upgrade to Parsix GNU/Linux 7.5 (Rinaldo) as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is preparing a major new update for Ubuntu Touch, but it will take a while until it’s going to be ready. From the looks of it, the devs are preparing some interesting improvements and updates.
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Ubuntu can be used for almost any task you can imagine and that includes powering a Boss-modified Tesla Model S so that it can run autonomously.
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Dell is one of the biggest companies that sell PCs preinstalled with Ubuntu, and now they are also featuring a tutorial on how to install Ubuntu on your Dell machines.
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One of the apps still missing from Ubuntu Touch is one that provides GPS navigation. Well, if you are an Ubuntu user that really needs this functionality, then you will be glad to know that an app called GPS Navigation is currently being developed.
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A couple of Apport vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Since 2004, when Ubuntu was launched, Mark Shuttleworth, its founder, has been paying privately to keep Canonical (Ubuntu’s parent company) alive. While Canonical as a whole has been unprofitable, its OpenStack cloud division has become profitable. Based on this Shuttleworth has been contemplating whether Canonical should become publicly traded.
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Flavours and Variants
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This month has been quite busy for me with classes. Now that the semester is finally over, I have a little more time, and that means I have enough time to do a review. It has been a few years since I’ve reviewed Kubuntu, the officially-supported variant of Ubuntu that uses KDE. Moreover, Kubuntu now features KDE 5 (I know the KDE naming and numbering system has become a lot more complicated, so this is, as a physicist might say, an intentional abuse of notation) as stable for the first time, so I figured I should try this version. I tried it as a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it’s like. (It should become progressively clearer through this review why there are no pictures.)
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Kubuntu Kubuntu is an official Ubuntu community project which releases new versions in step with the rest of the Ubuntu community. Kubuntu ships with KDE’s Plasma desktop by default, offering users the latest technology to come out of the KDE project. Kubuntu’s most recent release, version 15.04, is the first to ship with Plasma 5 and this is also the first version of the distribution to ship with systemd as the default init technology. The distribution’s release announcement states, “Plasma 5, the next generation of KDE’s desktop, has been rewritten to make it smoother to use while retaining the familiar setup. The second set of updates to Plasma 5 are now stable enough for everyday use and is the default in this version of Kubuntu.”
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elementary OS “Freya” has been out for some time now, but developers are still adding features to it despite the fact that it has been dubbed stable. Now, users have the option to define custom keyboard shortcuts, which was a very sought after feature.
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Elementary OS 0.3 Freya has received a new option that permits the users to define their custom keyboard shortcuts, a feature which has been long awaited by the community.
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We will be using Kodibuntu, a Linux based operating system with sole purpose of giving you a modern HTPC features and interface. The goal of this tutorial is to help you in building a standalone, multi purpose media center which you can control from your smartphone, tablet or PC.
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After having introduced you to the Lemon Pi single computer board, today we are happy to present Tessel 2, a development platform created by Technical Machine and designed from the ground up to be embedded in a product.
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Newark Element14’s new ValentFX Logi-Pi and Logi-Bone FPGA add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black feature Arduino and PMOD hooks.
We first covered the Logi-Pi and Logi-Bone Logi-Boards back in Sept. 2013 when ValentFX showed off prototypes at the New York Maker Faire. The Logi-Boards, which integrate Xilinx SPARTAN-6 XC6SLX9 FPGAs, and plug into the Linux-based Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black hacker boards, respectively, have now reached market, thanks to a partnership with Newark Element14. ValentFX and Newark have also launched a $45.48 Logi-Edu educational board add-on that purports to teach everyday hackers the mysteries of FPGA.
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Phones
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Nokia’s own MeeGo OS (used in Nokia N9) was regularly rated better than iOS…
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Android
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Google has announced that Chrome for Android is now open source, the news was announced by Android software engineer Aurimas Liuyikas on Reddit.
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We’ve heard rumors since at least August 2014 that Google+’s image functions may be spun out into a standalone photo service. In March, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for products at Google, said the company is going to put a renewed focus on photos. “Photos are a big use case,” Pichai said. “So we are going to say this is the stream now.”
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Android Police has peeked at a leaked copy of a reworked Photos app, and it’s clear that Google is using the service split as an incentive to shake things up. The highlight may be Assistant (below), an effective substitute for Auto Awesome that gives you more creative power — you can produce more content yourself (such as Stories) instead of waiting for it to show up.
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Researchers at Cambridge University discovered they were able to recover data on a vast array of Android powered devices that had undergone the factory data reset process.
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The update would improve performance and stability, and bring a Shield controller update that makes pairing easier. Among many other features, the LTE model includes improvement in camera, audio, and performance of the modem.
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Users of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with the model number GT-I9190 can have the latest Lollipop experience on their smartphones with the help of a new custom ROM. The new CyanogenMod 12.1 (CM12.1) Nightly custom ROM is based on stock Android user interface with additional features and options.
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In the research report published on Friday, Merrill Lynch analysts gave their input on 2015 Google I/O developer conference that will take place on May 28- 29 in San Francisco, California. Since competition in the payments industry is on the horizon, the research firm expects Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to launch an upgraded payment platform for the Android users.
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Google is expected to announce a bunch of new software initiatives later this week, one of them being Android M. Some leaks have already provided early information on what the upcoming operating system will have to offer, and a new report sheds light on what could be one of the most important new apps for Android M (and other Android versions) that Google is expected to announce at I/O 2015.
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If you’re a dedicated Android fan and not making full use of widgets, then you’re totally not using the full potential of Google’s platform. See, if we take away widgets out of the feature bag, we are easily stripping it from one of its defining features.
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Nanjing University boffins Jingyu Hua, Zhenyu Shen, and Sheng Zhong have tracked commuter train trips with 92 percent accuracy using stolen phone accelerometer data.
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Chinese smartphone maker ZTE has unveiled the successor to the Q509T, dubbed Q519T, a new affordable smartphone which is priced at 599 Yuan (approximately Rs 6,100) in China. There is no information provided as to when the device will be available in India.
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Android M is expected to be unveiled later this week at Google I/O, and it will bring several new features to Google’s mobile platform according to various reports, including a brand new device update guarantee for Nexus devices.
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A week has passed, which means we’re back with our usual roundup with some of the best new Android apps and games that have made their way into the Play Store. This time we’ve got a good collection of games, so if you were looking to add some new ones on your Android smartphone or tablet, now is the right time to do it. Also, do check out our previous roundup, as well as this week’s sister list with the newest and greatest iOS apps, as well.
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The Android 5.0 Lollipop update for Asus ZenFone 5 has been delayed by 3-4 months, reveals the Taiwanese company.
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After releasing its own branded 8-inch Android tablet a mere two weeks ago, AT&T is giving itself some fresh competition. The mobile carrier has announced that it’s bringing the LG G Pad F 8.0 to its customers starting on May 29.
What’s Hot on ZDNet
The new model should not be confused with the LG G Pad 8.3, which, while being an older tablet, offers a slightly larger, higher-resolution screen and a faster processor. Rather, it’s more of a bigger sibling to the LG G Pad 7.0 that was released late last year, coming with the same 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor (compared to the 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 inside the G Pad 8.3).
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ZTE, soon after launching the Nubia Z9 smartphone in China, has now unveiled yet another smartphone, the Q519T. Unveiled in China, the ZTE Q519T has been priced at equivalent of $95 (approximately Rs. 6,000).
The highlight of the ZTE Q519T smartphone is that it features a massive battery capacity of 4000mAh, which is claimed to deliver up to 35 days of standby time. The new ZTE Q519T smartphone will be available in Blue, Gold, and White colours.
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When I wear the LG Watch Urbane people almost never ask me about it. Why? Because it looks like a watch. Other smart watches, like the original Samsung Gear and the Sony Smartwatch 3 attracted more questions from people, perhaps because they’re more obviously not watches.
The shape helps, like the G Watch R, the Urbane is circular and has a prominent button on the side. If you have the right watch face installed it’s actually nearly impossible to tell it’s not a standard, but chunky, watch. That is surely a good thing from a design perspective, although watch elitists will still tell you the smartwatch thing is nonsense, and a fad. The truth is that even big names in traditional watchmaking are thinking about how they can offer smart features in their watches.
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Roman Nurik works for Google, but he also develops really cool (and free) Android apps from time to time. He’s the man behind Dash Clock, Muzei, and now the FORM Watch Face for Android Wear. You can grab it right now and enjoy it all on its own, or you can take advantage of the sweet Muzei functionality.
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If the name Roman Nurik doesn’t ring a bell, he’s a design advocate for Google, and every time he decides to publish an Android app it seems to turn out a winner. His two previous apps that created quite a stir in the Android community are DashClock Widget and Muzei Live Wallpaper. Both are awesome, so you shouldn’t expect the next to be less so. While not immediately useful to non-Android Wear users, Roman’s new FORM Watch Face demonstrates the power of Android as a mobile platform.
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“Your secure software is open source; doesn’t that make it less secure?”
This is a recurring question that we get at Benetech about Martus, our free, strongly encrypted tool for secure collection and management of sensitive information built and provided by the Benetech Human Rights Program. It’s an important question for us and for all of our peers developing secure software in today’s post-Snowden environment of fear and worry about surveillance. We strongly believe not only that open source is compatible with digital security, but that it’s also essential for it.
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Let’s say you want to identify something like a Kanban system for your software project management and you’ve looked at various commercial products but for one reason or another nothing quite fits your requirements. Perhaps they’re not organized in a way you’d like or they come with a load of other features at a price that doesn’t make sense for you or they can’t be integrated into your workflow so you’re going to bite the bullet. You’re going to look for an open source Kanban system and adapt it to meet your needs. But how do you find such a beast?
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Events
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Databases
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There are tech user conferences and then there are tech vendor conferences i.e. while the former seeks to code, the latter seeks to sell.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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One regular reader of this blog contacted me a few days ago to share a few suggestions and some concerns about the LibreOffice project. I did not agree with many of the points he was making, but a few of them made sense. I’d like to discuss the main one, because I think there is no clear cut answer about it even inside the LibreOffice project.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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I recently attended a half-day workshop on Karma with Pedro Szekely, our instructor. He started by warning us that he knows very little about libraries, but a ton about data. The files we needed for the workshop were on GitHub, if you’re interested in checking it out. You can follow the tutorial steps on the Wiki, and, of course, you can find Karma itself on GitHub.
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Open Hardware
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Go to DEFCON and you’ll stand in line for five hours to get a fancy electronic badge you’ll be showing to your grandchildren some day. Yes, at DEFCON, you buy your hacker cred. LayerOne is not so kind to the technically inept. At LayerOne, you are given a PCB, bag of parts, and are told to earn your hacker cred by soldering tiny QFP and SOT-23 chips by hand. The Hardware Hacking Village at LayerOne was packed with people eagerly assembling their badge, or badges depending on how cool they are.
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Programming
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AMD is among the companies working on adding a reader/writer for SPIR-V within LLVM.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Macedonia has just neutralised an armed group whose sponsors had been under surveillance for at least eight months…
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Memorial Day commemorates soldiers killed in war. We are told that the war dead died for us and our freedom. US Marine General Smedley Butler challenged this view. He said that our soldiers died for the profits of the bankers, Wall Street, Standard Oil, and the United Fruit Company.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Growing 80 percent of the globe’s almonds in California doesn’t just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination—roughly two hives’ worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether. That’s at least 80 percent of all available commercial hives in the United States, Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper who serves as vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, recently told NPR.
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Finance
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People need to stop blaming the rich for income inequality in America according to the third richest man in the world, Warren Buffett
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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With all this talk about epistemology and the messiness of history, it’s easy to forget that what Bush was being asked to do was not travel through time but to say whether or not he agreed with a decision, made by the last president from his party (who also happens to be his brother), that was based on lies and resulted in the deaths of half a million people. Would his brother have made that same choice? It’s an important question whose answer is obviously not obvious.
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Privacy
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Digital privacy has been a growing concern for businesses and general web users ever since Edward Snowden leaked PRISM documents to the press, and for good reason.
The documents revealed a digital surveillance operation that was larger and more efficient than even the most zealous tinfoil hat wearer could have imagined.
They detailed operations that collected vast streams of data from big name companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo, that had been approved in dark, back-room, secret courts away from the eyes of privacy advocates and digital watchdogs.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear this week that, while the Senate is rapidly approaching recess, the Senate “will stay in [session] until a deal is struck to extend” the Patriot Act. McConnell has also introduced legislation for both long-term and short-term reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s expiring provisions. It seems that McConnell is trying to bully the entire Senate into passing short-term reauthorization, giving him more time to further weaken reform efforts.
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Zimmermann and Snowden are 30 years apart in age, but their actions have framed the privacy debate. Zimmermann switched his focus from campaigning against nuclear weapons to pushing back on state snooping in 1991, when he released PGP for free over the internet in an act of political defiance. His protest helped prevent legislation which would have forced software companies to insert “backdoors” in their products, allowing the government to read encrypted messages.
The user manual for PGP, written by Zimmermann in 1991 and updated seven years later, is a startling prediction of the mass surveillance methods that were eventually adopted by the NSA after 9/11.
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Well, well. Here’s a quick (rare) Saturday post just to get folks up to speed on what happened late last night. After going back and forth for a while, the Senate voted on… and failed to approve both a version of the USA Freedom Act and a short “clean extension” of the clauses of the PATRIOT Act that were set to expire — mainly Section 215 which some (falsely) believe enables the NSA to collect bulk metadata from telcos (and potentially others). What this means is that it is much more likely that Section 215 expires entirely. The Senate has since left town, though it plans to come back next Sunday, May 31st to see if it can hammer out some sort of agreement. Though, beware of false compromises, such as those being pushed by Senate Intelligence Committee (and big time NSA supporter), Richard Burr. His “hastily introduced” bill pretends to try to “bridge the gap” but in actuality is much worse than basically anything else on the table.
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Lawfare — a blog primarily devoted defending the practices of spy agencies — has released a paper authored by Benjamin Wittes and Jodie Liu that theorizes that the public’s concern over privacy encroachments are — if not overblown — then failing to properly factor in the privacy “gains” they’ve obtained over the past several years.
The theory is solid, but the paper fails to differentiate between what sort of privacy losses people find acceptable and which ones they don’t — mainly by leaving privacy invasions by government entities almost completely undiscussed. It opens by quoting a scene from an old Woody Allen film in which the protagonist attempts to “hide” his purchase of porn at a magazine stand by purchasing several unrelated (and presumably uninteresting) magazines at the same time. This leads to the conclusion that people’s ability to enjoy porn in private has risen with the advent of the internet, while simultaneously opening them up to data harvesters and internet companies less interested in personal privacy than selling users to advertisers.
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Civil Rights
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal emails are in the news again, and members of the U.S. military and intelligence community sense that there’s a dangerous double standard developing regarding the handling of classified information.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Copyright Board of Canada delivered a devastating defeat to Access Copyright on Friday, releasing its decision on a tariff for copying by employees of provincial governments. Access Copyright had initially sought $15 per employee for the period from 2005 – 2009 and $24 per employee for the period from 2010 – 2014. It later reduced its demands to $5.56 and $8.45. The board conducted a detailed review of the copying within government and the applicability of the Access Copyright licence. Its final decision gives Access Copyright pennies rather than dollars: 11.56 cents for 2005-2009 and 49.71 cents for 2010-2014.
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The court order to transfer ownership of two Pirate Bay-related domains to the Swedish state will not be a straightforward process. Site co-founder Fredrik Neij, a party in the two-year long case, has just announced he will appeal the ruling. Neij isn’t interested in the domains though, he has much more serious things to consider.
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Send this to a friend
05.24.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Server
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Since I’m such a big container fan (been using them on Linux since 2005) and I recently blogged about Docker, LXC, and OpenVZ… how could I pass up posting this? Some Canonical guys gave a presentation at the recent OpenStack Summit on “LXD vs. KVM”. What is LXD? It is basically a management service for LXC that supposedly adds a lot of the features LXC was missing… and is much easier to use. For a couple of years now Canonical has shown an interest in LXC and has supposedly be doing a lot of development work around them. I wonder what specifically? They almost seem like the only company who is interested in LXC.. or at least they are putting forth a publicly noticeable effort around them.
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LXD is usable with Ubuntu 15.04 albeit not many have yet fully experimented with this new technology from Canonical given its early state. The LXD Linux container hypervisor allows for rapid provisioning, very fast performance, a REST API, and other functionality. If you’re wishing to learn more about LXD, this week at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver was a talk about LXD vs. KVM for Linux hypervisors.
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HP announced is second quarter fiscal 2015 earnings on May 21, with company executives enthusiastic about the company’s upcoming split, and continued prospects in the cloud.
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Kernel Space
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An EXT4 file-system corruption problem was uncovered with Linux 4.0 that turned out to be an MD RAID0 issue with the Linux kernel in the latest stable series. This RAID corruption issue has now been fixed in the latest kernel Git code.
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There’s numerous recent features to talk about this weekend for those interested in tracking Linux system performance, monitoring upstream projects for performance regressions, and carrying out other similar work using open-source software on Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 10.6 is up to a release candidate state and should be officially released in early June. If you’re not up to speed on this quarterly update to the open-source user-space graphics drivers, here’s an overview of the new features for Mesa 10.6.
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NVIDIA has been working out plans for their graphics driver to support Mir and Wayland. As part of that, besides their recent EGL support, they’ve been tackling kernel mode-setting.
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Applications
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Python is a high-level, general-purpose, structured, powerful, open source programming language that is used for a wide variety of programming tasks. It features a fully dynamic type system and automatic memory management, similar to that of Scheme, Ruby, Perl, and Tcl, avoiding many of the complexities and overheads of compiled languages. The language was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, and continues to grow in popularity.
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Proprietary
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I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 14.1.3 for both Mac OS X and Linux. CrossOver 14.1.3 has important bug fixes for both Mac and Linux users.
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Vivaldi, a web browser based on Chromium built by Opera founder that’s aimed mostly at power users, has been updated one more and is now available for download.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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After half a year of work, Godot, the most advanced open source self-contained game development environment reached version 1.1. This game engine is a community developed effort to produce an open (and no strings attached) alternative to large commercial software such as Unity and Unreal. This release focuses on improvements to the 2D engine so all features used by modern 2D games are implemented.
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GOG have done it again folks, Prehistorik 1 & 2 which are both games from my childhood have been published on GOG and both support Linux.
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The Steam repository now contains the Steam client package plus the S3 texture compression library for Open Source drivers for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
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The rise of Linux on the desktop is always just around the corner, right? Most recently it was Valve’s new focus on Steam-powered Linux gaming that was supposed to boost the open source OS to new heights. However, the most recent Steam Hardware & Software Survey shows a big drop for Linux. It’s now less than 1% of Steam systems.
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Interloper is a small scale real time strategy that recently released for Linux, and it managed to capture my interest for being a bit different.
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Seven years after the unofficial fan sequel to the 80s classic Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders was released in German for Windows, a director’s cut has been made available in English for Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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LOVE the blending tools. I’m used to those of Paint Tool SAI, and finding a program whose brushes are far more customizable and can do more is digital art heaven. Especially an open source one!
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Evolution is a powerful concept and tool. When harnessed properly, humans have been able to tailor and adapt crops and domesticate animals. We’ve been able to grow the Dutch unnecessarily tall and create beautiful and consequence-free theme parks as shown in the Jurassic Park documentary series on the BBC. However, when not monitored closely or left to nature’s own devices, the result is the terrifying land based sharks that have caused such recent devastation across most of Australia.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It’s been a while since my last post, I was busy with my university exams and didn’t get much time to work on my GSoC project. But during whatever time I got I tried to get myself familiar with GNOME Shell coding style and get a hang of the way it works, since GNOME Shell is the main module I will be working with in this project. But things weren’t as simple as I initially thought them to be. It has been a struggle trying to find out some structured documentation for GNOME Shell code-base mainly the JavaScript part.
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Reviews
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I have to say, Xubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet shattered my expectations. Obliterated them. Overall, I was expecting a distro that would be about as good as its parent. Instead, I got this fine piece of digital machinery, which purrs and meows and growls like a turbo-charged tiger, if this silly metaphor makes any sense. Or is it an analogy?
Now, one tiny software glitch, plus one big regression that affects the entire family. That’s the sum of my complains. On the plus side, Xubuntu fully supports the hardware, including the tricky UEFI stuff, it’s fast, robust, elegant, rich in software and features, simple and fun to use, and it works well with anything I’ve thrown at it. By far the best distro of this year. I don’t give out 10/10 lightly, but I’m inclined to do that right now, even though the few tiny problems we’ve had prevent me from doing that. However, the whole package reminds me of Fuduntu, really. Pure and simple and just good. 9.99999/10. Try it, you won’t be disappointed. We’re done here.
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Arch Family
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I don’t know why, but I always had this desire of installing new operating systems and discover by myself how they work, how software packages are installed, removed, updated, and how they differ from other OSes.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 is shaping up quite well across the Fedora Workstation, Server, and Cloud offerings. Out of curiosity, this week I ran some initial comparison tests of Fedora Server 21 vs. Fedora Server 22.
Fedora Server 22 notably switches its default file-system over to XFS from EXT4 for new installations. Fedora Server 22 also has the other same updated packages to Fedora 22 like the Linux 4.0.2 kernel and GCC 5.1.1.
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A while back I bought a Nexus 9, mainly because it has a weird processor that emulates a 64 bit ARM (aarch64). Google seem to have abandoned this platform entirely, just 6 months after I got it, so fuck you too Google. Anyway …
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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SparkyLinux features customized lightweight desktops (like E19, LXDE and Openbox), multimedia plugins, selected sets of apps and own custom tools to ease different tasks.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After only three days from the last kernel update for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Canonical published today details about a recent security flaw that was patched in the Linux kernel packages of the distribution.
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Canonical’s endgame is to create a full desktop-mobile convergent system, to run the same code-base on Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Phone and Internet of Things devices. Also, the user interface is responsive, adjusting itself to fit best the screen.
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Canonical is preparing a major new update for Ubuntu Touch, but it will take a while until it’s going to be ready. From the looks of it, the devs are preparing some interesting improvements and updates.
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Details about a NTFS-3G vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) have been published by Canonical in a security notice.
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Phones
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Android
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According to the latest research of the Cambridge University, selling your Android phone could put you at risk of losing your most personal information to any stranger.
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I’ve been living like a savage barbarian the past week and I don’t like it one bit. In fact, my life has been inconvenienced more times than not, it’s been filled with various frustrations, and from time to time certain tasks that were once simple have been much harder.
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Experts have argued that the recently released Android Lollipop is the best performing operating software that Google has ever produced. The software, which was first released in October 2014 and updated with Android 5.1 in February 2015, boasts a sleeker, faster and more beautiful display. Its kinder on the battery and is fit to be used not only on phones and tablets, but also on watches.
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We suspected it was going to be released this weekend and here it is, the Android 5.1.1 OTA is starting to roll out to some T-Mobile users. The update’s approval was confirmed by the operator’s product evangelist Des on Twitter and Google+ a few hours ago and it has appeared on T-Mobile’s product support pages.
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Twitch is now offering video-on-demand (VOD) service to users of their mobile apps. However, if you’re using the Android version, you actually need to do more than just receive an update from the Google Play store.
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In less than a week, San Francisco’s Moscone Center will host Google’s annual I/O developer conference – geeks from all around the world will gather to polish their coding skills and see Google’s latest technologies in action. Needless to say, we’ll be also keeping a close eye at the event as many of the announcements made there will be of great interest to us and our readers. To be more specific, Google is likely to preview a new version of its Android operating system. Major announcements regarding Android Wear, Android TV, and Android Auto, among other Google products and services, are being rumored as well.
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This phone has a 1.2 Ghz Dual core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of internal storage with option to add a microSD card, a 5 megapixels camera and a 4.3 inches 540p display running stock Android.
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This 11.6-inch tablet is now listed at Amazon.com for $399,- USD and comes with Remix OS pre-installed. This Remix OS is a heavily tweaked version of Android (version 4.4.2) optimized for desktop use.
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It’s been almost one year since Google officially unveiled its current version of Android, called Lollipop, which means it’s just about time to see what the next major update will bring.
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T-Mobile has begun rolling out its Android 5.1.1 update for the Nexus 6. The release was finally approved by Google just two days ago, and it brings Wi-Fi calling as well as plenty of bug fixes.
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Google will be unveiling the successor to Lollipop at Google I/O in just a few days, but we won’t get a real name. It will likely just be called Android M until it’s released, but Google has an internal code name just as it did for L and K. It’s called Macadamia Nut Cookie (MNC), a name which is already being referenced in AOSP.
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The Times goes on to point out, however, that besides the criminal label and the fines, nothing much has changed for the banks. In a memo to employees this week, the chief executive of Citi, Michael Corbat, called the criminal behavior “an embarrassment” — a euphemism for crime that wouldn’t pass muster if it were to be expressed by a person accused of benefit fraud, say.
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Rosendahl emphasized that Akanda was born as open-source software and will remain open-source. From a commercial perspective what Akanda provides to enterprises is support and professional services.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Last Monday, I bought the phone anyway. I must say that I am very pleased by its performance and very cheap price. One can swap the SIM card to use the phone with another carrier here, too.
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Mozilla’s chief executive announced major switch of strategy to boost Firefox OS market share. Unlike its previous program with focus on price, Firefox will finally deliver “quality.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The latest GNU Compiler Collection code now has proper optimization targeting/tuning support for the IBM z13.
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Openness/Sharing
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Science
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Photography has been a medium of limitless possibilities since it was originally invented in the early 1800s. The use of cameras has allowed us to capture historical moments and reshape the way we see ourselves and the world around us. To celebrate the amazing history of photography and photographic science, we have assembled twenty photographic ‘firsts’ from over the past two centuries.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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These legends have some fundamental similarities. They are based on deliberate misrepresentations of the war and obfuscation with regard to the interests involved. In order to explain the deceptions behind the Vietnam Syndrome it is necessary to examine the “other war”. Contrary to much official history of US involvement in Indochina—the stuffing of almost all the films made—whether documentary or feature—the war began and ended as a CIA operation. The confusion as to war aims, strategy, tactical and operational effectiveness arise entirely from the fact that more than probably any other war fought with conventional forces—up to that time (except Korea but that war hasn’t ended yet)—the war in Vietnam was initiated, managed, funded, advertised and ultimately waged by the invisible army of US capitalism.
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Yet, Obama is known to be just another powerless US president serving war industrialized Wall Street and at present dutifully ordering lethal multi nation bombings.
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Despite the fact that the US plans on conducting airstrikes on Isis in Iraq and Syria for years, the Chicago Tribune reported on Monday that key members in the House and Senate have resigned themselves to the fact that there’s virtually no chance of Congress agreeing on any sort of bill to constrain or legalize the Obama administration’s bombing campaign in the Middle East.
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The US Defense Department’s watchdog knowingly turned a blind eye to financial irregularities, leading to the Pentagon signing off on an audit. This has led to questions regarding just how transparent the government auditing process actually is.
A special investigation by Reuters revealed that a senior member of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Inspector General team had colluded with an independent auditing company, Grant Thornton LLP, to falsely keep the US Marine Corps books clean.
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Is Anglo-America a failed state? In the realm of intelligence and national security, the special relationship is being tested.
As he spoke to a crowd of Americans, Britain’s defence minister, Michael Fallon, had a US-UK flag pin on his lapel.
“Just as together we broke the bonds of totalitarianism and tyranny in the Second World War,” he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in March, “so we faced down the threat of communism in the cold war”.
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There is no independent identification of the casualties or any explanation as to why they were targeted.
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It’s springtime, and Republicans are feeling hawkish again. See how Sen. Rand Paul’s views on foreign policy have shifted as he’s adopted a more aggressive stance. It wasn’t that long ago when the Kentucky Republican was staging a talking filibuster against the Obama administration’s drone policy, warning the American people that the president might deploy a drone against an American citizen on American soil without judicial process.
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At the Lincoln Day Dinner dinner in Des Moines Saturday night, Senator and probable 2016 candidate Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he would have no problem droning potential ISIS recruits, and was so excited to do so he reckoned he might could skip the whole due process part.
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Elites want more violence. They are unconcerned that innocent civilians are killed.
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The truth is that we can never be certain who is in the target zone of any drone strike. Even though drones spent a week watching this compound, it is obvious that drones cannot see everything in the area.
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Lethal drones are President Obama’s weapon of choice in striking at suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists in remote areas, but – as with any weapon of war – there must be a cost-benefit analysis, including whether drone strikes create more enemies than they kill, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
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Machinery of lethal strikes enjoys moral and legal impunity – as intended
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The Justice Department is acknowledging that the FBI, DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies are likely to make increasing use of unmanned aerial drones in the United States.
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MALE VOICEOVER (Good Kill, Voltage Pictures): The remotely-piloted aircraft is not the future of war. It is the here and now. Make no mistake about it: this ain’t PlayStation. We are killing people.
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President Obama’s announcement last month that earlier this year a “U.S. counterterrorism operation” had killed two hostages, including an American citizen, has become a fresh occasion for questioning the rationales for continuing attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles aimed at presumed, suspected, or even confirmed terrorists. This questioning is desirable, although not mainly for hostage-related reasons connected to this incident. Sometimes an incident has a sufficient element of controversy to stoke debate even though what most needs to be debated is not an issue specific to the incident itself. More fundamental issues about the entire drone program need more attention than they are getting.
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TONY JONES, PRESENTER: All this talk of killer drones raises some very profound questions. For instance, are nations more likely to go to war if there’s less risk of their civilians being killed? And what does it mean if you take human decision-making out of the loop? Can a machine tell the difference between a civilian and a combatant?
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The programs in question involved such activities as the CIA’s efforts to derail Iran’s nuclear program and the agency’s use of drones to kill militants inside Pakistan. Again, the cracks in Blair’s authority were revealed: The DNI, as determined by the 2004 legislation that created the position, was to be the focal point for intelligence support to the president and other senior government leaders, and was allowed some say in budgetary matters, but was not granted command over any covert missions abroad.
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Don’t expect any news you read or watch today or in the future to tell you that. The fact that President George W. Bush knowingly lied us into a disastrous war in Iraq cannot be told. Our media systems even now cannot report this story.
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These are the choices facing Washington, all stemming from the events of just one weekend. The path of this war has changed, leaving western powers with ever less room for manoeuvre.
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Remind me who, even among opponents and critics of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, ever imagined that the decision to take out Saddam Hussein’s regime and occupy the country would lead to a terror caliphate in significant parts of Iraq and Syria that would conquer social media and spread like wildfire. And yet, don’t think that the future is completely unpredictable either.
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On top of this evidence, known to the Bush White House but not the general public or Congress, was the public evidence from the international weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq. They found no WMD, yet the Bush administration insisted the weapons must be there and only by invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein could America be safe.
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In which we examine the shadowy death of democracy, where we’ve come from and where we may still go.
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So when Jeb Bush gave four answers in four days last week to the same question — “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” — one would expect that his primary opponents realized that they were about to get asked the same question, and spent all of five minutes coming up with a better answer than “yes.”
If Marco Rubio’s appearance yesterday on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace is any indication, he did not take those five minutes.
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Yet plans call for guns-blazing war games on Pagan at least 16 weeks a year. Hundreds of Marines, potentially joined by troops from Japan, Australia and South Korea, would storm ashore in landing craft, firing mortars and small arms, backed by naval bombardments, swarms of helicopters, drones, fighter jets and perhaps B-52s dropping real bombs.
The plan has sparked an outpouring of resentment toward the U.S. military, fueled by strong sentiment that Pagan’s future should be determined by the people of the islands, not by Washington.
“We love our island. We don’t want to give it up,” said Jerome Aldan, the 40-year-old elected mayor of the Northern Mariana Islands. “This proposal is going to turn it into a wasteland.”
Aldan was 6 when the eruption of Mt. Pagan forced the island’s residents — about 100 families in all — to evacuate 200 miles south to Saipan, capital of the Northern Marianas, a U.S. commonwealth territory. The military, he fears, will turn Pagan into a war zone and kill the families’ decades-old dream of returning.
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Pentagon’s admitted partial responsibility in the death of two children was meant to divert attention from more widespread abuses, critics of the US government’s drone strikes claim.
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This designation, I suggest, was less a reflection of the seriousness of Gadahn’s actions and more an indication of how much they perplexed the state. Gadahn never killed anyone, never blew up a building; the closest he ever came to actual operational significance was when he petitioned bin Laden, offering his services as a media strategist. Ultimately, the real threat was not so much Gadahn as his image. With his undeniable American-ness and (renounced) Jewish heritage, Gadahn confounded prevailing understandings of who “terrorists” are, where they come from and what they look like.
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A German court is to hear a case against the government brought by relatives of victims of a US drone attack in Yemen in a groundbreaking action that has the potential to interrupt the American strikes.
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A court in Germany is set to take evidence from a Yemeni victim of the USA’s secret drone programme following revelations that military bases on German soil play a key role in the strikes.
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, an environmental engineer from Sana’a who lost two relatives to a 2012 drone strike, has won the right to have his evidence heard as part of a constitutional claim filed in Germany.
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KnowDrones.com Coordinator Nick Mottern claims that the US Army and Air Force program to use unmanned aerial systems in combat has had catastrophic results because the drones have killed large numbers of civilians, but have not had significant impact on the scale of terrorist activities.
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No miraculous leap of faith is necessary to believe that U.S. officials did not know that the hostages were at the target site. And, still, it raises the question of whether the CIA really knows who it is killing when it launches strikes.
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Warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition pounded Shiite rebels across three Yemeni cities today, as Riyadh reported the death of a Saudi child from cross-border fire.
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Cross border rocket attacks launched from inside Yemen have killed two people in southern Saudi Arabia over the last 24 hours, Saudi Arabia’s state news agency SPA reported on Friday.
SPA quoted a Civil Defence official in the southwestern province of Jizan as saying that a child was killed and three other children were wounded on Friday in the al-Tawal region.
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Whoopi Goldberg lit into Republican presidential candidates on The View on Tuesday for their attempts to sound tough on foreign policy.
“The Republican candidates are kind of sounding more like action heroes,” Goldberg said. “Chris Christie wants to pump up the military. Marco Rubio says he will find and kill terrorists like Liam Neeson in Taken. You’re too short to be Liam Neeson, find somebody else.”
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A US air strike on Syria last year probably killed two children, officials say – the first admission of civilian casualties in the campaign.
“We regret the unintentional loss of lives,” said Lieutenant General James Terry, head of the US-led campaign.
US Central Command said the strike on 5-6 November, near Harim City, targeted the al-Qaeda-linked Khorasan Group.
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While notable for admitting the possibility it killed two young children, admission called “too little, too late” by expert who says deathtoll of innocent people far exceeds Pentagon statement.
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The segregation is so pronounced that it can be traced on a map: Some 49% of the 1.3 million active-duty service members in the U.S. are concentrated in just five states — California, Virginia, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.
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The capture and killing of the world’s most wanted man was always going to be an enthralling story, considering how he challenged and punctured the pride of the sole global superpower as well as evade arrest for a decade before being liquidated.
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Some might argue that knowing exactly how Osama bin Laden was killed really doesn’t matter. Some might even argue that he is still alive, which, if nothing else, would demonstrate the persistence of urban legends relating to conspiracies allegedly involving the U.S. government. JFK’s assassination has the grassy knoll and second gunman, plus Mafia, CIA, and Cuban connections as well as a possible Vietnamese angle. 9/11 had the mystery of the collapse of Building 7. More recently still, the Texas State Guard was mobilized to monitor a military training exercise because it was rumored to be a ploy to impose martial law. Demonizing Washington as one large conspiracy is good business all around.
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Gaza’s economy is on the “verge of collapse,” a new World Bank report warned Friday, saying the unemployment rate there is now the highest in the world and calling on Israel and international donors to remedy the situation.
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Pakistan has strongly condemned the US drone strike in North Waziristan on May 16, and has called for cessation of such strikes.
“Such strikes are a clear violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Foreign Office spokesman Qazi Khalilullah said.
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Germany, France and Italy have pledged cooperation to jointly develop a “Euro-drone” for intelligence-gathering and surveillance of the skies.
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Last week, just over two years since that note was written, a jury sentenced Tsarnaev to death for his role in the bombing. Speaking to the press outside the John J. Moakley courthouse in Boston, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, “We are not intimidated by acts of terror, or radical ideals,” and described the marathon bombing as “a political crime, designed to intimidate and coerce the United States.”
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On May 12, 2015, Ananta Bijoy Das (32), a progressive writer, blogger, editor of science fiction magazine Jukti, and an organizer of Gonojagoron Mancha (People’s Resurgence Platform), was hacked to death, using machetes, by four assailants at Subidbazar Bankolapara residential area of Sylhet city, for writing against religious fundamentalism.
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In 1979, my father was arrested and tried as a CIA agent in Iran.
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It would be difficult to find a better example of tyranny than the U.S.-supported military dictatorship that has ruled Egypt for decades. In many ways, it mirrors the brutal U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. No legislature. No independent judiciary. No due process of law. And lots of round-ups, kidnappings, torture, and execution of people who protest or who just hold the “wrong” beliefs.
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Drone use against terrorists causes collateral damage, but it remains “the most effective weapon” in the United States’ arsenal, former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell told RT in a wide-ranging interview.
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In summary, the most likely—though not most lethal—terror threats to Americans come from individuals living within the United States who are partially motivated to undertake self-directed attacks based upon their perception that the United States and the West are at war with the Muslim world.
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Since 9/11, the United States’ “war on terror” has become the overarching news story of our time.
As the nation’s dominant news organization, The Times deserves, and gets, intensive scrutiny for how it has handled that story. The grades, clearly, are mixed. Its role in the run-up to the Iraq War has been rightly and harshly criticized. Its early reporting on surveillance, though delayed, was groundbreaking. Its national-security reporting has been excellent in many ways and, at times, is justifiably slammed for allowing too much cover for government officials who want to get their message out.
Nearly 14 years after 9/11, a reckoning finally is taking place. The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, has said repeatedly in recent months that he thinks it’s time to toughen up and raise the bar.
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In this web-only conversation with journalist Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, we turn to Iraq. He recently wrote a piece for Rolling Stone titled “Forget What We Know Now: We Knew Then Iraq War Was a Joke.” Taibbi wrote the piece after Jeb Bush’s infamous interview on Fox News. Megyn Kelly asked Bush “knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” Bush responded, “I would have.” Jeb Bush later reversed his stance.
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In a heated 10-minute exchange, MSNBC host Chris Matthews confronts CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell with the question of why, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he let Vice President Dick Cheney get away with saying Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons.
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A former top CIA official and intelligence briefer to President George W. Bush before the Iraq War has acknowledged Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney falsely presented information to the public. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Michael Morell was asked about Cheney’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons.
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Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) could learn a lesson from his older brother on how to field questions about the Bush family political dynasty.
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Michael Morell, twice acting director of the CIA and a member of President Barack Obama’s five-member surveillance review panel, said he supports the latest version of the USA Freedom Act, which backers say would end the dragnet collection of domestic call records.
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Mystery bombs have fallen twice on China, from Myanmar. The first time, March 13, killed five Chinese and injured eight. On May 14th, another one was dropped, injuring five villagers.
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Goss registered through Dickstein Shapiro law firm which is his new employer. The company has long-lasting relations with the Turkish government in its turn.
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So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went.
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Transparency Reporting
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Since independent Senator Bernie Sanders announced his presidential candidacy in April, polls in Iowa show support there for him has increased to 15 percent among Democrats, up from five percent in February. This compares to about 60 percent backing for former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton. Sanders is the longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history, yet he is going to run in the Democratic Party for the Democratic nomination. We discuss Sanders’ plans with former presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, author of the new book, “Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015.”
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Just two weeks after its launch, Transparency Toolkit’s ICWatch project, which documents more than 100,000 job profiles associated with the US “intelligence community” has been rehoused at WikiLeaks due to death threats and DDoS attacks on its infrastructure.
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As Independent Senator Bernie Sanders ramps up his campaign for the presidency, his focus has been on issues like economic inequality, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and stopping global climate change. Yet questions have remained about his views on the realm of policy most relevant to the commander in chief’s job: foreign affairs.
A televised CSPAN interview Sanders gave in 1989, when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, offers a look into his thinking about the world. At one point, the interviewer asked Sanders about the distinction between socialism in Latin American countries and the authoritarian government of the Soviet Union.
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Earlier this month, a federal judge sentenced Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA analyst convicted of leaking information about a secret anti-Iran plot, to three-and-half years in prison. It was a strikingly heavy sentence. If it were part of a serious crackdown on all government employees who violate their oaths, it might be justifiable. Instead, it is something quite different: further evidence of the wildly different ways leakers are treated, depending on who they are.
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Even worse, the feds claimed that Sterling, who is black, did it out of resentment over a failed racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency — in effect using Sterling’s willingness to stand up for his rights against him.
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There were no Blacks on the jury, and according to Mr. Solomon, “the evidence presented by the prosecution was circumstantial email and phone call metadata without content of any incriminating nature.”
Despite pledging to be the most transparent presidential administration, Pres. Obama has expanded Bush era surveillance techniques, and has used the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined.
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The mere fact that Hillary Clinton’s official emails were kept on her personal computer system is turning out to be one of the least important things about them. What matters most about this first batch of messages released by the State Department is that they reveal Clinton, as secretary of state, at the center of a tangled web of connections and conflicts of interest between public and private actors.
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The messages show the role played by Sidney Blumenthal, who was working for the Clinton family foundation and advising a group of entrepreneurs trying to win business from the Libyan transitional government. Blumenthal repeatedly wrote dispatches about the events in Libya to Clinton, who often forwarded them to her aides at the State Department.
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Britain acted deceitfully in Libya and David Cameron authorised an MI6 plan to “break up” the country, a close confidante of Hillary Clinton claimed in a series of secret reports sent to the then-secretary of state.
Sidney Blumenthal, a long-time friend of the Clintons, emailed Mrs Clinton on her personal account to warn her that Britain was “game playing” in Libya.
Mr Blumenthal had no formal role in the US State Department and his memos to Mrs Clinton were sourced to his own personal contacts in the Middle East and Europe.
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Unnamed US officials allegedly disclosed very sensitive information in a report on raid in Syria, published by New York Times.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The two great ecological challenges of our times are biodiversity erosion and climate change. And both are interconnected, in their causes and their solutions.
Industrial agiculture is the biggest contributor to biodiversity erosion as well as to climate change. According to the United Nations, 93% of all plant variety has disappeared over the last 80 years.
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Bees flit from flower to flower dining on nectar. Sometimes that nectar may contain traces of widely used pesticides. Yet the bees are unlikely to know which nectar is tainted. Indeed, they can’t taste these pesticides, a new study finds. However, the pesticides are similar to nicotine. This can encourage the bees to come back for more. And especially troubing: A second new study suggests the pesticides can harm some wild bees.
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“We need that relationship with bees,” says author and beekeeper Crowder. “That’s how we need nature. We can’t live without nature and bees help us recognize that connection.”
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So gushes Mother Jones, adding the enticing word “exclusive” to the story. But – weirdly enough, for a confection of spying and science reporting, both of which are normally so reliable – this appears to be a bit garbled. Firstly, the “climate research programme” looks to be more like the CIA had allowed civilian scientists to access classified data—such as ocean temperature and tidal readings gathered by Navy submarines and topography data collected by spy satellites. So, not CIA research at all: just data sharing. And presumably not CIA data mostly; if this is stuff routinely gathered by Navy subs, its presumably Navy data; which the CIA had been given the job of giving out? Hard to be sure. National Journal seems to support my interpretation.
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For most of the past two decades, a handful of climate change scientists have had the CIA’s MEDEA (Measurement of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis) program as an ace in the hole: they could draw on classified info from spy satellites and subs to study global warming in extreme detail. However, they’ll now have to make do with alternatives. The agency has shut down MEDEA, saying that its projects to study the security implications of climate change “have been completed.” While the CIA says it’ll still “engage external experts” on the subject, it won’t be providing consistent access to its extremely accurate and rare data.
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The Central Intelligence Agency has announced that it’s closing down MADEA, a decades-old research program that shared classified information with scientists to study how climate change might exacerbate global security risks.
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Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis, or Medea, which began in the 1990s, allowed civilian scientists access to classified satellite data. The program was scrapped under former President George W. Bush, but reconstituted in 2010 under president Obama.
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Britain is ramping up its military rhetoric, sending its biggest warship for NATO drills in the Baltic, right off the Russian coast, in this latest show of force. The drills kick off on June 5 and will last for two weeks.
The helicopter carrier HMS Ocean is expected to reach Russia’s city of Kaliningrad sometime this week, carrying aboard about 80 Royal Marines who are to join other NATO troops in Poland, the Sunday Times reports.
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Finance
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A senior official at the Bank of England “inadvertently” sent research assessing the economic dangers of the UK leaving the European Union to an editor at a national newspaper.
The Bank was left in an embarrassing situation on Friday after it accidentally emailed details – including how to fend off inquiries related to the report – directly to the Guardian newspaper.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The context was “Hearing Is Believing,” an event sponsored by NPR and member stations WNYC and WBEZ to pitch public radio (and its podcasts) as an advertising vehicle (American Community Radio, 5/12/15).
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Actually, Border Books did close in large part because the economic system is rigged against ordinary Americans. One of the main reasons Amazon has been able to grow as rapidly as it did is that Amazon has not been required to collect the same sales tax as its brick-and-mortar competitors in most states for most of its existence. The savings on sales tax almost certainly exceeded its cumulative profits since it was founded in 1994.
While there is no policy rationale to exempt businesses from the obligation to collect sales tax because they are internet-based, this exemption has allowed Amazon to become a huge company and made its founder, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world.
Oh yeah—Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post.
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The most powerful component of the Fear and Disinformation Campaign (FDI) rests with the CIA, which, secretly subsidizes authors, journalists and media critics, through a web of private foundations and CIA sponsored front organizations. The CIA also influences the scope and direction of many Hollywood productions. Since 9/11, one third of Hollywood productions are war movies. “Hollywood stars and scriptwriters are rushing to bolster the new message of patriotism, conferring with the CIA and brainstorming with the military about possible real-life terrorist attacks.” “The Sum of All Fears” directed by Phil Alden Robinson, which depicts the scenario of a nuclear war, received the endorsement and support of both the Pentagon and the CIA.
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In particular, Allen frequently documents how intimately and seamlessly connected the members of the media aristocracy are with other members of Washington’s ruling elite, whether they come from the intelligence community, the super-wealthy, big banks, the lobbying community, or top levels of government.
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Here is the shocking story of how the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms became an intermediary for the Taliban in Afghanistan and relayed an offer by the Taliban to the US government for the surrender of Osama Bin Laden months before the 9/11 attacks. The offer was refused. This story, written by my friend and Cockburn’s old partner at the Village Voice, James Ridgeway, and Camelia Fard, was published in the Voice on June 12, 2001, and promptly vanished from the cultural memory after 9/11. In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations, Ridgeway asked me to re-run the article on CounterPunch. I was very happy to oblige him. It’s an astounding read. –Jeffrey St. Clair
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Every nation must create a bogey man or a group to crucify and persecute, in order to unify the public behind their leaders, help them act out their collective aggression, and dodge the important domestic issues that plague the day.
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Censorship
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The founder of Russia’s most popular social network recently described to Mashable how he chose to flee his native Moscow after Kremlin loyalists wrested control of the company away from him.
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Russia’s media watchdog has written to Google, Twitter and Facebook warning them against violating Russian Internet laws and a spokesman said on Thursday they risk being blocked if they do not comply with the rules.
Roskomnadzor said it had sent letters this week to the three US-based Internet firms asking them to comply with Internet laws which critics of President Vladimir Putin have decried as censorship.
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Privacy
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You might not think that an academic computer science course could be classified as an export of military technology. But under the Defence Trade Controls Act – which passed into law in April, and will come into force next year – there is a real possibility that even seemingly innocuous educational and research activities could fall foul of Australian defence export control laws.
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Even as the Senate remains at an impasse over the future of US domestic surveillance powers, the National Security Agency will be legally unable to collect US phone records in bulk by the time Congress returns from its Memorial Day vacation.
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Dysfunction in Congress has gotten so bad it might end up actually doing some good: the NSA’s mass surveillance powers under the Patriot Act are now on the verge of expiring after a dramatic 1am vote in the Senate on Saturday morning.
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A last-minute bid to reform NSA spying before lawmakers break for a week-long recess failed early Saturday morning after hours of debate and filibuster overnight when Senate lawmakers voted 57-42 against the USA Freedom Act.
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The US Senate has blocked a bill that would have ended the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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Bill fails for the second time after vote in the small hours of Saturday morning, but Rand Paul thwarts Republican leaders’ attempts to extend Patriot Act
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There was drama in the Senate last night, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struggled to extend a Patriot Act provision that supporters say allows the government to conduct mass surveillance of Americans’ calling records. (Opponents think the program is illegal regardless, but the legislative provision has become a focal point for the fight over the larger issue.) But his fellow Kentucky Republican senator, Rand Paul, led the charge to stop him.
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The Senate struggled unsuccessfully to prevent an interruption in critical government surveillance programs early Saturday, blocking a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the USA Patriot Act.
The main stumbling block was a House-passed provision to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone records. Instead, the records would remain with telephone companies subject to a case-by-case review.
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Former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and law professor Geoffrey Stone say it’s time for Congress to put politics aside and act quickly to reform surveillance laws in order to protect American privacy and maintain an intelligence edge.
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It took a federal appeals court 97 pages to explain why the post-9/11 Congress, in allowing the National Security Agency to seize business records “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, hadn’t authorized the agency to scoop up records of every telephone call made in the United States.
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Before explaining how “farming chickens is like hooking up with James Franco,” due to the increasingly bizarre demands of chicken companies, Oliver talked about the latest on the USA Freedom Act, designed to curtail aspects of the NSA’s surveillance. Oliver had dived into the subject during his recent interview with Edward Snowden, but now some of the reforms he had advocated for have passed in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been reluctant to take up the bill, saying he would prefer brief extensions of the current system, an idea Oliver compared to the excuses someone makes to try and stave off a breakup. Meanwhile, the fact that a federal appeals court ruled that the NSA had never had the legal authority for its phone data collection at all inspired a more tactile analogy from Oliver.
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A bitter ideological divide in Congress appeared destined Wednesday to at least temporarily end the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records as government officials warned they would have to begin shuttering the program after Friday if lawmakers do not act.
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Addressing an audience at Stanford University via video chat on Friday, Edward Snowden discussed the moral conundrums he faced as a whistleblower. He also revealed the fears he still harbors about government surveillance, and he made some recommendations on how authorities should address whistleblowers and surveillance.
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Whistleblower Edward Snowden says he has been working harder and doing more significant things while in exile in Russia than he did while being a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA).
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Paul says collecting the records is an assault on civil liberties.
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The Left’s favorite foil to an often-moderate Hillary Clinton has remained quiet on NSA reform.
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An Austrian newspaper has published what it claims is evidence that Deutsche Telekom spied on Vienna for German spooks for the miserly sum of just €6,500 a year.
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A third of Germans believe Chancellor Angela Merkel intentionally lied when she vowed to end US spying on Germany, in a bid to shield herself from criticism ahead of the 2013 general election, a poll has shown.
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An Austrian green party politician is claiming the American secret service NSA had a particular interest in the Netherlands and that it was top of a NSA priority list.
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Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr is working on a “backup” plan to extend the Patriot Act’s surveillance authorities before they expire at the end of the month, even as House leaders threaten to jam the Senate with their spying-reform bill.
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In an appearance on “The Campaign With Ernie Powell,” a radio show that deals with the question of how progressives can win political campaigns, Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer says the NSA is engaged in the same invasive behavior “that sparked the American Revolution.”
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…NSA has had the ability to transcribe the contents of phone call conversations into written—and searchable—formats…
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As a reporter who covered the National Security Agency before before the Edward Snowden documents brought it to the mainstream, Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker says it would be easy to feel jealous of the journalists breaking those stories now. “But I’ve sort of moved on,” Keefe says, “and I watch those stories with great interest.”
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks exclusively to the Guardian about why he’s working harder now than ever before; how good it feels to be a ‘small part of something important’; and why he believes there is still so much more he wants to accomplish. In regards to people’s privacy, he argues that it is about more than just changing laws and systems, but actually people’s values
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The United States plotted to find Osama bin Laden by concealing tracking devices in medical supplies, possibly through Red Cross hospitals, according to a report citing documents leaked by former security contractor Edward Snowden.
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What an old softee he was, compared to the throat-cutting killers of the “Islamic State”. The black-bannered executioners are back at work in Ramadi and Palmyra and yet, back from the dead, old bin Laden returns once more, fished out of the Indian Ocean (if he was ever there) for one final re-appearance. He loves his wife, he wants his son to take over the whole al-Qaeda outfit, he studies – if he can read English – Noam Chomsky.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel is coming under increasing pressure to divulge a list of targets, including the IP addresses of individual computers, that German intelligence tracked on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Critics have accused Merkel’s staff of giving the BND foreign intelligence agency the green light to help the NSA spy on European firms and officials, triggering a scandal that has dented the chancellor’s popularity.
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Over the weekend, the British surveillance agency GCHQ — the most extremist and invasive in the West — bathed its futuristic headquarters with rainbow-colored lights “as a symbol of the intelligence agency’s commitment to diversity” and to express solidarity with “International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.” GCHQ’s public affairs office proudly distributed the above photograph to media outlets.
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At an 18th-century mansion in England’s countryside last week, current and former spy chiefs from seven countries faced off with representatives from tech giants Apple and Google to discuss government surveillance in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks.
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Apple, Google and Vodafone reportedly attended highly confidential meetings with spy chiefs from seven countries last week to discuss the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks.
As Digital Spy reports citing The Intercept, executives from the firms debated privacy and security with the likes of the CIA, GCHQ and other spy agency chiefs of past and present from Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Sweden.
The group attended the three-day conference organised by the Ditchley Foundation in an 18th-century mansion in Oxfordshire, where questions where raised about mass surveillance and intelligence operations, brought on by Snowden’s whistleblowing activities since the summer of 2013.
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The attendee list is impressive. Key speakers apparently included former acting CIA boss John McLaughlin; former White House deputy chief of staff Mona Sutphen, the current and former heads of the UK’s GCHQ; the current or former heads of intelligence agencies in Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Germany; and the EU’s counter terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove.
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United States has conducted a series of dangerous surveillance missions over a series of islands that Beijing is using to expand its regional influence. On Wednesday, a U.S. surveillance plane was detected by the Chinese Navy and was warned eight times.
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When Hillary Clinton was running against Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Blumenthal was acting as a Hillary adviser and circulated a memorandum about Obama’s communist connections. The political left was shocked.
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Whenever Donald Gregg, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea [...] worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for 31 years, details in his succinct memoir the journey he has traveled as a politician, through Southeast and Northeast Asia, and the halls of power in Washington D.C. He spent ten years in the White House under George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
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Civil Rights
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Unfortunately, all is not what it seems. As Jesse Franzblau reminds us, some of the aid has gone to rights-violating security units and even fallen into the hands of the cartels.
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A Cleveland police officer who stood on the hood of a car and fired his gun 49 times through the windshield at two unarmed passengers has been found not guilty on two counts of voluntary manslaughter.
Michael Brelo was also found not guilty of felonious assault, and discharged.
On Saturday morning, Cuyahoga County judge John P O’Donnell said prosecutors failed to prove without a reasonable doubt that bullets fired by officer Brelo were the cause of death of Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell, or that Brelo had no fear for his own life during the volley of gunfire that ended a high-speed car chase on 29 November 2012.
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After African-American communities in Baltimore and Ferguson, MO came together to demonstrate against the deadly and racially disparate policies of law enforcement, Fox News branded the protests a “war on cops.” But when the story became a mostly white Texas biker gang plotting to kill police with grenades and car bombs, the network took a decidedly less sensationalist approach in its reporting.
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Chosen People –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,” believing that they themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144,000 souls will get a special place in the afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were thought to be descended directly from gods (in contrast to everyone else).
Religious sects are inherently tribal and divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer. “Gang symbols” like special haircuts, attire, hand signals and jargon differentiate insiders from outsiders and subtly (or not so subtly) convey to both that insiders are inherently superior.
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U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM AGENCIES have long been preoccupied with the threat posed by the recruiting successes of the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab in Western countries. The group has managed to lure hundreds of foreign fighters — including some 40 Americans — to Somalia through online propaganda videos and word-of-mouth in disaffected immigrant communities.
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The American Civil Liberties Union found that the value of military equipment used by American police departments has risen from $1m in 1990 to nearly $450m in 2013. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (ie, paramilitary police units) were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year, often to handle relatively modest crimes, like breaking up poker games. Incidents of police violence and related protests in the past year have helped bring these practices to light.
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American cities resemble war zones during times of protest. Now, Washington’s going to try to fix this problem by rolling back a 25-year-old program that supplied local police forces with free surplus military gear. It’s about damn time—but unfortunately, it’s not going to solve America’s police problems.
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Only now—after the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces, after police agencies have been trained in the fine art of war, after SWAT team raids have swelled in number to more than 80,000 a year, after it has become second nature for local police to look and act like soldiers, after communities have become acclimated to the presence of militarized police patrolling their streets, after Americans have been taught compliance at the end of a police gun or taser, after lower income neighborhoods have been transformed into war zones, after hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police who shoot first and ask questions later, after a whole generation of young Americans has learned to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates—only now does President Obama lift a hand to limit the number of military weapons being passed along to local police departments.
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A key Pentagon adviser is warning Australia that its next submarine fleet purchase may be obsolete as a result of game-changing technology breakthroughs in drone warfare.
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Former Texas Governor Rick Perry today said, as president, it would be “inhumane” not to employ controversial “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding if a terror suspect might give up critical information that would save lives.
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Three leaders of the struggle discuss the lessons of the 60′s and what’s needed today.
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Last month, the Russian MoD announced that servicemen from a newly re-equipped S-400 regiment deployed in the Far East had conducted missile launches in the Kapustin Yar firing range. “The servicemen succeeded in destroying drones that emulated a modern means of aerial attack,” the MoD said. Several regiments deployed in the Far East are scheduled to take delivery of new S-400s, replacing S-300s.
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Western military intervention is not the way to solve the ISIS crisis. Thus far it has made few gains against the group and ISIS is still strong – despite the coalition being at war against them since the U.S. began carrying out airstrikes in August of last year. The coalition has gone on more than 3,700 bombing runs in Iraq and Syria but still ISIS holds important territories such as Mosul in Iraq and Deir Ezzor in Syria.
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You probably have, and it was called Zero Dark Thirty, the film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal and backed with gusto by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA provided Bigelow and Boal with privileged access to officials and operators behind the hunt for Osama bin Laden — and not coincidently, their movie portrayed the CIA’s torture program as essential to the effort to find and kill the leader of al Qaeda. It grossed more than $132 million worldwide.
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That’s because the CIA was in possession of something that was potentially more explosive than the detainee abuse photos: hundreds of hours of videotaped “enhanced interrogations” of two Al Qaeda suspects in CIA detention, that included the use of techniques widely described as torture.
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After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then endured a few more months of house arrest.
What happened to the torture program? Nothing.
Following years of waiting for the government to do something, I was heartened when I read in my prison cell—in a four-day-old copy of The New York Times—that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had finally released in December a heavily censored summary of its report on the CIA’s brutal “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
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A district court judge on Wednesday blocked an effort by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to force the CIA to turn over classified records about brutal interrogation programs the agency used to run.
While a 500-page declassified version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report” was released last December, the full, 6,900-page version remains classified. So does a controversial set of CIA documents created as part of an internal review started by former Director Leon Panetta.
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The CIA can keep secret a nearly 7,000-page Senate report on harsh interrogation methods, as well as an internal agency review, a federal judge has ruled.
The complete 6,963-page report compiled by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the related “Panetta review,” are exempt from the dictates of the Freedom of Information Act, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg concluded.
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A US District Court judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that sought the release of the full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on torture by the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as an internal CIA report commonly referred to as the Panetta Review.
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A distraught APA spokesperson advised that such facts are extremely dangerous on the loose. She warned that no one should approach them until they have been captured, tranquilized, and defanged by the APA’s public affairs office. “We need to turn them into mere allegations as quickly as possible,” she was overheard telling an unidentified colleague. “Obviously, we can’t refute facts!”
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Speaking to Hoekstra on the side lines of this week’s Israel Bar Association conference in Eilat, it is clear that he stands firmly behind the US using enhanced interrogation or torture techniques (depending who you ask) to extract intelligence information from certain terrorist detainees.
He also strongly criticizes the US Senate’s December 2014 report that lambasted the techniques as illegal torture.
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While I worked for the FCO I saw really nice colleagues, decent men and women I worked with, go along with organising what they knew to be illegal war in Iraq, and with facilitating the torture and extraordinary rendition programmes. Because that was what paid their mortgage, looked after their children, and above all gave them social status as high British diplomats.
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While former U.S. officials continue to deny torturing “war on terror” detainees – and President Obama fails to enforce any meaningful accountability – countries from the old Soviet bloc are confronting their complicity in the CIA’s crimes, writes Nat Parry.
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It’s easy to understand why Szymany, a former military airstrip set amid dense forest in northeastern Poland, would have appealed to the CIA. According to reports by European investigators—never formally confirmed by the U.S. or Polish governments—the CIA from 2002 to 2005 used clandestine charter flights to bring “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects to Szymany, where they were interrogated and tortured at a nearby detention center.
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Prosecutors investigating the use of Scottish airports by the CIA for rendition flights have called for an unredacted copy of the US Senate’s CIA torture report, it has emerged.
The prosecutors have confirmed that investigations of airports in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Prestwick and Aberdeen are under way, British anti-torture charity Reprieve revealed on Sunday.
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CIA aircraft which were used to transfer prisoners to secret sites around the world in order for them to be subjected to torture are known to have stopped over at Scottish airports – including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Prestwick and Aberdeen.
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Prosecutors have confirmed that police investigating the use of Scottish airports by CIA ‘rendition’ flights have asked that the US provide them with an un-redacted version of the Senate’s report on the detention and interrogation programme.
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After months of partisan debate, the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch as head of the U.S. Justice Department—but her delayed confirmation was just the beginning of the challenges she will face as attorney general. In addition to the turmoil in Baltimore, Lynch inherited a torture problem.
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Subsequently, various forms of sexual abuse and sexual humiliation have been a signature of post-September 11 interrogations by US forces.
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A 30-year-old Michigan man has been arraigned on child abuse charges after authorities say he restrained his girlfriend’s 5-year-old son with belts, leaned him back over a footstool and poured water down his underwear-covered face.
WEYI-TV (http://bit.ly/1HqkGJm ) says Michael Porter appeared in court Monday, and a judge set a $400,000 for Porter. It’ unknown if he has a lawyer.
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When Sen. John McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act was enacted in 2005, I was a junior enlisted Army interrogator getting Arabic language training in California. Two years later, McCain’s law directly impacted the way I conducted my interrogations.
The Detainee Treatment Act, also called the McCain Amendment, prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any prisoner in the custody of the U.S. government and requires military interrogations to be performed in accordance with the U.S. Army Field Manual.
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Matthew DeHart, a veteran from a multi-generational military/intelligence family, ran a Tor hidden service server for his Wow guildies, members of his old army unit, and whistleblowers.
DeHart once discovered an unencrypted folder of damning documents on his server, which quickly disappeared and was replaced with an encrypted folder of the same size, with the same name. The unencrypted docs detailed an FBI investigation into some very dirty CIA tricks, possibly involving the still-unsolved slew of anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress in 2001. Not long after, DeHart was spooked by a visit from the FBI to one of his contacts, and he destroyed all potentially compromising storage associated with his server.
That’s when things got weird. DeHart’s house was raided and all his computers and storage were confiscated (his screenshots of the FBi/CIA docs were not caught up in the sweep – they were hidden on thumb-drives in his dad’s gun case). Eventually he was indicted on charges of inciting a minor to produce sexually explicit images, though the FBI found no evidence that he’d ever done this, or possessed the images in question.
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Matt DeHart, a former drone analyst, might have seen something the FBI didn’t want him to see, and it wasn’t kiddie porn.
[...]
DeHart’s apparently psychotic ramblings in that ER weren’t delusional. He was being interrogated by the FBI, and those harrowing interrogations continued for almost a week. He wasn’t allowed to make a phone call until August 12, six days after the FBI nabbed him. “He was basically babbling on the phone,” his father, Paul, testified later in court. “It was apparent to me that he had been drugged in some way or another.”
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Whatever the case, the worst Sterling can be accused of is exposing government failure and indiscretion. In that sense, he easily meets the legal definition of a whistle-blower. Whatever information he exposed, he did it in the public interest.
But the Obama administration has abused whistle-blowers. I know a little something about that myself — I was charged with three counts of espionage for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program several years ago.
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The driving force is institutional: government, the mainstream media, the military-industrial economy. These entities are converging in a lockstep, armed obsession over various enemies of the status quo in which they hold enormous power; and this obsession is devolving public consciousness into a permanent fight-or-flight mentality. Instead of dealing with real, complex social issues with compassion and intelligence, our major institutions seem to be fortifying themselves – with ever-increasing futility – against their imagined demons.
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…64 Guantanamo detainees who filed habeas petitions have seen their cases adjudicated.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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It is hard to overstate how much I love the British mobile provider Three and how I wish it would come to the United States.
My fellow Americans, let me (again) re-iterate how badly we’re all getting overcharged: Three offers a 30-day prepaid plan with unlimited data, unlimited texts, and 200 minutes of domestic calling, all for £20 ($31). That’s about one-third less than what I pay right now Stateside.
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Send this to a friend
05.23.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Research house Gartner estimates that the 2015 calendar year will bring banner sales for the operating system as more schools and home users seek out Chromebooks. Should Chromebook reach the 7.3 million unit mark, the figure would represent a 27 per cent increase over last year.
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Kernel Space
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The long awaited Systemd v220 has been released. Systemd v220 has a lot new features, improvements and bug fixes.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Modern (and some less modern) laptops and tablets have a lot of builtin sensors: accelerometer for screen positioning, ambient light sensors to adjust the screen brightness, compass for navigation, proximity sensors to turn off the screen when next to your ear, etc.
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The GNU inetutils team is proud to present version 1.9.3 of the GNU networking utilities. The GNU Networking Utilities are the common networking utilities, clients and servers of the GNU Operating System.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A new collection called “Surprise Attack Ultra Mega Pack” has been released on the Humble Bundle website, and it includes 12 Linux games.
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Version 1.1 of the Godot Game Engine has been released. This open-source game engine update brings a new 2D engine and claims to be one of the most advanced 2D engines for cross-platform games.
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CodeWeavers has recently released a new version of their commercial CrossOver software that allows GNU/Linux and Mac OS X users to run Windows applications. It’s a front-end for Wine!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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RandR 1.5 was firmed up a few days ago for X.Org Server 1.18. The lead features to RandR 1.5 are monitor objects and tile support.
X.Org developer at Red Hat, David Airlie, has added the RandR 1.5 monitor support to the GTK3 tool-kit’s X11 backend.
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The latest edition of Simplicity Linux, version 15.4, recently became available for download. Simplicity Linux delivers just what its name suggests: It is a simpler way to run a fully powered Linux desktop on any computer you touch.
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New Releases
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On May 22, Softpedia was informed by the developer of Q4OS, a small distribution of GNU/Linux that uses the old-school KDE3 desktop environment and was designed for low-end computers, that the distro reached version 1.2.2.
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The first release candidate to OpenWRT 15.05, the “Chaos Calmer”, is now available for testing.
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Arch Family
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The Arch Linux developers informed users today, May 22, about the immediate availability of a critical update for the kernel packages used in the distribution that promises to patch the well-known EXT4 RAID data corruption issue.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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A new set of improvements has landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling release branch of the famous openSUSE Linux distribution.
The advantages of a rolling-release Linux distribution is that developers can add all kinds of cool and new packages without having to resort to major new releases. They do test all these upgrades before releasing them, but they eventually land. The same can be said about the latest updates which cover the Linux kernel and the GNOME stack.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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That’s right — the bits are heading out the door (and onto our mirror network)! Expect the official announcement around 10am US Eastern time Tuesday morning.
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There’s one certainty in life, that is: Fedora will never arrive on time. In a post to the Fedora devel-announce mailing list the results of the ‘Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go’ meeting were announced, it was a No-Go. Thankfully there was another meeting later today (May 22) to determine whether the release can be signed off and that’s where it was decided to ‘Go’.
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While yesterday there was risk of Fedora 22 being delayed beyond next week, this next Fedora Linux release was cleared today for being released next Tuesday.
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At the Fedora release Go/No-Go meeting last night it was determined that three bugs were serious enough to violate the release readiness criteria. As a result, the Final was blocked and a second Go/No-Go was scheduled for today. The results of that meeting are in! Elsewhere, Jack Germain said, “Simplicity Linux is easy to use and runs fast” and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his secret to converting users to Linux.
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At the Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go Meeting #2 that just occurred, it was agreed to Go with the Fedora 22 Final by Fedora QA, Release Engineering and Development.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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He has posted the script on GitHub for others to try. It’s in really early stage of development but it’s surprising and at the same time disappointing to see that Valve made no efforts whatsoever to bring steaming services like Netflix to their platform that they plan to dominate the living room.
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A developer has put together some tools (still under construction) that would allow users to use SteamOS to play Netflix. It’s in its early stages, but the developer has made something that Valve hasn’t even thought about until now.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has recently announced that Kernel fixes for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 have been implemented.
Once released, an Ubuntu system does not get any new features implemented, but kernel updates that include security fixes become available very often.
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Canonical has published details about a FUSE vulnerability in its Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. This is not a major issue, but that’s not a reason not to upgrade.
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Mark Shuttleworth is reportedly considering a move to make Canonical a public company.
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While the week started out with some of us waxing nostalgic about penguins on racing cars, it seems that the march of progress and onward-and-upward improvement continues, if news from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is of any indication.
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Because it is a new platform, the main problem is that it does not have a lot of applications yet, despite the fact that it has a big and active community, the community-driven apps are not enough.
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In the future, we may all have our own operating system, as well as 15 minutes of fame. Even now, the lure of owning, or more likely these days, hosting, one’s own OS continues to tempt companies and nations alike. This week we heard some rumbles about new OSes coming from Google, Huawei, and even the government of Russia. Meanwhile, Canonical took another step with Ubuntu Touch by announcing that Meizu has launched the developer version of the Ubuntu MX4 phone in China.
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Phones
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Android
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We always try to keep up with assorted fan communities to get a sense of how they’re feeling about their favorite products. Reddit’s Android fan community is typically very smart and insightful, which is why we were interested to see what Android M features they’d most like to see Google unveil at its big Google I/O conference next week. Here are the six most popular responses as ranked by upvotes.
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Google has already unwillingly confirmed that it’s going to unveil Android M at its I/O 2015 conference next week, and a few reports now claim to have knowledge of one of the major features that are going to be available to Android M users in the near future.
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Google’s interest in software for low-spec devices might take it through the emerging market and straight to the Internet of Things.
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I didn’t see this coming. Samsung turned up at the Mobile World Congress with a 50% larger stage, 25% cheesier jokes aimed at Apple and a 10% more dramatic mic-drop when it unveiled the S6.
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Every year Google’s I/O Conference is the place where creators and developers unite to discuss some of the biggest ideas that enrich and change the way people interact with their devices.
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Last year, Android Auto was unleashed at Google’s big developer’s conference, but that was just a taste of its dashboard ambitions. At next week’s Google I/O, all signs point to the company giving us a glimpse into a new infotainment system designed from the ground-up to be powered by Android.
Currently, Google’s in-car play is limited to Android Auto, which does maps, music, texts, calls, and voice searches. But when Google shows off the latest version of its mobile OS – Android “M” – part of that announcement is reportedly a car-specific build designed that could control everything from the stereo to the climate control and more.
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Android 5.1.1 is working its way through Google’s lengthy list of Nexus devices. After coming to Wi-Fi tablets first, this week we saw it start to hit cellular devices like the Nexus 5, N4, and N9 LTE. As you may have noticed, Google’s latest smartphone didn’t make the list. With any luck, the Nexus 6 will get an over-the-air update sometime this weekend.
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Android is getting a TouchID-style system of its own with Android M, according to Buzzfeed’s sources. Apparently it’ll act a lot like the iOS tool too, bypassing passwords for associated apps in favor of reading your fingerprint. Given that I/O is practically right around the corner (next week!) it shouldn’t be long before this all gets confirmed — Google hasn’t responded to our request for comment just yet.
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The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is considered to be one of the best devices of 2014 and one of the most influential devices this year. TouchWiz and Android 5.0.2 Lollipop on the device work together properly and the S Pen features that Samsung has added to the user interface are highly appreciated by users. Although a pretty large phone, the Galaxy Note 4 keeps its slim body and light-weight construction within users’ preferences. The only thing missing right now is the Galaxy Note 4 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
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Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including the low sales of the Samsung Galaxy S6 family, the early arrival of the Galaxy Note 5, early reviews of the Sony Xperia Z4 tablet, Microsoft Office preview for Android, the new OnePlus 2 handset is benchmarked, Android Wear updates, MixRadio arrives on the platform, and the release of AdBlock’s Android browser.
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If you were itching to build an open source browser for Android, you can now do it using a practically all the code from Chrome for Android.
As Venture Beat spotted, Google has uploaded the bulk of the remaining code into the open source Chromium repository.
The open-source browser shares a lot of the same code as Google Chrome and often serves as the proving ground for new and experimental services.
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Mitsubishi’s “FlexConnect.IVI” automotive system runs Android on a TI Jacinto 6 SoC, and drives IVI, HUD, and cluster displays simultaneously.
The trouble with most in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems is that they’re mounted in the center of the dashboard, and therefore not ideally located for the driver. Yet the display also needs to be accessible from the front seat passenger. Mitsubishi Electric’s FlexConnect.IVI system follows the trend of integrating IVI screens with a separate GUI instrument cluster, and also adds a third GUI heads-up display (HUD) display projected against the windshield for greater driver safety.
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Open source development is the future of software. It’s great for users like you and me because open source software is usually free (not always) and often safer to use because malicious code is less likely to be implemented.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google developers have released a new development version of the Google Chrome browser, and the latest version is now at 44.0.2403.9. It’s not a big update, but it does bring some interesting changes.
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Launched in September 2008, Google’s Chrome browser is now dominant in its share of the desktop web browser market, with approximately 1 in 4 Internet users interfacing with the web using the browser. What many Chrome users probably don’t know, however, is that it’s actually based off the open source Chromium browser, also developed by Google. Up until today Chrome for Android differed from its desktop counterpart in that it’s codebase wasn’t open source – meaning, the code for the app wasn’t publicly available for other developers to view, modify, and build upon. That changed today.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As the OpenStack cloud computing scene evolves, an ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, cam out a few months ago with what it billed as the first enterprise-ready, commercial implementation of OpenStack Trove database as a service (DBaaS). The company also announced that it had open sourced its Tesora Database Virtualization Engine.
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Concentrating on the hybrid clioud during a time when it is seriously reshaping its whole business around cloud computing, IBM has announced that it will make OpenStack the central platform for its portfolio of cloud services. Dubbed IBM Cloud OpenStack Services, the new program will deliver a collection of OpenStack-based services for hybrid cloud customers.
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In 1983, when I started the free software movement, malware was so rare that each case was shocking and scandalous. Now it’s normal.
To be sure, I am not talking about viruses. Malware is the name for a program designed to mistreat its users. Viruses typically are malicious, but software products and software preinstalled in products can also be malicious – and often are, when not free/libre.
In 1983, the software field had become dominated by proprietary (ie nonfree) programs, and users were forbidden to change or redistribute them. I developed the GNU operating system, which is often called Linux, to escape and end that injustice. But proprietary developers in the 1980s still had some ethical standards: they sincerely tried to make programs serve their users, even while denying users control over how they would be served.
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This week the FSF added our signature to a coalition letter addressed to Barack Obama, calling on him to reject any proposal to systematically undermine the encryption used to secure digital devices and software made in the US.
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Openness/Sharing
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Software developers—and even consumers—are familiar with the open-source movement. Open-source projects, like the popular Firefox web browser, are generally developed in a public, cooperative effort. The copyright holder “opens” the consumer’s right to modify the “source” product and distribute it to others as long as the result is also “open” for others to do the same.
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We hear enough about how so many third world diseases are preventable, but people just lack the resources; preventable diseases can too easily become severely crippling, or even deadly, due to the condition of poverty. We also hear enough good stories about people who are using their medical and technical knowledge to change this fact.
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Open Data
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Politiken, the third-largest daily newspaper in Denmark, has put online a data visualisation application which presents the budgets of 98 Danish municipalities, using Open Data.
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Open Hardware
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We’ve seen the first version of the Tessel a few years ago, and it’s still an interesting board: an ARM Cortex-M3 running at 180MHz, WiFi, 32 Megs of both Flash and RAM, and something that can be programmed entirely in JavaScript or Node.js. Since then, the company behind Tessel, Technical Machines, has started work on the Tessel 2, a board that’s continuing in the long tradition of taking chips from WiFi routers and making a dev board out of them. The Tessel 2 features a MediaTek MT7620 running Linux built on OpenWRT, Ethernet, 802.11bgn WiFi, an Atmel SAMD21 serving as a real-time I/O coprocessor, two USB ports, and everything can still be controlled through JavaScript, Node, with support for Rust and other languages in the works.
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Programming
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Zapcc is the latest compiler I heard about this morning… Zapcc is based on LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler but claims to be much faster than it.
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As of this month, the mainline code for LLVM and Clang finally have complete OpenMP support (currently against the OMP 3.1 specification).
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Security
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Using secret questions to give people access to their passwords is a terrible idea, according to a new paper from Google.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It started in April with a rash of deals between Argentina and Russia during President Cristina Kirchner’s visit to Moscow.
And it continues with a $53 billion investment bang as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visits Brazil during the first stop of yet another South American commercial offensive – complete with a sweet metaphor: Li riding on a made in China subway train that will ply a new metro line in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Olympics.
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Transparency Reporting
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Today it was reported that McNeilly turned himself in to the police at Edinburgh airport and is currently in military custody.
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With the Obama administration having prosecuted more national security leakers than any other, anonymous sources are the only way Americans can find out how their government is waging its secret war on terror. That’s why journalist Seymour Hersh deserves congratulations rather than condemnation for his story on the killing of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden.
There’s been criticism of Hersh, much of it centering on his use of anonymous sources. But if you read Hersh’s story closely and check what others have written, you’ll see that his account holds up. The report was published in the May 21 edition of the London Review of Books.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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If Theresa May has a reputation as a safe pair of hands, one has to wonder what she would have to do to lose it. The home secretary invented a human right to a pet cat in a conference speech, and allowed “go home” immigration vans to be wheeled out in diverse communities, before conceding that the vans themselves had to go home to the garage. Now we learn, courtesy of a leaked letter from her cabinet colleague Sajid Javid, about a wild scheme to censor broadcasters.
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UK Home Secretary Theresa May has been accused of trying to introduce state censorship of TV broadcasters by a senior Conservative minister in a leaked letter.
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In a letter to David Cameron written before the general election, then Culture Secretary Sajid Javid attacked Ms May’s plan to use regulator Ofcom to vet programmes before they were broadcast in the strongest terms, saying it posed a threat to freedom of speech.
Mr Javid, now Business Secretary, also said Ofcom would be turned from a regulator into a state “censor” by the proposal and lead to comparisons with “regimes” with dubious human rights records, according to the letter which was leaked to The Guardian newspaper.
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Home Secretary Theresa May has been accused of attempting to introduce government censorship of British television programming by one of her Cabinet colleagues, a leaked letter has shown.
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The phenomenon of the Streisand Effect, where high-profile attempts to censor or prevent people from seeing something result in massively increased attention for the something, is a brilliant example of psychological reactance, the tendency of people to strongly object when a freedom is being taken from them [even though they weren’t using it] and do whatever they can to restore it [which will get them arrested if they’re not careful].
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Wikipedia is yet again being censored by China’s Great Firewall.
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Español
On Thursday, May 21, the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) — an illegal opposition party created in 2011 — uploaded a YouTube video of activists in the southern city of Palma Soriano sharing DVDs filled with news and other hard-to-access information with the public.
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Uh oh… We’re not sure Taylor Swift said “eff you” on stage at the Billboard Music Awards, a Fox News anchor definitely didn’t talk about the prospect of free “cock” across the nation and we’re pretty sure a little boy didn’t beg his mother to get nasty with a homeless man.
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A New York benefit show for the National Coalition Against Censorship cancelled last week over allegedly offensive material will go on at a new venue — though without the Mohammed-themed play that first started the controversy.
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An anti-censorship benefit event at New York City’s Sheen Center was canceled recently over concerns about some of the scheduled speeches and Neil LaBute‘s play Muhammad Gets a Boner.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has proclaimed the Film and Publication Board’s (FPB) Draft Online Regulation Policy “Africa’s worst new Internet censorship law”.
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As a woman who writes articles about video games, I hear the word “censorship” a lot these days. To hear certain corners of the internet tell it, “censorship” supposedly means having discussions on the images we see in media, asking people to think about the language they use and the effect it achieves, doing any kind of media criticism, or moderating comments so that nobody can shit them up with frantic sealioning about how other people are being too sensitive to criticism.
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“Kanye West was grossly over-censored at the Billboard Music Awards,” the statement reads. “Non-profane lyrics such as ‘with my leather black jeans on’ were muted for over 30-second intervals. As a result, his voice and performance were seriously misrepresented.
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Kanye West was all ready and amped to close out the 2015 Billboard Music Awards with “All Day” and “Black Skinhead.” But home viewers weren’t able to fully enjoy Yeezy’s performance, as the broadcast heavily muted parts of the show, including words that don’t even anger the FCC or violate its regulations.
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Authorities in Iran are prosecuting another writer on national security charges for signing statements and writing posts that criticized state censorship on the Facebook page of the Iranian Writers’ Association.
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An administrative court in Egypt ordered the prime minster to take the necessary and immediate action to censor pornographic websites on Wednesday. While the court specifically calls for immediate action, the order can still be appealed at the Supreme Administrative Court.
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An Egyptian court has ordered Egypt’s Prime Minister take immediate action to ban pornography websites in Egypt, reported state media Al-Ahram.
The decision by Egypt’s Administrative Court on Wednesday contradicts the same court’s decision two years ago in which it decided not to ban pornography websites, stated Ahram Online.
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Country’s new gender equality minister among those blurred from photograph on grounds that pictures of women offend conservative religious mores
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When it was announced that Miri Regev was to be the culture and sports minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fourth government, some people made jibes about her suitability for the position, based on her reputation as a loud and inflammatory politician who sees the world in clear terms of good and pure (us) and evil and impure (the entire world, including groups in Israel that don’t think “as we do.”)
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Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn’t come around again. The Draft Online Regulation Policy recently issued by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) of South Africa is such a regulation. It’s as if the fabled prude Mrs. Grundy had been brought forward from the 18th century, stumbled across hustler.com on her first excursion online, and promptly cobbled together a law to shut the Internet down. Yes, it’s that bad.
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Today, in an important First Amendment decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an attempt by the NAACP to use trademark as a tool to censor unwanted online criticism—a result we had urged in an amicus brief filed with the court back in October. The Fourth Circuit overruled a federal district court in Virginia, which had previously ruled that the Radiance Foundation’s use of the moniker “NAACP” infringed on the organization’s trademark.
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Rockstar Games and parent company Take-Two Interactive have filed a lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) over the latter’s in-production TV drama film Game Changer (working title).
The BBC revealed the project last month, confirming earlier reports. The film traces the conflict between Rockstar Games lawyer Jack Thompson over Rockstar’s controversial Grand Theft Auto series, with Bill Paxton playing Thompson and Daniel Radcliffe starring as Rockstar Games co-founder Same Houser.
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Privacy
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In October 2014, the IPT hearings produced another unexpected admission from the UK government. As Privacy International reported: “Details of previously unknown internal policies, which GCHQ was forced to reveal during legal proceedings challenging their surveillance practices in the wake of the Snowden revelations, reveal that intelligence agencies can gain access to bulk data collected from US cables or through US corporate partnerships without having to obtain a warrant from the Secretary of State.” The safeguards on how this material can be used are minimal: “On the face of the descriptions provided to the claimants, the British intelligence agencies can trawl through foreign intelligence material without meaningful restrictions and can keep such material, which includes both communications content and metadata, for up to two years.”
In December 2014, the IPT ruled against the Privacy International group of human rights organisations, and “accepted the security services’ position that they may in principle carry out mass surveillance of all fibre optic cables entering or leaving the UK and that vast intelligence sharing with the NSA does not contravene the right to privacy because of the existence of secret policies.”
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In 2011 and 2012, the NSA and the communications intelligence agencies of its “Five Eyes” allies developed and tested a set of add-ons to their shared Internet surveillance capability that could identify and target communications between mobile devices and popular mobile app stores—including those of Google and Samsung. According to an NSA document published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the targeting capability could have been used to launch “man-in-the-middle” attacks on mobile app downloads, allowing the NSA and other agencies to install code on targeted devices and gather intelligence on their users.
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Edward Snowden has hailed landmark shifts in Congress and the US courts on NSA surveillance but cautioned that much more needs to be done to restore the balance in favour of privacy.
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The conversations are, mainly, pretty mundane: one man at East Village restaurant Cafe Orlin, talks about publishing photographs. A woman at Crunch is talking to her personal trainer about how much she enjoys watching House of Cards. A guy in a cafe is telling a story about getting evicted from an apartment with “a bathtub the size of a racquetball court”.
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Over the past year, they’ve hidden dozens of mini tape recorders under tables and benches around New York City, secretly taping people’s conversations. This week, they launched a website where they’ve posted some of their recordings. They range from the mundane, like a woman at a gym talking about her plans for the evening, to the intimate, like a man at a restaurant talking about his lover’s fetishes.
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The head of the German Intelligence Agency (BND) told a special parliamentary committee on Thursday that his agency is ‘dependent on’ the American National Security Agency (NSA).
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More than 400,000 new keywords have been found in German spy agency BND’s computers, a German media report says. The findings would further undermine the organization, accused of helping the NSA with surveillance.
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The scheme is laid out in a top-secret NSA presentation dated June 2010 and titled “Medical Pattern of Life: Targeting High Value Individual #1,” which was among the files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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Once the compound was located, the U.S. government also wanted DNA evidence that bin Laden was inside. Not long after the raid, it was reported that the CIA had set up a hepatitis vaccine drive in Abbottabad as a front to obtain DNA samples. The doctor working for the CIA, Shakil Afridi, was arrested by Pakistani intelligence and eventually sentenced to decades in prison — not for allegedly working for the CIA, but on charges of aiding a militant group.
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Chinese kit-maker Huawei isn’t apportioning swelling sales outside the Middle Kingdom to NSA snooping fears, more that double digit growth in Europe is related to brand recognition a decade after it up shop there.
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The NSA and its surveillance state supporters in the Senate are making a last ditch effort to prevent Congress from taking away any of the spy agency’s authority to snoop on innocent Americans, despite the fact that there is now broad support for NSA reform in Congress.
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Two U.S. Senate Republicans predicted Friday that their chamber will have enough votes to pass a short extension of three U.S. spy programs until Congress and the White House can come up with a final plan.
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“You can’t enjoy your civil liberties if you’re in a coffin,” Christie — a likely presidential candidate — said earlier this week.
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As Congress ponders the fate of the PATRIOT Act — and the counterterrorism surveillance programs it authorizes — two potential Republican presidential candidates stuck up for those programs Friday at a conference of Republican activists.
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Kirk Wiebe says the Senate is not challenging the authority that allows bulk collection of phone records
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Russian companies are taking no drastic steps to replace US-made equipment.
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The creator of a searchable database of 27,000 National Security Agency (NSA) contractors says his team has received a death threat as well as legal threats.
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The news that the NSA is preparing to begin winding down their bulk surveillance program against Americans would be welcome to the general public, but it’s probably not true, and the claim is certainly not directed at us.
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After Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in the panic following the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, officials described it as a way of breaking down a wall that had kept the CIA and FBI from sharing information. They argued that international terrorism investigators needed the same powerful tools that a grand jury gives law enforcement agents to conduct broad criminal inquiries.
Section 215 was already law, but it was expanded by the PATRIOT Act to allow federal agents to obtain not only “business records,” but also “any tangible things.”
Librarians were among the first to sound the alarm, and they were ridiculed for it. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft accused them of spreading “hysteria” that FBI agents were tracking what people were reading and “how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.”
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Internet anonymity has become difficult to procure as the NSA is doing everything in its power to keep tabs on Internet activity. One way that people have been protecting their anonymity is by using the anonymizing network, Tor. It was popularly used to access dark web sites like Silk Road, but it can also be used for good. For example, people in certain countries without free speech protections could be jailed or worse for disparaging online claims against the government; Tor provides a way to prevent those users’ web activity from being tracked. As it turns out, Tor isn’t as safe from the prying eyes of big government surveillance as we once thought.
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It has become very hard to keep internet anonymous, as the NSA is doing everything in its ability to keep a check on internet activity. The hackers which have the full force and backing of Beijing, London, and Washington, D.C. are anonymity’s toughest opponents. People have been using the anonymizing network, Tor to protect their anonymity. Tor was generally used to enter dark web sites like Silk Road, but it can also be used for good.
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This week, Paul tried to recapture that spirit, inveighing for 10.5 hours against the National Security Agency’s data collection program — an effort that also attempted to boost his presidential campaign.
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One in three Germans have said their trust in the government is shaken. Regardless of the media outrage over the allegations that German intelligence helped the NSA, Angela Merkel wasn’t rushing to offer an explanation.
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The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is coming under increasing pressure to divulge a list of targets, including the IP addresses of individual computers, that German intelligence tracked on behalf of the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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Among the many arguments presented in opposition to allowing the federal government collecting mass amounts of data from people who aren’t even suspected of terrorism (besides the Fourth Amendment violations) is that: one, it hasn’t actually helped stop any terrorist plots; and two, we can’t trust a massive federal bureaucracy to subsequently dispose of information it gathers unrelated to any cases its working on.
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“The court” in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial is a shadowy tribunal that tries (and executes) Josef K., the story’s protagonist, without informing him of the crime he’s charged with, the witnesses against him, or how he can defend himself. (Worth noting: The FISA court doesn’t “try” anyone. Also, it doesn’t kill people.)
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There’s a reason why gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. According to whistleblower former NSA official William Binney, the NSA has too much data to sift through, that it hampers the agency’s effectiveness in detecting threats before they happen with potentially deadly results. Basically, the NSA is no longer as effective in preventing any attacks. What it’s good for now is forensic investigation to trace the perpetrators of any terrorist attack—after it happens. The Boston Marathon gets bombed, the government finds the Tsarnaevs quickly enough, (through a lot of security videos and much later their transmissions) but the agency still failed to prevent the bombing from happening. So all the data the NSA has collected is actually slowing the agency down. Imagine a cop so pumped up with donuts he can’t catch up to a purse snatcher on foot.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Such a plan would affect over 500 million citizens’ ability to use the Internet. Imagine using Twitter and not being able to link to a news article without paying a fee. It would shut down the spread of news. This is just one way copyright is being twisted to censor the Web – but it’s far from the only way. That’s why we are part of a huge network of individuals and organizations committed to stopping these censorship plans, wherever they emerge.
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It’s taken more than two years for Swedish authorities to seize two key Pirate Bay domains but over in the United States the process is dramatically quicker. A TV company has just achieved similar aims against 11 ‘pirate’ streaming domains after being granted a comprehensive ex parte restraining order by a Florida court.
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05.22.15
Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Clear Linux, Intel’s new container-based distribution, bristles with ideas for how to run containers and perform OS management
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It’s been more than six months since the OpenWrt developers announced the release of the OpenWrt “Barrier Breaker” 14.07 custom firmware for routers, but today they’ve just informed us of the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming OpenWrt “Chaos Calmer” 15.05 update.
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Android smartphones are becoming very powerful devices, and many of them can easily handle the word-processing, photo editing and other desktop PC-type tasks. So why not make your Android smartphone double as a desktop PC? Here we show you how to install the Linux variant Debian on your Android device, on which you can then install popular programs like LibreOffice and GIMP. Best of all, you don’t need to root your device to do this.
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The AndEX Live DVD that we introduced to you a few weeks ago has been updated today with new features, such as the latest Linux 4.0 kernel.
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Issue 6 of Linux Voice is now nine months old, so we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. You can share and modify all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), even for commercial purposes, providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source and retain the same license.
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Desktop
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Yesterday, Europe had an average of 2.29% page-views from GNU/Linux desktops according to StatCounter.
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This suggests the spiking systems are a single organization on a single schedule with a single system administrator… Sounds like schools to me but it could also be a large business or government or particular device sold in huge quantity without automatic updating. The 3 spikes on weekdays suggests to me it’s the schools.
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Yesterday, with nearly 2 billion citizens of the Internet, GNU/Linux desktops had 1.75%, ~35million. Chrome GNU/Linux had 0.46%, ~10million, with another 7million expected in 2015.
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Server
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Intel reckons that’s harder to do with Linux containers as “underlying kernel still can be attacked from within the container.” That’s bad because it means “all containers on the same host can be compromised, regardless of the intended isolation between them,” making multitennacy risky and therefore unlikely.
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The biggest example is CoreOS, a heavily venture-backed startup based in San Francisco that has already gained some early attention as a potential alternative to Docker. The company’s open source project dubbed Rocket has won backing from powerhouses like Google and Intel and others like Red Hat and VMware.
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Intel has become the latest vendor to throw its weight behind the push to solve the security woes of containers with the launch of a new technology that promises to address the risks currently standing in the way of widespread production use from the hardware level up. It’s the latest fruit of the internal Clear Linux Project.
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The downside is that it does not work well with Linux containers as underlying kernel still can be attacked from within the container and all containers on the same host can be compromised.
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Containers are a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. This could be from a developer’s laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production and perhaps from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.
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Kernel Space
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Jiri Slaby, the maintainer of the 3.12 kernel series, announced earlier today that a new maintenance release is available for all users of this LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel.
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RAID bug can corrupt the filesystem, patches incoming, caution advised
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After yesterday’s announcement of Linux kernel 3.12.43 LTS, which got numerous changes, including a patch for the famous EXT4 data corruption issue that plagued almost all Linux kernel branches, today we can report that Linux kernel 3.18.14 LTS is out and it also includes a patch for the respective EXT4 bug.
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The lengthy list of changes to systemd 220 can be found via this mailing list post.
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Lennart Poettering had the great pleasure of announcing today, May 21, the immediate availability for download of a new release of his controversial systemd init system that is adopted by more and more Linux kernel-based operating systems.
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The Linux kernel continues advancing on many hardware fronts, among which is support for ACPI 6.0 and the kernel is making the new LIBND subsystem for non-volatile memory device support.
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Applications
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Weblate 2.3 has been released today. It comes with better features for project owners, better file formats support and more configuration options for users.
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Nowadays, Social platforms are making the biggest impact in both professional and personal life of all. We’re all virtually connected with each other using Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, G+, and Linkedin etc. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business man, a student or whoever, the Social platform takes most part in your self or business promotion. Using social media, anyone can easily collaborate with anyone and spread their business promotions, ideas, features or whatever to the world. So, implementing your own social platform for your oraganization is a good practise to communicate globally. There are may collaboration tools out there. Today, In this tutorial, we are going to discuss such kind of collaboration tool called ‘eXo platform’.
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A year ago, I started working on a new storage library for low-level operations with various types of block devices — libblockdev. Today, I’m happy to announce that the library reached the 1.0 milestone which means that it covers all the functionality that has been stated in the initial goals and it’s going to keep the API stable.
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No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
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Apparently, no one can stop the ever growing “Popcorn Time” community of movie pirates, as after an iOS Installer was released to allow users to install the Popcorn Time app on their iPhone or iPad devices from a Mac or Windows machine, there’s now a browser-based video streaming service too.
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As you may know, Enpass is a free, multi-platform password manager available for the main desktop and mobile platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. It uses SQLCipher (open source extension to SQLite) for the 256-bit AES encryption of database files.
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Note that if you use multiple monitors, the tray will only show up on the primary monitor!
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Instructionals/Technical
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The first time I used vi was in a college programming course. It was the default editor on the computer lab’s UNIX systems we used to compile our assignments. I remember when our professor first introduced vi and explained that you used the hjkl keys to move your cursor around instead of the arrow keys. Before this point, I was a pico user (that dates me a bit now), and it seemed so backward to me that vi used hjkl instead.
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Games
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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the huge Kickstarter from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night developer Koji Igarashi. I spoke to the developer to clarify about their Linux support.
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Gas Guzzlers Extreme was causing major excitement when it was planned for Linux, but sadly things didn’t turn out so well.
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Greedy Guns is a fast paced action platformer with exploration, ability upgrades and loads of bullets. It’s available in a free and open beta on Itch.io.
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As you probably noticed that SuperTuxKart 0.9 released ~ 1 month ago. I tried to build it in the same day, but build failed on ARM architecture.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Right from the start, we at KDAB have had lots of fun playing a leading role – and as the Qt experts, we look forward to continuing to contribute to the growing Qt community.
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We found out that the German Discworld covers were made with Krita, and had the privilege to ask the artist to talk about her work.
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The other day I introduced a new Rust code completion plugin for Kate, powered by Phil Dawes’ nifty Racer. Since then there’s been a whole bunch of additional developments!
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So what is exactly new in this build? Especially interesting are all the improvements to PSD import/export support. Yesterday we learned that Katarzyna uses PSD as her working format when working with Krita – we still don’t recommend that, but it’s easier now!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Tarballs are due on 2015-05-25 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.17.2 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.17.2. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!
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While we are eagerly waiting for the final release of the Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment to become available in the main software repositories of our favorite Linux distributions, Clement Lefebvre has announced that we can install it in a Beta form in Linux Mint.
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The GNOME developers are trying all kinds of interesting interactions with devices outside the desktop environment, and now they are working on a way to get the GPS locations of an Android phone.
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Foresight Linux is shutting down after not being able to generate enough participation to warrant its continued development.
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OpenVZ
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This OpenVZ template comes with slackpkg pre-configured, using the generic URL “mirrors.slackware.com” so that your packages will always be downloaded from a mirror near you. OpenVZ is a bit peculiar in the sense that it knows a little bit about how Linux distros are being configured. So the OpenVZ control panel is the place where you configure the hostname, IP address and root password of your VPS. In order to make the Slackware installation internet-aware out of the box, I added two Google DNS IP addresses to its “/etc/resolv.conf” file. The result? Once provisioned, the VPS starts fast and mere seconds after booting I was able to login as root to my new machine.
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Just wanted to share my answers to the, “What features are absent in OpenVZ from your point of view?” question.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Today at Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go meeting it was decided that Fedora 22 Final is No-Go. More details in meeting minutes [1].
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Mark Shuttleworth has been quoted as saying he’s considering taking Canonical public. He needs to talk to “his team,” but Shuttleworth thinks the time is just about right. Speaking of Canonical, Jack Wallen today said that poor little Canonical is just picked on by the Linux community and the Linux community is only hurting itself. On the other side of town, Fedora 22 is a No-Go tonight, but getting revisited tomorrow.
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Fedora 22 is scheduled to be released next week but for that to happen there’s still a number of blocker bugs that need to be addressed. The second release candidate of Fedora 22 Final is now available for those wishing to stress this major update of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.
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At today’s Go/No-Go meeting it was decided that Fedora 22 Final is not ready for release. However, tomorrow that decision will be re-evaluated.
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During today’s Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go meeting, the Fedora Linux developers did not approve the launch of the final version of the Fedora 22 Linux distribution, which already got a one week delay from the initial schedule.
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Debian Family
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I wanted to upgrade my server to Jessie, and didn’t want to keep the 3.2 kernel indefinitely, so I had to update to at least 3.14, and find something to make my life (and maybe some others) easier.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical and Ubuntu have been around for more than a decade, but not everyone knows that the company is privately owned and not publicly listed. It looks like Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, might consider filing for an IPO, which means making the company public.
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Shuttleworth, who has funded the popular Linux company out of his own pocket since its founding in October 2004, said that while a final decision has not been made, “He’s seriously thinking about taking Canonical public.”
The decision won’t be entirely his. “I need to talk it over with my Canonical team.” He also said that the idea has been being seriously kicked around internally for the last several months.
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Because it is in its early development stages, Ubuntu Desktop Next 15.10 it does not bring too many changes to Ubuntu Desktop Next 15.04, but however, if you want to test it, I recommend you do this in a virtual environment.
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Ubuntu 15.10 has been dubbed “Wily Werewolf” and a release date has been set for it. You can expect Ubuntu 15.10 to be available on October 22, according to Softpedia.
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The UK government releases every year a security guidance that details various problems and security problems that are identified in systems used by the authorities. They also revealed some issues with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, although it’s not something major.
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Aaeon’s AIOT-X1000 SBC runs Wind River Linux on an Intel Quark chip, and offers dual Ethernet, dual mini-PCIe, and optional WiFi, BT, ZigBee, and 3G.
Last year, Taiwan based Aaeon debuted the AIOT-X1000 SBC as the guts of its AIOT-X1000 IoT Gateway. Now the 3.5-inch board is available on its own for a wide range of IoT applications. The name combines the prefix “Aaeon Internet of Things” with the board’s single-threaded Intel Quark X1000 system-on-chip, which here runs the Yocto-based Wind River Linux. The low power, Pentium ISA-compatible SoC can be clocked at up to 400MHz, and has no GPU.
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You should know that there’s an on-going Indiegogo campaign (with flexible funding) for a new computer board called Lemon Pi and developed by the EMBEDSTUDIO Chinese company.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Top 20 most popular Samsung Z1 apps to be downloaded from the Tizen store during April 2015 have been released. Many favourites are still there this month like WhatsApp, Opera Mini, McAfee AV, Trucaller and LockApps. Notable new ones are the highly requested MX Player and Speed Truck which made it to #3 position.
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Android
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Google may be the next big company to take on the internet of things, giving it an entry into the world of connected everyday objects. According to The Information, Google has developed software that can run on low-power devices and give them the ability to communicate with other connected devices nearby. Internally, the software is reportedly being called “Brillo,” but it may debut under an Android name next week, at Google’s I/O conference. The Information reports that the software could be used on everything from major home appliances like refrigerators to smaller tech like garden monitors.
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The biggest updates for Android user is the version upgrade, and we’re already at v5.0! Google every year comes out with an update for the Android OS which helps them update the users’ Operating System of the phone.
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Google continues adding new “micro features” that continue to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile. Jack Wallen believes these features that have helped to crown Google the King of Mobility.
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You know you spend a lot of time on your smartphone, but what are you doing with it? It’s a question QualityTime (Android 4.0+) attempts to answer, monitoring activity on your handset and revealing the apps that you just can’t pull yourself away from. Here’s how to get the app up and running on your device.
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As per user reports, Sony has finally started rolling out the Android Lollipop update to its Xperia Z and Xperia ZR handsets, specifically Android 5.0.2. The Japanese tech giant also announced it was rolling out a firmware update for its Xperia Z1, Xperia Z1 Compact, and Xperia Z Ultra smartphones with several bug fixes.
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Sling TV, Dish Network’s Internet TV service designed for cord cutters, is now available on the Android TV platform, the company is announcing this morning, including Google’s Nexus Player. This addition expands the service’s already fairly extensive lineup of devices it supports, which today includes Roku and Roku TV, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Xbox One, as well as iOS and Android phones and tablets, and Mac and PC desktops.
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Google has begun rolling out the latest version of its Lollipop operating system to a few new Android devices this week, including the Nexus 4, Nexus 5 and Nexus 9 tablet with LTE capabilities. If you own any of these devices, you should be able to download the 5.1.1 update over-the-air in the coming days, but we’ve included direct links below if you’d rather not wait.
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Setting a timer or alarm has been one of my favorite conveniences since I started using a Wear device regularly 6 months ago. Granted, they aren’t must-haves in my life, but they do come in handy occasionally, and I find myself using them on Wear more often than I would on my phone.
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Google I/O will be here in mere days, and that means it’s time for the 2015 edition of our Google Tracker. If you’re new to the series, Google Tracker is a running list of all the projects going on at Google HQ. We do bi-annual installments—one at the beginning of the year and one just before I/O—making this the fourth edition on Ars.
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If you recently sold your old Android phone, chances are your text messages, emails, pictures and Facebook key are still in there, even if you wiped its memory clean.
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We’ve gotten a few reports today of a new feature hitting the YouTube app, and it’s a big one. After an extended public outcry, Google appears to be adding support for 60fps video to Android. Videos shot in 60fps look much smoother and more realistic, but this doesn’t seem to be live for everyone yet.
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Asus has announced that the ZenFone 4, ZenFone 5, and ZenFone 6 smartphones’ scheduled Android 5.0 Lollipop update has been delayed.
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Google appears to be on the brink of revamping Chrome OS to broaden its appeal and give it a whole new kind of life. The evolution is happening on a few different fronts, many of which we’ve seen the beginnings of in bits and pieces already. Soon, though, the big picture should start to become clear.
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I’m likely on the hook for providing a version of my “WhyWeFOSS” as an example, so stay tuned for that post in the near-ish future.
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At the Vancouver OpenStack summit, software-defined storage company Nexenta announced the general availability of its NexentaEdge Block and Object Storage platform, as well as a strategic alliance agreement with Canonical and its Ubuntu OpenStack.
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The combination of open source and open standards ensures long-term preservation of electronic records and prevents IT vendor lock-in, says Luciano Ammenti, head of the IT department at the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) in Vatican City.
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If your next software development project is going to be successful, be it a simple Java EE deployment or a full-scale role out of a private cloud initiative based on OpenStack, a tremendous amount of code has to be written. The sad state of affairs enterprise organizations need to reckon with is that there is no way all that code can be written by the internal development team.
So what’s an organization to do? According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, successful organizations reach out to the open source community. “There is too much software to be written for any one organization to write this software on its own,” Zemlin said. “Open source allows businesses to focus on only the most important aspects of their technology stacks; only the things that truly differentiate the organization.”
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Jim Whitehurst recently wrote about the performance management approach we use at Red Hat for the Harvard Business Review. In his article, Whitehurst details one aspect of the performance management process that differentiates Red Hat from other companies—its flexibility.
We have a system for tracking performance (called Compass), and we have expectations for when Compass reviews are performed (at least annually, preferably quarterly). But the details and structure of implementation are up to individual managers or teams. I lead a team of more than 100 people at Red Hat, and I’d like to share how I measure and manage performance the open source way.
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That crazy DrumPants wearable tech we first saw in ’07 — the same one that raised 75 grand on KickStarter and was featured on Shark Tank in 2014 — is back. Its creators have now turned to Indiegogo to fund the mass production of DrumPants version 2.0, which they claim is faster and stronger than its predecessor. Plus, it’s now open source. The wearable, for those who’ve only just heard of it, isn’t actually a pair of pants with drums (sorry to disappoint). It’s a set of accessories comprised of two elongated drum pads and two foot pedals you can use to play different kinds of instruments, along with a knob that lets you choose between samples and musical scales. You can wear them over your clothes, or under, like the jamming dude in the GIF above.
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Events
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We have been back from Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 in Toronto for 2 weeks now. It is time for a report! 
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I’ve started the day with the session called “Crack, Train, Fix, Release” by Chris Heilmann. While it was very interesting for some unknown reason I was expecting a talk more closely related to software testing. Unfortunately at the same time in the other room was a talk called “Integration Testing from the Trenches” by Nicolas Frankel which I missed.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The code behind Google’s Chrome browser has always been open source—it’s known as the Chromium project. The Android port has thus far been more locked down, but that changes today with a big commit from the development team. Chrome for Android is now almost entirely open source, and that could mean some cool new browsers are on the way.
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Google has uploaded the majority of the remaining Chrome for Android code into the open-source Chromium repository. In other words, Chrome for Android now matches Chrome for desktop in terms of available open source code, letting anyone examine, modify, and compile the project.
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SaaS/Big Data
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There are not enough OpenStack experts to go around. At OpenStack Summit, there is literally not a single company here that is not looking for more programmers, architects, and engineers.
But, they’re coming. OpenStack is now backed by more than 200 vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, RackSpace Red Hat, and VMware. Is there any enterprise out there which doesn’t have a working relationship with at least of one of these companies?
This is making OpenStack deployment easier. If your company doesn’t have the talent it needs to do it in-house, Canonical, Red Hat, and Mirantis, to name but three of the leading OpenStack deployment firms, are all ready to jump in and help you get up and running. In short, you can pay cash today and have a working OpenStack cloud tomorrow.
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CDW is out with its Cloud 401 report, based on interviews with more than 1,200 IT managers from many industries. The report finds that more than a third of all computing services today are delivered throughthe cloud. It also determined that organizations are actively pursuing new services: Thirty-five percent of respondents say they plan to shift new IT services to the cloud.
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In one recent survey, IT managers said that the most important project their teams are working on for 2015 is cloud computing. And IDC predicts that by 2018, the worldwide market for public cloud services will be worth more than $127 billion, accounting for “more than half of worldwide software, server and storage spending growth.”
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“The moment we stop listening to users and it’s just a vendor-to-vendor conversation, or it’s just a developer-to-developer conversation and the user doesn’t have a seat at the table, that would leave us with a vulnerability that could undo all the good work we’ve done,” Collier said. “We just have to keep listening to users and we’ll be ok.”
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Building a company from freely available software might not seem like the most logical idea, but it’s one that is working for many vendors in the OpenStack cloud ecosystem. In a panel session at the OpenStack Summit here, the founders of cloud storage vendor SwiftStack, cloud database vendor Tesora, cloud vendor Piston Cloud Computing and cloud service provider Blue Box Cloud as well as the CEO of DreamHost, Simon Anderson, detailed their experiences and challenges in building OpenStack-powered businesses.
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David Ward, Development CTO and Chief Architect at Cisco, has been thinking a lot about how networking works in the cloud era, and he shared some of those thoughts at the OpenStack Summit here.
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Just a year into their production use of OpenStack for powering their internal cloud, they are leveraging it for everything from video to networking to deploying web applications, all on an in-house OpenStack cloud spread across two data centers. And this rapid change is getting noticed inside the company.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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This is an in-progress scratch-pad of notes to build release notes from as and when we release. Please do not list features that are to be shipped already in the 4.4 release! Please do not add wish-list features that you hope will be implemented, but only what actually is implemented already.
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Following yesterday’s LibreOffice 5.0 branching in Git, the first beta for LibreOffice 5.0 is now available for testing.
The Document Foundation announced on their blog the availability of the first beta for LibreOffice 5.0, which will be officially released around the end of July or early August.
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Healthcare
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Everyone wants personalized healthcare. From the moment they enter their primary care clinic they have certain expectations that they want met in regards to their personalized medical care.
Most physicians are adopting a form of electronic healthcare, and patient records are being converted to a digital format. But electronic health records pose interesting problems related to sorting through vast amounts of patient data.
This is where open source programming languages come in, and they have the ability to radically change the medical landscape.
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Business
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This is the second article in a series all about open source business models, specifically around open source platforms.
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Licensing
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For months now Allwinner has been violating the GPL and have attempted to cover it up by obfuscating their code and playing around with their licenses while jerking around the open-source community. At least today they’ve made a positive change in open-sourcing more of their “CedarX” code.
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Openness/Sharing
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There was a time when a reporter was called a hack.
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Open Hardware
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The Pi-Top is an open source DIY laptop made using the latest in kitchen table manufacturing technology
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Last Monday marked the start of the RoboUniverse Conference and Expo at The Javits Center in New York City. Twelve companies vied for a single cash prize, as well as complimentary investment and legal services. Voxel8 was the winner of the competition, and while all the entrants gave fascinating rapid-fire pitches for their startups, there was one company that stood out for me and has seemingly slipped under the radar in the 3D printing space. The company I’m speaking about is Ragnar Robotics.
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The Luka EV is an all-electric, street legal vehicle designed and built as an open-source experiment. Currently, the vehicle is targeting a single-charge range of around 186 miles, with a top speed of about 81 mph. The Luka’s price should land in the area of $22,445 when all is said and done. The creators are aiming at a design and build time of less than a year, and are using a FRP body based on a Solidworks model of a video game car.
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Programming
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Remembering what the programming world was like in 1995 is no easy task. Object-oriented programming, for one, was an accepted but seldom practiced paradigm, with much of what passed as so-called object-oriented programs being little more than rebranded C code that used >> instead of printf and class instead of struct. The programs we wrote those days routinely dumped core due to pointer arithmetic errors or ran out of memory due to leaks. Source code could barely be ported between different versions of Unix. Running the same binary on different processors and operating systems was crazy talk.
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Security
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The University of London’s Computing Centre (ULCC) has recovered from a major cyberattack that cut dozens of UK institutions from the institution’s IT services for five hours this morning.
The incident appears to have started around 7am and by 9am ULCC said it was looking into a firewall issue. By 10am, engineers had reset its firewalls and core routers but had been unable to solve the issue.
By mid-day, the assessment had become clearer. “All our services are now up and running again! The networking issue was caused by a cyber attack,” read an update on the institution’s website.
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Dennis Fisher talks with security pioneer Marcus Ranum about writing an early Internet firewall at DEC, the security gold-rush era of the 1990s and early 2000s, why he never patented most of the ideas he has come up with and how he found peace of mind.
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Google analyzed hundreds of millions of password security questions and answers, revealing how startlingly easy it is for would-be hackers to get into someone else’s account.
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With ten guesses, an attacker would have a near one in four chance of guessing the name of an Arabic speaker’s first teacher. Ten guesses gave cyber criminals a 21 percent chance of guessing the middle name of a Spanish speaker’s father.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor who predicted in 2003 that proponents of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would be “vindicated” upon the discovery of weapons of mass destruction there, is holding fast to the idea that the deadly and expensive conflict was the right move. Kristol’s justifications for the war, however, have changed dramatically.
In a May 20 op-ed for USA Today, Kristol argued that U.S. intervention in Iraq was justified in 2003 “to remove Saddam Hussein, and to complete the job we should have finished in 1991.” Kristol added that “we were right to persevere” in Iraq, “even with the absence of caches of weapons of mass destruction.”
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Finance
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US trade officials pushed EU to shelve action on endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to cancer and male infertility to facilitate TTIP free trade deal
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Censorship
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One of Finland’s largest festivals, Helsinki’s World Village, is a celebration of multicultural tolerance and respect. The free annual two-day event, known as Maailma kylässä in Finnish, has attracted more than 80,000 visitors in recent years.
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Privacy
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Global intelligence agencies, including the US National Security Agency, planned to hijack millions of Android smartphones with spyware.
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The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.
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Canada and its spying partners exploited weaknesses in one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers and planned to hack into smartphones via links to Google and Samsung app stores, a top secret document obtained by CBC News shows.
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As the Senate does its little song and dance today over surveillance reform, kudos to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for producing what has to be one of the most ridiculous opinion pieces on this debate to date. It’s called The Anti-Surveillance Rush, and its main argument is that the Senate shouldn’t be “rushing” through this debate, and that it should instead simply do a clean extension of section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to allow for further debate. This is wrong and it’s clueless. The WSJ editorial board can be nutty at times, but the level of cluelenssness displayed here really takes it to another level. Let’s dig in.
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Reform Government Surveillance, an organization that represents large technology companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft, on Tuesday pressed the U.S. Senate not to delay reform of National Security Agency surveillance by extending expiring provisions of the Patriot Act.
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As the deadline ticked closer to the expiration of the NSA’s powers of mass phone record collection, the Senate locked itself into chaotic wrangling over two competing surveillance bills on Thursday.
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Social media. So popular. And so very, very incriminating. The less-than-illustrious history of many a criminal who felt obliged to generate inculpatory evidence via social media postings has been well-detailed here. But what if you want to hide your indiscretions and malfeasance? If you’ve posted something on any major social network, chances are it will be found and used against you.
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A report by the FBI’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on the agency’s use of Section 215 collections has just been released in what can only be termed as “fortuitous” (or “suspicious”) timing. Section 215 is dying. It was up for reauthorization on June 1st, but the Obama administration suddenly pushed that deadline up to the end of this week. Sen. Mitch McConnell took a stab at a clean reauth, but had his attempt scuttled by a court ruling finding the program unauthorized by existing law and the forward momentum of the revamped USA Freedom Act. And, as Section 215′s death clock ticked away, Rand Paul and Ron Wyden engaged in a filibuster to block any last-second attempts to ram a clean reauthorization through Congress.
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Civil Rights
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The Florida mailman indicted for flying his unregistered gyrocopter through restricted airspace and landing on the U.S. Capitol lawn last month pleaded not guilty to six charges on Thursday.
Doug Hughes appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., where he entered his plea. He faces nearly a decade in prison if convicted on the two felony counts and four misdemeanors.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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What began as some squabbling over the definition of net neutrality in India has evolved into a global public relations shit show for Facebook. As we’ve been discussing, India’s government has been trying to define net neutrality ahead of the creation of new neutrality rules. Consumers and content companies have been making it very clear they believe Facebook’s Internet.org initiative violates net neutrality because it offers free, walled-garden access to only some Facebook approved content partners, instead of giving developing nations access to the entire Internet.
Internet.org partners began dropping out of the initiative, arguing they don’t like any model where Facebook gets to decide which content is accessed for free — and which content remains stuck outside of Internet.org. Facebook so far has responded by trying to claim that if you oppose Internet.org you’re the one hurting the poor, because a walled garden is better than no Internet at all. Of course that’s a false choice; Facebook could simply provide subsidized access to the entire Internet, but that wouldn’t provide them with a coordinated leg-up in the developing nation ad markets of tomorrow.
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DRM
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Digital Right Managements (systems preventing you from copying a movie or a song you bought, print an ebook you paid… and sometimes even read these!) are a real nuisance and we should fight them. But we believe here that fighting only is not enough. We should also propose constructive alternatives, new ways to produce, share and enjoy media and arts.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.21.15
Posted in News Roundup at 3:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the most crucial pieces of any UNIX-like operating system is the init dæmon process. In Linux, this process is started by the kernel, and it’s the first userspace process to spawn and the last one to die during shutdown.
During the history of UNIX and Linux, many init systems have gained popularity and then faded away. In this article, I focus on the history of the init system as it relates to Linux, and I talk about the role of init in a modern Linux system. I also relate some of the history of the System V Init (SysV) scheme, which was the de facto standard for many Linux distributions for a long time. Then I cover a couple more modern approaches to system initialization, such as Upstart and systemd. Finally, I pay some attention to how things work in systemd, as this seems to be the popular choice at the moment for several of the largest distributions.
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A reddit discussion that focused on things about Linux that most users don’t know has gotten tons of responses, and some of them are quite interesting and informative.
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When TrackingPoint first showcased its Linux-powered scopes with tracking assistance that substantially improved rifle accuracy, even in the hands of untrained hunters, it kicked off a controversy over what level of technology was appropriate for hunting or home defense, and whether the company encouraged irresponsible behavior. Now, it seems that debate is coming to an end thanks to imminent financial failure. While the company’s website remains online for now, there’s a new header that notes: “Due to financial difficulty, TrackingPoint will no longer be accepting orders. Thank you to our customers and loyal followers for sharing our vision.”
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The parent company behind the Linux rifle, TrackingPoint, is having financial difficulties and is no longer accepting orders. Elsewhere, Tony Mobily said the time for Desktop Linux passed without it ever becoming a success while Bruce Byfield discusses how the design philosophy of desktop projects influences their end product. Qt and KDE celebrated 20 years of Qt development goodness and Linux.com wants to know your favorite single-board computer.
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Master Linux quickly and efficiently with the next great courseware offer from TNW Deals. The Linux Learner Bundle puts you in command of the basics with 6 elite courses and 50+ hours of interactive learning content.
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Desktop
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What they heck? Run KVM VMs inside of Docker containers? Why would anyone want to do that? Well, so you can embed KVM VM disk images inside of Docker images… and easily deploy a KVM VM (almost) as easily as a Docker container. That kind of makes my head hurt just thinking about running a Windows 7 Desktop inside of a Docker container… but someone out there is doing that. Yikes!
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Dell is one of the most important providers of Ubuntu-powered hardware, and the company has just released a new laptop called Inspiron 15 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition.
Companies like Dell or IBM have helped to make Ubuntu much more popular because they sell a lot of hardware, and they are shipping that hardware with Ubuntu preinstalled. It might not seem like a big deal. After all, you can always install something else, but many customers don’t switch to a different OS and Ubuntu remains installed.
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Buyers, especially tech enthusiasts are crazy about the latest tablets and phones that roll out, thus the sales for PCs are pretty low. In the near future, individuals may start using these devices as desktop PCs instead. A major blow for the computer companies might be on the verge of happening, thus a new design concerning the software may also be implemented. So, we can say goodbye to operation systems and apps with one sole UI. It would be awesome though to see how the apps we use change their format depending on how they are being used. This whole process was called convergence and was inspired by those who creating Ubuntu OS when they rolled out a mobile device that also worked as a computer back in 2013. And even though the campaign for this phone didn’t go as planned, those at Canonical were dedicated to implement big changes and make their Ubuntu operating system, into this versatile UI. And right behind them is the Microsoft Company, a strong competitor that also wishes to do the same thing with Windows 10. So it seems that the “convergence” battle is on and the question is: which one will stir the biggest wave?
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Applications
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The Argentinian devs who created Popcorn Time took down its website and GitHub repository in July 2014 in response to a takedown request from the Motion Picture Association of America.
A couple of teams later forked the original Popcorn Time source code. One fork is PopcornTime.io, and the other is Popcorn-time.se .
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A new release 0.2.13 of RInside is now on CRAN. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by Rcpp.
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OpenMS is free software available under the three clause BSD license and runs under Windows, MacOSX and Linux.
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Adblock Plus today launched Adblock Browser for Android. Currently in beta, the company’s first browser was created by taking the open-source Firefox for Android and including Adblock Plus out-of-the-box.
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The first Beta for LibreOffice 5.0 has been released by The Document Foundation and the bug hunting season has been declared officially opened.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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We have another four classic games that have gained Linux support thanks to GOG.com, our collection seems to be growing nicely with them!
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We already knew that the Linux port of Van Helsing was put on hold, but now it seems the developers aren’t going to port any of them to Linux.
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Endless Legend was originally going to come to Linux, and then the developers decided it wasn’t worth it. The Linux client had even been started and was looking good, but was dropped after the Windows and Mac OS clients were deemed too buggy. Now SteamOS has appeared in their voting system for what to work on, it needs votes.
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The new Humble Paradox Bundle is now available for purchase, even if it’s not exactly the most Linux-friendly collection of titles released so far under the Humble Bundle umbrella.
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The famous Cossacks RTS series is returning after a decade, and it will be released as a Linux title as well. It’s being developed by the same studio that made the original games, GSC Game World.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Linux desktop users have two main sets of utilities: KDE’s and GNOME’s. The GNOME utilities are found in GNOME, MATE, Cinnamon and Unity. Neither KDE nor GNOME has any objective advantage over the other, but the user experiences are so different that they could almost be two different operating systems.
Both utility sets have the same basic features, but each starts with its own concept of what users want. As I have said before, GNOME’s utilities are exercises in minimalism, generally designed only for the most common use cases. By contrast, KDE’s utilities are completist, typically cramming every possibly related feature into their windows, as well as every possible opportunity for customization.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New Releases
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On May 20, Steven Shiau announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development version of his popular Clonezilla Live CD that helps users with disk cloning operations.
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Arne Exton, the creator of several distributions of GNU/Linux and Android-x86 Live CDs, has updated his LFA (Linux For ALL) distribution recently with a new, custom kernel package and various under-the-hood improvements.
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Slackware Family
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Building on my experiences with chromium-dev (the development channel of the Chromium browser which is currently at version 44), I have made similar changes to my latest package for the chromium browser and its widevine and pepperflash plugins.
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Red Hat Family
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When high-value analytics can be brought to every worker’s fingers, the old-style organizational structure becomes inefficient, Whitehurst writes. You want only employees who are mission-oriented, dedicated to what the company is all about, and you want to empower them to fulfill that mission, weeding out those who aren’t so dedicated.
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A recent Red Hat survey on mobile trends revealed that 70 percent of organizations plan to embrace the Internet of Things in the next 5 years. So where is Red Hat on the IoT stage?
To further understand Red Hat’s IoT strategy, I reached out to the company’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Mark Coggin.
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 is scheduled to be released next week but for that to happen there’s still a number of blocker bugs that need to be addressed. The second release candidate of Fedora 22 Final is now available for those wishing to stress this major update of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s been four years and two weeks since Mark Shuttleworth expressed his goal of “200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years.” While Ubuntu’s presence has continued to increase over the past four years, it doesn’t look like that goal has been realized yet or will be by the end of the calendar year.
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Canonical shows off its Orange Match Box appliance that runs Ubuntu’s Snappy Linux at the OpenStack Summit.
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Canonical published recently the first daily build Live ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu Desktop Next 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system were made available for download.
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On May 20, Canonical published a new Ubuntu security notice where they’ve informed users about the immediate availability of a new kernel update for its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
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On May 20, Canonical published a new Ubuntu security notice where they’ve informed users about the immediate availability of a new kernel update for its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
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On May 20, Canonical had the pleasure of showcasing its latest products at the OpenStack Summit event that takes place these days between May 18-22, 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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The release schedule for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) has been finalized, and we now have all the intermediary steps and the launch date for the next operating system from Canonical.
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Details about a number of Oxide vulnerabilities which have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, have been detailed in a security notification.
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Canonical and Ubuntu continue to suffer the slings and arrows of the Linux community. Jack Wallen believes the infighting carries a hefty cost.
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Mark Shuttleworth, founder of open-source supplier Canonical, continues to strive towards the vision of a converged handheld device, despite his failed attempt to raise $32m through crowdfunding for Ubuntu Edge, the smartphone that doubles as a desktop PC.
Recalling the crowdfunding initiative that fell short by $13m, he says: “I’m really proud how people stepped up and said it was a good idea. We concentrated all our efforts on the software and now we’re shipping phones.”
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The 2015 Linux hacker board survey has arrived. In its second year, this collaboration between Linux.com and LinuxGizmos.com has collected 53 open-spec, community backed SBCs that run Linux and/or Android. Please take a few minutes to fill out our short SurveyMonkey SBC Survey, and select your favorite SBCs, then enter a drawing to become one of 20 randomly chosen participants who receive a free Linux SBC. Farther below, we offer brief summaries of the 53 boards, with links to product pages.
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Rate your favorite hacker SBCs, and you might win one of 20 SBCs including the BeagleBone Black, Creator CI20, DragonBoard 410c, and Edison Kit for Arduino.
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The Lemon Pi single board computer tries to copy the success of the very popular Raspberry Pi, even the 40-pins feature port of the Raspberry Pi is copied(!)
The Lemon Pi features a powerful ARM Quad-core cortex A9 and Imagination PowerVR SGX544 GPU. Connectivity is handled by Multi-USBs, I2C, SPI, UART, I2S, PCM, SPDIF, MIPI DSI / CSI, HDMI, and Ethernet ports.
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Phones
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Linux—or a form of it, at least—and other open source programs soon could be playing a bigger role in the mobile and tablet market in Russia. And it has concerns over spying by the NSA to thank.
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Android
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Google’s finally confirmed the Nexus 4 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update and the new firmware should start rolling out in the near future. Here’s what owners of the former flagship need to know about the company’s brand new Nexus 4 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop release.
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Google isn’t just going to sit back and let Apple take all the glory when it comes to smartwatches. The search giant has just begun rolling out the first major update for its Android Wear platform, adding a plethora of new features to the smartwatch mix.
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We can be pretty confident that Google will be launching Android M at Google I/O next week, after it was accidentally mentioned in an Android for Work event schedule. As Android continues to mature with each new version it’s getting harder to predict what’s up next. We don’t expect a major overhaul this time around, but there’s definitely still work to be done.
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Is the Android security risk overstated?
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Developers are said to be reluctant to modify iPhone and Android apps for Windows Phone over doubts over app quality and how easy the process will be
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Instagram’s Layout app, which landed on iOS in March, is coming to Android today.
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Google has introduced a new limited run of Android device accessories called ‘Edition’ cases. These cases, which come in sizes compatible with Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Samsung Galaxy S5, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 4, also come with a live wallpaper to match which displays satellite-captured images of Earth by night and constellation pics from the night sky of your current location by night.
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What we’re seeing on the right is a Motorola Droid Turbo that runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, despite the fact that an official Lollipop update has yet to be rolled out to the handset. The explanation for this is that the device pictured here belongs to Jose Arturo, one of Verizon’s device test engineers, who says that the 5.1 update should reach end users starting mid June.
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Researchers said there’s an urgent need to mitigate runtime-information-gathering (RIG) attacks on Android mobile and Android-controlled Internet of Things devices. They demonstrated RIG attacks against IoT devices and developed an app to stop such attacks.
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For many Nexus owners, the wait for Android 5.1.1 is finally over. Today, OTAs began rolling out for several Nexus devices which had thus far been stuck on Android 5.1. If waiting on an OTA update isn’t your thing, you can now head on over to Google’s Nexus developer page to get the latest factory images.
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A couple months ago, Facebook’s photo social network Instagram released a popular collage app called Layout for iOS. Now Layout is available for Android. The Layout app lets you create a collage of your photos and it can be shared on social networks like Facebook or Instagram. The photo collage also saves to your Android device so that you can message it to your friends and family.
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Even though they get plenty of attention from the press, the newest Android flagships aren’t necessary the best choices for many smartphone buyers, especially for Android fans looking for affordable high-end devices. The Asus ZenFone 2 is one alternative, a cheap Android phone that packs 4GB of RAM and costs just $299 in the U.S. However, there are plenty of other premium Android phones overseas that meet the same criteria: They’re powerful and significantly cheaper than the Galaxy S6, Nexus 6, HTC One M9 or LG G4. Unfortunately, many of them are also out of your reach, including the following two devices.
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Last month the Nvidia Shield Android TV 500GB “Pro edition” showed up on Nvidia’s website with a price tag listed at $300, but shortly after this Nvidia pulled down the listing, claiming that this was a developer SKU and had been put up by mistake. As it turns out, that’s not exactly the whole story.
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Here at BGR, most of our smartphone coverage focuses on brand new smartphonesthat are cutting-edge and high-end. After all, a huge portion of our readership consists of savvy tech fans who always need to have the latest and greatest gear. But not all of our readers are quite so enthusiastic, and some would rather save money and buy a more affordable smartphone — after all, $650, $750 or even $800+ is a whole lot of cash to spend on a phone.
If you’re looking to buy a new smartphone and want to get some serious bang for your buck, here are two options that you can pick up at shockingly low prices.
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The Information is back with more Google news before I/O. The outlet claims that Google is developing another operating system, this time for low-power “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices. The OS is codenamed “Brillo,” and the publication claims Google “is likely to release the software under the Android brand, as the group developing the software is linked to the company’s Android unit.” We’re going to take that to mean “it’s based on Android.”
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So as technology leaders — as the drivers of innovation — we must always be on the lookout for new ways to ready our organizations for agility. One means to that end is open source. Open source is the ultimate platform for flexibility, right? A platform that affords us the agility we need to quickly adapt as technology evolves, business demands expand and markets mature. A platform that allows us to innovate how we want, when we want — rather than innovating on the path and at the pace of our vendors.
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Cultural heritage management tends to suffer from limited funding and resources, which can make a crisis — whether natural disaster, pipeline construction, or war — that much more catastrophic for assessing what’s in need of protection. An open-source system called Arches is the first online tool designed specifically to inventory heritage sites. It was created through a partnership between the World Monuments Fund (WMF) and the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), and its third version launched earlier this month.
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Events
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Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Protocols Plugfest Europe 2015. It was really good to get out of the bubble of free software desktops where the community love makes it tempting to think we’re the most important thing in the world and experience the wider industry where of course we are only a small player.
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I was in Depok, Indonesia last week to speak at GNOME Asia 2015. It was a great experience — the organisers did a fantastic job and as a bonus, the venue was incredibly pretty!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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This is based on the proprietary former addon pocket, which is now no longer supported since it is being integrated.
It’s only the beta channel, but this has all the hallmarks of a half-baked revenue stream for Mozilla that ultimately sells out user privacy – and what’s worse, is opt-out, rather than opt-in.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Ever since NASA and Rackspace first got together in 2010 to create OpenStack, there has been the concept of an integrated OpenStack release. However, at the OpenStack Summit here this week, developers declared the integrated release model to be dead, being replaced with a new “Big Tent” model that redefines what OpenStack includes as a platform.
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But backers of the project insist it’s as strong as ever. This week OpenStack is in the midst of its 11th semi-annual Summit in Vancouver. From all accounts it’s got the feel of a real tech show with an estimated 6,000 attendees and more than 500 companies supporting the project.
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Alan Clark, chairman of the board at the OpenStack Foundation, discusses new efforts under way to improve diversity and grow the open-source cloud platform.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is a great OpenSource project. They have a Design Group and help you a lot if you’d like to do something for LibreOffice. Now LibreOffice prepare the new release LibreOffice 5.0 and for this release I’d like to be finished the LibreOffice Breeze icon set. Uri and I work since last November on the icon set so you also have a package available in your repository. Now I’d like to post that we are nearly finished. 98 % (2.700 icons) of the icon set is done, so it is ready for your review. As the monochrome LibreOffice icon set Sifr is less finished than Breeze, I though the fallback icon set for Sifr is Breeze.
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CMS
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Open source is increasingly changing the software industry. We can see open source products gaining market share in almost every category today, and this development is continuing at a fast pace.
Although a lot of business people still intuitively think of Linux when it comes to open source software, content management systems played a pivotal role in changing the mindset within corporations. Why? Because the CMS industry was one of the first to largely adopt open source products. Nowadays, the most corporations use open source content management systems for their web platforms. Some of them may not even realize it.
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Openness/Sharing
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The action plan that France must submit as part of its membership of the Open government partnership (OGP) is mainly build on reforms already announced.
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France will chair the Open Government Partnership from October 2016 to October 2017, after the OGP Steering Committee accepted France’s application at a meeting in Mexico on April 24.
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Eastern Central Europe has to reinvent itself and digital tools are the way to succeed. This is one of the conclusions drawn during the Personal Democracy Forum Poland-Central Eastern. This conference, which took place in Warsaw in mid-April, was organised by the ePaństwo Foundation (Fundacja ePaństwo) – a Polish NGO aiming at developing democracy and transparency.
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Open Hardware
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Last week, VA’s Center for Innovation launched its three-month Innovation Creation Series for Prosthetics and Assistive Technologies. The aim of the series is to build a suite of special prosthetics and other state-of-the-art technologies to support wounded veterans in their day-to-day lives.
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Programming
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Although Java was developed at Sun Microsystems, Oracle has served as the platform’s steward since acquiring Sun in early 2010. During that time, Oracle has released Java 7 and Java 8, with version 9 due up next year. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke to Oracle’s Georges Saab, vice president of software development for the Java Platform Group, about the occasion of Java’s 20th anniversary.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Following a report on Sunday, where Human Rights Watch said video and photographic evidence showed that Saudi Arabia used cluster bombs near villages in Yemen’s Saada Province at least two separate times, the US State Department said it is “looking into” the allegations but, as Foreign Policy reports, said the notoriously imprecise weapon — banned by much of the world — could still have an appropriate role to play in Riyadh’s U.S.-backed offensive (as long as it was used carefully).
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The US is trying to win “hearts and minds” in Africa. It’s not going well.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Fox personalities criticized President Obama for calling climate change “an immediate risk to our national security” during his U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement address. But security experts agree with the president that global climate change does threaten U.S. national security.
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Finance
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The Nobel laureate writes, “There is much confusion about ISDS, but plain and simple: ISDS is about rewriting the rules of how our economy works, tipping the balance of power in favor of big businesses at the expense of workers and the public here and in partner countries.”
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There is “no ducking the fact” that spending on the police has to face further cuts but it “is perfectly possible” to do it without affecting the quality of neighbourhood policing, the home secretary, Theresa May, has told officers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Silence From Network After Christian Minister Arrested For Threatening To Kill Muslims
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During a bizarre appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Obama administration is engaging in “Nazi stuff” by using ethnic politics, and wants to confiscate all the country’s firearms and put people “in jail for even having them.”
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Privacy
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For an international fugitive hiding out in Russia from American espionage charges, Edward J. Snowden gets around.
May has been another month of virtual globe-hopping for Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, with video appearances so far at Princeton and in a “distinguished speakers” series at Stanford and at conferences in Norway and Australia. Before the month is out, he is scheduled to speak by video to audiences in Italy, and also in Ecuador, where there will be a screening of “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning documentary about him.
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Communications massively collected for further behavioural analysis and profiling (PRISM) and sabotage of any commercial product dedicated to protect our data and communications (BULLRUN) are just examples of how everyday technology, now part of ourselves, has been systematically perverted and turned against us.
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Back in January, David Cameron made what sounded like a threat to ban, or at least undermine, encryption in the UK. “The question is,” Cameron said, “are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read. My answer to that question is: no, we must not.” On its own that might be dismissed as a politician talking tough to please his supporters, but it’s part of a much wider attack on strong encryption from the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.
In October last year, FBI Director James Comey spoke of his agency’s fears about things “going dark” because of encryption, while NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said encryption “does a terrible disservice to the public.” A month later, NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker offered the view that the reason Blackberry had failed was because it used “too much encryption.” More recently, Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, said encryption is “the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism,” while the UK’s National Policing Lead for Counter-Terrorism, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, called products that offer strong encryption “friendly to terrorists.”
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Civil Rights
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Cooke knew the CBP agents needed something in the way of reasonable suspicion to continue to detain her. But they had nothing. The only thing offered in the way of explanation as they ordered her to return to her detained vehicle was that she appeared “nervous” during her prior interaction with the female CBP agent. This threadbare assertion of “reasonable suspicion” is law enforcement’s blank check — one it writes itself and cashes with impunity.
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After presenting her driver’s license, Cooke, who surely learned in college that police (and even CBP agents!) need “reasonable suspicion” to detain someone, asks why she was pulled over. “You guys have no reason to be holding me,” she says. A male agent who identifies himself as a supervisor has no explanation for the detention, but he says Cooke will have to wait for a drug-sniffing dog to inspect her car. “Well, they’d better be here soon, because if not, I’m calling 911, and this can all be figured out,” Cooke says. “You guys are holding me here against my will.” Eventually the female agent who first interacted with Cooke says she seemed nervous—an all-purpose excuse for detaining someone, since people tend to be nervous when confronted by armed government officials.
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A Florida man who piloted a gyrocopter through miles of America’s most restricted airspace before landing at the U.S. Capitol is now facing charges that carry up to 9½ years in prison.
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The Florida postal worker who flew his gyrocopter under the radar into Washington and onto the West Lawn of the Capitol earlier this year faces nearly 10 years in prison after being indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday.
Doug Hughes, 61, was indicted in U.S. District Court in D.C. on two felony counts of flying without a pilot’s certificate and lacking registration for his small aircraft, each carrying up to three years in prison.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.20.15
Posted in News Roundup at 3:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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To be fair, the number 77 car was not a favorite to win the race. In fact, Moreno started from the eleventh row — the last row — after just barely qualifying. But most of that was irrelevant: Linux was out there. Tux 500 was highlighted prominently in eleven major newspapers, dozens of minor ones, two major non-tech magazines, and dozens of non-Linux/tech publications on paper and across the web.
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About 6 years ago, I wrote an article about why I felt that installing software in GNU/Linux was broken. It pains me to say that the situation is, sadly, exactly the same:GNU/Linux never made it to personal computers, really, and at this point it looks like it never will.
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I have converted many users, including my wife, to Linux in the past 10 years and and I am still going strong. If you do it right, Linux will do a better job for your users than Mac OS X or Windows … if you do it right.
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Desktop
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Chromebooks have become extremely popular, with numerous models appearing on Amazon’s list of bestselling laptops. Customers are so interested in Chromebooks that Amazon has added a helpful Chromebook Buying Guide to steer them toward the model that might be right for them.
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Linux containers have been around for several years, but have come back into vogue recently with the growing popularity of Docker containers.
Docker containers launched with the aim of making it easy for developers to test and distribute applications and have taken off with a bang: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Joyent have all announced ways to integrate and manage multiple Docker containers into their offerings.
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Server
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When Google announced that it would support AppC, a vendor neutral container format, and the first container based on it, CoreOS’s Rocket (RKT), some people took this as Google supporting AppC over Docker. That is not true.
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IBM hasn’t been shy about its ambitions to transform into a cloud company, building up a broad portfolio of infrastructure, platform and software services. Part of that strategy has been to be intimately involved with OpenStack, the open source cloud platform. This week at the project’s biannual conference in Vancouver, IBM announced it was expanding its OpenStack offerings.
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OpenStack’s catalog provides apps in multiple formats, including Murano packages, Glance images and Heat templates. Now firms can find apps in one place.
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OpenStack’s Nova compute project originally began as the Nebula project at NASA. At the OpenStack conference here, Jonathan Chiang, IT Chief Engineer at NASA JPL detailed how the space agency is now using OpenStack in its effort to land humans on Mars.
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Kernel Space
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It appears that the current Linux 4.0.x kernel is plagued by an EXT4 file-system corruption issue. If there’s any positive note out of the situation, it seems to mostly affect EXT4 Linux RAID users.
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Some time ago, I figured out that there are more than a billion instances of the Linux kernel in use, and this in turn led to the realization that a million-year RCU bug is happening about three times a day across the installed base. This realization has caused me to focus more heavily on RCU validation, which has uncovered a number of interesting bugs. I have also dabbled a bit in formal verification, which has not yet found a bug. However, formal verification might be getting there, and might some day be a useful addition to RCU’s regression testing. I was therefore quite happy to be invited to this Dagstuhl Seminar. In what follows, I summarize a few of the presentation. See here for the rest of the presentations.
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Graphics Stack
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Among other OpenGL 4.x extensions, one of the more recent additions to OpenGL being tackled by open-source developers is ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object.
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Besides Intel DRM updates landing today in DRM-Next for eventual merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel, AMD landed some changes to their HSA kernel driver named AMDKFD.
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Applications
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LiVES, a video editor and VJ tool that permits users to combine real time and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files, is now at version 2.4.0 and is ready for download.
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The extremely active development team of the open-source and cross-platform MPV movie player software based on the popular MPlayer multimedia playback application reached version 0.9.2 on May 19.
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Following this morning’s branching of Mesa 10.6 and pushing Git master to Mesa 10.7, the Mesa 10.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available.
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Proprietary
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Google was proud to announce today, May 18, the immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 43 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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WPS Office (also known as Kingsoft Office) is a freeware office suite having the same features as Microsoft Office (more of a Microsoft Office clone), installed by default on Ubuntu Kylin, the Ubuntu flavor developer for its Chinese users.
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Debian, Ubuntu (as well as other Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions like Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.) users can install Enpass for both 32bit and 64bit by using its new official repository.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It will launch on May 26th for Steam gamers, and it looks like a visual feast that’s for sure.
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The Steam for Linux top selling list is always changing, but that’s not really surprising now that there are lots of titles on the open source platform. We now take a closer look at what the gamers prefer to play this week.
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The NeocoreGames studio confirmed the fact that it’s no longer trying to port its games on the Linux platform, even if they were already working on the Beta version for The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.
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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is the last game in the Borderlands universe and one of the first triple A titles to get Linux support. Now a new update has been released, and the Linux version got it as well.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today we celebrate 20 years since the first release of Qt was uploaded to sunsite.unc.edu and announced, six days later, at comp.os.linux.announce. Over these years, Qt evolved from a two person Norwegian project to a full-fledged, social-technical world-wide organism that underpins free software projects, profitable companies, universities, government-related organizations, and more. It’s been an exciting journey. From the early days of Trolltech in 1999, through an evolution of licensing (from the original FreeQt, to QPL, to GPL, to LGPL today), corporate cooperation from Nokia and Digia, Open Governance, and leading edge technology refinements, Qt has supported the spirit of free software, thriving communities, and high quality products.
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Everything is ready for the 3rd edition of LaKademy – The KDE Latin America Summit…
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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On May 19, the ROSA company was proud to announce the immediate availability of the ROSA Enterprise Desktop X2 Linux kernel-based operating system for enterprise users, which can request an ISO image from the ROSA sales department.
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Russian ROSA Company today announced the release of ROSA Enterprise Desktop X2, the newest version of their business-class operating system. Elsewhere, kernel version 4.0.2 may have introduced an ext4 corruption bug resulting in data loss affecting at least Arch, Debian and Fedora.
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Debian Family
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FileZilla, one of the best open-source and cross-platform FTP clients available on the market, reached version 3.11.0 on May 19 bringing assorted new features and bug fixes.
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Last month we heard libdvdcss and ZFS should soon appear in Debian GNU/Linux, but now it doesn’t appear that easy… It could end up taking a while longer for the ZFS file-system and the libdvdcss support for DVD playback on Debian to appear within the official repositories.
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Derivatives
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Tails first achieved notoriety as the Linux distribution that National Security Agency whistleblower Ed Snowden used. Tails, an acronym for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is focused on enabling user privacy while online. On April 29, 2014, the Tails 1.0 debuted, and it has been steadily updated ever since. Tails 1.4 launched May 12 of this year with a number of new capabilities, including several important security updates. Among the big changes in Tails 1.4 is a new privacy-focused search tool called Disconnect. Tails 1.4 also enables users to print a paper copy of their privacy keys using the Paperkey tool. A core part of every Tails release is the included Tor browser, which benefits from an update in Tails 1.4 that fixes a number of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities. There are times when the Tor browser isn’t enough, and users need a regular browser to get access to a service, which is why Tails 1.4 also includes an Unsafe Browser, as well. In this slide show, eWEEK examines key features of the Tails 1.4 release.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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On May 19, the Ubuntu Kernel Team had a meeting in order to plan the steps that are to be taken by them prior to the migration to the latest upstream Linux kernel packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.
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Canonical has published details about a few vulnerabilities that were found and corrected in the Linux kernel packages, affecting the kernel for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicon) operating system.
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For now, Ubuntu 15.10 still uses Kernel 3.19 (the same kernel as Ubuntu 15.04), but the next daily builds should bring Kernel 4.0.4, which is the latest stable version available released so far. But if Linus Torvalds manages to get Kernel 4.1 out in time, Canonical may implement it as default, on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.
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Recently, Canonical has split the Ubuntu RTM branch into two branches, one channel being for the BQ phoneand ther other one for the Meizu one. This is a good thing for the developers that create optimizations for one Ubuntu phone only (e.g. tweaks for Meizu that are not needed on Bq, or vice versa).
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Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has confirmed that the next Ubuntu Touch Update (OTA 4) will be released by the end of the month and will change the code base of the system to Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.
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Ubuntu Touch is already stable, and it’s available on two different phones right now, Bq Aquaris and Meizu MX4. It’s different from your regular OS experience, but that’s a good thing. The only real problem is the lack of apps, although a Blackberry approach to the problem might be a good thing for Canonical.
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A smartphone that can work as a desktop may be a long shot but the pursuit of mobile technology has brought many benefits to Ubuntu, according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.
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We’ve been hearing about Meizu’s forthcoming Ubuntu-powered smartphone since early 2014—more than a year ago. Well, all those words just became tangible, and they’ve coalesced into the first compelling-looking Ubuntu phone.
The Ubuntu MX4 is now out and can be purchased from Meizu’s website in China. Meizu’s Ubuntu phone follows in the footsteps of the Bq Aquaris, which is now on sale across Europe. The second Ubuntu smartphone will also be on sale in Europe soon.
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Phones
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Android
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Screen sizes on smartphones have been on an upward spiral since the time Apple launched the original iPhone several years back with a tiny 3.5-inch screen. The first of Google’s Nexus devices, the Nexus One came with a small 3.7-inch screen as well, but since then, every subsequent smartphone generation has seen a significant increase in screen sizes and today, what is seen to be an acceptable screen size is significantly larger than what would have been considered mainstream even a couple of years back. One doesn’t have to go too far back to remember a time when Samsung’s original Galaxy Note from 2011 was joked about as a “slice of toast” on various internet forums because of its 5.3-inch screen size – something that’s actually smaller than most mainstream devices of today, which come with larger 5.5-inch screens. Circa 2015, handsets with larger screens, being significantly better at multimedia consumption, have given rise to the phablet phenomenon, and smaller handsets have gone out of fashion, especially at the higher end of the spectrum.
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Yep, Maps for Android Wear, it’s happening! A few of you have already spotted the icon in your Wear launchers if you’re running the new Maps 9.9 APK and Android Wear 5.1+, you should be able to get Maps for Android Wear fully up and running… mostly.
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Layout, an app for making photo collages that Instagram introduced on iOS in March, is now available for Android. The app, which can be downloaded here, arrays your photos in a variety of grids. It’s meant to capitalize on the fact that about one in five Instagram users regularly post collages to their accounts, according to the company.
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Micromax Informatics Ltd., India’s second-largest smartphone seller, is going where Google Inc.’s Android One failed to go, bringing a real local-language experience onto the Android platform for the subcontinent. This could help the company go after first-time smartphone users as the market expands into small towns and rural states.
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Six months after Lollipop’s release, how have the major Android manufacturers done at delivering upgrades to their devices?
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Eurecom researchers recently developed an Android application that can monitor the network traffic of other apps to alert users of suspicious or malicious network activity.
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In a post in its product forums today, Google said that the rollout of the Android 5.1.1 update for Android Wear smartwatches is imminent. And just so, Android Police is reporting that some owners of the LG G Watch and LG G Watch R have already received it. The update adds some great new features, including support for getting notifications on any Wi-Fi network, wrist gestures, and the ability to draw emoji. We laid it all out in our LG Watch Urbane review, which ships with the update already pre-installed.
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Fox News host Bill O’Reilly interviewed a former biker gang leader about a recent biker shootout in Waco, Texas that left nine people dead. O’Reilly’s interview with his white guest was a sharp contrast to interviews the host regularly has with African-American guests, where he lectures them about black violence, culture, and family structure.
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Per usual, the media would retell the narrative based entirely on Pentagon and White House action movie prose. Just as with the bin Laden raid narrative—that later turned out to be mostly false—this tale involved some unbelievably compelling details: “rescuing a Yazidi slave,” “hand-to-hand combat,” “women and children as human shields,” “precise fire” (that, of course, avoided these women and children), and a body count, “40 extremists,” that would make Jack Bauer blush.
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Being an early adopter of anything and everything Linux, I was quick to order the LG Watch Urbane the moment it was made available on Google Store. It was the most expensive watch around, there were no detailed reviews, but I was impressed by the design.
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I’m Lee Schlesinger, currently managing editor for the Spiceworks Community. Spiceworks provides a free downloadable help desk and network inventory application, and hosts a community for IT pros to discuss both work and off-topic issues. Though we have a pretty popular Linux group in the community, many of the community members, who we call SpiceHeads, work in Microsoft-centric shops.
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Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is preparing to launch an operating system for the internet of things that’s just 10 kilobytes in size. The company says that its “LiteOS” is the “lightest” software of its kind and can be used to power a range of smart devices — from wearables to cars. Huawei predicts that by 2025 there will be roughly 100 billion internet-connected devices in the world, with 2 million new sensors deployed every hour. The company also said that the OS would be “opened to all developers” to allow them to quickly create their own smart products — although it’s unclear whether this means that LiteOS will be fully open-source. Huawei says LiteOS also supports “zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking.”
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In Sweden there is a service called BankID, it’s an electronic identity service. Banks issue the electronic ID which can be used by companies, banks and government agencies to authenticate and conclude agreements with individuals over the internet. A few months ago however it was decided that BankID software on Linux would no longer be supported. Finding an alternative can be difficult for Linux users.
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Events
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack is ready for enterprise deployment, but there are rough spots that is likely to relegate it to new workloads and self-service developer use, according to Forrester Research.
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At OpenStack Summit, Red Hat announced it was releasing a technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with integration into OpenStack’s new Manila shared file system project.
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A foundation can do a lot to unite a community–just look at the example set by The Linux Foundation. This week, the OpenStack Foundation has rolled out a community application catalog built to facilitate collaboration and sharing on the OpenStack scene, where many IT administrators are wrestling with deploying the open cloud platform. The concept is to encourage administrators and others to leverage the work that has already been produced in OpenStack deployments.
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Researchers at Gartner have been in the news for throwing some shade on Hadoop with the results of a new study that found that Hadoop is, well, hard. There are just not enough skilled professionals that can claim mastery of the platform, among other issues. Gartner, Inc.’s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Branching LibreOffice 5.0 now puts it under a hard feature freeze while the beta one release is to follow quite soon followed by a second LO 5.0 beta in early June. Four release candidates for LibreOffice 5.0 will come during June and July while the official release of LibreOffice 5 is still slated for the end of July or early August.
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CMS
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dotCMS has claimed a desirable chunk of the enterprise market by landing and working alongside large clients such as Standard & Poor’s, Wiley Publishing, Thomson Reuters Foundation and Hospital Corporation of America. As such, it’s reputation as an enterprise solution is growing fast.
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Healthcare
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I’ve known Fred for about 15 years or so, first as a contributor to OpenEMR and later we accidentally met in person at the University of Texas. It’s pretty cool to come face-to-face with folks you’ve only know online and, mostly, from working with their contributed code! Over the years, Fred has hosted a couple of open source healthcare IT conferences and done some great work in the field for ClearHealth/MirrorMed with Dave Ulhman and now focusing on open data.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Working directly with hardware is hard. Each project brings with it mundane questions of which compiler to use, what communications protocols to work with, and how to load code. Developers also need to figure out how to debug the live system without affecting the program being executed.
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Programming
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The merger was put to a vote on GitHub by io.js developer Mikeal Rogers, who initially proposed the merger in February, and the io.js technical committee voted to approve the merger yesterday. According to Rogers, the team will continue releasing io.js versions while the convergence takes place, but after the merger is complete, the io.js working groups and technical committee will join the Node.js Foundation under renamed titles.
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The goals of the program are to provide high-quality computer science instruction at the high school level and to identify potentially talented computer students who are in demographics underserved by the IT industry, such as women and ethnic minorities.
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Good news for stressed out IT professionals—a TEKsystems survey of more than 1,000 IT workers indicates a vast positive change in the stability of IT staffing environments as compared to a year ago.
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Security
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Dan Berrange, creator of libvirt, sums it up nicely on the Fedora Devel list:
“While you might be able to crash the QEMU process associated with your own guest, you should not be able to escalate from there to take over the host, nor be able to compromise other guests on the same host. The attacker would need to find a second independent security flaw to let them escape SELinux in some manner, or some way to trick libvirt via its QEMU monitor connection. Nothing is guaranteed 100% foolproof, but in absence of other known bugs, sVirt provides good anti-venom for this flaw IMHO.”
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At the start of 2014, attackers’ favorite distributed denial of service attack strategy was to send messages to misconfigured servers with a spoofed return address – the servers would keep trying to reply to those messages, allowing the attackers to magnify the impact of their traffic.
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Another HTTPS vulnerability has started to make its rounds earlier this morning. Dubbed Logjam by its researchers, the vulnerability stems from the US’s encryption export mandate back in the 1990s. This particular vulnerability, in the transport-layer security layer protocol, breaks the Diffie-Hellman perfect forward-secrecy. Susceptibility to the vulnerability is depended on servers and clients supporting the DHE_EXPORT encryption scheme, or using a key less-than-or-equal to 1024 bits.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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But here’s the truth Jeb Bush and the others are hiding or eliding: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Co. were not misled by lousy intelligence; they used lousy intelligence to mislead the public.
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The latest example of the sort of crime story that would be huge news if the perpetrator were Muslim–rather than, in this instance, someone who hates Muslims–is the case of Robert Rankin Doggart, a former congressional candidate from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, who was caught on tape and on social media talking about wiping out a Muslim community in upstate New York.
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Finance
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Europe faces the risk of a second revolt by Left-wing forces in the South after Portugal’s Socialist Party vowed to defy austerity demands from the country’s creditors and block any further sackings of public officials.
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But the measure will not only hurt those who need such programs most, it may also increase costs to the state in the long run. As Liz Schott, a welfare policy analyst, explained to the AP: “Long-term welfare recipients are often the most vulnerable, suffering from mental and physical disabilities, poor job histories and little education … But without welfare, they’ll likely show up in other ways that will cost taxpayers, from emergency rooms to shelters to the criminal justice system.”
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Earlier in this special report series, CMD revealed how states that do not hold their charter schools and authorizers accountable have the upper hand when the U.S. Department of Education (ED) evaluates applications to the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year charter schools program. But if the review process is deeply flawed, the oversight of the $3.3 billion disbursed within the charter schools program is not much better.
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Austerity is about shifting the burden of an economic crisis from one part of the population to another.
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Privacy
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Email. Online banking. Facebook. Your doctor’s office. These are all places where we rely on encryption to keep the private details of our lives safe. Without encryption, none of these services would be remotely safe to use, and even with encryption breaches are too common. We all want the digital world to be safer, not less secure
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Tech giants including Apple, Google, and others believe government would be putting American citizens at risk if it required tech companies to build a back door for law enforcement, and now they’ve issued a letter to President Obama, urging him to prevent such a move by Congress.
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Facebook’s founder owns four properties surrounding his California home, and a huge, sparse estate in Hawaii. Why do so many tech billionaires crave isolation?
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Civil Rights
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We’ve had a bunch of stories lately about the increase in militarized police and what a ridiculous and dangerous idea it is. As we’ve discussed in the past, much of this came from the Defense Department and its 1033 program, which takes decommissioned military equipment and gives it to police. This results in bizarre situations like the LA School District police having a bunch of grenade launchers. The program is somewhat infamous for its lack of rules, transparency and oversight.
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Sister Megan Rice, the 85-year-old activist nun who two years ago humiliated government officials by penetrating and vandalizing a supposedly ultra-high-security uranium storage facility, has finally been released from prison. A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the 2013 sabotage convictions of Rice and two fellow anti-nuclear activists, Michael Walli, 66, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 59, ruling that that their actions—breaking into Tennessee’s Y-12 National Security Complex and spreading blood on a uranium storage bunker—did not harm national security.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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For more than two years hard negotiations have been conducted within European institutions regarding the regulation proposal on telecommunications, which now contains two main chapters, one on roaming and the other on Net Neutrality. In 2014, a lot of work was done by citizen organisations to ensure that the European Parliament would protect Net Neutrality and uphold the rights of citizens to access a non-discriminatory, guaranteed access to a neutral and transparent Internet networks.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Popcorn Time has been called the Netflix for pirated movies, but it requires the installation of a desktop application. Not anymore. Now thanks to a site called Popcorn Time In Your Browser you’re just a couple of clicks away from watching a pirated movie stream.
The in-browser app works much like the desktop version, remotely streaming torrent files from YTS through Coinado. Users do not need to install anything, and from what I can tell, the torrent files are never stored locally on the user’s machine. Just click on a title, wait a few seconds and bam, a pirated movie starts playing.
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Last we had checked in on the ongoing legal wrangling between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a court had ruled pretty strongly against Hood, accusing him of acting in “bad faith,” for “the purpose of harassing” Google in violation of its First Amendment rights. Checking back in on the case to see what’s been going on, it appears that things have continued to get more and more heated. A little while after that ruling slamming Hood, Wingate ordered Hood to provide a bunch of information to Google as part of the discovery process for the case — including, bizarrely, responses to Techdirt’s FOIA request, which we had declined to continue after Hood’s office demanded over $2,000 and made it clear that they still likely wouldn’t give us anything.
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