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11.18.12

Links 18/11/2012: Linux 3.7 RC6, FreeBSD.org Intrusion

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • LongTail Video Launches New Version Of Its Open Source Video Player, With Support For Apple HLS

  • Events

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD.org intrusion announced November 17th 2012

      On Sunday 11th of November, an intrusion was detected on two machines within the FreeBSD.org cluster. The affected machines were taken offline for analysis. Additionally, a large portion of the remaining infrastructure machines were also taken offline as a precaution.

    • DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

      At the beginning of this month there was the release of DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 that claimed a battle for speed against Linux with major improvements for the multi-threaded application performance against Linux. PostgreSQL was the only benchmark cited by the DragonFly camp with the new performance results, so a couple Phoronix tests were carried out.

      Being interested in seeing what changes DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 has for performance against the earlier DragonFlyBSD 3.0 release and Linux distributions, I ran a couple quick and informal benchmarks. For the available hardware, an Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition CPU was used, which has six physical cores plus Hyper Threading. Intel HT plus the individual cores can be easily toggled from the BIOS of the motherboard.

    • Hackers obtained access to FreeBSD servers

      The team behind the FreeBSD operating system reported that an intrusion into two of its servers was detected on 11 November. The security team says that the two affected servers were taken offline immediately and that investigations show that the first unauthorised access probably took place on 19 September. Apparently, the intruders didn’t exploit any security holes in FreeBSD; instead, they stole the SSH key of a developer with regular access privileges.

  • Project Releases

  • Programming

    • Clang Can Analyze Code Comments, Generate Docs

      Aside from why LLVM/Clang was ported to one of the fastest super computer’s in the world and using Clang to implement Microsoft’s C++ AMP, another interesting session at this month’s LLVM Developers’ Conference in San Jose was about using Clang to analyze code comments.

      By having Clang parse documentation comments, Clang could be enhanced to do additional semantic checking, ensure the code comments remain relevant to the actual code, and code completion APIs could take advantage of the documentation within the code. Ultimately, a Doxygen-like tool could be created based upon Clang for generating proper documentation out of the code itself and the associated comments. Further out, automatic comment re-factoring could be done to update names referenced within the inline code comments so that the resulting documentation is always up-to-date.

    • Pairing A C Compiler With QEMU’s Code Generator

      Earlier this week when writing about the state of the Tiny C Compiler, I learned more about QCC. QCC is a new initiative to pair a forked version of the Tiny C Compiler (TCC) with QEMU’s code generator.

      The QCC compiler is being worked on by Rob Landley, a developer with much compiler development experience that previously worked on early 64-bit TCC support. The QEMU CPU emulator has a code generator named TCG, which is short for Tiny Code Generator. The TCG generator translates code fragments from any target code supported by QEMU into a code representation that can be then executed on the host.

Leftovers

  • following in ethically-challenged footsteps of Scalia and Thomas

    Oops: They’re doing it again: Another Supreme Court Justice flouts ethical standards

  • Science

    • Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy

      After Hurricane Sandy, survivors needed, in addition to safety and power, the ability to communicate. Yet in parts of New York City, mobile communications services were knocked out for days.

      The problem? The companies that provide them had successfully resisted Federal Communications Commission calls to make emergency preparations, leaving New Yorkers to rely on the carriers’ voluntary efforts.

  • Security

    • What do we do about untrustworthy Certificate Authorities?

      OpenSSL maintainer and Google cryptographer Ben Laurie and I collaborated on an article for Nature magazine on technical systems for finding untrustworthy Certificate Authorities. We focused on Certificate Transparency, the solution that will shortly be integrated into Chrome, and also discuss Sovereign Keys, a related proposal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both make clever use of cryptographic hashes, arranged in Merkle trees, to produce “untrusted, provable logs.”

    • Anonymous attacks over 650 Israeli sites, wipes databases, leaks email addresses and passwords (updated)

      When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week began taking military action in the Gaza strip against Hamas (as the IDF announced on Twitter), Anonymous declared its own war as part of #OpIsrael. Among the casualties are thousands of email addresses and passwords, hundreds of Israeli Web sites, government-owned as well as privately owned pages, as well as databases belonging to Bank Jerusalem and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • True Amount of BP Settlement Will Depend on Hidden Tax Giveaways

      Today, BP agreed to a $4.5 billion settlement to resolve felony and misdemeanor charges related to the Gulf oil spill, but taxpayers may end up indirectly covering up to 35 percent of that amount if the company is allowed to take the settlement as a tax write-off.

      “The judge shouldn’t approve this settlement if BP could pass off much of this settlement cost onto taxpayers,” said Phineas Baxandall, the Senior Tax and Budget Policy Analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG). “Especially in the context of pressing budget shortfalls, every dollar BP writes off means an additional dollar Americans will pay in the form of higher taxes, budget cuts, or more national debt.”

    • Fukushima fish ‘may be inedible for a decade’

      Fish from the waters around the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan could be too radioactive to eat for a decade to come, as samples show that radioactivity levels remain elevated and show little sign of coming down, a marine scientist has warned.

    • How BP’s historic Deepwater Horizon fine will be paid by the US military

      An explosion Friday on a rig in the Gulf owned by Houston-based Black Elk Energy has reportedly injured several workers, with four missing, two possibly killed. This latest incident – just a day after the US department of justice’s historic settlement with BP over the Deepwater Horizon disaster – highlights the risks of offshore oil-drilling, and the need for tougher regulations on one of America’s most hazardous industries.

  • Finance

    • Economists: US Wages Stagnant for Over a Decade

      As wages remain stagnant since 2002, the past ten years have been effectively been a “lost decade for workers,” says writer Kevin G. Hall.

    • Slovenia Should Sell Assets to Lure Investors, Goldman Says

      Slovenia, the first post-communist nation to introduce the euro in 2007, is struggling to avoid the need for a bailout from international lenders as political gridlock grips the nation of 2 million people. The government of Prime Minister Janez Jansa is pushing ahead with an overhaul of the economy with some measures threatened by a possible referendum.

      Labor unions and opposition leaders have filed a motion for a people’s vote on government plans to recapitalize state-owned lenders like Nova Ljubljanska Banka d.d. and the creation of a wealth fund.

    • Occupy hatches plot to destroy payday loan industry

      In today’s ever-perplexing world of personal finance, there’s no question consumers could benefit from a little clarity.

      Just don’t expect to find any in the pages of Occupy Wall Street’s new manifesto on consumer debt.

  • Censorship

    • Yelp Takes Down Review That Sparked Legal Threat

      Yesterday we had the story of how an 18-month-old Yelp review for Casey Movers in Massachusetts spurred the company to send a legal threat to the author, Kristen Buckley, leading her husband, Phil Buckley to do some research and uncover questionable “positive” reviews of the company, and to call the company out for its legal threat. That story has been getting a lot of attention from a variety of sources, and some have noticed that the original review is gone. Yes, gone. If you go there, you can now see Kristen’s followup comment about the legal threat, and Casey Movers’ response to the original review — but not the original review itself.

    • Christian wins case against employers over gay marriage comments

      A Christian who was demoted for posting his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook has won a legal case against his employer.

      Adrian Smith lost his managerial position, had his salary cut by 40%, and was given a final written warning by Trafford Housing Trust (THT) after posting in February last year that gay weddings in churches were “an equality too far”.

    • Victory: government backs down from “default” filtering?

      According to reports this Saturday in the Daily Mail and Telegraph, David Cameron will be asking ISPs to ask customers if they have children, and if so, help them install filtering technology.

      While the Daily Mail cite this as a “victory” for their campaign to switch porn off in every household, and allow people to “opt in to porn”, in fact it would be a humiliating climb down.

    • Restrictions to Internet free speech: Assange and Manning

      The US quite regularly rebukes Russia for putting a leash on the freedom of speech. This May, the US State Department focused on the Russian media in its annual human rights report.

    • What you can and can’t say on social networking sites

      The situation raises an interesting debate about the right to free speech and protecting people from unjustified attacks.

  • Privacy

    • UK government threatens firms over hidden customer data

      The UK government has repeated its threat to legislate if businesses do not voluntarily release data gathered on customers who ask to see it.

    • German police stop man with mobile office in car

      Forget texting while driving. German police say they nabbed a driver who had wired his Ford station wagon with an entire mobile office.

      Saarland state police said Friday the 35-year-old man was pulled over for doing 130 kph (80 mph) in a 100 kph zone while passing a truck Monday.

  • Civil Rights

    • Taliban Oops Reveals Mailing List IDs

      Somewhere out there, Mullah Omar must be shaking his head.

      In a Dilbert-esque faux pax, a Taliban spokesperson sent out a routine email last week with one notable difference.He publicly CC’d the names of everyone on his mailing list.

      The names were disclosed in an email by Qari Yousuf Ahmedi, an official Taliban spokesperson, on Saturday. The email was a press release he received from the account of Zabihullah Mujahid, another Taliban spokesperson. Ahmedi then forwarded Mujahid’s email to the full Taliban mailing list, but rather than using the BCC function, or blind carbon copy which keeps email addresses private, Ahmedi made the addresses public.

    • Leaders should be sacked for incompetence, not cheating

      US generals Petraeus and Allen had to bow to what feels close to mob rule. Is this how we do accountability now?

    • Why smart people do dumb things online

      Petraeus is smart: He graduated in the top 5% of his class at West Point and went on to earn a Ph.D.

      Petraeus has self-control: His self-discipline was “legendary,” according to Time Magazine.

      And Petraeus knows what he’s doing: During his time as a four-star general and as director of the CIA, he acquired an intimate knowledge of how easily email can be hacked.

      And that’s why it’s so incredible that even Petraeus did the dumbest thing imaginable when it came to his email: He trusted it with his secrets.

      Allegedly.

    • Trying to Keep Your E-Mails Secret When the C.I.A. Chief Couldn’t

      In the past, a spymaster might have placed a flower pot with a red flag on his balcony or drawn a mark on page 20 of his mistress’s newspaper. Instead, Mr. Petraeus used Gmail. And he got caught.

      Granted, most people don’t have the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through their personal e-mails, but privacy experts say people grossly underestimate how transparent their digital communications have become.

      [...]

      Google reported that United States law enforcement agencies requested data for 16,281 accounts from January to June of this year, and it complied in 90 percent of cases.

    • Website Calls Out Authors of Racist Anti-Obama Posts
    • In UK, Twitter, Facebook rants land some in jail

      One teenager made offensive comments about a murdered child on Twitter. Another young man wrote on Facebook that British soldiers should “go to hell.” A third posted a picture of a burning paper poppy, symbol of remembrance of war dead.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Ofcom: mobile blocking Skype but we don’t care

      ISPreview UK: “Ofcom used this report to keep a close eye (sic) on the issue of Net Neutrality and Traffic Management, although they found that “there are currently no substantive concerns in relation to the traffic management practices used by fixed ISPs“. The regulator noted some “concern” with how some mobile operators block Skype (VoIP) but not enough to take any action against.” The traffic management section starts on p49 and includes this choice example of how ISPs are largely ignoring Ofcom’s evidence-gathering:

    • Russia demands broad UN role in Net governance, leak reveals

      Leaked document from upcoming treaty negotiations reveals Russia wants transfer of authority over Net to national governments. The U.N.’s increasingly shrill denials are ringing ever more hollow.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • DuPont-Dow Corn Defeated by Armyworms in Florida: Study

      Fall armyworms in southern Florida survived a pesticide engineered into corn by Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) and DuPont Co., the second insect to show signs of resistance to genetically modified crops in the U.S., according to a study.
      Fall armyworms ate the leaves of corn engineered to produce an insecticidal protein and lived, according to 2012 field trial data presented Nov. 13 at a conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. The protein is marketed by Dow and DuPont as Herculex.

    • MEPs demand better evaluation of GMOs

      The study by the biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini (University of Caen), conducted over two years on rats fed diets containing genetically modified maize (NK603 variety), with and without the Roundup herbicide, as well as with Roundup alone, the results of which were published on September 19 in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, has reignited the debate about the possible risks associated with the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and the reliability of the 90-day toxicology studies previously used to justify their approval.

    • Copyrights

11.17.12

Links 17/11/2012: EXT4 File System Benchmarks, Linus Torvalds Interview

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux in Enterprises, market share and Business which use Linux

    Unquestionably Linux is still struggling to claim a respectable share in desktop market. The trend does not seem to vary drastically in enterprises too. However in contrast to Linux share in desktop operating system, Linux claims a considerably larger market share when it comes to operating system used by enterprises. The post presents some latest stats depicting where does a Linux stand as an operating system for business. The post also details some enterprises that rely on Linux for their everyday computation.

  • Kernel Space

    • EXT4 File-System Tuning Benchmarks

      Following last month’s Btrfs file-system tuning benchmarks, in this article are a similar set of tests when stressing the EXT4 file-system with its various performance-related mount options. Here are a number of EXT4 benchmarks from Ubuntu 12.10 with different mount option configurations.

      Aside from testing the EXT4 file-system at its defaults on the Linux 3.5 kernel with Ubuntu 12.10, the common Linux file-system was tested with nobarrier, data=journal, data=writeback, nodelalloc, and discard. Here’s the documentation on each mount option per the EXT4 documentation:

    • The Not-Ready Btrfs and ExFAT Linux Filesystems

      Two newer filesystems of importance to Linux are exFAT and Btrfs. exFAT is the controversial Microsoft filesystem for Flash memory devices, and Btrfs is for “big data”. Once upon a time there was much sound and fury around these, but lately it’s been quiet, so let’s see what’s been happening.

    • Why Linus Torvalds would rather code than make money

      The Linux kernel is what everything else runs on top of, so it’s the key to everything that a Linux device can do.

      It’s in your Android phone. It’s in the computers that run the servers at Google, Amazon and all the other web services that we take for granted.

      It powers the database that US immigration uses to decide if you are who you say you are, it’s deep under the Alps searching for new particles at CERN, and it’s even on unmanned drones searching for drugs traffickers in the Caribbean.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • The Problem of Menus

      Interfaces for traditional computers and mobile devices have become increasingly inventive in the last few years. So far, however, none have solved a basic design challenge: designing an efficient menu.

      The challenge rarely exists within applications. An application usually has half a dozen or more top level menus, each with less than a dozen items, so a drop-down system is usually good enough.

      But on the desktop environment, the norm has always been to have a single menu that lists all applications, and often shut-down commands, a list of favorites, and a few other items.

      To function well, each variation needs to make items quick to find and to distract minimally from whatever else the user is doing. Unfortunately, while a solution may do one of these things, none of the available alternatives manages to do both at the same time.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • FOSDEM’13 Excellent Opportunity for KDE

        FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (this year on the 2nd & 3rd of February). It’s one of the few community-centered conferences in Europe, and the largest volunteer-run Free Software event in Europe as well. Proposals are now invited for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics. KDE will be in the Cross Desktop Developer Room (devroom), along with Enlightenment, Gnome, Razor, Unity and XFCE. This is a unique opportunity to share KDE with a wide audience of developers.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Final GNOME 3.6 update improves stability

        GNOME logo The second update to the 3.6.x series of GNOME has been released by the project’s developers to further improve the stability of the popular open source Linux and Unix desktop environment. As expected at this stage, the maintenance update has only minor changes including bug fixes and module and translation updates.

  • Distributions

    • Buyer’s guide to Linux distros

      Fancy giving Linux a whirl? Here are all the factors that you should look for when choosing from the wide range of available Linux distributions.

    • Which is the best Linux distro?
    • Dream Studio 12.04.1 Screenshots

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Developers Unhappy, Fork udev

        The udev code-base has been forked by Gentoo Linux developers after they — and other parties — have been unhappy with the future direction of udev as set by systemd developers.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian review

        With several other distributions effectively based on the Debian system, it’s fair to say that it’s an important distro. In fact, as Linux distributions go, it’s positively stately; a grandaddy among open source upstarts.

        As you might expect from such an elderly, respected relative, it’s awash with hardware support – as well as the common Intel x86 processors, it will work with a number of other architectures, including PowerPC. Plus, there’s a huge 29,000 software packages included on the full DVD-based ISO, a download that runs to 4.4GB. In many respects, Debian’s tagline – “the universal OS” – is well earned.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Builder 2.3.1 Supports elementary OS Luna

            On November 15, Francesco Muriana has the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu Builder 2.3.1 open source application.

            Ubuntu Builder 2.3.1 is here to fix two annoying bugs in Ubuntu 12.10′s installer form, Ubiquity, that didn’t allow users to customize the slideshow.

          • Crowdsourcing in IT: A New FOSS Trend?

            Shuttleworth also pointed to what he called the “DevOps magic” that can arise when the community comes together. “You can have one group using Chef, and another group using Puppet, and with JuJu, they can easily connect and use each other’s knowledge, leveraging the unique skills that they both bring to table,” he explained. “It’s a complete buffet of all the goodness that open source offers.”

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 3Scale Launches Open Source API Proxy Providing Enterprises On-premises and in the Cloud API Traffic Management

    3Scale3Scale, a leading Plug and Play SaaS API Management platform and services provider, has just announced the launch of a new Open Source API Proxy that provides Enterprises API traffic management on-premises and in the cloud.

  • i2b2 open source software boosts HIE, biomedical research

    The health informatics software i2b2 — Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside — was started in 2006, and has become something of a building block for several health information networks and research projects in genomics, pharmaceuticals and population health.

    Developed at the Partners HealthCare System as a federally-funded biomedical computing center, the open source software is letting biomedical researchers combine genomic and molecular research with data and observations from electronic health records, and its code set is also being used to link with claims databases and health information exchanges.

  • Sometimes the good guys win

    Leave it to him to prove me wrong, and I can tell you how he’ll respond: He’ll just chalk it up to my being a liberal. Honest. Then we’ll laugh about that — the tree-hugging Californian and the rock-ribbed conservative Texan — and we’ll move on to the next FOSS issue we’ll be addressing together.

    Thanks for getting the better of your disease, Ken. I know I speak for a multitude of folks who would echo that sentiment, and I know an army of folks who are glad you’re on our side in fighting proprietary software.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Finances Are Sturdy As it Eyes the Mobile Future

        Mozilla has just released its annual report, with a PDF available at the bottom of this page, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is that Mozilla’s search revenue climbed a very healthy 31 percent for the year. Many people don’t realize that Mozilla gets most of its revenues from Google, as we’ve reported before, but even more may not realize that Mozilla also has deals with Microsoft, Yahoo and other search players. Mozilla’s royalties, mostly from search deals, came to $161.9 million for 2011, up from the previous year’s $123.2 million.

      • With increased revenue, Mozilla sets its sights on mobile

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • How to become a contributor to LibreOffice: a digest with pointers

      Sophie Gautier, one of the founders of the Document Foundation and currently a member of our membership committee has recently published a series of articles on how to become a contributor to the LibreOffice projects. Her blog posts do not cover the development side of the story, but they discuss an often less understood and perhaps less documented aspect of our community and contribution process. As I find myself sending her articles by email several times a week, I thought it would be just easier to list them and link them here for more convenience.

    • Upgrading Away From Office Suites

  • Education

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Could open source software save New York City’s bike share program?

      A bike share program that was supposed to be launched last summer in New York City has come to a halt due to software related issues. I can’t help but think that if the software was open source, these problems would have been easily resolved, elimating worrisome delays.

      This past August, Mayor Bloomburg said “The software doesn’t work,” responding to questions about why the bike-share program is on hold. Now, according to a post in the New York Times, flooding and damage from Hurricane Sandy has caused further setbacks.

    • Google Books team open sources their book scanner

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap launches “Operation Cowboy”

        The OpenStreetMap community has announced that it will host its second global “mapathon” during the weekend of 23–25 November; this time, the event is code-named “Operation Cowboy” and will focus on the US. Concentrating on “armchair mapping”, aerial images will be surveyed at local meetings, as well as from home. Based on these surveys, the project will then complement its map material for the US. The campaign has its own official Twitter account and hash tag: #OPC2012.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Development of PHP 5.5 begins

      The release of a first alpha of PHP 5.5 marks the official beginning of the 5.5.0 release cycle for the scripting language’s next major version. PHP 5.5 also marks the end of support for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

    • Why LLVM/Clang Was Ported To A Super Computer

      Most often whenever writing about LLVM and its Clang C/C++ compiler front-end on Phoronix, within the forums is a flurry of comments from those in support of and against this modular compiler infrastructure. Some are against LLVM/Clang simply because its BSD-licensed and sponsored by Apple rather than the GPLv3-licensed GCC backed by the FSF. Others, meanwhile, see LLVM as presenting unique advantages and benefits. What reasons would a leading US national laboratory have for deploying LLVM/Clang to their leading super-computer? Here’s an explanation from them.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Drone activist makes rounds before prison

      An Iowa farmer headed to federal prison at the end of the month after protesting at a Missouri Air Force base warned William Woods University students yesterday that the military’s use of predator drones will bring combat into the United States.

    • TSA Vendor Denies Faking Test of Body-Imaging Software

      OSI Systems Inc. (OSIS)’s Rapiscan unit, one of two suppliers of body-scanning machines in U.S. airports, may have falsified tests of software intended to stop the machines from recording graphic images of travelers, a U.S. lawmaker said.

      The company “may have attempted to defraud the government by knowingly manipulating an operational test,” Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Transportation Security Subcommittee, said in a letter to Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole Nov. 13. Rogers said his committee received a tip about the faked tests.

    • Naked Scanner Maker Accused Of Manipulating Tests To Make Scans Look Less Invasive
    • Doug Stanhope on Alcohol, Politics and Killing Comedy Bootleggers’ Families

      Stanhope’s coarse, unapologetic and shockingly candid brand of comedy has won him rabid fans, as well as a few foes. Ricky Gervais said Stanhope “might be the most important standup working today.” Jón Gnarr, the comedian-mayor of Reykjavik, recently welcomed Stanhope to Iceland so he could perform in the country’s only maximum-security prison. (For this, Stanhope invented the “Stanhope Defense,” the legal argument that you committed a crime just to see the show.)

      At the same time, Stanhope’s cracks about the attractiveness of Irish women and the redundancy of the royal family have incensed an impressively large fraction of the British Isles.

      Whether you love or hate him, there’s more to Stanhope than just his drunken, in-your-face comedy routines. That’s clear from his critically lauded portrayal of a suicidal comic in the hit show Louie, not to mention his media-savvy web ventures, including Doug Stanhope’s Celebrity Death Pool. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s release of his new live CD/DVD, Before Turning the Gun on Himself, Wired caught up with Stanhope and tried to temper his raging comedy fury with cold, hard science. The results were far less messy than expected.

    • A drone policy in reverse

      Should Mexico have the ability to send drones over U.S. soil to follow the gunrunners and kill them?

    • Oliver Stone on the Untold US History From the Atomic Age to Vietnam to Obama’s Drone Wars
    • Death from above

      Britain announced a doubling of its drone fleet in Afghanistan while France said it is sending drones to Mali.

    • NICTA to help protect the US’ drone fleet

      Other members of the consortium include the Boeing Company, Galois and the University of Minnesota.

  • Finance

    • Plan

      The rot comes from predators posing as conservatives and mouthing the rhetoric of “free markets.” They are not actually interested in free markets. Their goal is to use the government to build monopolies, to control resources, to block regulation, to crush unions, to divert as much as possible from taxpayers into private pockets. They have a reckless attitude toward war-making and they put the financial system in peril by failing to enforce standards of ethics and transparency. As a result, they imperil the country’s credit in the world. True conservatives recognize this, which is why they defected from Bush and McCain long ago.

  • Censorship

    • Right to remain silent in school?

      Principals in Kentucky may soon have to worry about reading students their rights in addition to ensuring that the students know how to read and write.

    • Social Media, Internet Shutdowns are the Latest Weapons in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

      This exchange prompted Brian Fung at The Atlantic to wonder if the war of words between Israel and Hamas violated Twitter’s of terms of service, which prohibits “direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Fung eventually concluded that the exchange did not constitute a violation of Twitter’s TOS, but Matthew Ingram took the opportunity to point out the extraordinary amount of power social media companies have in scenarios such as this one. YouTube has refused to take down the assassination video, even though it appears to violate the site’s community guidelines, which state “if your video shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don’t post it.” Wired goes on to quote an anonymous YouTube employee saying that the guidelines are just that—guidelines, and not hard-and-fast rules. YouTube’s decision to leave the assassination video up comes just weeks after the company decided to break from its long-standing policies and take down an anti-Muslim video “The Innocence of Muslims” in Egypt and Libya, even though they explicitly admitted that the video did not violate any aspect of their terms of service and they had not received a court order requiring them to do so.

    • Verizon called hypocritical for equating net neutrality to censorship

      Back in July, we covered Verizon’s argument that network neutrality regulations violated the firm’s First Amendment rights. In Verizon’s view, slowing or blocking packets on a broadband network is little different from a newspaper editor choosing which articles to publish, and should enjoy the same constitutional protection.

  • Privacy

    • What the Petraeus scandal says about digital spying and your e-mail

      E-mail — even anonymous e-mail — is not as secure as you think: E-mails don’t just carry a subject line and whatever you type into them. These digital missives also tote along with them packets of information called “metadata” or “headers,” which may contain information about where the message was sent from. That can help investigators corroborate who sent an e-mail, even if it comes from an anonymous account.

  • Civil Rights

    • Polish and German police against antifascists

      That day, German Nazis wanted to organize demonstration against Polish immigrants. The counter demonstration is supported both by workers, leftists and religious groups. Even the mayor of the town gave “support” to the demonstration. But the true about this “support” is a bit different.
      Near the German-Polish border there was an organized group which was going to join. Posters were put in the streets of the town of Kostrzyn. People also could join contacting the group via internet.

    • Ikea ‘deeply regrets’ use of forced labour

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Bad Reasoning: We Don’t Need More High Speed Internet Because People Don’t Use Fast Internet Now

      There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how far the US has fallen behind other countries when it comes to high speed broadband. And many are taking it for granted that high speed broadband is important to economic growth and viability. Yet Tim Worstall, over at Forbes, argues that “High Speed Broadband Doesn’t Matter A Darn” because a UK study showed that people don’t use super high speeds. He quotes a report (pdf) from Booz & Co.

    • Domain Shakedown: Companies Warned About The Dangers Of Unprotected .SX

      Ever since ICANN announced plans to allow tons of new top level domains to enter the market, many have recognized that this was nothing more than a money grab — as companies would feel compelled to buy up “their” names to keep them out of the hands of others. What’s amazing is that TLD operators are barely even hiding this in their marketing material. Lauren Weinstein recently received a “pitch” from the operators of the new .sx domain. .sx isn’t one of the new “generic” TLDs from ICANN, but rather is a newish TLD from Sint Maarten (an “autonomous country” from within the Netherlands) similar to various other “new” TLDs built off of lucky country codes (such as .tv, .ly and .co). However, the marketing message for .sx is really quite incredible. Basically, they’re saying .sx is quite similar to “sex” and, gee, you wouldn’t want your brand associated with sex, would you?

    • Google, Dish Held Talks to Launch Wireless Service
    • Show your support for European fast broadband!

      You’re probably aware of our targets on broadband. To get every European with basic broadband coverage by 2013; and, by 2020, fast coverage (30 Megabits+) for all, with 50% of households having subscriptions at 100 Megabits or more. Those targets are central to Europe’s digital agenda – and essential to ensuring new products and services can come online.

    • History of the Internet in Canada

      When discussing the history of the internet in Canada we must first look at the pre-internet era: A confusing time with many emerging technologies and incompatible network protocols.

      In the early 1980s we had BBSes or Bulletin Board Services where individuals could run BBS software such as C-net, Opus and PCBoard (or even their own custom software) on a home computer. The computers were connected via modems using regular telephone lines, and users could log in one at a time. Some of the bigger BBSes could handle more than one user at a time but were generally a paid service, not free like most of the hobbyist services.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

11.16.12

Links 16/11/2012: Fedora 19 is Schrödinger’s Cat, Android Grabs 90% Smartphones Share in China

Posted in News Roundup at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Nvidia’s Ginormous Gift to Linux Gamers

    “This could sway game companies to make more games for Linux, meaning that gamers would have to boot into Windows less and less, eventually maybe not at all,” said blogger Linux Rants. “Where go the games go the users. Other applications follow. If played correctly on the market, this could be the first step for Linux to more global acceptance on the desktop.”

  • ZaReason’s Ubuntu All-in-One PC Might Look A Little Familiar…

    Linux hardware re-sellers ZaReason have debuted their ‘Zimo 930′ PC – an all-in-one desktop computer that has more than a whiff of familiarity about it.

  • Students learn Linux

    More than 200 students from schools and pre-university (PU) colleges in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, and Kasaragod participated in competitions based on open-source software in a city college on Thursday. The event titled “Byte-Struck ’12” was held at P.A. College of Engineering (PACE), to create awareness about free open-source software (FOSS) among high school and PU students.

  • Desktop

    • $199 Acer C7 adds to Google’s Chromebook Holiday Push

      A few weeks after Samsung found surprising success with its new $249, ARM-based Chromebook, Acer launched an x86-based Acer C7 Chromebook on Nov. 13 for just $199. The latest two laptops running Google’s open source Linux- and Chrome-based Chrome OS are considerably cheaper than the Windows-based competition, putting them in the same territory as low-cost Android tablets like the Kindle Fire HD.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel Introduces PowerClamp Driver For Linux

      Linux kernel developers have created an Intel PowerClamp driver, which is an experiment with idle injection for Intel hardware to take advantage of power-efficient package-level C-states for power capping and passive thermal control. Separately, Intel RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) support is now exposed through TurboStat.

    • AMD Is Still Contributing Code To Linux

      Many Linux users have been mad over AMD closing down its Operating System Research Center resulting in many AMD Linux open-source developers losing their jobs. Last week I wrote that ultimately it shouldn’t be too worrisome for Linux users wanting to use AMD processors and chipsets on Linux and this still looks to be the case.

    • Kernel Log – Coming in 3.7 (Part 1): Filesystems & storage

      Linux 3.7 introduces a range of Btrfs performance improvements. The kernel now supports the SMB data exchange protocol that recent Windows versions use, and it offers discard functionality for software RAIDs, which is important for SSDs.

    • Intel Makes Microsoft’s C++ AMP Cross-Platform

      Engineers at Intel ended up developing “Shevlin Park”, which is a prototype implementation of C++ AMP built using OpenCL with LLVM/Clang. The LLVM/Clang compiler stack was modified to handle C++ AMP programming constructions and the C++ AMP computations expressed within OpenCL compute kernels.

    • Distributed filesystem: XtreemFS 1.4 with Hadoop support

      At the SC12 conference that is currently taking place in Salt Lake City, the XtreemFS developers have released version 1.4 of their distributed filesystem. XtreemFS 1.4 supports asynchronous background writes, which significantly improves performance when storing data. The developers say that they have further improved stability – server and client operation is now said to be “rock solid”. The new Hadoop client allows the filesystem to be used as a substitute for HDFS in Hadoop clusters.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa: Thread Offloading, Asynchronous SwapBuffers

        Marek Olšák continues to work on Mesa/Gallium3D performance improvements. Marek’s latest work is on implementing a-synchronous SwapBuffers and to allow for thread offloading of SwapBuffers via a new DRI2 extension to the libGL-Mesa interface.

  • Applications

    • Top 5 Free Suites to Replace Microsoft Office
    • Resara Me This

      More than any other program, Samba allows Linux desktops to exist in the world of Windows. In fact, Samba historically has allowed Linux to live secretly in the server room as well. It’s possible to emulate a Primary Domain Controller from your Linux server, and Windows machines can’t tell the difference. The problem is that Microsoft no longer uses PDCs and has turned to Active Directory.

    • Taking a look at NixNote

      Sometimes, well more often than that, I get annoyed by the lack of attention and outright affection that Linux gets from some software developers. Specifically the developers of web applications that also offer desktop clients.

      Case in point: Evernote. I use Evernote, not to remember everything but to remember certain things I need to remember. And if you’re going to excoriate me for using a web-based application, I don’t want to hear it.

      Back to Evernote. Users of Mac OS and Windows can install a shiny desktop application. No such beastie exists for Linux. Well, not officially. While I’ve run the Windows Evernote client under WINE, it wasn’t the most satisfying experience. Which is why I turned to NixNote (formerly NeverNote).

    • Proprietary

      • ViewCast Introduces the Most Cost-Effective Digital Streaming Media System; Extends Support for Linux Community

        ViewCast Corporation (OTCBB: VCST), a developer of industry-leading solutions that help companies deliver video to broadband and mobile networks, announced today the availability of the newest addition to its line of industry-leading streaming media systems, the Niagara 9100-4D, a digital high-density encoder platform. The product will debut at Content & Communications World (CCW), the conference for innovative communication technologies in New York. Additionally, a new Linux driver for the Osprey 845e video capture card will be available soon.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine

    • Games

      • Valve’s Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns

        Valve’s initial roll-out of their Steam client for Linux is all centered around Ubuntu. With Ubuntu having the largest market-share on the Linux desktop, Valve is focusing upon proper Ubuntu support as their first priority. In the days that the Ubuntu/Debian package has been available of the Steam Linux Beta, it’s already been reported to work on other Linux distributions. Some Linux distributions have also begun to package the Steam Linux binary for their own platforms, but now there’s some concerns about doing this, at least from the Arch Linux camp.

        With catering to Ubuntu Linux users as their first priority, Valve released the Linux beta as just a Debian package. Other Linux distribution packagers meanwhile want Steam on their own Linux distribution and to make it easy for their Linux gamers, so some have begun creating their own Steam binary packages. One of the first Linux distributions doing this was Arch Linux where they re-packaged Steam for Linux for their system. However, concerns have arose whether this is permitted or not.

      • Steam for Linux gets three new games

        Steam is a great source for any gamer. It is a place that will allow you to try out and enjoy many of the more popular video games that are available on the market today. Steam Greenlight will allow you to vote on games that you would like to see become available. It is a great system for gamers; they do not have to drop $50 to purchase every game off the shelf. They can simply join Steam and enjoy the most popular ones at a reduced price.

        Steam is not only a place to acquire games to play. It is also a place where you can talk with other gamers and possibly get information on cheat codes or creative ways to pass a particularly difficult level. It is convenient and rather popular.

      • Let’s Play: Steam Linux Beta Client

        Now follow my installation video if you want to know how to run the client if you’re not a beta tester.
        As i said before, there are many games which can be already played, but the first thing to do (if you have not done it before) is to redeem all your HIB Steam keys.
        This is a list of playable games:

        - Aquaria
        - Cogs
        - Cubemen
        - Darwinia
        - Dungeons of Dredmor
        - Frozen Synapse
        - Space Pirates and Zombies
        - Uplink
        - World of Goo

      • I Will Survive – On Kickstarter

        I Will Survive looks like an interesting platform game with dark homer, uncensored adult content, gore and zombies.

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Empathy 3.6.2 Integrates Better with GNOME Online Account

        Empathy 3.6.2 instant messaging client for the GNOME desktop environment, but also used on the Ubuntu operating system, was announced last evening, November 13.

        It has been a while since our last announcement for a stable version of Empathy, so we will list here all the fixes and enhancements implemented in the app since version 3.6.0.1, which improved Live search.

      • GNOME 3.8 Will Have Support for ownCloud

        The upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment will allow users to easily connect to their ownCloud and Flickr accounts, via the GNOME Online Accounts app.

      • The 2012 GNOME User Survey Begins, Take It Now

        It’s time for the annual GNOME User Survey to solicit feedback from Linux desktop users about their views on the GNOME desktop, preferences about Linux desktop features, and other topics. Please take a few minutes to complete this brief survey.

      • GNOME 3.6.2 Has Been Officially Released

  • Distributions

    • Elementary OS Luna preview

      The first beta edition of what will become Elementary OS Luna has been released. Luna is a bold attempt to revamp and completely retool Jupiter, the distribution’s first edition. I got a first look at what Luna will bring to the table with the latest stable edition of Pear Linux, whose shell, Pear Shell, is based on Pantheon, the desktop environment and shell of Elementary OS.

      From what I have so far observed about Elementary OS Luna, it is built atop Ubuntu Precise Pangolin, on Linux kernel 3.2. It uses a pre-Ubuntu 12.10 version of Ubiquity, Ubuntu’s graphical installation program, which means that it lacks support for LVM and full disk encryption.

    • elementary OS 0.2 Beta 1 Looks Really Beautiful

      After years of hard work, Cassidy James proudly announced a few minutes ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming elementary OS 0.2 Linux distribution is now available for download and testing.

      Personally, I’m so excited about this development release of the elementary OS 0.2 that I don’t even know where to start.

    • CAINE 3.0 Review – Linux Forensics

      CAINE is a well-known specialised Linux distribution focusing on penetration testing. With its latest 3.0 release, it updates itself to the Ubuntu 12.04 base and adds a host of new tools

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 3 Alpha 3 Is Powered by Linux Kernel 3.6.5

        Anne Nicolas announced a few last night, November 14, the immediate availability for download of the third Alpha release of the upcoming Mageia 3 operating system.

      • Mageia 3 is Shaping up with Alpha 3

        After a bit of a delay Mageia 3 Alpha 3 was released yesterday. This offering brings several improvements, new security checks, and upgrades, but unfortunately for the impatient, no new artwork. Mageia is asking for testers, particularly of the installer and upgrade process, and bug reports to help make Mageia 3 as rock solid as possible.

      • Mageia 3 receives third and final Alpha

        Mageia 3, the next version of the popular new distribution, is in its final Alpha stages, with updates to the installer and kernel

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Releases Upstart 1.6

            While most Linux distributions have moved on to using systemd as their init daemon replacement, Canonical is still investing in their Upstart init daemon for Ubuntu. Upstart 1.6 has now been released and it presents several new features.

          • Could Ubuntu Power Your Phone?

            Ubuntu on smartphones remains a totally theoretical proposition. But that hasn’t stopped Canonical from releasing a video showcasing all the cool things that Ubuntu could do if it did run on phones. Is the company getting ahead of itself, or is this a sign that Ubuntu might finally be poised to make the jump to the mobile world?

          • Ubuntu gaining ground in website deployments

            Although it has chiefly been known as a desktop Linux distribution, Ubuntu has been gaining ground in data centers as well, according to the latest statistics from web survey outfit W3Techs.

            In figures compiled on Thursday, 7 per cent of all the world’s web servers were found to be running Ubuntu, up from 5.5 per cent the previous year.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 12.10

              This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop environment.

              The software I propose as default is the one I found easiest to use and best in their functionality – this won’t necessarily be true for your needs, thus you are welcome to try out the applications listed as alternatives.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Vendor-supported open source software unpacked

    The value of vendor-supported open source software was the focus of the panel discussion at ITWeb and Linux Warehouse’s Virtual Data Centres Forum, held at Montecasino on Wednesday.

    The aim of the discussion was to unpack the vendor-supported open source software phenomenon and detail what opportunities this kind of software creates for virtual data centres.

  • Broadcom Releases Bluetooth Software Into Open Source
  • OmniOS Wants To Fill The OpenSolaris Void [link corrected]
  • Control vs. influence: Which way for open source?

    Apparently, all that’s stopping the music industry from returning to its former glory is its failure to punish people who download music without paying for it. But if that’s the case, why did music sales in Japan fall when downloaders of unlicensed content were slammed with draconian penalties?

    The same reverse effect applies to open source. Why do open source projects with a vendor tightly controlling the code usually fail to grow? Why do open source projects with relaxed licenses still get plenty of code contributions, though the license does not require them?

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • CMS

    • Rebuttal: Open Source DAM Solutions – Like Buying a Cake or Buying a Car?

      I often read Edward Smith’s contributions to CMSWire and he does a good job of presenting DAM concepts in a way that is straightforward for non-experts to understand. However, I disagree with a number of the points raised in his recent article, “Open Source DAM Solutions: More Control for Those Who Need It,” as I believe it misrepresents this category of software license.

  • Business

    • ForgeRock Launches Open Identity Stack To Protect Enterprise, Cloud, Social, And Mobile Applications

      ForgeRock Inc., the pioneer of open source Identity and Access Management (IAM), today announced availability of the first and only unified, 100% Open Source Stack to secure applications and services across enterprise, cloud, social and mobile environments. With over 250K downloads in less than 24 months, the ForgeRock Open Identity Stack is rapidly building a rich community of global companies working to deploy identity management infrastructure more easily and economically.

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 5.2 Release Is On Approach

      NetBSD 6.0 was released last month with better multi-core/SMP support, the experimental CHFS file-system for flash devices, and other worthwhile enhancements. However, for those not yet ready to jump from NetBSD 5.x to NetBSD 6.0, there is a NetBSD 5.2 release on approach.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Last day to submit Free Software Awards nominations!

      Here at the Free Software Foundation, we are grateful to the people who have devoted their lives to advancing free software. We’re thankful for the developers working hard to bring new free software tools into the world. We’re thankful for the legal eagles working to defend the GNU General Public License. We’re thankful for the organizers committed to introducing free software to new audiences. That’s why, each year, we give out the Award for the Advancement of Free Software to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and advancement of free software.

    • FSF to begin accepting scanned assignments from Germany

      The FSF is pleased to announce that we can begin accepting scanned assignments from contributors residing in Germany.

      Last year, the FSF was happy to announce a change to our copyright assignment policy. Based on the advice of our counsel we were able to begin accepting scanned copies of assignments from U.S. residents. We also updated our policy to enable sending digital documents worldwide, but we unfortunately could not begin accepting scanned documents in return from non-U.S. contributors.

    • Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

  • Project Releases

    • FreeIPMI 1.2.3 Released
    • Samba 4 now planned for release on Dec 11

      Samba 4 — the first open source Active Directory-compatible print and file server — will now ship on December 11, developers say.

      It’s a bit of a delay from the recent slated finish date of Nov 27th, now the targeted date for release candidate 5. Release candidate 4 of Samba was posted on Nov 13.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Harvard Research Scientist: Sharing Discoveries More Efficient, More Honorable Than Patenting Them

      More efficient. More honorable. It’s a small example of the potential destruction for both prongs of the pro-patent argument. If it makes science more efficient to not patent, there goes promoting the progress. If it’s more honorable, there goes the moral argument. And, unlike some pharma companies, I’m not even going to make patents the key point here: Bradner’s focus is on helping people. Do we get the same sense from the crowd patenting their drugs, their medical diagnostic techniques, and anything else they can get their hands on?

    • Open-Source Advocacy Proves Its Value in 2012 Elections

      Open source is a term first used to describe software, meaning both its free redistribution and the practice of making it easy for anyone to change a product’s design and use. Open-source organizing meant youth groups were able to do more with less.

    • African company constructs world’s first open-source metabolic chamber

      HealthQ Technologies, a high-tech startup facility based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, claims to have constructed the first open-source metabolic chamber in the world.

      The company says that the metabolic chamber will enable South African entrepreneurs and researchers to perform crucial experiments using facilities which were previously inaccessible. It is also intended to be used for developing new technologies and products in the wellness, weight-loss and fitness industries.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open standards unlock software potential

      Unpacking all things open source, Red Hat’s open source evangelist for EMEA, Jan Wildeboer, stressed that open source software means increased flexibility and freedom.

      During his keynote address at the Virtual Data Centres Forum, held at Montecasino this week, Wildeboer, sporting his trademark red hat, provided a brief history of the development of open source, open standards and open content.

Leftovers

  • “Involuntary porn” site tests the boundaries of legal extortion

    In the era of Polaroid cameras, you didn’t have to worry too much about a racy snapshot you took in the privacy of your bedroom becoming available to the general public. But thanks to the rise of digital cameras and the Internet, that’s now a real risk. Hackers, disgruntled exes, and other vindictive individuals who gain access to your compromising digital snapshots can share them with the world with a single click.

    Recently, a number of websites have sprung up to cash in on the public humiliation of others. One of the first such sites was IsAnyoneUp, which solicited nude pictures of ordinary Americans submitted by third parties. To maximize the humiliation, the photos were posted along with identifying details such as name and home town. The site’s owner, Hunter Moore, reportedly raked in thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue, and he made the rounds on television talk shows defending his site.

  • Science

    • Robots in demand in China as labour costs climb

      In China, there’s no better time to be a robot. Pictures from last week’s International Industry Fair in Shanghai show them duelling with lightsabers, playing ping pong and dancing in lion costumes. One shows a female robot in a white wool coat shaking hands with a visitor.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Anti-GM protests throughout Latin America

      Fear of unforeseen health and environmental consequences resulting from genetically-modified crops has caused protests throughout Latin America in recent months, notably in Paraguay and Mexico. (item 2)

    • Hide the Kids, the Elderly, the Sick & the Poor! Paul Ryan is Headed for the Cliff

      After an electoral shellacking and exit polls that show the vast majority of Americans are on Barack Obama’s side when it comes to the major issues of the day, Paul Ryan is headed back to Congress convinced that he espouses “very popular ideas” and calling the 2012 results “a very close election.”

      With this mind-set Ryan is prepping to turn the “fiscal cliff” austerity debate to the advantage of the Social Security bashers and Medicare slashers.

    • Tamiflu scrutinised as BMJ calls on pharmaceutical giant to release data

      A leading British medical journal is asking the drug maker Roche to release all its data on Tamiflu, claiming there is no evidence the drug can actually stop the flu.

    • ‘Grand Bargain’ Charade a Scheme to Protect Corporate Welfare

      Congress is still talking about a “Grand Bargain” that “balances” far more spending cuts than tax increases. That is another way of saying that you – the consumer of Medicare and Medicaid services, the recipient of Social Security, and the average taxpayer will take the brunt of the spending cuts, while the wealthy get their income taxes restored, not raised, to their pre-Bush modest levels. Don’t buy it!

  • Security

    • CGit Maintainer Disappears, Security Hole Found

      The maintainer behind the open-source CGit project, the popular web front-end to viewing Git repositories, disappeared some months ago. Since then a new maintainer has taken over work on this widely-used software while also discovering a nasty security hole that allows arbitrary command execution. A new CGit release has now occurred under the new leadership to address this problem.

    • At SEC: Porn Surfing Down, Waste Up, Stunning Disregard For Basic Computer Security

      An internal investigative report of the SEC’s Trading and Markets division has been recently been reviewed by Reuters. After reading its rundown of the misdeeds and abuses uncovered, I’m left with the urge to laugh maniacally in the manner of someone having just cleared the tipping point and now sliding irretrievably into insanity. The sheer irresponsibility on display here springs from the sort of irredeemable carelessness that comes with spending other people’s money (taxes) and operating without any credible oversight or accountability (a large percentage of government entities).

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • A Presidential Candidate Who Will Talk About Drones
    • The Real Scandal: Crimes of War, Not Passion

      The media blitz is fully engaged around the latest Washington sex scandals, and with it come nascent cheers from some anti-war sectors over the public unraveling of the top brass who have helped to orchestrate the longest war in U.S. history. On email threads and in the blogosphere, one is likely to view celebratory remarks laced with words like “comeuppance,” “karma,” and “justice.” Yet while it may be true that there’s a certain element of ironic remuneration in all of this, it’s also the case that such episodes can serve to draw our focus toward the wrong issues and the wrong scandals.

    • Police ban Israeli activists from West Bank demonstrations

      Israeli police officers distributed closed military zone orders for four West Bank villages early Sunday morning to 13 prominent activists in groups such as Anarchists Against the Wall, Ta’ayush, and the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement. In most cases, the military orders were delivered personally, but for some activists who happened not to be home, they were left under their doors. In some cases, the officers came to look for the activists in their old addresses, disturbing family members and friends, entering homes without a court order, and videotaping those present against their will, even after they were requested not to do so.

    • Cybersecurity Bill Fails To Move Forward In The Senate (Again)

      As was widely expected, Harry Reid tried to bring the problematic Cybersecurity Act back from the dead today. He needed 60 votes for cloture, which would have then allowed the bill to actually be debated upon (with various amendments considered as well). However, after a few short grandstanding speeches, the attempt at cloture failed, 51 votes to 47, well short of the 60 votes needed. Harry Reid then got up and lashed out at his colleagues, basically saying that he and other Cybersecurity supporters have been spreading so much FUD about how we’re going to be attacked that he can’t believe Senators didn’t fall for it.

    • Dismissal of Whistleblower’s Lawsuit Against Rumsfeld Grants US Officials Greater Immunity for Torture

      A federal court dismissed a lawsuit last week against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The suit, brought by Donald Vance, a US Navy veteran and former defense contractor, and Nathan Ertel, also a former defense contractor, alleged he was responsible for torture they had experienced in an American-run prison in Iraq for nearly one hundred days. The dismissal effectively makes it even more impossible for US citizens to sue high-ranking officials, who are responsible for their torture.

    • Hillsborough investigation: police watchdog given list of 2,444 police officers

      Owers told the committee that the IPCC’s Hillsborough inquiry was into the aftermath of the tragedy – into whether there was a cover-up, why blood samples were taken, what information was released to the media.

    • A country at war rarely spares a thought for the children of the enemy
    • Kent police officers arrested over crime statistics ‘irregularities’

      Five detectives are being questioned in an anti-corruption probe into the alleged manipulation of crime statistics to meet detection targets.

      Kent police said on Thursday the officers – understood to be a detective inspector, detective sergeant and three detective constables – had been arrested “over allegations of administrative irregularities” relating to prisoners.

    • Burma frees more than 450 prisoners before Barack Obama’s visit

      Human rights campaigners say no dissidents are among prisoners to be released in ‘goodwill gesture’

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Madrid demonstration leads general strike as Spain comes to a standstill
    • Rebel mayors threaten banks that continue with eviction policy
    • The Growing Global Movement Against Austerity

      Amaia Engana didn’t wait to be evicted from her home. On Nov. 9, in the town of Barakaldo, a suburb of Bilbao in Spain’s Basque Country, officials from the local judiciary were on their way to serve her eviction papers. Amaia stood on a chair and threw herself out of her fifth-floor apartment window, dying instantly on impact on the sidewalk below. She was the second person in two weeks in Spain to commit suicide as a result of an impending foreclosure action. Her suicide has added gravity to this week’s general strike radiating from the streets of Madrid across all of Europe. As resistance to so-called austerity in Europe becomes increasingly transnational and coordinated, President Barack Obama and the House Republicans begin their debate to avert the “fiscal cliff.” The fight is over fair tax rates, budget priorities and whether we as a society will sustain the social safety net built during the past 80 years.

    • Soup Kitchens Overwhelmed in Crisis-Ridden Spain

      A huge pot of rice steams on the stove at the soup kitchen run by Emaús in the municipality of Torremolinos, on the outskirts of this southern Spanish city. This morning, like every other, Pepi, Adriana and Diego are cooking for over a hundred people who can no longer afford to feed themselves.

    • The American Anti-Corruption Act gets money out of politics, so the people can get back in.
    • Financiers Still Aren’t Rocket Scientists

      Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that “numbers guy” Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn’t the only one to take, just the latest in a series) is more annoying than entertaining.

      You would think that the 2008 economic meltdown, in which the financial industry broke the entire world when they were blindsided by the fact that housing prices can go down as well as up, might have cut into the idea of Wall Street bankers as geniuses, but evidently not. The weird idea that the titans of investment banking are the smartest people on the planet continues to persist, even among people who ought to know better– another thing that bugged me about Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites was the way he uncritically accepted the line that Wall Street was the very peak of the meritocracy. It’s not hard to see where it originates– Wall Street types can’t go twenty minutes without telling everybody how smart they are– but it’s hard to see why so many people accept such blatant propaganda without question.

      Look, Romney was an investment banker and corporate raider at Bain Capital. This is admittedly vastly more quantitative work than, say, being a journalist, but it doesn’t make him a “numbers guy.” The work that they do relies almost as much on luck and personal connections as it does on math– they’re closer to being professional gamblers than mathematical scientists. This is especially true of Bain and Romney, as was documented earlier this year– Bain made some bad bets before Romney got there, and was deep in the hole, and he got them out in large part by exploiting government connections and a sort of hostage-taking brinksmanship, creating a situation in which their well-deserved bankruptcy would’ve created a nightmare for the people they owed money, which bought them enough time for some other bets to pay off.

    • AT&T’s $14 Billion Dollar ‘Bribe’ to Get Rid of Telecom Regulations Is a Multi-Layered Hoax

      Kushnick’s Law states: “A regulated company will always renege on promises to provide public benefits tomorrow in exchange for regulatory and financial benefits today.”

      On November 7th, 2012, AT&T’s press release announced that it would “invest $14 billion to significantly expand wireless and wireline broadband networks, support future IP data growth and new services.”

    • Bankers Beginning to Look a Smidge Desperate: Goldman Looking for Technology Magic Bullets to Fix its Cost Problem

      Now that Wall Street blew up the global economy in its search for fun and profit, it is finally having to eat its own cooking in the form of more modest profits. Of course, the slightly chastened Masters of the Universe seem constitutionally unable to recognize that their own actions might have something to do with the fix they are in. Yes, the immediate aftermath of the crisis looked just dandy, as super low interest rates and official confidence building led to some lovely trading opportunities, which in turn produced record bonuses in 2009 and 2010. But as the Fed flattened the yield curve and the economy has stayed stuck in low gear, investors aren’t keen on taking risk, even if negative real interest rates leave doing nothing as an unattractive option.

    • Alert! Rahm Takes First Step to Privatize Chicago Water – Under the Radar

      To Mayor Emanuel, some jobs are worth more than others–What’s really saved by privatizing a couple dozen positions at the water department?

    • Britain stands at equality crossroads, according to landmark report
    • Will EU nations turn over tax-and-spending sovereignty to Germany?
    • Greece’s creditors should take a haircut

      Caricatures normally paint the IMF as the hard guy, the one who insists that sour austerity medicine is taken on time and in full. By contrast, the EU and the ECB are the softies who roll over in the end and agree a compromise.

      If you ignore the detail of the current spat within the so-called troika, these pen portraits fit. Christine Lagarde and the IMF think the 2020 deadline for reducing Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio to 120% should be kept. The EU politicians think an extension to 2022 is in order on the grounds that Athens is doing a reasonable job in cutting spending and raising taxes.

    • Gas prices: FSA examines whistleblower’s claims of ‘Libor-like’ manipulation
    • A highly taxing session for the men from Amazon, Google and Starbucks

      This public accounts committee interrogation made other recent grillings look like a chat on the sofa with Richard and Judy

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • This Is What Plutocracy Looks Like: Romney Suggests Obama Bribed Voters
    • WI Legislators Receive $24K in Campaign Contributions After Pushing ALEC Predatory Lending Bill

      Wisconsin’s effort to open the state to predatory lenders using American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislation has paid dividends for the ALEC legislators behind it.

      In May of 2011, Rep. Robin Vos, the ALEC State Chair in Wisconsin and head of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, rolled a provision into the 2011-2012 budget bill resembling ALEC model legislation and that legalized auto title loans. Democrats voted against the provision, but it ultimately passed the Republican-led Finance Committee and state legislature.

    • Winners and Losers in the “Big Secret Bucks” Spending War

      The Sunlight Foundation has crunched the numbers and calculated the “return on investment” that big-spending Super PACs and “dark money” groups achieved in the 2012 cycle. It reflects how much of the money spent by each group went to support candidates who won (or to oppose candidates who lost) in the general election campaign.

    • After at Least $6 Billion Spent on 2012 Election, Reformers Look to Future

      Now that the most expensive election in history is over, an increasing number of Americans are demanding action to reduce the influence of money and corporations in our political system — and reformers are offering solutions.

      Polling shows nine in ten Americans agree there is too much corporate money in politics. The vast majority of Americans believe special interests and campaign donors have the most influence over our elected officials (59 percent believe “special interest groups and lobbyists” have the most influence and 46 percent believe it is campaign donors). Only 15 percent of Americans believe that ordinary people are calling the shots.

    • The Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?

      It was the CIA director’s relationship with JSOC—not Paula Broadwell—that should have raised concerns.

  • Censorship

    • Israel Throttles Palestinian Television
    • Senator Wyden Opposes Anti-Leaks Provisions, Puts Hold on Intelligence Authorization Bill

      Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has placed a public hold on the intelligence authorization bill to prevent anti-leaks provisions from passing without any meaningful debate or amendments because he believes they would “inhibit free speech and damage the news media’s ability to report on national security issues.”

      On the Senate floor, Wyden declared, “Congress should be extremely skeptical of any anti-leaks bills that threaten to encroach upon the freedom of the press, or that would reduce access to information that the public has a right to know.”

    • Senator Wyden Puts Hold On Intelligence Authorization Act Over Free Speech Concerns

      Once again, Senator Ron Wyden seems like one of a very small number of people in Congress actually willing to stand up against bad bills that are pushed forward with fear mongering. Earlier this year, we noted just how absolutely ridiculous it was that Senator Dianne Feinstein seemed a hell of a lot more concerned about punishing whoever blew the whistle on questionable US activities like Stuxnet, then about the questionable activities themselves. In response, she put forth some legislation that was designed to punish government whistleblowers, rather than understand why they were blowing the whistle. This bill got dumped into a key appropriations bill, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013. In other words, Feinstein basically said that if we are to fund intelligence activities we have to crack down on whistleblowers. Shameful stuff.

    • “Involuntary porn” site tests the boundaries of legal extortion

      Freedom of expression has been at the top of the agenda this week in Baku at the internet governance forum (IGF), an annual United Nations “multi-stakeholder” meeting. The IGF has previously been held in less democratic states, such as pre-Arab-spring Egypt, and was set up by the UN world summit on the information society, held in Tunisia (and Geneva). But the Azerbaijan government has been particularly vicious in its attacks on journalists and bloggers.

    • Latest Company To Discover The Streisand Effect: Casey Movers

      Phil Buckley has a story of a Massachusetts-based moving company, called Casey Movers, which appears to have violated both of those rules, starting with a legal threat to Buckley’s wife concerning a negative review she had written about Casey Movers 18 months ago, after her parents had a very bad experience with the company. It first took the company over a year to even notice the review and then post a weak defense of its practices. It didn’t respond to any of the specific complaints about unprofessional behavior or broken promises. It only focused on the amount that the company had been willing to pay for damages, and gave a somewhat “technical” response about how this was what the “insurance option” she chose provided — and even could be read as scolding her for not choosing the more expensive insurance option.

    • There’s no way to stop children viewing porn in Starbucks

      Last week’s debate in the Lords on the proposal to stop opt-out pornography filters was a perfect parable about the dangers of putting technically unsophisticated legislators in charge of technology regulation.

  • Privacy

    • Now E-Textbooks Can Report Back on Students’ Reading Habits

      Data mining is creeping into every aspect of student life—classrooms, advising, socializing. Now it’s hitting textbooks, too.

      CourseSmart, which sells digital versions of textbooks by big publishers, announced on Wednesday a new tool to help professors and others measure students’ engagement with electronic course materials.

      When students use print textbooks, professors can’t track their reading. But as learning shifts online, everything students do in digital spaces can be monitored, including the intimate details of their reading habits.

    • When Will our Email Betray Us? An Email Privacy Primer in Light of the Petraeus Saga

      The unfolding scandal that led to the resignation of Gen. David Petraeus, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, started with some purportedly harassing emails sent from pseudonymous email accounts to Jill Kelley. After the FBI kicked its investigation into high gear, it identified the sender as Paula Broadwell and, ultimately, read massive amounts of private email messages that uncovered an affair between Broadwell and Petraeus (and now, the investigation has expanded to include Gen. John Allen’s emails with Kelley). We’ve received a lot of questions about how this works—what legal process the FBI needs to conduct its email investigation. The short answer? It’s complicated.

    • article image8 million UK children on secret database without parental consent
    • The alternatives to the draft Communications Data Bill

      Big Brother Watch has submitted supplementary evidence to the Joint Committee on the draft Communications Data Bill highlighting the alternatives and opportunities available. The draft Bill, which would require details of our every email, website visit and social media log to be recorded, is currently under review from a specially convened joint committee of MPs and Peers.

    • ORG applies to intervene in Golden Eye case – and we need your help

      We want to do more to promote digital rights like privacy through interventions in relevant court cases.

      As part of that ambition, we have applied for permission to intervene in the appeal of the Golden Eye International v Telefonica UK decision. And we need your help to take this important case.

    • How one law student is making Facebook get serious about privacy

      The world’s largest legal battle against Facebook began with a class assignment. Student Max Schrems still hasn’t turned in his university paper on the topic, due well over a year ago, but he has already accomplished something bigger: forcing Facebook to alter its approach to user privacy. Now, Schrems wants cash—hundreds of thousands of euros—to launch the next phase of his campaign, a multi-year legal battle that might significantly redefine how Facebook controls the personal data on over one billion people worldwide.

      “If we get €300,000 ($384,000), we ca

    • FBI’s abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation

      That the stars of America’s national security establishment are being devoured by out-of-control surveillance is a form of sweet justice

  • Civil Rights

    • If There Needs To Be An Investigation, It Should Be About Why The FBI Was Reading Certain Emails

      While some have noted the irony of General Petreaus being taken down due to online surveillance methods that he should have been aware of, the case is bringing growing attention to an issue many of us have been discussing for a while: how easy it is for law enforcement to snoop through your email. We raised the question already, but as more info comes out, the whole thing is looking that much more questionable.

    • Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel On City’s Illegal Recordings Of Conversations With Journalists: ‘Much Ado About Nothing’

      Chicago city hall officials are in a bit of trouble for recording phone conversations with Chicago Tribune reporters without their consent. A city attorney is downplaying the incidents, insisting that there’s no “widespread practice of such tapings” and promising that “steps are being taken” to prevent this from happening again.

    • It Isn’t a Crime When the Government Does It

      So remember when Chicago police were arresting people for recording them, and charging them with crimes punishable by 10 or more years in prison? Remember the woman who was arrested and charged because she attempted to record Chicago PD internal affairs police browbeating her when she tried to report a sexual assault by a Chicago cop? Remember all that stuff we heard from Chicago PD and Cook County DA Anita Alvarez’s office about protecting privacy?

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Democrats & Republicans Should Come Together To Support A Future Of Abundance

      As a therapist would tell a couple bickering over each others’ working and spending habits, Republicans and Democrats now quarreling over the federal budget should change the framing of topic. Instead of focusing only on how much the government should tax and spend in the economy we know, the leaders of the opposing parties should look at what the economy could quickly become if government passed laws encouraging productive private sector investment in growing technology-driven markets.

    • Thailand To Join TPP Negotiations; Access To Medicines Likely To Suffer As A Consequence

      If Thailand joins the TPP negotiations, it will undoubtedly be forced to rescind those compulsory licenses — one of the key features of TPP is its strengthening of protection for pharma patents. The inevitable consequence of that will be increased prices in Thailand for key medicines, and more people suffering and dying as a result. It would be interesting to know what pressure has been brought to bear on the Thai government to take what seems such a damaging step for its people, when other nations are moving in precisely the opposite direction.

    • Copyrights

      • When Agents Attack

        About a year ago, I noticed a shift in the general tone of writers’ conferences. For the ten years I’ve been attending them, there was a tendency for agents at these events to lord it over the room, being very strict about what they were looking for, how they like to be approached, how not to approach them, and how to talk to them. The power balance was one-sided, needlessly (and sometimes insultingly) so.

        Then agents started getting nervous. And defensive. Instead of, “This is how to get us,” the line became, “This is why you need us.” And things started to get a lot more interesting.

        A week and a half ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Novelists, Inc. 23rd Annual Conference. And on one of the panels I sat on, all the growing tension and dissatisfaction came to a head.

      • University Of Washington’s Defense Of Twitter Limits On Journalists More Ridiculous Than The Restrictions Themselves

        Except… that’s not true. The “live description of events” is not protectable by the University. It’s possible that someone could claim copyright over their own description of the events, but the University has no IP rights on the “live description of events.” Such a thing simply doesn’t exist and it would be a massive First Amendment issue if it did. That someone there thinks such a “right” exists is ridiculous.

      • Another Kirtsaeng Question: Why Have the Distribution Right?

        In the wake of the Kirtsaeng oral argument, I wanted to look at a strange thing about how the first sale doctrine works in our copyright laws. The first sale doctrine makes it legal for you to sell, lend, or give away copies of copyrighted works that you own. Without it, it would be copyright infringement for you to do any of those things with a book, a CD, or a DVD, even if you’d bought and paid for a legitimate copy of the thing.

        In much the same way that deeply-held values of free speech and expression are reconciled with copyright law through the doctrine of fair use, first sale allows copyright law to coexist with the older doctrines of property: the fact that I own this physical object means I get to decide how I want to dispose of it.

        Even though the law recognizes that owning your own copies of works is a fundamental right, it still gets to that right in a slightly roundabout way. If I were to walk through how copyright and first sale governed my sale of a paperback, I’d first look at section 106(3) and see that it gives a copyright holder the ability to prevent me from selling my copy of a book. But then, section 109(a) sweeps in to preserve my property rights within the sphere of copyright.

      • RIAA Prefers Customers Who Buy A Little To Pirates Who Buy A Lot

        To me, this was a fairly innocuous finding, well in line with other studies. For my money, the more important findings were that personal sharing ‘between friends’ is about as prevalent and as significant in music acquisition as ‘downloading for free’, and that together they are outweighed by legal acquisition.

      • Book Scanning As Fair Use: Google Makes Its Case As Authors Guild Appeals Hathitrust Fair Use Ruling

        Two new developments in the two big cases concerning book scanning and fair use: first up, we’ve got the somewhat unsurprising news that the Authors Guild is appealing its rather massive loss against Hathitrust, the organization that was set up to scan books from a bunch of university library collections. As you may recall, Judge Harold Baer’s ruling discussed how the book scanning in that case was obviously fair use. It was a near complete smackdown for the Authors Guild.

11.15.12

Links 15/11/2012: Enlightenment E17 Alpha 2, m0n0wall 1.34

Posted in News Roundup at 9:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux for a business traveller

    Are you a business traveller? Do you need to spend at least some of your nights away from home, somewhere in a hotel? Do you have a company laptop?

  • Fund-seeking PengPod wants to inspire Truly Linux tablet movement
  • Buyers Surprised By Coolness of Linux Powered Refrigerator

    A different way to put it, is: When Linux is in your refrigerator, you have Network Attached Storage.

  • Early XBMC Linux builds ported to Allwinner A10 devices

    We’ve covered a number of PCs-on-a-stick in recent months, all of which have the potential to function as an uber-mini Android-powered media centers.

  • Server

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Enlightenment E17 Alpha 2 Released
    • What is a Desktop?

      A few days ago I started to work on a part of KWin which made me wonder what do we mean with the word “desktop” in the context of a window manager such as KWin. Of course in the sense of a window manager one means “Virtual Desktops” when speaking of “desktop”.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop

      • 8 GTK 3.6 Compatible Themes Available In PPAs For Ubuntu 12.10

        GTK themes need to be updated to work with each new major GTK version, and because of this, some beautiful themes available for GTK 3.2 or 3.4 like Zukitwo and others, don’t work with the latest GTK 3.6 available in Ubuntu 12.10 and other Linux distributions.

        There are, however, a few cool themes which work with the latest stable GNOME / GTK (3.6). Below you’ll find 8 GTK3.6 compatible themes which are available in PPAs / repositories for Ubuntu 12.10 and work with both GNOME Shell and Unity.

  • Distributions

    • Snowlinux 3 White Review: As usual good, will be interesting to compare with Linux Mint 14

      If you think Ubuntu 12.10 is buggy and painful to use, then you must try out the new Snowlinux 3 “White”. It is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and it simplifies a lot of stuff which Ubuntu complicates! Desktops available along with this edition are: Mate 1.4, Cinnamon 1.6 and Gnome fallback 3.6. Linux kernel is 3.5.

    • What Is The Easiest Version Of Linux To Learn?

      With each day that passes, more and more people are giving Linux a try. It’s free and it can hold its ground against both Windows and Mac, so why not? And maybe you want to give it a try, too–but you keep hearing about how difficult Linux is, how it’s a “geek-only” operating system, etc. Thankfully, there are certain versions of Linux that will help ease you into the process.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Price Target Lowered to $60.00 at BMO Capital Markets (RHT)

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) had its target price trimmed by BMO Capital Markets from $65.00 to $60.00 in a report issued on Monday. They currently have an outperform rating on the stock.

      • Red Hat Developer Demands Competitor’s Source Code

        A very serious argument erupted on the Linux kernel mailing list when Andy Grover, a Red Hat SCSI target engineer, requested that Nicholas A. Bellinger, the Linux SCSI target maintainer, provide proof of non-infringment of the GPL. I can think of two reasons why this is disturbing. The Linux kernel mailing list is where most of the business of writing Linux code happens, and the seriousness of violating the GPL, which would be like stealing from Linux.

        [Allow me to call them Nick and Andy] Nick is developer at Rising Tide Systems, a Red Hat competitor, and a maker of advanced SCSI storage systems. Nick’s company recently produced a groundbreaking technology involving advanced SCSI commands which will give Rising Tide Systems a lead in producing SCSI storage systems.

    • Debian Family

      • Descent|OS 4.0 Drops Ubuntu for Debian

        Brian Manderville proudly announced a couple of days ago on Twitter that the development for the upcoming Descent|OS 4.0 Linux operating system has started.

      • Tails 0.14 Screenshots

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Necklaces now available! $10 of each purchase supports Ubuntu in schools
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 291
          • Canonical Releases Ad For Ubuntu For Android

            Back in February Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu for Android as a part of Ubuntu’s multi-device plan. Ubuntu for Android is a side-by-side pairing of the Android and Ubuntu OSes on a single phone. You can dock in and transform your android phone into a fully functional Ubuntu desktop and while you plug the phone out it can be used as normal android phone. Also you will be able to use your Android apps from your desktop using the Ubuntu for Android.

            The OSes are sharing their Data and also the Kernel which means that no hassle of syncing and also very efficiently working OSes. More can be found about the Ubuntu for Android at Ubuntu’s official website.

          • Search Google Play From Unity

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Xubuntu 12.10 – Day 2 – Customise the desktop

              In the first part of my review of Xubuntu I just looked at the default installation.

              The thing with Xubuntu is that the base is very light but it has so much potential that I believe it can be turned into anything you want it to be. As your needs are different from my needs the ability to customise is very important.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Update: CyanogenMod says owner hijacked domain, demanded $10,000

          Android enthusiasts trying to reach CyanogenMod.com, the website for the popular community-maintained firmware of the same name, will find themselves staring at a blank filler site as of today. As has been detailed in a blog post up on the new CyanogenMod.org, the owner of the original domain (one Ahmet Deveci) name shut the site down after he was discovered impersonating CyanogenMod founder Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik for the purpose of cutting referral deals with other sites.

          When confronted and asked to surrender the keys amicably, Deveci responded by demanding $10,000 for the domain, an amount that the team “won’t (and can’t) pay.” CyanogenMod team members were able to reclaim ownership of the project’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, but upon being locked out of the system Deveci promptly deleted the domain’s DNS records, rendering the site unreachable.

        • New Ad for Ubuntu for Android Arrives, But Where’s the Beef?

          If you’ve been waiting for Ubuntu for Android, it still isn’t here yet, but you can take in a promotional video for it, available here. As Mark Shuttleworth has made clear, Canonical is moving quickly ahead with its plans to bring Ubuntu to platforms going well beyond just desktop computers. Smartphones are a key platform that Canonical is targeting with Ubuntu, and the company was very vocal about Ubuntu for Android at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. So why is a video that is essentially an ad for Ubuntu for Android appearing when you still can’t get a smartphone with it running?

        • Queen gets Galaxy Note 10.1, not iPad, for Royal Collection

          Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 was chosen as the Royal Collection’s tablet by the Royal Commonwealth Society charity, the BBC is reporting today. The organization considered going with the iPad, but instead chose Samsung’s device. It’s not clear why the Galaxy Note 10.1 was picked over the iPad, which, like it or not, essentially defined the tablet era we’re entering.

        • Google: Seriously, we’ve improved Google TV
        • Updated Google TV Gets Voice Search

          Google TV has just got a new update that makes hunting content on your smart telly faster and easier, by the simple method of talking to it.

          It’s ‘Voice Search’ where you can basically say anything you want to the TV and see what results come up. You won’t know how good the gizmo’s hearing is until you’ve tried it. Say “HBO” and you might go right to a shopping channel selling deodorant, or say “Homeland” to see all the live and streaming options to watch the show. You can even say “how to tie a bow tie” and watch a YouTube video showing you how to do it. Which nicely segues into Google TV’s updated YouTube app.

        • Google’s Android finally earns respect with developers

          The mobile video game Kingdoms at War is popular with owners of Apple Inc’s iPhone and Google Inc’s Android smartphones alike. But for the game’s maker, there is a very important difference – it earns more than double the money on iPhones and iPads than it does on Android devices.

        • Pantech Magnus pic leaked, could be sign of upcoming announcement
        • Android 4.2 Hits AOSP, Broadcom Replaces NXP with NCI Stack for NFC
        • Android 4.2 goes AOSP
        • Android 4.2 Jelly Bean arrives

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Lenovo’s S2110 Android tablet delivers the goods

        Although Samsung’s thin, lightweight Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets have dominated the 10-inch Android tablet market for the past year-and-a-half, they’re going to be facing some serious competition from new devices from Lenovo and Google. I spent the past several weeks getting to know Lenovo’s modestly priced IdeaTab S2110, which optionally morphs into a laptop-like hybrid. How does it compare?

      • Android 4.2 OTA Update Available For Nexus 7

        I went to sleep with the news of Android 4.2 hitting AOSP. When I woke up and checked my Nexus I was greeted with a notification of a system update being available. I instantly hit the install button and my Nexus 7 got the 4.2 update. The new 4.2 Jelly Bean update has the same build number as the previous i.e. JOP40C but there are certain new features in 4.2.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Review: 6 slick open source routers

    Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the lousy stock firmware your routers shipped with.

    Apart from smartphones, routers and wireless base stations are undoubtedly the most widely hacked and user-modded consumer devices. In many cases the benefits are major and concrete: a broader palette of features, better routing functions, tighter security, and the ability to configure details not normally allowed by the stock firmware (such as antenna output power).

  • OmniOS Aims To Fill The OpenSolaris Void
  • Introducing Vagrant

    Vagrant is an open-source (MIT) tool for building and managing virtualized development environments developed by Mitchell Hashimoto and John Bender. Vagrant manages virtual machines hosted in Oracle VirtualBox, a full x86 virtualizer that is also open source (GPLv2).

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Big Comeback

        Mozilla is now something of a venerable institution in the open source world – the first release of browser code by Netscape took place back in 1998. Even Firefox is eight years old, which seems pretty incredible.

        Given that unusual longevity, it’s no wonder that the project has seen its ups and down. I wrote about a particularly dark period a couple of years ago, when people thought that Firefox and Mozilla had peaked in terms of their influence. Six months later, I was reporting on the plans of Mozilla’s new CEO; there was clearly a lot starting to happen, but how would it pan out?

      • Mozilla publicly announces the open-source Flash-renderer Mozilla-sponsored Shumway project
      • Native Flash Support For Firefox On The Way, The Shumway Project

        Earlier this year, Adobe announced its plans to abandon the widely used Flash plugin in Linux and other UNIX-like (excluding Apple’s Mac) operating systems. It meant that there won’t be a new version of Adobe Flash for these systems. Adobe, however, will continue to provide security updates to Flash on these systems for a period of five years. After that, Linux users will be forced to use the out-of-date Flash plugin indefinitely or switch to some alternatives like Gnash, which currently do not work well.

      • Want to take Firefox OS for a spin? Firefox Plugin Makes it Easy

        While Firefox OS isn’t here yet, it is coming soon— sometime in early 2013. If you are interested in the OS and want to give a test drive, you previously could use a nightly build and throw it onto the Raspbery Pi or even flash it to a Galaxy Nexus. These methods were both quite complicated, though. Good news, a new Firefox browser plug-in allows you to emulate FireFox OS on Mac, Linux and Windows.

      • Watch Mozilla show off the Firefox OS Gaia UI, Marketplace and more

        Since first being announced back in July 2011, Mozilla has slowly but steadily revealed new details of its upcoming mobile operating system, Firefox OS (formerly Boot to Gecko).

  • SaaS

    • Nebula Names OpenStack Co-Creator VP of Product Management

      If you’ve followed the short history of the OpenStack cloud computing platform, you probably know that NASA and Rackspace drove the early development of the project. Today, Nebula, headed by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, is naming Jesse Andrews as VP of product management. Andrews was the founder of ANSO Labs and founding engineer of OpenStack. ANSO Labs was the company that designed and implemented the core OpenStack cloud technologies Nova and Horizon for NASA.

  • CMS

    • WordPress Makes a Bid to Bring Open Source CMS To Cities around the World

      Every city in the world needs to have a website. The good people at open source CMS vendor WordPress think that CMS should be free too.

      So WordPress is now offering a WordPress.com/cities setup and account for any city for free. This is the hosted version of the open source WordPress code that powers more blogs than any other software on Earth.

  • Education

    • MOOCs trend towards open enrollment, not licensing

      MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course. The idea of large-scale, free online education has been around for quite some time. Some examples include David Wiley’s 2007 Introduction to Open Education; Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2008; Open Content Licensing for Educators; and many others.

  • Healthcare

    • Wentz wows at EHR summit

      Robert Wentz, CEO and president of Oroville Hospital, spoke about the hospital’s success in implementing open-source electronic health records at a summit held outside of Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17 and 18.

  • Business

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Has More Optimizations

      GCC 4.8 features improvements to link-time optimizations (LTO) with the LTO partitioning having been re-written for improved reliability and maintainability while fixing some link failures (see our GCC 4.7 LTO benchmarks). Aside from improving LTO, there’s also improved inter-procedural optimizations. The interprocedural optimization improvements come from a new symbol table, improvements to the inline heuristicsm and better inlining decisions.

  • Public Services/Government

    • We the People: Seceding from open government?

      The petitions for Texas and other states to secede from the U.S. on the White House’s “We the People” site have drawn a great deal of attention in the past couple of days. I find it highly ironic that people are protesting following the re-election of the Administration by using the very platform set up by said Administration for grassroots advocacy. That being said, it’s also a testament to the idea that open government works—even for those who believe it doesn’t.

    • ‘Freiburg’s frustration with IT caused anger over free software’

      A halfhearthed implementation of OpenOffice has frustrated the civil servants working for the German city of Freiburg, says Timothy Simms, one of the city’s council members. “I think that in their anger, they’re now making OpenOffice the scapegoat for many other IT problems.”

      One of the problems, according to Simms, is that the city never seriously switched to OpenOffice, a free software office suite. He says that many civil servants are still using a version of a proprietary office suite that is now over a decade old.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Belief Genome: an open source technology startup

      Belief Genome™, described as an “open source technology startup”, aims to map all human beliefs. The prototype code is already available to the public on Github, however there’s still a lot of development to be done.

    • Open Hardware

      • Google engineers open source book scanner design

        Engineers from Google’s Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced book scanner under an open source licence on Google Code. The Verge reports that the engineers developed a prototype during the “20 per cent time” that Google allocates to its employees for personal projects. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner can automatically digitise entire books.

      • Google engineers open source book scanner design

  • Programming

    • LLVM 3.2 Release Candidate 1 Is Out There

      The first release candidate of the LLVM 3.2 compiler infrastructure along with the Clang C/C++ front-end compiler is now available.

    • About Advising Bitergia with My SourceForge Hat

      I’m lucky enough to be able to do the job I love.

      As part of my job I dedicate almost 20% of my time to projects related to the SourceForge core business, and this includes advising few open-source-related companies. Among them a special place goes to Bitergia, a company focused in the area of software development analytics.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OASIS adopts AMQPv1: An open standard for smart grid and cloud

      For governments looking for cutting edge, open source messaging solutions, the recent action by the OASIS standards consortium to approve the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) Version 1.0 is a major development.

      The need for cutting edge, mission critical messaging options is arising in a variety of contexts: it is a key component to interoperable ‘smart grid’ frameworks, as well as ‘cloud’ solutions.

Leftovers

  • Twelve-year, $430 million effort fails to get DHS radio users on the same frequency

    The Homeland Security Department spent $430 million on a fruitless plan to enable radio users departmentwide to communicate on the same frequency, according to a new audit released Tuesday by an internal watchdog.

  • How Barack Obama killed John Wayne

    The reason that President Barack Obama won reelection, as most everyone knows by now, is that older white males, on whom the Republican Party has long relied, are declining in numbers, while women and minority voters, key components of Obama’s base, are increasing. In the electoral post-mortems, Obama’s victory has been considered a kind of valedictory to white male supremacy. But his win did something else: Obama killed John Wayne on Nov. 6 — with the complicity of roughly 61 million Americans.

    [...]

    Wayne’s America was hard and unyielding. This emerging America is softer and more sensitive. As opposed to a solitary hero, it embraces the idea of collective heroism.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • When a Palm Reader Knows More Than Your Life Line

      “PLEASE put your hand on the scanner,” a receptionist at a doctor’s office at New York University Langone Medical Center said to me recently, pointing to a small plastic device on the counter between us. “I need to take a palm scan for your file.”

    • Will GOP Governors Really Try “Nullifying” Obamacare?

      Despite Americans overwhelmingly rejecting Mitt Romney and his plans to “repeal Obamacare on day one,” an effort to nonetheless thwart the federal health care law on the state level is underway, led by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and Cato Institute, with help from American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a key holdout and has not indicated whether he will continue to actively block the health care law.

    • Idiots line up to thank Papa John’s for screwing them out of healthcare

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • The DHS And FBI Present: You Might Be A Terrorist If… (Hotel Guest Edition)

      When registering, present as many forms of ID as possible. Be sure to mention where you work EVEN if no one asks. Brag if you have to. Hand out business cards to the staff. Let the desk clerk know that your stay here is no secret and that your room number should be given to anyone who asks, including those who don’t ask. When asked if you have a room preference, answer with a bright, but unfrightening, “I’ve never had a ‘preference’ in my life! I’m easy to please and an American citizen!”

      Head directly to your room, carefully avoiding eye contact with doors marked “Employees Only.” Immediately unpack all of your luggage. Make several phones calls using ONLY the in-room phone. Call the front desk several times so as to avoid appearing suspicious. Return to your unattended vehicle and clone yourself using existing, but non-potentially-dangerous technology. Make no sudden movements and keep your ID and passport displayed prominently. Return one of yourselves to your hotel room, again using the front entrance in a non-threatening, flag-waving manner.

      Stay in your room. Use the provided wi-fi. Avoid sites that use any form of encryption. Be careful not to stay in your room too long. When venturing out for something to eat or a non-suspicious conversation with the suspicious staff, avoid stairwells, hallways, exits/entrances, and connecting roads. On second thought, just stay in your room. This will make it easier to avoid being caught up in the middle of a personnel shift change.

      If you must leave your room, smile and wave at each and every security camera. Lift your shirt to display lack of weapons, explosives or identifiable scars and tattoos. If purchasing anything from the hotel, use only credit cards, checks or DNA. Return to your room using the most surveilled route. Use the in-room phone to order room service. Turn down the delivery when it comes, stating that you’re trying to keep visitors and deliveries to a minimum. Apologize for not having any cash to tip with, but explain that this lack of cash directly contributes (not monetarily, of course) to the safety of everyone in the hotel. Repeat this apology to housekeeping when they arrive, being sure to answer the door before they get to the second knock. Try to ignore their just-out-of-earshot griping about having to clean around the scattered contents of four large suitcases. Smile in a non-threatening fashion and shrug as if to say, “LOOK AT HOW MUCH I DON’T HAVE TO HIDE.”

    • Obama signs secret directive to help thwart cyberattacks

      President Obama has signed a secret directive that effectively enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyber­attacks on the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.

      Presidential Policy Directive 20 establishes a broad and strict set of standards to guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting threats in cyberspace, according to several U.S. officials who have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the record. The president signed it in mid-October.

    • President Obama Signs ‘Secret Directive’ On Cybersecurity
    • Tony Blair jeered by UCL students

      Tony Blair was jeered by anti-war protesters at University College London on Tuesday.

      Students and campaigners from the Stop the War Coalition repeated their demand that the former prime minister be tried for war crimes.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Swedish Muhammad Cartoonist Says ‘World’ Created Controversy

      Swedish artist Lars Vilks caused a storm of controversy when his cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body was published in 2007. Large-scale protests ensued around the Muslim world, and Vilks has since lived under what he describes as “house arrest” for his own safety.

    • It’s Scary How Rapidly Government Requests For Info And Censorship Are Increasing

      Google’s latest transparency report is out and the notable bit of info is that governments continue to increase how often they’re seeking info about users. The increase there is a steady growth which is immensely worrisome. There’s also an equally troubling increase in the attempts to censor content via Google, though in that case, it was relatively flat until the first half of this year when it shot way, way up.

      [...]

      This one is concerning. What court ordered a takedown of a YouTube video criticizing local government officials? That seems like it should be public info.

    • Russian Government Kills Russian Wikipedia Clone “To Protect Children”

      This Monday, the Russian Government placed a Russian Wikipedia clone on a censorship blacklist. The Russian Government maintains such a kill switch for “harmful sites” – motivated with protecting children from drug use, child porn, or suicide methods. In reality, as usual, give anybody such a switch and they’ll shut off things they plain don’t like.

    • Revisions to UAE Cybercrime Law Stifle Free Expression

      Recent revisions to the United Arab Emirates’ cybercrime law will not only restrict internet freedom but are in violation of citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and should be immediately repealed. These revisions come amidst a broader crackdown on human rights defenders both online and offline in the UAE. Freedom House renews its calls for authorities to cease efforts to silence opposition through extralegal harassment and intimidation.

  • Privacy

    • The Petraeus Affair: Surveillance State Stopper?

      Lawmakers, now reminded of their own vulnerability, need to strengthen email privacy protections. Companies need to do more to help customers protect content.

      [...]

      The careers of two of the nation’s top military men have unraveled because the FBI started pulling threads from an inbox without any real evidence of a crime. Maybe that’s just the wakeup call the government needs to recognize the value of privacy.

  • Civil Rights

    • Activists Arrested Confronting Dick Durbin About ‘Fiscal Cliff’

      With hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to desperately needed federal safety-net programs looming and the future of Bush-era tax cuts to the rich up in the air, Chicago activists brought their case to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) last week.

      In two days of action on Thursday and Friday, a coalition of Chicago grassroots and faith-based groups called Make Wall Street Pay Illinois demanded that Durbin use his leverage as Senate Majority Whip to protect crucial public services and programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare from the massive cuts ahead.

    • Freedom House Condemns Wave of Arbitrary Arrests in Cuba

      As the world’s eyes were turned on the U.S. election, Cuba’s regime unleashed a wave of arbitrary detentions, arresting 20-25 dissidents on November 8 and 9, as they were on their way to an organizing meeting for a campaign to end human rights abuses in Cuba. These detentions are in addition to another 520 arrests that took place in October, according to the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation, led by Elizardo Sanchez. Freedom House condemns Cuba’s crackdown and urges the regime to release these activists and heed citizen calls for greater respect for its human rights obligations under UN treaties.

    • Thousands of Kuwaitis protest against voting changes

      Tens of thousands of Kuwaitis packed into a square opposite parliament on Sunday in a peaceful opposition-led rally against new voting rules.

    • The Israeli documentary putting military rule in Palestine on trial

      The Law In These Parts, an Israeli documentary awarded this year’s Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury prize, examines how the country created a military-legal system to control the Palestinians in the lands Israel occupied in 1967. And at some point during the film, it becomes clear that it’s the judges who are on trial. The documentary, which just screened as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, features forceful archive footage, alongside a line-up of Israeli legal experts, explaining how they made Israel’s occupation laws.

    • China says no to foreign rights monitors for Tibet

      China will not allow foreign observers into restive Tibet to probe human rights abuses, an official said on Friday, dismissing mounting international pressure for an independent investigation in the troubled mountainous region.

    • European Commission takes action on gender equality

      Today the European Commission produces a proposal for clear action to help improve gender equality at senior corporate level.

      I am and have long been politically in favour of quotas to promote gender equality. Part of me wishes we didn’t need affirmative action: but the fact is, without external intervention, it could take hundreds of years to achieve the kind of change we need. Europe has so many talented women who have what it takes to succeed in business: but none of them has eternal life, they can’t wait that long.

    • After More Than a Decade, Congress Finally Sends Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act to President Obama for Signature

      Finally—after more than a decade of advocacy—Congress has enacted better protections for the brave truth-tellers who safeguard taxpayer dollars. Today, the Senate unanimously passed the long-beleaguered Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA, S. 743, as amended by the House). The WPEA closes many loopholes and upgrades protections for federal workers who blow the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality. This opening salvo to the lame duck shows that Congress can put aside partisan posturing and deliver more government accountability to the American public. These hard-fought reforms will substantially improve the status quo for federal whistleblowers and taxpayers.

    • Hurricane Sandy Shows Folly of $150 Million Spy Center for Wall Street

      Over the past five years, more than $150 million of taxpayer money has been dumped into a spy center in Lower Manhattan where employees of Wall Street firms and real estate behemoths sit side by side with municipal police to spy on the comings and goings of pedestrians on the streets around Wall Street. But none of the thousands of spy cameras positioned around the city that feed into this center foresaw the storm surge that put as much as 40 feet of corrosive salt water in the basements of commercial buildings in Lower Manhattan, crippling thousands of businesses along with the lives of area residents.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

11.14.12

Links 14/11/2012: Android 4.2 Source Code, Mozilla’s Shumway Project

Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Who Would Buy A $199 Chromebook With 3.5 Hour Battery Life And HDD?

      Google is all set to shake the stagnated desktop PC market held hostage by Microsoft. There has not been any revolutionary innovation in the desktop PC space which is monopolized by Microsoft. It took Apple to shake it with the incredible Retina display (Microsoft wouldn’t have minded keeping 1024×800 for another 10 years). Google is all set to change this and Windows 8 is going to offer all the help it can to the wider adoption of Chromebooks.

      The recently announced ARM-powered Samsung Chromebook is selling at mere $249 which is going to make quite a lot of laptop users rethink, especially those who spend all of their PC time inside a browser. Before people could place their orders, just a day before Neuxs 4 was going on sale, Google dropped another bomb on Microsoft with the announcement (and immediate availability) of a $199 Acer Chromebook.

  • Kernel Space

    • Interview: Linus Torvalds – I don’t read code any more

      I was lucky enough to interview Linus quite early in the history of Linux – back in 1996, when he was still living in Helsinki (you can read the fruits of that meeting in this old Wired feature.) It was at an important moment for him, both personally – his first child was born at this time – and in terms of his career. He was about to join the chip design company Transmeta, a move that didn’t really work out, but led to him relocating to America, where he remains today.

    • ‘Personality Cults’ and the Open Source Channel
    • A Template For Writing Linux Kernel Drivers

      LDT has been published, a Linux Driver Template for helping new Linux kernel developers begin writing hardware device drivers.

    • Graphics Stack

      • NVIDIA 310.19 Linux Driver Carries Enhancements

        There’s a new release available in the NVIDIA 310.xx Linux graphics driver series. The NVIDIA 310 Linux driver is already great for its big performance improvements thanks to Steam/Source coming to Linux and threaded OpenGL optimizations, but now the driver has been made even better.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Dropping GNOME Fallback Mode: The Right Decision, Wrongly Handled

        You have to pity the GNOME project these days. Even when it does the right thing, it does so in a way that maximizes controversy.

        I’m talking about the project’s recent announcement about dropping support for fallback mode. Since it was first introduced with the GNOME 3.0 release the fallback mode has provided an approximation of the GNOME 2 desktop for users who lacked the hardware acceleration needed for the latest desktop environment. Now, GNOME developers have announced that the upcoming 3.8 release will not include the fallback mode.

      • GNOME Shell 3.6.2 Has Been Officially Released

        The GNOME developers announced last evening, November 12, the immediate availability for download of the stable GNOME Shell 3.6.2 user interface for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

        GNOME Shell 3.6.2 is the second maintenance release for the GNOME Shell 3.6 UI, which is part of the GNOME 3.6.2 desktop environment update, due for release tomorrow, November 14, 2012.

      • GNOME Dev Responds to Criticism of Open Source Interface

        One might reasonably assume that the controversy surrounding the design of GNOME 3, which was released well over a year ago, would have abated by now. But in one of the clearest signs that it hasn’t, a leading GNOME developer recently posted a strongly worded tirade against critics of the open source desktop environment — namely, the “crazies” and “yellow journalists.”

        The developer, Federico Mena-Quintero, published his thoughts on his personal blog, not any official GNOME outlet. Still, as one of the cofounders of the GNOME project, he carries a lot of weight within the open source community.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Core Desktop on the Nexus 7: Getting Involved

          A little while ago I talked about our goals to get the core Ubuntu Desktop running on the Nexus 7. Again, just to be clear: the goal here is to get the lower level foundations of the Ubuntu Desktop running efficiently on the Nexus. This work is focused on optimizing the kernel, X, networking, memory consumption etc of the core of Ubuntu and not focused on making Unity into a tablet user interface. You can’t build a great house without a solid foundation.

        • New video offers a peek at Ubuntu for Android
        • Devs port Ubuntu to Rockchip (RK3066) devices

          Rockchip’s stalwart RK3066 can best be described as a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 chip with clock speeds up to 1.6 GHz.

          The processor powers a number of tablets as well as PCs-on-a-stick, including the Z2C, Minix NEOG G 4, Kimdecent, Droid Stick T10, MK802 III, UG802 and the UG007.

        • Could Ubuntu Power Your Phone?

          Ubuntu on smartphones remains a totally theoretical proposition. But that hasn’t stopped Canonical from releasing a video showcasing all the cool things that Ubuntu could do if it did run on phones. Is the company getting ahead of itself, or is this a sign that Ubuntu might finally be poised to make the jump to the mobile world?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Parsix 4.0 Arrives with GNOME 3

            Parsix is a wonderful distribution that offers a complete starter system with its own repositories while remaining compatible with Debian. Version 4 was just released and “brings tons of updated packages, faster live boot, improved installer system and quality new features.”

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Giant pandas threatened by climate change

      Giant pandas could be left hungry and struggling to survive by global warming, scientists have warned.

      A new study predicts that climate change is set to wipe out much of the bamboo on which the bears rely for food.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Free speech? Man arrested for burning poppy photo

      Lawyers and campaigners have taken to Twitter to criticise the arrest. “Dear idiots at @kent_police, burning a poppy may be obnoxious, but it is not a criminal offence,” tweeted legal commentator David Allen Green, who rose to prominence when working on the case of “Twitter bomber” Paul Chambers.

      “What was the point of winning either World War if, in 2012, someone can be casually arrested by @kent_police for burning a poppy?”

    • Google hit with $200,000 damages bill over Mokbel shots

      A Melbourne man who won a defamation case against search engine giant Google has been awarded $200,000 in damages.

      Milorad Trkulja, also known as Michael, sued the multinational over images of him alongside a well-known underworld figure that appeared in its search results.

      A six-person Supreme Court jury found last month that Mr Trkulja had been defamed by the images, which he first contacted Google about removing in 2009.

    • Update On “Is Anybody Down?” Investigation And Bumptious Legal Threats From Craig Brittain And Chance Trahan
    • ‘Revenge Porn’ Site Owners Escalate Their Failure, Going From Bogus DMCA Notices To Bogus Legal Threats

      Needless to say, the criticism hasn’t ceased and nothing has been taken down. In fact, the boys have moved past the DMCA process and have moved on to completely bogus legal threats to us here at Techdirt, and a number of other sites as well. As described by Popehat, who has received an identical threat, it appears that Trahan and Brittain have decided to dive right into the always-entertaining “bumptious legal threat” arena.

  • Privacy

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Twitter limit: University of Washington caps live game coverage for media, threatens credential revocation

      It looks like college coaches aren’t the only ones restricting Twitter use. Todd Dybas, a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune, Tweeted yesterday that he was “reprimanded” by the University of Washington Athletic Department for apparently Tweeting too much during Sunday’s 85-63 win over Loyola.

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Founder Arrested Again On Suspicion Of New Hacking & Fraud Offenses

        Every other Friday there is a court hearing in Sweden to discuss the continued detainment of Gottfrid Svartholm. A request to detain the Pirate Bay co-founder for an additional two weeks was granted yesterday but not without more drama being added to the proceedings. Gottfrid was arrested under suspicion of being involved in a second hacking case along with accusations of four instances of serious fraud and four attempted frauds. Further details of the alleged crimes are being kept secret.

      • The Cake Copyright Is A Lie; Safeway Just Doesn’t Want To Be Mocked

        A few folks have sent in this story on the blog of the wonderful (and super popular) site Cake Wrecks, which (as the name suggests) highlights hilariously bad cake designs, supposedly done by “professionals.” Not surprisingly, the site is well known among those who wield cake decorating bags. However, some do not appreciate the wonders of such a site… especially when it features their own cakes. Cake Wrecks recently put up a blog post in which it reveals that at least one Safeway (a part of the giant supermarket chain) has apparently told its bakery that there is a “no photography” rule, officially set up to avoid having its cakes show up on the site — though, they’re using copyright as their excuse:…

      • The Raw Power Of Louis CK: Even HBO Is Opening The Garden Gates

        Yesterday, Louis CK announced the seemingly impossible: his next comedy special will air on HBO, and also be available as a DRM-free download like his revolutionary Beacon Theatre show. Yes, even the network so infamous for its tight grip on content that fans have literally begged it to take their money can’t ignore the overwhelming success of CK’s open, inexpensive, highly accessible approach to content distribution.

      • Will The Next Secretary Of State Support Internet Freedom Or SOPA?

        Last week, we noted that one of Hollywood’s favorite Congressional Reps., Howard Berman had lost his re-election bid (in part due to re-districting, putting him up against another incumbent). For years, Berman has been a go to guy for the entertainment industry looking to pass dubious copyright expansion bills. Berman used to run the “IP Subcommittee” of the Judiciary Committee — which you would think is a major conflict of interest, since he (literally) represented part of Hollywood. Amusingly, when he moved on to head the Foreign Affairs Committee, the next line for the IP Subcommittee was Rep. Rick Boucher — a noted copyright reform advocate. Magically, the Judiciary Committee made the IP Subcommittee disappear. When Boucher lost in the next election, and a maximalist was available again, magically the subcommittee reappeared.

        Either way, as a bunch of sources have been reporting, now that Berman lost, he’s on the short list of possible candidates to become the new Secretary of State after Hillary Clinton steps down early next year.

      • Musicians Weave Elaborate CNET Conspiracy Theory In Attempt To Get BitTorrent Banned

        Last year, we wrote about a silly and uninformed lawsuit filed by eccentric rich guy Alki David against CBS. David has an online TV company, FilmOn, which has some similarities to Aereo and other online rebroadcasters. The networks sued the company, of course, and David has since gone on an odd and vindictive campaign against them. As someone who tends to think services like his should be both legal and embraced, I’d like to support him, but his legal campaign is just ridiculous and now has the possibility of causing real and serious harm. His reason for suing CBS was that a few years ago CBS bought CNET, and CNET has (for many, many years) run a site called Download.com. Download.com is a service that many software providers use to distribute their software. David claimed that because Download.com (a site owned by CNET which was — only relatively recently — purchased by CBS) distributed Limewire — which was eventually found to be infringing — that CBS was also guilty of copyright infringement. That original lawsuit was dumped pretty quickly, after the judge noted that David had failed to show what copyrights were being infringed (a key piece in any copyright claim).

      • RIAA: Pirates Are Bigger Music Fans Than Average Consumers

        After a study pointed out that file-sharers spend more money on music than their non-sharing counterparts, the RIAA felt the need to respond. The music industry group is now characterizing news reports on the findings as “misleading” and is ready to burst the bubble. According to the RIAA there is a straightforward reason why P2P users buy more – they are simply better engaged music fans than average music consumers. … Eh?

      • Copyright Industry Madness Takes Six Years To Catch Up With The Worst Satire Of It

        Six years ago, a satire site wrote a story about how the copyright industry wanted more money if you invited friends to watch a movie in your living room. This notion has now been patented in new technology: automated headcounts coming to a living room near you, to enable new forms of restrictions. Apparently, the copyright industry takes six years to catch up with the very worst satire of it.

      • Confused Irish Newspaper Editorial Argues That Search Engines Need To Pay Newspapers

        First of all, they seem to be claiming that search engines that index content, show a snippet and link people to the original content are “piracy.” That’s crazy talk. Furthermore, while they don’t name the “search engine” they claim that it “offered” these articles. Of course, if it really posted all the articles itself, then there is no need to change copyright laws — the company could already sue them for infringement. However, assuming that they’re really talking about Google or just about any other search engine, what they really mean is that the search engines aggregated the content and linked people back to the original. The “cost” to produce those articles is irrelevant to the overall discussion. Yes, it costs money, but it’s the job of a business model to bring in even more money. If the business geniuses who run your paper are too clueless to figure out how to monetize the traffic from Google, then perhaps you deserve to go out of business.

11.13.12

Links 14/11/2012: Linux Mint 14 RC, India’s Educational Android Tablet

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A world without Linux: Where would Apache, Microsoft — even Apple be today?

    Dabbling in alternative history is always a haphazard exercise. The intertwining of myriad factors and actions, mixed together in an infinitely complex historical equation that determines the future, renders any attempt to excise a certain variable essentially impossible. However, it can sometimes be educational and illuminating to try and poke holes in the edges of recent history to see where we might have wound up. Also, it’s fun and potentially full of surprises.

    Case in point: What would the world be like if Linus Torvalds hadn’t uploaded his v0.0.1 Linux kernel to a public directory in 1991? What if the world never knew Linux?

  • Linux Top 3: Mint, Martian Blueberries Fedora and Supercomputer Domination
  • Mint 14 RC Screenshots
  • FOSS: A Linux Conversion

    My friend Jerry is 70+ years young. Jerry has also been a client of mine on and off over the past several years for on-site support calls at his home office. Recently he was telling me how his aging Dell Dimension 2400 with Windows XP was running so very slow it was frustrating. We all know the story, the Microsoft OS was suffering from crud creep after several years of use. A cleanup and/or reinstall was needed to get it back to running faster. The other option is a new PC. Jerry is on a fixed income and cannot afford to replace the PC with a new one running “Microsoft Latest OS!” at this time. I talked with Jerry about his options, and he decided to give Linux a shot on this old Dell.

  • Early builds of XBMC for Linux ported to Allwinner A10 devices

    One of the nice things about tablets, mini PCs, and other devices with Allwinner A10 processors is that it’s very easy to get Ubuntu, Fedora, or other Linux-based operating systems to run on them. And once of the nice things about those operating systems is that they make excellent media centers when you add the open source XBMC media center software.

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel Pushes Their Linux-Friendly Xeon Phi

      In addition to NVIDIA and AMD announcing new high-end server/workstation GPUs to coincide with this week’s SuperComputing SC12 conference in Salt Lake City, Intel has announced new details and release information on their Xeon Phi co-processors.

    • Qualcomm DragonBoard S3 APQ8060 Preview

      The S3 DragonBoard is sold by BSquare at a price of just under $500 USD. The deployed operating system for the DragonBoards is Google’s Android. The S3 DragonBoard will be benchmarked on Phoronix in the near future. There isn’t any Linux distribution yet ported to this DragonBoard so benchmarks will be done on Android as well as (hopefully) through a Linux chroot on Android.

    • Jim Zemlin: Proprietary Software Is Doomed

      SPAIN: Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation tells Silicon News that Linux and open source must win in the end

    • ARM atomic operations

      Modern 32-bit ARM processors are becoming increasingly more complex than was the case with the implementation of previous generations of the architecture. Processors implementing version 5 of the architecture do not support Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), while newer architecture versions add not only full capability for SMP (and its related supporting architectural extensions), but even go as far as to enable the implementation of designs based upon AMP (Assymmetric Multi-Processing[0]) – commonly known as Big.LITTLE. These newer features require changes to the underlying architecture, to support memory ordering operations, cache coherent access to shared memory, atomic operations, and so on. This article summarizes some of these changes, with a view toward Fedora developers needing to modify ARM code, especially to implement support for atomic operations. Much greater documentation is available online, especially on ARM’s own website.

    • Graphics Stack

      • NVIDIA, AMD Push High Performance GPUs

        With SuperComputing’s SC12 conference kicking off today in Salt Lake City, AMD and NVIDIA have both come out with their new high-end GPU products for compute purposes.

        NVIDIA’s top offering for servers and workstations are the Kepler GK110-based K20 and K20X. The K20X is capable of peaking at 1.31 Teraflops for double-precision floating point math or 3.95 Teraflops when doing single-precision floating point operations. The K20 meanwhile can achieve 1.17 and 3.52 Teraflops for double and single precision floating point, respectively. The memory bandwidth with ECC disabled for the Tesla K20X tops out at 250GB/s while packing 6GB of GDDR5 video memory. The K20X has 2688 CUDA cores on its GK110 die while the K20 has 2496 cores.

  • Applications

    • Extreme Graphics with Extrema

      High-energy physics experiments tend to generate huge amounts of data. While this data is passed through analysis software, very often the first thing you may want to do is to graph it and see what it actually looks like. To this end, a powerful graphing and plotting program is an absolute must. One available package is called Extrema (http://exsitewebware.com/extrema/index.html). Extrema evolved from an earlier software package named Physica. Physica was developed at the TRIUMF high-energy centre in British Columbia, Canada. It has both a complete graphical interface for interactive use in data analysis and a command language that allows you to process larger data sets or repetitive tasks in a batch fashion.

    • Proprietary

      • How Lightworks Falsely Rides Open Source Publicity Train

        2 years ago, Lightworks made a promise to the open source community. A promise that has made them darlings of the open source spotlight. A promise that the have yet to fulfill. One blogger takes serious issue with this lack of fullfilment, and rightly so. Blogger Nekohayo offers in depth insight into the failed promises of Editshare.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • AI Research Goes Open

        When it comes to AI research, Wei Qi, or Go, shows that machines still have some way to go to beat human beings… but they’re closing in

      • More Steam Linux Games to Pick Up

        The game runs natively on Linux and numerous Steam Linux users have confirmed this. The deal is still on if want to get the game for one fourth price.

        Now two more first person shooters, Killing Floor and Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 are fully working on Linux via Steam.

        Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 can be purchased for $10 from Steam. There is 75% off on Killing floor on GetGamesGo which sends Steam key to your email. So you can pick up the game for $5 only which is otherwise priced at $15 on Steam.

      • Valve Is Working On A New Game Engine

        Valve is working on a new game engine following in the success of their widely-popular Source Engine that is now running nicely on Linux.

        In an informal interview with Valve while a few 4Chan members were touring Valve’s Bellevue offices, Gabe Newell was asked about a new game engine and his response was “we’ve been working on new engine stuff for awhile.” Details though aren’t clear at this time whether it’s a “Source 2″ engine or something radically different.

      • OpenMW Open-Source Game Remake Sees New Release

        OpenMW, the project to create an open-source remake of the Elderscrolls III: Morrowind game, continues to move along. This weekend was the release of a new version with many changes.

      • A Popular Open-Source Game Still Years From Beta

        There’s an interesting and very promising open-source first person shooter game that does offer impressive graphics but is still a couple years from reaching a beta state.

        The game that’s still a ways out from being in beta is Unvanquished. Back in July was the first time I looked at it when it appeared to be a very promising open-source game that was derived from the Tremulous first person shooter and using the id Tech 3 game engine but with integrating the XreaL renderer enhancements.

      • Q&A with Hero-U’s Corey & Lori Cole
      • How to upgrade your Linux box for Steam

        When you consider that none of us could have much of an interest in Linux if it wasn’t for the hardware it runs on, x86 hardware gets relatively little attention.

        This might be because Linux is now so stable, and performs well enough on older hardware, that we seldom need to think about it.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt Developer Days in Silicon Valley

        Qt Developer Days 2012 are the premier Qt events of the year. The 2012 Conference for Europe started today in Berlin co-hosted by KDE e.V.; there will be news and more information from the Conference over the next few days. Meanwhile, preparations are well underway for Qt Developer Days – North America in Silicon Valley, which will take place December 5 – 7. It is presented by ICS, KDAB and Digia and is being organized by ICS.

      • KDE vs. Gnome in daily life

        This is not a competition. The thing is, you can install any which program on any which distribution, pretty much, regardless of what desktop environment you choose to choose. Instead, this is a friendly reality check for people who prefer this or that operating system. Let’s say you wish to use only the native applications developed for your particular flavor of the desktop. How would your productivity or efficiency or peace of mind change then?

        We will pit Gnome programs vs. KDE software, across a range of categories. No browsers this time, since we did them only a few weeks ago, so you have your plethora of pinia … I mean browsers to test and compare. Today, we will focus on other applications, like file managers, image and photo software, office suites, media players, and a handful more. I will try to be objective, a near impossible task, and give you an overview when and where the KDE tools take a lead and which Gnome apps you will want to prefer for your daily use. And at no point in the time-space continuum will be debate the merits of the desktop environments as a whole. That’s a different subject for a different article.

      • cults of personality redux

        In a recent blog post, I slammed cults of personality in Free software communities. Some noted in the comments that this was not the only challenge we faced, and I completely agree. On the one hand, it’s a bit of an odd observation to make: of course all complex results have complex sets of causal factors. Entire volumes have been written about this aspect of complex challenges, and a thread I’ve noticed in a number of pieces I’ve read is that the shear number of causal factors makes it hard for people to untangle and overcome the challenges presented. It’s like we become distracted by too many topics and forget that you eat an elephant one bite at a time and not all at once; that it is OK to examine and address issues in a piecemeal fashion.

        Others noted that there are some good affects that come from these cults of personality. This is also true. But it’s sort of like saying, “Since I put $100 in the bank today, I will have $100 to spend.” That may be true, but if you already spent $500 using your credit card .. no, you don’t have $100 to spend. You owe $400. This is simple math that most people get intuitively, but when we apply it to systems analysis it often gets missed. Most things people do have some advantage (locally, individually, in the here-and-now, etc), and that is usually how they get entrenched in the first place. Full accounting, which means looking at the broad spectrum of results, is required to come to a full and proper sum, however. Some benefits are not good enough when there are large amounts of documented negatives.

      • Do Personality Cults Dictate the Direction of Open Source?

        Are open source software trends driven by cults of personality? That’s the question that Aaron Seigo, a contributor to the KDE Project, asks in a new post. The Var Guy makes a pretty good argument that although open source users line up behind pundits such as Mark Shuttleworth, Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, these people don’t dictate the direction of users and developers as much as Seigo thinks. While noting that fact, it’s also worth noting that cults of personality may have an even more pronounced effect on proprietary platforms than open source ones.

      • the sun is a billion little spotlights

        So let me put my spotlight where my mouth is: To everyone who was at the Linux Color Management Hackfest: you are my inspiration for today. I hope you had an awesome time and I can’t wait to use (and tinker with, of course ;) the results when they find their way into a nearby source code repo. :)

      • Qt 5.0 Beta 2 Released As The Final Approaches

        With Qt 5.0 Beta 2 there’s more bug-fixes and other work to prep for the long-awaited official release of Qt5. This release of Qt is also packaged with Qt Creator 2.6 that sports new features for developers. At this time they have also finalized upon all of the official Qt modules for the 5.0 release.

      • Amarok Rating Stats
      • Qt marches on with 5.0 release, sets sights on iOS and Android

    • GNOME Desktop

      • On fallback mode

        I’m just going to preface this by admitting something: I love GNOME 3. It works (for me) and is, in my opinion at least, beautiful in its simplicity. When I show almost anyone my computer, the response is almost always positive – comments usually include ‘thats cool!’ or ‘I like that!’. Its interface is streamlined and non-intrusive, and for myself and many others, allows us to do what we want, without unnecessary intrusion by the GUI.

      • Features Coming In For The GNOME 3.8 Desktop

        While many GNOME Linux users are upset over GNOME 3.8 dropping its fallback mode, this next release of the GNOME desktop environment is set to offer a number of new features.

      • A re-designed Notifications API will soon land in Gnome!

        Many application (ie Skype, Lifearea, Dropbox etc) are still using Legacy Notification Icons in Gnome Shell, and apart that the ugly result, it is also unpractical in use both for desktop and touchscreens.

        While there is no plan to map the legacy GtkStatusIcon model, the new notification API promises to make everyone’s life easier and it will bring some new exciting features!

  • Distributions

    • ROSA 2012 (Server)
    • ROSA Enterprise Linux Server 2012 released
    • ROSA Enterprise Linux Server “Helium” 2012
    • ROSA Server, A New Russian Red Hat Enterprise Clone

      ROSA, a Moscow-based software development company focusing upon open-source software projects, has today announced RELS. The ROSA Enterprise Linux Server is yet another clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    • Top 5 Reasons to have a Linux Live CD

      Ubuntu is one of the most popular free and open source software available. A 2012 survey revealed it is the most popular Linux Distribution on desktop and laptop PCs. Below are some of the reasons why you should have Live CD / DVD with Ubuntu, or other Linux distribution.

    • Zenwalk Linux 7.2 (in its various forms)

      The Zenwalk Linux distribution is one which I’ve always respected for its design philosophy. The project aims to be light, straight forward to use and the default installation comes with one program per task. This means that while the application menu is full, there isn’t much overlap in functionality. Zenwalk is based on Slackware and attempts to remain compatible with its parent distribution. Version 7.2 of Zenwalk came out recently and I decided to download the Live edition of the distribution.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva announces cloud solution

        The French GNU/Linux company Mandriva has entered the cloud market with a solution of its own based on its own GNU/Linux distribution for management of IT infrastructure.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat evades query about Garrett’s ‘rape’ post
      • Oracle: Get your Red Hat Linux patches from us, it’s easier

        In the latest episode in its ongoing pissing match with leading Linux vendor Red Hat, Oracle has set up a new service that allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers to more easily browse the source code of changes Red Hat has made to its version of the Linux kernel.

      • Oracle releases Git repository with RHEL changes

        Oracle is now providing a public Git repository, called RedPatch, which includes the source code of all changes that Red Hat makes to the kernel of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. Oracle equates this to its own Oracle Linux and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) products and says it is providing the same kind of repository for that distribution. The new RedPatch repository for RHEL allows users to browse individual patches with Git and redistribute them under the GPL.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – November 12th, 2012

        * Code search engine for Debian
        * Bits from the DPL
        * One step closer to “Wheezy”
        * Other news
        * Upcoming events
        * New Debian Contributors
        * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
        * Important Debian Security Advisories
        * Work-needing packages
        * Want to continue reading DPN?

      • Debian Developer

        Today, I officially got approved by the Debian Account Managers as a Debian Developer (still waiting on keyring-maint and DSA). Over the years, I have seen many people complain about the New Member Process. The most common complaint was with regards to the (usually) long amount of time the process can take to complete. I am writing this blog post to provide one more perspective on this process. Hopefully, it will prove useful to people considering starting the New Member Process.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Will 2013 Be the Year of the Ubuntu Desktop?

            As I came up with the title for this article, I did so fully realizing that many of you will likely groan at the thought of yet another “tis the year of the Linux desktop” article. However unlike other articles, I have actual concrete examples of why I think that it’s fair to suggest that 2013 could be a huge year for Linux on the desktop.

            But before we dive into what 2013 has in store for Linux, Ubuntu, and Linux desktop adoption, let’s take a look back at previous instances where year of the Linux desktop was proclaimed.

          • TypeCatcher: The Best Font Fetcher For Ubuntu
          • Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.2 Ready For 12.10
          • Your Next Android Phone May Come With An Ubuntu PC

            Android is pretty versatile as far as operating systems go. It can be a lot of things, but we still haven’t seen Android take on the PC space in a big way just yet. Ubuntu might just change that.

            Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions available, will soon be available on Android phones sporting multi-core processors. The application allows the Android phone to perform normally when it’s a phone, but it transforms into an Ubuntu PC when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

          • Canonical Presents New Ubuntu for Android Commercial

            Canonical published a few days ago a new animated commercial for their upcoming and ambitious Ubuntu for Android project (watch it above).

            Allowing users to connect a multi-core Android phone to an Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu for Android was originally announced by Canonical at the beginning of 2012.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 14 Almost Ready

              Linux Mint 14 is nearing final with the announcement of its release candidate yesterday. Available in 32 and 64-bit with your choice of MATE or Cinnamon, this release “comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.”

              Version 14 is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and ships with Linux 3.5, GCC 4.7.2, and Xorg X Server 1.13.0. The new features list includes items such as the upgrade to MATE 1.4 which “not only strengthens the quality and stability of the desktop but it goes beyond GNOME 2 by fixing bugs which were in GNOME 2 for years and by providing new features which were previously missing.”

            • 32-bit support in Linux Mint 14 RC 64-bit
            • Linux Mint 14 Release Candidate
            • Linux Mint 14 approaches with release canddiate

              Linux Mint founder Clement “Clem” Lefebvre has announced the availability of a release candidate for version 14 of his project’s Linux distribution. Code-named “Nadia”, the RC of Linux Mint 14 is based on Ubuntu 12.10, and is available with either Cinnamon or MATE as the default desktop environment.

            • Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 released

              We are very proud to announce the immediate availability of Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 code name Gloria.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux on a Nspire CAS CX Calculator
    • Sinclair BASIC comes to Raspberry Pi

      The 80′s are so now, as hot on the heels of the RISC OS’ Raspberry Pi debut comes the equally retro-tastic news that the BASIC version used in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum can also run on the Pi.

    • TI launches its £10 Stellaris ARM Cortex-M4F LaunchPad

      There’s been a lot of coverage on HEXUS and other websites of the card-sized computer, the Raspberry Pi and its intent to introduce people to the world of programming at a low-price, however, despite best attempts, the Pi, with its embedded Linux operating system, doesn’t exactly have the lowest entry-point and is focused more on high-level applications programming.

      Whilst the Pi and several ARM Cortex-AX boards, targeted at applications programming have been dominating the news, ARM and its licensees have been making leaps and bounds in the low-power microcontroller market, slowly bridging the performance gap between complex applications processors and what had typically been small, simple 8-bit microcontrollers, such as Atmel’s AVR and the PIC chip.

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Nexus 7 Is On Top Of The Holiday Shoppping Lists

        According to a survey done by TechBargains, a deal aggregation website that combines intelligent curation with real-time price-value discovery algorithms, Nexus 7 is on top of the shoppers wish-list this holiday season. The survey was conducted on TechBargains among 1255 respondents in October 2012.

        According to the survey 53% of the people want to buy a tablet this Christmas. Among those 53%, one out of three want a Asus Nexus 7. This edges out the 30% for ipad, 24% for ipad mini and 24% for Kindle Fire HD. “With more tablets on the market to fit every size budget, our survey reveals consumers are even more interested this year versus last year in giving and receiving a tablet – the must have tech gadget this holiday season,” said Yung Trang, president and editor-in-chief of TechBargains.com.

      • Indian President Unveils Aakash 2.0 Tablet

        India is taking its Aakash tablet seriously. None other than the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee announced the release of the new Aakash 2.0 on National Education Day. (Sunday 11th November)

        The party in New Delhi was also a big video conferencing event, where hundreds of teachers throughout the land joined in with proceedings whilst showing off the Ten Thousand Teachers Training Programme – live video interaction with participants.

      • India gives Android-based educational tablet another go

        On the country’s National Education Day yesterday (Sunday), India’s president Shri Pranab Mukherjee unveiledPDF a new Android-based tablet computer for the education sector. The Aakash 2.0 succeeds another version of the tablet which was introducedPDF in India last October but, according to some media reports, failed to establish itself due to poor overall performance.

      • How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it
      • Fund-seeking PengPod wants to inspire Truly Linux tablet movement

        (Phys.org)—Hey, kid, want a tablet that’s capable of Linux and Android dual booting for one hundred bucks? The smart kid will answer, ok what’s the catch? The catch is that, even if things go very well, it won’t be on the shelves before next year and that, to reserve this open source rendering you have to go through the crowdfunding site, indiegogo. The tablets are called PengPods. The goal is to eventually bring forth a line of both Linux/Android tablets and also mini PCs. All devices are designed with an Allwinner A10 or A13 processor. For delivering the best of both worlds, Android and Linux, they run Android and boot Linux from an SD card. The advantage is said to be that the Linux enthusiast does not need to jump through hoops to have Linux.

      • QOOQ Linux/QT tablet for foodies, Revolutionizes Meal Preparation

        Do you enjoy preparing food in your kitchen and wouldn’t mind owning a tablet that can help transform the process of at home cooking, along with gaining content from leading chefs? Well, if you are in the USA, French firm UNOWHY has now announced the launch of the QOOQ tablet, which is the first interactive touch screen slate especially designed for the Kitchen.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Survey: Newcomer Experience And Contributor Behavior In FOSS Communities

    Have you been a recent contributor to any big FOSS project like Debian, GNOME, Gentoo, KDE, Mozilla, Ubuntu, NetBSD, or OpenSUSE? How have you felt as newcomer to the open source community you participated in? Did you meet trolls who made your life difficult to join the community or you encountered friendly people who helped you fit into easily? What was you experience in joining the project and about making contributions whether they be technical or non technical?

  • Pidgin and the Impending Shutdown of Windows Live Messenger

    And before anyone goes there, we can’t support Skype. There is no documentation of the protocol available to us, nor is there code we can borrow from a cleanly reverse-engineered alternative implementation. All that exists is SkypeKit, whose license agreement explicitly forbids its use in open-source software. The license also forbids use in “server applications” which precludes doing something like wrapping a simple closed-source XMPP daemon around SkypeKit. It is not currently possible to legally support Skype, so we won’t try.

  • Google Books engineer creates open source book scanner

    There seems to be a lot of lessons wrapped up in this story. One, never under estimate the things you can create with a vacuum cleaner. Two, there are benefits to giving employees personal time. And three, a 1,000-page book can be scanned in an hour and a half with the right equipment. Or so we’ve learned from Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh, who – along with team mates – has created a $1,500 book scanner and made it open source.

  • In depth: Software-defined storage

    By contrast, if a company wants to add capacity to its server estate, software technologies such as open source operating system Linux and server virtualisation allow it to add cheap, commodity hardware as and when it is needed.

    So far, however, these forces have not been applied to storage. “The liberating effect that virtualisation and open source have had in the server world over the past ten years hasn’t really taken place in the storage world yet,” explains Simon Robinson, vice president at 451 Research.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla launches Popcorn Maker 1.0

        Over the weekend, at its Mozilla Festival event in London, the company announced the launch of version 1.0 of Popcorn Maker, its free web application for authoring interactive videos. Described as “a new way to tell stories on the web”, Popcorn Maker was developed as part of Mozilla’s Webmaker programme, which aims to encourage users around the world to learn about and use “the open building blocks of the web”.

  • SaaS

    • CloudStack: Filling Two Niches Open Source Enterprise Cloud Management
    • Can Hadoop Survive its Weird Beginning?

      Hadoop has arrived as a force in the business computing landscape because it offers people the ability to store and analyze data at scale for an affordable price. But Hadoop is not like other efforts to commercialize open source in some important ways. In addition, it is arriving at a time in which some of the traditional advantages of open source-based business models have eroded because of cloud computing and other developments.

  • Databases

    • Education for the real world: Open course on open source NoSQL databases

      Back in March of this year, the University of Albany Student Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) organized its second Open Source Festival. The event brought together enthusiasts of open source from industry, government, and academia in the New York-Albany area. There, I shared my experience of teaching an open source class at RPI and the work that OSEHRA was doing on further promoting the use of open source software in healthcare. Among other topics of discussion was the need to educate college students on the basic concepts of NoSQL databases.The concern was coming from the now widespread use of the M database across healthcare applications and the lack of awareness about M in the academic community—most courses focus on Relational Databases. It is worth pointing out that M is both a language and a database, more specifically, a hierarchical NoSQL database, and it is used in thousands of clinical facilities worldwide.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Apache OpenOffice seeks Quality Assurance volunteers

      The Apache OpenOffice project has put out a call for volunteers to join its Quality Assurance Team. Ahead of the Apache top-level project’s next major release, Apache OpenOffice 4.0, the developers say that they “need to grow our Quality Assurance (QA) capabilities to keep up with the output from our programmers.”

  • BSD

    • Should There Be A Unified BSD Operating System?

      There’s a call for unification of the four largest *BSD operating systems in a move to create a “unified BSD” with the best features in order to better compete with GNU/Linux.

      It’s unlikely that this call for unification will result in any action, but an independent user has written a brief statement cross-posted to several BSD mailing lists about a Unified BSD? The user asks why the BSD community can’t band together and form a unified platform rather than fragmenting their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. He wants to see the four largest BSD variants merged: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Should Free Software Be Used Only For Good

      A debian developer for the Mono framework received a bug against Mono source code. The source code contained code from the JSON project, which uses a curious license. The license is a free software license with one difference, It has an additional condition for users of software written by the JSON.org team, The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

      This causes a problem for the maintainer, who wants to include the Mono framework into Debian. Debian is more than simply a piece of software to download; it’s a collection of free software.

      Software in the Debian repository must adhere to the Debian free software guidelines. The JSON.org license applies to every project using the JSON.org code, and the non-standard license has a history of causing problems. In particular, the code’s author seems to derive enjoyment from just how often people ask him to remove ‘Use for Good, Not Evil’ from the license’.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Doing government websites right

      Today, I have a piece over on Tech President about how the new UK government website—Gov.uk—does a lot of things right.

      I’d love to see more governments invest two of the key ingredients that made the website work—good design and better analytics.

    • Open Source Could Clean Up US Elections

      Open source software could be a paradigm for a national voting system in the United States that could still allow states and counties to customize and adapt the technology. Taking the Linux operating system model, a common open source core or kernel of the software could be developed and distributed to elections officials in each of the 50 states.

  • Licensing

    • Debating Continues Over Possible Kernel GPL Violation

      For the past few days there has been a much-viewed and very polarized discussion happening on the Linux kernel mailing list about a possible GPL violation within the Linux kernel.

    • Proprietary Linux extensions reportedly violate the GPL

      Linux developer Andy Grover has posted to the kernel developer mailing list (LKML) to accuse RisingTide Systems of violating Linux kernel licensing conditions with its RTS OS storage operating system. This has led to a discussion in which prominent kernel developers, a RisingTide employee and a legal representative for the company have explained their positions. Discussion has also turned to NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux drivers and related cease and desist notices.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Xenix: The Microsoft Unix That Once Was

    One would not normally associate Microsoft with Unix. While Microsoft’s interest(s) in Unix may remain minimal in recent times, history tells a very different story.

    Let us take a quick journey down memory lane, back to the late 1970′s and into the early-mid 80′s. In 1979, Microsoft formed an agreement with AT&T Corporation to license Unix from AT&T. And then Microsoft licensed out its renamed Unix to OEM vendors, including Intel, Tandy and SCO. Those companies then ported it to their own hardware architectures and requirements.

    Microsoft was hit by a legal problem of the “UNIX” name not being able to be used. Therefore, Microsoft was forced to come up with their own Unix distribution name. Xenix was chosen. AT&T licensed Unix to Microsoft and then Microsoft passed on the same Unix software re-branded as Xenix.

  • Posting Too Much On Facebook Is A Sign Of Emotional Instability

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Sourcefire Integrates Malware Detection with IPS
    • Ruby update fixes hash flooding vulnerability

      The Ruby developers have released an update to the 1.9.3 series of their open source programming language, fixing a denial-of-service vulnerability. Ruby 1.9.3 patch level 327, labelled 1.9.3-p327, corrects a hash-flooding issue that could be exploited by an attacker to cause a high CPU load that can result in a denial-of-service. The problem can be caused by an error when parsing specially crafted sequences of strings.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • If You Eat Something, Say Something: DHS Sounds The Alarm On The ‘Terrorist Implications’ Of Food Trucks

      It’s interesting (or maybe just kind of sad) that various government agencies see possible terrorists everywhere but rarely, if ever, catch one. Despite the large number of personnel being thrown at the problem (along with lots of money), actual terrorists seem to be in limited supply.

      But these agencies haven’t let their lack of success temper their vision of a nation under constant imminent attack. Public Intelligence recently posted a Powerpoint presentation from the NYC fire department (FDNY) discussing the unique safety issues mobile food trucks present. Along with some actual concerns (many food trucks use propane and/or gasoline-powered generators to cook; some *gasp* aren’t properly licensed food vendors), the presenter decided to toss in some DHS speculation on yet another way terrorists might be killing us in the near future.

    • Without an agreement, Reid eyes last 2012 effort on Cybersecurity Act

      Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) may take another crack at passing cybersecurity legislation next week although Republicans and Democrats still haven’t reached a compromise on the matter.

      Reid is aiming to bring the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 to the floor at the end of next week after the Senate votes on Sen. Jon Tester’s (D-Mont.) sportsmen’s bill, according to Senate aides.

      The bill’s prospects look dim, however, as it appears the bill still lacks enough Republican support to clear the upper chamber. Observers expect the bill to fail just as it did in August, when Senate Republicans blocked a motion to move the measure forward after arguing that it would saddle industry with new burdensome regulations.

    • Harry Reid Wants To Try One More Time To Force Cybersecurity Bill Through Congress

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Petraeus Case Shows FBI’s Authority To Read Gmail, Other Email Services

      Your emails are not nearly as private as you think.

      The downfall of CIA Director David Petraeus demonstrates how easy it is for federal law enforcement agents to examine emails and computer records if they believe a crime was committed. With subpoenas and warrants, the FBI and other investigating agencies routinely gain access to electronic inboxes and information about email accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other Internet providers.

      “The government can’t just wander through your emails just because they’d like to know what you’re thinking or doing,” said Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and now in private law practice. “But if the government is investigating a crime, it has a lot of authority to review people’s emails.”

  • Copyrights

    • Toshiba: You Can’t Have Repair Manuals Because They’re Copyrighted And You’re Too Dumb To Fix A Computer
    • iFixit CEO launches open Toshiba service guide scheme

      Toshiba’s argument is that this violates its copyright. True, of course, but when such documentation no longer has a commercial value companies like Toshiba should become less defensive, just as many games developers, for instance, turn a blind eye to making games long past their sell-by date available to fans.

    • Toshiba laptop service manuals and the sorry state of copyright law

      As you would be no doubt already aware, I run a section of my blog here devoted to the free sharing of laptop service manuals. This is a side project I have run for the last three years, gathering as many repair manuals as I could find on the internet and rehosting them on my website for anybody to download and use.

      I have unhappy news for you all. Since I was first contacted by Toshiba Australia’s legal department, I have been attempting to discuss with them the potential for me to continue to share their laptop service manuals on my site. Their flat and final response was “You do not have permission [to disseminate Toshiba copyright material] nor will it be granted to you in the foreseeable future.” As a result, all Toshiba material that was on my website is now gone, permanently.

    • Obama Considering Prominent SOPA Supporter for Cabinet

      President Obama is reportedly considering appointing one of the biggest supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) as his new Secretary of State.

    • A month after download law, consumers spending less on music: survey

      On Oct 1, knowingly downloading copyrighted music and video in Japan became punishable by up to two years in prison and a 2 million yen penalty.

      The law was passed in June after the Japanese music industry, the second largest in the world after the U.S., reported continued financial losses, with analysts suggesting that just one in 10 downloads were legal.

      Since the law came into effect, there have certainly been some changes, and many Internet users have become reluctant to click that download button for fear of receiving a hefty fine, meaning that the law has been a success in a way.

    • UK Newspaper Licencing Agency Says Musicians Need To Pay To Quote Reviews
    • Famed quotation isn’t dead — and could even prove costly

      It may be one of the most-quoted lines in American literature — and if you dare to quote it, you might have to pay.

      In late October, Faulkner Literary Rights — which represents Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner’s estate — sued representatives of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” for misquoting the famous line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

11.12.12

Links 13/11/2012: India’s Android Tablets, Tails 0.14

Posted in News Roundup at 10:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Why experiment with Linux?

    In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the announcement or release of a number of new products: the iPad Mini, an updated version of the full-size iPad, and Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Surface tablet.

    A lot less attention was paid to the October 18 release of one of the most widely-used Linux distributions, Ubuntu. That’s unfortunate, because Linux in its various flavors is a solid operating system. It’s even used by such major companies as Google on both their servers and their desktops.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • CloudSigma’s Membership to The Linux Foundation Reinforces its Position as a Customer-Centric Public Cloud Provider
    • Nagios plugin to check an OCSP server with hardcoded certificate
    • Ext4 Data Corruption Bug and Solution
    • LM_Sensors 3.3.3 Improves Linux Hardware Sensors

      With most of the interesting hardware monitoring/sensor drivers are living within the mainline Linux kernel, this week’s LM_Sensors point release update isn’t particularly interesting. The new release-, LM_Sensors 3.3.3, adds in support for humidity sensors within the sensors command. Additionally, the sensors-detect command no longer probes I2C adapters on graphics cards.

    • Linux 3.7-rc5
    • Download Linux Kernel 3.7 Release Candidate 5

      Linus Torvalds announced earlier today, November 11, that the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel is now available for download and testing.

    • VIA Kernel Mode-Setting Still Not Ready For Mainline

      It’s been several months since having anything to report on the state of VIA graphics under Linux. VIA hasn’t been doing anything officially to better their Linux support and the “OpenChrome” development community is quite limited and small. While the long-in-development OpenChrome DRM driver for providing VIA kernel mode-setting support has yet to be merged into the mainline code-base, it’s still being developed.

    • Thoughts on the ext4 panic

      In just a few days, a linux-kernel mailing list report of ext4 filesystem corruption turned into a widely-distributed news story; the quality of ext4 and its maintenance, it seemed, was in doubt. Once the dust settled, the situation turned out to be rather less grave than some had thought; the bug in question only threatened a very small group of ext4 users using non-default mount options. As this is being written, a fix is in testing and should be making its way toward the mainline and stable kernels shortly. The bug was obscure, but there is value in looking at how it came about and the ripples it caused.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Wayland LiveCD Now Supports XWayland

        It’s the Rebecca Black OS that serves as a live platform for experimenting with Wayland. There was a new release at the end of October but now it’s been updated again to handle the recent XWayland patches. XWayland allows for running X11 applications on top of Wayland. THe XWayland code should be merged into the mainline X.Org Server for the 1.14 release in March.

      • Intel 2.20.13 Driver Update Carries More Bug-Fixes

        For a while Chris was releasing new Intel X.Org driver updates weekly but that has settled down now with most SNA fall-out and other recent changes having been worked out. However, on Sunday morning he found it time to release the xf86-video-intel 2.20.13 driver.

      • Linux Consumers Should Still Avoid S3 Graphics

        Whenever writing about VIA Technologies on Phoronix, S3 Graphics always comes to mind due to its relations with HTC and VIA. In fact, it’s the only time that S3 Graphics usually ever comes to my mind aside from when talking about S3 Texture Compression. Anyhow, after writing this morning about the VIA KMS driver still not being mainline, it’s worth reminding uninformed Linux users that S3 Graphics products remain poorly supported under Linux.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora and LVM

          Those following the progress of the Fedora 18 development cycle cannot have failed to notice that the rework of Anaconda, the distribution’s installer, is not going as smoothly as one might have liked. Complaints are common, and there is a real risk that installer problems will end up being what users remember about this release. Given that, it may seem surprising that the Fedora developers intend to change one of the fundamental decisions made by the developers of the new installer.

    • Debian Family

      • Help us to release “Wheezy”: participate to our BSP marathon
      • Tails and Claws

        One other thing I like about Tails, and I brought this up briefly in the review of Liberté, is there are a few different approaches to take when a user wants to perform an action which is not recommended. The operating system can allow the action, the operating system can warn the user of the potential danger and then give the user a choice as to whether to proceed, or the system can block the action. Liberté opted to block unsafe actions. Tails, on the other hand, takes what I feel is the more desirable approach of educating the user about the potential dangers of their actions and then letting the user decide whether to take the risk. It is a style which protects the operator, but doesn’t presume to know better than the user and I like this approach. Last, but not least, I found the documentation on the Tails website to be clear and fairly easy to navigate. The developers have done a good job of trying to educate their users, both explaining what Tails is and what it is not, and I see that as a good starting point. To date, Tails is probably my favourite security-oriented distribution.

      • Squash Some Debian Bugs, Party And Contribute To Community

        If you are a Debian user and you want to contribute to the community, then you have your chance this fall with the Debian BSP Marathon. You might know that the next release of Debian, codenamed “Wheezy”, is in the testing phase and your contribution might be helpful to speed up the release date.

        So what is a BSP? According to the Debian wiki: “A Bug Squashing Party is a come-together (either virtual or reallife) of Debian Developers and Debian enthusiasts on a specified timeframe where these persons try to fix as many bugs as possible.”

      • Tails 0.14

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10: your next OS?

            With Ubuntu 12.10, Linux has grown up and learned to do its own marketing. It’s snappy, it’s tasteful, and it’s aggressively attacking ground in which competitors’ customers lie. That’s good. But it won’t succeed, not yet.

            Why?

            Because in order for people to believe anything free can be good – anything at all – it has to be really good. As in, a better package than something you’d pay for. And Ubuntu 12.10 is good – but it’s not that. Not yet.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Google Play Lens for Unity
          • Ubuntu 12.10 review – Why so regressive?

            The Ubuntu team had an awesome LTS release with Pangolin, so they can afford to play silly with Quantal Quetzal. Indeed, Ubuntu 12.10 is a fairly buggy release overall, with lots of regressions. There are some tiny improvements, some visual polish, but you also get a whole lot of new problems, Amazon thingie notwithstanding. To name a few, memory and CPU usage, network activity, weird artifacts, dumb programs, bad virtual machine performance, and still more. Not at all what we used to see in Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu GNU/Linux PC Sales

            Ubuntu GNU/Linux has shipped on $7.5 billion worth of hardware in the last 2 years,

          • A second go at Ubuntu 12.10

            A STUBBORN streak led me to try installing Ubuntu 12.10 (a.k.a. Quantal Quetzal) on my home PC again, after an anti-climactic failure last week to get past the “Preparing to Install” screen the first time around.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint Nadia Release Candidate Out

              The Linux Mint team has published a new release candite for the upcoming version (14) of Linux Mint, codenamed Linux Mint Nadia. This release is based on Ubuntu 12.10, and comes with MATE and Cinnamon desktops.

            • Download Linux Mint 14 Release Candidate, Based on Ubuntu 12.10

              Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced a few minutes ago, November 11, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 operating system is now available for download and testing.

              Being based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, Linux Mint 14 RC (Release Candidate) is powered by Linux kernel 3.5 and includes lots of new features and updated packages.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • PengPod, A Dual-Booting Android and Linux Tablet

        True, the Android operating system is based on Linux, but many dyed-in-the-wool Linux users would prefer a tablet running “real” Linux, which is exactly what Peacock Imports is trying to do with its line of PengPod Linux tablets.

      • How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it
      • India gets $25 Android tablet

        The long-awaited low cost Aakash 2 tablet from UK firm Datawind has finally been officially launched in India, complete with several new hardware enhancements which the government will be hoping helps spur student learning.

        The Aakash 2, which is commercially available as the UbiSlate 7Ci for Rs 3,500 ($US64), is costing the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) Rs 2,263 ($US43), although government subsidies will put the price charged to students at just Rs 1,130($US24.65).

      • OLPC Comes to Canada

        Belinda Stronach is promoting use of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in aboriginal schools in Canada. I can relate to that. In many aboriginal communities, the ratio of students per PC is ~10 when most educators seek a range from 1 to 3. OLPC Canada is getting started with a first goal of 5000 OLPCs. It’s just a start. The need is at least 100K. OLPC has the advantage over using recycled desktop PCs, the solution I used, because they are a better size for small children and their classrooms.

      • New $199 Acer Chromebook Is Cheaper Than Samsung’s

        Signs are stil appearing that Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, after a somewhat lukewarm early reception for it. Recently, we covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249.Now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook, shown here, that sells for only $199. These devices, at these price points, along with some of the bundled deals that come with them, signal that a number of Google’s expected Chrome OS strategies have finally come to fruition.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Facebook open sources its MapReduce successor

      Facebook has open sourced its Corona scheduling component for Hadoop, which the company calls “the next version of Map-Reduce”. Facebook is using its own fork of Apache Hadoop which is optimised for the massive scale of its operations.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Community Live: DIYbio at Manchester Science Festival 2012

      DIY biology is a hot topic and has piqued the interest of the Wellcome Trust and NESTA in the UK and the FBI in the US. What has it got to do with open source and hacking? Quite a lot as it happens and those curious could get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, at a series of workshops held in Manchester over the weekend of 3 and 4 November 2012.

  • Programming

    • Top 5 Programming Tools for Kids

      The Raspberry Pi has created a lot of interest in the press for its low cost and credit-card size. The main reason for the creation of the Raspberry Pi was to see it used by kids all across the globe to learn programming. Computer classes in the UK have been constrained by the national curriculum for ICT, with students having to limit their computing activities to learning applications such as Word and PowerPoint, and using the internet to help with their school work. However, learning how to use Microsoft Office is often of little or no interest to students. Students are motivated by interactive activities such as programming, as they like to make things to find out how they work.

Leftovers

  • When Is a Mandate Not a Mandate?

    When it comes to explaining election results, there’s no precise way to determine whether voters gave the winner a “mandate”–defined by Oxford as “the authority to carry out a policy, regarded as given by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins an election.” That makes it interesting to see how media use the expression–and which presidents they think earned one.

  • White House website deluged with secession petitions from 20 states
  • Government says mounting damages claims support case for secret courts

    Seven fresh claims for damages involving highly sensitive national security evidence have been made in the past year, the government has revealed. Three cases have been settled confidentially.

  • Science

    • Charles Darwin gets 4,000 write-in votes in Georgia

      A Georgia congressman who attacked the theory of evolution found himself with an unlikely opponent in Tuesday’s U.S. election, when 4,000 voters in one county cast write-in ballots for the 19th century father of evolution, British naturalist Charles Darwin.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Plot to Destroy America’s Beer

      Brian Rinfret likes imported beer from Germany. He sometimes buys Spaten. He enjoys an occasional Bitburger. When he was 25 years old, he discovered Beck’s, a pilsner brewed in the city of Bremen in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law of 1516. It said so right on the label. After that, Rinfret was hooked.

      One Friday night in January, Rinfret, who is now 52, stopped on the way home from work at his local liquor store in Monroe, N.J., and purchased a 12-pack of Beck’s. When he got home, he opened a bottle. “I was like, what the hell?” he recalls. “It tasted light. It tasted weak. Just, you know, night and day. Bubbly, real fizzy. To me, it wasn’t German beer. It tasted like a Budweiser with flavoring.”

    • Pfizer caught “gaming the system,” loses Viagra patent in Canada

      Pfizer’s legal monopoly on one of its top-selling drugs just got shredded in Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled 7-0 the company should have its patent taken away because the drug company attempted to “game” the system, grabbing a patent without disclosing what their invention really was.

      Pfizer was able to acquire its Canadian patent without naming the compound required to make Viagra, namely, sildenafil citrate. The Canadian patent system, like all patent systems, is a kind of bargain between patentees, who are given a limited monopoly on a particular product or process, and the public, which is supposed to benefit from the disclosure of a new invention, the justices noted in their opinion.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • How to kick that Amazon habit

      Amazon is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is ruthlessly efficient, has low prices and excellent delivery (or “shipping” as it says, in distressing Americanese). It is renowned for economies of scale and tight cost control – and now for aggressive tax avoidance. The UK’s biggest online retailer has avoided paying corporation tax on profits it makes from billions in sales here.

    • The Safety Net is the Glory of America and the unending Wall Street Nightmare

      Wall Street’s leading “false flag” group, the Third Way, has responded to the warnings that Robert Kuttner, AFL-CIO President Trumka, and I have made that if President Obama is re-elected our immediate task will be to prevent the Great Betrayal – the adoption of self-destructive austerity programs and the opening wedge of the effort to unravel the safety net (including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid).

    • From Liberal Victory to Disempowerment in Six Easy Steps

      The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night’s election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

    • The People’s Bailout

      This is a long post but it’s about something pretty interesting so I hope you’ll indulge …

      Like many folks, Occupy Wall Street has been some doing good work in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, helping people on the ground.

      Now OWS is launching the ROLLING JUBILEE, a program that has been in development for months. OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)

    • Superstorm Sandy—a People’s Shock?

      Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers’ resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city’s refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: “Mom-and-pop stores simply can’t do what big stores can in these circumstances,” he wrote.

      And the preemptive scapegoating didn’t stop there. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is) then “pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act” would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public-works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the prevailing wage in the region.

    • Victory of the Lesser Evil
    • Drums Beating to Privatize Social Security

      This Real News Network interview with Bill Black provides an overview of why Wall Street and the Administration are so keen to gut well loved and socially valuable safety nets for the elderly, in particular, Social Security. This talk is a good introduction for people who may not understand how high the stakes in the budget fight are and why the economic arguments used to justify it are bogus.

    • Thames Water – a private equity plaything that takes us for fools

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Melinda Gates Talks Eugenics

      This July, we will be celebrating the centennial anniversary of London’s First International Eugenics Conference of 1912. One century later, on July 11, 2012, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the largest private foundation in the world) and the British government will co-host a new London conference on eugenics with global coalition partners such as American abortion chain Planned Parenthood, British abortion chain Marie Stopes International, and the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA). The only difference is that the July 2012 London conference will never acknowledge that eugenics is its driving idea. Melinda Gates has claimed that the conference, which is officially dedicated to “deliver[ing] more modern family planning tools to more women in the world’s poorest countries,” should involve “no controversy.”

    • Final Factcheck: Political Lying Perfectly Balanced

      So the Republican claims about Obama’s welfare plan were “over-the-top”–which I guess is another way of saying flatly untrue. The questionable “counterspin” (hey!) Kessler is talking about would appear to be mostly about something Bill Clinton said, based on a letter written by Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. The core of the Republican claim–that Obama was seeking to end the work requirements under current welfare law–is not supported by any evidence. But Kessler, even on this controversy, wants to make it seem like the deception is bipartisan.

    • PR industry: “Our bad actions are Wikipedia’s fault.”

      Yet another PR agency is blatantly busted doing the thing we patiently warn them against over and over, with the consequences we warn them of over and over.

      The apparently-unanimous industry response, per PR Week: “It’s all Wikipedia’s fault, they should make it easier for us to spin.”

      PRCA in particular appear to have turned their opinion 180° since June, when they heartily endorsed the CIPR/WMUK guidelines.

  • Censorship

    • Spanish magazine sentenced to a 10,000 Euro fine for investigating corruption in the Catalan health system

      On 24 October, Sibina and Dante were found guilty of defamation against Josep María Via, health advisor at the Government of Catalonia. Dante and Sibina accused Via, amongst others, of links with corruption. They were convicted to pay a fine of 10,000 Euros. Josep María Via justified his complaint with the title of the video (“The biggest robbery in the history of Catalonia”) and specifically the word “robbery”. Of the original sum of 20,000 Euros, the judge considered only half of the complaint and finally condemned the magazine to pay 10,000 Euro. Via, who manages the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, said he would give the amount to charity.

  • Privacy

    • Companies are Mining your Facebook/ Twitter Info… and Selling it (Beckett)

      Yesterday, we got a rare look at how information on your public social media profiles—including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn—is being harvested and resold by large consumer data companies.

      Responding to a congressional query, nine data companies provided answers to a detailed set of questions about what kinds of information they collect about individual Americans, and where they get that data.

      Their responses, released Thursday, show that some companies record — and then resell — your screen names, web site addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.

    • Big Brother UK: 8 million children recorded on massive secret database

      A newly uncovered clandestine computer network, known as the ‘One System,’ can reportedly share children’s personal details across different UK agencies, including age, sex, address and their school behavior records – all without parents ever knowing.
      One of Britain’s biggest government contractors has created a database containing the personal details of 8 million children, the Sunday Times revealed.
      The database was created by Capita – a company specializing in IT systems – and includes information on a child’s sex, age, exam results, if they have special needs, bad behavior like absenteeism and how many minutes late they are to lessons.

    • Election 2012 — Privacy and Unfinished Business

      It was a little more than a decade ago that the United States was rocked by the events of 9/11. Much happened on that day, including a sharp turn away from personal privacy and toward national security. Up went the cameras and the Patriot Act, and down came many laws that help safeguard privacy. A new industry for domestic surveillance emerged.

      But does it need to be this way? At the beginning of a second term for President Obama, it is time to move beyond the paranoid strategies for public safety that have dominated both Democratic and Republican presidencies.

  • Civil Rights

    • Thousands protest while troops surround Potala Palace

      In the early hours of this morning around 5,000 young Tibetans took part in the biggest protests to happen in Tibet since March. The students marched through the streets of Rebkong County, stopping to demonstrate outside a local government building.

      The protest come one day after China mobilised paramilitaries to suppress the protests carried out in Rebkong yesterday.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Listen to Steve Wozniak when he talks about the internet and freedom

      WHAT A WEEK it has been. A hurricane thrashed New York City and New Jersey on the US east coast last weekend, killing over 100 people with fierce winds and storm flooding, demolishing entire seaside communities and cutting power to millions of homes and businesses. The region had only started to recover before it got hit by another storm. Tens of thousands of people are still without power and heat, and are miserable and starving due to transit disruption and petrol shortages.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Big Agriculture Bankrolls Defeat of California’s Proposition 37

      Opponents of genetically modified food will continue to fight despite defeat in California (Photo by asianfarmers via flickr) Opposition of Proposition 37 was spearheaded by large agribusiness and chemical companies—such as Monsanto and Dow—and big food manufacturers—including PepsiCo, Nestle, and Conagra—who dumped more than $45 million into the fight. Monsanto, a leading maker of genetically engineered seeds, contributed $8.1 million alone against the measure which would have required labeling on genetically modified food.

11.10.12

Links 11/11/2012: Qt On Android, Debian Back To GNOME, Firefox is 8

Posted in News Roundup at 11:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-Java move

    Micro-blogging site Twitter experienced record traffic as the results of the 2012 US Presidential election were announced on Tuesday night, but the service never faltered despite the increased load – something Twitter engineers credit to the company’s move from Ruby to Java for its backend software.

  • VMware Does Complicated Dance With Open Source
  • VMware updates micro version of open source Cloud Foundry PaaS
  • The Trend Of Open Source And Proprietary Software Business Model

    Open source software has been there for a long time. Its popularity is increasing each and every day and has reached such a level that it’s hard to find a domain which does not have an open source presence. Companies are reluctant to buy proprietary software due to the cost involved. In most cases, open source software seems to be a viable option.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Education

  • Healthcare

    • NIH showcases informatics researchers as new open source ventures launch

      After the National Institutes of Health grew interested in bioinformatics, following breakthroughts in the 1990s, the National Centers for Biomedical Computing were created with the goal of advancing the field by a few leaps and bounds, because IT systems hadn’t quite caught up to molecular biology.

      The nine centers were founded through the 2000s, and with the advent of new data processing and visualization tools, there’s been “an explosion of knowledge” in biomedical research, said Brian Athey, from the University of Michigan Medical School’s National Center for Integrative Bio Informatics (NCIBI).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Beer: The open source beverage of choice

      Beer is truly the most democratic, egalitarian, and open source of all beverages. It is for both common folk and connoisseurs. It is for the masses. And, from my experience as a homebrewer and beer geek, you will rarely find a beverage that can be so liberating (in more ways than one).

    • Crowd-sourcing a cure

      On September 10, 2012, the Italian data artist who is passionate about the open-source medium, posted on the website he created, Open Source Cure (artisopensource.net): “I have a brain cancer. Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors. Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life… I opened them… so that I could share them with everyone. Just today I have been able to share the data about my health condition with 3 doctors. 2 of them already replied.”

    • Open Hardware

      • Compost your server

        It takes talent, luck and charisma to become a rock star (or money, connections and good looks, depending on how you look at it). It’s much harder to become a rock star of the open-source hardware movement. One way to do it is to create a compostable server chassis. No big deal, right?

      • Build Your Own Arduino Powered MP3 Jukebox

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • The party game is over. Stand and fight
  • Should Microsoft sell its search engine Bing?

    It was quite expected from the beginning that the Redmond giant Microsoft is not going to earn huge profits from Bing. Unveiled in 2009, Bing is Microsoft’s online search engine, which was launched to compete with the search leader Google.

  • Microsoft Surface is not durable

    The cover surrounding the touch panel of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, appears to be far from durable, as users are reporting that within mere days of receiving their version, it began to split and come away from the frame.

    The problem is being experienced by multiple users, each of them reporting the same thing: where the keyboard magnetically attaches to the main body of the device, the cover seam begins to split. On top of this, many have also reported that the Windows 8 logo hasn’t been etched or embossed into the frame and has already begun to wear.

  • Apple seeks standard to appease angry university net managers

    Under fire from its customers in the higher education market, Apple has proposed creating a new industry standard that would fix problems with its Bonjour zero configuration networking technology that is causing scalability and security problems on campus networks.

  • Microsoft’s Big Hidden Windows 8 Feature: Built-In Advertising

    Despite the fact that I’ve been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we’re not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen (thankfully), but rather ads that can be found inside of some Modern UI apps that Windows ships with. That includes Finance, Weather, Travel, News and so forth. Is it a problem? Let’s tackle this from a couple of different angles.

  • Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters

    Like a lot of people, I listened to Rush Limbaugh the day after the election. Pure Schadenfreude, I admit it; I just wanted to hear the reaction. I searched the right-wing media landscape far and wide and tried to find even a hint of self-examination, self-criticism, and I didn’t find much. Then again, they didn’t lose the presidential vote by much, so they didn’t take the election result as a total repudiation of their belief system, as they probably shouldn’t have, anyway.

  • Science

    • Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence

      Every ten years, the average IQ goes up by about 3 points. Psychologist James Flynn has spent decades documenting this odd fact, which was eventually dubbed the Flynn Effect. The question is, does the Flynn Effect mean we’re getting smarter? Not according to Flynn, who argues that the effect simply reveals that IQ measures teachable skills rather than innate ones. As education changed over time, kids got better at standardized tests like the IQ test. And so their score

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Photography Advocate/Journalist Acquitted After Arrest Over Filming Police; Intends To Sue Back

      We’ve linked to the blog, PhotographyIsNotACrime.com (PINAC), a few times in the past (it recently moved locations). Its author, Carlos Miller, not only covered a number of cases involving photographers being arrested or harassed for photographing buildings, police or something else, but was a defendant in just such a case himself. Miller was arrested back in January while videotaping police at an “Occupy Miami” event. Not only was he arrested, but his camera was confiscated and the police deleted footage from the camera — including footage of the encounter that led to his arrest. The police claimed that Miller had disobeyed an order by the police to “clear the area.” However, the videotaped footage — which Miller was able to recover despite the deletion — showed a different story. It showed a clearly-aware-of-his-rights Miller making the case that he was doing nothing wrong. Furthermore, other journalists were allowed to stay in the area, and one of those journalists, Miami Herald reporter Glenn Garvin, testified at the trial about how he was allowed to stay. In fact, he went to the officer who arrested Miller and asked her if he needed to move, and she told him he was “under no threat of getting arrested.”

    • Torture Continues to be Legitimized by U.S. Legal System

      In another blow to human rights, freedom, the law, and morality, the 7th Circuit Court has exonerated Donald Rumsfeld from prosecution for allegations of being a primary architect of U.S. torture policy.

    • Innocents are killed by drones

      THE evidence suggests that innocent bystanders are killed and injured often in US drone attacks – not occasionally.

      The evidence is contained in a report compiled by Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity, Reprieve.

    • Navy SEALs punished for revealing secrets to video game maker

      Seven U.S. Navy SEALs have been reprimanded for giving up classified information connected to their tradecraft so a video game could seem more realistic, according to a navy official.

  • Cablegate

    • U.S. WikiLeaks Criminal Probe ‘Ongoing,’ Judge Reveals

      U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady of Alexandria, Virginia, noted the investigation in a legal flap surrounding three WikiLeaks associates who lost their bid to protect their Twitter records from U.S. investigators. The three had asked the court to unseal documents in their case. In May, O’Grady ordered the documents remain under seal for six months. On Wednesday he renewed that order, based on a government filing.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Secret Documents Show Weak Oversight of Key Foreclosure Program
    • Ex-Goldman trader’s fraud caused $118 million loss: U.S. regulator

      U.S. regulators on Thursday accused a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc trader of defrauding the Wall Street bank of $118 million in a scheme of fabricated trades and fake entries.

    • Cisco VP Threatens To Stalk Memo Leaker… Driving More Attention Than Original Memo

      Internal memos from large companies leak all the time. It happens. Companies don’t like it, but most learn to deal with it. Sometimes, they go a bit nuts. For example, you may remember the spying scandal at HP, in which the board tried to stop leaks by spying on phone records and other info, including trying to spy on various journalists. Apparently some companies just go a bit nutty when they think they have someone to track down, where execs suddenly think they can act like they’re in some sort of spy movie. Apparently this is now happening at Cisco as well. A few weeks ago, Network World reported on Cal State’s decision to use Alcatel-Lucent instead of Cisco, claiming that it saved the university $100 million. As is fairly typical at companies when such bad news is in the press, an internal memo was sent around on how to respond to questions about this story. And… as is fairly typical at such companies, the internal memo leaked to bloggers who posted it. The memo itself is fairly tame and about what you’d expect given the situation.

    • Chris Spannos: Greece Between Austerity and Fascism

      The European Union has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. But it is today’s Greek anti-fascist movement that deserves an award for doing what European states have so far failed to do — confronting the rise of violent neo-Nazi movements on the continent.

      Although fascism is not new in Greece, it has seen a resurgence in the Golden Dawn party, which won 18 parliamentary seats in the last election. Some polls indicate that approximately half of Greek police support Golden Dawn and that the party enjoys legitimacy in wide social circles. Police sometimes even refer crime victims to Golden Dawn for follow-up on law enforcement and citizen protection.

    • Bitter cold inside a disaster shelter

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win

      In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

    • Lauren Lyster Interviews Dan Ariely on Financial Fraud, Moral Hazard, and the Psychology of a Cheater

      I would not necessarily compare the deterrent effects of punishments for a capital crime, which is often a crime of passion, with financial fraud. And beyond some point no matter how severe the punishment may become, the deterrence is not commensurately increased.

      The problem is that there is little or no personal penalty these days for even the most egregious forms of financial misbehaviour and fraud. There is a fellowship of mutual corruption at the heart of the money system.

      And as some have warned for years, political capture and moral hazard have broken the Anglo-American financial system with profound implications for the real economy. What I find appalling is when so called progressive economists dismiss this important principle for the sake of their models and expediency.

  • Censorship

    • Australia comes to its senses, abandons Internet filtering regime

      The Australian government has now, after years of testing and preparing, formally abandoned a plan to filter its domestic Internet. Officials now say that it will use Interpol’s “worst of” child abuse site list as a way to shield Ozzies from truly awful content.

    • Google Is Blocked in China as Party Congress Begins

      All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China on Friday night and into Saturday, the company confirmed. The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way.

  • Civil Rights

    • AT&T is glad to expand service, but wants pesky FCC regulations dropped

      On Wednesday, AT&T announced a plan to invest $14 billion in expanding its wireless and U-Verse service around the country. At the same time, the company submitted a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking for an end to the “conventional public-utility-style regulation.”

    • Voter Suppression Efforts Blunted by Vigilant Advocates and High Turnout in Wisconsin and Nationally

      With most voter ID laws blocked before the 2012 elections and local election officials and civic groups prepared for True the Vote’s intimidation tactics, some of the worst fears about voter disenfranchisement were averted in Tuesday’s vote. But partisan voting laws and continued confusion over election administration led to long lines — prompting President Obama to note “by the way, we have to fix that,” in his acceptance speech.

    • Why was an Indian man held for sending a tweet?

      How can a virtually unknown Indian boost his Twitter following a hundred-fold overnight?

      Ravi Srinivasan did it by becoming the first person in India to be arrested for a tweet. The 46-year-old runs a packaging business in the southern Indian city of Pondicherry.

    • Law Blog Fireside: Chris Hansen, the ACLU’s Longest-Serving Attorney

      Mr. Hansen, 65, joined the group in 1973 and became senior staff counsel 20 years later, a role that allowed him to pick and choose issues to litigate around the country, from gene-patenting to Internet censorship to failing schools. Friday is Mr. Hansen’s last day.

    • Malala day: an inspiring girl reminds us of the power of the Internet

      This week, I’m just back from Azerbaijan – so human rights issues are very much on my mind.

      The European Union is not just a common market; and not just a guardian of peace. It’s a place of fundamental rights. Rights that we treasure, protect and assure for our citizens. And nor is the Internet just a set of technologies, or just a space for business opportunities. It is the new frontier of freedom. And people like the inspiring young Malala Yousafzai are a reminder of that.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Multi-Stakeholder Discussions á la Internet Governance Forum For WIPO?

      The need to bring all stakeholders together to discuss the future of copyright appears to have gotten a push from this year’s UN-led Internet Governance Forum.

      Trevor Clarke, assistant director general for the Culture and Creative Industries Sector of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said during a workshop on “Rethinking Copyright” today that the multi-stakeholder environment is “the best and and most appropriate” when it comes to the debate on copyright in the digital age. WIPO is preparing for such multi-stakeholder discussions, Clarke told Intellectual Property Watch.

    • UN Wants Multi-Stakeholder Discussions On ‘Rethinking Copyright’ — Ignores That The Only Stakeholder That Matters Is The Public
    • AT&T Admits That The Whole ‘Spectrum Crunch’ Argument It Made For Why It Needed T-Mobile Wasn’t True

      You may recall that back when AT&T was trying to buy T-Mobile, a big part of the argument was a spectrum crunch around its wireless efforts. The company insisted — strenuously — that it would not be able to expand 4G LTE services to more than 80% of the population unless it had T-Mobile. That argument ran into some trouble when a lawyer accidentally posted some documents to the FCC which admitted that the company could fairly easily expand its coverage to 97% of the population of the US without T-Mobile (and, in fact, that it would cost about 10% of what buying T-Mobile would cost). Suddenly, the argument that it absolutely needed T-Mobile rang hollow — even as the company continued to insist exactly that. Still, the FCC suddenly was skeptical and AT&T, seeing the writing on the wall, gave up on the merger.

    • Teen Hacker Banned From The Internet For Six Years

      A teenaged hacker known as Cosmo the God, who was involved in a number of big site takedowns earlier this year, and who is considered a “social engineering mastermind” has been sentenced to probation. The terms include a ban on internet access until his 21st birthday, six years from now, according to a Wired article by Mat Honan. For many years, we’ve questioned whether or not it’s reasonable (or even practical) to ban people from the internet for computer related crimes. It seems not only stupid and counterproductive, but just plain bizarre. The internet is so integrated into our lives these days that taking the internet out of your life is a lot more complicated than some might imagine.

    • Teenage Hacker ‘Cosmo the God’ Sentenced by California Court

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • GEMA Gets Bailed Out By Germany’s Parliament; Allowed To Proceed With Venue-Killing Rate Hikes

        The threat posed to Germany’s underground club scene by all-around IP thug GEMA is no longer just a threat. Back in July, GEMA decided to “streamline” its convoluted fee structure. Naturally, it decided to smooth things over in a upward motion, raising the fees charged to these clubs by up to 1,400%. This sparked protests against GEMA’s tactics and a petition with 60,000 signatures was brought to the Deutsches Bundestag (Germany’s parliament). Unfortunately, the Deutsches Bundestag punted, suggesting those unhappy with the new fee structure negotiate directly with GEMA. [However you spell "LOL" in German goes here.]

      • Viral Video Of 9-Year-Old Girl Football Star… Taken Down Because Of Music
      • Music Publishers Win $6.6 Million in Song Lyrics Copyright Case

        The copyright infringement lawsuit concerned the online publication of lyrics to works by Van Morrison, Ray Charles and others.

      • $6.6 Million Ruling Against Lyrics Site, Once Again, Shows How Short Sighted Music Industry Is

        For many years now, we’ve covered how music publishers have gone after all sorts of sites that post song lyrics, arguing infringement. As we’ve noted time and time again, this whole thing seems short sighted in the extreme. Lyrics sites don’t take away from interest in a song, they only increase it. And, yes, publishers have different interests than the musicians or labels, but it still seems counterproductive to sue and take down sites that were increasing interest in the actual music, as lyrics sites do. Unfortunately, lots of lyrics sites have been forced offline because the rates the publishers want are insane. A few years ago, a bunch of publishers went after Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse for its lyrics offerings. Greenspan — who was associated with MySpace in the early days as its parent company Intermix’s CEO — has, well, a colorful history. He’s spent many years stamping his feet about how Rupert Murdoch should have paid more for MySpace back in the day.

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