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04.19.14

Links 19/4/2014: Slow Easter News Day

Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • What open source really means

    As open source software continues to develop, many companies have begun to see the incredible value that it could bring to their organizations.

  • Open source trounces proprietary software for code defects, Coverity analysis finds
  • Open source code has fewer errors than proprietary code

    THE QUALITY of open source code has overtaken that of proprietary code for the first time, according to a survey.

  • Coverity Scan: Open Source Code Is Better Quality – The VAR Guy
  • Open source trounces proprietary software for code defects, Coverity analysis finds
  • Hey! Don’t Criticize Open Source Code Over Quality
  • ReactOS Working On A Community Windows OS

    A few months after ReactOS announced plans for a Cloud OS, the open-source project aiming for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows platforms, is now trying to spin a community edition of its operating system.

  • Open source now tier 1 for software development

    As Day 2 begins, I wanted to take the time to remember all the way back to yesterday on theCUBE. It may have been only 24 short hours ago, but the conversations had with some of the top executives, regarded by John Furrier as luminaries in their field, really highlighted the overall maturity of Linux and the open source community as both the future of the Cloud and that community seem to have converged this year.

  • Telerik Makes Framework for JavaScript Available via Open Source

    With strong roots in the Microsoft ecosystem, Telerik has always been part of the commercial software landscape. But starting today Telerik, a provider of application development tools, is embracing open source. The company today announced Telerik Kendo UI Core, an open source implementation of the JavaScript framework and user interface tools that Telerik created for its cross-platform application development environments.

  • Infoblox Announces Support for XenServer Open-Source Virtualization By Delivering a Virtual Appliance for Network Control

    Infoblox Inc. (NYSE:BLOX), the automated network control company, today introduced Infoblox Virtual Appliance Software for XenServer, bringing the full range of Infoblox enterprise-grade network control technologies to the open-source XenServer virtualization platform.

  • Infoblox to support XenServer open source virtualization
  • Open The Box: Cloud Company Gives Back To Community With Open Source

    Box has made its identity as a cloud company with generous file management features. The company showed another generous side by contributing to the Open Source movement with its own repository.

  • Box offers new open source initiative ahead of $250m IPO
  • The Cost of Open Source: the Problem

    Although I might give Mr Seggelmann the benefit of the doubt, the NSA’s track record for veracity in the wake of Edward Snowden’s astonishing leaks is not been of the best, and I am not inclined to do the same for them. But that’s another article. Here I want to concentrate on what is perhaps the most interesting facet of this story for readers of this column: the fact that the OpenSSL code suffering from Heartbleed is open source.

  • Box announces open source initiatives to ramp up community engagement

    Enterprise cloud storage and collaboration firm Box announced this week that the company is open sourcing a range of internal initiatives to “give back” to the coding communities that have contributed to its success.

  • Intel on open source: Software, hardware conversations must merge

    Doug Fisher, VP & GM, Software Services Group, Intel, took a trip down the memory lane of being a part of the open source community since its beginning and discusses his takes on the matter with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman, live from the 2014 Red Hat Summit.

  • SocioBoard Wants To Be Your Open Source Social Media Dashboard. Can It?

    Social media networks need to be streamlined otherwise you will get lost. A common problem that has been solved by a lot of social media dashboard startups already and SocioBoard is another startup trying to grab a pie from the existing market. The Mumbai based startup calls itself an open source product in social media space, the first of its kind globally from India. There have been Indian startups in the past that have tried to crack the space, they have had to face challenges. So it was interesting to give SocioBoard a spin.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • New tab page for Chrome: which one do you use?

        If you go to the Chrome Web Store and search for ‘new tab page’ or ‘startpage,’ you will find at least 30 different apps and extensions claiming to be the best. However, you do not have time to sift through all of them, so you settle for the one with the best reviews. Usually, the app or extension with the best reviews is the one I would suggest. However, when it comes to your new tab page, you cannot just pick the one with the highest reviews, and if you still use Google‘s standard new tab page, it is time for you to install a different one.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • With OpenStack Icehouse Here, Database-as-a-Service Tech Draws Attention

      One notable thing about Icehouse is that it introduces a new database-as-a-service feature, focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove. Trove is starting to get a lot of notice, and Tesora is among the companies with a stake in Trove’s success. The company is focused on Database-as-a-Service technology.

    • Getting Hit By The Variable Performance Of The Public Cloud

      With yesterday’s official release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS I set out to do some benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS in the public cloud. Unfortunately, that testing was drawn out due to the variable performance out of instances/droplets in the public cloud that are even of the same instance type.

    • Leveraging Cloud, Open Source To Aid Embattled IT

      IT executives laid out the challenges and opportunities created by cloud computing, open source, and other disruptive technologies during this week’s Red Hat summit in San Francisco.

  • CMS

    • We still believe in Linus’ law after Heartbleed bug, says Elie Auvray of Jahia

      Today Jahia is the #1 Open Source alternative to proprietary CMS vendors for upper tier digital projects. Over the years, we’ve focused on building a content platform that delivers true technology convergence: business user and developers work in harmony to deploy digital projects (Portals, multichannel, multi site, Multilanguage corporate sites, extranets, intranets and even full digital applications) securely and seamlessly.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • XP shutdown: Switch to free software, say FSMI activists

      Activists of the Free Software Movement of India say you had better switch to free software that can easily substitute the proprietary, costly licences of Microsoft. “When you migrate, it involves a lot of cost on hardware upgrades and migration. Besides buying the OS copy of a higher version, users need to upgrade their hardware so that their systems can support the new OS,” Y Kiran Chandra, General Secretary of the Free Software Movement of India, told Business Line.

    • Please protest the “Windows 8 Campus Tour”

      Microsoft is running “Windows 8 Campus Tour” events at many US universities. We’re inviting free software supporters, associated with the universities in question, to mount simple nondisruptive protests at these events.

    • GNU Dap 3.10 Released

      I am happy to announce the next release of GNU Dap.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Public sector slowly embracing cloud and open source

      The Red Hat Summit, celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Continuing its commitment to live coverage of tech events, SilconANGLE’s theCUBE is there, hosted by SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Meet TrustTheVote, A Project To Make Voting Open Source And Transparent
    • Blender Foundation needs more help to crowdfund the world’s first fully open source animated feature

      Julius writes, “With people like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backing them up, the Blender Foundation’s first full feature length film looks like one of those things that’s just bound to happen by itself. Except right now it isn’t. Having successfully collected over $630 000 in funding from over 3500 individual pledgers (setting a new world record for animated film), Project Gooseberry needs more to become what it promises to be — a historic open content film production.”

    • OSCAL, creating an open source ecosystem in Albania

      OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the first annual conference in Albania organised to promote software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, a global movement that originally started more than 25 years ago.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source 3D Printers for Small Business

        You may have heard of 3D printers—they’ve been all over the news. But you may not know that they represent real opportunity for small business owners. While 3D printers have been around since the 1980s in manufacturing (they were more commonly known as industrial robots), the big change came just a few years ago, when affordable models for hobbyists hit the market. Savvy small business owners take note: we’re witnessing the start of an affordable technological revolution, and it’s just the beginning.

      • Robohand: 3D-printed open source hand replacements

        Supposing you’ve had several fingers chopped off in the recent past and you understand how to operate a scissors, Robohand may well have a solution for you. The company began with a fellow by the name of Richard van As, a fellow who lost his fingers in a carpentry accident in 2011. Searching for the past several years for a solution to his problem, as a good carpenter never gives up, he discovered a future partner with whom he’d eventually found Robohand.

      • Open-Source Designs Could Turn You Into The Next Philippe Starck [Video]

        Customizable clothing has been inching its way into society for a while now, but with the kick off of Milan Design Week, a new company has unveiled an opportunity to customize your own designer furniture.

      • Open-source project teaches design of ARM boards

        A Linux programmer from the Slovak Republic has created an open-source project to help engineers and students to learn about advanced hardware design and how to port Linux to your own ARM board.

        It is the idea of Robert Feranec at the Fedevel Academy and colleague Martin Murin who has created the iMX6 Rex module based on a Freescale i.MX6 1.2GHz quad-core processor.

      • Build this open source DIY wind turbine for $30

        Getting started with home wind energy projects can set you back a pretty penny if you buy a finished product, but if you’re a little bit handy and don’t mind scrounging for materials and getting creative in the garage or backyard, you can try your hand at building one of these DIY wind turbines for about $30 in materials. After all, it is #iheartrenewables week!

  • Programming

    • [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.0.0-rc0

      A major version bump between v1.x.x series and the upcoming v2.0.0
      means there are a handful of backward incompatible UI improvements,
      but for most people, all the tricky preparation for the transition
      would have been already done for you and the upcoming release just
      flips the default. Unless you were living in a cave and have stayed
      with an ancient version of Git (e.g. one before 1.8.2 that was
      released more than a year ago) for all these times, that is—those
      of you may want to double check the backward compatibility notes
      section at the beginning of the draft release notes.

    • Using Clang’s Static Analyzer To Find Bugs In Your Code

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Security

    • GNUtls: GnuTLS 3.3.1

      Released GnuTLS 3.3.1 which is a bug fix release on the next stable branch of GnuTLS.

    • gnutls 3.3.1

      libgnutls: Enforce more strict checks to heartbeat messages
      concerning padding and payload.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Ukraine: how America’s coup machine has destroyed democracy worldwide since 1953

      Soon after the 2004 US coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, I heard Aristide’s lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He began his talk with a riddle: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?” The answer: “Because there is no US Embassy in Washington D.C.” This introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Caroline Lucas cleared of anti-fracking protest charges

      Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, has been found not guilty of obstructing a public highway and a public order offence during high-profile anti-fracking protests.

    • GMO Lobby Works Tirelessly Against Mandatory Labeling

      A coalition of genetically modified organism (GMO), pesticide, grocery and agriculture corporate trade groups are fighting mandatory labeling efforts at the state and local level by pushing preemption measures in Congress and at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

  • Finance

    • Krugman: Worried About Oligarchy? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

      In an interview with journalist Bill Moyers set to air Friday, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman celebrates both the insights and warnings of French economist Thomas Piketty whose new ground-breaking book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that modern capitalism has put the world “on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy—a society of inherited wealth.”

      The conclusions that Piketty puts forth in the book, Krugman tells Moyers, are revelatory because they show that even people who are now employing the rhetoric of the “1% versus the 99%” do not fully appreciate the disaster that global wealth inequality is causing.

    • South Carolina City Approves Plan To Exile Its Homeless

      Many homeless people in Columbia, South Carolina are facing an arduous choice: vacate downtown or be arrested.

    • Zero-hours contracts cause shopworkers’ misery

      Super-flexible working results in financial insecurity for supermarket workers and create potential for abuse by managers

  • Censorship

    • Florida on bloggers didn’t go far enough

      Remember when the word “blog” was first being bandied about? That was back in the early 2000′s when free web hosting from Geocities and Angelfire was still a big deal. Then the idea began taking off, especially after bloggers exposed Jeff Gannon of “Talon News” as James Guckert.

      It was a sordid affair that left CNN and other so called “mainstream” outlets in the dust as it proved how irrelevant they were becoming.

      Unfortunately, people in positions of power aren’t dealing with this new media very well. Neither are businessmen such as Christopher Comins. He attempted to sue a blogger because they posted about him shooting two dogs in a field. Comins claimed that bloggers such as Matthew Frederick VanVoorhis didn’t count as media since he was a blogger.

  • Privacy

    • Forget Dropbox: BitTorrent Sync Allows You To Skip the Cloud Entirely

      As cloud service companies battle it out for supremacy, one file sharing service sets itself apart by skipping the cloud altogether. It’s called BitTorrent Sync, and starting this week, it’s going to be available through Netgear’s native app store.

    • Making sense of Snowden

      This is a fantastic example of how to conduct an academic discussion of a really contentious subject. It brings together academics and NSA people to talk calmly about what’s happened and what it means. The participants are Yochai Benkler, Bruce Schneier, and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center and John DeLong and Anne Neuberger of the National Security Agency. The conversation is expertly moderated by the Berkman Faculty Director Terry Fisher.

  • DRM

    • ‘Kill Switch’ Included on All Cell Phones Made in U.S. by 2015

      Yeah, because law enforcement really cares quite a bit about whether or not your smartphone is stolen…unless it’s law enforcement stealing your phone from you in the first place because you’ve used the camera on it to protect yourself from police state activity by taking incriminating photos and videos of said law enforcement.

      Well, now they won’t even have to physically take your phone from you, because apparently they’ll be able to just push a button and remotely wipe it clean of all data.

      On an aside, someone tried to break into my house and it took a whole day for the cops to even bother to show up…like they really give a crap about whether or not your phone is stolen.

      As with every other trendy new technology advertised as making consumer’s lives just Jetsons-level awesome, there’s an obvious flipside that can be used (abused) for quite the opposite.

      By the way, the 2014 CTIA Board of Directors and Officers include the higher ups (Presidents, CEOs and VPs, etc.) from most of the major communications companies including Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Blackberry, AT&T, Sprint, Qualcomm, LG Electronics, Samsung, T-Mobile, Motorola, U.S. Cellular, Nokia and Apple.

      And remember, many of these companies are the same ones the NSA taps to track all your online communications and populate their databases with your data.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Knock off Nigel is back! – You won’t believe who it is.

      If I may we will start with Knock Off Nigel. For those that don’t live in the UK and maybe missed this treat, its an advert showing the evils of Copyright infringement, or it tries too. With an unsophisticated attempt to create a stigma around Copyright Infringement, because the creators seem to have been of roughly GCSE level, it created a cult following for its catchy jingle and cheesy character. Shamefully previous campaigns failed too, with the Channel 4 Series “IT Crowd” even getting in on the act of mocking the creators of these “adverts”.

    • Eli Lilly Enlists Congress In Fight Against Canada For Refusing Patent On Useless Drug

      Eli Lilly bet its entire business model on patents years back, rather than on creating useful products that people want to buy. Lately it’s been having trouble getting new patents, and is reacting extremely poorly to the fact that its last-gasp efforts to get new patents aren’t working. As we’ve noted, a few years back, Canada rejected some patent applications for some Eli Lilly drug after the Canadian patent board “determined that the drug had failed to deliver the benefits the firm promised when obtaining the patent.” In other words, after realizing that the drug is not useful, Canada rejected the patent.

    • Novel Open Source Seed Pledge aims to keep new vegetable and grain varieties free for all

      Jack Kloppenburg (left), professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, Irwin Goldman (center), chair of the Department of Horticulture, and Claire Luby (right), graduate student in the UW’s Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics program, fill envelopes with non-patented seeds in the Horticulture office in Moore Hall.

    • U.S.: open source seed program keeps varieties in public domain

      Twenty-nine broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetable and grain varieties have been made public through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI).

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