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05.10.14

The World’s Craziest Patent System (USPTO) Now a Serious Threat to Free Software, But So is Copyright

Posted in Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 4:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Privatising everything, even vague ideas

Author

Summary: Patents on everything that’s conceivable are being granted and even APIs are being monopolised, due to overzealous copyright lawyers

YESTERDAY we wrote about Amazon‘s latest crazy patent, using it as an example of how crazy the USPTO has gone. It’s not even an examination centre, it is approving almost everything that comes through, rendering it just a rubber-stamping pipeline like ISO. Ars Technica says that “Amazon’s latest patent is sillier than the peanut butter sandwich patent”, or to put it another way: “Thought the peanut butter sandwich patent was a joke? That one doesn’t even register a chuckle compared to a patent recently granted to Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant now can claim a legal monopoly on the process of photographing people and things against a white backdrop.”

The USPTO is starting to look more like a hoax. Sun employees, whose patents got passed to Oracle, said they had joked about how silly a patent they could get past the USPTO. They even competed over how ridiculous a patent they could slide through. And watch what Oracle is doing with such patents right now. Copyright may be essential for copyleft licences such as the GPL, but what happens when patent attacks on Android are coupled with copyright on APIs? To quote the EFF: “We’re still digesting today’s lengthy decision in the Oracle v. Google appeal, but we’re disappointed—and worried. The heart of the appeal was whether Oracle can claim a copyright on Java APIs and, if so, whether Google infringed that copyright. According to the Federal Circuit today, the answer to both questions was a qualified yes—with the qualification being that Google may have a fair use defense.

“Quick background: When it implemented the Android OS, Google wrote its own version of Java. But in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google relied on Java APIs. Application Programming Interfaces are, generally speaking, specifications that allow programs to communicate with each other. So when you type a letter in a word processor, and hit the print command, you are using an API that lets the word processor talk to the printer driver, even though they were written by different people.”

Copyright, patents and even trademarks in the US need revisiting. There are many examples where each of those three get misused to censor, to crush competition, to impede innovation, and ban sharing where it’s clearly beneficial, collectively. The waning dominance of the West may, in some awkward way, one day weaken all those artificial barriers that ACTA, SOPA, TPP etc. are trying to prop up. Right now it’s too damn clear that progress is not the goal; protectionism for the top 1% of wealth holder is the goal. █

Today’s Slashdot and IDG Still Relaying Microsoft Propaganda

Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 4:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Apache vs. Microsoft

Credit: Netcraft

Summary: A propagandist’s claims of Microsoft gains in servers miss the reality of diversification among FOSS Web servers and continued decline of Microsoft in active Web sites

TRUTH is not relative and facts are not opinions. There is currently some nasty attack on Google, alleging that the company is in bed with the NSA when it’s actually Microsoft that’s in bed with the NSA. This has “Scroogled” all over it, so we won’t entertain it all that much. Several rebuttals have been written about it.

What we wish to address today is a piece of propaganda that’s circulating on the Web right now. Linux Today published it and then removed it, perhaps realising that it was serving a propaganda against FOSS (now that it’s removed it’s hard to tell is someone in the comments pointed out the obvious). The propaganda links to Netcraft, which Microsoft likes to game and even though the latest server survey states clearly what active domain/site means, someone in Slashdot is twisting it (same headline as the one Linux Today pulled down), stating that “Microsoft [is] Closing In On Apache Web Server Lead” (which is untrue).

We already wrote about this last month and before, emphasising that Microsoft seems to be gaming statistics by taking over millions of parked domains, perhaps using some manipulative secret deals.

So to summarize, both Slashdot and IDG (Microsoft-connected) currently push false Microsoft propaganda by counting parked domains. They deserve to be publicly shamed for it. They’re in the business of misinformation. █

Links 10/5/2014: Munich’s GNU/Linux Success Story Told, CoreOS Introduced

Posted in Site News at 3:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Arm Yourself with A Good Open Text Editor
  • Unreal Tournament opens up, GitHub releases open source Atom editor, and more

  • Web Browsers

    • What are the alternatives to Google Chrome and Firefox on Linux?

      Say what you want about web browsers on Linux, I just miss Internet Explorer. No let’s be serious. A great thing about Linux distributions is in general that they come packaged with a good browser. If that browser is not your favorite, you can easily install another one (and you don’t necessarily need a browser to download your favorite browser). For most users, however, this favorite browser will be Chrome or Firefox, and there are reasons for that: they are both good browsers. For more adventurous users, there is also Opera, which recently improved. But, there exist browsers out there which are a lot more exotic, with particular features and goals. I shall propose you eight examples: eight browsers which may not be as complete as Chrome or Firefox, but which are definitely worth checking out for their philosophies or design.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Moving towards an open source cloud with OpenStack

      Over the past years, I’ve played a leading role in helping to bring openness to the storage industry. At Nexenta, we inherited great technology from Sun Microsystems and went to market with an open core business model. This model, and a lot else, worked well and Nexenta has been called “the most disruptive storage company of the last 10 years” in part because of the impact we had on legacy, lock-in based proprietary vendors.

    • OpenStack Congress Set to Define IT Policy

      Martin Casado, Networking CTO at VMware, explains how the new OpenStack project will open up app, storage and networking policy.

    • Big Data a Big Priority for Most Organizations

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD Affirms That LibreSSL Will Be Portable

      In the fallout from the OpenSSL heartbleed bug, OpenBSD developers forked OpenSSL into LibreSSL. Initially the only supported platform for LibreSSL was OpenBSD, but the BSD developers are pushing harder now for platform portability.

    • LLVM 3.4.1 Release!

      This release contains bug-fixes for the LLVM 3.4 release and is both API and ABI compatible with 3.4.

      A few changes of note are:

      - varargs fix for X86.
      - Geometry shader support for R600.
      - A few c++11 fixes.
      - Various other fixes to the AArch64, ARM, PowerPC, R600, and X86 targets.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Coreboot Keeps Getting Better Bay Trail Support

      Coreboot for Intel’s low-power Bay Trail platform is a basic DPTF framework. The DPTF framework for Bay Trail isn’t yet complete but is nearly working. DPTF is the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework designed for “thin, quiet, and cool platform designs.” As explained at 01.org, “Intel DPTF provides mechanisms for platform components and devices to be exposed to individual technologies in a consistent and modular fashion thus enabling a coordinated control of the platform to achieve the power and thermal management goals.”

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Upcoming Maxwell GPUs Will Support H.265, But VP9 Is Uncertain

      NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 750 graphics cards back in February as their first products based upon their new Maxwell architecture. Sadly those GPUs didn’t support any H.265 or VP9 acceleration, but at least it looks like the former will be supported by the next round of Maxwell GPUs.

Leftovers

  • One in 10 Americans think aliens abducted missing Malaysian plane

  • Science

    • New York City to turn phone booths into Wi-Fi hot spots

      New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is fielding proposals to transform the city’s largely forgotten phone booths into Wi-Fi hot spots, an ambitious project that would create one of the largest public Wi-Fi networks in the country.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Climate change making food crops less nutritious, research finds

      Rising carbon dioxide emissions are set to make the world’s staple food crops less nutritious, according to new scientific research, worsening the serious ill health already suffered by billions of malnourished people.

      The surprise consequence of fossil fuel burning is linked directly to the rise in CO2 levels which, unlike some of the predicted impacts of climate change, are undisputed. The field trials of wheat, rice, maize and soybeans showed that higher CO2 levels significantly reduced the levels of the essential nutrients iron and zinc, as well as cutting protein levels.

    • Vermont gov signs law to require labels on GMO foods

      Standing on the Statehouse steps before a legion of activists, Vermont’s governor signed a new law Thursday that could make the state the first to require labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms — and also could make it the first to be sued over the issue.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Wars to End All War

      And the searchlight stops at Ukraine, full of neo-Nazis, corrupt oligarchs, nuclear reactors, an unelected government, a wrecked economy, a simmering civil war. God help us. Old animosities and ideological divisions come back to life. The United States and NATO stand off against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thirty-one people — maybe more — die in a burning building in Odessa. This kind of thing could be the pretext for a world war. Sanity is up in flames.

    • The Lawyer Behind the Drone Policy

      When the White House nominated David Barron to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, based in Boston, it expected the usual Republican opposition. Mr. Barron, a Harvard law professor, is known as a liberal who was pointedly critical of President George W. Bush’s national security policy. What it didn’t expect — but should have — was that Democrats would have some problems with the nominee, too.

    • Letter: Killing via drone is bad for America

      Dr. Cornell West was the guest speaker at the Tucker Missionary Baptist Church in Syracuse on Sunday past. I was amongst the standing-room-only crowd of people who understand the importance of Dr. West’s heartfelt concern for the well-being of all mankind.

      His speech titled “Connecting the Dots: Poverty, Racism, Drones” was a fiery condemnation of many of our government policies as well as the burgeoning hyper-rich who seem to have had their empathy gene extracted. Dr. West touched on many of our social ills and economic injustices that have wreaked havoc on the family unit and imbued too many young people with a value system that does not include altruism. He also condemned our onerous “criminal injustice” system.

    • Activists gather to protest militant drones

      An 8-foot-long metal replica of an MQ-9 Reaper drone towered above demonstrators as they read names of children killed in a CIA airstrike on Chenagai, Pakistan, in 2006.

      Eighty civilians were killed in that strike, including 69 children at a religious school.

      Members of the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition gathered Wednesday at the Monroe County Courthouse, with signs calling for an end to drones use by the United States military. They read names of victims killed by drones in the Middle East through a megaphone.

    • Tell us more about drones

      We have a right to know what our government is up to

    • Air Force wants to buy deadly Reaper drones
    • Revised law could turn animal activists into terrorists

      When Amy Meyer saw a sick cow being pushed by a bulldozer outside a slaughterhouse, she did what any of us would in this age of iPhones and Instagram – she filmed it.

      Ms Meyer, 25, knew it was not only cruel, it was a public safety risk.

      Similar video footage had resulted in the largest meat recall in US history, when it was revealed that cows too sick to walk were being fed to schoolchildren as part of the national school lunch program.

      Instead of being praised for exposing this, Ms Meyer was prosecuted.

      Even though she stood on public property, she was charged with violating a new law in Utah that makes it illegal to photograph or videotape factory farms and slaughterhouses.

      This was the first prosecution of its kind in the US, but if the agriculture industry has its way, it won’t be the last.

    • Science fiction may become reality with ‘killer robots’
    • Excerpt: Richard A. Clarke’s ‘Sting of the Drone’
    • Obama, Putin, the Ukraine: A Symbolic Lynching

      The murder of a 17-year old German exchange student, Diren Dede, in the act of committing a midnight prank in a garage whose door was left open, video camera and sensors at the ready, alerting the homeowner who rushed for his shotgun, fired four blasts in the dark, legally/constitutionally protected by the Montana “Castle” law, killing the youngster—a law, receiving bipartisan endorsement, which amended a 2009 law specifying the imminence of mortal danger as grounds, now, eliminating the provision to allow unconditional license to kill on one’s property, IS America in microcosm circa 2014.

    • Imperialism and revolutionaries

      New TV show encapsulates the dissonance between US nostalgia for revolution and its current counter-revolutionary stance

    • Australians were killed by a US drone strike, and we deserve to know why

      The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was announced in mid-April. Christopher Havard and “Muslim bin John,” who also held New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year.

      Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed that both men were foot soldiers for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, though they may also have been collateral damage (the real target being other terror heads).

    • Drone strike kills seven militants in Nangarhar province
    • US closes Yemen embassy amid fears of Qaeda revenge attacks

      The US embassy was closed to the public on Thursday in Yemen after a spate of attacks against foreigners and fears that al-Qaeda will seek revenge for a deadly offensive in the south.

      “The embassy is closed today. And this will remain in effect until further notice,” an employee at the US mission in a heavily-guarded neighbourhood in northeast Sanaa, told AFP.

    • FBI agent arrested in Pakistan on weapons charge
    • Detained FBI Agent in Pakistan Released on Bail
    • FBI agent detained in Pakistan is out on bail
    • CIA’s Afghan cutbacks worry U.S. military
    • CIA, U.S. military at odds over Afghanistan pullback plan
    • NATO has left a mess in Afghanistan

      Today is “a day of honour” to mark our Afghan mission, courtesy of handouts by corporate Canada.

      Stephen Harper wants the photo-op but does not want to pay for it, though he did for the state funeral for his former finance minister, an occasion he used, in breach of protocol, to canonize the Conservative management of the economy.

    • The New Cold War: Libya, Syria, and the Ukraine

      Syria’s not-so-civil war has been going strong for more than three years now and recently the news agency Reuters reported that “at least 150,000 people have been killed” in that time span.

    • Pakistan FM: Fake Vaccination Program to Blame for Polio Outbreak

      Dr. Afridi operated a phony vaccination program in early 2011 on behalf of the CIA, and with tacit support from the WHO. Instead of vaccinating children against polio, they were collecting the DNA of children to look for relatives of terrorists. The program led to the death of Osama bin Laden.

    • CIA Front, USAID, “Spreading Democracy”, Gearing Up in Ukraine – Suharto II?

      As the bodies of labor union reps and dissidents are piling up on the stairwells of Odessa and the streets of eastern Ukraine, today it is reported that USAID needs another couple million to support pro-Western “media outlets” in the run-up to the sham election to be held in the troubled state.

  • Finance

    • Around the World, Social Unrest Starts with Soaring Food Prices

      From 2008 to 2014, insurrectionist activity has sequentially erupted across the globe, from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria and Yemen; from Greece, Spain, Turkey and Brazil to Thailand, Bosnia, Venezuela and the Ukraine.

    • Robert Reich: 6 Principles Populists on the Right and Left Both Agree On

      More Americans than ever believe the economy is rigged in favor of Wall Street and big business and their enablers in Washington. We’re five years into a so-called recovery that’s been a bonanza for the rich but a bust for the middle class. “The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it right down to their toes,” says Senator Elizabeth Warren.

    • Ukraine gets its Mafia-type loan

      It’s essential to identify the conditions attached to this Mafia-style “loan”.

    • Police ‘have CCTV images’ of Monaco heiress attacker
    • Workers of oppressed countries subjected to modern-day slavery

      Labor trafficking stands out among the most brutal features of capitalist society. Millions around the world are held in forced servitude, and traded like property among the global elite.

      An untold number of workers have been trafficked, obtained abroad or even within the United States, and held in compelled labor. According to the U.S. government, between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into slavery in the United States every year, with foreign survivors more often found in labor than sex trafficking.

    • Why Passengers Cheered a Vermont Bus Strike

      An 18-day bus drivers’ strike in Burlington, Vermont, ended in a win April 3 when drivers ratified a new contract 53-6.

      Strikes are rare these days, and fewer still result in victories—so why was this one different? What generated public support for the strike, despite management’s aggressive plan to blame drivers for the loss of bus service for nearly three weeks?

    • Washington’s Pivot to Ignorance: Will the State Department Torpedo Its Last Great Program?

      Take the current case of an unprecedented, unkind, under-the-radar cut in the State Department’s budget for the Fulbright Program, the venerable 68-year-old operation that annually arranges for thousands of educators, students, and researchers to be exchanged between the United States and at least 155 other countries. As Washington increasingly comes to rely on the “forward projection” of military force to maintain its global position, the Fulbright Program may be the last vestige of an earlier, more democratic, equitable, and generous America that enjoyed a certain moral and intellectual standing in the world. Yet, long advertised by the U.S. government as “the flagship international educational exchange program” of American cultural diplomacy, it is now in the path of the State Department’s torpedoes.

    • The Fulbright Program is the flagship of American cultural diplomacy. So why are we cutting it?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Charter Schools Fail: New Reports Call Their ‘Magic’ Into Question

      When members of the U.S. House of Representatives consider, beginning today, a bill to incentivize the expansion of charter schools, you can expect there to be a lot of heat but not very much light in their discussion of the need for more of these institutions.

    • CMD Reporting on Walker Dark Money Criminal Probe

      In one of the first cases to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision, a federal judge just tried to open the door to new levels of corruption in Wisconsin elections — but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals could still stop him. On May 6, federal Judge Rudolph Randa ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s long-running “John Doe” criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between political campaigns (including Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign) and non-profit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth that spent millions during the state’s recall elections.

  • Privacy

    • US accuses Israel of ‘alarming, even terrifying’ levels of spying

      Friends do not spy on friends. That illusion about America’s attitude to its allies was conclusively debunked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about America’s National Security Agency and its British partner in global electronic eavesdropping, GCHQ. But by every account, the US is being repaid in kind by one of its closest international friends – Israel.

    • Congress Will Vote on an NSA Reform Bill that Won’t Reform Much of Anything

      What do you end up with when you take a strong NSA reform bill championed by just about every civil liberties group and combine it with a widely derided one that threatened to expand the NSA’s power? A watered-down piece of legislation that takes baby steps toward limiting surveillance but still leaves some gaping loopholes that lets the government maintain the status quo.

    • Bill ending NSA bulk data collection moving quickly in U.S. House
    • Can the NSA Keep U.S. Metadata Safe from Hackers and Spies?

      It sounds like a system with gaping security flaws run by an agency that has shown itself incapable of guarding what it considers to be its most precious secrets. Say that no NSA employee ever abuses the detailed information it has about the private communications of Americans. Even with that guarantee, why should Americans trust the NSA to safeguard its data from foreign governments and hackers?

      I’ve yet to see any persuasive answer from NSA defenders.

      In fact, if you believe, like Edward Lucas of The Economist or John Schindler of the Naval War College, that Snowden is the unwitting dupe or witting agent of Vladimir Putin, then you’re effectively saying that a foreign government has already breached a trove of NSA information that could be used to manipulate elections, blackmail some unknown number of Americans, and do all manner of other mischief.

      I don’t think Snowden is a spy. But his success inclines me to think that the privacy of Americans will be much better protected, even absent any abuses by the NSA, if the NSA erases what it’s gathered about us from its servers, rather than acting as if it can protect it all indefinitely. In the wrong hands, metadata on millions of innocents could do significant damage. Why trust the NSA and its contractors to keep it from the wrong hands?

    • Net tech bods at IETF mull anti-NSA crypto-key swaps in future SSL
    • NSA spying is causing Americans to self-censor their Internet activity

      An MIT researcher claims he’s quantified some of the troubling self-censorship civil liberties advocates worried would result from public knowledge of mass spying.

      The new study reports that Google users were slightly less likely (2.2 percent) to use search times that the National Security Agency flagged as potential national security threats.

    • The NSA’s Corporate Collaborators

      When a provider like Amazon is awarded a $600 million 10-year contract to provide the CIA with cloud services [18] do you suppose that Amazon is inclined to cater to government requests? Think of it this way: Roughly 70% of the intelligence budget goes to the private sector [19]. There are incentives for executives to go along.

    • Why Shouldn’t Google Discuss Security With The NSA?

      I’m no great apologist for Google, but this is hardly evidence that the company was all that tight with the NSA. Given that the email exchanges took place months before the revelation that Google’s communications were being tapped – which the company claims it didn’t know – there’s no earthly reason why it shouldn’t take part in a national security initiative.

    • NSA’s mass surveillance programme in interest of US citizens, says ex-director

      Speaking on the mass spying of US citizens, Alexaner just said the government agency was working in the best interest of the US citizen.

    • NTT says NSA activity is changing data center buying habits

      The survey quizzed 1,000 ICT decision-makers in France, Germany, Hong Kong, the UK and the US. It found that nearly nine in ten (88%) of ICT decision-makers are changing their buying behavior. About a third (38%) have amended their procurement conditions.

    • The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative

      The only way out of this I can see is to abolish the secret police and build out a new secure internet before the inevitable processes of institutional change generate a new rationale for spying on us. Unfortunately I see no way (at present) to pursue this agenda.

    • The Way the NSA Uses Section 702 is Deeply Troubling. Here’s Why.

      Section 702 has been used by the NSA to justify mass collection of phone calls and emails by collecting huge quantities of data directly from the physical infrastructure of communications providers.

    • 10 things we’ve learned about the NSA over the past year

      1. The appetite for domestic collection increased significantly after Sept. 11, both as a a cause of and a response to the Big Bang-like expansion of the national security state. The NSA expanded the reach and scope of its domestic collection activities as the the domestic threat exceeded. (I define domestic collection differently; it’s the set of programs and analytical policies that touch a large volume of American-to-American communications in some way without individual FISA orders having been obtained.)

    • German NSA investigative panel to allow Snowden to testify

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is to testify before a German panel investigating the activities of the spy agency. However, the panel has not yet determined whether he may travel to Berlin for the hearing.

    • German lawmakers want to interview Snowden
    • German authorities want to interview Edward Snowden about NSA spying
    • German Lawmakers Call On Snowden To Testify In NSA Investigation

      The debate on whether or not to call on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to testify in a parliamentary inquiry on the mass surveillance of German citizens by the American government came to an end on Thursday when committee members unanimously voted yes.

    • German lawmakers seek to interview Snowden over NSA spying
    • Would You Hire Former NSA Boss Keith Alexander For Cybersecurity Consulting?

      It is, of course, no surprise that former NSA boss Keith Alexander is now setting out a shingle for consulting work in the private sector.

    • Can Larry Klayman make history with his NSA lawsuit?

      Larry Klayman is back in his favorite place. The lawyer who launched hundreds of lawsuits against federal agencies, White House officials, Cabinet secretaries, judges, journalists, former colleagues, foreign governments, dictators, presidents, this newspaper and others who offended his hair-trigger sense of right and wrong, takes a seat at the long plaintiff attorney’s table in the august U.S. Courthouse two blocks from the Capitol.

    • Congressman Jim Cooper on the NSA Internal Watchdog Act
    • Ted Cruz: Thin Justice Argument to Dismiss Rand Paul NSA Suit
    • The relationship between the White House, Silicon Valley and its money? It’s complicated

      Among the major tech players, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has been an especially high-profile figure. He launched an advocacy group that has been among the most active on the immigration issue.

      And he has been a vocal critic of the NSA’s data collection, calling Obama to voice his alarm. Shortly after, Obama met with Zuckerberg and CEOs from Google, Netflix and other tech and Internet companies, pledging to safeguard privacy rights.

    • NSA broadens funding for 4 universities to advance the science of cybersecurity

      The National Security Agency is expanding funding for several universities to continue scientific research into cybersecurity.

      The intelligence agency awarded contracts to North Carolina State University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and recently announced that these three universities along with the University of Maryland would receive additional funding.

    • Why There’s No Such Thing As A Private Facebook Chat
    • You might want to pay for an e-mail service like the OpenBSD-running Neomailbox

      I don’t look on the OpenBSD Misc mailing list very often, but today a message from that list introduced me to Neomailbox, which offers services that include secure, encrypted e-mail and anonymous web surfing for prices that are very reasonable.

    • Privacy Tool: Encrypt What You Can

      Encrypt the data you store. This protects your data from being read by people with access to your computer.

    • Should Google Kill Google Plus?
    • Help save Twitter – An appeal to all users.

      If people don’t want Twitter turning into another Facebook with in your face adverts all over the place, you need to say no now.

      If you block and dismiss any user who promotes their account/services, there will quickly be a message sent out that people are not interested in their marketing campaigns.

      I had intended on making a name and shame list of all the companies who would pay to push their products onto you, however I’ve spent the last hour blocking so many that it will take too long to list.

      So if you don’t want Twitter turning into Facebook, join me now. #nospamforme

  • Civil Rights

    • Death on the Job Report

      Workplaces are much safer today than when the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act was passed in 1970, which promised workers in this country the right to a safe job. The job fatality rate has been cut by 81 percent; more than 492,000 workers lives have been saved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as workplace tragedies continue to remind us. These tragedies are all preventable.

    • An American Retreat from Human Rights?

      Who knows, if that change is voiced loudly enough by you to your representatives, we might restore the glory to America’s standing in the world, and America’s standing to its own citizens. Write, call, or email your representatives today (see www.contactingthecongress.org). Ask them to support HRAC’s call to demand greater support from the United States to respect international human rights norms. Ask them to push the conversation forward on joining the ICC. Ask them to support better protections for American soldiers during service and afterwards. We should be ashamed of the way we treat human rights standards right now and we should be ashamed at the way we treat our soldiers and veterans. We deserve better and we can do it with a united voice.

    • The Boston Marathon Bombing Interrogation and the Legal Suspension of Law

      According to a lawsuit filed by Tsarnaev’s lawyers Wednesday, following his arrest in April 2013 Tsarnaev was denied repeated requests for a lawyer as he was continuously interrogated by FBI agents while complaining of his worsening medical condition due to gunshot wounds sustained to the head, face, throat, and jaw. Unable to speak, Tsarnaev wrote answers on a note pad. Defense attorneys were turned away from the hospital and federal agents lied to the suspect, saying his dead brother was still alive. All this before Miranda rights were read.

    • Is citizenship a right?

      …British government has revoked the citizenship of 42 people, including 20 cases in 2013.

    • CIA torture report won’t be made public for months

      The release of the long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques — widely denounced as torture — is certain to take much longer than the 30 days sought by Senate Democrats.

      The panel’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said at the beginning of April that she hoped the CIA would complete by now the process of excising from the report information deemed harmful to national security.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Sprint may start throttling its biggest data users

      Sprint subscribers are facing new limits on their supposedly unlimited data plans, at least in congested areas.

      The top 5 percent of data users may now get slower speeds during peak usage times, according to the legal and regulatory section of Sprint’s website. Speeds will return to normal when users leave a congested area or when demand subsides.

    • Protesters set up camp at net neutrality rally outside FCC headquarters

      Protesters set up camp outside the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) on Wednesday to fight plans they say will create a two-tier internet and hand control of the web to major corporations.

      The rally – reminiscent of the Occupy-style rallies that started in 2011 – started outside the FCC’s Washington headquarters at noon with protesters from Fight For the Future, Popular Resistance and others unfurling banners reading “Save the Internet”.

    • OPEN INTERNET BACKERS STAGE ‘OCCUPY FCC’

      Internet libertarians calling for the equal treatment of all Internet data have camped out in front of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, D.C., saying they won’t quit their Occupy-style protest until the regulator stands up for Net neutrality.

      About 15 people stood outside the FCC’s headquarters on Wednesday afternoon in a protest organized by the two groups, Fight for the Future and Popular Resistance. Five of the demonstrators said they were determined to set up camp overnight and stick around until May 15, when the commission is set to unveil proposed new Net neutrality rules — or perhaps longer, if the new rules don’t meet their expectations.

    • Net Neutrality: FCC Boss Smacked by Tech Giants, Internal Dissent

      FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler faces mounting opposition to his proposed net neutrality rules as more than 100 Internet companies sent a letter expressing alarm over the direction laid out ahead of next week’s vote and imploring regulators to protect the web’s openness

    • Will the Italian Presidency of the EU Council Support Net Neutrality?

      The voice of the Italian presidency of the Council of the European Union could mark a real departure from the usual government talk chastising the vote on Net Neutrality adopted by the European Parliament! According to the information portal Euractiv, the Italian presidency could support the text voted by the Members of the European Parliament and be ready to defend it in front of the European governments and telecommunications industry. As the publication of the guidance report of the Council of the European Union about the Net Neutrality (scheduled for 5 or 6 of June) nears, La Quadrature du Net welcomes this encouraging position and asks European citizens to invite their governments to follow this example.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • The Bizarro, Fact-free World Of Copyright Policymaking

        If you’re a regular visitor to this website, you’re likely used to the never-ending parade of horribles detailing how copyright has been used to censor documents, stifle innovation and generally wreak all kinds of unintended havoc.

        Even with this constant attention, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of exactly how world-champion strange copyright policy is. Only when it’s placed alongside other government policies does it become clear exactly how it has evolved into a bizarro-world version of rational policymaking.

      • Pirate Bay Founder Launches Election Campaign For European Parliament

        In two weeks time citizens of all European Union member states will vote on who should represent them in the European Parliament. In Finland the local Pirate Party has a true Internet star on the ballot with Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, who kicks off his election campaign today with a little bit of romance.

      • UK ISPs Agree to Send Out Music & Movie Piracy Warnings

        The music and movie industries and several of the UK’s leading ISPs have reached terms on a deal to tackle Internet piracy. The arrangement will see the BPI and MPA monitoring people sharing files illegally and the ISPs sending them “escalating” warning letters.

      • No, Every Person Does Not Owe The Movie & Music Industry $67 Million, But Copyright Is Still Broken

        In a similar move, some folks at the Huffington Post have now estimated that every single man, woman and child on earth owes the combined music and movie industries on the order of $67 million. Each. Not cumulatively. Cumulatively, it would be $470,925,000,000,000,000,000 — which is also 6.63 times the GDP of the entire planet.

05.09.14

Corporate Press Glorifies Microsoft Patent Trolls

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Patents at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Corporate press worships its wealthy sponsors

Fred C. Koch
Fred C. Koch

Summary: New examples of revisionism and propaganda from Bill Gates-funded press and other corporate media, which portrays rich (and highly abusive) villains as heroes

Robber barons are using bodies like the USPTO and fake charities like the Gates Foundation in order to take everything from everyone. Not only copyright is used to abolish competition and create monopolies.

Microsoft’s billionaires are no exception to the rule; in many ways, they rule and they are exceptional in the degree to which they are abusive. These people are the NSA’a biggest partner and they are the world’s biggest patent trolls. One of them founded Intellectual Ventures with Gates’ help and Microsoft’s other co-founder (Allen) also became a patent troll some years ago.

What we truly have a problem with is obscene media distortion. No man bribes the press and even bribes blogs as much as Gates does. Gates even bribes The Guardian (millions of dollars paid to ensure he never gets criticised there, not to mention a lot of anti-Google bias these days). The Guardian says that Gates is leaving MSFT (the stock), but everyone who paid attention should have noticed that he only increased/elevated his role inside Microsoft a few months back. He has a lot to do with Microsoft’s abusive current strategy, which includes criminal racketeering, attack ads, etc. Looking at USA Today, which is funded by plutocrats as well, it is currently whitewashing the world’s biggest patent troll and Bill Gates’ friend Nathan Myhrvold (opening this page seems to choke any computer I point at it due to bad Web development). This is not even pretense of journalism, it’s propaganda and it is utterly disgusting.

iophk tells us that at Forbes, whose role is to glorify the plutocrats like Gates, there is “no mention of LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice,” not even in this article about the demise of Microsoft Office. As iophk puts it: “It’s making its way into mainstream news. Fails to address monopoly rents and LibreOffice / Apache OpenOffice are conspicuously missing. And the article tries to whitewash Gates.” Here is the talking point again, right at the very beginning:

For Microsoft , it’s been a year of upheaval. First, the company got only its third CEO ever when Steve Ballmer was replaced by Satya Nadella. Then last week, Bill Gates lost his title as the company’s largest shareholder for the first time ever, slipping behind Ballmer. But while these are notable milestones, neither has threatened Microsoft’s business in a fundamental way. And that’s why Microsoft observers should be especially concerned about a report from SoftWatch which suggested most people with Office installed don’t use it much — if at all. Given that Office is the most important product Microsoft sells, any erosion in its profitability could threaten Nadella’s turnaround story and make the timing of Gates’ stock sales look most prescient.

This is a decoy and a very dangerous decoy too. Gates is evidently preoccupied with patenting everything and putting patent tax on every single thing, urging politicians to give taxpayers’ money to patent monopolies that he invests in. It’s a heist and it should be treated as criminal. But when you live in a world that’s dominated by corporate press, don’t expect to hear it all that often. Here is more on the demise of Microsoft Office:

…most users simply don’t use applications often enough to justify the cost. Exactly what model replaces it is where things become more complex.

Looking again at the article which The Gates-funded ‘Guardian’ relayed, watch the congratulatory revisionism:

Bill Gates, the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, will have no direct ownership in the company he co-founded by mid-2018 if he keeps up his recent share sales.

Gates, who started the company that revolutionized personal computing with school-friend Paul Allen in 1975, has sold 20m shares each quarter for most of the last dozen years under a pre-set trading plan.

Gates “revolutionized personal computing” in the same sense that Koch revolutionised the environment. This is not decent journalism as it fails to mention how Gates really made his money and how he illegally crushed competition. But never mind the corporate press, so long as we know who’s funding it. LinuxTag, after years of making an error, appears to have finally learned to reject Microsoft’s dirty money with which Microsoft used to infiltrate and subvert the event. No patent trolls and Mafia staff in this years’s LinuxTag? █

“I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”

–Microsoft's chief evangelist

The US Patent System is Only Getting Worse as 92% of Patent Applications Now ‘Successful’, Everything Under the Sun Patented

Posted in Patents at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Innovation myth hinged on grossly lenient system

Bezos gives lecture

Summary: Amazon shows that it continues to be a major part of the patent problem (trying to patent every silly idea) not just the US but potentially also in Europe

THE USPTO, like several other pseudo-’federal’ agencies (controlled by corporations and/or lobbyists, e.g. the FCC) is totally out of control and over time it is getting increasingly detached from its original goal/s. It’s time to abolish or restart the USPTO, as we pointed out even half a decade ago.

In today’s news we have Amazon, which tries to legitimise software patents in Europe, getting a patent on photography against a white background. Yes, seriously.

As Timothy B. Lee points out, almost every patent application (in the US) now becomes a patent and this includes not only Amazon’s infamous “one-click” shopping but also photographing merchandise. As TechDirt put it:

US Patent Office Grants ‘Photography Against A White Background’ Patent To Amazon

The US Patent and Trademark Office is frequently maligned for its baffling/terrible decisions… and rightfully so. Because this is exactly the sort of thing for which the USPTO should be maligned. Udi Tirosh at DIY Photography has uncovered a recently granted patent for the previously-unheard of process of photographing things/people against a white backdrop… to of all companies, Amazon.

The USTPO deserves no more than zero legitimacy at this stage and as Glyn Moody recently pointed out in his talk, we need to keep this corrupt mess out of Europe:

Software Patents in Denmark: To Be or Not To Be?

Every week brings us new reports about the destructive effect of software patents in the US, and of a patent office there that is only too willing to grant them and other undeserving patents: an excellent if depressing article by Timothy Lee points out that the “allowance rate” – the percentage of patents that are eventually granted by the USPTO – is now a staggering 92%.

There are very good grounds for fearing that the imminent new Unitary Patent system will bring exactly the same problems to Europe, and yet there has been almost no discussion about it, certainly not here in the UK. Similarly, British citizens have not been asked whether they want this new system foisted on to them. You might say that’s an unreasonable thing to expect, since patents by their very nature are complex, specialised subjects. That may be true, but the fact that Denmark will be holding a national referendum on the subject in a few weeks’ time, shows that it can be done.

[...]

Today, we live in a very different world. In 2012, 469,000 patent applications were filed with the USPTO; 258,000 in Europe; 11,000 in Denmark alone. That is a world of inventive abundance, not scarcity. Some might say that’s great, and that it shows that the patent system is doing its job well, encouraging lots of inventors to come up with lots of inventions. But we need to look more closely at both the benefits and costs of that patent system, and its overall impact on the economy.

That’s precisely what a new research paper from Bessen, Neuhäusler, Turner and Williams entitled simply “The Costs and Benefits of United States Patents” attempts to do. It’s fairly long and complex – it’s written by economists, for economists – but its results are entirely straightforward.

The research looked at the costs and benefits to US companies of patents from 1984 to 2009. That’s particularly useful, since it embraces quite distinct periods in patenting. Overall, it found that the total benefits accruing to US companies from patents was around $385 billion. Calculating the total costs, which include indirect losses as well as the more obvious ones, was harder, and the authors of the paper came up with two different estimates based on slightly different methodologies.

There is no doubt that the USPTO is totally out of control. Keeping the USPTO at bay by preventing imperialist expansion of patents is essential right now. It has not been entirely successful over the years, but popular pressure played an important role not just in Europe but also in India, to name just one country. This is class war between billionaires or their corporations and everybody else. █

Links 9/5/2014: LXQt Introduced, New Debian Release

Posted in News Roundup at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Making Linux Feel at Home

    Hiring Tux is a smart move for both small and large businesses. Linux once was considered a hobbyist’s operating system, but it has come a long way and now is considered enterprise class. It is considered very stable and secure. Linux can easily be customized, and there is a huge community eager to help out. Those are just some of the reasons to migrate to the Linux desktop.

  • Desktop

    • New Intel powered Chromebooks to feature Bay Trail chipset

      A plethora of new Intel-powered Chrome OS devices were announces at a press conference hosted Wednesday by tech giant Google and chip manufacturer Intel. The event, which featured Caesar Sengupta from Google, and Navin Shenoy, vice president and general manager of mobile computing at Intel, announced, among other things, Chromebooks powered by Intel’s low-energy Bay Trail chipset, which will enable the lightweight computers running the Linux-based, web-centric operating system from Google to reportedly have 11 hours of battery life. Other devices announced include Intel’s Haswell and Core i3 chips.

    • LG Chromebase will be available May 26th

      The LG Chromebase, the first all-in-one Chrome OS PC, has been announced to be made available to US customers on May 26. With 2 GB of memory, a 16GB SSD (solid state drive), and a dual-core Intel Haswell CPU, LG has followed the usual specifications found on most Chromebooks. For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, these specifications would probably be seem insufficient. However, what makes Chromebooks and the Chromebase stand out, is that they run Google‘s Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based upon Linux, so is very light and does not need many resources. In addition, since it only runs internet applications, it does not need many resources.

    • LG Chromebase will be available May 26th

      The LG Chromebase, the first all-in-one Chrome OS PC, has been announced to be made available to US customers on May 26. With 2 GB of memory, a 16GB SSD (solid state drive), and a dual-core Intel Haswell CPU, LG has followed the usual specifications found on most Chromebooks. For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, these specifications would probably be seem insufficient. However, what makes Chromebooks and the Chromebase stand out, is that they run Google‘s Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based upon Linux, so is very light and does not need many resources. In addition, since it only runs internet applications, it does not need many resources.

    • Chromebooks Gain Important Features, Appear to Be Here to Stay

      Part of what’s driving Chromebooks forward is that Google is on a rapid release cycle with Chrome OS. And, very importantly, Google has relaxed the fiercely cloud-centric vision it originally had for Chrome OS, so that applications for Chromebooks can be used offline.

    • Chromebooks looking to replace PCs by going offline

      Google is adding more features to Chromebook applications so that they can be used without accessing the Web, addressing a common complaint among users who want the laptops to function more like traditional PCs.

      Although Web use remains a central feature of Chromebooks, Google recently added the ability to edit videos and watch full movies offline, for instance. A shorter update cycle means that the company can be more responsive to user demand.

    • OEMs Flee Low-margin PCs
    • Weekend Apocalypse in Ethiopia

      While the share of page-views from Ethiopia that StatCounter sees for GNU/Linux has been impressive lately, take a look at the peaks:

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.15 SSD File-System Benchmarks

      Now that kernel development activity is settling down for the Linux 3.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks of the EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems compared to the stable Linux 3.14 kernel performance.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The State Of The Intel Kernel DRM Driver

        Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center is presenting this week at LinuxTag 2014 about the state of their Linux kernel graphics driver.

      • Wayland 1.5 Appears To Be In Great Shape

        While there’s many changes to Wayland 1.5, it doesn’t look like there should be much fallout from the many new features. When releasing the Wayland 1.5 RC, Kristian Høgsberg mentioned they’re at “a historic low in terms of open bug” with just 15 open bugs covering Wayland/Weston. The overall state of Wayland appears to be very good.

      • SteamOS Update 105 Lands New AMD Linux Driver

        The SteamOS Update 105 includes the AMD Catalyst 14.4 Linux driver, updates to the Iceweasel web browser, upstream Debian 7.5 package updates, new packages included in the SteamOS repository, and support for newer network adapters. The new network hardware supported is the Realtek R8168 and handling for more Intel WiFi chipsets.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • How To Install LXQT On Ubuntu 14.04 And Ubuntu 13.10
    • LXQt 0.7.0 released
    • LXQt 0.7.0 – Next Generation Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment Has Been Released

      The LXDE and Razor-qt teams are proud to announce LXQt 0.7.0, the first release of LXQt, the Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment. This beta release is considered a stable continuation of the Razor desktop. It has been almost a year since the Razor-qt project and the LXDE-Qt project decided to merge. Since then, the LXQt desktop has been under active development by 13 developers and dozens of contributors and translators.

    • New DE LXQt Released, Linux Drones, and Deploying Linux

      Today in Linux news a new desktop environment saw its first release. A joint effort from the LXDE and Razor-qt clans brings LXQt 0.7.0. In other news, several outlets are covering the US Navy’s plans to move drones from Solaris to Linux. And finally today, Jack Germain covers the ins and outs of deploying Linux.

    • Linux desktop environment LXQt achieves first release

      Besides being stable and versatile, Linux-based operating systems are very customizable too. You see, most distributions allow you to customize the UI by selecting different environments. While GNOME, KDE and Unity are a few of the popular environments, there are many others as well.

    • LXDE, Razor-Qt merge to create awesome LXQt project

      ‘May the fork be with you’ is a term we often hear in the free software community as it’s extremely easy to take the code and fork it to scratch your etch. What’s really difficult (and that’s something really counts) is to actually come together, collaborate and merge code-base to create something which helps more people, which is not just about scratching your own itch, but to do something which benefits more and more people.

    • Linux Has Too Few Distributions and Desktop Environments

      The Linux platform is actually the base for a multitude of operating systems, but a part of the community feels that there are too many distributions. The truth is that there are probably too few of them.

      One of the points of contention that usually arise in the Linux community is the fact that there seem to be too many Linux distributions and too many desktop environments. If we were to compare Linux with any other platform that would be true, but such a comparison would be incorrect.

      Linux is the only platform that allows this kind of freedom, so making a comparison with other operating systems is actually incorrect because they do not incorporate the same kind of philosophy and openness.

      My point is that even if Linux seems to be the home of many operating systems and desktop environments, the reality is that, in fact, there aren’t actually enough. The reason why I pick OSes and desktop environments is because they are the most visible, but the same is true for any other component.

    • Does Linux need more distributions and desktop environments?

      One of the best things about Linux is that there’s literally a distribution for everybody. Linux offers users the greatest range of choices of any desktop operating system. But do we need even more options? Softpedia thinks that we do and explains the advantages of having more desktop environments and distros.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • RESULTS OF CARD SORTING THE KDE SYSTEM SETTINGS

        KDE tries to be as much customizable as possible: All freedom to the user! This leads to an extended configuration that might be confusing to new users. Additionally, modules from different sources are aggregated in a way that not necessarily fits the mental representation of users. For instance, the distinction between ‘workspace appearance’ and ‘window appearance’ is not common in other desktop environments.

      • KDE kicks off wallpaper contest for the next Plasma

        Here’s your chance to see your favorite snap beautifying the next release of KDE Plasma! KDE’s Visual Design Group (VDG) announced a wallpaper competition for its next release of Plasma and submissions are live for the entire month of May 2014.

      • KDE Network Manager: Details sorted

        More than 800 people participated in our online sorting of the KDE Network Manager details. In this article we present the results.

        [...]

        To achieve this we doubled some information into a tool-tip. This will of course only be an advantage for non-touch-users. We replaced the ‘connected’-statement in the current interface by the IP address and information about the current connection speed. Also, seeing the large amount of different information available for a single wireless connection we propose to split this information up into the sections ‘My computer’, ‘Speedgraph’, ‘Connection’ and ‘Router’.

      • Last week in Krita — week 19
      • Moka Icon Theme Ported to Plasma!

        One of the first things people think of when talking visual design is icons. Now as “design” this is a very tight definition since a large chunk of it is so much bigger. But icons is a part of it all and it is something that is the most obvious change visually. Icons are also something very very difficult to do well as there is not only several very strict rules and concepts to consider while doing them, there is also a very large amount of work involved (thousands of icons for starters). Beyond that there are issues that make it even trickier.
        As icons are very direct visually – they are often victim of harsh criticism (or downright harassment) but further than that the BASE theme of a distro have to follow even stricter rules if it want to be accessible to as many as possible.

        Now we using Plasma do not have the huge wealth of icon themes as the boys and girls over at GTK, but we are getting there ever so slowly and today I would like to present one of the latest icon themes to get ported to KDE – Moka by Sam Hewitt.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Wayland Is Approved For Fedora 21

        The Wayland change for Fedora 21 is about better supporting GNOME Wayland sessions. Fedora 20 already brought experimental GNOME Shell Wayland support while Fedora 21 is building upon more polished support thanks to upstream improvements landing with GNOME 3.14 due out in September.

      • Among Other New Apps, The New GNOME Books Will Be Part Of The GNOME 3.14 Desktop Environment

        The GNOME developers are presenting at the Google Summer of Code their new ebook management application, called intuitively GNOME Books, which will be part of GNOME 3.14, the first desktop environment with official support for Wayland, Red Hat’s new system compositor.

  • Distributions

    • Robolinux VM Allows You To Run Windows In Linux
    • Robolinux turns your C Drive into a virtual Windows machine you can run in Linux

      Say you want to move from Windows to Linux… but there are a few Windows apps that you can’t give up, and they don’t work well under WINE. The developer of Robolinux offers a Debian-based GNU/Linux operating system designed to let you run Windows XP or Windows 7 in a virtual machine.

      But the latest version of Robolinux goes a step further: It includes a tool that lets you create a virtual machine by cloning your Windows C: Drive, which means it takes just minutes to create a version of Windows that you can run in virtualization in Linux, and it will already have all of your existing programs and data.

    • AV Linux Dazzles Both Eyes and Ears

      With audio and video applications, you often need more than one package, and the assembled collection of multimedia packages in AV Linux is huge. The range of software offerings is a bonus. You do not get lightweight ware that leaves you yearning for more powerful features. The audio-visual tools are mature. Many of the productive apps are custom builds that enhance what you can do with them.

    • GoboLinux 015

      Six years after its last release, GoboLinux is back, with the 015 release of the distribution that is best-known for a total rearrangement of the traditional Linux filesystem hierarchy. More information about the distribution is available, as are release notes for 015.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Want to Install OpenMandriva Lx 2014? Some Things You Need to Know

        I guess that the main question is: after seeing those problems, do I intend to keep OpenMandriva Lx 2014?

        The answer is yes. I find the distro responsive, beautiful, and functional for pretty much all I need (except printing or typing in Japanese so far :-P ).

        Those, however, are very specific problems that other users should not expect to find, I suppose, and I can live with them.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 8.0 Jessie To Likely Target The Linux 3.16 Kernel

        Ben Hutchings began extrapolating data of stable kernel releases and around the time of the Debian Jessie freeze will likely be the Linux 3.17 release, but that might be too close for comfort. However, at the same time, the earlier the Jessie kernel is frozen the more hardware enablement back-porting and other fixes that will need to queue up for this next major Debian GNU/Linux release.

      • APT Reaches Version 1.0.3
      • Debian 7.5 “Wheezy” Live CD Now Available for Download

        When a new point release of Debian is made available, the Live CD version of that distro is not accessible to users right away. It usually takes about a week for the Debian Live CD team to put together the new releases.

      • Debian 8.0 Jessie Will Be Using Either Kernel 3.16 Or Kernel 3.17, As Default

        As you may know, Debian 8.0 Jessie will be the first Debian system that will be using Red Hat’s systemd as the default init event manager. While it is in it’s early development stages, only the first Alpha version being available until now, new information about the future generation Debian system has been released.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Three Reasons Why You Should Upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

            One of the best reasons to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is by far the new Linux kernel stack that comes with the new version. Ubuntu 14.04 includes the 3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the v3.13.9 upstream stable Linux kernel, which is one of the newest ones made available.

          • Ubuntu AIO DVD Has All Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Flavors on One Disk

            Ubuntu AIO DVD (all-in-one), a collection of the most important Ubuntu 14.04 LTS flavors made available on April 17, 2014, is now ready for download.

            Canonical released its latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS distribution back in April, and along with it all the other famous flavors were also offered. There is a single problem with this launch, namely that the distros come as separate operating systems and you will have to download five ISOs, including the original, if you want to have all of them.

          • Canonical Releases New Ubuntu Touch Images Based on Ubuntu 14.10

            Ubuntu for phones and tablets was announced more than a year and a half ago and the developers are working hard to make that October deadline when the first Ubuntu powered phones are supposed to arrive, although this is not a date set in stone.

          • Canonical Has Updated The Kernels Of All The Supported Ubuntu Systems, For Security Reasons. Update Your Ubuntu System’s Kernel Now!

            As you may know, Canonical has updated the kernels of all the supported Ubuntu systems: Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, due to the fact that it had some security issues, allowing unprivileged users to cause denial of service to the system and get root access.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

              Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that uses the popular KDE desktop environment. According to information from the development team, this version offers more stability and also brings the latest apps for KDE.

              As Xubuntu 14.04 and Lubuntu 14.04, Kubuntu 14.04 come with long term support. The long term support means it comes with the promise of at least 5 years of support, including patches and bug fixes.

            • Secure Ubuntu Privacy Remix 12.04r1 (Protected Pangolin) Officially Released

              With all the security and anonymity issues that are now affecting the online community, a Linux distribution that promises to keep users secure is not something out of the ordinary. In fact, there already is a number of OSes that seem to fit into this category, like Tails for example, and Ubuntu Privacy Remix is just one of them.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Rate your favorite hacker SBCs, win prizes

      Together with Linux.com, the Linux Foundation’s community website, we have set up a survey on SurveyMonkey with 32 open spec single-board computers. Pick your favorite three boards and answer a few questions about what you’re looking for in an open, hacker SBC and enter the optional drawing for a chance to win cool Tux, embedded Linux, and Android gear. Five randomly selected winners will receive a T-shirt, sweatshirt, hat, mug, or USB drive.

    • Choose Your Favorite Open Source SBC, Enter to Win Prizes
    • 10 nerdiest Linux gadgets

      Of all the nerdy Linux gadgets out there, these take the cake.

    • Navy giving its helicopter drones a Linux upgrade

      The systems used to fly the MQ-8 Fire Scout, the robotic helicopter developed by Northrop Grumman for the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships, are about to get an upgrade—one that’s based on the Linux operating system. Raytheon has been awarded a $15.8 million contract to deploy a new version of the Vertical Takeoff and Landing Unmanned Air Vehicle Tactical Control System (VTUAV TCS) that takes the operator’s console off its legacy Sun Microsystems Solaris 8 platform and brings it in line with military standards for drone control platforms—allowing it to be used with other compatible unmanned aircraft.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung replaces mobile design boss following Galaxy S5 backlash

          Amid criticism of the latest Galaxy S smartphone, South Korean firm Samsung Electronics has replaced Chang Dong-hoon, the head of its mobile design team, by vice president of mobile design Lee Min-Hyuk. According to Reuters, “Chang, a former professor who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will continue to lead Samsung’s design center which overseas its overall design strategy.”

      • Android

        • Secret Back Doors in Android

          Following the latest Google update (which I was given no option to reject) I noticed that Google had added a remote kill switch as an opition. It was enabed by default. “Allow remote lock and erase” is what Google calls it and it is essentially working like a back door. Google and its partners in government are gaining a lot of power not over a smartphone but over a tablet.

        • How Google’s Android Silver could become ‘Wintel for phones’

          Analysis In the 1990s, Intel and Microsoft dominated the “open” PC standard – and it appears that Google now wants to do the same for its Android system, via its Silver programme.

        • Chromebooks to go offline as Intel moves inside

          Intel has finally joined the Chrome OS bandwagon ensuring it won’t become obsolete in the post PC (Windows) era. The two companies hosted a joint press event on May 6 where they announced quite a lot of Chromebooks powered by Intel chips. Intel enjoyed a monopolistic position during the Windows era and the partnership between Intel & Windows was known as Wintel, which unfortunately was bad for the industry as it lead to some anti-competitive business practices which heavily damaged (and almost destroyed AMD).

        • Huawei launches ultra-slim Ascend P7 Android phone

          Huawei’s new 4G LTE smartphone, the Ascend P7, is finally here. A significant upgrade from last year’s Ascend P6, the new smartphone offers an updated Emotion UI interface on top of Android 4.4.2 Kitkat mobile operating system. It also provides users with updated cameras, and a 5-inch 1920×1080 resolution 441ppi IPS display. At 6.5mm slim, Ascend P7 is being touted as one of the slimmest 4G LTE smartphones in the market. The phone packs dual 13MP and 8MP cameras.

        • Is CryptoLocker Ransomware arriving on Android?

          ThreatPost reports that the Reveton cyber-crime gang is advertising an Android version of CryptoLocker. This program seems to have no way to actively infect an Android smartphone or tablet. To get it you have to actually download the APK file.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Hashover: A free-software alternative to Disqus and other hosted-commenting services

    I’ve been waiting for this: Hashover is a free-software project that aims to replace hosted-comments services like Disqus and those offered by Facebook and others that keep your comments in their database.

  • Atom, GitHub’s next-gen text editor, is now open source

    Nathan Sobo announced that GitHub is contributing its text editor for programmers, Atom, to the open source community under the MIT license. While GitHub will continue to have its dedicated team working on Atom, they are also looking for a thriving and long-lasting community around Atom, just like Emacs and Vim.

    Atom has been powered by open source packages from its Beta phase. The current announcement takes it to the next level by open sourcing the rest of Atom including the core application, Atom’s package manager and Atom’s Chromium-based desktop application framework, Atom Shell.

  • Google Open-Sources Their AutoFDO Profile Toolchain

    Google has open-sourced their toolchain for providing automatic feedback-directed optimizations from perf data profiles to what can be used by GCC and LLVM.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 30 Beta 2 Brings Better Integration with Social Networks, Australis Stays Put

        According to the changelog, support has finally been added to GStreamer 1.0. We say finally because most applications that use GStreamer switched to the new 1.0 branch a long time ago. The latest GStreamer available right now is 1.3.1, so you can imagine how far behind Firefox is.

        Also, the Mac OS X command-E will now set the “find” term to the selected text, a new sidebar button will provide easier access to social, bookmark, and history sidebars, it’s no longer possible to call WebIDL constructors as functions on the web, box-shadow and other visual overflow issues have been fixed, mute and volume will now be available per window when using WebAudio, background-blend-mode is now enabled by default, and ES6 array and generator comprehensions have been implemented…

      • Death of net neutrality: Is Mozilla barking up the wrong tree?

        Net Neutrality has been quite the conversation during the last several months. Without the free flow of information, the topology of the entire Internet would be defeated in its entirety. So when Mozilla recently proposed that the FCC categorize remote delivery services as telecommunications services, I personally sympathized with the members of the well known non-profit.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • phpMyAdmin 4.2.0 Now Available for Download

      The final iteration of phpMyAdmin 4.2.0 has been released and comes with a large number of changes and improvements. It’s been a while since the previous major update and, after a few RC versions, it was time for more important fixes.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation Officially Releases LibreOffice 4.2.4

      The Document Foundation has announced that the final version for LibreOffice 4.2.4 is now available for all platforms, including Linux.

      This is just a maintenance release for the 4.2.x branch and features a moderate number of fixes and changes, but users who have this office suite installed should upgrade as soon as possible…

    • LibreOffice Calc – Reintroducing Spreadsheets

      Today I would like to discuss a boring subject: Spreadsheets. Actually it’s not that boring when you come to think of it. At least I’m going to try not to make it boring. Let me set something straight first: Spreadsheets are not just about numbers; they are about data. You may have already read Michael Meeks’ article on LibreOffice’s major rewrite of its spreadsheet engine (the much famed Ixion engine that was alluded to first in 2010) and indeed this is a major development for LibreOffice and ultimately for office suites in general – I’ll come back to that later- but this post is not an appreciation article for Michael and Kohei, it’s about how we think of spreadsheets, why we tend to think of them in a very limited way, and how we could redefine the uses of LibreOffice Calc. 256px-LibreOffice_4.0_Calc_Icon.svg

  • Education

    • Tackling the challenges of open source adoption in education

      In our recent survey on free and open source software in the UK education sectors, we asked colleges and universities for their main reasons for not selecting an open source solution according to 12 criteria. Below you can see how important each of the criteria were rated for software running on servers:

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Wind River accelerated virtual switch software delivers breakthrough performance

    Wind River has announced that it has achieved industry-leading performance with its accelerated virtual switch (vSwitch) integrated within Wind River Carrier Grade Communications Server, which is designed for network functions virtualization (NFV). The accelerated vSwitch can deliver 12 million packets per second to guest virtual machines (VMs) using only two processor cores on an industry-standard server platform, in a real-world use case involving bidirectional traffic.

  • Washington State files lawsuit against fraudulent Kickstarter campaign

    According to the lawsuit, Edward J. Polchlepek III (aka Ed Nash) of the company, Altius Management, has failed to make good on a successful Kickstarter campaign for Asylum Playing Cards. The said campaign had a Kickstarter goal of $15,000, which they exceeded with a closing funding of $25,146 back in October 2012. The Attorney General’s office alleges Polchlepek’s company had collected the money but never made good on their promise of delivering the cards or the other backer rewards that were promised by them during the campaign. Since some of the backers were residents of the state of Washington, legal team of the state were able to get involved. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson stated in a press release, “Consumers need to be aware that crowd funding is not without risk. “This lawsuit sends a clear message to people seeking the public’s money: Washington State will not tolerate crowd funding theft. The Attorney General’s Office will hold those accountable who don’t play by the rules.”

  • Science

  • Hardware

    • ARM exec: Forget eight-core smartphone chips, just enjoy a SIX-PACK

      The last person that you’d expect to tell you that eight-core smartphone SoCs are overkill would be a man whose company licenses and gets royalties from those cores – but that’s exactly what ARM’s director of mobile solutions James Bruce told attendees at last week’s ARM Tech Day.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 5 Ways US Medical Billing Is Way More F#@ked Than You Think

      If you’re not from America, or you’re young and healthy enough to have avoided doctors up to now, you may not have been exposed to the delights of this country’s high medical costs. So here’s a demonstration, in the form of a $243K bill for a three-night hospital stay…

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Finance

    • Why Aren’t North American Workers More Militant? (1/2)

      May 1 is the day of international working class solidarity. It was born or created at a time of great working class militancy, a fight for the eight-hour working day and more. Over the years, there have been many peaks of working class struggle, just some of them, for example, the 1877 railroad strike, which went national and started right here in Baltimore; 1919, a general strike in Winnipeg, Canada; in 1930s, industrial unions were organized in both countries, both the United States and Canada; after World War II, in 1946, there were more strikes organized in the United States than there’d ever been before or have been organized since; and in the 1960s, another peak in working-class struggle.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Judicial Hijinks in Effort to Kill Walker Criminal Probe and Destroy Evidence

      On May 6, federal Judge Rudolph Randa ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s long-running “John Doe” criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between political campaigns (including Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign) and the non-profit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth and its allies that spent millions during the state’s recall elections. Randa, who was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush and is a board member of the Milwaukee Federalist Society, compared limits on money-in-politics to “the guillotine and the gulag.”

  • Censorship

    • Lawyers threaten redditor over negative router review on Amazon

      Lawyers for Mediabridge Products, a wireless network device manufacturer, sent a scathing letter to a redditor on Monday, threatening to sue him unless he deletes his negative review of one of the company’s products on Amazon.com.

    • Google Blocks Demonoid for Spreading Malicious Software

      In one of the harshest moves a search engine can take against a site, during the past few hours Google flagged torrent site Demonoid as likely to harm users’ computers. After arriving at the conclusion that malicious third-party ads had caused the problem, Demonoid responded by disabling every single advert on its site until further notice.

  • Privacy

    • Freedom Online Coalition Basically Ignores Surveillance: Makes A Mockery Of Its Name

      We already wrote about how US Secretary of State John Kerry made some tone deaf remarks about “online freedom” and transparency during his appearance at the Freedom Online Coalition meeting in Estonia last week. However, it appears that his remarks fit in well with the theme of the event, which appeared to be “big governments ignoring that whole state surveillance online thing.” The Freedom Online Coalition is a group of 23 governments, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France and many others — and you’d think they’d pay some attention to the very vocal concerns about how those governments are engaged in lots of online spying. In fact, a bunch of public interest groups sent a letter asking the FOC to live up to their state commitments, and respond to claims of human rights violations against journalists and others via state surveillance online.

    • House Committee axes NSA bulk phone metadata collection

      A House committee on Wednesday unanimously voted to end the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program.

      The vote by the House Judiciary Committee was 32-0. The measure moves to the full House, where its passage is uncertain.

      “Today’s strong, bipartisan vote by the House Judiciary Committee takes us one step closer to ending bulk collection once and for all and safeguards Americans’ civil liberties as our intelligence community keeps us safe from foreign enemies who wish us harm,” committee lawmakers said in a joint statement.

    • USA Freedom Act unanimously clears House Judiciary Committee

      Six months after it was written to restrain the National Security Agency’s sweeping domestic surveillance, a privacy bill cleared a major legislative obstacle on Wednesday, even as its advocates worried that the compromises made to advance the bill have weakened its constraints on mass data collection.

    • Legal Guidelines Say Apple Can Extract Data From Locked iOS Devices

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • How Comcast Is Trying To Turn The Internet Into The Old, Broken Phone System

      Each day, the open internet/net neutrality battle gets a bit more interesting. We just covered Tim Lee’s excellent look at how Comcast and other big telcos were effectively using interconnection disputes to get the same result as violating net neutrality, without technically violating the basic concept of what most people believe is net neutrality. And he’s back with an even more important explanation of how Comcast’s ultimate goal is to effectively make the internet more like the old phone system, post AT&T breakup, in which everyone had to pay to access the end points of the network. Ironically, they’re trying to recreate the internet in the form of the old telephone network, while at the same time doing everything to resist being classified as a telephone network by the FCC.

    • The end of the open Internet is un-American: Take action now!

      As you know from my last post, I was recently in Thailand. On my way back, I learned that after much strife, Thailand had decided to oust its prime minister. And when I arrived back in the U.S., I learned that the FCC seemed to have decided to oust the notion of an open Internet.

    • Tech giants urge rethink of net neutrality changes

      More than 100 technology companies have written to the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC), opposing potential changes to net neutrality rules.

      The FCC is considering allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to charge content providers to prioritise their traffic.

      Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon warn that such a move represents a “grave threat to the internet”.

    • FCC’s new net neutrality rules opposed by 100+ internet companies (update: vote still on schedule)

      Despite FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s insistence that he is on the side of an open internet, the controversy over proposed net neutrality rules continues to expand. Resistance to the new rules is now coming from voices within the FCC and major internet companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Yahoo and more. The plan was for the five commissioners to vote on their approval next Thursday, but today one of them, Jessica Rosenworcel, called to push back that vote by a month (update: an FCC spokesman says the vote will go forward as scheduled). Citing “real concerns” with Wheeler’s proposal and a need for time to consider the “torrent of public response” received, she wants the delay so public conversation can continue. That would mean putting the agency’s legal staff out front to explain the measures and answer questions in ways that are accessible to the public, instead of starting a Sunshine Period that would end the ability to accept public comment.

  • DRM

    • Publisher ‘DRMs’ Physical Legal Textbook About ‘Property,’ Undermines Property And First Sale Concepts

      We’ve talked in the past about just how badly certain industries would love to expand the restrictions created by DRM onto physical goods. And that’s because, unlike what copyright system defenders like to claim, DRM allows companies to put restrictions on content that go way beyond what kind of restrictions can be placed on physical goods. For example: the right to resell something. In the copyright space, we’ve long had the first sale doctrine, which makes it possible for you to resell a physical book you own, without having to first get permission from the copyright holder. Of course, first sale has long been under attack, especially by academic publishers who absolutely hate the idea of a resale market. That’s because they are monopoly providers — professors assign the textbooks, and students need to buy them, leading to ridiculously inflated prices. Of course, what publishers still don’t seem to grasp is that a healthy used market actually increases the value of the primary market, since buyers are more comfortable knowing they can at least make back some of the money at the other end.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Why Mr Wales is dreadfully wrong about the Internet Party

        Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that the Pirate Party simply must change its name to the Internet Party, to be more conformant with MegaUpload owner Kim Dotcoms vision for the future of the digital space in New Zealand. Far be it from me to arrogantly dismiss the ideas and opinions of my internet policy elders, but in this case Mr Wales misses a big point and additionally generates harm to a healthy future debate about internet policy.

      • Lobby tries to kill private copying with demand for iPod tax

        For well over ten years we have been arguing about a private copying exception, to legalise everyday consumer behaviour of copying music to computer disks. Despite the fact that copyright industry groups have always said they’d never sue anyone, they claim that an exception would cause substantial damage that requires compensation.

      • Is iPod tax on cards as government delays right to copy your music?

        Open Rights Group is concerned that groups representing rightsholders are seeking compensation for consumers potentially copying music they have bought onto different devices, for example from a CD to their iPod. Last year, UK Music, which represents the live music sector, said that “the exception cannot lawfully be made without fair compensation”.

05.07.14

Links 7/5/2014: OpenELEC 4.0.0, Chromebooks Mainstream

Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • GitHub’s ‘Atom’ text editor is now public, free, and fully open source

    Now, the company is opening it up to the public after an apparently successful invite-only phase. Atom is now available for Mac users and is open source, naturally. The company plans on releasing Linux and Windows versions very soon.

  • GitHub Unleashes Atom Into Open Source Realm
  • How a hacker slumber party gets girls into code

    When I walked into Carroll Hall, for a moment I felt like I was back in college… and at the World’s Best Slumber Party. There were tables full of salty snacks, stacks of sleeping bags, and the chatter of excited young women. But, unlike the sleepovers of my youth, talk was about Python, HTML, and Ruby. These were young women interested in learning to code.

  • 5 steps for tackling bugs and fixes for an open source project

    I do a lot of work on open source, but my most valuable contributions haven’t been code. Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks. Here’s some things I’ve learned along the way.

  • Henri Bergius: Flowhub public beta: a better interface for Flow-Based Programming

    Today I’m happy to announce the public beta of the Flowhub interface for Flow-Based Programming. This is the latest step in the adventure that started with some UI sketching early last year, went through our successful Kickstarter — and now — thanks to our 1 205 backers, it is available to the public.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome security increases with changes in security warnings

        Over the past few months, users have seen a change in the way Chrome displays security warnings. Adrienne Porter Felt, one of the people who work on the Chrome security team, did a presentation showing the effect that warnings on Chrome affect people’s browsing experience. In the presentation, she uses data that they have collected to show the CTR (click through rate, or the rate at which users ignore warnings and continue to a webpage). She describes some of the challenges they face, and the solutions they have implemented to prevent users from downloading malicious files, and the effect these solutions have had.

    • Mozilla

      • Easily Fix Firefox 29

        Just as a meaningless addendum, I actually don’t use Firefox itself, but rather Debian Linux’s “Iceweasel”, which is exactly the same, the only difference being the logo. Debian has insanely high standards for what constitutes “free”, which is in fact laudable but leads to things like this renaming because Firefox’s logo isn’t as completely free as it could be. It causes a lot of confusion for Debian neophytes in the help forums, that’s for sure. I kinda like being an Iceweasel user. Cool name. There’s also Icedove (renamed Thunderbird email program) and my favorite, Iceape (renamed SeaMonkey internet suite). Speaking of SeaMonkey, did you know this even existed? Yes, it’s still possible to use a full featured “internet suite” that includes a web browser, email and newsgroups client, and HTML editor all in one package. Pretty cool, and free of course, and maybe even useful for some folks. All of these things are from the aforementioned fine folks at Mozilla, which is what rose out of the ashes of Netscape years ago. I loved Netscape!

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenDaylight Developer Spotlight: David Goldberg

      David Goldberg is ConteXtream’s lead software engineer and was the first software developer to join the next generation SDN product team. David is also leading ConteXtream’s contribution to the OpenDaylight project and is one of the top commiters to the LISP Flow Mapping project. Prior to Contextream, David was responsible for the development of network analysis tools during his army service in an elite technological group in the IDF Intelligence Corps. David holds a BA in Computer Science and Management (cum laude).

    • Open-source cloud players prep for Structure debate, and maybe a group hug

      How has the open-source cloud landscape changed in the last two years? There’s certainly been a lot of moving and shaking, but how much traction has there been in terms of corporate deployment?

    • VMware Embraces Pivotal PaaS for Hybrid Cloud

      VMware today announced that it is supporting the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (CF) Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) on the vCloud Hybrid Service (VCHS).

    • Hadoop Vendor MapR Announces Record Growth in Big Data Market

      There’s no question that Big Data is now a huge market, but what may surprise some observers is just how rapidly it continues to expand. That growth is evident in reports such as the announcement this week from MapR, which delivers Big Data solutions based on the open source Apache Hadoop platform, that first-quarter growth has tripled over last year.

    • Eucalyptus Systems releases Eucalyptus 4.0

      Eucalyptus 4.0 targets the needs of IT and DevOps who are deploying and managing large-scale hybrid AWS-compatible cloud computing environments.

  • Databases

    • Dish Looks to Open Source Software after Database Failure

      Satellite-TV provider Dish Network Corp. turned to open source database software in 2012 when its first foray into Big Data crippled its conventional database. Dish wants to capitalize on data it collects in its interactions with customers to be able to better market new products and services.

  • CMS

  • Funding

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Changes So Far For LLVM 3.5

      LLVM 3.4 was released in January and since then LLVM 3.5 has been under heavy development and will be released this summer.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Dysfunction in Nigeria

      The media now have a new cartoon figure of hate in the bearded, bobble-hatted leader of Boko Haram, and in truth he is a very bad person. But armed rebellions of thousands of people do not just happen. It is not a simple and spontaneous outbreak of evil, still less a sign that we must wage Tony Blair’s war on Muslims everywhere.

    • All countries will have drone kill technology in 10 years – report

      Despite a track record that is stained with the blood of innocent victims, drone technology is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for militaries around the globe, and it’s too late for the United States – presently the leader in UAV technologies – to stop the rush, according to Defense One, a site devoted to security issues.

    • Malcolm Fraser’s criticism of drone operations ‘ridiculous’, says ex-Army drone pioneer

      The man who established the Australian Army’s first drone unit has hit out at former prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s criticism of Australian involvement in US military drone operations.

    • Drones: Obama’s Invisible War

      The story of the CIA-led killer drones which are killing women and children on a daily basis is a tale accorded inexcusably scant attention in media. Indeed it is being ignored.

    • Why you should take Rand Paul’s latest stand on drones seriously

      It remains the most memorable moment of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) young career in Congress: a 13-hour talking filibuster in 2013 to stall the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA. But it was more publicity stunt than a principled stand of much purpose; Paul was merely seeking the answer to a narrowly crafted question about the use of drones in the United States, and Brennan easily won confirmation anyway.

    • Drone Secrets

      Secrecy in a democracy is highly problematic (as is the question of whether the United States remains a democracy). Arguably, there have been a few cases where Washington was right to keep the American public in the dark. The Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb and the timing and location of the Allied D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe were the two most closely guarded secrets of World War Two. But more frequently, secrecy’s only purpose is to protect the rulers (Pentagon Papers, anyone?).

    • ‘Obama, why did you ruin my paradise?’- US drone victim in Pakistan

      Pakistan is in a perilous, decapitating state, thanks to US drones. A man who lost his family to a US drone attack begs for President Barack Obama to answer his question, “Why did you ruin my paradise?” The Voice of Russia, in joint cooperation with a local Pakistani journalist, interviewed 35-year-old electrician Haji Gul, whose entire family was wiped out from an American drone strike, revealed that his young daughter and wife died due to the US’ erratic actions and unjust drone practices.

    • Science fiction may become reality with ‘killer robots’

      The US, China, Israel, Russia, South Korea, and the UK are all reported to be pursuing autonomous weapons

    • In ongoing protest: Anti-drone demonstrators continue monthly campaign

      For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.

      The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.

      “You can’t bomb the world to peace.”

      “Kill the drones, not innocent people.”

      Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”

    • Senators given access to doc authorizing drone killing of American
    • White House to provide lawmakers access to drone memo authorizing killing of American

      The White House pledged Tuesday to give lawmakers expanded access to memos on the legality of killing American citizens in drone strikes, a concession aimed at heading off Senate opposition to a judicial nominee involved in drafting those secret documents.

    • Drone memo author endorsed call for transparency

      Before he authored legal memos related to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, David Barron joined a group of left-leaning legal scholars and endorsed a statement of principles urging more transparency from the very office now withholding his work from the public.

    • Post-Nuclear Senate: Rand Paul Can’t Slow Nomination Tied to Drone Policy (Updated)

      If Harvard Law Professor David J. Barron fails to win confirmation as a federal appeals court judge, it won’t be because he was “blocked” by Sen. Rand Paul.

      If Barron doesn’t make it to the bench, it will likely be because Democrats have unease about the legal justifications for drone strikes. In a post-nuclear-option world, Republicans can send letters talking about blocking or delaying nominees but their practical impact is nil.

      White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday that the Obama administration will allow senators to access classified materials related to the drone program before voting on the Barron nomination.

      “I can confirm that the Administration is working to ensure that any remaining questions members of the Senate have about Barron’s legal work at the Department of Justice are addressed, including making available in a classified setting a copy of the al-Awlaki opinion to any Senator who wishes to review it prior to Barron’s confirmation vote. Last year, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had access to the memo, and I would note that in his Committee vote, Barron received unanimous Democratic support,” Schultz said in a statement. “We are confident Barron will be confirmed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and that he will serve with distinction.”

    • What Rand Paul and Drones Have To Do with Juliette Kayyem

      Barron, back when he worked for Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel, apparently helped author one or two of the memos providing authorization for the September 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with al-Qaeda in Yemen. Those memos are among several documents that the Obama administration has been ordered to release; it has not done so, claiming that it might still appeal the court ruling.

    • Court seeks reply from police over refuting to file FIR against drone attacks

      Mirza Shahzad Akbar pleaded to the court to lodge case against CIA officials.

    • Protester chooses jail over fine

      A Milwaukee woman Monday became the second of five protesters convicted at trial of trespassing for walking onto the Volk Field military base at Camp Douglas in 2013.

      Joyce E. Ellwanger, 77, told Juneau County Circuit Judge Paul Curran she preferred to serve jail time rather than pay the $232 fine for trespassing during a protest of U.S. drone warfare.

      “I can’t in good conscience pay it, judge,” Ellwanger told the court.

      Curran sentenced Ellwanger to five days in the Juneau County jail on the trespassing violation but found her not guilty of a charge of disorderly conduct.

    • Al Qaeda seems to be resurging in Yemen – Middle East expert

      At least 37 al Qaeda militants have been killed in southern Yemen. The area is one of the country’s most impenetrable ones, and the army has recently intensified an offensive to root out foreign and local Islamist fighters there. The number of attacks against Yemen’s US-backed army and security forces in the south has risen since the launch of an anti al-Qaeda offensive. The Voice of Russia talked to Dr. Lina Khatib, Director of Carnegie Middle East Center.

    • Obama Announces Federal Review After “Deeply Troubling” Botched Execution
    • There’s a top secret CIA weapons facility just north of San Antonio
    • Secret CIA Weapons Depot Linked With Two Texas Locations
    • CIA’s secret weapons cache found in Texas
    • Is Texas Home to a Secret CIA Weapons Facility? Camp Stanley Orders Over Two Million Rounds of AK-47 Ammunition
    • What Happened to CIA Torture Report? Senate in the Dark Too

      The Senate’s high-profile summary of a 6,600-page CIA torture report was supposed to be released by now, at least in a redacted form. It hasn’t been, and no one in the Senate seems sure why.

    • Dems Angry Over Delay in Releasing CIA Interrogations Report
    • Senate Dems antsy over W.H. release of CIA report
    • Obama administration proves why we need someone to leak CIA Torture Report

      Despite both the White House and CIA promising a quick declassification review, Politico reported this week that the White House and CIA are now refusing to even answer questions as to when the report will be sent back to the Intelligence Committee for release. Senator Dianne Feinstein said, “I would hope that it would be short and quick. That may be a vain [effort].” Senator Dick Durbin said, “I don’t know what the reason is [for the delay].”

      Sadly, it was quite predictable that the White House and CIA would delay the release of a report, which is reportedly devestating in its criticism of the CIA, and will remind the public that the Obama administration refused to hold anyone at the CIA accountable for its crimes. Disturbingly, the CIA itself—the same agency the report accuses of years of prisoner abuse and systematic lying—is in charge of the redaction process for the report, despite the fact that it has already dragged its feet for over a year, has been accused of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even allegedly spied on its staffers all in an apparent attempt to prevent the report from seeing light.

    • CIA-Backed Militias Disband in Afghanistan

      The CIA has released thousands of Afghan fighters from its payroll, leaving a major security vacuum.

    • CIA financed and trained paramilitaries disbanded in Afghanistan
    • Djibouti call: US leases African drone base, alleged CIA jail for 20 years

      The US has signed a deal with Djibouti, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa, extending by decades the presence of America’s largest military base in Eastern Africa. The site serves as a hub for drone strikes in Yemen and is a suspected CIA secret prison.

    • Yemeni sues African country for torture at US black site
    • Terrorists, Dictators, and the CIA Are Helping Polio Make a Comeback

      The Taliban portrays vaccination drives as a western plot to sterilize Muslim children or as a cover for spies. The CIA unfortunately lent credence to the latter claim by using a phony vaccination campaign as a ruse to collect DNA evidence from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Stanford to divest its endowment from coal stocks

      Stanford University has announced that it is pulling its endowment out of investments in any of 100 publicly traded companies that are focused on extracting coal. No future investments will be made in any of those companies, and the university will instruct the managers that run its non-endowment investments to avoid these stocks as well.

    • Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048

      That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

      The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, — with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama — was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

      The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

    • Climate Change Is Already Here, Says Massive Government Report

      Climate change is no longer a distant threat, but a real and present danger in the United States, according to a government report issued Tuesday.

  • Finance

    • In Greece, Austerity Kills

      A string of academic reports documenting in detail the impacts of austerity on health care and health outcomes in Greece have recently been released [1]. They show how European authorities, IMF and Greek government policies implemented in response to the economic crisis have led to deaths and attacks on the health of ordinary people. But there was nothing inevitable about those consequences. As the medical journal the Lancet stated: “Experience elsewhere in Europe shows that those countries which prioritise social protection (including health) in the midst of austerity, and favour fiscal stimulation, secure better outcomes for their populations.”

    • Time to bail students out of $1 trillion debt

      We may as well call it “edu-pay-tion,” as far as many prospective students are concerned. The cost of a college degree has risen 1,120 percent since 1978, but wages have increased a mere 6 percent during that same period. The national collective college debt is more than $1 trillion! We have college grads mired in $29,000 of debt, on average, while they are looking for jobs that do not exist. Parents and grandparents of those grads are also saddled with much of that debt, which is immune to bankruptcy, and they will have to make the payments until they die.

      What have we gotten ourselves into? The greed that accompanied those easy-to-obtain, just-sign-here college tuition loans, borders on immoral. Financial institutions were like Black Friday crowds, trampling one another to get in on the act. New lending operations cropped up every day, and new proprietary colleges and universities opened their doors throughout the nation, advertising their degrees and easy to get loans for tuition. What would happen if students and parents just stop paying on that $1 trillion debt? Who would pay then? Bingo! I can see another bailout coming, and this time it will be for student loans.

    • Russia demands $3.8bn security deposit from Visa and Mastercard

      International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC Struggles in Kansas City

      Hundreds of lobbyists and state legislators gathered in downtown Kansas City last week for ALEC’s Spring 2014 task force summit, where a task force led by a tobacco lobbyist discussed education, corporate interests plotted ways to thwart shareholder activism, and legislators took a trip to a coal-fired power plant.

    • MayDay Citizens’ Super PAC Aims to Rewrite the Rules of U.S. Campaign Finance

      At least so believes famed political activist and Harvard ethics and law professor Lawrence Lessig and other co-founders of MayOne.US. The KickStarter fundraising campaign aims to ignite fundamental U.S. campaign finance reform by crowdfunding an initial $1 million to create a super PAC (short for political action committee) to rival those created by public figures, big corporate donors, powerful lobbyist and special interest groups.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Internet ‘close to three billion users’, says UN

      The internet is closing in on three billion users, according to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union

    • Interconnection: Or How Big Broadband Kills Net Neutrality Without Violating ‘Net Neutrality’

      For years now, every time the net neutrality debate starts getting really confusing, Tim Lee comes along and puts it all into useful perspective. Six years ago, there was his exceptionally useful position paper on net neutrality for the Cato Institute. A couple years ago, he wrote another great piece for National Affairs magazine that deftly explained why the internet wasn’t competitive and why that’s a problem. Now working for Vox, he’s put together a great piece that explains the technical difference between the interconnection fights and the net neutrality battle — but also explains how the end result is basically the same.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Microsoft Still Imposes Broken ‘Updates’ and Breaks GNU/Linux Through UEFI Boot Restrictions

Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The pressure against software freedom and user control over his/her PC a growingly serious issue

FAIR competition is a business risk that Microsoft cannot tolerate. Microsoft wants to mistreat many users by exposing them (for cash) to the NSA. With UEFI and remote updates, the NSA can even remotely brick computers — a serious risk that almost nobody is willing to speak about. It’s all about control (over users) and Microsoft goes out of its way to reduce users’ security. As Richard Stallman put it the other day: “Nonfree [proprietary] software is likely to spy on its users, or mistreat them in other ways. It is software for suckers. Awareness of this is spreading, which helps us make the case for Free software to people who are not computing experts.”

What’s even more troubling right now is that Vista 8 is self-updating (for the latest back doors to be installed) and Ryan tells us that “Microsoft is about to get rid of support for Windows 8.1 without the update pack, and it seems the broken Windows Update problem is still pretty common.” To quote: “Check your Windows Update log, if you’ve got a “Failed” entry next to KB2919355 then your PC will also become orphaned after May 8.” So much for ‘security’.

Interestingly enough and coinciding with the above, yesterday afternoon Jamie posted this review which complains about lingering issues with UEFI (some previous issues relate to Windows updates that allegedly break dual-booting), stating:

In order to install Linux from a bootable USB stick I need to be able to get to the Boot Selection menu, but on Acer systems with UEFI firmware, this is a bit tricky. The Boot Menu key (F12) is disabled by default, so I first have to boot to the BIOS Setup Utility, by pressing F2 during the power on or reboot cycle. Then in the Main setup screen there is an option to enable “F12 Boot Menu”.

That’s one trick down, but there’s another one which might be required. Depending on what version of Linux you want to install, and perhaps how you feel about Secure Boot, you might want/need to disable that. In the BIOS Setup Utility, on the Boot menu there is an option to disable Secure Boot – but I can’t get to it: moving the cursor down just skips over it!

I can change boot mode from UEFI to ‘Legacy BIOS’, but that isn’t what I want to do. I learned (the hard way) with my previous Acer Aspire One, that I have to go to the Security menu and set a “Supervisor Password” before it will let me disable Secure Boot mode. I’m sure this makes sense to someone, but whoever that is, it isn’t me.

In this case I am going to start by installing Linux with Secure Boot still enabled, so I don’t really have to do this, but I went ahead and set a supervisor password anyway, because I will eventually want to turn off Secure Boot anyway.

An ordinary computer user would give up at this stage.

It sure seems like control over one’s computer is getting harder, whether it’s due to artificial limitations or imposed back doors. Fighting for software freedom is important right now, more so than ever before. Some companies and government agencies truly dread the idea of people controlling their machines. The International Day Against DRM is a reminder of this [1,2,3] and based on a new report [4] the FBI is now “pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors.” Like CIPAV in Microsoft Windows? █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. International Day Against DRM
  2. Mark the Day Against DRM with discounts on books and videos; join the EFF live video panel

    Today is the Day Against DRM, organized by the Free Software Foundation through their Defective by Design campaign against digital rights management (DRM), which they refer to instead with the more accurate moniker “digital restrictions management.”

  3. How DRM Harms Our Computer Security
  4. FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites – now

    CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.

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