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10.28.14

Links 28/10/2014: SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, Canonical OpenStack Distro

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Organizations are Rallying Behind an Open Source Internet of Things

    If you’ve been reading about the Internet of Things (IoT) market, you may be noticing that it is picking up steam with powerful partnerships and big name companies launching initiatives. Red Hat put up an extensive post recently illustrating that it is very focused on the concept of networking objects of all types, and we’ve covered the backing that organizations ranging from The Linux Foundation to Microsoft are putting behind the IoT market.

  • Events

    • Ceph Developer Summit 2014 – Hammer

      The Ceph Developer Summit (CDS) for the next major Ceph release called Hammer started today some hours ago (2014/10/28). It’s again a virtual summit via video conference calls.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hybrid cloud – the future is open source

      Among respondents to Computing’s recent data centre research programme, the hybrid cloud model is generating a lot of interest. Indeed, moving towards a hybrid model was the aim of 41 per cent of them (see figure 1).

      Hybrid cloud implies a close interconnectivity between a private cloud (i.e. a collection of physical and virtual systems used exclusively by one company) and the multi-tenant public cloud services exemplified by Google, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. This seamlessly integrated whole allows data, services and workloads to be moved between public and private clouds at will, with the administrator able to monitor and manage the whole system via a single dashboard.

    • Making cloud storage easy with OpenStack Swift

      When you want to learn about object storage in OpenStack, John Dickinson is the guy to ask. John is the Director of Technology at SwiftStack, a company which relies on the OpenStack Swift project to provide unstructured data storage to customers around the world. He also serves as the Program Technical Lead (PTL) for OpenStack Swift and has been involved in the development of Swift since 2009.

    • IBM Expands Global Cloud Footprint and Focus on OpenStack

      Despite a recent poor quarterly results report, IBM appears to be applying even more focus to its cloud services business. The company has announced an expansion of its global cloud network with a new cloud center in Mumbai, India and a new suite of cloud services for OpenStack. And these are just the latest components of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment in cloud centers in every major market worldwide.

    • Chris Kemp: Nebula CSO. Cloud pioneer. Entrepreneur. Former NASA CTO.

      Chris Kemp spoke with TechRepublic about the founding of OpenStack and how he went from NASA’s first CTO of IT to startup founder.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCL 2.6.12 is released

      The GCL team is happy to announce the release of version 2.6.12, the latest achievement in the ‘stable’ (as opposed to ‘development’) series. Please see http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl for downloading information.

    • [GNU IceCat] 31.2.0

      GNU Icecat is now available on Fedora repositories.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Survey probes accessibility of Member States’ transposing of EU legislation

      A survey is being conducted to see if the sharing of information on how the European Union Member States are transposing European legislation can be improved. The results of this survey could potentially contribute to increased interoperability of the ICT systems that provide access to European legislation.

    • W3C now endorses HTML5

      In addition HTML5 will see much more better games get developed for the web, Mozilla using various technologies have shown off desktop-like games in terms of graphics, if this were to become mainstream we may see a shift from people using traditional desktop and laptop to devices like Chromebooks, although post-Snowden privacy concerns make this a more distant reality than it was before. HTML5 also brings with it native support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) and math (MathML), anotations important for East Asian typography and features to enable accessibility of rich applications.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Army Says Only 30% of Americans Could Join

      The U.S. Army now says that seven out of 10 young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible to become soldiers.

      The alarming reduction in the pool of prospective soldiers worries Army brass and they largely attribute it to three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories.

      “There’s a reliance on an ever-smaller group of people to serve and defend the country,” said Maj. Gen. Allen Batschelet, commanding general for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. “What do we do about that and how do we address that concern?

    • David Cameron jogger: ‘How good is security if I managed to run between them?’

      The jogger who was manhandled to the ground after running into David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has said he had “no idea” why police officers jumped on him.

      Dean Farley, a 28-year-old hospital worker from Leeds, questioned the Prime Minister’s security arrangements.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Washington Post’s Putinology

      OK, so fiery anti-Americanism is the belief that the United States desires a unipolar world where it calls the shots. Does anyone doubt US elites think otherwise?

  • Privacy

    • Verizon’s ‘Perma-Cookie’ Is a Privacy-Killing Machine

      Verizon Wireless has been subtly altering the web traffic of its wireless customers for the past two years, inserting a string of about 50 letters, numbers, and characters into data flowing between these customers and the websites they visit.

    • Sharyl Attkisson’s computer intrusions: ‘Worse than anything Nixon ever did’

      That’s the noise that Attkisson’s Apple computer was making at 3:14 one morning. A Toshiba laptop computer issued by CBS News did the same thing a day earlier, around 4 a.m. All this goes down in October 2012, right in the midst of the Benghazi story. A person who’s identified as “Jeff” warns Attkisson: “I’ve been reading your reports online about Benghazi. It’s pretty incredible. Keep at it. But you’d better watch out.” “Jeff,” like several of the names in “Stonewalled,” is a pseudonym.

    • Report Reveals Wider Tracking of Mail in US

      In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly…

Links 28/10/2014: PiFxOS, The Document Foundation in OSBA

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Wipro to deploy 10,000 strong team for open source initiatives on non-proprietary software

    Wipro’s open source practice has been made under its Business Application Services division, under which the company intends to build open source platforms that enable online services on a large scale.

    The company will shift its focus to applications, infrastructure, including operating systems, databases, cloud technologies and software defined infrastructure. Significantly, in the Product Engineering space, Wipro believes licensable IP blocks will help shrink product development timelines.

  • Catalyst to lead Mahara open source ePortfolio project

    Catalyst, an open source software specialist based in Christchurch, New Zealand, has taken ownership of ePortfolio project Mahara’s trademark and will also lead the its partner programme, it announced overnight.

  • Events

    • ‘All Things Open’ All Wrapped Up for 2014

      There was absolutely nothing wrong with this year’s All Things Open conference. There were a few glitches, as might be expected, but not enough to matter. Was it perfect? Probably not. Perfection at a conference would probably be pretty boring — and boring would be a fault keeping it from being perfect, if you’ll excuse a little circular logic. Let’s just say say that ATO was more than good enough — and then a lot more.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla hopes to challenge Raspbian as RPi OS of choice

        The Mozilla Foundation staged a Mozilla Festival in the UK over the weekend, and one of the projects developers delivered was a port of Firefox OS working to the Raspberry Pi.

      • Mozilla Positions Firefox OS as a Competitor to Raspbian for Raspberry Pi

        The Mozilla Foundation held its much anticipated festival in England this past weekend, and one of the projects shown off by developers is a port of Firefox OS working with he Raspberry Pi. The diminutive, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi devices (shown here), priced at $25 and $35, have quickly won over hackers and hobbyists who are taking Linux in new directions, including even supercomputing.

        Now, Mozilla appears to belive its Firefox OS mobile platform can engage developers working on robotics and other applications for Raspberry Pi boards.

      • Mozilla preps Firefox OS for the Raspberry Pi

        Mozilla released an experimental “PiFxOS” build of Firefox OS optimized for the Raspberry Pi, with an early focus on robotics and media players.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Venture Funding Marches On as SwiftStack Secures $16M

      If you observe the old adage “follow the money” right now, it seems that you’ll be led straight to OpenStack. Today, there is yet more news about venture funding for an OpenStack-focused startup. SwiftStack, which specializes in software-defined storage based on the OpenStack cloud platform, announced that it closed $16 million in funding to scale its efforts to enable storage scalability for the enterprise.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Is #1

      LibreOffice is a fine example of what FLOSS can be. When FLOSS projects reach this level of penetration in usage there’s no limit to how far they can go. We’ve seen this before in the Linux kernel, Apache web-server, MySQL database, PostgreSQL database and many others.

    • The Document Foundation joins the Open Source Business Alliance

      The Document Foundation (TDF) joins the Open Source Business Alliance (OSB Alliance), to strengthen LibreOffice ecosystem by creating stronger ties with companies and organizations deploying the free office suite on a large scale.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.1 RC3 Gets Lots of Fixes

      The previous RC in the series had a very short list of changes and just a couple of regressions, which indicated that we might get a stable version soon. It looks like that wasn’t the case after all and that we still have to be patient and gaze with great interest at what the devs are doing.

      FreeBSD 10.0 was a big step forward for this distribution and a natural evolution from the 9.x branch. People tend to forget that open source is not the same thing with Linux and there are other distros out there that might be using a completely different base, like BSD for example. The first point release for FreeBSD 10.x is also an important step for the devs because it gathers a huge number of changes that will make users’ lives much easier.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Emacs 24.4 Released
    • New GNUMail release 1.2.2

      After Pantomime a GNUMail release had of course to follow. The same words as for Pantomime apply.

    • GNU wget 1.16 released
    • GNU libtool 2.4.3 released [stable]

      GNU Libtool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a
      consistent, portable interface. GNU Libtool ships with GNU libltdl, which
      hides the complexity of loading dynamic runtime libraries (modules)
      behind a consistent, portable interface.

    • guile-ncurses 1.6 released

      I am pleased to announce version 1.6 of GNU Guile-ncurses. Guile-ncurses is a library for the creation of text user interfaces in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It is based on the ncurses project’s curses, panel, form, and menu libraries.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Changing the Behaviour of Eclipse’s Update Manager

      If you’ve developed plugins for the Eclipse environment, you’re moderately aware that Eclipse’s update manager can behave in strange ways from a user perspective. Things have gotten better with the p2 Remediation Support in Kepler (4.3.0) but what about dependency resolution done by Maven plugins, like Tycho, at build-time ? You get to specify a list of repositories, their content is aggregated, and if your request is satisfiable, it will be satisfied. Of course there’s some criteria p2 will attempt to optimize. For example, preferring highest version with fewest dependencies (minimize transitive closure) from a set of identically named units.

    • Clang Goes Ahead And Enables C11 By Default

      LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler went ahead and enabled C11 as the default C language for the upcoming LLVM 3.6 release.

Leftovers

  • NYT Tried to Sell ‘Pro-Growth’ Candidate, but Brazilians Weren’t Buying

    Stewart was referring to Aécio Neves, governor of the state of Minas Gerais and the favorite of “investors and business people in Brazil.” Neves ended up losing to incumbent President Dilma Rousseff, described by Stewart as “a former Marxist guerrilla who praises Mr. [Hugo] Chávez as ‘a great Latin American.’”

    [...]

    Cardoso belonged to the same party as Neves, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, which despite its name takes a center-right line. This may explain why Neves’ “pro-growth” policies were not as convincing to Brazilian voters as they are to New York Times columnists.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Assange court ruling expected ‘by midnight’

      Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s appeal against the arrest warrant hanging over him is being considered by a court in Stockholm, with the chief prosecutor expected to report back before midnight.

    • Peter Carey: ‘How can Assange be a traitor?’

      Peter Carey’s new novel, Amnesia, features an activist on the run from the US government. He talks to Tim Martin about his intuitive connection with the WikiLeaks founder

    • Whitlam, Assange inspire Carey

      Peter Carey is in Melbourne flogging his latest book Amnesia, about an Australian female cyber-terrorist, a kind of Julian Assange in drag. When I call the two-time Booker Prize winner’s hotel, he’s wolfing down the last of a cold steak sandwich. Gough Whitlam had died earlier that week and was still on his mind.

    • Peter Carey, A History Manifesto

      Peter Carey’s new novel Amnesia counterpoints modern hackers with murky incidents in Australia’s recent past as a writer explores where countries and individuals stand in the modern world.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Privacy

    • Feds identify suspected ‘second leaker’ for Snowden reporters

      The FBI recently searched a government contractor’s home, but some officials worry the Justice Department has lost its ‘appetite’ for leak cases

    • Big Brother’s Liberal Friends

      IT IS strange that the Obama administration has so avidly continued many of the national-security policies that the George W. Bush administration endorsed. The White House has sidelined the key recommendations of its own advisers about how to curtail the overreach of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has failed to prosecute those responsible for torture, on the principle that bygones should be bygones, extending a courtesy to high officials that it has notably declined to provide to leakers like Chelsea Manning. The result is a remarkable degree of continuity between the two administrations.

      Yet this does not disconcert much of the liberal media elite. Many writers who used to focus on bashing Bush for his transgressions now direct their energies against those who are sounding alarms about the pervasiveness of the national-security state. Others, despite their liberal affectations, have perhaps always been enthusiasts for a strong security state. Over the last fifteen months, the columns and op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post have bulged with the compressed flatulence of commentators intent on dismissing warnings about encroachments on civil liberties. Indeed, in recent months soi-disant liberal intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley have employed the Edward Snowden affair to mount a fresh series of attacks. They claim that Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and those associated with them neither respect democracy nor understand political responsibility.

      [...]

      Snowden and his companions have shown that national-security liberals’ arguments for deference rest on false assumptions. The truth is that not only are America’s overseas interventions problematic by themselves, but they are also increasingly undermining domestic liberties. Intelligence efforts that are supposed to be focused abroad turn out to have sweeping domestic consequences. It’s impossible to distinguish intelligence data on domestic and foreign actors. Security officials in various countries can work together across borders to circumvent and undermine domestic protections, actively helping each other to remake laws that restrict their freedom of operation. And at home, officials can use these new arrangements to work around and undermine civil rights. This commingling of domestic and international politics is complex and poorly understood. It helps explain why national-security liberals have such difficulty in comprehending—let alone refuting—Snowden’s and Greenwald’s arguments.

  • Civil Rights

    • Occupy Democracy is not considered newsworthy. It should be

      From last Tuesday, Parliament Square was wrapped in wire mesh. In one of the more surreal scenes in recent British political history, officers with trained German shepherds stand sentinel each day, at calculated distances across the lawn, surrounded by a giant box of fences, three metres high – all to ensure that no citizen enters to illegally practice democracy. Yet few major news outlets feel this is much of a story.

    • A Plan to Cut Costs and Crime: End Hurdle to Job After Prison

      With an estimated one in three American adults having been arrested at some point in their lives, and 16 million people — about 7.5 percent of the adult population — who are felons or former felons, the question of how to reintegrate the 700,000 people who are released from prison each year has become increasingly urgent.

    • How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb’s Career

      Ceppos assigned another Mercury News investigative reporter, Pete Carey, to review Webb’s reporting against the charges of the media critics. On October 12 the Mercury News published Carey’s findings, which backed up Webb’s work and actually added new information, particularly regarding the 1986 search warrant against Blandón and his arms-dealing associate, Ronald Lister. But though Webb’s reporting was vindicated, the assignment to Carey was an omen of the paper’s increasing defensiveness.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XLI

      In my last update, I noted that the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapter remains the centre of attention, with rumours swirling around that the President-elect of the new European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, would pull a rabbit out of his hat by announcing that ISDS would be dropped. That didn’t happen, and it seems that once more, the UK is to blame.

    • Copyrights

      • Big Pirate Sites ‘Raided’, Admins on the Run

        Authorities have carried out raids across Germany in pursuit of the operators of movie streaming portal Kinox.to. The individuals are also said to be behind other sites including Movie4K, FreakShare and BitShare. Throw alleged extortion, arson and the fact the sites are still online into the mix, and the plot only thickens.

      • MPAA Reports The Pirate Bay to The U.S. Government

        The MPAA has informed the U.S. Government about two dozen piracy-promoting websites it would like to be gone. The list includes major torrent sites The Pirate Bay and Kickass.to, file-hosting services such as Uploaded and Rapidgator, as well as Russia’s social network VK. The popular Popcorn Time application was also welcomed with a mention.

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