… Se puede decir que sólo “el 1%” apoya Battistelli y su orden del día.

“ Consutores PWC de Italia y Chipre fuéron escogidos por la EPO para realizar este estudio al que una vez más los representantes de empleados fuéron marginalmente asociados.”

Hablándo de los representantes de empleados ( lo que queda de ellos , no la unión amarilla ), hay una falta de progreso de Battistelli , quién está de empeórar las cosas mucho …

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• GlusterFS: First impressions

• Desktop

  • Linus Torvalds really likes Google’s Chromebook Pixel

  • Chromebook Pixel Supports Linux and Android

    When Gus looked over the Chromebook Pixel recently, he liked the design but didn’t think much of the Pixel’s productivity potential. It’s feasible to take a Pixel and run other operating systems on it, including Ubuntu and Android.

  • Linus Torvalds may consider Chromebook Pixel as his primary laptop

    Linus Torvalds is a huge fan of Nexus 7, he wrote on his Google + stream how much he liked it. He was, however, not that excited about the early Chromebooks, but he did use one in kitchen (as a common PC to check calender etc).

    Despite being the creator of the Linux kernel, he is a huge admirer of Apple’s Macbook Air due to it’s sleek design. He criticized PC vendors for using low res screens and cheap material in laptops.

  • On the Chromebook Pixel, the Multiple OS Future Takes Shape

  • Chromebook Pixel: Does this device herald Android and Chrome OS’s wedding?

    Pretty much everyone agrees that Google’s Chromebook Pixel is too expensive to just run the Chrome OS Web browser. But what if it could run Android tablet apps as well?

• Server

  • IBM To Make Its Cloud Services and Software Open Sourced-based

• Kernel Space

  • Advocating for Linux on the Front Lines and in the Kernel

    “I hate that Microsoft has so much power in the Trusted Computing debates and how that plays out in new hardware,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. The kernel “should be about being an OS. It’s a fine distinction what constitutes ‘OS’ — always has been — but in my opinion, extending or modifying the Linux kernel to Microsoft’s whims is too big a concession.”

  • Feature set of Linux 3.9 has been established

    Experimental RAID 5 and 6 support in the still experimental Btrfs will be one of the major new features of Linux 3.9, expected to arrive in late April. This has become apparent because Linus Torvalds has now issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.9 which, as usual, closes the Linux development cycle’s “merge window”, the phase during which the developers integrate the majority of changes for the next version. This time, the merge window, which started with the release of Linux 3.8, only lasted thirteen instead of the usual fourteen days.

• Applications

  • Crashplan, the Only Reason I Install Java

    For years, I’ve been singing the praises of BackupPC, and for servers, I still think it’s the best thing going. The problem with BackupPC, however, is in order for it to work reliably, your workstations need to be on all the time. This is especially difficult with laptops.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Coreutils Status Reports: numfmt – A number reformatting utility

    • Free Guide To LibreOffice 4.0

    • PulseAudio: An Achilles Heel that needs repair

    • How to Install Anything in Ubuntu

    • [HOW TO] Install Oxygen Transparent In KDE 4.10

    • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Scientific Linux 6.3

    • A very tiny GIS

      quickplot is a fast, interactive 2-D plotter. All it needs to do its job is a text file with x and y points in a list. If those points are longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, quickplot works like a simple GIS program, with some surprising capabilities.

      This article explains how I set up quickplot to do species mapping for Australia. For most of my mapping work I use qgis and Google Maps/Earth, but quickplot is handy for quickly making simple maps and zooming in on details. With an executable size of only 453 kb, quickplot is the tiniest and fastest GIS I know.

  • Games

    • Latest Steam numbers show Linux, Mac gamers almost equal

    • Steam Hardware Survey Reveals 2.02% Users Are From Linux

      Seems like Linux is finally catching up with Mac OS users, at least as a gaming platform. Valve software has released some stats of hardware survey which shows Linux users have become almost double while compared to January. This considerable increase is obviously because of Steam being pushed to Ubuntu Software Center, thus making it available to more number of users.

    • Linux close to overtaking Mac on Steam

      Valve’s survey shows Linux already accounts for two per cent of users

      Valve’s latest Steam survey shows Linux is already close to overtaking Mac in terms of user base.

      Steam for Linux recently left beta testing, and is now available for download through the Ubuntu store.

    • Steam: Linux user percentage close to Mac, Ubuntu 12.10 most popular

      2% doesn’t sound like much perhaps, but it’s worth noting that Mac users represent just over 3% of total users, despite having been supported for much longer. Trends show Mac operating systems are losing popularity while Linux is on the rise, too.

    • 0 A.D. Music Shows There’s More to Open Source Than Code

      The open source ecosystem is mostly about code. After all, sharing code is at the core of the open source ethos. But for many Free Software projects, there’s more at stake than code itself, as the development team behind the open source game 0 A.D. made clear recently when it highlighted the contributions of musical composer Omri Lahav–whose work is an important reminder that software success, in many cases, is about more than ones and zeroes.

    • Linux users on Steam close the gap on Mac

      Just weeks after a native Linux client launched for Valve’s popular Steam digital distribution service, Linux users already make up more than two percent of all Steam users.

      Steam for Linux launched last month with more than 100 games readily available for Linux OS users, including a multitude of Valve games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike Source and Team Fortress 2.

    • Whispering Willows: A Horror-Puzzle Adventure Game

    • Voluntary Steam survey finds Linux usage increased during the client’s first official month

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Linus Torvalds switches back to Gnome 3.x desktop

    Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has switched by the Gnome 3, saying the desktop’s shortcomings can be fixed via the use of extensions.

  • xmonad – The Speed Demon

    I’ve been noticing my work machine getting slower, and slower, and slower over the past few months, and over the weekend it finally gave up the ghost and died. For the past five years I’ve been using the most current version of OS X on an old MacBook Pro, but the Mac had a hardware problem. When I dropped by desktop support with the dead Mac, they offered me an equally old Mac, or a new PC. I chose the PC. I’ve returned to Ubuntu for the first time since 2008, and I’ve gone the minimalist route with xmonad, the tiling window manager. I’ve got one thing to say about the new setup, this thing is fast.

  • Transocean Turns on BP With Scorching Oil-Spill Document

    BP prolonged the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by two months by concealing the rate of oil flowing from the broken Macondo well, Transocean claims in a document filed in the damages trial.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 5 Useful Plasmoids for KDE

      In the past, we’ve written about several cool KDE apps. I’m now going to show you some desktop applets – called plasmoids – that have caught my attention. They are all included in KDE 4.9. KDE and productivity junkies, read on!

    • Plasma Workspaces SDK, Plasmate 1.0 Released

    • Plasmate 1.0

      Plasmate follows the UNIX philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well”. As such, it is not a general purpose IDE but rather a tool specifically tailored to creating Plasma Workspace add-ons using non-compiled languages such as QML and Javascript. It guides each step in the process, simplifying and speeding up project creation, development, adding new assets, testing and publishing. The goal of Plasmate is to enable creating something new in seconds and publishing it immediately.

    • Plasmate 1.0: A Plasma Workspaces SDK

    • KDE Ships March Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

      KDE has released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. They are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended for everyone running the initial 4.10 release. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be safe and pleasant for everyone.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Gnome 3.8 Beta PPA Available For Ubuntu Raring

      While it’s already known that Raring Ringtail, the next major release of Ubuntu will mostly have Gnome 3.6, users can now install Gnome 3.8 Beta in this currently development version of Ubuntu and try out the new features. All you need to do is add a personal package archive and update the packages using apt.

    • A Few Updates Of Gnome 3.8

      Gnome 3.8 is currently in active development phase and a few features planned earlier are being implemented. One of the Gnome developers, Debarshi Ray has posted some screenshots of awesome work he has done with Gnome lately. Like you can now add IMAP/SMTP accounts directly to Gnome Online Accounts via its single sign-on dialog, and integrate all email clients to use them. Best still, Evolution has already been integrated and you will no longer need to separately add accounts in Evolution to receive your mail.

    • Recent GNOME 3.7 sightings

      With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things).

• Distributions

  • First look at Rebellin Linux 1.00 “Adrenaline”

  • ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012: Very efficient & elegant stock Gnome 3 distro

    I have been following ROSA Linux since 2012. Now that possibly not everything going right for Mandriva Linux, the emergence of ROSA has assumed paramount significance. ROSA has not only enhanced the Mandriva based, but also created its own very distinct theme, especially for KDE. Even I am an ardent admirer of the unique design that ROSA brings on the table. Every ROSA release so far has been very refined and amazingly attractive.

  • New Releases

    • Neptune 3 RC

      We are proud to announce our release candidate of Neptune 3 “Brotkasten” our first 64bit version of Neptune. This release candidate comes with several bugfixes and changes aswell as the new KDE SC 4.10.

    • Springdale 6.4

    • Clonezilla 2.1.1-2

    • A fresh litter of Puppy Linux releases: Wary, Racy and Quirky

      Wary and Racy 5.5, as well as Quirky 5.4.91, can be downloaded from the ibiblio servers. Explanations of the different members of the Puppy Linux family are available from Kauler’s web site.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva ‘Back in the Game’ With Enterprise Software

      Though Mandriva has been a popular Linux desktop distribution for many years, the company early last year found itself in a tough spot financially. Since then, Mandriva has undergone some major changes, adopting a new enterprise focus and creating an independent nonprofit foundation to carry on the Mandriva open source community work. The company also recently joined The Linux Foundation, a sign that Mandriva is “back in the game,” says CEO Jean-Manuel Croset. Here, he discusses how the company turned around, its new enterprise server and cloud products and its relationship to the new OpenMandriva foundation.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon Linux 11 review

      Sabayon Linux 11 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a distribution inspired and based upon Gentoo Linux, a version of Linux that uses source based installation rather than binary packages. Sabayon is intended to have the features of Gentoo with less work, and does include binary package management. This is a review of Sabayon 11, using the MATE desktop. 64 bit edition. As in my previous review of Sabayon 8, I had no trouble creating a bootable USB key with UNetbootin on Windows. I chose MATE not only because it fit within 2 GB, but because I’ve done an Xfce review already.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Spin Systems, Inc. Joins Red Hat Partner Program

      Spin Systems, a leading provider of enterprise-wide medical, legal and financial solutions to Fortune 500 companies and federal government agencies, announced today that it has joined the Red Hat partner program.

      Spin Systems has broad knowledge of technologies based on Red Hat and Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions and created a solution that collects more than 1.2 billion records per day from medical diagnostic devices, electronic medical records, information kiosks, and other sources. In addition to reducing costs and improving efficiency, the solution is designed to help clients access healthcare records in seconds rather than weeks or months.

    • Dell Inc. : Dell Works With Red Hat, Intel and VMware To Launch Center of Excellence for Hospitals Using Epic EHR Software

    • Dell, Intel, Red Hat, VMware Team on Linux for Health Care
      

    • Dell, Intel, Red Hat, VMware Team on Linux for Health Care

      Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Intel, (NASDAQ: INTC), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) have teamed up to open a dedicated facility for hospitals to test and deploy new healthcare software running on x86 servers using Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux.

      The idea is to show small- to medium-sized hospitals and medical facilities that Epic Systems’ electronic health records (EHR) software running on x86 industry-standard servers with Linux can meet the needs of mission-critical healthcare solutions. Inasmuch as the healthcare industry has long been the poster child for proprietary software and hardware, highlighting the cost savings and interoperability advantages offered by an open source platform also is a key priority of the initiative.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 18 + Cinnamon – Not bad, more polish needed

      • Fedora Desktops – Quick Look

        So in short, while I use Xfce, and will continue doing so, from this short comparison, KDE comes out as the winner.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Project News – March 4th, 2013

    • Debian Developers Prefer Teams and Git

      Lucas Nussbaum has been crunching some numbers that lead him to conclude that “Debian is (still) changing.” Over the years a few trends have emerged as Nussbaum demonstrates using snapshot.debian.org and a data mining script.

      In a blog post earlier today, Nussbaum posted graphs of some of the trends he’s seeing in Debian package development. His first graph shows that the number of team-maintained packages have seen a dramatic increase the last several years while the number of “not co-maintained” and small independent group maintained packages have remained fairly steady. Nussbaum believes these numbers show the team-maintained model is preferred by today’s developers.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu may switch to Android technologies to keep the Linux desktop competitive

          With the recent introduction of Ubuntu Touch a very interesting change of strategy is emerging for Canonical.

          As Phoronix and others have discovered, Ubuntu Phone and Touch are using SurfaceFlinger as their compositor. SurfaceFlinger uses OpenGL ES to render applications screens/windows in a hardware accelerated way using the OpenGL driver of the GPU directly.

          Now, Canonical is promising a completely integrated experience for Ubuntu 14.04 which will run Phone, Touch, TV and Desktop applications in one common GUI environment. How will they be able to fulfill their promise for Linux desktop applications currently running on Xorg?

          So far, everyone has believed that the Ubuntu desktop is migrating from Xorg to Wayland. This migration has been going so slow that there is actually no visible sign of happening any time soon. It seems that Canonical has slightly changed the “to” part of their migration plans. They are not moving to Wayland, they are moving to SurfaceFlinger.

        • UBUNTU TO USE ITS OWN DISPLAY SERVER CALLED MIR, UNITY TO BE PORTED TO QT/QML

        • Ubuntu Building Own Display Server, Unity To Switch Back to Qt/QML

        • Mixed Reactions On Mir, Upstream Developers Not Happy With It

          A few hours after Canonical announced Mir, a new display server that is not derived from X or Wayland, we saw mixed reactions from developers and users. While it seems that some upstream Wayland and X developers are not at all happy with Canonical taking such a decision, some users are excited and expect a faster and snappier desktop out of box, tightly integrated with Unity.

        • Canonical’s Mir Display Server is a clever approach

          Unity has been in development for over two years and was based on Nux/Compiz (Unity 3D) and Qt (Unity 2D). It forms the foundation of Canonical’s convergence plan to have one code base and interface on all devices running Ubuntu. This poses several challenges like developing a common display server which is capable of running on all devices without much overhead and an interface to rule them all. This was the sole reason behind the creation of Unity and not choosing other desktop environments such as Gnome Shell etc

        • GK802 Mini PC Ubuntu Release Now Includes Hardware Accelerated Graphics (video)

          Owners of the Zealz GK802 Mini PC might be pleased to learn that a new released of Ubuntu has been released for the stick mini PC which allows you to get full use from the mini PC and now even includes hardware accelerated graphics to enjoy.

        • Ubuntu 13.04 beta touts search privacy – before it hooks in eBay, IMDb etc

          Linux distro Ubuntu 13.04, which hit its first beta today, is already showing promise: there are small but very useful usability tweaks planned for Ubuntu’s Unity user interface.

        • Ubuntu de-bricked my Android Jelly Bean Touchpad

        • Things to consider before flashing Ubuntu on your Nexus Device

        • Ubuntu-based XPS Sputnik developer ultrabook goes on sale in the UK

        • ServInt Announces Ubuntu Availability

        • Ubuntu should be ready for daily use in a couple of weeks

          While the preview version of Ubuntu Touch for developers is a promising look at what the OS has in store it’s far from a fully featured version of the final product. However according to Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth it shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready for daily use. According to an interview with ZDnet an everyday driver is going to be ready to download in a couple of weeks.

        • HP launches a cheap Pavilion all-in-one PC running Ubuntu

          Last year HP announced its intention to start selling machines shipping with Ubuntu instead of always opting for Windows. That push started in China, but today HP shipped its first new consumer Ubuntu hardware for Europe.

          It’s a Pavilion all-in-one carrying the forgettable name of the Pavilion 20-b101ea. It’s also not going to set any performance records as this is a low-end machine aimed at users who want to use the Internet, an office suite, watch HD video, and play a few web games. But what is compelling is the price. In the UK it is being sold for £349 including sales tax. A quick conversion puts the price pre-tax at just US$429.

        • Getting Started With The First Online Ubuntu Developer Summit

        • Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server – Update

          On the evening before the first online Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical has revealed its plans for “Mir”, a next-generation display server which will run as a system-level component to replace the X Window system. Canonical has rejected Wayland, seen by many as the successor to X Windows, because they feel it recreates X semantics in its input event handling and parts of the protocol include privileged shell integration which the Mir specifiers would rather not have. The decisions along this path of development appear to have been taken in the summer of 2012.

        • Ubuntu Touch Will Be Usable In ‘Couple of Weeks’ Says Shuttleworth

        • Dedoimedo Ubuntu smartphone contest!

          Normally, I am not a big fan of smartphones. Scratch that, I am very much not a fan of smartphones. However, after I heard and saw Mark Shuttleworth present the upcoming mobile devices that will be running Ubuntu on them, for the first time, I was really intrigued with the technology and its potential use.

          Indeed, sometime in Q4 2013 or Q1 2014, I will be buying myself one. In fact, I will be buying two devices, one for myself and one for the lucky winner of the Dedoimedo Ubuntu smartphone contest. Please read to see how you can participate and maybe win yourself a handsome smartphone.

        • Ubuntu Announce Unity Next, Will Be Written in Qt/QML

        • Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS Review: Now I like Unity!

          Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is possibly one of the most landmark long term release for Ubuntu and Canonical for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is the first long term release with Unity desktop. Second, first time the LTS is supported for 5 years. Love it or hate it, Unity has now become synonymous with Ubuntu. And after reviewing a lot of distros with stock Gnome 3 as desktop, I now understand why canonical didn’t pursue Gnome 3. Unity, at least, is intuitive and easier to use even for a Linux novice. If that right side strip irritates you, simply check the auto-hide option. Agree, customisation is sacrificed if you use Unity, but it looks elegant.

        • Google Chrome OS vs. Ubuntu

          At the time of this article’s creation, the Samsung Chromebook is the number one top seller on Amazon.com. Chrome OS is attacking other operating systems head on.

          In this article, I’ll explore how Chrome OS stacks up against Ubuntu and whether the two operating systems are likely to appeal to the same user base.

        • Ubuntu dumps X window system, creates replacement for PC and mobile

          The X window system has served numerous Linux- and Unix-based operating systems well over its nearly three decades of life. But Canonical is ready to move on from X, saying a new display server is necessary to power the Unity user interface in Ubuntu as the OS expands from desktops to tablets and phones.

        • Ubuntu Phone based on CyanogenMod 10.1 … unless it isn’t – new scandal of the week?

          Is Ubuntu Phone based on CyanogenMod 10.1? If so, is this a major scandal in the mobile business? According to some, Ubuntu Phone is indeed based on CyanogenMod, while others say that’s not quite so simple.

        • With convergence in mind, Ubuntu Linux scraps Wayland

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • The emerging smartphone OS battle: Firefox vs. Tizen vs. Ubuntu

    • Ballnux

      • Samsung posts first teaser video for Galaxy S 4

      • Rumored Specs, Tantalizing Ad Fuel Galaxy S IV Launch Excitement

        Samsung may be on the verge of doing something paradoxically Apple-ish: being original. Often accused of copying Cupertino — both in and out of courtrooms — it appears the company may have something completely different to unveil at its Galaxy S IV launch event next week. Not only that, it’s taking a new tack with its prelaunch ad campaign, building suspense instead of taking swipes.

      • Samsung’s New Smartphone Will Track Eyes to Scroll Pages

        Samsung’s next big smartphone, to be introduced this month, will have a strong focus on software. A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling.

        The phone will track a user’s eyes to determine where to scroll, said a Samsung employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.

        The source would not explain what technology was being used to track eye movements, nor did he say whether the feature would be demonstrated at the Galaxy S IV press conference, which will be held in New York on March 14. The Samsung employee said that over all, the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.

    • Android

      • Acer To Ship 7 Million Android Tablets This Year: Sources

        With an aim to meet strong demand for entry-level tablets, Acer is reportedly planning to ship 10 million tablets in 2013, an increase of 400 per cent year on year.

        Of the projected shipments for this year, seven million units will use an Android-based platform, while the remaining are going to be based on Windows.

      • Android 4.2.2 AOSP Binaries Launched For Nexus Devices

        Google has announced the release of Android 4.2.2 Android Open Source Project (AOSP) binaries. These are intended for use with any Nexus AOSP-enabled device including Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 and the previous generation Galaxy Nexus.

      • Android 4.2 Now Available For ASUS Transformer Pad TF300

        ASUS has started rolling out Android 4.2 Jelly Bean to its Asus Transformer Pad TF300 in the US region. The roll-out makes it the first non-Nexus device to receive the update to Google’s latest mobile operating system.

        Android 4.2 will be released to Transformer Pad owners via a free over the air update starting today in the United States and will be available in other regions later this month. This makes the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 just the fourth device to receive the update, after the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices.

      • Koush releases open source Superuser app for rooted Android devices

        Android developer Koushik Doutta has made a name for himself developing some of the most popular tools used by folks who root their devices and install custom ROMs. His ClockworkMod Recovery and ROM Manager apps are some of the most popular tools for installing custom firmware on an Android device.

      • Google’s Red Guide to the Android App Store

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • First Ubuntu Touch tablet up for pre-order in Australia

      Recently Canonical showed off a special Ubuntu build for tablets, and now Australian company Intermatix is offering its customers the chance to pre-order the first tablets running the new OS. Unsurprisingly, two models are being offered: the Intermatix U7 and U10, which sport screens measuring 7 and 10 inches, respectively.

    • World’s first Ubuntu tablet is available for pre-order

      Here is great news for our readers and Ubuntu fans. World’s first Ubuntu powered tablet is here and currently available for pre-order. The tablet is priced at AUS $299.00 and a discount of 10% is announced for the first 50 customers.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google’s Zopfli Compression Algorithm Is Now Open Source

  Google has open sourced its Zopfli data compression algorithm. Zopfli, according to the company, can produce files three to eight percent smaller than zlib and can be used to speed up Web downloads.

  Zopfli, based on the Deflate algorithm, has been optimised to produce smaller file sizes at the expense of compression speed. The smaller compressed size would mean better space utilisation, quicker load times, and of course lower Web page load latencies.

• ‘Blender Master Class’ Gets A+ in 3D Graphics Instruction

  The Blender graphics tool can result in some great-looking 3D imagery — once you learn the software so you can unlock all its capabilities. Blender Master Class holds the keys to those features and functions; it’s easy to understand and executed with a useful hands-on style that takes advantage of the author’s considerable experience in creating graphics masterpieces.

• Open Source Ceph FS Popular in the Cloud, Big Data

• Exclusive: Startup AnsibleWorks pitches open-source IT configuration, deployment tool

  A couple of former Red Hat veterans think there’s an easier way to configure, deploy and manage IT across an organization and founded AnsibleWorks to attack that problem.

• Cloud Sherpas releases open-source framework for short-cutting Google Apps development

• Events

  • Big Names, Excellent Content at OS Conference in South Carolina – March 27 & 28

• SaaS/Big Data

  • IBM Delivers OpenStack-based SmartCloud Orchestrator

  • IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

  • Where Linux Led, OpenStack Will Follow

    The critical momentum that the industry is seeing today for the open standards cloud movement is reminiscent of Linux and its turning point in the late 1990s, and we’re willing to bet that cloud will have a similar outcome – the triumph of open standards over proprietary approaches to cloud computing.

    How do we know? When you look at cloud, the fundamentals are the same.

    The strategy articulated around open source in 1998 – preventing vendor lock in, providing market choice, spurring innovation, and enabling modularity of design to drive higher quality software – holds true today for enterprise cloud computing.

  • IBM OpenStack: Is This Linux All Over Again? (Not Yet)

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Apache OpenOffice Hits 40 Million Download Milestone

    Apache OpenOffice has reached an impressive 40 million downloads since the release of OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) said that this number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge, excluding language packs and source tarballs.

• Education

  • Great to meet my young advisers yesterday!

    And the unvarnished truth is what I got. They raised a lot of interesting points. From subjects I’m well familiar with, like the need for a modern, European copyright framework. Plus we had an interesting debate about the need for a more modern, dynamic education system – one that is adapted to digital realities. It’s very challenging providing courses and certification in a fast-moving world where practices can change within months; and sometimes, indeed, the best teacher is experience.

• BSD

  • GNUstep on FreeBSD

    I thought it would be fun to share how well GNUstep runs these days. FreeBSD now is a first-quality platform! Stable and not second to Linux at all. NetBSD is close to it too. I try hard that all application maintained by me are not “Linux centric” as most of today’s desktops are!

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Free Software Supporter Issue 59, February 2013

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    * Will you be at LibrePlanet? Register today for March 23-24
    * Mako Hill remembers Aaron Swartz
    * Only Gandalf can protect Europe from the unitary patent
    * Winners announced for free software gaming’s highest honor, the Liberated Pixel Cup
    * Announcing the Empowermentors Collective: a group for women of color and queer people of color
    * GNU Press discounts Bison Manual!
    * FSFE asks you to show your love for free software!
    * Keep the pressure on the White House and US Copyright Office to fix anti-circumvention provisions
    * Announcing status.fsf.org: Our new home for microblogging
    * FSF licensing team: What we did in 2012 and why it matters for 2013
    * Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
    * LibrePlanet featured resource: Coreboot installation party at LibrePlanet 2013
    * GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 19 new GNU releases!
    * GNU Toolchain update
    * Other FSF and free software events
    * Thank GNUs!
    * Take action with the FSF

  • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 27 new GNU releases!

• Public Services/Government

  • ‘Like medieval merchants, open source community can create its own laws’

    Communities of developers of free and open source software can create their own governing laws, using more than just their software licences, say two Irish researchers Ian Ó Maolchraoibhe and Maureen O’Sullivan, from the National University of Ireland, in the city of Galway. The two are currently working on an academic paper, a follow up to the presentation they gave at the Fosdem conference in Brussels earlier this month.

  • Local authorities network to focus on open standards and interoperability

    Open standards and the compatibility of data and IT systems are two of the core themes of a network of municipalities, founded last week Thursday. The new organisation is called Linked Organisation of Local Authority ICT Societies (LOLA). It is the international version of national networks of local administrations in Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium.

  • Ozone Widget Framework required to be open source under congressional law

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • New leaders in science are those who share

      The Obama administration recently responded to a petition asking the government to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.”

      I first heard about the petition on Google+, and am very proud to be signature #52. Back then 25,000 signatures seemed like a tall order for what is a somewhat niche area. In the end, the petition gained over 65,000 signatures and an official response from the White House. The Open Science Federation posted a screen capture of the 25,000th signature landmark on June 3, 2012. John Wilibanks started the petition with signature #1.

  • Open Hardware

    • As Willow Garage Shifts Course, a Key Robotics Platform Changes Stewardship

      For many years now, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Open source robotics platforms have flourished, but they’ve also been fragmented, with software and hardware designs produced all around the world that have little to do with each other. That’s why it was so promising when the folks behind Willow Garage–a robotics project that originated at Stanford University–announced the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

• Programming

  • Eclipse Releases Open Source Orion 2.0 web-based IDE

    I’ve been following the development of Orion, since the Eclipse Foundation started the effort back in January of 2011. The basic idea behind Orion is to move development online into a web-based development model.

    The Orion 1.0 release came out in October of last year, and here we are four months later with an Orion 2.0 release.

• Standards/Consortia

  • IBM, standards, and the cloud

    I just figured out that I’ve been involved with standards for almost one-third of my life, since the mid-1990s. During that time, I’ve been employed by IBM but I’ve also worked collaboratively with other people in the IT industry on standards efforts in groups like the W3C and OASIS. I think that collectively we’ve helped move the industry from “proprietary and locked-in” toward “open and interoperable.” That’s a good thing.

    With that prolog, I’m pleased to help announce that, moving forward, IBM will base all its cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture. To kick this off, IBM will deliver a new private cloud offering based on the OpenStack open source software. (More marketing sort of stuff is available in the press release, which I will link to just as soon as I get the URL.)

  • Open standards are key for security in the cloud

    The current divide between proprietary and open approaches to enterprise cloud computing has implications beyond the obvious. More than just issues of cloud interoperability and data portability, open standards have benefits for user identity, authentication and security intelligence that closed or proprietary clouds threaten to compromise.

Leftovers

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Ten Years Ago, the Truth About Iraqi WMDs Was Published–and Ignored

    Ten years ago, a major American magazine published a bombshell report about the non-existence of Iraq’s WMDs. But it was hardly noticed by a corporate press corps too busy hyping the threat from those non-existent weapons.

    The story appeared in the March 3, 2003, issue of Newsweek–a short piece with the headline “The Defector’s Secrets.” It almost seemed as if the magazine didn’t know what it had on its hands. Or perhaps it did.

  • Eric Holder: Yes, Your Government Can Drone You to Death on U.S. Soil (UPDATED)

    Remember how Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has been trying to get a straight answer about whether the United States government reserves the legal right to assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil? Well, Attorney General Eric Holder has just answered the question in a letter to Paul, partially reprinted by Mother Jones.

  • Singapore asks US to help probe scientist Shane Todd’s ‘suicide’

  • VP Biden Beats Drums of War Against Iran at AIPAC Conference

    The annual AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference was the stage for U.S. and Israeli leaders to affirm their message that “all options are on the table” against Iran.

  • Attorney General Eric Holder: US Government Has Authority to Target & Kill US Citizens on US Soil

  • F.B.I. to Help Investigate American’s Death in Singapore, Reports Say

    …pathologist hired by the parents in the United States after their son’s body was flown back said it showed signs of struggle, and ruled the death a homicide.

  • FBI, FAA investigating drone spotted over Brooklyn

  • Pilot reports mysterious drone that could have caused crash over JFK airport

  • Importing the War on Terror: Glenn Greenwald & Activist Trevor Timm on Domestic Drone Surveillance

    Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation join us to discuss domestic surveillance drones and the secrecy surrounding military drones around the world. “I think the importation of the war on terror and its tactics, generally, to the U.S. is probably the most significant development in the world of civil liberties,” says Greenwald. Timm is also the co-manager of the @Drones Twitter account. As a result of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, drone use in the United States is expected to expand rapidly in the next few years, an issue that is being closely watched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [includes rush transcript]

  • UN demands prosecution of Bush-era CIA crimes

  • U.N.’s Drone Inquisitor: CIA Torture Was an ‘International Conspiracy of Crime’

    As his inquiry into U.S. drone strikes gets underway, the United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism and human rights has stepped up his rhetoric against the agency he’ll inevitably investigate. The CIA’s torture program was at the center of an “international conspiracy of crime,” he told a U.N. panel on Tuesday.

    The CIA’s torture in the last decade is unrelated from its current drone campaign. But Ben Emmerson, the U.N. rapporteur, will still need access to the drones from a CIA he portrayed on Tuesday morning as something similar to a Bond villain. In an interview with Danger Room last month, Emmerson said he was confident the Obama administration would grant him access to one of its most secretive counterterrorism programs.

  • $1.5 Trillion for the Drug War? 5 Outrageous Areas of Gov’t Spending That Should be Cut Instead of Social Services

• Cablegate

  • Bradley Manning Nobel Peace Prize Nomination 2013

    Following is the reasoning we sent to the committee explaining why we felt compelled to nominate Private Bradley Manning for this important recognition of an individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world. The lengthy personal statement to the pre-trial hearing February 28th by Bradley Manning in his own words validate that his motives were for the greater good of humankind.

  • Manning among record number Nobel Peace Prize nominees

    A record number of Nobel Peace Prize nominations were received this year, which saw US soldier and Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning being nominated for a third time.

• Finance

  • Fascist Switzerland Strikes back

    Switzerland will still go to any lengths to protect the ultra-rich dictators and mafia who flock there. Mutabar Tadjibaeva – multiple rape victim, survivor of repeated torture and still dogged human rights activist, is wanted for questioning by Geneva Police for the crime of ringing the bell of Gulnata Karimova’s 25 million dollar house and asking to speak to her.

    That is absolutely all she did. I know, as I was there and did it too. We both left our visiting cards, took some photos from the streets so the children of Uzbekistan could see where the profits from their slave labour in the cotton fields went, and then we left on the bus, as we came.

  • Selig Cartwright, Goldman Sachs Washroom Attendant, Comforts The Afflicted

    A job creator! I’m a job creator, Selig.

  • Building WSDEs: Strategies and Alliances

    Among those persuaded of the value of Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs) and of a transition to an economic system that includes a large and growing number of such enterprises, the question often arises, how do we get there from here? In other words, what sorts of strategies and alliances might allow or facilitate that transition? Here is an initial response to that question.

  • New Study by National Employment Law Project Documents ALEC’s Attack on Wages

    Since the Center for Media and Democracy’s launch of ALEC Exposed in July 2011, CMD has known that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its corporate funders are accelerating the race to the bottom in wages and working conditions for America’s working families. ALEC has a raft of “model bills” to lower wages and slash benefits for workers, even one to repeal state minimum wage laws.

    Now the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has joined in the effort to take a closer look at this ALEC agenda, tallying the bills introduced and pushed in states in the last few years.

    In an issue brief called “The Politics of Wage Suppression: Inside ALEC’s Legislative Campaign Against Low-Paid Workers,” NELP has documented that since January 2011, legislators from 31 states have introduced 105 bills aiming to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the state and local level, and 67 of these 105 bills were directly sponsored or co-sponsored by legislators affiliated with ALEC.

  • Goldman Sachs Has Already Figured a Way Around Regulation to Some of the Riskiest Investments on Wall Street

  • New Report By U.S. PIRG Targets Cash Stashed Overseas

    …offshore tax havens would net about $90 billion annually.

  • Tragedy or Farce? FBI Claims Sequester Will Harm Their Wall Street Investigations

    Following the failure of the U.S. Congress and President Obama to navigate away from an otherwise avoidable sequester, the FBI is up in arms over the subsequent spending cuts they say will hamper, among other things, its ability to pursue financial crimes.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Walker Walks Away from “John Doe” Investigation, Pushes Budget Deal Only ALEC Could Love

    On March 1, 2013, Milwaukee Country prosecutors shut down the long running “John Doe” probe into corruption in Scott Walker’s office during the time he served as Milwaukee County Executive. Six people were charged and convicted, including three former Walker staff, but no charges were brought against Walker. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm issued a brief, telling statement: “After a review of the John Doe evidence, I am satisfied that all charges that are supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt have now been brought and concluded.”

    There is no doubt that Walker emerges from the scandal in a stronger position to advance his extreme legislative agenda and his plans for higher office.

    Walker’s recently-unveiled budget is covered with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) fingerprints: his tax plan disproportionately benefits the top one-fifth of earners while putting a whopping $2 in the pockets of the bottom one-fifth; his school voucher program would leave 870,000 public school students with no additional funds; and his food stamp stipulations would force the needy to look for the 212,400 jobs that the governor has promised but failed to create. To top it all off, his ALEC cronies want to cover their tracks with a bill that would put a price on the public records that expose them.

  • Keystone’s Endorsement by a TV ‘Leftist’

    controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t get covered much in corporate television–it takes tens of thousands of activists marching in Washington to get a few words on the nightly newscasts.

    But the State Department’s recent draft assessment of the pipeline’s environmental impact got a mention on one show, and it said a lot. Not about the pipeline, really, but about corporate media.

  • Why Are Walmart Billionaires Bankrolling Phony School “Reform” In LA?

    For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.

• Privacy

  • Brussels introduces rules to combat illegal logging

    European rules to combat the trade of illegal timber have come into force, but NGOs and think tanks doubt the readiness of EU countries to carry out the legislation.
    The new laws, which came into effect on Monday (4 March), require operators importing or producing wood to identify its country of origin and legality.

    The regulation also prohibits the sale of illegally harvested timber on the European market to cut profits from the trade worldwide, which analysts link to deforestation and desertification, rising CO2 emissions, corruption, armed conflict and the destruction of vulnerable communities.

    The EU law requires member states to lay down “effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties”. However, despite two years of preparation, EU countries have so far failed to apply the legislation or impose credible penalties and sanctions, said analysis by the WWF.

  • Don’t make me ROFL! Teens are losing interest in Facebook

  • Someone please explain the term ‘irony’ to the NSA

    National Security Agency’s massive new surveillance compound in the Utah desert outside Salt Lake City.

  • The NSA doesn’t like having its privacy invaded

    A reporter tried to take pictures of a massive new government data center in Utah. Bad idea

  • Surprise Visitors Are Unwelcome At The NSA’s Unfinished Utah Spy Center (Especially When They Take Photos)

    Most people who visit Salt Lake City in the winter months are excited about taking advantage of the area’s storied slopes. While skiing was on my itinerary last week, I was more excited about an offbeat tourism opportunity in the area: I wanted to check out the construction site for “the country’s biggest spy center.”

  • Seattle Police surveillance cameras: No ‘public vetting’ events announced yet; councilmembers consider new oversight rules tomorrow

  • Google Breaks Silence On FBI’s National Security Letters That Demand Its Users’ Data

    National security letters are the Fight Club of government data surveillance. Thanks to the gag orders that accompany those FBI requests for users’ private information, the first rule for any company that receives an NSL is that it doesn’t talk about receiving an NSL. Now Google is doing its best to blur–if not quite break–that rule.

  • Transparency Report: Shedding more light on National Security Letters

    Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos. We work exceptionally hard to keep that information safe—hiring some of the best security experts in the world, investing millions of dollars in technology and baking security protections such as 2-step verification into our products.

  • AG Holder Asserts Authority to Conduct Drone Strikes on U.S. Citizens

    Today, Sen. Rand Paul received two pieces of correspondence regarding the legality and constitutionality of the U.S. government using lethal force, including drone strikes, on Americans and in U.S. territory. Sen. Paul sent three inquires on the matter to President Obama’s nominee to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan (HERE, HERE and HERE). He finally received responses from both Mr. Brennan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on one item of inquiry.

  • Obama Administration Says President Can Use Lethal Force Against Americans on US Soil

    Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in “an extraordinary circumstance,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.

  • The Google Glass feature no one is talking about

  • Google services should not require real names: Vint Cerf

  • DNA Collection Questioned as Court Weighs Privacy Rights

• Civil Rights

  • Four essential safeguards MPs must back

    Time is running out to ensure that the British legal system is not fundamentally altered in favour of the State’s desire to keep secret what it chooses. Today several amendments to the Justice and Security Bill are before the House and we urge MPs to back them, if they are unwilling to vote against Part 2 of the Bill.

  • “Undignified” practice of child strip searches still taking place

    Unbelievably, tens of thousands of children, as young as 12, are still being subjected to the “undignified” practice of strip searches, despite reassurances from the Youth Justice Board.

• DRM

  • First Cell-phones. PCs Next?

    If restricting what consumers can do with the cell-phones, smartphones and tablets that they own is unconscionable, isn’t it time personal computers of all kinds were freed from the unconscionable terms of end-user licence agreements (more likely, decrees by monopolists) which are clear attempts to monopolize hardware and to extend copyright beyond what legislators conceived? This is not a new concept. Richard Stallman was decades ahead of the US government when he called for Free Software to be used everywhere.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Wenohah Hauter, Author of “Foodopoly,” Discusses Why Corporate Control of America’s Food System Affects YOU

    Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of the national advocacy organization Food and Water Watch, will be in Madison, March 18, to read from her acclaimed new book “Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.” Publishers Weekly calls it a “tour de force.”

    Since 2005, Food and Water Watch has lead the fight against corporate control of the U.S. food system, against the privatization of the U.S. water supply and against water contamination by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

    In her new book “Foodopoly,” Hauter examines farming at the turn of the 20th century until today, and details the consolidation of the food chain from crop seeds to retail stores to argue that the people who grow our food, and consumers, have been cheated and manipulated by agribusiness and the leading food companies. She explores how the evisceration of anti-trust laws has dramatically increased consolidation among food and agricultural firms, which, along with the growth of big box stores and the marketing of junk food, has perverted how food is sold and marketed and what people eat.

  • Copyrights

    • Saying “Copy” Was A Screw-Up

      Why is a song that I play digitally or a book I read electronically subject to extensive controls that are not considered appropriate to records or books? It’s because they are subject to licenses that can’t be applied by the seller to the physical works. Why can those licences be imposed on digital works? Because the use of digital works is considered subject to copyright, whereas the use of physical works is not. Why is that? Because the act of instantiating the work for use has been described as “copying”, allowing the rules surrounding copyright to be used as a threat to back up arbitrary license terms controlling use.

    • Doubt cast on Pirate Bay’s claim to have set up in North Korea

    • After Being Cut From Norway, The Pirate Bay Returns From North Korea

    • Fake headline of the day: the Pirate Bay “moves” to North Korea

    • REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• The Linux Setup – Chris Knadle, Engineer/System Administrator

• Open Ballot: Moment of the Millenium

  With Linux continuing its steady rise to world domination, we thought we’d ask you what you think has been the greatest moment for Linux since the start of the millennium.

• Leaving the Land of the Giants

  The cover of the December 1st–7th 2012 issue of The Economist shows four giant squid battling each other (http://www.economist.com/printedition/2012-12-01). The headline reads, “Survival of the biggest: The internet’s warring giants”. The squid are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Inside, the story is filed under “Briefing: Technology giants at war”. The headline below the title graphic reads, “Another game of thrones” (http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game). The opening slug line reads “Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other’s throats in all sorts of ways.” (Raising the metaphor count to three.)

• Linux Top 3: Secure Boot Bricks, Kernel Advances and MariaDB

• Top Linux and open-source programs survey results

  LinuxQuestions’ annual members choice survey is in and the top Linux distributions and open-source programs are sometimes quite surprising

• Desktop

  • Chromebooks vs Windows 8 certified systems

    The “freedom” issue surrounding Chromebooks is well documented, same with Windows 8 certified systems. So, which one is better? Or which one gives you less or more freedom?

  • Pavilion 14 Chromebook shows HP’s ‘multi-OS approach’

  • Big Hardware Heavyweights Are Welcoming Open Source Platforms

    There are more signs emerging that some of the biggest global technology players in the hardware space are warming up to open source operating systems, even as they appear to cool toward Microsoft Windows. Recently, we’ve reported on Chromebooks running the Chrome OS platform, and how they have improved dramatically, and are now available at $200 price points that challenge the laptop status quo. (The hot selling $199 Acer C7 is shown here.)

  • HP’s huge Chromebook is here, costs $329

  • Microsoft needs to start worrying about Chromebooks

    Here are four good reasons why Microsoft needs to worry about the rise of the Linux-powered, Chrome OS-enabled Chromebooks: Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.

  • HP Officially Launches Pavilion 14 Chromebook

    Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has officially launched the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook, joining Acer, Samsung and Lenovo as core PC makers that now back Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) ChromeOS-based cloud notebooks. Is the Chromebook revolution quietly accelerating within the shadow of Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows 8 push? Hmmm…

  • The ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’? That’s So 2012

  • Not Surprisingly, HP’s New Chromebook Is The Biggest, Heaviest, And Most Expensive New Chromebook Available

  • HP Starts Selling Google Chromebook; Is Year Of Desktop Linux Here?

    Rumors were true, HP has joined the Chromebook bandwagon and announced its first Chromebook. As the Microsoft dominated PC market is declining smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks are picking up. It’s inevitable that hard-core Microsoft partners like HP would start offering GNU/Linux powered Chromebook.

  • Hewlett-Packard joins Chromebook fray with 14-inch browser-based laptop

• Server

  • IBM targets emerging markets, offers cheap servers

    International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is to launch a new server range specifically targeting SMBs and emerging markets.

• Kernel Space

  • Udev fork is a training project say eudev developers

    At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a “hate based fork”. The developers also noted that their “pet project” was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.

  • RAID 5/6 code merged into Btrfs

  • Graphics Stack

    • Ubuntu and Multiple Monitors – AMD Edition

      There are several ways to end up with a satisfactory experience on the desktop with Ubuntu despite their recent confusion of the user interface. We will discuss some of those another day (KDE vs. Gnome vs. Cinammon vs. Unity). Today we are going to talk about setting up your desktop environment for multiple monitors. This article assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or 12.10, however, the process should work equally well back to version 10.04 LTS unless otherwise noted.

      Assuming you have installed Ubuntu and are successfully sitting at the desktop (the window manager at this point is irrelevant), a couple of questions will now come to mind. What am I going to be using my linux desktop environment for? If you are going to be running office applications, email, basic web browsing and the occassional movie, you might be done. The default (read: Open Source) binary video drivers for both AMD (radeon) and Nvidia (nouveaux) are perfectly acceptable for all of those things. In fact, recently, they both have picked up some compositing support (so you can run the nifty 3D window effects in Compiz or KWin) as well as support for gaming. However, that support is spotty and performance still leaves a lot to be desired.

• Applications

  • Stellarium 0.12 released with new rendering engine!

    Another major release for the popular open source planetarium was made available today, bringing huge improvements that will excite the fans of this useful application.

    Improvements, bug fixes and lots of new features additions contribute to the Stellarium’s next major step in the mission to help people discover and understand the night skies.

  • 5 Alternative Podcast Clients for Linux

    Most podcast fanatics on Windows and Mac OS X use iTunes as their main podcast client. What about Linux users? What are the podcast client that you can use?

    Here are five alternative podcast clients for Linux that I would recommend based on my own searching and experimenting.

  • Evolution 3.7.5 Fixes Numerous Bugs

    The development team behind the powerful Evolution email client announced earlier today, February 3, that the fifth unstable version of the upcoming Evolution 3.8 application is now available for download and testing.

  • Glances a new system-monitor tool

    Most of this post is based on the information found in the blog of Nicolargo, the author of this tool.

    Glances is a free software (licensed under LGPL) to monitor your GNU/Linux or BSD operating system from a text interface. Glances uses the library libstatgrab to retrieve information from your system and it is developed in Python.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Counting processors on your Linux box

    • How to install and use Hubot on Ubuntu Linux

    • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Fedora 18

    • IBM Systems Director VMControl resource lifecycle management: part 4

    • How to automatically chroot jail selected ssh user logins

    • Three tools for managing Vim plugins

    • Introduction to 389 Directory Server

    • How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On Fedora 18

  • Wine or Emulation

    • John Carmack Pushes Wine For Linux Gaming

      John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software and lead developer of the id Tech engine for the Doom and Quake franchises, is now promoting Wine for Linux gaming rather than native Linux ports.

  • Games

    • Hairy Tales to be ported to Linux if enough interest is shown

    • Wargame: European Escalation Coming Soon To Linux

      While it was speculated it would come to Linux as a key developer stated internally they were running the game on Linux, Wargame: European Escalation has now been officially announced for Linux. The game is currently undergoing closed beta testing on Linux before its official Steam debut.

      Wargame: European Escalation is a real-time strategy game that was released last year for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and its story is set in Europe during the Cold War. This game is powered by RUSE’s IRISZOOM game engine. Wargame: European Escalation was developed by Eugen Systems and is distributed digitally via Steam.

    • Unvanquished Alpha 12 Brings Lots Of Churn

      The popular Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game that promises to deliver on good quality in-game graphics and compelling game-play, is now out with its monthly alpha release.

    • Steam games in Slackware

      Valve is updating its Steam client for Linux regualarly, fixing the issues which are reported by lots of interested Linux gamers. I was a bit behind with updating my Slackware remix of the client binaries but I have overcome the flue and pushed an update, bringing the steamclient package for Slackware to the latest version, 1.0.0.22.

    • id Software Hits Linux Gamers with a Wine Bat

      id Software has habit of releasing their engines as open source, but a statement made by John Carmack, on Twitter, revealed an interesting information.

      People will remember that id Software was one of the few big game developers that thought about the Linux platform way before there were any hints that the open source platform was a valid business avenue.

    • Unvanquished Alpha 12 has hit!

    • Dyad confirmed for Steam, hitting PC, Mac, Linux

    • Jonathan Blow criticises Linux dev tools

      Linux as a games platform is being held back by chronic shortcomings with IDEs and debuggers, says Braid developer Jonathan Blow.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • What’s new with Nepomuk 4.10

      I’ve blogged about some of the more prominent changes in this new Nepomuk release. I thought it would be a good idea to document all the changes, most of which I haven’t publicly blogged about.

    • Little bits of news about Gwenview

    • building KDE software from git.kde.org the easy way

    • new plasma-framework repo

      On November 3, 2008 libplasma moved from kde-workspace to kdelibs sporting a spiffy API that used the new QGraphicsProxyWidget heavily.

      In Randa this past summer we agreed on the last few big decisions for libplasma2. We would remove QGraphicsView and move entirely to QML. In the process, libplasma would have no drawing system dependent code in it. It would be data and business logic only.

    • Alternatives to Knotes

      I am still migrating away from my old KDE tools. Most of them will run under LXDE, or any other desktop, but I’m finding that since KDE 4 came out, the accessories are all fatter, slower, and worst of all, buggy. I reported last month on replacing Korganizer. Next up: Knotes.

    • Krita 2.6 Released, Offers Better Photoshop Compatibility

      Krita 2.6 adds many performance improvements, but also new support for OpenColorIO, a color management system used by movie studios and applications like Blender, which means that Krita now fits into a movie/vfx studio workflow.

    • KDE’s Aaron Seigo Starts Weekly Hangout On Google+

      Great news for KDE users. Aason Seigo, the KDE project lead, is starting a weekly Google+ Hangout. Seigo ‘tested’ the first hangout and it went well, except for some initial glitches caused by Pulse Audio.

    • Video Guide On Building KDE

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Power management in GNOME 3.8

    • GNOME Switching to JavaScript?

      Floating out in newsfeeds today was an interesting tidbit by John Palmieri who said, “So GNOME finally chose an official language and it is JavaScript.” Now I’m not a developer, but everytime I encounter JavaScript it’s causing problems. Is this a good idea for GNOME?

    • JavaScript becoming default language for GNOME apps

      At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in.

    • GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

      The GNOME project, developers of the GNOME desktop for Linux, has decided JavaScript will be the only “first class” language it will recommend for developers cooking up new apps for the platform.

    • Dissent on Gnome’s Javascript decision

    • Why I said goodbye to the Gnome Desktop

      It’s finally time for me to leave the Gnome Desktop, thanks to Gnome 3. Fortunately for me, the MATE desktop is a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop, and as of Fedora 18, is integrated into the Fedora repository; it’s also fairly easy to install.

• Distributions

  • 2012 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

    Desktop Distribution of the Year – Slackware (20.59%)

  • A look at UberStudent 2.0

    UberStudent is a Linux distribution which declares itself as being “Linux for learners”. The project is based on Ubuntu with UberStudent 2.0 using the latest Ubuntu long-term support release as a base. Looking over the project’s documentation we find UberStudent is designed with an eye toward education. The project is targeting people wishing to teach or learn academic computing. The project’s website refers to the distribution as a learning platform, designed to help people become fluent in computer technology. There are several editions of the latest UberStudent release. The main edition comes with the Xfce desktop environment and other editions feature the LXDE and MATE desktops. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. I opted to try the Xfce edition which can be downloaded as a 3.5 GB DVD images.

  • Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” Review: Lightweight, fast and elegant Openbox distro for low spec computers!

    From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 “Ultra” Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.

  • New Releases

    • Expected release list

    • New Linux distro would target disabled users

      There are more than a billion people around the globe living with some sort of disability today, yet software in general and operating systems in particular are just beginning to address their computing needs.

    • Welcome to Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0r2 Release Notes

  • Screenshots

    • Linux Lite 1.0.4 screen shots

      Linux Lite is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. It is uses the Xfce desktop environment, a desktop environment known to be suitable for low-end computers. The latest update, Linux Lite 1.0.4, was released just today.

      It ships with Steam client for Linux, the popular game distribution platform, installed. Because of the memory requirements of Steam, don’t expect to run this edition of Linux Lite on a resource-starved computer, if you intend to play that game.

    • Arch 2013.02.01 Screenshots

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS quarterly rollup release: Hands on

      PCLinuxOS is an “old standard” Linux distribution. Although it doesn’t seem to have been getting as much attention recently it still seems to have a significant number of very loyal followers.

      The strength of PCLinuxOS today is in stability, and a very active and dedicated user community.

      It includes an excellent array of applications and utilities in the base distribution, so for many purposes it is ready to use right out of the box. If you try it and have problems of any kind, you can generally get very capable help from the PCLinuxOS User Forums very quickly.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Joins HP Enterprise Services Technology Alliance

    • Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Trying Desperately to Excite the Market

      Red Hat provides open-source software. It is particularly famous for its Linux operating system. In the third quarter, Red Hat’s revenues increased by 18% y-o-y to hit the $344 million mark, which was in-line with expectations. Subscription revenues experienced a 19% increase that enabled them to hit the $294 million mark. Billing also grew by 18%. More importantly, in the third quarter, the company announced the acquisition of ManageIQ. ManageIQ specializes in cloud management and automation. The acquisition is expected to be a long term gain for Red Hat. It is also an attempt to take on VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) , a company that has managed to make inroads into enterprise through its vCloud platform but failed to enter the public cloud.

    • Red Hat to employees: yes, please bring new apps to work

      Bring us your cool, useful, and productivity-heightening apps and devices and we’ll look at them and work to support your efforts.

      That’s the unique view that Linux vendor Red Hat takes when it comes to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon that’s prevalent in the world of enterprise IT.

    • Cloud9 IDE Builds Online Development Environment with Red Hat OpenShift

      Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Cloud9 IDE has built its online development environment with Red Hat’s OpenShift Online hosted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. By integrating OpenShift Online into its original online development environment, Cloud9 IDE is able to deliver more flexibility, security and ease of use to developers.

    • HP and Red Hat Partner On Premises and In the Cloud

    • Fedora

      • I’m FedUp with Fedora!

        So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried it, so I wanted to give FedUp a try.

      • Fedora 18 review

        The latest edition of Fedora Linux was released on January 15th, after 2 months of delay. This community project is sponsored by Red Hat Linux and is one of the primary showcases for the GNOME desktop and its applications. Among the features making their debut is a much improved Samba setup (which is supposed to let you connect easily with Windows’ Active Directory). Also, the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments which got their start in Linux Mint are available, although not installed by default.

        This is my review of the KDE edition of Fedora 18, 64-bit version. After 3 reviews of their main release, I decided it was time to check out the KDE Spin edition. Fedora has several different “Spins”, produced to showcase desktops or emphasize scientific, design, gaming, or other focused interests.

      • Fedora 18 Officially Released for IBM System z 64-bit

        Dan Horák announced that the Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems is now available for download.

      • Fedora 18 for ARM released

        The Fedora 18 for ARM release includes pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3) hardware platforms. Fedora 18 for ARM also includes an installation tree in the yum repository which may be used to PXE-boot a kickstart-based installation on systems that support this option, such as the Calxeda EnergyCore (HighBank).

  • Debian Family

    • Release-team Sees About 90 Bugs to Squash Before Releasing Debian Wheezy

    • Debian Project News – February 4th, 2013

    • Debian Project News – February 4th, 2013

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu: What They’re Doing Right and Wrong

          Ubuntu’s rate of evolution over the past few years is astounding. It has grown from a standard Gnome desktop distribution into a full operating system with its own desktop environment, development tools and community.

          To celebrate Ubuntu’s success, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the things Ubuntu is doing well and also mention some issues that could use improvement.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 15 Will Be Named Olivia

            Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few days ago that the codename for the upcoming Linux Mint 15 operating system will be Olivia.

            Linux Mint 15 (Olivia) will be available for download at the end of May 2013, and it will be distributed as separate Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce editions.

• Devices/Embedded

  • $25 Raspberry Pi, Minus Some Features, to Arrive First in Europe

    It’s been a big 2013 for the Raspberry Pi so far. As we’ve reported, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based computing device (shown) is emerging as one of the biggest open source stories of this year. While fully stocked Raspberry Pi devices have been selling briskly at the $35 price point, a new blog post confirms that the latest Model A devices, initially available only in Europe, will move back to the $25 price point–in reach of lots of schools and individuals.

  • Cheaper Raspberry Pi out in Europe for $25

  • New $25 Raspberry Pi Linux PC Lands in Europe; Cuts RAM, But is More Efficient

  • Raspberry Pi Model A now on sale in Europe

  • Raspberry Pi Model A released one year later

    Raspberry Pi’s base model release finally fulfills the promise of a $25 computer, available in Europe now

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • Samsung GALAXY Young and Samsung GALAXY Fame

        Samsung announced the Samsung GALAXY Young and Samsung GALAXY Fame. The GALAXY Young, available in white, deep blue, wine red and metallic silver, is a smart and affordable Android playmate for the younger, stylish generation of mobile users. The GALAXY Fame, available in pearl white and metallic blue, combines powerful performance with an essential suite of features and services, all packed within a stylish design.

    • Android

      • App fever: Avocado

      • Wine for Linux is going mobile: You will soon be able to run Windows apps on Android

        Wouldn’t it be great if you could run Windows applications on your Android smartphone or tablet? Well, that may one day be a reality, and the person who is working on the new project is the best man for the job. That’s right: Wine for Android is coming.

      • Windows apps coming to Android with Wine port

      • Full-Fledged Windows Apps Could Be Coming Soon To Your Android Phone

      • Wine Will Bring Windows Apps To Android, If There Are Any

        Alexandre Julliard, the project lead for Wine, gave a mini demo of Wine for Android at FOSDEM, which will allow Android users to run Windows apps.

        Who needs Windows apps on Android when Windows mobile platform has a very tiny app ecosystem when compared with Android. On the contrary there are thousands of high-profiled Android apps which are not available for Windows 8 mobile devices.

      • NVIDIA demos Project SHIELD streaming from PC

      • OUYA Finds a Friend With Amazon

      • Ouya preorders start today; retail availability set for June

        The Android-based console will be available for $99.99. An extra controller will go for $49.99.

      • Google Play adding ‘new forms of payment,’ shuffles developer payouts

        Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is revamping its payout schedule for Android application developer partners, stating the change is designed to accommodate new Play storefront payment options.

      • Google Extends Payout Schedule For Developers By 2 Weeks, As “New Forms Of Payment” Are Added To Google Play

      • FOSDEM: Android app to control LibreOffice presentations

        Together with version 4.0 of LibreOffice, due out in the next few days, the developers plan to release the “Impress Android Remote” app that allows the office suite’s presentation features to be controlled from Android smartphones. The developers plan to release the app at the same time as, or shortly after, LibreOffice 4.0; communication with the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth. This is some of the information that LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks offered in his presentation at this year’s “Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting” (FOSDEM 2013), which ended on Sunday.

      • Android System Administration Utilities

        “Change is inevitable in a progressive society. Change is constant” Benjamin Disraeli 1867. Quite a fitting quote if I say so myself. When I started in systems administration back in the mid 90’s everything was done either remoted in from your desktop, a server, or you plugged a terminal into the back of the server. Laptops were still bulky back then and I loathed carrying around my brick of a laptop to connect into things. Thin laptops were too much for a lot of IT budgets, Palm was just getting started, and tablets were luxury items (yes we had tablets). We made do with what we had.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Linux Netbooks: Hiding in Plain Sight

Free Software/Open Source

• FOSS+CSS: Closed Source DOS Accounting Meets Linux and DOSEMU

• Guest Post: Patrick McGarry on Open Source Disruption

  The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February – 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here.

  In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.

• Events

  • New events calendar for open source conferences, meetups, and more

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome and Firefox demonstrate plug-in-free video chat

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla improves Firefox’s Do Not Track feature

      If you are on the Internet, chance is that you are being tracked. Advertising companies, Internet services and even Internet Service Provider track users for a variety of purposes, but most often to profile users to increase advertising revenue or sell the data to companies that do.

      While cookies are most often used for that purpose, and I’m using the term lightly so that it includes all different kinds of cookies, it is not the only option that companies have. Fingerprinting may be an option as well which tries to identify users based on factors such as their IP address, operating system, web browser and other data that is submitted automatically when connections are established.

• Databases

  • Monty has last laugh as distros abandon MySQL

    When the community GNU/Linux distributions Fedora and openSUSE recently announced that they would be switching their default database management system from MySQL to MariaDB, one man in Finland would have had a very hearty laugh.

  • Oracle Releases MySQL 5.6 To Improve NoSQL, Performance

    While there’s many in the open-source community that remain unhappy with Oracle, including the direction of the MySQL database server to the point that Fedora will now ship MariaDB instead, MySQL 5.6 was released this morning by the software giant.

    Oracle says their general availability release of MySQL 5.6 has increased performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability over earlier releases of this open-source MySQL database software.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Microsoft Office and the Big Subscription Bet

    “LibreOffice does everything I need, and in fact I keep learning about new things I can do in LibreOffice,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I even carry it with me on USB Thumb drive in the Portable Apps version. So please explain to me why I should care about overpriced bloatware? And don’t get me started on the $%^**#%$ Ribbon.”

  • LibreOffice 4.0 Release to Widen Divide with OpenOffice

    It was in September of 2010 that a group of key members of the OpenOffice.org developer team announced that they were no longer willing to wait out the uncertain future of OpenOffice, especially in the face of the lack of interest shown by Oracle, the new owner of the project following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems nine months before.

• Healthcare

  • Node.js integrates with M: Next big thing in healthcare IT

    Join the M revolution and the next big thing in healthcare IT: the integration of the node.js programming language with the NoSQL hierarchical database, M.

    M was developed to organize and access with high efficiency the type of data that is typically managed in healthcare, thus making it uniquely well-suited for the job.

    One of the biggest reasons for the success of M is that it integrates the database into the language in a natural and seamless way. The growth and involvement of th community of M developers however, has been below the radar for educators and the larger IT community. As a consequece it has been facing challenges for recruiting young new developers, despite the critical importance of this technology for supporting the Health IT infrastructure of the US.

• Business

  • The impact of open source on business and social good

    I vividly remember the time when my early opinions about open source software were built around questions that made natural (and perfect) sense to me at that point in my life, like: “Why would someone sell a software product for free?” and “Why should anyone participate in a project that does not reap financial rewards?” These formed the basis of my rationale.

    That was before I embarked on my professional journey and as a consequence had not experienced organizational life. My myopic view towards the open source methodology of developing projects, and the profound impact this methodology has on the business world in general and the organizational structure in particular, began to broaden after my first intense exposure to the Linux operating system at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. My understanding about the magnificence of this operating system and the process by which it is constantly iterated caused a 180-degree transformation. This consequently cultivated appreciation for the entire process of peer production and the impact it has on today’s businesses, both big and small.

  • The Right Way To Do IT

• Funding

  • Can you help the Sonar Project?

    We’ve been asked to help promote what looks like an incredible initiative. The Sonar Project hopes to fund the development of a Linux distribution focused on accessibility, and the campaign is looking to raise $20,000 through Indiegogo, a crowd funding site. But the project could also benefit from people with graphic design skills as well as those who can simply help spread the word.

  • Piston Cloud Gets $8 Million of Funding from OpenStack-friendly Partners

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • The Luminosity of Free Software

    About 5 minutes before starting the Hangout last week, I impulsively named it “The Luminosity of Free Software” as that was resonating with the thoughts in my head at the time .. and I think I’ll stick with that name for the time being. You may notice that there is no “KDE” in the title (or my name, either and that’s intentional. I want to be able to discuss larger issues in Free software, and this gives me more freedom to do so. The show will be a reflection of my interests and those who watch and participate, so there will be a good amount of discussion that relates to or is relevant for KDE, it just won’t be exclusively about it.

  • Time for GNUPedia again?

    At one time, Wikipedia was a universal source for the useful programming tools and resources. If some language, framework or tool was used in general, it has been covered there. However recently Wikipedia seems raising the requirements to the level that would exclude many useful Free software projects. For instance, recently JAMWiki has been removed – reasonably popular, thousands of downloads (and that is for server side app), mentioned in near every review on Java-based wiki engines over multiple sources on the web – where it has been a problem?

  • FSF licensing team’s 2012 – 400 compliance reports resolved

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • Why Aaron Died

      I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

      I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.

      I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.

      [...]

      I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.

      I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.

      And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.

    • Where Does Mayor Bloomberg Stand on Academic Freedom?

      This morning, Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, issued an extraordinarily powerful statement in defense of academic freedom and the right of the political science department to co-sponsor the BDS event.

      [...]

      So that’s good. But the fight is not over. The New York City Council, as you know, has laid down a gauntlet: if this event goes forward, with my department’s co-sponsorship, the Council will withdraw funds from CUNY and Brooklyn College. As Glenn Greenwald points out this morning, this is about as raw an exercise of coercive political power —and simple a violation of academic freedom—as it gets; it is almost exactly comparable to what Rudy Guiliani did when he was mayor and pulled the funding from the Brooklyn Museum merely because some people did not like what it was exhibiting.

      So now the battle lines are clear: it’s the City Council (and perhaps the State Legislature and Congress too) against academic freedom, freedom of speech, and CUNY.

      Throughout this controversy, there has been one voice that has been conspicuously silent: Mayor Bloomberg. To everyone who is a journalist out there, I ask you to call the Mayor’s office and ask the question: Will he stand with the City Council (and follow the model of his predecessor), threatening the withholding of funds merely because government officials do not like words that are being spoken at Brooklyn College? Or will he stand up to the forces of orthodoxy and insist: an educational institution, particularly one as precious to this city as CUNY, needs to remain a haven for the full exploration of views and opinions, even about—especially about—topics as fraught as the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

    • A time for action: One student’s commitment to free and open access

      I have been a PhD student for less than two years.

• Programming

  • The History of Visual Development Environments: Imagine There’s no IDEs. It’s Difficult if You Try.

Leftovers

• Social Media and the Professional: Twitter

  In this series I’m looking at my experiences using social media as a business professional. In this entry I examine the rules and policies I personally use regarding Twitter.

  In the introduction to this series of blog entries, I asked several questions regarding my use of particular social media services, and how I manage the intersection of my personal and professional lives in them. Here I’m going to look specifically at Twitter. This is the way I use the service and may or may not be how you do or should use it yourself.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Congress Is About to Introduce Legislation to Decriminalize Marijuana

    Whispers has learned that a member of Congress is about to introduce legislation today to decriminalize marijuana.

    The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2013 will be introduced by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, from Colo., whose office did not immediately respond to request for comment.

• Security

  • “Lucky Thirteen” attack snarfs cookies protected by SSL encryption

  • Java: Where Oracle, Twitter and Black Hats Meet

  • 250,000 Twitter Passwords Hacked – What Should You Do?

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Now is the Winter of our Disinterment

    Monarchy is bollocks, and something we should have outgrown a long time ago. Nice to see that today’s Prince Harry retains the tradition of remorseless homicide though.

  • 54 countries helped CIA after 9/11, report says

  • 54 countries helped CIA to kidnap, detain and torture – report

  • Someone Just Leaked Obama’s Rules for Assassinating American Citizens

    For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama’s targeted killing program.

  • Senators demand secret memos on targeted killing

    Eleven senators sent a letter to President Obama on Monday demanding access to secret legal memos outlining the administration’s case for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in counterterrorism operations overseas.

  • Brennan Approved Signature Strikes in Yemen because of “Personal Appeals”

    Daniel Klaidman has what must be intended as a defense of John Brennan. Given that it (once again) fails to mention Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, accepts Brennan’s claims to have opposed torture on its face, and makes no mention of Brennan’s assault on Americans’ privacy, it fails to make the case it tries to, that Brennan would rein in the war on terror at CIA.

  • Legal Review of Presidential Power to Engage in Preemptive Cyber Strikes to Remain Secret

    Unnamed officials involved in the review inform that the administration is moving in the coming weeks to “approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyber attack.” These rules, according to David Sanger and Thom Shanker, will “govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States.” If the president approves a strike, the government will be able to “attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.”

  • Obama Admin Enacts Right for Preemptive Cyberattacks

  • Our Illegal Drone Program

    He strongly suggests we’ve been targeting all manner of alleged terrorists, including cooks and drivers. And we’ve changed that practice not because of the dubious legality of targeting non-combatants, but because cooks are easily replaced.

  • Chief Prosecutor, Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions

  • After Talking about Restoring Trust in CIA, Panetta Lies about the Young Woman’s Drone Death that Led to Khost

    Leon Panetta lies about the drone strike that killed Baitullah Mehsud and his wife

  • Zero Dark Thirty, Manhunt and Obama Admin. Justify Use of Torture

  • Targeted Killings: Obama’s Endless War

  • LAWYERS: NYPD’S MUSLIM SPYING VIOLATES 1985 PACT

    Civil rights lawyers urged a judge Monday to stop the New York Police Department from routinely observing Muslims in restaurants, bookstores and mosques, saying the practice violates a landmark 1985 court settlement that restricted the kind of surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and ’70s.

  • Former Military Prosecutor on How Torture Weakens America

    Morris Davis says the used of “enhanced interrogation techniques” has failed to make America safer.

  • In Guantanamo, War on Human Rights Passes for War on Terror

  • Why Does the Media Go Easy on Barack Obama?

    Allegations of liberal media bias are almost constant in the conservative press, but their intensity has increased since President Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared together on 60 Minutes, where interviewer Steve Kroft posed “softball” questions that were almost comically obsequious. “Mr. Kroft, as embarrassing as his interview was, is merely symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the unprecedented swooning and cheerleading by the press for Barack Obama,” Peter Wehner wrote in Commentary, echoing an argument voiced by many on the right. He posits that the rise of conservative media outlets like Fox News may have triggered a liberal backlash.

  • 5 Disturbing Aspects of the DOJ White Paper on the President’s License to Kill

    More generally, the white paper fleshes out the Obama administration’s argument that U.S. citizens killed by drones are getting all the process that is appropriate in the circumstances; hence the Fifth Amendment, though implicated, is not violated. And since these targeted killings are lawful acts of self-defense, the Justice Department says, they do not violate the law against killing U.S. nationals in foreign countries or the executive order banning assassination. After all, “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” Duh.

  • CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’

  • Blunt words on China from US Navy

    The US trade publication Defense News last week posted a video on its blog from a US Naval Institute conference featuring an extraordinarily blunt assessment of China’s maritime strategy and ambitions from US Navy Captain James Fanell, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence and Information Operations for US Pacific Fleet. The moderator describes Fanell as the ‘top intelligence officer’ in the Pacific Fleet, which means he is advising some of the US military’s senior decision-makers on China’s military strategy and capability.

  • This Isn’t the Memo You’re Looking For

    As important as it is to see the white paper DOJ gave Congress to explain its purported legal rationale, it is just as important to make clear what this white paper is not.

    First, is it not the actual legal memos used to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and who knows who else. As Michael Isikoff notes in his story, the Senators whose job it is to oversee the Executive Branch — even the ones on the Senate Intelligence Committee that are supposed to be read into covert operations — are still demanding the memos, for at least the 12th time. The release of this white paper must not serve to take pressure off of the White House to release the actual memos.

  • Justice Department White Paper Details Rationale for Targeted Killing of Americans

  • Who Decided U.S. Megabanks Are Too Big to Jail?

    Tom Hanks has a knack for playing the roles that define American generations. In “Saving Private Ryan,” he embodied the courage of the men who landed on the Normandy beaches under heavy fire. In “Apollo 13,” he conveyed calm and ingenuity under intense pressure: “Houston, we have a problem.” And Forrest Gump revealed much about America before, during and after the Vietnam War.

  • Senators ask Obama for legal opinions OKing drone strikes

    A bipartisan group of 11 senators is appealing directly to President Barack Obama to give lawmakers his administration’s legal justification for using armed drones or other counterterrorism operations to kill American citizens.

  • Bipartisan Group of Senators Seeks Legal Justifications for the Deliberate Killing of Americans

  • ‘CIA used ISI’s detention centres in Pakistan during war on al Qaeda’

    The report authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the US in its war against al Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and “torturing” terror suspects.

• Cablegate

  • Iceland expelled FBI agents seeking to question a WikiLeaks volunteer

  • Iceland Removed Two FBI Agents During Worldwide WikiLeaks Investigation

  • Iceland Kicks Out FBI Wikileaks Probe

  • When Truth Tried to Stop War

  • WikiLeaks Founder Assange Awarded Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts

  • Julian Assange awarded ‘Courage Award 2013′ by Yoko Ono Lennon

  • Appeals Court Sides With Gov. Secrecy in WikiLeaks, Twitter Case

  • Journalists Should Defend Whistle-Blowers

    Accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning will have spent 1,000 days in prison come Feb. 23. Manning faces a possible lifetime sentence for allegedly leaking military information to the news outlet WikiLeaks in 2010.

  • BRADLEY MANNING, JOHN KIRIAKOU, AND THE SHAMAN’S WRATH

    The first trend is increasing inequality and hierarchy. Roughly speaking, early human societies evolved from relatively simple, egalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers, to more complex, hierarchical, unequal societies. Over time, as a general tendency, leaders, chiefs and kings emerged with ever stronger authority and powers.

    The second trend is increasing injustice in dispute resolution — what Betzig called “asymmetry in the resolution of conflicts”. Roughly speaking, when there are disputes, they are resolved less and less on the merits of the case, and more and more on the power and wealth of the parties. The powerful tend increasingly to win disputes even if they are in the wrong. Asymmetric rules may develop: for instance, insulting a peasant has rarely had serious consequences, but not so with insulting the king.

  • Jeremy updates

    First, I regret to inform that we have received a phone call from Jeremy the other day, telling us that he has been moved into solitary confinement, ‘the hole’ for an undetermined amount of time. We are not sure why, because our phone call was cut short when the battery died on my phone. This injustice was further confirmed when we conferred with his legal team, who have been visiting him on a daily basis since he was put in solitary confinement. At this point, he will not be able to receive visits (other than his lawyers) and will have heavy restrictions on phone calls. He is still able to receive mail, although less regularly. With hope, he will not be in the hole for too long and be ‘lucky’ to return to regular prison society sooner rather than later.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • The Siren Song of the Robot

    The quest for cheap energy and cheap labor is a conquering human urge, one that has played out with notable ferocity starting with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of coal into British manufacturing and the more recent outsourcing of Western manufacturing to Asia have marked key thresholds in this ongoing progression.

• Finance

  • Visa Sued by Australian Regulator Over Currency Policy

    Visa Inc., (V) the world’s biggest payments network, contravened Australia’s consumer protection laws by preventing buyers from using a currency of their choice when shopping, the country’s competition regulator said.
    The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in an e-mailed statement that it sued Visa in federal court, claiming the company prevented the expansion of so-called dynamic currency conversion services. A copy of the claim wasn’t immediately available from the court.

  • Group Launched to Support WikiLeaks, Transparency Journalism Reports Incredible Success

    A foundation dedicated to promoting and funding transparency journalism, which launched on December 16, has concluded its first round of funding for organizations. It has enjoyed incredible success and found there are a lot of people who want to support this kind of an organization.

    The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) raised nearly $200,000 for four different organizations, including WikiLeaks, which it collected donations to support because the media organization faces a banking blockade that makes it difficult for it to directly accept funds from supporters.

  • Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

    AT 9:30 A.M. ON AUGUST 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market’s servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don’t see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week’s average.

  • Private Prisons Will Get Totally Slammed By Immigration Reform

  • Max Keiser’s unpleasant facts on UK economy (25Jan13)

    Max Keiser deliveres some unpleasant truthes on the state of the UK economy.

  • FBI Monitors Occupy, Denies Violating First Amendment

    Though it should surprise no one, the FBI has been thoroughly tracking the ideas, movements, and members of Occupy Wall Street since August of 2011, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, PCJF’s executive director said in a release.

  • Goldman Sachs: Doing “God’s Work” by inflicting the Wages of Sin Globally

    The central point that I want to stress as a white-collar criminologist and effective financial regulator is that Goldman Sachs is not a singular “rotten apple” in a healthy bushel of banks. Goldman Sachs is the norm for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the so-called “too big to fail” banks). Impunity from the laws, crony capitalism that degrades democracy, and massive national subsidies produce exceptionally criminogenic environments. Those environments are so perverse that they produce epidemics of “control fraud.” Control fraud occurs when the persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud. In finance, accounting is the “weapon of choice.” It is important to remember, however, that other forms of control fraud maim and kill thousands.

  • Carney set for first taste of Bank of England

  • Fixing ‘too-big-to-fail’

    The United States is plagued by large corporations with outsized political power. They are “too big to fail.” So if they are about to fail, they get rescued. Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.

    We need to replace them with smaller companies, but U.S. antitrust law is inadequate. It exists, but has been weakened over the past decades. Consider the proposed “Volcker Rule,” which would make many banks split into two companies, one for risky investments and one for loans based on savings, as the old Glass-Steagall law required. This would address some problems, but would not make banks small enough. Eliminating “too big to fail” banks means making sure that each is small enough that regulators, prosecutors and elected officials won’t hesitate to let it suffer the consequences of its own decisions.

  • Does anybody NOT see the common sense Richard Stallman speaks here?

    It isn’t often that I feel the need to amplify Stallman’s words; he’s usually a little extreme-left for my tastes. But this is one of those times when he reminds me why I still count him as a visionary – perhaps even still ahead of his time.

    In this Reuters interview, he addresses the problem of corporations that are “too big to fail” and proposes that monopoly laws be strengthened, a return to Glass-Steagall-type regulation, and a progressive tax on corporations, where the bigger the company, the more of a percentage they pay.

    Wonderful, wonderful sense, it would fix just about every economic problem we have in this country. And you can hang your hopes on seeing unicorns fly before it actually happens.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • FCC Poised to Open the Door for Unbridled Expansion of Media Empires

    If the world can learn anything from Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, it’s a lesson about the brute force of a media empire.

    Rupert Murdoch’s conglomerate was so powerful, it was allegedly able to invade people’s privacy and pay police officials to grease its dodgy news gathering machine; all while playing kingmaker in British Parliamentary elections and gaining access to the highest reaches of state power.

  • CBS To CNET: ‘Free Beer, Not Free Speech’

    Meanwhile, CNET has been fired by folks at CES. They won’t be choosing the “Best of Show” anymore and they lose credibility as an objective tech news source–at least temporarily.

• Censorship

  • Collateral Censorship: Oxford Union Replaces Assange Speech Backdrop, Citing ‘Copyright’ Concerns

    This is bogus on so many levels. First off, and most importantly, the video itself is a “work” of the US government, and as such is simply not protected by copyright law. Rather it is definitively in the public domain as per Section 105 of the Copyright Act. And, of course, even if it was subject to copyright, it would still be a ridiculous claim. There would be obvious fair use in merely showing a single still image from a longer video, especially given the context of the use and the speech. And, yes, this is in the UK, rather than the US, but even under UK “fair dealing” concepts, this would almost certainly be considered fair dealing.

  • UPDATE: OXFORD UNION
    RESPOND TO ASSANGE

  • NYC Council Threatens to Withdraw $ if Poli Sci Doesn’t Withdraw Cosponsorship

  • First Into Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    At the valuable Nuclear Secrecy blog today a report, not widely-known, about one of first outside experts into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings. Local reaction amazing. My own book and video on U.S. film-makers who arrived a few weeks later, and their footage suppressed for decades.

  • Greek police ‘Photoshop away’ signs of brutality from mugshots

• Privacy

  • The privacy cliff and how not to fall off it

    On January 25, 2012, the European Commission (EC) issued a privacy proposal to require “data controllers” (online merchants, advertisers, etc.) to provide more transparent and accessible information to data subjects (individual Internet users). The proposal asserts a right of EU citizens “to be forgotten,” thereby obliging data controllers to delete personal data on request. Data controllers would be prohibited from collecting data unless the subject gives express consent. In the meantime, the United States has proposed precisely what the EU has already vehemently rejected: voluntary industry self-regulation, subject to limited federal enforcement.

  • Wikileaks and you: privacy, human rights and the rise of the surveillance state

  • Guantánamo judge: defence cannot prove CIA eavesdropping on meetings

  • Human rights court to declassify ‘CIA prison in Poland’ documents

    The Polish government says it is ‘disturbed’ by the European Court of Human Rights’ decision to declassify documents on the alleged existence of a CIA prison in Poland.

  • ECHR rules to declassify documents on CIA prisons in Poland

  • Report: Possible torture at CIA prison in Romania, infamous terrorists held in Bucharest, presidents “accountable”

  • Intel Firm Paid CIA Nominee Well As He Left for White House

    When John Brennan heads to Capitol Hill on Thursday, senators are expected to grill the prospective head of the CIA about his central role in the Obama administration’s expansive “targeted killing” program. They might also want to ask him a few things about his finances.

  • Did you read about CIA cooperation in Canada, trousers in Paris, and judges in Chicago?

  • Justice Department Leaks Memo “Legalizing” Murdering Americans

    Here is the memo. With a few tweaks and a more creative title — like “Murder With Your Hands Clean” — this memo could sell a lot of copies.

  • Leaked Memo Shows Expansive Rationale for U.S. “Kill List”

  • The CIA And The Hazards Of Middle East Forecasting

    The documents show that agency analysts, down to the last minute before the outbreak of fighting, were assuring President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other policymakers that Egypt and Syria were unlikely to attack Israel.

    Those assessments, in the words of a CIA postmortem report from December 1973, “were — quite simply, obviously, and starkly — wrong.” Nearly 40 years later, the CIA analysts responsible for those judgments say they are still troubled by their mistakes.

  • Report on CIA rendition reveals massive scale of European assistance

  • Poland declines to answer court’s questions on CIA jail

  • Former PM Miller: CIA black site accusations are ‘lies’

    “If Senator Pinior believes he saw a document with my signature on it, then he is a liar and a scoundrel,” Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) leader Leszek Miller said on Tuesday morning after the European Court of Human Rights announced it was to declassify evidence which is part of an investigation into claims that Poland hosted a CIA prison, where suspected international terrorists were held and tortured as part of the United States ‘war of terror’.

    Jozef Pinior,a senator for the ruling Civic Platform party and a member of the European Parliament committee in Poland investigating the secret CIA ‘black site’, said Tuesday morning that there is “enough accumulated evidence to show that there was a CIA prison in Poland, organized with the consent of the government under Leszek Miller”.

  • Report details CIA’s rendition practices

    The report, authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the U.S. in its war against al-Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and “torturing” terror suspects.

    [...]

    Ms. Singh said she had found evidence that prisoners were held in countries like Thailand, Romania, Poland and Lithuania while Denmark facilitated CIA air operations.

  • Study says 54 countries helped CIA renditions

    Fifty-four foreign governments assisted the CIA in a global campaign that included harsh interrogations of suspects, a rights advocacy group said Tuesday, as it pressed for greater accountability.

    The report by Open Society Foundations marks the most comprehensive list of countries that helped the United States in what critics saw as excesses by then president George W. Bush’s administration after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

  • CIA link to Dubrovnik Airport, claims Sudan source

    The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in extraordinary renditions via Dubrovnik, a newspaper has claimed.

    [...]

    But citing a report called ‘Globalizing Torture’ by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), the suspects were taken via Croatia at least twice.

  • Sudan Served As a Hub for Receiving Al-Qaeda Suspects Nabbed By CIA – Report

  • ‘Naming the Dead’ aims to give a voice to civilians killed in drone strikes

    If you noticed a drone strike in the news, chances are the only name that accompanies it will be the name of the target and if they’re now believed to be alive or dead. More than two thousand people — civilian and militant — have been killed in Pakistan by US drone strikes since 2004, but their identities remain often unreported and unclear. It’s hard to give emotive value to drone deaths if you can’t name the victims.

  • Pakistani ambassador to U.S. calls CIA drone strikes a ‘clear violation’

    CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are “a clear violation of our sovereignty and a violation of international law” that threaten stable relations between the two governments, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday.

    Persistent reports that Pakistan has tacitly approved the strikes while publicly denouncing them are untrue, Ambassador Sherry Rehman said.z

  • Drones in the US: Senators Could Derail CIA Nominee Confirmation Over Administration’s Drone Program

• Civil Rights

  • Police drug search intrudes on husband’s final moments with deceased wife

    A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.

  • Amicus briefs in Hedges v. Obama inform indefinite detention lawsuit

    The Bill of Rights Defense Committee recently coordinated the filing of three amicus (friend of the court) briefs in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenging domestic military detention under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.

  • On Rosa Parks’ 100th Birthday, Recalling Her Rebellious Life Before and After the Montgomery Bus

    Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. “Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero,” Theoharis says.

  • Twitter Wikileaks Court Order – News and Background

    The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, February 15 in a hearing in a legal battle over the government’s demands for Twitter user records. The ACLU and EFF represent Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one of the Twitter users whose records were sought by the government.

    On February 8, 2011, a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia unsealed motions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, and others concerning government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. The documents were originally filed under seal late last month.

  • Bipartisan Washington State Bills Would Nullify NDAA “Indefinite Detention”

    Washington state lawmakers will consider bipartisan legislation that would block any cooperation with attempts to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens in Washington without due process under sections written into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

    If passed, the law would also make it a class C felony for any state or federal agent to act under sections 1021 or 1022 of the NDAA.

  • EFF wants a rewrite of US e-crime laws

    INTERNET ACTIVIST GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants the US to reconsider the severity of its computer crime laws and tear them up and start over.
    The Inquirer (http://s.tt/1zoHD)

  • Exposed: Whole Foods’ and the Biggest Organic Foods Distributor’s Troubled Relationships with Workers

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • RIAA Set For Historic 10,000,000th Google URL Takedown

    • The EU Commission’s Outrageous Attempt to Avoid Copyright Reform

      Today starts “Licences for Europe”, an initiative by the European Commission to discuss the issues of today’s copyright regime. Instead of planning for a broad reform that would break away with full-on repression of cultural practices based on sharing and remixing, the Commission is setting up a parody of a debate. 75% of the participants to the working-group concerning “users” are affiliated with the industry1 and the themes and objectives are defined so as to ensure that the industry has its way and that nothing will change. Through this initiative, the EU Commission shows its contempt of the many citizens who participated in defeating ACTA and are still mobilized against repressive policies.

    • Even more delays to the Digital Economy Act

      The Digital Economy Act’s Sharing of Costs Order has been withdrawn – another procedural complication that will delay implementation even further.

    • Japanese Government Plants Anti-Piracy Warnings Inside Fake Downloads

      Last year saw a major upgrade in Japan’s anti-piracy legislation in an attempt to shift Internet users away from file-sharing sites and networks and towards the country’s legitimate outlets. But while the change in the law was significant, getting the legal-downloading message to users proved problematic. In response the government and rightsholders are now seeding fake files with anti-piracy messages hidden inside.

    • Researchers dive into copyrights and wrongs of the download age

      The University of Glasgow will be home to a research centre that will examine how copyright is changing and the need for new business models for distributing creative content.

    • Golden Eye write to alleged copyright infringers

      Just under 1,000 broadband subscribers in the UK received letters in December from O2 or Be Broadband, saying that the company is passing on their name and address details to a company called Golden Eye.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Linux Now Has “Double” the Market Share of Windows

• Valve Telling Windows Users To Try Linux!

  It’s always a third player who disrupts the market or changes the market equations. Valve, the popular game distributor, has made GNU/Linux a viable platform for the gaming community. While Google has already turned it’s Android and ChromeOS into household names bringing Linux to the living room, Canonial is still struggling.

• Valve starts promoting Steam for Linux to Windows users

  Steam is now being used by thousands of gamers running a Linux OS, and Valve has got to the point where they are happy to start urging Windows users to make the switch.

  Proof of that comes from the screenshot you see above. It’s the Steam website, and placed prominently near the top of the page is a “Join the Beta” promotion suggesting you try Steam for Linux. There’s even a download link to get Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which removes yet another barrier to entry.

• Lenovo, Linux, and the Coming of the Chromebooks

  Lenovo’s announcement that it would start selling Chromebooks to schools caused quite a buzz in FOSS-Land. It’s being interpreted as a nail in Microsoft’s coffin. “I would say, What took you so long, Lenovo?” Google+ blogger Alessandro Ebersol. “Chromebooks are hot, and it’s their prime time. You see, all that BS that the netbook is dead, is, indeed, just BS.”

• Lenovo’s new Thinkpad X131e Chromebook can take licking, keep ticking

• Linux & Open Source Dominate North Korea?

  You may or may not have heard of Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was visiting the secretive country North Korea. His daughter posted a blog about N-Korea which became quite popular.

• Recent Large Shifts in the Market for Technology

  Probably the biggest event in the software wars was the evident dominance of Android/Linux v iOS in smart thingies. While Apple came to dominate this space with slick gadgets and promotion,

• Valve Suggesting Windows Users to Try Ubuntu and Steam Linux Beta

  When visiting Steam download page from a web browser running on a Linux based OS, you are pointed to Linux version of Steam and a promo ad about Steam Linux beta is shown.

• A taste of Guacamole on Linux

  This is a new and interesting project that could be really useful both for companies that for private users, Guacamole is an HTML5 remote desktop gateway that provides access to desktop environments using remote desktop protocols like VNC and RDP. A centralized server acts as a tunnel and proxy, allowing access to multiple desktops through a web browser.

• BlenderArt Magazine Issue 40 Is Here For Download

• Meet PicUntu, a lightweight Linux designed for tiny PCs

• Linux Top 3: GNOME 3.8 Moves Forward, Consort Falls Back

• Eric Schmidt blogs about his trip to the country, full of Linux and restrictions.

  Eric Schmidt blogs about his trip to the country, full of Linux and restrictions.

• Server

  • Interview: IBM’s Linux chief tech officer Paul McKenney

  • Valve starts push toward Linux gaming

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Going Linux Jan 19: #196 Computer America #58

  • Open Ballot: Podcast changes

    We want to refresh it a bit, so we thought we’d ask you, dear listeners, what new category you’d like to hear. Perhaps an old on that you’d like reinstated, or something new that you think would fit in with the TuxRadar style. Or perhaps you think we’re perfect and wouldn’t change a thing.

    Whatever it is, pop it in the comments and we’ll bear it in mind when we start the new series later in the week.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.8-rc4

  • Linux 3.8-rc4 Kernel: Things Are Calming Down

  • Linux Kernel 3.7.3 Is Available for Download

  • LTSI v3.4 Released

  • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Paul McKenney

  • Kernel Log – Coming in 3.8 (Part 1)

    Linux now supports F2fs, a filesystem that is specially designed for storage media with flash chips. The developers say that Btrfs is now faster to complete certain tasks and that Ext4 is more efficient when handling small files.

  • Linux Still Being Ported To The Synopsys ARC CPU

    The Linux kernel is still being ported to new hardware. One of the latest processor families that has been receiving a Linux kernel port is the Synopsys ARC700 series.

  • Google Continues Working A Lot On Coreboot

    Last year I wrote about Google becoming more involved with the Coreboot project for an open-source BIOS replacement for many motherboards/laptops. Google has been very interested in Coreboot since for their Chrome OS on the OEM Chromebooks they can achieve “super fast boot times” while being stable, secure, and can be quite customized with the open-source project. Google continues to invest heavily into the upstream Coreboot project.

  • HDA Intel Audio To Improve A Lot In Linux 3.9 Kernel

    With we are only about half-way through the development of the Linux 3.8 kernel, there’s already exciting features beginning to enter the development spotlight for Linux 3.9. One of the features coming to the Linux 3.9 kernel will be grand changes to the very common “HDA Intel” audio codec drivers.

    HDA Intel is widely-used for integrated sound adapters and providing HDMI/DisplayPort audio support. The Linux driver for HDA Intel supports around 50 different controllers and 300+ different codecs. Up to this point it’s been a maintenance burden handling all of the differences in this audio kernel driver as part of ALSA, but it’s to be largely improved with Linux 3.9.

  • Aggressive Low Memory Booster For The Linux Kernel

    Last week on the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for an Aggressive Low Memory Booster. This is potentially an interesting feature for Linux systems with limited amounts of RAM.

    A developer from Samsung India, Pintu Kumar, proposed introducing an “Aggressive Low Memory Booster” feature for the Linux kernel to boost the available free memory of the system when under extreme memory pressure, which should particularly benefit embedded Linux devices with limited amounts of RAM.

  • Intel Releases Its 19th Driver In The 2.20 Series

    On Sunday was the release of the xf86-video-intel 2.20.19 DDX driver. This is the 19th point release in the long-standing Intel X.Org 2.20 series that’s been largely led by Chris Wilson out of Intel OTC.

  • DRM KMS Locking Rework Readied For Linux 3.9

  • Graphics Stack

    • AMD’s Catalyst Legacy Linux Driver Updated To 13.1

    • Intel Graphics See Some Gains On Fedora 18

    • NVIDIA Certifies 310.32 Linux Graphics Driver

    • Mesa Update Makes Radeon MSAA Much Faster

    • AMD Catalyst 13.1 For Linux Officially Does X.Org 1.13

      Catalyst 13.1 for Linux was released on Thursday as the first AMD Linux binary blob of 2013. This driver is notable since it officially supports X.Org Server 1.13.

    • NVIDIA ION: Nouveau Competes With The NVIDIA R310 Driver

      It’s been quite a while since delivering any Linux graphics benchmarks of the NVIDIA ION, the platform for pairing integrated NVIDIA graphics with an Intel Atom processor for small form factor PCs. While NVIDIA’s ION is basically defunct, for those still having a nettop or netbook that’s ION-based, here’s a performance comparison of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics between the open-source Nouveau driver and the NVIDIA 310.xx binary Linux graphics driver.

    • AMD Fights Back and Releases ATI Catalyst 13.1 Driver for Linux

      AMD is getting back in the Linux game with a huge driver release that should be able to save face on the open source platform.

      It’s not clear why AMD chose to virtually ignore the Linux platform in the last couple of years, but it seems they are back with a vengeance.

    • AMD’s Linux drivers offer improved gaming performance

      Version 13.1 of AMD’s proprietary Linux graphics drivers apparently fixes a performance issue with Valve games. The new version of Catalyst is also said to solve a similar problem with graphics cards in the “Southern Islands” generation. Both problems are listed in the “Resolved Issues” section of the new version’s release notes, although no details are given. Some information is available in the release notes for the Catalyst 12.11 beta that preceded version 13.1 – according to this document, the driver offers significant performance improvements with the Linux variant of Left for Dead 2; however, this version of the game has yet to be released by Valve.

    • LLVMpipe Gallium3D Sees A Bit Of New Activity

      A bit of new code was committed this week for Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe software driver that attempts to provide modest OpenGL performance as a software fallback by taking advantage of LLVM to exploit multiple CPU cores and the latest instruction set extensions on modern processors. Unfortunately, the rate of advancement for LLVMpipe still isn’t too fast.

      As can be seen when looking at the Mesa LLVMpipe changes through the Git web front-end, hitting mainline Mesa yesterday was enabling integer texture support, fixes for integer color buffers, and some trivial code clean-ups. Going back further, there’s been some more fixes, Automake support for LLVMpipe, and some other minor work, but unfortunately nothing too exciting.

    • Intel’s Mesa Driver Gets New Performance Patch

    • Freedreno Gallium3D Now Handles Running XBMC

    • Intel Driver Now Enables Floating-Point Textures

      Intel’s Mesa DRI driver now is unconditionally enabling floating-point textures. Up to this point, the floating-point textures feature of GL3 hasn’t been enabled by default due to patent worries.

    • Intel Driver To Play A Bit Better With S3TC Compression

      In addition to the Intel driver now always enabling floating-point textures, a patented feature but something that’s required for GL3 compliance, the Intel DRI driver is set to play better with S3TC, the also patent-troubled but widely-used S3 Texture Compression.

      Ian Romanick sent out three new patches today on the mesa-dev list about “Enable some S3TC” for Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver. “This is mostly a re-spin of the patch that I sent out many months ago. The main change is that when on-line compression is not available, only a subset of extension strings is advertised. This was based on feedback from a developer whose application does submit uncompressed data with the expectation that the driver will compress it.”

  • Benchmarks

    • Intel Releases 13 New Linux Benchmarks

      Courtesy of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center are 13 new Linux micro-benchmarks that have been created based upon the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. These brand new test profiles provide test coverage of systemd boot performance, timing of various common system tasks, GPU residency times, PowerTop wake-up monitoring, and much more.

• Applications

  • FlareGet – Download Manager for Linux

    flareGet is a full featured, multi-threaded and multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux. It supports in-built browser integration with all the browsers.

  • Proprietary

    • Opera To Release WebKit-Based Web Browser

      Next month Opera will be rolling out “Opera Ice”, a new web-browser for smart-phones and tablets. This mobile Opera browser won’t be built on their Presto engine but rather the popular WebKit engine. Initially this WebKit-browser is just targeting the mobile space but it’s expected to eventually land on the desktop too.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • The unsolved problem of the init scripts

    • Rotating Backup with rsync

    • How To Use Xfce4 Terminal 0.6.x As A Drop-Down Console (Guake-style)

    • How to Change the Length of the Add-ons Install Countdown in Firefox

    • Switch Between your Gnome Shell Desktops using Mouse Scroll Wheel

    • How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type

    • Fedora 18 Tips and Tricks

    • Setting the wireless regulatory domain in Linux on your laptop

    • How to straighten out firewall configuration on Fedora 18

    • How Steam and Android Will Change Gaming Forever

    • Everyday Linux User Review of Manjaro Linux

    • Android Programming for Beginners: User Menus

    • Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On CentOS 6.3

    • Setting up apt proxy Server Approx on Ubuntu Linux

    • Introduction to GNU R on Linux Operating System

    • How To Upgrade From Fedora 17 To Fedora 18 With FedUp (Desktop & Server)

    • Temporarily Unavailable: /tmp: filesystem full

    • Linux Terminal: pidstat, know everything about your processes

    • Debian Wheezy Local Git Server With Git Lite Workflow

    • How to straighten out firewall configuration on Fedora 18

    • Introduction to GNU R on Linux Operating System

    • Install ROSA Launcher on Fedora 18 KDE

    • Striping Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On CentOS 6.3

    • How to Secure SSH with Google Authenticator’s Two-Factor Authentication

    • How to build a Linux router

    • Please Join Us: The 100 Linux Tutorial Campaign

      We know that the Linux community is growing. It’s getting bigger every year as it moves across industries and geographies. Our Who Writes Linux paper documents each year the increasing number of contributors, sponsors and the pace of development. Only the collaborative development model can deliver and support this kind of rapid growth.

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Let’s Play: Street Fighter X Tekken

    • Wine 1.5.22 released

    • Wine 1.5.22 Handles 64-bit ARM, Mac Graphics Driver

    • Interesting Insights Into Wine’s Development

      Wine, the widely-known open-source software for running Microsoft Windows programs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, now weighs in at more than three million lines of code. In this article is some insight into its pace of development, how the CodeWeavers company dominates Wine’s development, and other intriguing statistics about this project that’s been around for two decades.

  • Games

    • The Catch 22: Growing The Linux Gaming Market

      The word on the street seems to be that Linux is set to be a commercially viable gaming platform. And the way it looks right now, this might actually prove to be true. There’s still some uncertainty amongst both developers and gamers though. At the core of a lot of it is this: Developers are hesitant to make games for a market as small as this, and gamers are hesitant to adopt it as a gaming platform because there are so few games for it.

    • Steam10,000,000 hopefully coming to Linux via Steam

    • Two Tribes Are Hunting For Linux Interest

    • Planetary Annihilation desert biome concept released!

    • Cheese Talks To Double Fine (about cross-platform game development)

    • More Developers Invited For Desurium Application

      Desurium, an open source Desura client, is looking for more developers. The announcement was posted in the Linux Gaming subreddit. Currently, the Desurium client on Linux outperforms the official Desura client, but there are many bugs which needs fixing and more features need to be added.

    • Gear Up coming to Linux

    • Open Source Handheld GCW-Zero Nears Kickstarter Goal

      There’s only 8 days until the end of Game Consoles Worldwide’s Kickstarter campaign for their open source handheld, GCW-Zero. With another $28,000 to go, the GCW-Zero is very close to hitting it’s funding goal of $130,000; but also dangerously close to missing it.

    • GCW-Zero open-source handheld needs a Kickstart

    • New Crowdfunding wiki is up

      Hi everyone I decided to do a wiki for Crowdfunded games instead of doing a page like our game sales page as that only needs to track “current” stuff so here’s our new wiki for it!

    • AMD Releases Proprietary Linux Graphics Driver, Patches Steam Issues

      Just how important has Linux become? Very. Just weeks after hearing that Steam would be launching for the world’s favorite open-source desktop OS, AMD has just announced new Catalyst drivers made specifically for — you guessed it — Linux. The Catalyst 13.1 Proprietary Linux Graphics were just let loose into the wild, and it provides budding Linux gamers with bona fide GPU support for a huge swath of AMD Radeon graphics cards. Everything from the Radeon HD 5000 series to the Radeon E6760 embedded family is supported, as well as cards that are stuffed within all-in-one PCs, integrated GPS, and AMD Mobility GPUs.

    • This 22-day-old open-source Minecraft-cloning game builder runs in Javascript in your browser

      It’s not every day that a reporter’s interview is derailed by an 85-year-old drunk woman who hits a power pole in Oakland, cuts power to a developer’s home office, and forces him to Mi-Fi on a Skype call while his laptop’s battery slowly dies.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Linux & Windows 8: So Far the Penguin Is Ahead

    There’s no real way to compare how the various desktop Linux distros are doing against Windows 8, Microsoft’s newly crowned flagship product, since Linux isn’t offered preinstalled in any meaningful way by the major OEMs. What we do know is that the new Windows would seem to be failing to excite buyers; folks haven’t been rushing to the big box stores to purchase a new desktop or laptop running the new operating system.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE 4.10 RC 3 released

      The final KDE 4.10 release candidate is now out, with features for the final release including faster indexing, better notifications, and Qt Quick

    • 10 Year Old KDE Bug Finally Gets Fixed

      It turns out that KDE’s “Reject Cross-Domain Cookies” feature of the KDE Libraries has been broken since 2002 and was only fixed yesterday. Thiago Macieira dived into the problem yesterday to see why all of his web cookies would be forgotten after a kded restart. The problem originates within KDE’s KCookieJar within the HTTP KIOSlave of kdelibs.

    • KDE Ships Third Release Candidate of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.10

    • Amarok 2.7 Released, Codenamed ‘Minor Tune’

      Amarok team has released 2.7 version of Amarok, the ‘feature rich’ music player which is part of the KDE project. This version fixes more than 500 bugs after the 2.6 release. The version is code named “minor tune” because list of new features added in Amarok are not pages long. Some of these changes were made during the Google Summer of code 2012.

    • Amarok 2.7 Fixes 470+ Bugs, 15+ New Features

    • Amarok 2.7 gets semantic with Nepomuk

      Amarok 2.7 is available on a wide range of Linux platforms; a Mac OS X port is still in development and a Windows port of 2.7 is not available yet. Download and installation instructions are available. Source code is available as a tarball or from the KDE git repository. Amarok is licensed under the GPLv2.

    • KDE Plasma, Applications And Workspace 4.10 RC 3 Available For Kubuntu

    • 10 Year Old And Forgotten KDE Bug Fixed

      KDE developers have fixed a bug which has been there for almost a decade. “Reject Cross-Domain Cookies” feature of KDE was broken since 2002 and has been fixed this week. This bug was responsible for loss of cookies after a kded restart. KDE’s KCookieJar within the HTTP KIOSlave of kdelibs was responsible for this bug.

    • KDE 4.10′s third and final release candidate arrives

    • Qt5 Packages Available For Arch Linux

      Qt packages in Arch Linux official repository are out of date, and it will take sometime for the packages to compile it and push it to repositories. However, if you are too impatient, you can download the packages for Arch Linux x64 from this dropbox folder. All the Qt components have been packaged, except qtdocs and qtwebkit.

    • SDDM: A Lightweight QML-Based Display Manager

      A Phoronix reader has announced his work on SDDM within the Phoronix Forums this weekend. SDDM is a very lightweight display management that takes advantage of Qt’s QML.

      SDDM doesn’t have feature parity to GDM, KDM, or LightDM, but is just focusing upon being a lightweight display manager that gets the job done for most Linux desktop users while being very slim in terms of code size and dependencies. SDDM just depends upon PAM, Xlib, and Qt but none of the KDE libraries or anything else. This new display manager forgoes any support for remote connections, XDMCP, and other advanced functionality supported by many of the alternatives albeit seldom used by a majority of Linux desktop users.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Direction Of GNOME To Be Discussed Next Month

      Vincent Untz will be speaking at FOSDEM early next month in Brussels to “clarify the directions the GNOME project is taking, and to explain the rationale for various decisions.” He’s hoping that after this Belgian conference people will better understand the course of the GNOME desktop and begin to rebuild trust in the project.

      The second set of 2013 interviews for the annual Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting conference were posted to the FOSDEM web-site this week. Perhaps the most interesting interview is that of Vicent Untz talking about his main track talk.

    • GNOME SysAdmin Andrea Veri about GNOME Infrastructure

      Andrea Veri is one of the five SysAdmin of GNOME Web-Infrastructure and GNOME Foundation Membership Committee Chairman.

    • Does GNOME 2 nostalgia harm the future of the free desktop?

      For a desktop that was supposed to become defunct two years ago, GNOME 2 remains surprisingly alive. Linux Mint offers a direct fork in Mate, and recreates GNOME 2 with a series of extensions in Cinnamon. A new distribution called SolusOS now offers Consort, a fork of GNOME fallback, which resembles GNOME 2. Meanwhile, the GNOME project prepares to support a set of core extensions to reproduce the GNOME 2 experience. Hardly a week goes by without some distribution announcing a release that includes some form of GNOME 2.

      All this activity is understandable, and even admirable to a degree. It’s testimony to users’ anger over GNOME 3 and the ability of free software to empower users.

      However, increasingly I worry about the effect that these efforts will have on the future of the desktop. In the stampede to return to the past, the ability to innovate frequently seems to be trampled without anyone caring.

    • Gnome 3.7.4 Development Release Is Here

      The Gnome development team has announced the release of Gnome 3.7.4. This is adevelopment release, and stricrtly recommended for those who are willing to test the upcoming Gnome 3.8 features. That said, not everything has been updated in this relase. Some of the core applications such as Nautilus, Tracker and Gnome Boxes have not been updated for this release because of some build bugs and other problems.

    • Gnome 3.8 Progress Update

      Gnome 3.8 is the next major release of Gnome desktop environment, and one of its lead developer, Matthias Clasen has published some interesting information about its current status. For our readers, the good news is that most apps are ready for the next release, just some minor fixes here an there. If you want to test the release now, grab the Gnome 3.7.2 sources and compile them. The 3.7.2 tarballs were released just a few days before.

    • Upload Images To Flickr Directly From Nautilus

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Snowlinux 4 (E17)

    • Alpine 2.5.2 released

      The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availablity of version 2.5.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

      This is a bugfix release which contains various security fixes, fixes for the r8169 NIC driver and fixes for squid.

    • Release Notes for CRUX 3.0

  • Screenshots

    • openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1 Screenshots

    • UberStudent 2.0 Lightweight Screenshots

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Linux distro spotlight: Mageia

      Mageia’s creators came away from the experience of Mandriva with a firm commitment to creating a Linux distribution with strong community governance

  • Red Hat Family

    • PayPros Selects Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to Create PayPros Innovo Next-Generation Payment System

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 18 Spherical Cow review – Bad bad bad

      • Upgrading Experience from F17 to F18 (Spherical Cow)

        After a long waiting and continuous delay, finally fedora 18 got release on 15 Jan (f18 Schedule), as per blogs/ML communications this delay is due to critical bug in Anaconda, Windows 8 secure boot, fedup (Fedora Upgrader) …etc, but it’s always good to delay instead of buggy release.

      • Almost workable Fedora 18 desktop

      • Fedora 18 Review – Great Bovine Spheres!

        After much delay, the Spherical Cow graces us with its presence. How does the final version of Fedora 18 stack up?

      • Fedora 18 with Xfce: My first impressions from live media

        Fedora 18 has finally appeared in its final form after many delays. Largely responsible: a new Anaconda installer that has seen much criticism, mostly from users who like complicated manual partitioning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

      • Fedora May Replace MySQL With Maria DB In Schrodinger’s Cat

        The next release of Fedora, Fedora 19 may ship with MariaDB as the default database instead of the more popular MySQL. This decision is mainly taken because Fedora developers have always strived to ship the latest and greatest open source software in Fedora Operation System, and steps taken by Oracle are making MySQL to move more towards being closed source.

      • Fedora 18 Fails At ARM Wrestling Arch, Ubuntu, Linaro

        Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Project News – January 21st, 2013

    • Derivatives

      • Tails Linux version 0.16 – Firewall Disabling Script Waits For Exploitation

        The file, if ran with correct permissions, will completely disable your firewall! So much for the idea that Tails always routes everything through Tor! Where this news has been posted and comments allowed, mysterious “anonymous” users have expressed their low brow intelligence leaving comments such as, “Well you need to be root to run it so it doesn’t matter, if you have root you can do anything!”

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 13.04 Adds New Launcher Options

        • Thoughts on Ubuntu Smartphones

        • Unity Changes – Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

          As you probably know, there will be no alpha milestones for Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail and Unity has got some minor, but interesting changes since the Raring development has begun, so I though I’d make a video showing some of these features so you can see what’s new.

        • All 100 Edubuntu computers in Ghana have been deployed!

          Back in October I spent 2 weeks in Ghana helping a team begin a deployment of 100 desktops shipped to Africa ICT Right in Ghana by Computer Reach based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately due to a series of unforeseen events, we weren’t able to see the deployment of all 100 systems to completion. While we were able to do a lot of useful work, when the last of the Computer Reach team left only 10 had actually been fully deployed. I summarized our trip here. In November I wrote this update which described the pickup of the systems for other regions, and the deployment of another 10 systems to Madina No.1 School.

        • Early Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks On The Intel Atom

          On Friday benchmarks were delivered of the Atom-based NVIDIA ION platform with the Nouveau driver against NVIDIA’s binary blob. Those results were favorable towards the reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA driver. For finishing off the week are more benchmarks from this aging NVIDIA ION system but this time seeing how well the low-end 64-bit Ubuntu performance is when comparing the latest 13.04 development image to the 12.10 and 12.04.1 LTS releases.

        • South Africa: Mobile Ubuntu – a Unix Powered Smartphone

        • South Africa: Ubuntu Coming to Phones

        • Head-to-Head Desktop Comparison: Ubuntu 12.10 vs. OS X Mountain Lion

          Over the years, many people have speculated about when Ubuntu will be ready for the casual computer user. Some individuals have compared Linux distributions to other operating systems, such as OS X.

          In this article, I will be offering a unique comparison between Ubuntu 12.10 and OS X Mountain Lion. Since I have access to both operating systems in my home office, I was able to take the time to narrow down where each operating system excels and where improvement is still needed. I have also attempted to do so without bias or platform-specific hype.

        • Head-to-Head Desktop Comparison: Ubuntu 12.10 vs. OS X Mountain Lion

        • Ubuntu 13.04 to Receive New Window Docking Animations – Screenshot

          The maximize and minimize transitions for windows in the Ubuntu operating systems have been perfected over time, but now a patch has been implemented for Compiz to further refine the effects.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 Advertised on the Official Steam Website

        • 13.04 wallpaper contest

        • ‘Ubuntu Packages’ Site Finally Gets Revamped

        • Ubuntu Decides To Turn On Intel SNA

          If you are an Ubuntu Linux user and rely upon Intel integrated graphics, Ubuntu developers could use your help in trying out Intel’s SNA as they decide whether to enable this experimental acceleration architecture in Ubuntu 13.04.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Review: Linux Mint 14 MATE Edition

            My last review of Linux Mint was for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 13 “Maya”. Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” was released back on Nov. 20, 2112, but with all of the hustle and bustle of the winter holidays, I didn’t have time to install it and write up a review until now.

          • Ultimate Edition 3.5 Review: Ugly but fully loaded!

            My first exposure to Ultimate edition was with 3.4. I installed the 64-bit one to my newly bought Core i7 3rd gen. laptop with 8 GB RAM last year, but had to remove it bugged by it’s instability. First the default interface is devoid of much aesthetics, Second, effects are too loud and most important, third, instability – not a single day passed with something or the other crashing in the background or my laptop suddenly stopped responding and would require a hard reset. First two issues on aesthetics and too much of effects I took care myself with 24 hours of usage but I couldn’t handle the third one and replaced it with supremely stable Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon.

          • BodhiLinux 2.2.0 Review | E17 Stable Release

          • Reviews: First look at Fuduntu 2013.1

          • Lubuntu 13.04 Wallpaper Contest

• Devices/Embedded

  • Weird and wonderful Raspberry Pi hacks

  • Your First Bite of Raspberry Pi

    I have to give Kyle Rankin all the credit for my Raspberry Pi collection. I never really felt geeky enough to do anything with an Arduino, and for some reason I mentally lumped the RPi into the same world. Boy was I short-sighted! Thankfully Kyle showed me the light, and I managed to snag some of the new 512MB model B units. You’ll be hearing about the Raspberry Pi from Kyle as well, but this month, I want to introduce the RPi to those folks who have been hesitant to buy one, thinking they weren’t geeky enough. I had to ask a lot of dumb questions when my Raspberry Pis arrived; hopefully, I can save you that embarrassment.

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini with NFC to launch this month

        If you’ve been looking at your options for a new phone, and have been considering a Galaxy S3 Mini, chances are you noticed the lack of NFC support in the current model. Later this month, however, that will change, and Samsung is launching an NFC-capable version in the UK this month.

      • HTC M7 revealed in high-resolution render

      • [Exclusive] This May Actually Be The HTC M7 With Sense 5.0

      • LG’s Optimus G Pro revealed in leaked image with 5-inch 1080p display, 3,000mAh battery and LTE

      • LG announces 1 million sales of its flagship Optimus G smartphoneLG announces 1 million sales of its flagship Optimus G smartphone

      • Rumor: KONA, SANTOS and ROMA new expected tablets from Samsung

      • Samsung’s ‘Godiva’ phone appears on blurrycam with Verizon branding, no physical keyboard

      • EXCLUSIVE: SamMobile confirms specifications of the GT-N5100 Galaxy Note …..

        6.3″ Samsung Galaxy Note III to have Exynos 5 Octa CPU. Samsung looks to China to replace Apple orders

        Samsung eyes China for chip business

        Samsung mobile head confirms 8-inch Galaxy Note

        JK Shin confirms that a midsize stylus-powered Note tab will be released as soon as February.

        EXCLUSIVE: Samsung to announce 5.8” Android smartphone

    • Android

      • Nexus 4 sold 10 times more than expected

        As everyone knows, Google’s flagship device made by LG, the Nexus 4, is a pretty hard catch. It seems that Google was a little bit skeptical about LG being able to sell the new member of the Nexus family, both parties having all kinds of rumours (like halting the production for a revmaped device) to deal with.

      • Sony Xperia Tablet Z(SO-03E) equipped with Full HD Display has been leaked

      • HTC M7: first image of the 2013 flagship

      • Nexus 4 vs Galaxy Nexus: The Evolution Continues

        So in the world of Google Nexus devices I can honestly say that yes, the Nexus 4 is still being made and is still being delivered to those who ordered them. The rumors of the phones having evaporated or production being halted are just not true. I received mine two days and and since I own other Nexus devices I couldn’t help but put it to a full comparison test against my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 to see just how it fits into the Nexus family.

      • Sending huge files from one Android device to another

        Android 4.1 and above has a nifty feature–Wi-Fi Direct–which lets you send a file from one Android device to another quickly, conveniently and free.

      • Rock and Paper, the Android Personal Computer’s new looks

      • VIA’s tiny Android-powered ARM motherboard gets a pair of upgrades

        Earlier this year, VIA released a tiny $49 ARM-powered motherboard it called the Android PC System (APC) in an effort to ride the wave the Raspberry Pi Foundation accidentally started with its $35 Linux computer for budding young developers. Today, it’s announcing a pair of follow-ups: the APC Rock is a $79 bare motherboard, and the APC Paper is a $99 version that is identical, except it loses the VGA port and comes in a recycled cardboard case designed to look like a small hardcover book. The Rock is available now, and the Paper has a March pre-order date. The original APC will continue to be sold with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) for $49.

      • Experimental XBMC Android build adds hardware-accelerated video for most devices

      • Official Android Community app launched: we go hands-on

      • What is Google cooking up for Google I/O 13?

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Archos GamePad coming to the United States February 2013

      Our friends in Europe have been enjoying the Archos GamePad since December, but Archos wasn’t interested in letting us US folks in on the fun at the same time. Heck, the company didn’t even give a peep as to when we might be seeing the gaming tablet in the United States at CES. We knew it’d be Q1, but had no clue which month to expect it.

    • Ubuntu Powered Nibbio Tablet Dual Boots With Android

      The tablet market may be saturated with Android tablets, but it’s not very often that you find a well-spec’d tablet boasting Ubuntu. Italian company DaVinci Mobile Technology has opened up pre-orders for its new 10.1 inch, full HD tablet. The tablet will feature a dual boot system with Android 4.0 installed alongside Ubuntu 12. Named, Nibbio (Kite in Italian), the tablet is available in Wifi and 3G versions, both costing €309. The cost of securing a pre-order however, is a mere €29. What’s more, placing a pre-order entitles you to an additional year on your tablet’s warranty. The tablets will begin shipment midway through March 2013.

    • Build An App For Aakash Tablet And Win Upto 50,000 Rupees

    • Kogan announces $149 unlocked Android smartphone with 5-inch screen

      The Agora offers some interesting specs, including dual SIM slots and a phablet-size display. It’s scheduled to reach U.S. shores in about a month.

Free Software/Open Source

• IF YOU CARE ABOUT FREEDOM, RAMP UP YOUR HAM

  I think it’s interesting how most people who claim to care about freedom don’t have a ham radio (amateur radio) license, especially you folks in open source.

  You reject and rebel against the Monopolists in Redmond and the Fruit Devices from Cupertino recognizing that they are dictating how you will and will not use the thing you are spending all your money on.

• cbarylick
  The open source movement, marketing and finally saying “Hello” to the mainstream

  It goes without saying that the open source software movement has created some amazing things in the decades it’s been active and running. Where code has been shared, random developers have come up with some great new ideas and features and the open source goal of contribution has achieved its mission.

• ITA signs agreement with Intel to promote open source software

  In line with ITA’s efforts in spreading a Free and Open Source software culture for the past two years, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in support of the Open Source Intel Global Challenge in Oman was signed here recently between the Information Technology Authority (ITA) and Intel Corporation.

• Vert.x heading for Eclipse Foundation

  The future home of Vert.x will most likely be at the Eclipse Foundation. Project leader Tim Fox recommended that the JVM-polyglot asynchronous event-driven framework should look to the Eclipse Foundation as a “little more ‘business friendly’” home for the project’s assets and governance. Mike Millinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, welcomed Fox’s recommendation. A call for a +1/-1 vote from the original Vert.x community, seems so far to be predominantly +1, with no serious objections.

• Wikipedia is moving

  On the Wikimedia Foundation’s tech blog, Technical Communications Manager Guillaume Paumier has announced that Wikipedia and other services will move from Tampa, Florida to the company’s new primary data centre in Ashburn, Virginia over the coming days. With this move, the company aims to “improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites”. Paumier said that service limitations are expected during the transition: “Our sites will be in read-only mode for some time, and may be intermittently inaccessible.” Migration will begin on 22 January and is scheduled to be completed by 24 January.

• ITA to support Intel’s Open Source competition

• Opening up the open source community

  I’ve mentioned the reported decline in Wikipedia contributors, and wondered out loud whether the organization sees the dip as an acceptable price to pay for heightening the standards for content contributions to its open source encyclopedia. “Our No. 1 strategic priority, as a movement,” she continues, tapping the table for emphasis, “is to increase contributorship.”

• Open Source Computing Brings Everybody’s Favorite Droid To Life

  I think we can all agree that R2-D2 is one of the most lovable robots ever created. Compared to his more terrifying contemporaries, the little guy just oozes charm. Now one man has made his very own R2-D2 using a Raspberry Pi linux computer.

• CommuniGate Updates Open-Source cPanel Adaptor Kit

• Twitter’s Whisper Systems now an open source project

  Whisper Systems, the mobile security startup Twitter acquired in late 2011, is now an open source project which has a new official home outside the microblogging service.

• Events

  • Free Geek provides jobs and free classes to the community

    Here in the District of Columbia, a loosely-knit group comprised of social workers, librarians, technologists, environmentalists, disability rights advocates, and educators has come together in the past few years. This coalition, known as the Broadband Bridge, sees digital justice and digital inclusion as a cornerstone towards self-determination in traditionally underserved communities.

  • Kyle Rankin to Keynote SCALE 11x

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Announces Firefox OS Developer Phone

      Three major players are battling for a spot in the highly competitive smartphone market with their open source operating systems — Jolla, Mozilla and Canonical. While Jolla has some deals to bring their devices to the market, Mozilla has a lead here.

    • Mozilla Announces Firefox OS Developer Phone

      Three major players are battling for a spot in the highly competitive smartphone market with their open source operating systems — Jolla, Mozilla and Canonical. While Jolla has some deals to bring their devices to the market, Mozilla has a lead here.

    • Mozilla Announces Firefox OS Developer Phone

      Three major players are battling for a spot in the highly competitive smartphone market with their open source operating systems — Jolla, Mozilla and Canonical. While Jolla has some deals to bring their devices to the market, Mozilla has a lead here.

    • Announcing the Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone!

    • Mozilla develops Minion security testing framework

      The Mozilla Foundation is developing an open source security framework called Minion and plans to release a beta version in the first quarter of 2013. Minion will allow developers to subject their web applications to a security check. The framework will target applications with well-established pen testing tools such as OWASP’s Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), Skipfish and NMAP. Further testing tools are planned to be incorporated into the framework as plugins.

    • Mozilla stabilises Firefox 18

      Mozilla has released Firefox 18.0.1, a first update to Firefox 18, which was released ten days ago. According to the release notes, and the lack of any additional entries on the security advisories page, the release is a stability update addressing three issues.

    • Mozilla picks JavaScript titan Eich to lead charge against ‘Droid, iOS

      He’s taking over as Mozilla fights for the hearts and minds of devs who might once have defaulted to Firefox, but are now being dazzled with open-source choices.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • WiFi + USB Drive = Your Own Mini-Internet (Freedom)

    Worried about draconian Internet laws? Creeping surveillance? The inability to share with others without being criminalized? The Internet is still a tool of tremendous power, but a deep rot has set in. We have caught it early and we are fighting to stop this rot, but there are other options we can begin exploring to hedge our bets, enhance our current efforts of fighting against corporate monopolies, and eventually, build an Internet of the people, by the people, for the people – big-telecom monopolies not welcomed.

  • Open Compute Summit: New Members, Technologies

    The Open Compute Project, backed by Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), is gaining momentum, as evidenced by the increasing attendance at the Open Compute Summit. This week, the summit attracted more than 1,900 attendees that were interested in checking out the latest and greatest in Open Compute Project technologies, innovations and products. There has been a bit of buzz about some of the innovations unveiled at the show, and this can only mean good things for the open source cloud computing market.

  • HP Cloud Leader Biri Singh Exits: Should Partners Worry?

• Databases

  • Tui airline Jetair moves to open source with SkySQL

    Jetair, the expanding Belgian arm of the Tui Group, is bringing in open source database technology supplier SkySQL.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Six new features coming in LibreOffice 4.0

    It’s hard to believe LibreOffice has only been around about two years, so thoroughly has it come to dominate as the leading free and open source productivity suite, but late last week a release candidate for its next major version appeared.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD And NetBSD Images Available For Raspberry Pi

    FreeBSD and NetBSD are UNIX variants that are known for their stability and performance. If you are using a GNU/Linux distro in Raspberry Pi for sometime, and want to try something new, you can now download these images from the Raspberry Pi site and try them. Make sure you have a 4 gB or more SD card to dd these images into. Also, as they are bleeding edge releases, be sure to expect some bugs and crashes.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Hurd Is Still Moving, Albeit Slowly

    Since last week when writing about the LLVM/Clang compiler being ported to GNU Hurd, readers have asked via the forums, email, etc about the state of this open-source kernel backed by the Free Software Foundation. GNU Hurd and its Mach micro-kernel continue to be developed, just not at a rapid pace like the Linux kernel.

  • The Year in Emacs

  • Gnuaccounting 0.8.2 improves its document management

    Version 0.8.2 of the cross-platform accounting and bookkeeping package Gnuaccounting has been released. The Java-based application supports the creation of invoices, shipping notices and receipts with OpenOffice and LibreOffice and can interface with online banking accounts through FinTS (formerly HBCI) as well as store data in MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

• Project Releases

  • OpenCart v1.5.5 released

    OpenCart v1.5.5, a free PHP shopping cart system, released with a lot of new features and fixed issues.

• Public Services/Government

  • Government tech stakeholders gather at state hackathon

    Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government.

  • Norway’s municipalities run open source apps from open source cloud

    The Norwegian free software association for municipalities, Friprogforeningen, is starting to offer cloud-based open source applications. This means municipalities can use open source tools such as the Redmine project management and bug-tracking tool and the OTRS service management and helpdesk software, without having to install and maintain the applications. The cloud itself is running free and open source software.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Crowdfunding push for EZ-EV open source electric kit car

    Electrical engineer Gary Krysztopik has been driving his self-built, open-framed, three-wheeled electric “hotrod” on the roads and highways of San Antonio (TX) for over three years now, but folks still can’t help staring as he zooms past. While also working on gas-to-electric conversions (including a VW Bug and a Porsche Carrera), he’s been busy refining and tweaking the design for his “battery box on wheels” and is now preparing to release the EZ-EV car as open source plans, build-it-yourself kits and complete vehicles.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral

      As a scientist your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal’s paywall is unacceptable

    • For Our Information: Politicians Need To Let Go

    • How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture

      The visitor was clever — switching identifications to avoid being blocked by M.I.T.’s security system — but eventually the university believed it had shut down the intrusion, then spent weeks reassuring furious officials at Jstor that the downloading had been stopped.

      [...]

      He described attending two meetings with the chancellor of M.I.T., Eric Grimson. Each time there also was a representative of the general counsel’s office. At both meetings, he said, members of M.I.T.’s legal team assured him and the chancellor that the government had compelled M.I.T. to collect and hand over the material. In that first meeting, he recalled, “I said to the chancellor, ‘Why are you destroying my son?’ He said, ‘We are not.’ ”

    • Carmen Ortiz’s Husband Criticizes Swartz Family For Suggesting Prosecution Of Their Son Contributed To His Suicide

      Dolan has since deleted his entire account after he either came to his senses or someone suggested strongly that he think better of it. While you can understand his desire to defend his wife’s efforts, the tweets aren’t just somewhat offensive following Aaron’s suicide, but misleading as well. To argue that the prosecution was fair because they offered him a 6 month plea deal is complete and utter hogwash. As many have pointed out, it doesn’t appear that Aaron should have been facing any federal charges at all. The 35 years is completely relevant, because that’s part of the hammer that his wife was using to pressure him into taking the 6 month plea deal so that she and her assistant could get a big headline about another “guilty” plea. To act like the 6 month offer is some sort of “leniency” is insane when you know the details of the case and everything else that came with it.

      Dolan also — conveniently — ignores that the government supposedly told Aaron’s lawyers that if he didn’t take the deal, the next one they’d come back with would be worse, and that if the case actually got to court, they’d try to get the judge (notorious for strict sentences) to throw the book at Swartz.

• Programming

  • 9 of the Best Free PHP Books

    Learning the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) programming language from scratch can be an arduous affair. Fortunately, budding developers that want to code in this language have a good range of introductory texts available to read, both in-print and to download. There are also many quality books that help programmers that have reached an intermediate level deepen their understanding of the language.

• Standards/Consortia

  • W3C Invites Chinese Web Developers, Industry, Academia to Assume Greater Role in Global Web Innovation

    W3C announces Beihang University as a new center for W3C technical staff and leadership activities in China. W3C anticipates that a dedicated presence in China will enhance opportunities for collaboration among Chinese companies, Web developers, and research institutes, and W3C’s full international community, including Members from more than 40 countries.

    “China is in the midst of an innovation boom,” said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “In IT, Chinese companies have excelled in instant messaging, online games, smartphones, and search, and there is a flourishing Chinese browser ecosystem. In the past two years W3C has benefited from greater Chinese participation, and we look forward to that trend accelerating through the efforts of local industry and Beihang University. Global participation in W3C enables our community to identify global needs for the Web, and drive solutions.”

    In its new capacity, Beihang University invites Chinese Web developers, industry, and academia to assume a greater role in global Web innovation.

  • Vint Cerf appointed to National Science Board by President Obama

Leftovers

• Is Facebook Graph Search A Concerning Matter?

  Is Facebook Graph Search A Concerning Matter?
  Syn Waker’s picture
  Posted by Syn Waker on20Jan2013

  As we all heard about, Facebook started to roll out a beta version of its Graph Search, a feature that “gives people the power and the tools they need to search through the content on the site”. At what cost?

  We’ve already seen how Facebook “handles” the privacy of the humble Facebook users (see face recognition and social web), but now, Mark’s social network has made a bold step by making impossible to hide your timeline from being indexed in the ‘walled’ search results (altough individual posts can be hidden), and those who opted out before this feature would be disabled, they would still be forced to change the privacy settings for every single post they wanted to be hidden from curious eyes.

• Media freedom is a delicate flower

  I am delighted to have read over the weekend, and to have been officially presented today, with a keenly awaited report into the practice of media freedom and pluralism in the European Union. The lead author is Prof. Vaire Vike Freiberga (The other members were Professor Herta Däubler-Gmelin, Professor Luís Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro and Ben Hammersley)

  It is remarkably wide-ranging; it touches on the work of many of my Commission colleagues.

• Google Handwrite gets easier and faster

  Since we launched Google Handwrite last summer for smartphones and tablets, we’ve been improving recognition quality and also working on a number of features to make it easier and faster to handwrite your searches on Google. You can now distinguish between ambiguous characters, overlap your characters, and write multiple characters at a time in Chinese.

• What Gates Foundation Should Have Said in Its MET Teacher Evaluation Report

  No matter how you mix it, it’s better to go with Value-Added, student surveys, or both: As Dropout Nation noted last year, the accuracy of classroom observations is so low that even in a multiple measures approach to evaluation in which value-added data and student surveys account for the overwhelming majority of the data culled from the model (72.9 percent, and 17.2 percent of the evaluation in one case), the classroom observations are of such low quality that they bring down the accuracy of the overall performance review. This point is raised again in the latest group of models floated by Gates in its final MET study. Only one model matches the level of accuracy Value-Added has on its own — and that’s because observations only account for two percent of the data in the model. The usefulness of the next model, one of the three Gates prefers because observations account for a quarter of the data used (while Value-Added accounts for half), declines by nine-hundreds of a standard deviation based on Dropout Nation‘s analysis of the MET report’s data; another model, in observations, Value-Added and student surveys account for one-third each, the loss of accuracy is nearly two-tenths of a standard deviation.

  Yet the Gates Foundation insists on pushing a “multiple measures approach” that is useless to teachers, school leaders, families, and children alike:

• Science

  • Symbolic computation in the small: Math on mobile

• Health/Nutrition

  • Refugees in Canada have poorer access to health care than in refugee camps

    Has the day come when access to basic health care is worse in Canada than in a refugee camp? It has, thanks to cuts to the Interim Federal Health Program. Refugee claimants from 27 designated countries of origin, announced on Dec. 15, will now be denied almost all health care services.

• Security

  • Security advisories for Monday

  • The ghost of a Spring Framework bug haunts old code

    There are reports of the discovery of a remote code execution flaw in the Spring Framework, but many are not mentioning that the flaw in question was fixed over a year ago and that what has been found is actually a new way to exploit that old flaw. In 2011, a “variable” severity flaw, identified as CVE-2011-2730, was discovered by two researchers in versions 3.0.0 to 3.0.5, 2.5.0 to 2.5.6SEC02 and 2.5.0 to 2.5.7SR01. The flaw involved Expression Language (EL) and its use in JSP; EL expressions were evaluated by default and in some circumstances were evaluated twice, which could lead to information disclosure to an attacker if there was a location in an application where an unfiltered parameter was placed in a tag that would be evaluated. A paper covered the details.

  • No, availability is not security!

    Security is a very important factor in my choice of distributions and software solutions, and I tend to hold a very strict view of what it means from a modern computing standpoint. In one sentence, my stance on security is this: A sound and complete security posture has to take both physical and network security into account.

    Anything less will not fly. So when I came across an article that attempts to sell that view short for the sole purpose of promoting a product, it didn’t sit well with me. The offending article was written by Frank Karlitschek, founder and CTO of Owncloud, a cloud storage service and solution.

    In More to Security than Encryption, he takes this skewed stance that it is (somewhat) ok to say something is secure even though it lacks encryption. He then makes several points to support that stance.

  • Oracle’s Java patch leaves a loophole

  • 29c3: Hacking Politics

    Every year at the end of December, computer hackers from all over the world gather in Germany – this time in Hamburg – for the Chaos Communication Congress, four days of talks, meetings and workshops.

    With “Not my department,” as the theme of the year – a tongue in cheek reminder that hackers should accept their responsibilities when it comes to politics and social justice – 29c3, short for 29th Chaos Communication Congress, reveals the growing influence of a certain type of hacker, one increasingly aware of its political role.

  • Security guards attack man for shooting video of subway track

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • The Shadow That Hangs Over Obama’s Second Term

    On Monday, President Obama will talk about protecting children during his speech. But he knows that over the next four years he will be asked to make decisions that will result in the killing of the children, not because he is an evil man but rather because he has readily and rationally accommodated himself to the necessity of evil.

  • Terror Threat Prompts U.S. Rethink on Africa

  • Suspected US Drone Kills 8 in Yemen

    Yemeni military officials say eight people have been killed in two suspected U.S. drone strikes in Abieda valley in central Marib province.

    Residents contacted by The Associated Press say that at least two of the eight people killed in Saturday evening’s strikes were known al-Qaida militants of Saudi nationality. They identified one as Ismail bin Jamil.

    They say at least three of the bodies were charred beyond recognition.

  • Drone strikes in Yemen, 8 killed

  • Locals identify one al-Qaeda militant killed by US drone

    Four suspected al-Qaeda militants in Marib province were killed by an American drone strike early this evening. An earlier drone strike in the same area had missed the target.

    [...]

    The first attack that missed the militants was in a populated area, and angered the locals.

  • Suspected US drone strike kills 8 in Yemen, at least 2 are alleged al-Qaida militants

  • Drone strikes ‘to be exempted’ from CIA terror ‘playbook’

    …CIA’s controversial drone operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan would effectively be given an exemption…

  • CIA’s free reign on targeted killing: Pakistan exempted from agency’s drone ‘playbook’

  • CIA drone strikes will get pass in counterterrorism ‘playbook,’ officials say

    Among the subjects covered in the playbook are the process for adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when U.S. citizens can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or U.S. military conduct drone strikes outside war zones.

  • Drone hits to continue for now: Olson

    US Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson said Saturday the US respects Pakistan’s integrity and will not leave Pakistan alone.

  • US Drone Strikes Cause ‘Blowback’

  • Should drone strikes be considered lawful?

    The US has been using armed drones in the ‘War on Terror’ since the year 2001. Though they are used in targeted killing, civilian casualties cannot be prevented. This raises legal and ethical questions.

  • ‘DRONE WAR WILL TRIGGER NEW ARMS RACE’

    The increasing resort to drones by President Barack Obama will over the long term usher in “a new arms race and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent, destabilized and polarized between those who have drones and those who are victims of them”, a leading terrorism expert has warned.
    One of the distinctive elements of President Obama’s approach to counterterrorism has been his embrace of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to target terrorist operatives abroad, says Michael J Boyle in an article for International Affairs, a British journal published every two months.

  • Panetta Signals Scaled Back Drone Program

    Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta can see a world in which the use of drones is no longer a staple in the United States’ counterterrorism toolkit, according to an interview with ABC News.

  • OP-ED: Rally, March, and Die Against Drone Wars in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Tuesday

    1. Take 30 seconds to join 60,000 others in pushing for a ban on weaponized drones.

  • SHOCKING VIDEO: MAN JUMPS ONSTAGE & POINTS GUN AT BULGARIA PARTY LEADER

    The leader of Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish party survived a brazen attack after a man jumped onstage and leveled a gas pistol at him while he was delivering a speech during a party gathering in the capital Saturday.

  • Zero Dark Thirty’s ‘Almost Journalism’: Another Word For Propaganda

    Why aren’t film director Kathryn Bigelow’s claimed government sources, including employees of the CIA, in jail like Pfc. Bradley Manning? Or, at the very least, being investigated for their role in one of the most damaging leaks of national security information in U.S. history?

  • Burn, burn – Africa’s Afghanistan

    One’s got to love the sound of a Frenchman’s Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like… a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

    Apparently, it’s a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people – with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years – in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

  • New UN report highlights ongoing problem of torture in Afghan detention facilities

    Torture remains a serious concern in numerous detention facilities across Afghanistan, despite significant efforts by the Government and international partners to address the problem, according to a new United Nations report released on Sunday.

    The report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) states that more than half of 635 conflict-related detainees interviewed experienced ill-treatment and torture, particularly in 34 facilities of the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS) between October 2011 and October 2012.

  • Ex-Army Officer Accuses CIA of Obstructing Pre-9/11 Intelligence-Gathering

    A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in the shut-down of the military’s notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks.
    Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal bodies and sharing some degree of blame for the attacks. Shaffer also adds to a picture emerging of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit as having actively prevented other areas of intelligence, law enforcement and defense from properly carrying out their counterterrorism functions in the run-up to September 2001.

  • Torture and Zero Dark Thirty

    Zero Dark Thirty is a spy thriller about the tracking and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Good police work did it, the film says, and it aims to show what (in the extraordinary circumstances) good police work amounts to. Action movies have been the director Kathryn Bigelow’s métier, and Zero Dark Thirty is tense and well-paced. It has the kind of proficiency one associates with, say, The Hunt for Red October. It does not mean to compete with a film like The Battle of Algiers. There is no question here of taking up a complex historical subject and exploring it with a semblance of human depth. Rather, the movie accepts the ready prejudices and fears of its American audience, and builds up pressure for two hours to prepare the thrill and relief at the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The first two hours skip forward selectively to cover the trajectory of ten years. The final twenty-five minutes of action are portrayed almost in real time.

  • The Institutionalization of Tyranny — Paul Craig Roberts

    Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

  • Sundance capsule: ‘Dirty Wars’

    We’ve all been over-inundated with coverage of war, whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan for a decade. We see the stories on television and in the movies and read the articles in magazines. Slowly, a portion of the populace becomes desensitized to the violence. It is a sad casualty of a seemingly never-ending struggle, and an indictment on our ability to compartmentalize and put our heads in the sand.

  • Dirty Wars: Sundance Review

  • Torture accusations against UK troops in Iraq echo the scandal of Abu Ghraib

  • John Brennan’s Rules: John Brennan Doesn’t Have to Play by the Rules

  • The Obama administration’s inexplicable mishandling of Marine Gen. James Mattis

    Why the hurry? Pentagon insiders say that he rubbed civilian officials the wrong way — not because he went all “mad dog,” which is his public image, and the view at the White House, but rather because he pushed the civilians so hard on considering the second- and third-order consequences of military action against Iran. Some of those questions apparently were uncomfortable. Like, what do you do with Iran once the nuclear issue is resolved and it remains a foe? What do you do if Iran then develops conventional capabilities that could make it hazardous for U.S. Navy ships to operate in the Persian Gulf? He kept saying, “And then what?”

  • Homeland Security’s Failed Attempt to Pervert the Freedom of Information Act Process

    Over a week ago, a federal judge ruled documents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was ordered to produce in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit could not be subjected to a protective order.

    The development has received minimal attention, but the case seems important, as the government sought to use an innovative tactic to provide documents it owed an organization while at the same time preventing the public from reading the documents. Had the judge allowed the protective order or “clawback,” it would have been a complete perversion of FOIA.

    The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) submitted a FOIA request on July 26, 2011, for documents “regarding a joint National Security Agency (“NSA”) and Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) pilot program, which has not been publicly named, designed to monitor all internet traffic routed to several defense contractors and attempts to detect whether there are malicious programs within this internet traffic designed to compromise the defense contractor security.”

  • Terrorism Charges Dismissed for Imam

  • Mali conflict exposes White House-Pentagon split

  • Binyamin Netanyahu rejects calls for Palestinian state within 1967 lines

  • Virginia drone regulation being pushed by diverse coalition

    A diverse coalition of organizations and lawmakers said Tuesday that the use of drones by police and government agencies must be regulated to protect Virginians’ privacy rights.

  • Rutherford Institute Issues Model Drone Resolution Establish Limits on Spying

  • Rockler: Domestic police departments’ drone usage should be limited

  • U.S. Drone Strike Policies

  • Casualties Reported In Afghan Drone Attacks

  • Watch Heems’ new anti-drone video for ‘Soup Boys’

  • Imran criticises US drone policy

    “These strikes have not reduced militancy; in fact are a major stimulant to terrorism,” said PTI Chairman Imran Khan.

  • ‘REAL NEWS’: WILL DRONE STRIKES AND ‘KILL LISTS’ DEFINE OBAMA’S DEFENSE POLICY?

    Shortly after the election last November a striking–yet quickly pushed under the rug–report came out that the Obama administration had hastily put together a “rules of engagement” manual for a potential Romney administration as they relate to the president’s extensive use of drones strikes in countries that harbor terrorists.

  • Drone protest closes street downtown

  • At least 13 militants killed in Yemen in blast and drone attack

  • Pentagon wants drone technology be used by navy troops

    The drone technology realized in Iraq and Afghanistan may be further exploited by the US navy troops, as it follows from a release made public on January 11 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a federal agency responsible for the development of new technologies. Interested vendors are invited to sign up for a research “in the area of distributed unmanned sensors and systems for maritime applications”.

  • CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin Brings Voices of Pakistani Drone Victims to Obama’s Inauguration

    Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the activist group CODEPINK, recently returned from Pakistan, where she traveled with families of the victims of U.S. drone strikes. Speaking at Sunday night’s Peace Ball in Washington, D.C., Benjamin urged progressives to remember the plight of U.S. victims abroad.

  • Drone Strikes Fuel Anti-Americanism and Do Far More Harm Than Good

    …“military aged males” who are killed in a drone-strike target to likely be a militant until proven otherwise.

  • US drone strikes amount to war crime: Political analyst

    US assassination drone attacks amount to “war crime” against innocent civilians by a government that claims moral leadership of the world, a political analyst tells Press TV.

  • European Drone Plan Seeks Political Backing as in Boost to EADS

    France and Germany are set to renew efforts to work on a joint unmanned aerial vehicle, supporting European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. (EAD) in its attempt to compete in a market now dominated by Israeli and U.S. companies.

  • Is it time for Congress to clip drones’ wings?

    Robert Naiman, policy director of Just Foreign Policy, was at DePaul University last week to talk about U.S. policy on drones.

  • US drone strikes on Qaeda kill eight people in Yemen

    “The bodies of the four dead were charred,” he said, requesting anonymity, adding that only the body of Ismail bin Jamil, a local Al-Qaeda chief, was identified.

  • U.S. Military Shapes Film Industry’s Portrayals On Big Screen

    The CIA and the Pentagon pulled out all the stops for the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty,” staging interviews with officials and a Navy SEAL for an inside account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

    Critics praised the movie’s gritty and gripping feel but, with the film due for release in major European markets this week, controversy has erupted over claims that it justifies US agents’ use of torture on detainees.

    The access granted to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal has turned the Oscar-nominated movie into the most detailed public account that exists of the May 2011 raid on a Pakistani compound to kill Bin Laden.

• Cablegate

  • ‘Gillileaks’ and Australia’s Hypocrisy Over Julian Assange

    Fast forward three years, and it would appear the Australian government has had a road to Damascus experience. Leaks it appears aren’t all bad, especially when they damage foreign governments threatening Australian corporate interests. Indeed so profound is the conversion that the Gillard government is now in the Wikileaks game itself.

    Let me provide the political context. In 2001 Australian mining giant BHP Billiton signed over its shares in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) copper mine, Ok Tedi, to a charitable trust, PNG Sustainable Development Program (PNGSDP). In return, the PNG government agreed to indemnify BHP over the environmental disaster its mine had caused.

  • WikiLeaks says Aaron Swartz may have been a ‘source’

  • Aaron Swartz named as possible WikiLeaks source

  • Swartz May Have Been a WikiLeaks Source

    Aaron Swartz may have been a WikiLeaks source, the group said on its Twitter feed over the weekend. In a series of tweets, WikiLeaks said that activist and hacker Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this month while awaiting trial on computer fraud charges, “assisted” the organization and “was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011,” Mashable reports. But the tweets did not go so far as to name Swartz as a WikiLeaks source, only saying, “We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that” he was.

  • WikiLeaks reveals association with Aaron Swartz

  • Fact Sheet: Julian Assange, his asylum, and the Swedish investigation

  • Aaron Swartz: A Julian Assange for the academic crowd

  • Exclusive: Meet Robin Bachmann, the 8 year old who is helping Julian Assange escape the Ecuadorian embassy

  • Online activists and exemplary punishment

    Across the world, authorities are wildly overreacting to the threat posed by online activism. History says it won’t work. Expect more Aaron Swartzs, Bradley Mannings and Kim Dotcomes in coming years.

  • CHRISTINE’S COMPELLING COMEBACK

    ‘A women’s university group have organized to protest Julian’s speech at the Sam Adam’s awards, with one key organizer stating that his inclusion is ‘inappropriate’ and contributes to the ‘casualness with which rape allegations and accusations are treated in our society’.
    As co-founders of WACA (WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance), as women, mothers and feminists we respect the right of all to protest but urge those considering attending this protest to not be blinded by statements that are, in the light of clear and indisputable facts, inflammatory and inaccurate.
    Here are just a few of those facts for people to consider:Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks have revealed a myriad of war crimes, human rights abuses, corporate and government collusion and corruption that ultimately impacts millions of women and children around the world on a daily basis and this is why Julian Assange has been asked to speak this year.

  • Why Wasn’t Bob Woodward Jailed Like Bradley Manning?

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Minamata Convention Agreed by Nations

    International effort to address mercury-a notorious heavy metal with significant health and environmental effects-was today delivered a significant boost with governments agreeing to a global, legally-binding treaty to prevent emissions and releases.

  • If Right-Wing Violence Is Up 400%, Why Is the #FBI Targeting Environmentalists?

    Violent attacks by right-wing groups and individuals have increased by 400% since 1990, and dramatically in the last five years, according to a new report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.

    When examined side-by-side with FBI reports on domestic terrorism, the data from this study shows that the FBI has been either grossly miscalculating, or intentionally downplaying, murders and violent attacks by right-wing extremists while exaggerating the threat posed by animal rights activists and environmentalists, who have only destroyed property.

• Finance

  • Oxfam seeks ‘new deal’ on inequality from world leaders

    The 100 richest people in the world earned enough last year to end extreme poverty suffered by the poorest on the planet four times over, Oxfam has said.

    Ahead of next week’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the charity urged world leaders to tackle inequality.

    Extreme wealth was “economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive”, the report said.

    [...]

    “From tax havens to weak employment laws, the richest benefit from a global economic system which is rigged in their favour.”

  • How to get $12 billion of gold to Venezuela

    Ever since the news broke last week that Hugo Chávez wanted to transport 211 tons of physical gold from Europe to Caracas, I’ve been wondering how on earth he possibly intends to do such a thing.

  • Goldman Raises CEO’s Stock Bonus 90% to $13.3 Million

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) boosted Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s stock bonus 90 percent to $13.3 million, topping JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Jamie Dimon for the first time in five years, as profit climbed (GS).

  • Snakes and Ladders: Investment Banking on the Brink

    Banks manipulated the LIBOR interest rate, which affects financial transactions worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. They foisted risky assets on customers and became involved in money laundering and tax fraud. Traders like Kweku Adoboli (UBS), Jérôme Kerviel (Société Générale) and Bruno Iksil (JPMorgan Chase) gambled away billions through risky transactions, either on their own or with their departments.

  • Rich Pickings: Goldman Sachs cashes in, world on brink of food crisis

  • Goldman Sachs made up to £250 million from betting on food prices in 2012

    Goldman Sachs made up to an estimated £251 million (US$400 million) in 2012 from speculating on food including wheat, maize and soy, prompting campaigners to accuse the bank of contributing to a growing global food crisis.
    Goldman Sachs is recognised as the leading global player in financial speculation on food and other commodities, and created the first commodity index funds which allow huge amounts of money to be gambled on prices.

  • The “Swiss Bank Accounts” of the 2012 Elections: How Secret Donors Are Corrupting Democracy

    The corrosive influence of money in politics was amplified in 2012 by the fact that in many cases we don’t know which individuals or which corporations actually provided much of the funding to affect election results. “Dark money” — election spending where we don’t know the source of the funds — played a bigger role in 2012 than in any other presidential election since Richard Nixon’s.

    A new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG) has helped expose more about what we call “the swiss bank account” of American elections, where wealthy elites attempt to secretly influence the outcome of our elections through non-profit groups that keep their donations hidden, and increasingly, through “straw” or “shell” corporations that appear to exist for no reason other than to anonymously pour millions into elections.

  • Open Letter to Mike Duke, CEO of Walmart

    Walmart, your gigantic company, is increasingly being challenged by your workers, government prosecutors, civil lawsuits, communities (that do not want a Walmart), taxpayers learning about your drain on government services and corporate welfare, and small businesses and groups working with unions such as SEIU and UFCW. Thus far, Walmart is successfully playing rope-a-dope, conceding little while expecting to wear down its opposition.

  • Goldman bankers get rich betting on food prices as millions starve

    Goldman Sachs made more than a quarter of a billion pounds last year by speculating on food staples, reigniting the controversy over banks profiting from the global food crisis.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Researcher Tears Apart Gates Foundation Teacher Evaluation Study

    University of Arkansas education professor Jay P. Greene has weighed in on the BIll and Melinda Gates Foundation’s conclusions about its teacher evaluation study.

    Greene says the foundation’s conclusions were based on the politics of convincing teachers and school districts of the merits of evaluations, and not data.

  • Understanding the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers Project

    But the folks at the Gates Foundation, afflicted with PLDD, don’t see things this way. They’ve been working with politicians in Illinois, Los Angeles, and elsewhere to centrally impose teacher evaluation systems, but they’ve encountered stiff resistance. In particular, they’ve noticed that teachers and others have expressed strong reservations about any evaluation system that relies too heavily on student test scores.

  • THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

    How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

• Censorship

  • EU Group Says Brussels Should Control Press Regulation, Attacks Cameron For Rejecting Leveson

  • Leveson: EU wants power to sack journalists

    Douglas Carswell, the Conservative MP for Clacton, attacked the report for making an “extraordinary, and deeply disturbing proposal”.
    “Having EU officials overseeing our free press – and monitoring newspapers to ensure they comply with “European values” – would be quite simply intolerable,” he said.
    “This is the sort of mind-set that I would expect to find in Iran, not the West. This kooky idea tells us little about the future of press regulation. It does suggest that the European project is ultimately incompatible with the notion of a free society.”

• Privacy

  • Ministers Express Doubts on Expanding Data Protection Laws

    E.U. justice ministers reacted coolly on Friday to a plan that would give consumers the ability to expunge the personal details Internet businesses have collected on them, essentially allowing individuals to block most kinds of online ads.

    During an informal meeting in Dublin, the ministers expressed reservations about elements of the proposal, which would impose new limits on data collection and profiling and give national regulators the ability to levy hefty fines equal to 2 percent of sales on companies that failed to comply.

  • PayPal Gets A Slice Of £25m DWP Identity Contract

  • I conceal my identity the same way Aaron was indicted for

    According to his indictment, Aaron Swartz was charged with wirefraud for concealing/changing his “true identity”. It sent chills down my back, because I do everything on that list (and more).

  • Graph Search’s Dirty Promise and the Con of the Facebook “Like”

    It turns out as much as half of the links between objects and interests contained in FB are dirty—i.e. there is no true affinity between the like and the object or it’s stale. Never mind does the data not really represent user intent… but the user did not even ‘like’ what she was liking.
    How is this possible? Let me explain.

• Civil Rights

  • Terror Threat Prompts U.S. Rethink on Africa

  • Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding “Sloppy Coding”

    In what appears to be a more-and-more common occurrence, Ahmed Al-Khabez has been expelled from Dawson College in Montreal after he discovered a flaw in the software that the college (and apparently all other colleges across Quebec) uses to track student information.

  • NDAA Would Have Sent MLK to Gitmo, Says Cornel West

    Firebrand black activist Dr. Cornel West gave a speech at the Tavis Smiley Presents Poverty In America series on Thursday that may surprise libertarians – in how much they agree with the “socialist radical.”

    Decrying the erosion of civil liberties today, Dr. West loudly lamented the “crypto-fascist” state developing in America – contrasting the federal government to crack addicts, whom he said at least “are honest about their addiction. The White House is addicted to power!”

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Cable Industry Finally Admits Caps Not About Congestion

    For years the cable industry insisted that they imposed usage caps because network congestion made them necessary. You’ll recall that Time Warner Cable insisted that if they weren’t allowed to impose caps and overages the Internet would face “brown outs.” Cable operators also paid countless think tanks, consultants and fauxcademics to spin scary yarns about a looming network congestion “exaflood,” only averted if cable operators were allowed to raise rates, impose caps, eliminate regulation or (insert pretty much anything here).

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Supreme Court conundrum: How far does a soybean seed patent go?

    Vernon Hugh Bowman is the rare Indiana soybean farmer destined for immortality as a U.S. Supreme Court caption.
    Bowman had the temerity to attempt to outwit Monsanto, the giant agriculture company that, as you surely know, invested hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research in the creation of soybean seeds that are genetically modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, which Monsanto markets as Roundup. The genetically modified seeds, according to the Supreme Court brief Monsanto filed Wednesday, have been such a hit with farmers that more than 90 percent of the U.S. soybean crop begins with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds. Given that every soybean plant produces enough seeds to grow 80 more plants — and that soybeans grown from Roundup Ready seeds contain the genetic modification of glyphosate resistance — Monsanto has insisted that farmers sign licensing agreements with strict restrictions. Soybean producers are only supposed to use the Roundup Ready seeds they buy to grow crops in a single season, and they’re forbidden from planting second-generation seeds harvested from first-generation crops.

  • US FTC Finds Sharp Rise In ‘Pay-For-Delay’ Deals Blocking Generics

    The Federal Trade Commission staff report [pdf] found that drug companies made 40 potential pay-for-delay deals in FY 2012 (1 October 2011 through 30 September 2012).

  • The dynamics of free culture and the danger of noncommercial clauses

    Free licensing lowers the barrier of entry to creating cultural works, which unlocks a dynamic where people can realize their ideas much easier – and where culture can actually live, creating memes, adjusting them to new situations and using new approaches with old topics.

    But for that to really take off, people have to be able to make a living from their creations – which build on other works. Then we have people who make a living by reshaping culture again and again – instead of the current culture where only a few (rich or funded by rich ones) can afford to reuse old works and all others have to start from scratch again and again.

  • Open, pop culture R&D lab for the public domain

  • Court Definitively Rejects AFP’s Argument That Posting a Photo to Twitter Grants AFP a License to Freely Use It — AFP v. Morel

  • It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing

  • Nokia backs 3D printing for mobile phone cases

  • After a year in the grave, can SOPA and Protect IP return?

    CNET asked the leaders of the congressional committees that write U.S. copyright law, plus the groups that backed the controversial legislation a year ago, to tell us what will happen next.

  • Copyrights

    • Fighting Back Against The DOJ

      They demurred on prosecuting war criminals (hey, they’re all government buddies and what’s a few prisoners tortured to death among friends?), but they sure as hell hounded Aaron Swartz to his death. It really speaks to how justice is so often these days a weapon of the powerful, not a defense for the powerless. The petition to hold Carmen Ortiz accountable for her bullying has now reached 38,000. Please sign it – and let the Obama administration know that this attack on dissemination of academic information is not acceptable.

    • Was Aaron Swartz Really ‘Killed by the Government’?

      Swartz’s case may not be as black-and-white as his loved ones suggest; no one person or entity “killed” Swartz. Suicide is caused by mental illness. But in bringing such tough charges against him, prosecutors do seem to have wrongly used their discretion. There is still more to be learned about how the Boston U.S. Attorney’s office made the choices it did, and Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has announced that his committee is investigating. Swartz’s actions were not above reproach. He appears to have been in the middle of a plan to “liberate” and disseminate privately owned articles. But the offense he was engaged in was not crime of violence or greed. It seems, rather, to have been an act of civil disobedience, or lawbreaking in the service of Swartz’s (and many people’s) idea of a more just world. That does not mean that Swartz had a right to do what he did or not to be punished. But his motives should have been an important part of the government’s calculus.

    • Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war against internet freedom

      On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, “it was not an important failure”, as Auden put it in Musée des Beaux Arts.

      About suffering they were never wrong,
      The old Masters: how well they understood
      Its human position: how it takes place
      While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

    • Aaron Swartz memorial evokes strong emotions and political urgency

      Friends, family, and colleagues share their stories of the activist’s life and work

    • Dotcom’s Mega Launches To Unprecedented Demand

      The much anticipated rebirth of Megaupload took place in the last few hours with interest living up to expectations. In less than one hour the site picked up 100,000 new registrations, going on to 500,000 and beyond just a few hours later. As the site struggled to cope with demand it became unresponsive in the face of an unprecedented flood of users eager to test out the new file-hosting site. Just a few minutes ago the launch party at Kim Dotcom’s mansion began, with some interesting reveals.

    • Kim Dotcom’s Mega Gets 1 Million Users During Launch, Should You Use It?

      The Internet superhero Kim Dotcom has returned with MEGA, after the US government – under the influence of Hollywood — seized Megaupload servers and took ownership of legit user data. After initially hiccups (where under US influence the government of the African nation of Gabon seized Me.ga domain) Dotcom has released MEGA with a lavish and mega launch party.

    • Dotcom’s Mega Launches To Unprecedented Demand

    • Senator John Cornyn accuses Eric Holder of prosecuting Aaron Swartz as ‘retaliation’

    • Feds Hounded ‘Net Activist Aaron Swartz, Says EFF’s Parker Higgins

    • The Folly of Obama National Security Officials Making Their Own Drone ‘Rules’

    • Attack on Sovereignty

      Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about.

    • The International Relations Academy and the Beltway “Foreign Policy Community”—Why the Disconnect?

    • Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

      Congress prepares to slap down prosecutors linked to the suicide of Aaron Swartz

    • Dick Cheney Sounds Off on CIA Torture, Iraq, and More in New Sundance Documentary

      The World According to Dick Cheney, a new documentary by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton, will make its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The film boasts hours of exclusive interviews with the ex–vice president, who remains unapologetic about his legacy—including CIA torture and the Iraq War.

    • The Fishing Expedition into WikiLeaks

      If, as WikiLeaks claims, Aaron Swartz:

      Assisted WikiLeaks
      Communicated with Julian Assange in 2010 and 2011
      May have contributed material to WikiLeaks
      Then it strongly indicates the US government used the grand jury investigation into Aaron’s JSTOR downloads as a premise to investigate WikiLeaks. And they did so, apparently, only after the main grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks had stalled.

    • Our Government’s UnPATRIOTic Investigation of Aaron Swartz

      As I noted back in December 2010, as soon as Eric Holder declared WikiLeaks’ purported crime to be Espionage, it opened up a whole slew of investigative methods associated with the PATRIOT Act. It allowed the government to use National Security Letters to get financial and call records. It allowed them to use Section 215 orders to get “any tangible thing.” And all that’s after FISA Amendments Act, which permits the government to bulk collect “foreign intelligence” on a target overseas–whether or not that foreign target is suspected of Espionage–that includes that target’s communications with Americans. The government may well be using Section 215 to later access the US person communications that have been collected under an FAA order, though that detail is one the government refuses to share with the American people.

    • Last picture of tragic internet guru: Reddit founder’s girlfriend tells of their last hours

      Taren insists Swartz killed himself because he was ‘tired’ of facing up to a merciless justice system that has ‘lost all sense of mercy’ and is driven by ‘vindictiveness’

    • Mega arrives: Hands-on with Kim Dotcom’s new cloud storage site

      Nearly one year after Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload storage site was shuttered on criminal charges filed by the United States government, the big man is back with a new cloud storage service, called simply Mega.

    • Australian Pirate Party Gets Approved and Russians are Denied (Again)

      It’s been an up and down week for Pirates, as official party status has been decided in two countries. In Australia it’s a big G’day to their Pirate Party, while the Russians yet again heard ‘Nyet’ from their Ministry of Justice.

      There is a certain level of symmetry to the world. When one part of the world has day, the other half has night. And more importantly, when one hemisphere gets summer, the other has winter. Right now it’s summer in the southern hemisphere and the sun is certainly shining on Australian Pirates.

    • Aussie Pirate Party Officially Enters Politics

      The Pirate Party officially becomes an Australian political organisation, stating that it “passed all tests by the Australian Electoral Commission”. For those who don’t know, a Pirate Party is, according to Wikipedia, a label adopted by political parties in different countries that supports civil rights, direct democracy and participation, free sharing of knowledge and freedom of information, advocating network neutrality and universal Internet access.

    • Mega hits 1 million users after one day as Kim Dotcom officially launches the service

    • Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Video Taken Down On Internet Freedom Day

      We’ve been talking a lot today about Internet Freedom Day, and the anniversary of the SOPA/PIPA blackout. The folks at Fight for the Future noticed the proximity of Internet Freedom Day to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and decided an interesting form of celebrating internet freedom would be to share a video of MLK’s famous “I have a dream…” speech. As you may or may not know, Martin Luther King Jr.’s heirs have been ridiculously aggressive in claiming copyright over every aspect of anything related to MLK — and they seek large sums of money from people for doing things like quoting him. When the MLK Memorial was recently built in Washington DC, the family was able to get nearly $800,000 just to use his words and likeness.

    • Law Professor James Grimmelmann Explains How He Probably Violated The Same Laws As Aaron Swartz

      We’ve been discussing the ridiculousness of the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, including the fact that if a federal prosecutor decides to take you down, it’s not at all difficult to find something they can try to pin on you, especially when it comes to “computer” crimes. Law professor James Grimmelmann explains how it’s quite possible that prosecutors could go after him under the same laws as it went after Swartz. He notes that he used to run the (excellent) blog LawMeme (which we used to link to frequently). After it died, he wanted to preserve many of the articles, and so he wrote a script to pull the articles off of the Internet Archive.

    • Toward a Revolutionary Transformation of Society

    • isoHunt Turns 10 Years Old, Keeps on Fighting Copyright Cartels

      IsoHunt, one of the oldest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, turns 10 years old today. The site has been fighting Hollywood in court for more than seven years but has not backed down. IsoHunt founder Gary Fung is determined to protect and facilitate people’s right to share culture legitimately. “One would think the people of the Internet are losing to the copyright cartels, but I think different,” he says.

    • In memory of Aaron Swartz: Stealing is not stealing

      If Swartz had knocked over a bookstore with the intent of depositing the books in a library, he’d have received a mental health evaluation and been threatened with less time. Moreover, if he was caught in the act of knocking over the bookstore, he’d be guilty of an attempted crime and face even lesser penalties. But for some reason, cyber crime is considered deadly serious. He was facing 35 years. You could murder someone and get less time.

    • After Aaron Swartz

      Brilliant young hackers, striving to build tools to change the world, are killing themselves. Just last week: Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and fierce open access activist, took his life at 26. There have been other high-profile suicides in the tech world in recent years: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder of the distributed social network Diaspora, dead at 22. Len Sassaman, a highly-regarded cypherpunk who believed in cryptography and privacy as tools of freedom, dead at 31. Dan Haubert, co-founder of the Y-Combinator funded startup Ticketstumbler, dead at 25. If these young men were like the 100 people who kill themselves in this country every day, the biggest factor contributing to their deaths was likely under-treated depression.

    • Aaron Swartz’s Father: MIT Put ‘Institutional Concerns Ahead Of Compassion’

    • Fighting Back Against The DOJ

    • The Impact of “Aaron’s Law” on Aaron Swartz’s Case

    • The pushback against Aaron Swartz misses the point

    • Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

    • A Moment of Silence for Aaron Swartz

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Ed Bott, Apologist for M$, Does it Again

    I paraphrase for the situation: Every PC that is shipped with our booting key is a small victory; every PC that is shipped without is a small defeat. Total victory is the universal adoption of our standards by OEMs, as this is an important step towards victory for M$ itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home running M$’s software.”

    Good try, Ed, but I’m not buying it. Building in anything specific to the OS of a monopolist is dangerous. M$ has shown for decades that it doesn’t do anything that doesn’t bolster the monopoly. You should know better.

    On the other hand, OEMs don’t really love M$ and I expect most of them will provide some kind of kill switch for the lock-in but it will be more work to migrate more PCs to the light.

• Server

  • HP launches ARM-based blade servers with Linux support

    HP launched its Redstone server range using low-power processors from both Intel and ARM vendor Calxeda. HP claims Redstone servers are designed for testing and proof-of-concept, presumably the concept that it can produce ARM-based servers.

    The Calxeda Energycore processors in HP’s Redstone servers are 32-bit processors designed for massively parallel workloads with an 80Gbits/s crossbar between processors. Calxeda claims that when the chip is mated to 4GB of RAM the whole setup consumes just 5W under load and idles at 0.5W.

  • Need a Reliable Server?

    Netcraft’s latest report gives some clues. The world’s most demanding hosting companies run GNU/Linux. Of the top 42 most reliable hosting companies,

    * 2 run F5 Big IP,
    * 5 run FreeBSD,
    * 8 run that other OS, and
    * 15 run GNU/Linux.

  • October 2011 Web Server Survey

    Across the million busiest sites Apache and Microsoft each lose market share this month whilst nginx and Google see small increases.

• Kernel Space

  • Linus Torvalds: Secure Boot Is Good; But Can Be Used In Bad Ways

    It’s true that secure boot can be used for horribly, horribly bad things but using that as an argument against its existence at all is I think a bit naive and not necessarily right. Because if you do things right then it’s a really good thing. I would like my own machine to have the option to not boot any kernel, or boot loader, that is not signed by this signature.

  • Linus Torvalds: Steve Jobs Was An Exceptional CEO

  • Linus Torvalds: Why Linux Is Not Successful On Desktops

  • Linus Torvalds: Open Source Is Also About Spreading, Distributing Vision

  • Linus Torvalds: Google with Android has really been very successful

  • Linus Torvalds: I Don’t Have A Facebook Account, Google Plus Just Works Better For Me

  • Which Is Linus Torvalds’ Native Language: Finnish or Swedish?

  • Exclusive Interview With Linus Torvalds At LinuxCon Europe 2011

• Applications

  • Two decades of productivity: Vim’s 20th anniversary

    The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.

    In this article, we will take a brief look back at the history of vi and its descendants, leading up to the creation of Vim. We will also explore some of the compelling technical features that continue to make Vim relevant today.

  • Cheese Goes Great With Webcam Hams

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Recover Deleted Files in Linux

  • Games

    • Voxatron, the new Indie game at HIB

      The organizers of Humble Indie Bundle today announced a new initiative on humblebundle.com, which allows anyone to buy Voxatron, an unreleased indie game for the PC at the price that you want.

      Voxatron, it’s at this time in Alpha stage, this game is a platform shooter retro-style, with more than 20 rich areas of enemies to defeat. The game is available for Windows PC, Linux and Mac, DRM-free, and with the guarantee that all future updates will be completely free.

    • Infos: The Humble Voxatron Debut (+ contest)

    • Two New Games Added to Latest Humble Bundle

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE’s November Updates Improve Nepomuk Stability

      November 2, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The October updates contain many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications using the Nepomuk semantic framework.

    • Trinity Does New Release To Let KDE 3.5 Live Om

      While KDE 4.0 has been around for nearly four years (and most complaints regarding the initial KDE4 fallout have been addressed) and the last KDE 3.5 stable snapshot (v3.5.10) came three years ago, the Trinity Desktop Environment has issued an official release today to keep the KDE 3.5 desktop living.

      The Trinity Desktop Environment is designed to pick up where KDE 3.5 left off in keeping up with the KDE 3.5 branch development. There’s been bug-fixes, new features, and other work to make KDE 3.5 more relevant in today’s world. The version released today is Trinity 3.5.13.

    • The Grass has Always been Greener on the other Side of the Fence

      Now to my actual blog post: I appreciate the idea of the Trinity developers to bring back the KDE 3.5 desktop experience to those users who really want it. This is a great offer. Personally I doubt that the Trinity project is doing the effort in the right approach. Instead of just porting Kicker and KDesktop to Qt4/KDE4 they forked everything and the kitchen sink. I rather doubt that a team which is smaller than the KWin team is able to maintain not only KWin but also every other part of KDE 3.5 and now also Qt 3.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • An interview with Equalis, a Scilab based business

    • SystemRescueCd 2.4.0

  • Gentoo Family

    • 10 Reasons Why I Love Sabayon Linux

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • Bugside manners

      • Fedora to simplify filesystem hierarchy

        Since 1979 (or thereabouts), Linux and UNIX-like operating systems have followed a particular, if arcane, way of organizing files. Now the Fedora Project is proposing a plan that will drastically change the way this filesystem hierarchy stores binary applications… if they can work out the potential kinks.

        Specifically, the developers in the Fedora Project are proposing to move all executable files into the /usr/bin directory and their libraries into /usr/lib or /usr/lib64, as needed.

  • Debian Family

    • DebConf12 Nicaragua dates confirmed

      The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian operating system, has confirmed the dates and venue for its next annual conference, DebConf12.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 11.10: Looks Kind of Cool But Who Is It For?

          I decided to try out Ubuntu 11.10 on my Thinkpad T43. It was actually my first time using Unity, although I had used the Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a netbook, and I knew the two had similar UIs. This isn’t going to be a huge, in-depth thing because I don’t see how anyone is going to touch the Ars Technica review of 11.10 (DarkDuck’s Unity vs. GNOME3 review is also quite good).

        • Ubuntu Eyes Mobile Market

        • Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux will battle for mobile developers

          Canonical, which has great ambitions to extend its Ubuntu Linux to such devices as smartphones and tablets, is prepared to reach out to developers to get them to build the applications necessary to make the platform successful. But the company will have its work cut out for it, given that established providers on the market have a substantial head start.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • A little love for Linux Mint.

          • A tale of broken love to Kubuntu 11.10

          • Pinguy OS – A Fully loaded Ubuntu respin which should suit new Linux users..

• Devices/Embedded

  • Britain’s $25 computer is coming by Christmas

    Earlier this year British games pioneer David Braben surprised many people with the first appearance of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, open source computer aimed at children that he was helping to develop.

    Now, six months on from that initial blitz of publicity, he says that it’s almost ready to go on sale for the first time. A finished version is due by the end of 2011, he told GigaOM, specifically aimed at programmers.

  • Jungo Launches Automotive Connectivity Middleware for Linux-based Infotainment Systems

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Rear-seat touchscreen computer runs Android 2.3

        VizuaLogic announced a rear seat entertainment (RSE) touchscreen computer that runs Android 2.3. Integrated into a car’s front headrest, the “SmartLogic Android Rear Seat Entertainment Package” is equipped with a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a seven-inch capacitive touchscreen, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IR, USB, microSD, and HDMI connections.

Free Software/Open Source

• An interview with Equalis, a Scilab based business

  Equalis supports all these needs by providing a complete Scilab support programs including: training, deployment, real-time support and consulting. Equalis also drives the Scilab product development roadmap to meet customer needs by accelerating bug fixes and including feedback on the strategic product roadmap. Additionally, Equalis also develops and supports exclusive premier software features and application modules to augment the baseline platform to meet its customers’ specialized needs.

• SaaS

  • http://www.muktware.com/news/2855

• Semi-Open Source

  • Zarafa to unveil free web meeting plug-in

    Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa is set to unveil a new web meeting plug-in for its groupware product. According to the company, the free plug-in for the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) currently supports up to three users, works regardless of each user’s email client or platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), and does not require registration.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Nominations are open for the 14th annual Free Software Awards

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today announced the opening of nominations for the 14th annual Free Software Awards.

• Programming

  • Eclipse is celebrating its 10th Birthday

    It is just a decade since IBM released the Eclipse project under an open source licence and the Eclipse Consortium, consisting of IBM, Borland,Rational, Suse, TogetherSoft, was announced.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Have your HTML5 and native app too

  • A browser to resolve mobile app development confusion?

    I read with interest the recent announcement by AppMobi that they are producing a browser for Apple iOS and eventually Android that will go beyond the basic HTML5 capabilities.

Leftovers

• Windows 7 finally beats XP, or does it?

  According to the StatCounter analysis Windows 7 overtook XP in the United States in April 2011 and in Europe in July. However, in Asia Windows XP still retains a clear lead at 55% in October compared to 36% for Windows 7.

  [...]

  StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion in the US) from their network of more than three million websites. NetMarketShare data collection network has over 40,000 websites, and counts unique visitors once for visit for day. In summary, NetMarketShare’s data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month.

  What that means is that StatCounter counts all page views while NetMarketShare looks at single site visits. That in turn imples that very active users of a particular operating system would weigh more heavily on StatCounter’s numbers.

• Finance

  • “OCCUPY WALL STREET” to Occupy WBAI

    A new show on WBAI starts this Wednesday: OCCUPY WALL STREET RADIO. From the streets to airwaves, the movement that began five weeks ago as a Day Of Rage takes to the airwaves on the only station that broadcasts the voice of the 99%. The initial Occupy Wall Street Radio airs Wednesday October 26th, from 6:30 to 8 PM. Going forward, the show can be heard Monday through Friday from 6:30 to 7 PM. The show will offer a regular check in for the latest breaking news from the streets. Hear the voices, the heart, the soul of this 99% growing and now global movement.

  • People’s Trial Of Goldman Sachs By Occupy Wall Street

    Taking their inspiration from the Bertrand Russell public trials of U.S. government officials held during the Vietnam War, the proceedings will include expert analysis by Cornell West and Chris Hedges, as well as testimony from individuals directly affected by Goldman Sachs’ policies.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • What CIOs Need to Know about Intellectual Property Law

    While nearly every CIO should worry about IP issues, there are exceptions. Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, a founding partner of top technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove, explains that if you’re CIO of, say, a government agency, there is “little, if anything” to get worked up over. Such a CIO likely never has to worry about her agency being sued by anyone, nor will she be selling products to others.

    That’s also the case for CIOs of most non-profits, or at least smaller ones. “Having some degree of oversight by a lawyer should cover just about everything they would need to know, because their exposure to the outside world might be limited to a Web site,” says Updegrove. “As long as they ensure that all proprietary software has been paid for and is not being used in violation of its terms, there should be little exposure and therefore no need for much knowledge.”

Summary: Microsoft gives SUSE another soft bribe ($100,000,000) to help serve Microsoft agenda

WHEN Novell signed a deal with Microsoft it was the parent company of SUSE, which was not an independent entity. Unlike a blog called “Boycott SUSE” (yes, one existed), we were just “Boycott Novell”, seeking to expose the management of the company that sold SUSE out. A couple of years later, $100 million were paid to help Novell — “help” in the sense that Microsoft boosted the bribe to Novell/SUSE following the initial deal, as Microsoft was happy with the outcome of making money from GNU/Linux server sales.

In order to eliminate free GNU/Linux and push Microsoft-taxed versions of GNU/Linux instead, Microsoft has just persuaded the Attachmate folks who run SUSE (the new management is from Attachmate) to take some more money ($100 million again) and help against the freedom of GNU/Linux, pushing software patents instead (SUSE helps validate a debt to Microsoft).

Here is the press release and the new banner under which they hide (like MoreInterop, to hide the ugliness of the patent deal).

Rob Weir writes:

Novell/SUSE renews interop agreement with Microsoft, will work together to target RedHat http://prn.to/pn8tAB http://bit.ly/r5zs1D

The problem with IBM is that it continues to support SUSE with all that Microsoft tax, especially in mainframes. Try to pressure Sutor, Weir et al. to withdraw support for SUSE. It’s just a Trojan horse, also for Mono. █

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Pinoy IT activist Manny Amador found dead

  Passionate Linux advocate and local IT pioneer Manny Amador was found dead by authorities on Friday in his rented house in Cebu where he had relocated to work for open-source firm InfoWeapons.

• Software Wars are updated now in git

• Stats for browsers and operating systems accessing sutor.com

  Linux 12.82%

• Google’s Problems with Android Apps, Webmaster Tools and Oracle – RMS Says Don’t Go There

• Desktop

  • Simmtronics Launches India’s First Solar-powered Desktop

    The operating system used is Linux (exact distro is unknown) and the kit includes a 74W solar panel with charge controller, SMF battery and AC inverter.

  • This Desktop runs on Solar Power, Courtesy Simmtronics Semiconductors

  • Can sunlight power a desktop?

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Going Linux #145

  • Podcast Season 3 Episode 14

  • Listen to Linux Radio!

• Kernel Space

  • Linux by the numbers

    The latest version of the Linux kernel, Linux 3.0, was pushed out last night, marking the end of the 2.6 kernel series.

    As most people in the know understand, this does not represent a big sea change, since the new version numbering was really just a way to discontinue the 2.6 numbering, which would have been 2.6.40 for the kernel today, had not Linus Torvalds announced in late May that the time had come for a new numbering scheme.

  • Don’t Panic! It’s only Linux 3.0

    There have also been improvements with how the kernel works with the still experimental Btrfs (B-tree file system) and the now standard ext4 file system. This, in turn, should lead to faster and, in the case of Btrfs, more reliable, file systems.

  • Graphics Stack

    • July 2011 Open-Source Graphics Driver Comparison

      This article presents these Linux graphics results for eight configurations.

• Applications

  • Geeqie: A Lightweight Image Viewer on Ubuntu

  • We’ve Just Revolutionized Alpha Testing

    Think back to the last time you wanted to look at a newer, unstable release of some app. Was it easy to do? Or was it a compilation from source full of mystical errors, booting a newer OS release from a live CD while fighting black-screen-on-boot bugs, or a terribly slow and awkward virtual machine installation (which still didn’t make much sense because you couldn’t try it with your real data)? I’ll guess it was closer to the latter.

  • 3 graphical clients for managing the Uncomplicated FireWall

    ufw, the Uncomplicated FireWall, is Ubuntu’s user-friendly, command line frontend to IPTables, the command line utility for managing Netfilter, the firewall application built into the Linux kernel. It is installed not just on Ubuntu, but also on all Ubuntu-based distributions. As simple to use as ufw is, a graphical interface is even better, especially for new users.

  • Proprietary

    • Google Music Manager Finally Launches On Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Formatting Files in Bash

    • The Five Minute How To Install VirtualBox 4.1 Guide

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 15 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

    • DIY: Secure a MySQL installation on Linux

    • How to free some space with apt-get

    • How to Rotate Apache Log Files in Linux

    • OpenSSH Best Practices

    • Quick Tip: Install Canon MP250 Drivers in Linux

    • Effortless File Sharing Across Platforms with FreeNAS

    • How To Install OpenERP 6 On Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server

      Recently at, we’ve been setting up several new instances of OpenERP for customers. Our server operating system of choice is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Installing OpenERP isn’t really that hard, but having seen several other “How Tos” online describing various methods where none seemed to do the whole thing in what I consider to be “the right way”, I thought I’d explain how we do it. There are a few forum posts that I’ve come across where the advice is just plain wrong too, so do be careful.

  • Games

    • Blocks That Matter Tech Demo Updated

    • BEEP now on USC

    • 0 A.D. Alpha 6 ‘Fortuna’ Released with New Maps, Sounds, Textures and Many Other Features

• Desktop Environments

  • Desktop Summit Announcements

    In case you missed them, there have been a couple of exciting announcements around the Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • public transport plasmoid looking for your input

      I really like the ability to quickly see route information with times and associated alerts for my home station, and with multiple instances of the Plasmoid I can keep track of several stations quite easily at a glance. The journey features are also indispensible.

      Using it with Contour, which is getting support for random Plasmoids in addition to the Nepomuk-derived resources that are associated with an activity, is going to be very, very nice for someone like me who travels a fair amount: I’ll end up with one Activity on my tablet per trip with all my files, contacts and even transit information agregated in one place that I can switch to with a simple thumb swipe. Oh, yeah!

    • ++performance

      Plasma uses a lot of files from disk, particularly when using QML and scripted Plasmoids, but also whenever something requests an image from the theme. The Package class is responsible for the former functionality and the Theme class for the latter. We already cache the results of the Theme rendering, but not the results of looking around on disk for the requested image. There is essentially no caching at all for Package: every request for a file sends it looking on disk for it.

    • KDE Plasma Desktop Introduction

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 17th July 2011

    • Improving KDE’s Plasma Performance

      Due to KDE’s Plasma extensive use of the hard disk for Plasmoids and other activities, and thinking about KDE’s performance on mobile device, Aaron Seigo has been working to make the library consume less memory. He has achieved at least partial success in this effort.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Setting up GNOME 3 on Arch Linux

      It must have been my curiosity that drove me to exploring Arch Linux a few weeks ago. Its coming on a Linux Format DVD and a few kind words about its being a cutting edge distribution were enough to set me installing it into a VirtualBox virtual machine for a spot of investigation. In spite of warnings to the contrary, I took the path of least resistance with the installation even though I did look among the packages to see if I could select a desktop environment to be added as well. Not finding anything like GNOME in there, I left everything as defaulted and ended up with a command line interface as I suspected. The next job was to use the pacman command to add the extras that were needed to set in place a fully functioning desktop.

• Distributions

  • A Linux Distro From the US Department of Defense

  • Lightweight Portable Security (LPS)-A Linux disto from the US Department of Defense

  • Preview: What’s Coming Up In VectorLinux 7?

    A while ago I received an invitation to view a video presentation giving 10 good reasons to review VectorLinux, and it’s true that I cannot recall to have read a review of it in years. This venerable distribution has been around for a long time but has also garnered some controversy around offering a paid for Deluxe version, introducing a paid for members club, and has been accused of not making source code freely available and thereby infringing on the GPL. It seems the club did not take off as I cannot find any mention of it anymore on the web site.

    All that aside, VectorLinux 5.0.1 was my distribution of choice when returning to Linux in 2005, and a nice experience it was. Basically what I had been looking for was something like Mandrake Linux back in the late 90′s but based on Slackware, and Vector did just fit the bill.

    It had and probably still has a very enthusiastic, helpful and polite community, and the forums were a great resource. I still remember the names and the fact that all these people are still actively involved as you can see in the credits during installation speaks volumes.

  • Not Your Average Linux Distribution: DOD’s Flavor

    The Department of Defense (DOD) has released a unique Linux distribution designed to be a secure option for people, such as telecommuters, who need remote access to internal government and corporate networks from potentially insecure desktops.

    Created by a collaboration between the DOD and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) can be booted from a CD or flash drive onto nearly any Intel-based PC or Mac, according to information posted on the project’s website.

  • Arch Linux: I stand corrected

    In my last article, ArchBang: A small review I was a bit unfair to the distro. I did not want to see these distros (ArchBang and Arch Linux) for what they really are and I consider that to be very wrong. Therefore, I bring you a few thoughts on Arch Linux after playing around with it for about 2-3 days.

    Arch is not your average, over-dressed, underpowered and over-popular Linux… as I so wrongly tried to see at as. Arch has the ability… no, gives you the power…

  • New Releases

    • Google Kills Labs, Experiments Continue

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • On exorcisms and other fun – specially for opennet.ru

  • Red Hat Family

    • Apple Lion? No – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 instead

      In a week peppered with massive exposure for Apple’s new OS X release Lion, open source converts will hopefully be more interested to read that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is now here.

      Key “extra toppings” in this iteration centre on features that enhance the flexibility, security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments.

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Updates Linux Security

    • Red Hat updates Enterprise Linux 5.7

      Red Hat has updated Enterprise Linux 5.7, which now includes several features from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

      The operating system processors supports deployments on Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM System z architectures.

      Red Hat also offers a security framework based on the OpenSCAP Security Content Automation Protocol, including a library and set of utilities, giving a standardised approach to validating Red Hat Enterprise Linux security.

    • Ouch! Oracle Drops Support For Red Hat, Suse Linux

      Oracle is dropping support for the leading open source operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux. The company made this announcement post its acquisition of Ksplice, the creator of innovative zero downtime update technology for Linux.

    • The changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7

      The main improvements to the latest release of RHEL series 5 are optimised virtualisation with KVM and Xen, as well as new and revised drivers. Slowly but surely, the series is nearing the end of the first and most active phase its lifecycle.

    • Fedora

      • Font Rendering in Fedora

        Shortly said, it’s not very impressive. But what are the options we have? Can we improve it? Well, there are some font settings that are available. See e.g. this blogpost about making fedora fonts look Ubuntu-like. Although I personally see that as making things worse, there are people who think otherwise. What I decided to do was to skim through most of the hinting options we have and decide for myself what looks best. And of course, provide my readers with some images so that they could decide for themselves.

      • Fedora 15 Shutdown

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • What Do You Dislike or Hate About Ubuntu?

        • The responsibilities of ownership

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android Market adds multiple-APK support to battle fragmentation

        Android Market now lets developers mount multiple Android Package (APK) files optimized for different devices and releases, instead of selling the optimized versions separately, says Google. Meanwhile, security firm Dasient reports that eight percent of Android apps are transmitting personal user data to unauthorized computers, and some Android malware is specializing in “drive-by downloads,” leaving users unaware of what’s being installed.

      • Toshiba tablet’s loaded with ports, but too hefty for eWEEK reviewer

        Toshiba’s Thrive is a decent, if unspectacular, entry to the trundling Android “Honeycomb” tablet market, according to this eWEEK review. However, the availability of multiple ports will please enterprise users, who might also like the removable battery better than did author Clint Boulton.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source Vs proprietary: the war goes on!

  Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd., (THBS) is one among them who are actively embracing open source solutions and contributing to open source community.

  “Being a player in the software services space, Torry Harris considers the open source software as a key enabler to cost-effective software solutions,” says Karthik T S, head of CoE SOA, Cloud and OSS, Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd. in an interaction with CIOL.

• Indian open source community, biggest in the World

  The technology industry in India has developed significantly in the last few years and India has evolved relatively well to the idea of open source software and adoption rates are remarkably good.

  With many companies embracing for open-source technologies, the role of open source in IT has been changed in many companies.

• Before you get locked into Lync, consider open source options

• Events

  • Talking About Linux and Open Source for Public Administrations

    During the first meeting of the Open Source Focus Group 2011, held in May at the ForumPA, I have been interviewed by the organizers to take stock of how Linux and Open Source are doing in the Italian public administrations.

  • Java 7 Summit to be held at EclipseCon Europe

    The Eclipse Foundation has announced that, in collaboration with Oracle, it will be presenting a Java 7 Summit at this year’s European EclipseCon conference. EclipseCon Europe 2011 will take place from 2 to 4 November at the Forum am Schlosspark in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

  • OSCON Will Stream Keynotes and More Online

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird 6.0 arrives in Beta Channel

      Mozilla has announced the release of version 6.0 of Thunderbird – its open source news and email client – into the Beta Channel. While a final release date for Thunderbird 6.0 has yet to be confirmed, a production version will likely follow shortly after Firefox 6.0, which is scheduled for 16 August.

    • Google Toolbar drops support for Firefox. Why now?

      Google has decided to drop support for Firefox for the Google Toolbar.

      No, that’s not a bad thing at all. The toolbar is a relic of any older era. An era when Firefox Sync didn’t exist, an era when the awesomebar wasn’t truly aweseome.

      Apparently however, Mozilla is seeing the Google Toolbar issue as being a potential barrier to adoption for Firefox 5.

• SaaS

  • Is open source in the cloud still open source?

    Open source platform as a service (PaaS) platforms are one of the most exciting topics in the software industry nowadays. Following the $212M acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, we’ve seen how in a matter of months, platforms like dotCloud of VMWare’s Cloud Foundry have emerged with complete PaaS suites based on popular open source technologies.

    The value proposition behind this type of PaaS offer is very simple. These platforms will enable the foundation to host, manage, provision and scale solutions based on some of the most renowned open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, MySQL among dozens of others.

  • Open source and the IT company, a lucrative proposition

    As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a long way in just a year. But it’s only one of a growing number of open-source projects challenging expensive and proprietary incumbents across the IT industry. From storage to networking, open-source projects are emerging that offer viable alternatives.

  • Rackspace’s cloud going all OpenStack

  • WS02 Brings Middleware to the Cloud

    Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

    Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

• Databases

  • EnterpriseDB Announces the Postgres Enterprise Manager BETA!

    EnterpriseDB is proud to introduce Postgres Enterprise Manager, the first enterprise-wide architected management tool for database professionals who are looking to efficiently manage and monitor Postgres servers throughout their organizations.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Test-Driving VirtualBox 4.1 on Linux: Bumpy but Pretty Good

    Oracle released VirtualBox 4.1 on July 19 with a slew of improvements ranging from usability improvements to rasing the ceiling for RAM to 1TB for 64-bit hosts. With 4.1, we decided to take VirtualBox out for a spin and see how it handles.

    I’ve been using desktop virtualization since the early days, when VMware was a scrappy little company shipping a nearly unheard-of product — a desktop virtualization tool that would let you run Windows in VM in Linux. No more dual-booting for those folks who had to have access to Microsoft Word or QuickBooks but wanted to enjoy Linux as their desktop of choice.

• CMS

  • Acquia Raises $15 Million, Plans Drupal Sales Push

    The specialist in commercial support for open source content and community management will use the money to gain share in the social software market.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA)

    The community has created the Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA) which is a group of senior community members who are working to evolve Zenoss core and the community to better serve the needs of the community and the entire Zenoss ecosystem. To this end, the board of ZCA has provided the following agenda…

  • Jaspersoft may be looking to acquire with its $11M funding

    Business intelligence software maker, Jaspersoft, announced yesterday that it raised $11 million dollars in funding. The round was lead by existing investors Red Hat and SAP Ventures in addition to including newcomer Quest Software.

    Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Parallel 20110722 (‘Murdoch’) released

• Project Releases

  • nginx-1.0.5

    2011-07-19

    nginx-1.0.5 stable version, nginx-0.8.55 and nginx-0.7.69 legacy stable versions have been released.

  • Imixs open source BPM, workflow engine reaches 3.0

    And in May, BonitaSoft upgraded its open source BPM suite which is also developed in Java and available under the GPL.

  • The Evolution of Asterisk (or: How We Arrived at Asterisk 10)

    We are fast approaching the seven-year anniversary of the release of Asterisk 1.0.0, which occurred at the first AstriCon in September, 2004. If you look back a little further, there were various “0.x” releases made as early as December of 1999… my, how time has flown!

    We’ve had quite a few ‘major’ releases of Asterisk since then, including 1.2, 1.4, and most recently, 1.8. Each of these releases has included significant changes, and sometimes architecture-improving changes. Each of them has also included substantial new functionality for Asterisk users. Along the way, we’ve been asked by many people in the community when we are going to start working on (or release) “Asterisk 2.0.” Typically, we’ve responded by saying that will not happen until we can really justify such a significant change in the version number. Many open source projects have gone through similar progressions, and quite a number of them have in fact undergone complete (or nearly complete) rewrites resulting in new ‘major’ versions.

• Licensing

  • Harmony’s curiously flat tune

  • Linux Foundation Releases New White Paper on FOSS Compliance for Suppliers

    The Linux Foundation strives to provide relevant, useful guidance to organizations setting up their free and open source software (FOSS) compliance programs. Last month, we released a white paper titled “A Five Step Compliance Process for FOSS Identification and Review.”

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Azavea Releases Source Code for PhillyTreeMap to Provide Municipalities and Citizen Groups With Collaborative Urban Forestry Inventory Tools

  • Open Access/Content

    • Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay

      A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.

• Programming

  • ActiveState Advances New Cloud Platform, Stackato, to Beta With New Features

    PostgreSQL, Python 3 and Additional Core Services Added, Opens Testing Group Further

  • Google Summer of Code 2011: midterms and statistics

    Google has published “a few more interesting statistics” from this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event; in May, a statistical breakdown of accepted students was published. According to a post by Stephanie Taylor on the Google Open Source Blog, 202 (18.1%) of this year’s 1,115 student participants took part in last year’s programme. Of those students, 35 were also part of the 2009 programme, meaning that 3.1% are three year students.

  • Gearing up for Java 7

    The last four Java Specification Requests (JSRs) required for Java 7 have received the blessing of the Java Community Process (JCP). JSR 292, support for dynamically typed languages, JSR 334, small enhancements to Java language and JSR 203, more new I/O APIs (NIO.2), all passed with unanimous support in the final approval ballot. The only note of dissent was from Google in the final approval vote for JSR 336, the umbrella JSR which incorporates all the JSRs required for Java 7.

  • European Space Agency Summer of Code

• Standards/Consortia

  • DOJ Delays Web Accessibility Regulations

    Earlier this month the United States Department of Justice admitted what many of us have suspected: we will not be seeing web accessibility regulations in the United States for commercial and public entities any time soon. Some time in 2013 at the earliest.

    In July, 2010, the Department issued what is called an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making indicating that it was planning to issue regulations about web accessibility. The step after an “Advanced Notice” is a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” (NPRM). After that is the rule itself. In its semi-annual regulatory agenda for Spring 2011, however, the DOJ called the NPRM for Web Accessibility a “Long Term Item” not expected until December, 2012. That’s well over a year from now. And it is close to two years after the public comment period on the Advanced Notice closed, and almost two and one half years after the DOJ announced the possible regulations in July, 2010.

  • TinyOgg finally comes to an end

    But now, it seems that what we are doing is obsolete. In May 2010, Google set free the WebM format which was quickly adopted by major web browsers in addition to the largest online video provider, YouTube. 99% of what people watch on YouTube is now available in WebM and thus playable without Flash or any other unfree technologies. (Well, in addition to the fact that I have not posted any entry in many months, which meant that there was no itch anymore!)

    Now is the time to move on to other projects (or to college life, who knows? ). By July 15th, TinyOgg entries URLs will be automatically redirected to the original video page and I will run the service for at least eighteen months more.

Leftovers

• Government shutting down hundreds of data centers

  The U.S. government is aiming to pull the plug on hundreds of unneeded data centers over the next few years in an attempt to save taxpayers some hard-earned cash.

• No apologies for Microsoft Windows

  Recently I’ve had some discussion with colleagues about Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux in comparison to each other. Generally, I’ve found that most people agree that Mac OS X is more stable than Windows, and those that are familiar with Linux feel that it too is more stable than Windows. But after that being said, they come back with an apology for Microsoft stating that they (Microsoft) have to get Windows to run on fragmented hardware, whereas Apple standardizes the hardware and can therefore provide a more stable operating system for it, because there aren’t nearly as many variations in hardware configurations.

• Cablegate

  • Petition defends David Hicks from censorship attempt

    Julian Assange, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky have added their names to a new online petition in support of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks.

    They join scores of other signatories, including Greens MP Adam Bandt, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, Liberty Victoria President Spencer Zifcak and Overland Journal editor Jeff Sparrow. Overland released the online petition on July 21.

  • Framing The Narrative: Murdoch v. Assange

    In Murdoch’s empire, talking points from above dictate the news delivered to the masses. Yet Rupert’s writers need only scan the front pages to discern how best to please their boss and get prominently featured. It’s a culture of corruption, as countless recent articles have documented, designed to maximise profits and political power.

    But the media landscape is changing. Why should we ordinary citizens of the world keep paying for news, when we can get it online for free? But then, if media organisations are not making a profit, how can they afford to keep supplying news for free? This remains the great unresolved Catch-22 of the C21st Fourth Estate.

    News Corporation is planning more firewalls to protect media content, despite the previous failure of such models at organisations like the New York Times. The UK Independent newspaper is now running an online survey asking readers to tell them how the paper can deal with the shifting media paradigm. The Economist prominently features an on-going debate on the subject.

    Meanwhile, I suspect The Guardian’s apparent anti-WikiLeaks crusade may be motivated by a desire to “own the space” that WikiLeaks has staked out (namely, the safest place to publish leaks in this new globalized, digital world). Yes, all the big media organisations are scared, even Murdoch’s dreaded nemeses at The Guardian.

  • Wikileaks report reveals corruption in Lithuanian newspapers

  • Library of Congress: We didn’t call WikiLeaks ‘extremist’

    The Library of Congress says it was not responsible for categorizing a WikiLeaks-related book as “extremist” and that it has decided to removed that label.

• Finance

  • Consumer Bureau Launches in Shark-Infested Waters

    According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street and the financial services lobby spent an eye-popping $1,400,000,000 between 2008 and 2010 to kill financial reform. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a whole unit dedicated to killing it. This year, the those same forces spent $156 million on lobbying in the first quarter. The big banks are fighting the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill with a stable of willing Congressmen and an army of lobbyists fanned out across a dozen federal agencies where Dodd-Frank rulemaking is underway.

  • Debt debate reverberates in state governments

    Virginia’s governor is livid that his famously tight-fisted state could face higher borrowing costs to build roads and schools. Maryland has put off a $718 million bond sale for three days because of the current financial uncertainty. And California plans to borrow about $5 billion from private investors next week to ensure it can cover day-to-day operating expenses should the federal government default on its debt.

  • House votes to check new consumer agency

    The House greeted the official opening Thursday of the new agency to protect consumers from financial abuse by voting to change its structure and reach.

    Republican sponsors said they were trying to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau more transparent and accountable. Democrats said Republicans wanted to cripple the agency before it gets on its feet.

  • Morgan Stanley Posts Loss That Hints at Recovery

    At Morgan Stanley, even a loss can be a win.

    Although the financial firm reported a second-quarter loss of $558 million on Thursday, three crucial divisions posted significant gains, a promising sign that the turnaround plan Morgan Stanley embarked on after the financial crisis was taking hold.

  • On Its First Day, Consumer Bureau Finds Support

    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally opened for business on Thursday, much to the consternation of Congressional Republicans.

    But as conservative lawmakers step up their attacks on the new regulator, aiming to undermine its structure and authority, champions of the bureau are pushing back.

  • 4 more Credit Suisse bankers charged in tax case

    Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged four more bankers with Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group with conspiracy in what they say was a long-running scheme to help U.S. taxpayers hide as much as $4 billion in assets.

    Prosecutors originally charged four people in the scheme in February, so the charges announced Thursday bring the total number of people charged up to eight. Charging documents filed in the case do not specify what bank the group worked for, but The Associated Press previously reported its identity.

  • Why aren’t Obama’s numbers lower?

  • Harry Reid: Cut, cap may be among ‘worst legislation’ in history

    Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate will vote Friday on the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, a bill backed by conservatives that he called “weak and senseless” and “perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.”

    The Senate had been expected to vote Saturday on the House-passed bill, which has little chance of passing the Democratic-controlled upper chamber. But Reid expedited the vote so the Senate can quickly move to a backup plan he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are hatching to raise the debt ceiling and avert a financial default by the Aug. 2 deadline, a Democratic aide said.

  • Economy’s spring slump could last through summer

    The economy could lapse even further if Congress and the Obama administration fail to reach an agreement on raising the nation’s borrowing limit in the coming week.

  • Goldman wins dismissal of Timberwolf CDO lawsuit

    NEW YORK (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing it of causing an investor to become insolvent by fraudulently misleading it about risky debt it expected would tumble in value.

    In a decision made public on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones in Manhattan said the plaintiff, Basis Yield Alpha Fund, failed to sufficiently show that its investment in the Timberwolf 2007-1 collateralized debt obligation was a “domestic” transaction, entitling it to sue in a U.S. court.

  • Goldman Model Championed by Blankfein Planted Seeds of Distress

    The window shades were lowered to block out the sunlight soaking lower Manhattan on a Friday afternoon in June as 14 students in Eric H. Kessler’s executive MBA class gathered in a conference room to present their analyses of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s leadership.

    The firm’s management shows “resistance to change” and is “doing business in a bubble,” one of the three student teams explained in a PowerPoint presentation. Another recommended creating an “ethics role” within Goldman Sachs’s securities division. Kessler, who teaches management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, peppered the students with questions. Could cohesive culture be a weakness as well as a strength?

  • 15 Reasons You Don’t Want To Work At Goldman Sachs

    There are plenty of good reasons to work at Goldman Sachs; we’ve written about them before.

    But inspired the bank’s miserable earnings report this morning, we realized that the negatives are piling up considerably.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection

    Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA: raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into “mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.

  • The Murdochs must stop spinning and resign

    In 2004, I created Outfoxed to expose Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism. Focusing on Fox News, we examined how NewsCorp has long blurred the line between corporate interests and journalistic integrity. The film presented an in-depth look at the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know. Those dangers were shown to include ethic-less journalism, as well as the role of public relations spin in replacing the honest presentation of facts.

    On Tuesday, as Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before parliament, this theme was repeated. Their testimony was less about true and honest answers and more about the script of a public relations firm, and an attempt to spin the public debate on issues of corporate disgrace.

    If their testimonies presented any information at all, it would be how much the Murdochs want to promote the spin of willful ignorance. For two incredibly involved businessmen, their testimonies would lead you to believe that they have long had absolutely no idea about what happens within their company.

  • Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News ran ‘black ops’ department, former executive claims

    Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television channel had a “black ops” department that may have illegally hacked private telephone records, a former executive for the station has alleged.

• Censorship

  • Website blocking minutes released under FOI

    109 MPs have now signed Julian Huppert MP’s EDM 1913, which called for the Government to reconsider policies such as website blocking, in light of the recent UN Special Rapporteur Report that was expressly critical of blocking on freedom of expression grounds. More recently, the Organisation for Security an Cooperation in Europe released a report that reached similar conclusions about disconnection and website blocking jeopardising rights to freedom of expression. Over 8,600 people have written to their MPs about this issue.

• Civil Rights

  • The Government still wants to hack your phone

    While politicians are convinced that Murdoch’s press has over-stepped the mark by routine hacking of citizen’s phones, let’s remember that plans for mass, pervasive hacking of our phones and emails is still sat waiting for revival by the Home Office.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Chrome OS, like Tux, will never fly

• Server

  • LinuxCon Preview: Details on the Watson Exhibit

    After strutting its stuff on Jeopardy! earlier this year, IBM’s Watson will be included at LinuxCon in a special exhibit August 17-19, 2011. We got some time with the IBM Power Systems Product Marketing Manager Ian Jarman to better understand what we can expect and what Watson and its IBM team have been working on since their very public victory earlier this year.

  • 12 Reasons Why Every Linux System Administrator Should be Lazy

  • IBM Grows Second Quarter Revenues

    IBM (NYSE:IBM) reported second quarter fiscal 2011 earning on Monday, with both revenue and income growth, as multiple segments of its business expand. Part of the growth is fueled by IBM’s expanding presence in growth markets and some is coming at the expense of rivals HP and Oracle, especially in the Unix space.

• Kernel Space

  • Kernel Log: Further problems with UEFI

    Some UEFI systems that are shipped with Windows always use a secondary installation of the bootloader which is intended as a fallback; this prevents a correctly installed UEFI Linux from starting up. Also: Google has released its BadRAM patches after all, a Linus Torvalds has appeared on Google+, and Lennart Poettering has posted further material on systemd on his blog.

  • Graphics Stack

    • S2TC: A Possible Workaround For The S3TC Patent Situation

      While S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) is widely used by many games and applications since its inclusion into OpenGL 1.3 and Microsoft DirectX 6.0, these lossy texture compression algorithms have not been implemented in the open-source Linux graphics drivers. This lack of open-source support is due to S3 Graphics holding the patent rights to this technology that they actively license to major hardware vendors. There long has been an external library that can be loaded and will work with most Mesa / Gallium3D drivers for advertising S3TC support, but it’s not found by default and it’s not included in leading Linux distributions due to these legal fears. There may now be a new solution for the S3TC Linux problem thanks to the advent of a new (and simpler) texture compression algorithm that can serve as a drop-in replacement.

    • NVIDIA Proposes Extending RandR

      While NVIDIA’s proprietary driver for their GeForce/Quadro hardware still lacks RandR 1.2+ support (that will hopefully change when RandR 1.4 is finally out), NVIDIA has proposed extending RandR to support over-scan compensation. This support isn’t for their mainline NVIDIA binary driver but rather their TEGRA Linux driver.

• Applications

  • One small step for [a] man… revisited using Audacity

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Tips for using Vim as an IDE

    • More Vim Tips

    • Video Tip – Using Pipes With The sudo Command

    • Linux system info, cheat sheetX

    • Set up F15 PV DomU at Xen 4.1 (kernel 3.0.0-5-generic) Dom0 on Ubuntu Oneiric

    • How To Install And Configure Mailman (With Postfix) On Debian Squeeze

    • Who and What Is On My Network? Probing Your Network with Linux

    • Python4Kids: New Tutorial – Tkinter tinkering (Graphical User Interfaces)

    • Apache Alternatives for Serving PHP

    • Five Good Reasons to Create a Virtual Infrastructure

    • Five Things to do after installing Fedora 15

    • Configuring Apache for Developing Multiple Websites under Ubuntu Linux

    • 24 iostat, vmstat and mpstat Examples for Linux Performance Monitoring

    • Viewing files at the command line

    • whowatch- Linux and UNIX interactive, process and users monitoring tool

    • DesktopNova Is A Wallpaper Rotation Application For Ubuntu Linux

    • IceCat 5 installation on Debian 6 Squeeze

    • Deciphering one of dpkg’s weirdest errors: unable to open ‘/path/to/foo.dpkg-new’

    • Kpaste – a friend for the lazy

    • How to fix configuration anarchy on the Linux desktop

    • Solution to “There seems to be a programming error in aptdaemon”

    • How to change Fedora’s font rendering to get an Ubuntu-like result

    • Mark’s Quick Gimp Tip

    • Creating Software-backed iSCSI Targets in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • Wine

    • CrossOver 10.1.0 released and CrossOver Games 10.1.1 released

  • Games

    • Puzzle Moppet now on Gameolith!

    • Helena the 3rd The Grande Finale

    • Two Indie Linux Games to be Featured in ‘PAX 10′ this Year

      Two Indie Linux Games, Atom Zombie Smasher and Snapshot have made in the PAX 10 list this year and will be featured at the PAX Prime from August 26-28 in Washington. The PAX 10 is a showcase of independent games to be exhibited at the event.

    • OnLive Is Hiring More Engineers For Linux Client

      OnLive, the cloud gaming platform where games are rendered and stored on servers, already has Windows and Mac OS X clients, but a Linux client is in the works. Back in March there was a job posting by OnLive where one of the responsibilities dealt with feature design and development for multiple platforms, including Linux. There’s also been other signs of OnLive for Linux in the works. The latest sign is a new job posting yesterday for the Linux client.

• Desktop Environments

  • Thinking about Desktop Environments, Window Managers and how to get a lightweight desktop

    LXDE: LXDE is a light environment with the traditional layout. It does not have that much customizability, but it is perfect if you just want a simple, easy to use and complete environment. LXDE uses the Openbox window manager, so any themes for Openbox will work in LXDE. Many pieces of LXDE will also work in other environments, and are available in individual packages. LXPanel is a very useful panel as it contains an automatically updating menu. LXAppearance can manage GTK themes, icon themes, fonts and, with a plugin, Openbox themes. PCManFm is a light file manager although I prefer Thunar. Leafpad is a light text editor, and LXTerminal is a good terminal.

    Xfce: Xfce is a more complete replacement for Gnome 2.X, although it is still missing some features. There are some nice xfwm themes, but Metacity themes often look better. Xfce 4.8 can now use Alacarte to edit it’s menus and, with the help of xfapplet, can use many Gnome applets such as Dockbarx and MintMenu. Xfwm contains it’s own compositor, making Xfce great for those who want to use Docky or AWN without Compiz. Xfce is admittedly not as light as it once was, but it is still lighter than Gnome 2 and is a suitable replacement.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Solution to “There seems to be a programming error in aptdaemon”

    • rekonq, 1 feature a week. #2

  • GNOME Desktop

    • We have to let GNOME2 go

      We will try to make the migration as much comfortable as possible. We have to let GNOME 2.32 go to its destiny. R.I.P.

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • We start collecting wishes for new build system

      As you know, release of Mandriva 2011 is coming. After that our developers continue to upgrade and polish mandriva build system. We receive many requests from community, that new build system must have new features. So, for example, new policy to add/upgrage packets, new functionality to create own “spins”/distributions or just for building existing package but with other defaults, etc.

    • Upstream Virtualbox + openssl versions on mandriva

    • VirtualBox 4.1 Goes Gold

  • Gentoo Family

    • Pardus 2011.1 review

      This article presents a review of the latest stable release, Pardus 2011.1, which was made available for download on July 12, 2011. It is the second this year and judging from the distribution’s recent release history, there should be one more before the end of the year.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Confirms Plans for North America Partner Conference

      Red Hat is gearing up to host a major North America Partner Conference (Oct. 26-28, Miami). The event signals a shift for Red Hat, which previously lumped partners and customers together at the annual Red Hat Summit. Here’s the update along with some insights from The VAR Guy.

      Yes, the annual Red Hat Summit and Jboss World conference continues to grow, attracting hundreds of partners and customers alike. But Red Hat is finally prepared to put a dedicated spotlight on its North American partners. The October partner conference is expected to include distributors, system integrators, VARs, solutions providers, ISVs and OEMs. Attendance will be invitation only. More information is expected to reach partners this month.

    • Fedora

      • Distro testing marathon – Fedora 15 – Day 2/3

        This is my second day with Fedora 15 Lovelock installed on my laptop. If you’ve missed the post about the first day you can find it here. Below are my thoughts about the Fedora experience

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Aptosid – An Overview

        aptosid might sound like a package management tool, but it’s actually a desktop-orientated (KDE4 or XFCE) Debian derived Linux distro. It’s more than a mere respin of Debian, but does it have what it takes to distinguish it from all of the other desktop distros?

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release Schedule

          The release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will be released at the end of April 2012.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint’s Debianized Xfce

            I discovered Mandriva in the wake of a catastrophe…but that is a story for another day, one which I shall spin when I write up my review of Mageia. I bring up Mandriva because in my life, the most usable desktop I’ve ever found has been in the Gnome variant of Mandriva 2010. Mandriva 2010.2 is still a go-to installation on the laptop, but that one (and 2010.1) gave me a little trouble with sound on the “Fun Computer”. Otherwise, they were perfect, but a little less perfect, so to speak. But the combination of the Mandriva Control Center and the cool, crisp Gnome design is hard to beat.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Open source remote controller flies model planes via Air Linux

    Open source hacker community Gizmo For You is developing a Linux-based controller and separate receiver device to remotely control a model airplane or other vehicle. Starting at $670, the battery-operated Open Source RC (OSRC) runs Linux on a Gumstix Overo SBC and includes a 4.8-inch display, a smaller monochrome status display, a 2.4GHz RF radio, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth for external thumbstick control.

  • Gumstix, Inc. Introduces the $99 RoboVero™ Controller Board

  • Phones

    • Android

      • 5 Android Apps for Google Plus!

      • It is time for Google to take control of Android

        One of the reasons Android has grown like no mobile platform in history is the open nature of the OS. OEMs, developers and buyers have flocked to a platform that allows modifications across the board, creating the ability for anyone to make Android look and work in many ways. The looseness of the Android platform has been its biggest draw, but there is such a thing as too much openness, and it is beginning to impact customers in ways that Google surely didn’t intend to happen.

      • Popular Android Game Apparatus Gets 3 New Levels

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • OLPC Plans Solar Charging, Satellite Internet for XO-3

      One Laptop Per Child is developing new functionality and protection features for its upcoming XO-3 tablet with the hope to attract more interest in the device.

      OLPC is designing rubber covers intended to protect the tablet but that could also integrate solar charging, satellite Internet or external keyboard capabilities, said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child.

      The tablet was originally announced in late 2009 with a projected price of under US$100. The XO-3 will become available early next year or perhaps sooner, and price is still being determined, but it will still be under $100, Negroponte said.

    • HP officially launches webOS TouchPad … again?

      When HP bought Palm last year I was hoping we would see less confusing messages and a more targeted focus for webOS with lots of resources to turn out great products. Instead, we end up with a rather lame tiny smartphone and then a tablet that was put on sale and then “officially launched” almost three weeks later. Yes, in case you didn’t know HP’s official launch for the HP TouchPad webOS tablet was yesterday, 17 July. I guess the 1 July release was just a practice run or something.

    • HP TouchPad 32GB WebOS tablet

      HP was right not to fear invidious comparisons with the iPad.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s Time for Packt’s Open Source Awards

  Has it been a year already? It must have because Packt Publishing (news, site) is launching its annual Open Source Awards, formerly the Open Source CMS Awards, designed to recognize and support promising open source projects . This year’s awards will be very similar to the awards in previous years, but there are a few changes.

• Open Source Pulse Sensor Project Looking for Funds

  An interesting new project on Kickstarter is raising money to support the creation of a small, cheap pulse sensor. The device is being developed on the open source Arduino platform so that it can be easily integrated into other projects.

• vSphere 5′s licensing opens the door for open source

• 10 things to think about to improve software product descriptions

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firebug developer joins Chrome browser team

• SaaS

  • OpenStack turns 1. What’s next?

    OpenStack, the open-source, cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, celebrates its first birthday tomorrow. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would. A year in, OpenStack is still picking up steam and looks not only like an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.

  • Yahoo and open source

    Yahoo is a well-known user of, and contributor to, open source projects. The company is most closely associated with Hadoop, and rightly so, as it is this open source project’s biggest contributor. Last month, it sponsored the Hadoop Summit 2011, in which its internal Hadoop experts, and others, ran a collection of workshops on the distributed workload operating system. It even announced that Yahoo had collected some top Hadoop engineers and spun off a new company, Hortonworks. Hortonworks hopes to sell Hadoop consulting services to enterprises.

  • The big deal about big data

  • OpenStack Turns One; What’s Next For The Open Source Cloud?

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • VirtualBox 4.1 has been released! PPA Ubuntu

    Oracle today released VirtualBox 4.1, a new major release. Introducing VM clones, this mean the ability to clone virtual machines via the GUI and VBoxManage, the New Advanced wizard for creating new virtual disks and virtual disk copy also for 64-bit memory limit is up to 1 TB. For guest Additions, status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends, Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts

  • Free hypervisor adds virtual machine cloning

    Oracle released a new version of its free virtualization software, now offering an easy way to clone virtual machines (VMs). VirtualBox 4.1 also includes a memory limit increase to 1TB for 64-bit hosts, guest support for Windows Aero, a new UDP networking tunnel for interconnecting VMs, and support for SATA hard disk hotplugging, among other cited new features.

  • Oracle Improves VirtualBox 4.1

    VirtualBox 4.1 is being officially released today, debuting new features that expand the use cases and deployability for the virtualization software. VirtualBox came into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) as part of the Sun acquisition in 2010. The technology is used both as a desktop virtualization tool on the client side and as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivery server side.

  • Oracle revs VirtualBox, mushrooms memory

    The open source VirtualBox hypervisor for PCs and servers got a major release on Tuesday when Oracle – which controls the VirtualBox project – kicked out version 4.1.

  • Oracle Girds VirtualBox for Enterprise Use

  • VirtualBox 4.1 Supports Upto 1TB RAM

  • IBM to donate Symphony code to Apache for consideration

    Six weeks ago I noted here that Oracle had to decided to offer the codebase for OpenOffice.org, the open source word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software suite to the Apache Software Foundation. Two weeks after that, Apache voted to accept the proposed project for incubation. Now, one month later, IBM is announcing that it will offer the Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice incubator for consideration. Why and what does this mean?

• CMS

  • Joomla 1.7 Improves Open Source CMS

  • Joomla Expands Beyond Content Management

• Business

  • consilium1 Announces Leadership Expansion to Support Growth in Open Source Adoption

    consilium1, a specialized information technology consulting services company, announced today that Mark Lugert has joined the c1 executive team as Vice President, Professional Services. In this role, Lugert will be primarily responsible for driving the expansion of the company’s burgeoning Open Source Adoption practice.

  • SugarCRM, Pentaho Proclaim Partner Momentum

  • Semi-Open Source

    • OpenGeo and Tascomi Announce Partnership to Support Users Across the UK and Ireland

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Interview: Kuno Woudt, MusicBrainz

    During November 2010, I travelled around Europe, meeting various free software developers on my way to FSCONS, the annual free software conference, in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Leftovers

• Computer scientists say it’s time to start looking at treatment of data waste

  Hasan and Burns analyzed three computers: a MacBook laptop, a desktop running Ubuntu Linux and a Fedora Linux fileserver in the University Library (Linux is a variant of the Unix operating system used primarily at educational and research institutions).

• How to move your Facebook photos to Google+

• Security

  • Lulz Security hackers target Sun website

    A group of computer hackers has tampered with the website of the Sun, owned by News International.

    At first, readers were redirected to a hoax story which said Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden.

    A group of hackers called Lulz Security, which has previously targeted companies including Sony, said on Twitter it was behind the attack.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC, For-Profit Criminal Justice, and Wisconsin

    As the first half of 2011 has revealed, Wisconsin is not a moderate “purple” state, but a state divided between staunchly “blue” progressives and righteous “red” right-wingers. That rift is particularly apparent in legislative conflicts over the criminal justice system, a debate spurred by corporate interests represented in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and perpetuated by ALEC legislative members, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

    Wisconsin’s history and public policy reflects the red/blue divide. It is the state that gave birth to the Republican Party, which supported slavery abolition, and the John Birch Society, which opposed the civil rights movement. In the first half of the 20th Century, the state elected both progressive hero Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and right-wing extremist Joe McCarthy. It is the state that elected both former Senator Russ Feingold (D) and Representative Paul Ryan (R).

  • ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman’s Little Shop of Horrors

    Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

    In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” for the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing — from energy and water utilities to Social Security — to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.

• Censorship

  • Telex to help defeat web censors

    Data smuggling software could help citizens in countries operating strict net filters visit any site they want.

    Developed by US computer scientists the software, called Telex, hides data from banned websites inside traffic from sites deemed safe.

    The software draws on well-known encryption techniques to conceal data making it hard to decipher.

    So far, Telex is only a prototype but in tests it has been able to defeat Chinese web filters.

Reader’s Picks

• 35% of tech professionals support for gnu/linux.

  A person or company that only “supports Windows” is not doing its job, which is to provide a service not to promote Microsoft. ISPs and tech professionals should be familiar with reasonable standards, not one of the dozens of Windows GUIs.

• Health/Nutrition

  • US Insurance costs chain people to corporate jobs by making it impossible to give up insurance to start a business..

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • US Police are citing child porn as a reason to mandate 18 month ISP logs on all users.

    In other news, a 95 year old woman was forced to remove her diaper, a woman in Nashville was arrested for refusing xray and groping for her daughter and a US court had decided in EPIC vs DHS that the TSA may continue to xray people.

  • A DHS Facial recognition system in Massachusetts has brought State Police down on 1,000 people who happened to look like someone else.

• Anti-Trust

  • Facebook bans Google+ advertisements.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • US Media is becoming even more consolidated at companies circumvent or violate what little protection there is.

• Civil Rights

  • A man was unable to give blood because he looked like a homosexual.

    The Food and Drug Administration policy, implemented in 1983, states that men who have had sex — even once — with another man (since 1977) are not allowed to donate blood. … jToday, all donated blood is tested for HIV, as well as for hepatitis B and C, syphilis and other infectious diseases, before it can be released to hospitals. This is why gay activists, blood centers including the American Red Cross, and even some lawmakers now claim the lifetime ban is “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

  • A Department of Homeland Security court case exposes all sorts of state bigotry.

    Ohio Homeland Security fired its Muslim liaison officer because he objected to its use of tax dollars to create programs “asserting that all Central Ohio Muslims and Arabs were terrorists or terrorism sympathizers … [and] included a picture of plaintiff as an example of a terrorist sympathizer,” … His problems apparently began when OHS and ODPS began receiving public criticism about his work – or the fact that they had hired someone to do such a job at all.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • A bill before the US Congress would allow incumbents to bid on TV White space spectrum to keep it from becoming unlicensed..

    The entire spectrum should be delicensed immediately but the rich and powerful want the control telco and broadcast give them.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Paul Vixie tell us that DNS blocking in the “PROTECT IP” is a bad idea.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Two Months To The X.Org Chicago Conference

    • VP8 Gallium3D Support In Mesa Is Being Worked On

      Besides pipe-video landing in Mesa, there’s some more good news to report when it comes to accelerated video playback over Mesa/Gallium3D. There’s a VP8 state tracker for this Google format that’s actively being developed.

      Back in March one of the proposals this year was to create VP8 support over VDPAU in Gallium3D. Originally this began as an H.264 VDPAU state tracker and then targeting WebM or Theora instead. In the end the GSoC proposal was for VP8 in Gallium3D via the VDPAU state tracker. However, the proposal was not accepted by Google due to technicalities.

• Applications

  • Genuine People Personalities

    Perhaps this topic is best left as a thought, a ‘what if’, but terminals have been around for dozens of years and little has changed since then. Perhaps giving terminals some people personality could help us leap into J.A.R.V.I.S.-like Operative Systems?

  • 10 small Linux applications I can’t live without

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Booting with EFI

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On An OpenSUSE GNOME 11.4 Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

    • Running the Tribler BitTorrent client in Fedora 15

    • How to Disable Automatic Workspaces in Gnome 3 (And Other Shell Tweaks)

    • Maximum Calculus with Maxima

  • Games

    • Free Puzzling: Puzzle Moppet Awareness Day

      I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that it’s Puzzle Moppet Awareness Day. The puzzle game by Garnet Games is adopting a trick widely used in the iOS world (gratuitous plug for Free App Hero, which offers a daily round up all the best free games for iThings) of going free for a day. While the PC has recently been enjoying Steam sales, pay-what-you-want schemes, and so on, few have adopted the model that’s working so effectively on Apple’s handhelds of just being free for a single day so word gets out.

• Desktop Environments

  • Intel AppUp Workshop at Desktop Summit

    The DesktopSummit 2011 team is pleased to announce the Intel AppUpSM Application Lab: MeeGo Series. The session will take place at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany as part of the Desktop Summit. Intel® is the Platinum Sponsor of the Desktop Summit.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Trending Gnome 3 alternative distros

      Gnome3 on its release on April 6 2011 was touted as the next generation of GNOME in nine long years. The highlight of Gnome 3, is the brand new user interface, modern desktop for modern technologies. Besides, Gnome 2 had a very long life and maintaining it, technically, was reaching the point of ‘critical mass.’ Secondly, Gnome 3 aims to get rid of a lot of clutter on the desktop.

    • Expected Changes In GNOME Shell 3.2

      Here’s a list of what to expect in GNOME Shell 3.2 (to be released on September 28), according to Allan Day, one of the main GNOME Shell developers:

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • NetSecL 3.2

    • Aptosid 2011-02 arrives with KDE 4.6

    • Linvo 2010.12.6

      The image passes the 700MB barrier, so I recommend you burn it on DVD or USB Flash Drive using UNetBootin.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS KDE MiniMe 2011.07 is now available for download

      PCLinuxOS KDE MiniMe 2011.07 for 32 bit computers (works on 64 bit computers too) is now available for download.

    • Extending support for 2010.1/2010.2 releases

    • Mandriva Linux 2010.x reaches end of desktop support

      French Linux distributor Mandriva has reminded users that Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Spring and 2010.2 have both reached their end of desktop support. From 8 July, no new updates to the desktop environments, web browsers and major apps will be provided.

    • Passing on the Linux dream

      The question, then, of whether Android is Linux seems to be settled in the mind of Google. Android is most definitely Linux. But there’s more to it than that: Google believes that Android is the natural successor of Linux, succeeding in areas that the parent operating system could not.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Scientific Linux: Enterprise Infrastructure on the rise

      Scientific Linux, among other distros, tries to provide an answer to this whole fiasco. If you are, for example, a grade school or a high school you can’t really afford to pay Microsoft for 40+ Windows 7 licences and a Windows 2008 Server, especially if your students are going to use those computers to do a little C++ or Java programming at most.

      The researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) know how limited funds can be. Ironically, in the world, research and education are among the most underfunded branches of society, so the less you have to spend on necessities, the more resources you have for your actual research.

    • Virtual Bridges Joins Open Virtualization Alliance, Extends Support for Linux Desktops

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 2 Review, Screenshots, Download Links

          Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 2 is released already and the changes we expected to see in Ubuntu 11.10 is slowly starting to show up. Among other things, the most important change is the arrival of GNOME 3.0 stack. Ubuntu is not based on GNOME 2.x anymore. Most of the default Ubuntu themes have been ported to GNOME 3.0 and lot of other things are changing as well. Read our detailed Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 2 review.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • 11 Server Apps for Android OS Devices

        Mobile phones can do more and more every day. There’s an app for just about everything and everybody, including server admins. With these 11 server-related apps for the Android platform, you’ll never again have an excuse to not take time off. These apps will enable you to monitor and manage your systems, all via your mobile phone or tablet.

      • Android Now Seeing 550,000 Activations Per Day

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Amazon’s Android tablet’s rumored as ad-supported Kindle 3G launches

    • The Five Best Linux Netbook Distributions: 2011 Edition

      Though netbooks have waned a bit in favor of tablet devices, there’s still a lot of demand for netbooks and netbook-friendly Linux distros in certain circles. Whether you’re looking for a brand-new netbook or to keep an older device current, there’s plenty of options for the Linux crowd. Let’s take a look at the top five netbook Linux distros.

Free Software/Open Source

• Just how “open” is open source vendor-neutrality?

  This week’s release of Jaspersoft Studio represents a new option for Eclipse-based business intelligence (BI) design environments.

  This product release sees Jaspersoft become an official member of the Eclipse Foundation — which is interesting, as its tools compete with those of existing Eclipse projects.

  If you’ve not visited Eclipse for a while, in it’s own words, “Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.”

• As Facebook Shows Its Fear, Open-Xchange Bounces Back

  The arrival of the Google+ social network has caused a battle to erupt over ownership of Facebook users’ contact information, and on Wednesday open source provider Open-Xchange fought back against Facebook’s earlier deactivation of its OX.IO export tool.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla in the New Internet Era — More Than the Browser

      Mozilla’s mission is to build user sovereignty into the fabric of the Internet. We work to ensure that the the Internet remains open, interoperable and accessible to all. To do this we build products, we build decentralized participation worldwide, and we build the ability for people to create their own experiences in addition to consuming commercial offerings.

      Internet life is undergoing immense changes. The mobile revolution has huge implications, from new devices to operating systems to user expectations. The social experience means a lot of personal data about me becomes central. The increasingly ubiquitous nature of computing devices (phone to tablets to microwaves to lights and electric meters) means the amount and kinds of data being generated are changing dramatically.

    • Mozilla Delivers New Firefox Versions at Rapid-Fire Pace

      Mozilla announced its intent to pursue a new rapid release cycle early this year, and while the company’s recent release of version 5 of the Firefox browser is being met with much less criticism than the previous version 4, we’ve reported on the fact that not everyone is happy with the speed of the releases. Enterprise IT administrators may be among the most unhappy observers. Still, if you’re keeping track, Mozilla is more on target to please users with rapidly delivered, high-quality versions of Firefox than it ever was before.

      It’s worth remembering that heading into this year, just before Mozilla announced its new rapid release cycle plans for Firefox, the browser hadn’t even reached version 4.0. Meanwhile, Google Chrome was snapping up browser market share with new and improved versions showing up every couple of months. In fact, Chrome’s development cycle is a big part of why Mozilla stepped up its release cycle for Firefox.

    • Firefox Leaps Ahead With Versions 6, 7, and 8

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Symphony contribution

    Also, as the PC Magazine review notes, we’ve done some really good UI
    work. I invite you to download Symphony [2] and take a closer look at
    this. Yes, it is different from what OOo has today. And a move of
    that magnitude has an impact on documentation and translations as
    well. But the feedback we’ve received from customers and reviewers
    is very positive. Do we integrate parts of the Symphony UI? That is
    something for the project to discuss and decide on.

    Finally, we will be proposing [3] a new incubation project at Apache,
    for the ODF Toolkit. These Java libraries enable new kinds of
    lightweight document processing applications. We think this would
    work well as an Apache project, and we look forward to moving that
    into incubation and developing that complementary project forward.

  • IBM to donate Symphony code to Apache for consideration

  • IBM throws its source code and support behind OpenOffice

    Of all the companies that support OpenOffice, there were only two that didn’t support the LibreOffice fork: Oracle and IBM. I could understand Oracle. While Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, didn’t really care about OpenOffice–after all Oracle essentially gave OpenOffice away to The Apache Foundation–I also know that Ellison wasn’t going to let The Document Foundation, LibreOffice’s parent organization, dictate terms to him. But, I’ve never quite understood why IBM didn’t help create LibreOffice. Be that as it may, IBM will be announcing tomorrow that it’s donating essentially all its IBM Lotus Symphony source code and resources to Apache’s OpenOffice project.

  • SAP joins OpenJDK Java project

    SAP has joined the OpenJDK project, an Oracle-led initiative producing an open source implementation of Java that also has gained support of such companies as IBM and Apple in recent months.

• Business

  • Open Source Earns New Opportunity With Channel Partners

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Jaspersoft joins Eclipse Foundation

      Open source business intelligence software specialist Jaspersoft has joined the Eclipse Foundation and presented Jaspersoft Studio, which integrates into the Eclipse IDE. The development environment enables developers to build reports and integrate them into existing applications free of charge. Potential data sources for reports include relational, “big data” and NoSQL databases, as well as text files.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Hurd Progresses – Debian GNU/Hurd by end of 2012?

    The GNU Hurd developers are moving forward with their work on the free software operating system. According to the most recent progress report from the project, there is now a “real plan” to release a Hurd variant of Debian with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy.

• Project Releases

  • Compiz 0.9.5 Has Arrived

    Sam Spilsbury has just tagged Compiz 0.9.5 for release as the latest development milestone for this compositing window manager.

• Licensing

  • The Open Game License: A case study in open source markets

    The history of the roleplaying game industry in general, and the Dungeons and Dragons game in particular, serves as an interesting case study in the relative benefits of openness in business models.

• Openness/Sharing

  • New book from Creative Commons celebrates the power of open

    By the end of 2010, more than 400 million works had been licensed with Creative Commons licenses. That’s 400 million musical compositions, news items, academic manuscripts, artworks, blueprints, presentations, photographs, books, blog posts, and videos whose owners believed traditional copyright restrictions didn’t allow their creations to properly circulate, grow, and flourish.

Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition

  • Insurance Exchanges Tilted Toward Health Insurers, Not Consumers

    The insurance industry made it abundantly clear this week that it is in the driver’s seat — in both Washington and state capitols — of one of the most important vehicles created by Congress to reform the U.S. health care system.

    The Affordable Care Act requires the states to create new marketplaces — “exchanges” — where individuals and small businesses can shop for health insurance. In the 15 months since the law took effect, insurers have lobbied the Obama administration relentlessly to give states the broadest possible latitude in setting up their exchanges. And those insurance companies have been equally relentless at the state level in making sure governors and legislators follow their orders in determining how the exchanges will be operated.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • ‘Ex-terrorist’ rakes in homeland security bucks

    Walid Shoebat had a blunt message for the roughly 300 South Dakota police officers and sheriff’s deputies who gathered to hear him warn about the dangers of Islamic radicalism.

    Terrorism and Islam are inseparable, he tells them. All U.S. mosques should be under scrutiny.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. drops bid for BSkyB

    Political and public outrage over the phone-hacking scandal involving some of its newspapers forces News Corp. to withdraw its $12-billion offer to take over Britain’s biggest satellite broadcaster.

• Privacy

  • Apple Pays Out $946 in ‘Locationgate’ Settlement

    Apple has begun shelling out dough for its location-tracking debacle lovingly referred to as “Locationgate.”

    Apple was ordered to pay out 1 million South Korean won ($946) in compensation for collecting user geolocation data without permission in May, Reuters reported Thursday. The payment was made to a lawyer named Kim Hyung-suk.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Rogers facing Internet throttling deadline

    nada’s largest cable Internet provider admitted to unintentionally throttling access to World of Warcraft — a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with more than 11 million subscribers around the world.

    The Toronto-based company disclosed its activities after one of its customers filed a complaint with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in February.

  • What to do About Retail Usage Based Billing: A Modest Proposal

    OpenMedia.ca, which spearheaded the public uproar over usage based billing earlier this year, launched a Vote Internet campaign that quickly attracted political support. The campaign asks candidates to be pro-Internet, which includes standing up for an open and accessible Internet and stopping the “pay meter on the Internet.” While this predictably raises claims of retail price regulation, addressing concerns about retail UBB need not involve a return to regulatory approvals over retail pricing of Internet services.

    I’ve argued that UBB is fundamentally a competition problem and that addressing the competition concerns (which OpenMedia also supports) will address many of the concerns. Increased competition takes time, however, and in the meantime there are legitimate concerns about the use of UBB in Canada at the retail level given the approaches in other countries and the pricing far above costs. In addition to discussing those issues, my UBB paper makes a modest proposal for addressing retail UBB that includes greater transparency and a reasonableness standard. The proposal – which I’ve called the creation of Internet Billing Usage Management Practices or IBUMPs – is explained below.

Summary: OpenOffice.org is moving to Apache, which helps IBM after a short moment of uncertainty and doubt

PR blunders aside (IBM PR telling me, “if you blog about the end of this case, none of this information came from IBM, okay? Cheers…”), it has just been announced that, as SJVN told us all last night, OpenOffice.org is going to Apache and the IBM folks are quick to issue remarks about it, led by Brill, Weir, and Sutor. Weir says that:

Oracle has followed through with their earlier promise to “move OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based open source project.” OpenOffice is moving to Apache.

Prior to that Weir also said: “Disappointing to see so-called open source proponents desperately trying to squash an open source project. It must be Tuesday.” It is not clear if he was referring to the petition to Oracle. Perhaps he should clarify his statements, e.g. with a link.

Remember how IBM reacted after Oracle had sued Google. The issues of patents will be discussed here later. IBM almost bought Sun.

Sutor writes:

It’s been an interesting road to get to this point over the decades, with well and not-so-well publicized twists and turns, but I’m glad we got here.

We’ll have more about this shortly, hopefully something unique (although the Internet will be flooded by pundits). Let us remember that OpenOffice.org is Free software and so is LibreOffice. There is a lot to be said now which probably will be said by every FOSS/Linux site.

In defence of IBM, the company is bigger than Microsoft, but it is not fundamentally against Free software. Scale is not the problem (SCO, for example, was always quite small). Prepare for a lot of FUD from the Microsoft camp, which harbours the #1 cash cow. █

Summary: Microsoft uses proxies to stomp on Google and give it antitrust trouble while it is actually Microsoft that deserve the antitrust treatment

Microsoft is not a reformed company. It’s a thuggish convict in search of a whipping boy. It is still an unethical bully which is more focused on bribes and extortion, as fiascos like OOXML and the B&N blackmail ought to remind regulators all across the world. It makes no sense whatsoever to remove oversight. It’s like releasing a prisoner who was beating inmates up. As one person puts it:

This ignores all the foot-dragging in the EU, the anti-competitive moves in mobile, the software-patent suits, etc.

There is another reason to keep Microsoft — not Google — under the microscope. It is Microsoft — not Google — which hires many AstroTurfers to daemonise a competitor, Google. In the context of Burson-Marsteller we mentioned this before Groklaw and others. Bob Sutor writes: “Burson-Marsteller: now #Facebook against #Google – http://bit.ly/ k6H6fL , then #Microsoft against #Google – http:// on.wsj.com/k5Brp9″

PJ opines (via reader of ours):

It links to a 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, “Microsoft Goes Behind the Scenes — Public-Relations Proxy Aims to Gather Opposition To Google-DoubleClick Deal”, showing that Microsoft hired the same PR firm as Facebook, Burson-Marsteller, back then also to attack Google. If you are surprised, please raise your hand. Say, journalists, why not ask Facebook if they got this lame idea in 2011 from Microsoft? Or ask Burson if they got the idea from Microsoft and then pitched it to Facebook. I have the feeling we haven’t dug all the way to the bottom of this picture yet.

For Microsoft this is business as usual. See our page on AstroTurfing for additional examples. How can such a convict be left without supervision? █

(ODF | PDF | English/original)

Resumen: IBM y Google se siguen perdiendo una oportunidad maravillosa para hacer de uno de los productos básicos una plataforma de comodidad y defender esta comodidad, poniendo fin a las patentes de software.

Las patentes de software son la mayor no-amenaza-bar a la libertad del software y las compañías que defienden su existencia son sin duda parte del problema. Por lo general, trabajar en conjunto contra de los intereses de aquellos cuyo plan es la eliminación de las patentes de software en su conjunto (FFII – Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre – es una excepción).

El mes pasado criticamos a Google por querer comprar las patentes de Nortel[http://techrights.org/2011/04/06/benjamin-henrion-on-google-nortel/]. Si Google pelea las patentes con todavía más patentes, entonces simplemente legitima la existencia de matorrales, los abogados de patentes y los monopolios protegidos por el gobierno. Hemos sido críticos de la hipócrita postura de Google desde hace bastante tiempo.

El último consorcio de patentes de Google para WebM es diferente sin embargo. Al igual que el pool (grupo) de OIN, viene con algunos compromisos. Desde el sitio oficial[http://www.webm-ccl.org/]: “Los miembros del CCL (Comunidad WebM licencia cruzada )se están uniendo a este esfuerzo porque se dan cuenta que el ecosistema entero de la red – usuarios, desarrolladores, editores y fabricantes de dispositivos – van beneficiarse de una alta calidad, desarrollada por la comunidad de código abierto formato de los medios de comunicación. Esperamos con interés trabajar con los miembros del CCL y la comunidad de estándares web para promover el papel WebM en video de HTML5. ”

“”A IBM no le gusta hablar acerca de su política en favor de las patentes y cuando le pregunté el doctor Sutor sobre ella se negó a responder.””Es un asunto difícil de defender, pero dado que la alternativa es hostil hacia el software libre y el software propietario, WebM es por mucho la mejor opción. El mismo argumento vale para la estrategia de patentes de IBM, que no está en contra de las patentes de software[http://techrights.org/2009/08/12/ibm-promoting-software-patents/] (lo mismo ocurre en cierta medida para Oracle y Red Hat). Las hilanderas, como Microsoft Florian[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Florian_M%C3%BCller], en un gran esfuerzo para distorsionar los hechos. Quieren que la gente cree que la hipocresía se extiende a todo el mundo del software libre. De hecho, IBM y su adhesión a la concesión de licencias con Microsoft no acaba de hacerlo parte del cartel, porque también está la OIN (Invención de red abierta), que fue creado por un hombre de IBM. La OIN hace una labor encomiable. Es por eso que la OIN es odiada por refuerzos de Microsoft.

Otro punto de contacto digno de Google e IBM tiene mucho que ver con sus esfuerzos de código abierto que no son del todo abiertos, y mucho menos libre. Los hilanderos Microsoft intenta tirar “barro” sobre la base de que, sobre todo para enbarrar a sus mejores competidores. IBM prefiere algo así como la licencia Eclipse y no la licencia de Apache que Google favorece al parecer. Esto es perfectamente aceptable, aunque el tema de patentes sigue siendo descubierto. Hemos hablado de esto en el IRC ayer por la noche. A IBM no le gusta hablar acerca de su política en favor de las patentes y cuando le preguntó el doctor Sutor sobre ello se negó a responder. No le gusto la pregunta. No es como si estuviera haciendo caso omiso, ya que habíamos tenido una relación amistosa durante años. Sobre la base de su currículum, IBM cambió el título de su trabajo (VP) de “código abierto y estándares” a “Open Source y Linux” y luego a “Sistemas Abiertos y Linux” (2010 al presente). De las normas a Linux y de código abierto para sistemas abiertos, ¿eh? Diversas explicaciones se podría dar para eso.

IBM es un amigo de código abierto, pero su política de patentes tiene un gran margen de mejora porque ahora que la persona # 1 en la USPTO es de IBM, es muy claro que la empresa no tiene interés en poner fin a las patentes de software para bien. Si bien ese es el caso, para los desarrolladores de software libre y propietario por igual (los jugadores pequeños) seguirán sufriendo. Aquí es una empresa que anuncia que va a poseer otra patente “a través del Internet”[http://www.renalbusiness.com/news/2011/05/doctors-xl-charge-capture-software-now-patent-pending.aspx]:

DoctorsXL el03 de mayo, dijo que su “software basado en web MobileXL 3.0 está ahora pendiente de patente”.

Necesitamos que las empresas más grandes que hablen en contra de las patentes de software. Pero las patentes son beneficiosas para los carteles con muchos empleados, por lo que es poco probable que las mega-corporaciones levantarán un dedo para reformas reales.

IBM y Google no son amenazas para el Libre/Software de Código Abierto, pero en conclusión, que merecen mucha más presión. Deben unirse a la lucha contra las patentes de software en vez de actuar como defensores de software libre (con patentes) y sus niñeras. █

Translation produced by Eduardo Landaveri, the esteemed administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.

Summary: IBM and Google are still missing a wonderful opportunity to make the platform a commodity and defending this commodity by putting an end to software patents

SOFTWARE patents are the greatest-bar-none threat to software freedom and companies which defend their existence are definitely part of the problem. They usually work against the interests of those whose plan is to eliminate software patents altogether (FFII being an exception).

Last month we criticised Google for its bid to take Nortel's patents. If Google fights patents with yet more patents, then it merely legitimises the existence of thickets, patent lawyers, and government-protected monopolies. We have been critical of Google's stance for quite some time.

Google’s latest patent pool for WebM is different however. Like the OIN’s pool, it comes with certain commitments. From the official site: “CCL members are joining this effort because they realize that the entire web ecosystem — users, developers, publishers, and device makers — benefit from a high-quality, community developed, open-source media format. We look forward to working with CCL members and the web standards community to advance WebM’s role in HTML5 video.”

“IBM does not like to talk about its pro-patents policy and when I asked Dr. Sutor about it he refused to answer.”It is a tricky one to defend, but since the alternative is hostile towards free software and proprietary software, WebM is by far the better choice. The same argument goes for the patent strategy of IBM, which is not against software patents (the same goes to some degree for Oracle and Red Hat). The spinners, such as Microsoft Florian, try very hard to distort the facts. They want people to believe that the hypocrisy extends to the whole Free software world. In fact, IBM and its cross-licensing with Microsoft does not quite make it part of the cartel because there is also OIN, which was created by a man from IBM. The OIN does commendable work. That’s why the OIN is loathed by Microsoft boosters.

Another touch-worthy point about Google and IBM has a lot to do with their open source efforts that are not entirely open, let alone free. The Microsoft spinners try to generate ‘dirt’ based on that, mostly for smears against those top competitors. IBM prefers something like the Eclipse licence and not the Apache licence like Google apparently favours. This is perfectly acceptable although the patent issue remains uncovered. We discussed this in IRC last night. IBM does not like to talk about its pro-patents policy and when I asked Dr. Sutor about it he refused to answer. He was not comfortable with the question. It’s not as though he was ignoring, as we had had a mostly amicable relation for years. Based on his CV, IBM changed the title from of his job (VP) from “Open Source and Standards” to “Open Source and Linux” and then to “Open Systems and Linux” (2010 to present). From standards to Linux and from Open Source to Open Systems, eh? Different explanations could be given for that.

IBM is a friend of Open Source, but its patent policy has room for improvement because now that the #1 person at the USPTO is from IBM, it is made abundantly clear that the company has no interest in ending software patents for good. While that is the case, Free and proprietary software developers alike (small players) will continue to suffer. Here is a company announcing that it is going to own another “over the Internet” patent:

DoctorsXL said May 3 that its web-based software MobileXL 3.0 is now patent pending.

We need more large companies that speak out against software patents. But patents are beneficial to cartels with many employees, so it is unlikely that mega-corporations will lift a finger for real reforms.

IBM and Google are not menacing to Free/open source software, but in conclusion, they deserve a lot more pressure. They should join the fight against software patents rather than act like FOSS defenders (with patents) and its babysitters. █

Summary: Nobody knows for sure if another company will pick Mono up from the ground, but there are conflicting interpretations as to what Microsoft will do about it

Novell’s Mono and Mono-based projects are being habitually promoted for all sorts of GNU/Linux distributions despite the known risk. “For those who think that Novell didn’t do quite enough damage to the FOSS community yet,” writes Groklaw‘s Pamela Jones, noting that Ubuntu’s Unity is getting hooks for Mono. From the Ubuntu Web site she quotes:

With bindings for C, Python, and Mono, you can integrate your app into the Unity desktop quickly and easily.

Upon the news about Monocalypse, she wrote: “Maybe they’d prefer to develop it in a country where patent laws haven’t gone stark raving mad, as in the US? If so, that would show some astuteness.”

“Would not be surprised at all if MSFT picks up Mono employees…”
      –Bob Sutor, IBM’s Vice President of Open SourceBradley Kuhn tries to pretend that he is the good guy in all of this and that other Mono critics somehow feel happy about the layoffs rather than the end of Mono funding (a red herring for sure as we do not celebrate loss of jobs). Jones also did not like Kuhn’s post and she wrote in response: “I disagree with this reasoning. Strongly. If you suspect, or know, that something violates somebody’s patent, it’s not actually wise to violate it. Kuhn acknowledges that. But then he argues it’s useful for it to exist. So it’s all right to violate the patent to get the benefits? It will come back to haunt you later, when you are accused of willfulness, from all I know about patents. If those programmers end up working for Microsoft, at least they won’t be violating anyone’s patents. And besides, what makes us assume that they don’t have jobs waiting for them already at Microsoft, part of a bigger plan? Alternatively, if Attachmate prefers to develop in Germany, maybe that is patent-related strategizing, which isn’t a bad thing.”

Bob Sutor’s immediate response in Twitter was: “Would not be surprised at all if MSFT picks up #Mono employees per http://bit.ly/l0nzUy Perfect fit, except for the open-sourcey part” (that would make sense). “But,” says GNU/Linux champion Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “without its corporate backer, what happens now to Mono? I really hadn’t expected this. Microsoft sponsored Attachmate’s purchase of Novell. I had presumed they’d be happy to see Mono keep going. I was wrong.” The last words are grand: “As for Novell? Well, I’m just glad its founder, the brilliant and cantankerous Ray Noorda is no longer to see the end of his company. It would have broken his heart.”

Sutor is IBM’s Vice President of Open Source and he never trusted Mono. Needless to say, the Mono boosters gave him flak for it.

Remember that Mono is not about spreading GNU/Linux, it is about spreading .NET. In fact, some Mono-derived products do not even run on GNU/Linux. As for SUSE, it is going back to its Nuremburg origins (nostalgic photograph) and Edward Berridge’s punch line about it went like this:

It is not clear if Miguel has been sentenced to Nuremburg, but pulling apart his team like that must miff him somewhat.

Stephane Rodriguez once told us about “Microsoft persons who take a pride not to be on their payroll. (DeIcaza told me in the past that he’s rich).” Nobody needs to cry for Miguel de Icaza, who is already a Microsoft MVP. Will he also become a Microsoft employee to be paid directly by Microsoft? He was already involved in steering CodePlex. We shall find out soon if it’s taken further. He is not blogging about the news yet.

Paul Cutler, who only joined Novell quite recently (after he had helped some Mono projects) is among those who leave. From his blog:

Yesterday was my last day at Novell. I enjoyed the 1+ year I spent working there – helping to ship SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to millions of end users through OEM partnerships was a fulfilling experience in knowing it helped Linux on the desktop grow.

People who did PR for Novell are also axed with the rest, which may help decrease the AstroTurfing from the company (they have abused this Web site under pseudonyms):

Social media, particularly Twitter, had comments running all day about the layoffs. Even the person who ran the NovellTalks Twitter account posted this farewell message, “To all those who have followed me, I’m sad to say that this account is being retired as I am leaving Novell. Best to all!”

Groklaw is left wondering what will happen next in Novell’s case against Microsoft. Has AttachMSFT decided to also cut down Novell’s legal team? Hopefully not, as it is also necessary for the SCO case. From Groklaw:

Novell has prevailed in its appeal against Microsoft in the antitrust case about WordPerfect! Here’s the Order [PDF], hot off the presses. The lower court’s order dismissing Novell’s claim on summary judgment essentially on a technicality is “reversed and remanded.” That means it goes to trial. Novell has the opportunity to tell a jury just what it believes Microsoft did wrong.

I have a special treat: I also have the audio of the oral argument before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and when you hear how skillfully Novell’s attorney, Charles Cooper, presents Novell’s case, I think you will understand very well why Novell prevailed.

Ultimately, there is not much love for Novell, but some of its court cases are still important. SUSE is a complicated subject because it helps Microsoft get richer and a lot of what Novell does is just putting a price tag or proprietary software on top of GNU/Linux. Jason Brooks reviews Novell’s Red Hat ripoff [1, 2], saying that it has “hiccups”. So who needs SUSE Manage anyway? It adds nothing new.

Don’t cry for Novell. It’s just a defunct company. Companies implode all the time, unlike people. Nobody is born an employee of a particular company. █

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Google and ARM reportedly plan to establish standardization for Android/ARM platforms

  Google is reportedly considering a push for standardization of its Android 3.0 hoping the new strategy will help resolve the drawbacks of the operation system; meanwhile, Google may also negotiate with ARM over the possibility of implementing standardization for ARM architecture products, according to sources from notebook players.

• Pacifistic SuperTux

• Installing Linux to a Gateway NV53 laptop, a trial for five distros

• An Introduction to the Linux Shell

  She sells seashells by the seashore. Well, yes… that may be true, but that’s not the type of shell we’re going to talk about here today.

• Hardware review I

  How well do these components work with Ubuntu 10.10 (and probably other recent GNU/Linux distributions)? Perfectly.

• Desktop

  • Dialog with the Girlfriend

    About a year ago I made a post about installing Linux on my girlfriend’s laptop. Just recently I was quoted on Linux Insider about how successful the installation had been a year later. I said that I believed it to have been a successful conversion of a Windows user to Linux. My descriptions were from my observations only, not my girlfriend’s. I had not thought at that time to ask my girlfriend what she thought about the change of operating system on her computer.

• Server

  • Small Cheap Computers in the Server Room

    GNU/Linux on ARM should be a no-brainer for data-centres. There are outfits now jamming hundreds of ARMed cores into 2U.

  • Linux and the storage ecosystem

    Linux is many things, and its power lies in its ability to flexibly support vastly different usage models. But one of Linux’s most important strengths is serving as the workhorse of the storage domain. Thinking about Linux and storage commonly conjures an image of direct-attached disks or the latest file system, but there’s much more to storage and Linux than meets the eye. Elements in the Linux are not only stable but also cutting-edge.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 197 – Don’t Mess with the Gunmonkey!

  • LB – Episode 68.5 – Special Bonus Pre-Show Q&A from Ep. 68

  • Free as in Freedom: Episode 0x0C: Disturbing Debates

    Bradley and Karen discuss two debates going on in the free and open source software community. One recent and seemingly inflated, and one long and confusing.

  • FLOSS Weekly 159: Newspeak

    Newspeak is a new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk.

  • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 396

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Merge Window Closes With -rc1

    While we have already been benchmarking code for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel a fair amount at Phoronix with the Nouveau page-flipping and z-compression merge plus Nouveau Fermi acceleration, only this afternoon did Linus Torvalds tag the first release candidate for this next major kernel update.

  • Kernel Log: First release candidate for Linux 2.6.39

  • Linux Foundation announces the Linux.com Linux Gurus for 2011

    The non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Linux, the Linux Foundation, has announced its top five 2011 Linux.com Linux Gurus. The awarding of Guru status is intended to recognise those individuals that have made the greatest contribution to the linux.com community through their participation on the site, by writing blog posts, answering questions, and so on. The contributors earn points as they participate on the site, and these are totalled each year during the period from 16 February to 15 February the following year. The top five points earners are awarded Guru status.

  • Android and the Kernel: It is Not that Simple

  • LM_Sensors 3.3 Brings More Sensory Goodness

    This user-space software project now has support for intrusion detection sensors and humidity sensors. LM_Sensors 3.3.0 also provides support for many sub-features implemented by new hwmon drivers, some arbitrary limits have been removed from libsensors, there’s new generic limit printing code in the sensors utility, and there’s new chips known by the sensors-detect program. There’s also been the variety of i2c/hwmon kernel driver updates in succeeding Linux kernel releases since the release of LM_Sensors 3.2 last October.

  • Linux 2.6.39 RC1 debuts new block device plugging model

    Both Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 are on track to use the recently released Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which introduced some significant performance gains.

  • APM, and the value in Linux

  • Graphics Stack

    • Here’s The Special AMD Present For Ubuntu Users

      As talked about at length yesterday, the Catalyst 11.3 driver that was just released is not compatible with the X.Org Server 1.10 final ABI. What this means is that this proprietary Linux driver update will not work on Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other Linux distributions experiencing major updates. AMD for at least the past seven Ubuntu releases has been seeding Canonical with driver pre-releases to meet the support deadline on new versions of this popular Linux operating system. Over last night, they did this once more.

    • Using Gallium3D On AMD FirePro Workstation GPUs

      How well do AMD’s FireGL/FirePro workstation graphics cards work with the open-source graphics drivers for Linux? It’s something we never have really focused on up to this point, since after all, most workstation users are satisfied with using proprietary display drivers on Linux. It is the workstation market that drives the proprietary Linux driver development after all for AMD and NVIDIA, and that is really the focus of development, not Linux gamers or enthusiasts. But curiosity got the best of me, so here’s what happens if you try to use an expensive FirePro graphics card with the open-source driver stack and the Mesa Gallium3D driver.

    • PowerXpress Support Notebooks Under Linux

      As mentioned this morning when AMD provided Canonical with a Catalyst 11.4 driver pre-release for proprietary Radeon / FirePro support under Ubuntu 11.04, there’s more than just support for Linux 2.6.38 kernel and X.Org Server 1.10. This Linux driver update also provides support for AMD PowerXpress with dual-GPU notebooks.

    • The AMD “Radeon HD 8000″ Open-Source Milestone

      The discussion surrounding issues with the Linux kernel DRM code has been quite interesting. From the 40+ comments so far, there’s been some interesting feedback from some of the key open-source driver developers along with AMD. In particular, the generation to succeed the next-generation of AMD graphics processors (what will be the “Radeon HD 8000 series” if they continue with the same marketing names) should be a pivotal moment for AMD’s open-source strategy.

    • NVIDIA GeForce 400 “Fermi” Series On Nouveau

      With NVIDIA still not providing any open-source support or technical documentation for their graphics processors, for those in the open-source community who seek to use their GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” GPUs without NVIDIA’s binary driver, they are left to use the reverse-engineered, community-created Nouveau driver. Fortunately, the support for the NVIDIA Fermi GPUs is coming along at a respectable pace — with even working OpenGL acceleration — considering that NVIDIA is providing no support at all. In this article are the first benchmarks of this experimental GeForce 400/500 “Nouveau NVC0″ driver versus NVIDIA’s official proprietary driver.

    • AMD Catalyst 11.3 Drops Support For Old X.Org

      With the month ending, Linux users were beginning to wonder where is this month’s proprietary driver update, but AMD’s web team has just uploaded the Catalyst 11.3 binary Linux driver. What’s changed though in this month’s update? Read on to find out.

• Applications

  • 9 Good CD and DVD Burning Tools for Ubuntu/Linux

    There is no dearth of good CD/DVD burning tools for Ubuntu. Brasero Disc Burner comes as default in Ubuntu and it is a good enough tool with almost all functionalities you expect from a basic CD/DVD burning application. But what really are the alternatives. Here is a quick listing of very good CD/DVD burning applications available for Linux(in no particular order). Read on.

  • Music Production in Linux 1

  • POV-Ray – A whole new level of 3D art

    Recently, I’ve ramped up my dabbling in 3D art. I’m going to continue exploring Kerkythea. I have shown you the program basics, but our next task is to start using the SketchUp plugin to export my 3D models. Hopefully, this won’t prove a too dazzling task for my brain. I will also try Blender. There’s another cute Windows-only program called anim8or. That shalt be tried, too. More plugins, exports, animations, fancy stuff.

    With luck, in the coming weeks and months, the 3D section will grow beyond what it has today, covering all sorts of otherworldly beauties. But let’s focus on POV-Ray. Truly amazing. I’m speechless.

  • Hotot: Give this new Linux twitter client a tweet

  • GIMP in Google Summer of Code 2011

    One of the tasks that we want to offer students in this year’s GSoC is porting GIMP plug-ins to GEGL operations. This is a very interesting task and if you are a student with experience in C programming, be sure to consider it.

  • Scribes Is A Very Interesting, Minimalistic Text Editor With Remote Editing Support

    In my quest to find the perfect text editor (for me), I’ve stumbled upon Scribes and I was quite impressed with its simplicity and features so I though it deserves a post on WebUpd8.

  • The Board 0.1.2

    It turns out that The Board‘s distro packages were a great success! The PPA package alone has been downloaded more then 330 times in just a week. Not bad for package only available for an unreleased version of Ubuntu. And I’m not even counting the implicit testers using the GNOME 3 live image. I’ve got some useful feedback from early testers and I expect get even more from now on.

  • 9 Good CD and DVD Burning Tools for Ubuntu/Linux

  • iotop – simple top-like I/O monitor

    iotop does for I/O usage what top does for CPU usage. It watches I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. It is handy for answering the question “Why is the disk churning so much?”.

  • When does it make sense to package software?

    At the most basic level, as I (a non-packager) understand it, packaging software makes it easier for someone else to deploy it. Repeatedly, identically, easily, in an automated manner.That’s it. That’s the big deal. So the question of do I want this software packaged? becomes would it be in my interest to make it easy for other people to deploy this software?

    This means that answering the question “should it be packaged?” isn’t actually about looking at the software, per se. Instead, you look how the situation of a group of people would change if the deployability of the software changed.

  • Indicator Applet To Mount CD / DVD Images: Mounty

    Mounty is a very simple indicator applet you can use to mount CD / DVD images. It supports ISO, IMG, BIN, MDF and NRG and besides mounting, it can also burn the images to a CD/DVD.

  • UMPlayer, Mplayer Fork With Interesting Features

    I have reviewed several video players in the past that use MPlayer as a core component. This includes my favorite video player SMPlayer but also KMPlayer (just received an update to version 3) or MPlayer WW. UMplayer is another MPlayer fork with some interesting new features that you won’t find in the other players. I do not want to say to much but I’m pretty impressed by the video player.

  • Proprietary

    • Sharing some bash-script-fu: Re-installing Flash dependencies

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Debian Squeeze Desktop (Nvidia GeForce 8200)

    • 10 Useful Sar (Sysstat) Examples for UNIX / Linux Performance Monitoring

    • How To Install Managing News On Ubuntu

    • Introduction to the Editing Operators in Blender

    • Software RAID on Linux with mdadm

    • WiFi Extension Problem Solved: DD-WRT

    • Paravirtualization With Xen 4.0 On Debian Squeeze (AMD64)

    • How to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal | Desktop & Server

    • Multi-Booting with Legacy Grub and Grub2

    • How to copy Flash Video in Firefox 4

    • How to Install and Setup Gcc 4.1(g++4.1) in Ubuntu 10.04/10.10

    • How to harden RHEL systems

    • Configuring the BeagleBoard to have network over usb0

    • Dragan Effect, Gimp Tutorial for draganized photos.

    • How To Install Liquorix (Kernel) In Ubuntu

    • Understanding Parallel Computing: Amdahl’s Law

    • Clonezilla – Cloning Disk to Remote Disk

    • Customize a Distro with Remastersys

    • tee

    • Check out NX remote access for Linux and Solaris systems

    • Use Linux and WebDAV to Facilitate Online Collaboration

    • The Needle and the Haystack—Part 1

    • Fix cannot connect to wired Internet problem in Ubuntu or Ubuntu vmware guest

    • CRASH your system

    • How to Customize Your Grub Screen With BURG Manager

    • Time your time

    • How to turn off laptop monitor in Debian/Ubuntu ?

    • Vi Editing Mode for Bash

    • Bash One-Liner to Determine Mountpoint from UUID

    • Boot Linux From a Portable USB Drive With Universal USB Installer

    • Now That You’ve Found Love What Are You Gonna Do?

    • E-sata, solid, and udisks

    • Metasploit—101 with Meterpreter payload

    • Extract unique IP addresses from an apache log

    • Extra Repositories for All Ubuntu Distros

    • python2-distribute: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.pyo exists in filesystem

    • Create a Shiny Logo Animation

    • Get information about packages through yaourt

    • How to fix the “federated domain” problem in emesene

    • Howto install ATI Display driver in Ubuntu

    • Introduction to the Editing Operators in Blender

    • How to Change the Ubuntu Linux Login Screen

    • Ubuntu Linux: How to Convert from HTML to JPG

    • How to control Ubuntu from the command line

    • Lilypond – A program for typesetting sheet music

    • Find Out If When Your Favourite PPAs Are Updated For Ubuntu 11.04 With This Script

    • Tip: Code for getting DHCP address from a virtual machine disk image

    • F.Lux for a better life ..

    • ImageMagick: Make thumbs of images

    • Create large files of random information

    • How To Install FFmbc on Debian Testing

    • Ubuntu Development Guide: Fixing a bug in Ubuntu

    • Music Production in Linux 2

    • Howto: Find the uptime and system load of a Linux machine using uptime command

    • JStock, Free Stock Market Software

    • WiFi Extension Problem Solved: DD-WRT

    • Use Ubuntu To Convert Movies For Android

    • Changing vmware vmnet bridged physical network interface

  • Wine

    • ReactOS 0.3.13 Brings Lots Of Improvements

      In working on some Phoronix Test Suite improvements for Wine / CodeWeavers today and another code push this afternoon, I checked on the ReactOS site only to find that a new release was made last week and hasn’t yet received much attention from the web.

  • Games

    • Spotlight on Linux: Supergamer Supreme 2.5

      Supergamer is, as you might guess, a Linux distribution whose main focus is on gaming. It’s based on a lighter distributions, features a light desktop, and is chocked full of games and demos. It began life in the Spring of 2006 and was received with great enthusiasm.

    • L.G.C. |B-Reel| — 0 A.D. Alpha 4 Daedalus – First Look

    • Ryan “Icculus” Gordon Will Be Talking This Weekend

    • Half-Life 2 On The Phoronix Test Suite

      As some may have heard, via Twitter or in other communications, with Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad we’ll be ramping up several key areas of our open-source benchmarking software and with our collaborative testing platform, OpenBenchmarking.org, and our continuous integration system, Phoromatic. From this already, Half-Life 2 and 3DMark are running by the Phoronix Test Suite.

    • BEEP, New Space Explorer and Platformer Coming to Linux in April

      Big Fat Alien, a Kelowna based indie game development studio is coming up with new fun space explorer and platformer for Linux in this April called BEEP.

    • Snapshot

    • Spring Engine – Ready for prime time?

      Spring technology is far, far from being mature and ready for the common gaming markets. The vast amount of preparation steps needs to get the game going, the bundle of glitches and errors and cryptic messages, the difficulty in getting the games downloaded and setup, all of these make Spring feel like an early alpha-quality concept rather than a true game engine. The potential is there, however it has not been tapped.

      My biggest disappointment is the high expectation I had. Having taken a look at the official websites and the lovely screenshots shown there, I was expecting a visual culinary blast, instead I was greeted with bland, late 90s graphics and a non-inspiring gameplay. Riddled with technical difficulties, Spring left a sour taste in my proverbial mouth. Now that I know how to handle the setup issues, future testing will be easier, but I’m not sure when Spring will become an exciting, marketable product.

      At the moment, it pains me to say, but Spring is not ready for prime time. Grade: 3/10. But hope shall not wither. Maybe in a year or so, I shall revisit my review. For now, the one true free RTS is still a dream.

    • Postal III Pushed Back, Linux Fate Unknown

      A month ago we heard the Source-based Postal III game was planned for a Linux release from Vince Desi, the CEO of Running With Scissors. At that point we heard they were planning for a May release of the game, but now it looks like it’s been pushed back to being a “summer” release and the state of the Linux client for Postal III is a bit less hopeful.

• Desktop Environments

  • KDE or GNOME?

    Why KDE? I don’t know… I sat down once and decided to put all the pros and contras of KDE and GNOME in one list. Result was quite strange… Kubuntu had same number of “pros” and “contras” on KDE side. While GNOME only gave me “pros” and no significant “contra”. So, there is something irrational which makes me to choos KDE when I boot my laptop.

  • Common user interface mistakes in KDE applications, part 4: Being GNOME friendly

    This time I want to talk about being GNOME friendly. While that may sound odd for a KDE developer to think about GNOME, assuming we want our applications to reach the largest possible audience, we should try to ensure GNOME users get a pleasurable experience. After all, a user is a user, there are efforts going on to ensure KDE works well on Windows and Mac OS X, I think we should also take care of GNOME users. They are at least as likely if not more likely to contribute back to our applications.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • the fun in banging our heads together

      After sitting on a train for four hours that whisked me through the countryside of Switzerland and into Germany, I am sitting in a room in Darmstadt that is full of familiar faces, along with one or two less familiar ones.

      For instance, it’s been a few years since I had the opportunity to meet up with Eva, who was KDE e.V. president before I was, and even longer since I got to sit down with Stefan Werden and discuss high level topics about Free software, distributions, KDE, etc. In fact, I think the last time I met up with Stefan for an extended visit was at the Appeal meeting in Berlin all those years ago. We’ve passed each other at conferences a few times since, but today and tomorrow we’re sitting down to really bang our heads together about (what else?) Plasma.

    • Camp KDE: Latest Updates

      Camp KDE 2011 is nearly upon us, but that hasn’t stopped the organizers from continuing to add to the fun. Be sure to check out the Camp KDE web site for the final agenda as well as speaker bios.

    • KDE Software Powers New Consumer-Oriented Computer

      Damien Tardy-Panis interviewed Robert Konopka, one of the founders of Xompu, to find out more about the company and why they chose KDE software. Read on to find out more about Xompu, what they think of KDE and our software, and news on job opportunities with the company.

    • Modern Art: A Look at Krita 2.3

    • 5 More Intriguing KDE Apps

      Ever so often, I take a stroll over to KDE-Apps.org and look at some of the fantastic creations people from the KDE community develop. There are a wide range of apps in nearly every category, but I have selected 5 that stand out and would be very useful additions to my desktop and hopefully yours too. All of these apps are either new or have been recently updated within the past few months.

    • KDE’s Dolphin tips and tricks

    • Nostalgia for those ALSA mixer channels that KMix and GNOME Volume Control used to have?

    • Build a device scalable user interface

    • Menu Button inside Window Decorations

      Peter Penz blogged about removing the Menu from Dolphin. While this is very interesting and nice looking I have a better idea: why not move the menu into the decoration? All what we need is already there. We have the awesome DBus Menu which allows us to send the menu to any other application (in most cases Plasma). So we could use this technology to direct the menu from the window into its decoration. Of course the menu should not be presented in its full completeness but be compacted into one dropdown menu – just like in the Netbook Shell.

    • Buy digiKam Tricks Book, Win a Bag of Photo Goodies

      Time for another giveaway. This time, anyone who buys the digiKam Tricks book has a chance to win a classy f/stop Dial Wristband and a Lomography notebook. As always, the rules are simple: when you buy a copy of the digiKam book, you automatically enter the giveaway. If you buy the book via Amazon, please send me your order confirmation as proof of purchase.

    • New KDE Polishes Linux but Leaves a Few Little Streaks

      The latest KDE version is well worth moving from its GNOME counterpart.

    • the fun in banging our heads together

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Gnome shell extension: new video shows-off the beast within

    • Adventures in the shell

      After months of envy, I decided that since GNOME 3 is to be released in almost two weeks, it was time to try it out. I must say that is is pretty damn cool. Yes, it has a few annoying bugs and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first release. It is definitely going in the right direction.

    • GNOME 3 Hackfest, Day One

      We have three release team members present. They have told us that they, assisted by Ryan Lortie, will be doing ‘release team things’. The rest of us are mainly busy with marketing and GNOME.Asia organisation. Our websites are a particular focus for the marketing work. Andreas has already added Jason’s first GNOME 3 video to www.gnome3.org as well as a countdown timer. We’re also going to be doing a lot of work on the new gnome.org. We’ll keep you posted as the changes roll in.

    • gnome-color-manager and profiles

      GNOME Color Manager has shown 2D CIE 1931 plots for a couple of years now, but as all color savvy people know, a gamut is a 3D object, and a 2D slice can be horribly inaccurate and misleading sometimes.

    • GNOME3 Live Image version 0.3.0 released

      Release team decided to do another call for tarballs to fix some bugs across the entire GNOME3 platform, so 2.91.93 was released yesterday.

    • GnomeICU is no more

      On July 9, 2000, my first patch to a Free Software project was accepted. It was a patch to fix a small bug in GnomeICU, which was then the best ICQ client for GNOME.

    • On the road to GNOME 3.0

    • GNOME3 live image 0.3.1 released

      As always, you can download it from http://gnome3.org/tryit.html. If you want to install this image on a system, just add “liveinstall” on the boot command line.

    • Another way to try GNOME 3

      Frederik Crozat has been doing a fantastic job of making it easy to try out GNOME 3. To complement his OpenSuSE based live images, we are happy to present a Fedora-based GNOME 3 preview. While this image is based Fedora 15 (beta), it is not the same as the Fedora desktop spin, e.g. it is not installable. We expect to re-spin this image with the final bits for the 3.0 release next week.

    • GNOME:Ayatana – being populated

    • the book was better

      Here is a cute video of a benchmark I’ve been looking at in recent times. It’s nice because it not only shows the performance improvements, but also the themeing fixes that were applied. The benchmark shows glade starting up and loading a huge glade file with 4 different GTK versions. It starts with executing glade on the command line and ends with the app quitting when it’s done loading.

• Distributions

  • Linux distros build on Conary package system

    The Foresight Linux project released Foresight Linux 2.5, the first major release of this rolling-release Linux distro in two years, featuring Linux 2.6.35, GNOME 2.32.1, KDE 4.6.1, and Xfce 4.8. Meanwhile, rPath released rPath X6, a specialized Linux distro and appliance-building system that, like Foresight, is based on the Conary package manager.

  • Slitaz Linux 3.0- An awesome 30 Mo Linux distribution

    SliTaz GNU/Linux is a mini distribution and live CD designed to run speedily on hardware with 256 MB of RAM. SliTaz uses BusyBox, a recent Linux kernel and GNU software.

  • My Move From Arch To Aptosid

    I recently moved over to Aptosid, and after a few days of using it I think it’s going to be a keeper as a replacement for Arch. While it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I would share my experience of moving – from the perspective of someone who has used Arch Linux for over a year. I’ll give a little background, then a brief summary, then some real details on how I got some things to work.

  • Reviews

    • Zenwalk Linux 7.0

      In summary, I am pretty impressed with Zenwalk Linux 7.0. It looks good and it works well, as long as you don’t have a netbook which needs the latest Broadcom wireless driver. I will probably keep it as the primary distribution on my HP 2133, and once the brcm80211 driver is included in it, I will be considering it for some of the others.

    • First looks at GhostBSD 2.0 and Kororaa Linux 14

  • New Releases

    • Announcing Foresight Linux 2.5.0

    • Foresight Linux 2.5.0!

    • Particularly Exciting Week in Linux

      Linux is usually exciting, but this past week brought several nice developments. Slackware announced another developmental milestone for their next version. Bodhi Linux reached 1.0. Foresight announced their first release in two years. Zenwalk developers released version 7.0. And SimplyMepis gets a release candidate.

    • Something about Slackware

      Slackware server hosting is one of the newest trends in domain hosting that is allowing many users to move from a Windows hosting platform. There are a lot of clients that are accustomed to Windows hosting, but loads of clients are seeking new hosting environments.

      Slackware isn’t exactly a new environment, but it has maintained a widespread use since its inception in 1993. It never quite gained the same popularity as Windows, but it has managed to be popular enough to move from one version to the next.

    • MEPIS 11 RC1: A Quick, Informal Glimpse

      Even though I’m already running MEPIS 11 Beta 3 as my production system, I downloaded the RC version 1 to test it.

      The Live DVD booted with no issue on my box. That’s great. I still need to try it on older systems, so I’ll wait a bit.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva Application Manager preview

      Today we have posted the first publicly available screencast of the new Mandriva Application Manager (MAM) on youtube. It shows the basic look&feel.

      [...]

      Soon we are are going to deliver the first alpha (at least a tech preview) too.

    • Mageia 1 Alpha2 — A Status Report

      On September 18, 2010, in response to Mandriva’s liquidation of its “Edge-IT” subsidiary and the attendant layoff of a substantial share of its developers, a group consisting of former Mandriva developers and Mandriva community contributers announced their intention to form a non-profit organization and release a fork of Mandriva Linux called Mageia Linux.

    • Awesome 3.4.9 available in Mageia

      I’m very glad to announce that awesome is available in Mageia since last week

    • New Mageia Forums Bring Community Together

  • Red Hat Family

    • BPEL engine on Red Hat’s shopping list

      Open source operating system and middleware firm Red Hat may be about to bulk out is JBoss middleware line through acquisition, CBR has learned.

      The news was confirmed in a CBR interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who said that now that the firm is approaching the billion dollar revenue mark, acquisitions are on the cards.

    • Red Hat the Master Packager: Open Source and the $1bn annual runrate company

    • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) CEO & President James M Whitehurst sells 25,000 Shares

    • Sohaib Abbasi Joins Red Hat’s Board of Directors, Company Welcomes Back Dr. Steve Albrecht

    • Geek Of The Week: Máirín Duffy

      Duffy is a Senior Interaction Designer for Red Hat. She leads the Fedora design team. Máirín is an avid artist, and she happens to be very involved in the OSS (open source software) community. Needless to say, she is a huge fan of Inkscape. Duffy is also a contributor on the GNOME project, and co-founder of GNOMEWomen.

    • Are Companies Evil?

      Recently I saw a blog on Red Hat and its decision to pay a company for the use of that company’s royalty bearing patented software. The author of the column lambasted Red Hat because (in the author’s opinion) Red Hat had (on one hand) stated a policy against software patents, and (on the other hand) seemed to be “encouraging patent trolls”.

    • Red Hat targeting UK growth in ‘non-traditional sectors’

      Open source supplier Red Hat is growing its business quickly in non-traditional markets in the UK, mirroring US expansion, according to chief executive Jim Whitehurst.

      Whitehurst told Computerworld UK that while Linux had a deep presence in financial, telecoms and military sectors, Red Hat predicts fast growth in other markets where a number of companies are moving away from Unix.

    • Fedora

      • Introducing /run

        So, this is what is implemented for F15 now. For F16 we will make a
        minor change on top of this: /var/run and /var/lock will become symlinks to /run (resp /run/lock), so that we don’t have to use bind mounts anymore which are not the most beautiful thing to use by default, and confusing to the admin. Due to the implications of symlinks and RPM we didn’t want to make that change in F15.

      • My thoughts about Fedora 15

        In short, it is awesome.

      • Fedora 15 status and so on

        One thing I’ve found is that I’m liking GNOME 3 more and more recently.

      • Fedora 16 naming vote delay

      • Slipping over the edge

        On a Sunday a few weeks ago, I finally decided to take the plunge and install the Fedora 15 Alpha on my primary workstation. I’ve been using GNOME Shell pretty much exclusively since Fedora 13, and I was looking forward to an even cleaner setup as it got closer to its first official release. The installation went smoothly, and, soon enough, I had the new interface up and running, and, I have to say, it’s looking great!

      • Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04: The Battle for Linux Desktop Supremacy

        Though Fedora and Ubuntu have taken contrasting approaches, they’ll both offer the new-to-Linux user two high quality choices.

      • And so it ends now

        Now this guy was a Fedora Ambassador and imho a good one, promoting Fedora and teaching new users how to get their systems up and running. But now he is no more an Ambassador. Why?… because some guys here think that the Freedom preached by this community ends when it comes to talk about Fedora.

        So if you are a fedora ambassador, promote the freedom we provide under our terms!!… wait.. that sounds weird…. oh yes… its a bit of contradictory isnt it? This guy was banned as a fedora ambassador for teaching on a blog post how to configure some UI things in a Windows 7 virtual machine, how to install Flash player under Fedora (omg he’s so evil!!), for explaining his blog followers how hi did to get some stuff working even if they are not the Fedora ‘standards’ for doing things.

      • Fedora 15 & GNOME3, initial impression

        So I upgraded my machine to Fedora 15 last night using preupgrade, and spent hours in trying to clean up my /home from ancient stuff since way back to Fedora 5 as they were causing weird issues.

        To those who are wondering: No, Fedora 15 beta is not out yet, its still in late alpha. Beta should be released in few weeks time, but I’m too excited to wait :P. Check out the Fedora 15 schedule for details on release dates.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian 6 Squeeze review – nearly, but not quite…

      Debian Squeeze is a good choice if you want to run a server or a desktop with stable packages and a couple of years of security patches, even more if your hardware is from an exotic architecture.

    • Debian 6 – does it get the credit it deserves? Absolutely not!

    • Debian Project News – March 28th, 2011

    • Debian and Arch

      I’ve mentioned two or three times now that I have been spending a lot of time in Arch and Debian these days. I hold both distros in equally high regard for being fast, light and good starting points for outdated machines.

      Debian gets points for reaching all the way back to the 486 generation, which means I can use it on my very very old systems. At the same time though, I find myself floating back to Arch more often than not.

    • SimplyMEPIS 11.0 nears Final with RC1 Release

      Warren Woodford has uploaded SimplyMEPIS 10.9.94, the first release candidate of MEPIS 11.0. This RC is available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.94_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.94_64.iso.

    • Fixed ISO images for Debian 6.0.1 released

      In each of the cases listed above, the failure case has been analysed and is understood. Fixes for all of the problems have been developed, and replacement images have been produced and tested. Following our normal naming scheme, the new images are versioned 6.0.1a to denote the bugfix rebuild.

    • Bits from the Release Team – Kicking off Wheezy

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Goodbye Ubuntu 9.10

        Dear Ubuntu 9.10 users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Karmic Koala release of the popular Ubuntu operating system. One month from today, on April 29th, it reaches end of life (EOL).

      • Ubuntu 9.10 reaches end-of-life on April 30 2011

      • First Look: Ubuntu 11.04 Beta

        Tomorrow, March 31st, Canonical will unleash to the world the first Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, due for release on April 28th, 2011.

      • Amazon.com Releases Ubuntu & Linux Mint Compatible Music Cloud Drive and Player!

      • Ubuntu 11.04 Beta released, reviewed

      • Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Beta 1 Released – Review and Screenshots

        If you have used Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition interface, you will be familiar with Unity. Unity interface is made of a launcher on the left where active application windows, pinned application shortcuts and unity-places are shown. On the top left corner there is an Ubuntu icon that shows dash menu with shortcuts. The panel on top is not customizable and movable and on the right, all the app-indicators stack up. Unity launcher also supports quick-lists and some applications like Gwibber, Shutter, Take Screenshot etc. are already using them.

      • Full Circle #47 – out NOW!

      • First Command to Run After Installing Ubuntu

      • Balancing Freedom and Functionality: A Design Challenge

      • Narwhal rising

        That’s the first thing that went through my head when I learned that the next version of Ubuntu Linux, Release 11.04, would be codenamed Natty Narwhal, in keeping with the tradition of alliterative animal names.

        Since 1996, I’ve been through Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gusty Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Karmic Koala, Lucid Lynx and Maverick Meerkat, though I had skipped a version or two.

        A narwhal, as it turns out, is an arctic whale, a sign, perhaps, that cool things are coming with the next release of Ubuntu, which is expected on April 28. Earlier in March, Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor, released the third alpha test version of the operating system, and was scheduled to make available two beta versions before the final release version.

      • Ubuntu’s Non-Free Parabox

        I’m a big proponent of “nonfree offsetting” (few people are, but I’m sticking to my guns); If Canonical wants to ship nonfree Flash instead of almost fully working GNU Gnash, then they should be willing to offset their balance with adequate investment into the free software alternative; i.e. they should be putting money into Gnash.

      • Ubuntu’s Contributions

        I’m not going to try and re-fight the old battles about who contributes and who doesn’t, or who contributes more or should contribute more. I just wanted to show one area where I think Ubuntu is a top contributor: putting the “community” in open source.

      • Here Is A Solution For Ubuntu’s Adobe Flash Problem

      • The Ubuntu Alien Conspiracy [Wallpaper]

      • Four New Features Coming to Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’

        The combination of Ubuntu Linux’s growing popularity with all the big changes coming up in the next version mean that Natty Narwhal, or Ubuntu 11.04, might just be the most widely and anxiously anticipated release of the open source operating system ever.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Elementary OS Pulling an Elive – Charging for Linux?

          Huh – pre-orders are usually needed only by software that requires a cost to download… Upon clicking on the link was I redirected to paypal with the item “elementary: Jupiter” in my order summary. I’ve read a few things around the internet about Elementary OS and I was keen to give it a try, but after having paid for Elive I don’t think I’ll ever be using a Linux based OS again that requires me to pony up some green for it.

        • Bodhi Linux 1.0 review

          I liked from the beginning the idea behind Bodhi Linux and so I followed the progress of this young version of Linux and take advantage of version 1.0 (congratulations to Jeff and the entire team) to make a review.

          For the uninitiated Bodhi Linux is a recent project that taking as a base Ubuntu 10.04 “reconstructs” the Enlightenment desktop, it use the login system manager of LXDE (and also as the terminal) and offers its own package system (.bod); The system being based on Ubuntu is still compatible with .deb and dpkg and aptitude can be used without problems.

        • Bodhi Linux: Interview with Jeff Hoogland

          I have recently become smitten with the Bodhi Linux distribution. It’s melding of the Enlightenment desktop and the Ubuntu distribution makes for quite a solid and speedy distribution. Because this distribution is fairly new to the scene, I thought it would be a good idea to interview one of the developers, so you can get a better idea where Bodhi Linux comes from.

          1. What made you decide to begin Bodhi Linux?

        • Pinguy OS 10.10 (64 bit)

          PinguyOS is one I hadn’t heard of until recently. It seems to be just a baby, in Linux distro terms, although I say that not due to size or its features, but because of its age. PinguyOS only came onto the scene sometime in 2010. The distribution is an offshoot of Ubuntu, and therefore follows its six-month release cycle and simple naming. PinguyOS 10.10 64bit. My new distro for the week.

          PinguyOS comes as a LiveDVD. As expected of a Live DVD, it comes packed with features! In fact, this has to be the most feature-packed distros I have seen to date.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • MeeGo and Symbian: How Long Will the Bodies Stay Warm?

        After Nokia revealed its partnership with Microsoft, many developers began regarding MeeGo and Symbian as sinking ships. However, they’re not being immediately ditched by the world’s biggest phone maker. Nokia’s still selling Symbian devices, and many millions still exist in the hands of consumers. But how long will it be before these platforms really do run out of gas for good?

    • Android

      • Android will lead smartphone market this year, says IDC

      • Android/Linux Predicted to have a Near-Monopoly of Smartphones by 2015

        IDC predicts 450million smart phones will ship in 2011. That’s a big number. About the same as “PC” shipments. Linux will be on a lot of them, about 39.5%.

      • Absolute Android apps

        With thousands of Android apps to choose from everyone has their favourite. These are some out our picks

        If you’re an Android user there are literally thousands of apps to choose from in the Android Market. Which is great for variety but a nightmare to find the ones that you really will use versus the ones that will simply take up space on your mobile phone or tablet PC.

      • Abandoning Android: Thoughts on the future of FOSS on modern devices

        Android’s development model has always been flawed. Google develops it behind closed doors and then makes the source available after each major release. This puts Android in the strange position of being FOSS only after development on a release is complete. During development it is closed. This has often raised my suspicion but I’ve never considered it more than an annoyance. I’d often wished that Android was developed out in the open by a larger community than just Google; however, having Android be FOSS by the time it got to me has always been sweet enough to stomach the sour taste of closed development. Now, with the recent announcement of Google’s intention to keep Android 3.0 closed source for some unknown length of time, it is clear this can no longer be ignored. Google, and thus Android, cannot be trusted.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Hercules Launches New eCAFE Netbooks

      Hercules has launched a new range of eCAFE netbooks, the eCAFE Slim HD and the eCAFE EX HD, both models are designed to be ultra portable, and the EX HD is designed to provide up to 13 hours of usage.

      Both models comes with a Cortex A8 processor, and Linux as the OS, you get 512MB of RAM a standard and 8GB of storage in the eCAFE Slim HD or 16GB of storage in the eCAFE EX HD, plus 50GB of online storage.

    • Linux and ARM Power New 10-Inch Netbooks

      Hardware maker Hercules this week gave Linux fans a nice boost by unveiling two new additions to its eCAFÉ netbook line that use ARM processors and run the open source operating system.

Free Software/Open Source

• OSI: The Open Source Road Ahead

  http://robertogaloppini.net/2011/03/31/osi-the-open-source-road-ahead/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CommercialOpenSourceSoftware+%28Commercial+Open+Source+Software%29

• It isn’t open source if it doesn’t pass “The patch test”.

  I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source. The license just helps pass the sniff test. I use one other test which I like to call “The Patch Test”.

• NASA concludes first Open Source Summit, aims to make openness the default

  NASA has been implementing an Open Government Plan for nearly a year, and this week they held the first NASA Open Source Summit in Mountain View, CA. But the roots of open source at NASA go back much further, to its founding legislation in 1958, which designed NASA as a source that would “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information”–a goal perfectly suited to an open approach.

• Google to NASA: Open source will not kill you

  Google open source guru Chris DiBona has called on NASA to use more open source code in its aerospace program, urging the government agency to test free software in unmanned flights and “blow-up some robots.”

  “I’ve heard people say: ‘We don’t want to endanger flights. We don’t want to endanger lives. Open source software comes from unknown sources.’ But that’s not what open source software is,” DiBona told gathered NASA employees on Wednesday at NASA’s inaugural Open Source Summit at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. “Open source software is still software. You have to make sure it fits your mission. You have to make sure it provides utility and security and the ‘bug-free-ed-ness’ you’re looking for. It’s just software.

• My NASA presentation: “Open Source Governance for your Organization”

  Today I’m giving a presentation at the NASA Open Source Summit at the NASA Ames Conference Center in Mountain View, CA. The talk is called “Open Source Governance for your Organization” and is based on my experience within IBM in the last few years and what I have written in this blog.

• Free Software needs Free Speech!

  You might think that a good program is all about good programming. But for a number of applications, the barrier to success isn’t programming at all. Some of the most interesting projects nowadays — speech recognition, for example — rely on machine-learning from databases of information. It’s not enough to write free software for these applications, we have to also provide that software with the right data. Contributing to these projects is needed from a much larger group of people, but it also can be very easy to do.

• Yahoo Plans to Open Source Code for Non-core Technologies

  Yahoo plans to release some technologies, including storage technologies, to the open source community, a senior executive of the company said.

• Open Source Software Tools And Directories: Where To Find Them, How To Evaluate Them

• 8 Ways Companies Can Contribute to Open Source Communities

  Open source software (OSS) is recognized for the cost savings it delivers when compared with proprietary alternatives. As enterprises continue to adopt OSS, the open source communities, mostly made up of volunteers, have been calling on enterprises to make contributions and donations with the aim of fostering open source software innovation and growth.

  With more that 1,000 open source communities in existence today, enterprises have many options when choosing where to contribute. With each community potentially delivering enterprise-grade technology, large companies have many reasons to keep open source alive and well. How can enterprises evaluate which communities to work with and how to get involved? Here are some suggestions.

• Events

  • Upcoming Open Source Webinars: MongoDB, Nuxeo, Scilab

  • ABLEconf Announces 2011 Keynote

  • Linux Fest Northwest 2011 & Oil Rush Giveaway!

    In fact, even if you’ve never touched a GNU/Linux based computer there are sessions and activities for you too! Throughout the entire Linux Fest Northwest weekend the Tutorium is open with several repeated mini-sessions running throughout and skilled volunteers looking to help and introduce new users (and potential new users) to GNU/Linux!

  • Setting up a conference: Part I – Determining Theme, Time and Place

  • Setting Up A Conference: Part 2 – Speakers…no, no, Sponsors!

  • Texas Linufest is just around the corner.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • FireSSH- A Firefox add-on to run SSH client in your browser

    • Mozilla’s Do Not Track header gaining ad industry support

      One of the new features that Mozilla introduced in Firefox 4 is a Do Not Track (DNT) setting. When the user enables the DNT option in the browser’s preference dialog, Firefox will transmit a custom header in HTTP requests that will inform servers that the user wants to opt out of Internet tracking. The concept has obvious merit because it provides a simpler, more predictable, and more consistent approach than the cookie-based mechanisms that are currently used today to signify opt-out status.

    • Firefox 4 leads IE9 in downloads and usage

    • Firefox 4 includes new feature for thwarting web attacks

      The latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, version 4, was released this week with a number of new security features, including a mechanism for preventing web-based attacks.

      One of the new security features, called Content Security Policy (CSP), is enabled by default and designed to stop common web-based attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and data injection, by providing a mechanism for sites to explicitly tell the browser which content is legitimate, according to Mozilla.

    • Firefox 4 borked by Compiz bug in Linux

    • 15 handy Firefox 4 tips and tricks

      Firefox 4 is the best Firefox yet, and it’s packed with useful tricks and features that can make your online life easier.

    • Firefox 5 Preview Available, Stable On April 13

      Mozilla is already offering a preview of the next-generation Firefox 5 for download and is planning on providing a stabilized version in about two weeks. Firefox 5 final is expected to arrive in the week of June 29.

    • 3 Best Ways To Speed Up Firefox 4 Browser

      Firefox 4 is special in many senses. Mozilla has made sure that this time users would love this browser in every aspect, whether it would be performance or display. We would be sharing some wonderful tips which would let you speed up Firefox 4.

    • Firefox 4 Tips: Bend the New Browser to Your Will

      Mozilla released Firefox 4 last week. I’m trying hard to like the new browser, but it keeps finding ways to annoy me. First, it moved the Reload button for no good reason (same for the Home button, but that’s just as easily fixed). Second, it put the tabs at the top of the screen (again, easily fixed). Third, and most important, a bunch of my favorite add-ons stopped working. Luckily, I’ve come up with a few ways to fix the interface quirks that are driving me nuts and solve the extension compatibility problem.

    • Firefox 5 Preview Available Now

      It turns out that Mozilla was not kidding. Firefox 5 is already in the works and can actually already be downloaded as a preview.

    • Mozilla kills embedding support for Gecko layout engine – Update

      Mozilla has officially ended support for embedding the Gecko layout engine in applications other than Mozilla core applications. The move will have an impact on any application which has used the Firefox layout engine in their applications and the first to announce that it will have to make significant changes is the Camino browser. A layout engine provides all the functionality needed to take HTML or other web content and convert it into a displayable form.

      In a posting to mozilla.dev.embedding, Embedding Module owner Benjamin Smedberg said that Mozilla had been considering the future for embedding Gecko in other applications. He cites the difficulty involved to date, the expected complexity of moving to a multiple process model and the desire to “strongly prioritize” Firefox as the key product of Mozilla. There is a possibility that embedding support could return in the future after Mozilla has moved Firefox to a multi-process model, but the developers are not going to prioritise that as a goal in their design work.

• SaaS

  • Cloud Hype Can Mask Silver Lining

    When, as Gingras pointed out, it’s been reduced by Microsoft’s cloud commercials to the answer to all of life’s problems, we’ve clearly reached a level of complete absurdity. You need to fix that family picture? Go to the cloud. You bored at the airport? Go to the cloud.

  • Some Thoughts on Diaspora

• Databases

  • A migrator’s guide to Drizzle

    The stable release of Drizzle has generated a lot of interest in migrating previous MySQL web sites to Drizzle. The good news for people attempting such migrations is that this isn’t incredibly difficult in many cases; this article will describe what to look out for and how to go about converting a web site or any other database related project.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Planning JDK 8, and beyond

    We already know what some of the big-ticket items are likely to be. There’ll be room for other features too, however, both large and small. It’s therefore time to define a simple process for collecting, sorting, reviewing, and prioritizing proposals and plans for new features, for JDK 8 and for later releases.

  • [LibreOffice] GSoc Ideas

  • 20 things we’d change about OpenOffice.org

    OpenOffice.org is a huge lumbering beast.

    Don’t get us wrong, we like it in principle and the practice is steadily getting better, but there’s still room for improvement.

    Here are 20 things we’d change about it to make it better.

  • Openoffice.org & Libreoffice- Personal/Family Budget Spreadsheet

  • The Document Foundation Marks Six Months of Freedom

    The Document Foundation published a summary today listing its achievements since its inception on September 28, 2010. Most users know of the widely publicized events such as the three releases of LibreOffice and the call for donations in order to fund the formation of a legal foundation. But activity has also encompassed, among other things, social and other media interaction, intellectual property protection, and distribution relationships.

  • LibreOffice Portable 3.3.2 (complete office suite) Released

    PortableApps.com and The Document Foundation are proud to announce the release of LibreOffice Portable 3.3.2. LibreOffice Portable is a full-featured office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database — packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go.

  • Developer interview: Christina Rossmanith

• CMS

  • Configuration management in Drupal 8

    In my DrupalCon keynote in Chicago, I talked about the key initiatives that I believe we should focus on for Drupal 8 core. One of those key initiatives that I talked about was configuration management.

• Business

  • Beyond $1bn: Why Red Hat is a one off

    Others, which mix proprietary software and open source, fare little better. SourceFire is at $130m, while companies like Alfresco, SugarCRM, Pentaho, JasperSoft, etc. talk about reaching $100m as the likely threshold to filing for an IPO.

    But no one – no one – is anywhere near Red Hat’s $1bn. Why?

  • Red Hat: one in a billion

    It looks like it’s time again to ponder on Red Hat’s ability to (nearly) make $1bn in annual revenue and wonder why open source has not produced more billion dollar success stories.

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Open For Business: Open source for sale

      I have been asked to turn “Open for Business” into a monthly column, focusing on applying the open source way to business. Let the reader beware that I am not a millionaire. I don’t own multiple houses or drive a new car, but for the past eight years I have made a living running a business focused exclusively on open source software (and that’s without needing outside investment). The suggestions offered in this column fall in line with our business plan of “spend less than you earn.” I hope others will find them useful.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Avoid the pitfalls of the JavaScript Trap on Gmail

    Today we’re launching the first in a series of features on how to use common websites without using proprietary JavaScript.

• Government

  • The Openness of Government

    In November 1959, for TV Guide Magazine, John F. Kennedy wrote about television as “a force that has changed the political scene”. He had recently experienced the first televised Presidential debates, against Richard M. Nixon, and realised that things would never be the same again. But not even he foresaw that 50 years later, that same communication technology would still be rewriting the rules of politics and government, continuing to open up yet more aspects of political life — not least by bringing the workings of parliaments around the world into our homes.

  • Federal IT Dashboard goes open source

    Today, we’re excited to announce that our Civic Commons team, working with the White House and the Federal CIO, has made the cost-saving IT Dashboard, the technology behind IT.USAspending.gov, freely available for any government entity to use and customize. This development is the latest in a growing movement to cut government IT spending by sharing reusable technology, thereby reducing redundant development costs and encouraging cooperation between multiple branches and levels of government.

• Licensing

  • Google open source guru: ‘Why we ban the AGPL’

    At the beginning of his talk, DiBona said that according to Google’s net crawlers, the web now contains over 31 million open source projects, spanning 2 billion lines of code. Forty-eight per cent of these projects are under the GPL, 23 per cent use the LGPL, 14 per cent use the BSD license, 6 per cent use Apache, and 5 per cent use the MIT license.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • Open Hardware Logo Selection Underway

• Programming

  • Greplin open sources Python tools

    Details about the utilities can be found a post on the Greplin:tech blog. Greplin also notes that, “As always: we love pull requests, issue reports, and comments!”. The tools are hosted on GitHub and are released under version 2.0 of the Apache License.

  • FOSS Development Is My Full-Time Job: Patricia Santana Cruz

    Last week we interviewed Luciana Fujii Pontello a representation of women power in the GNU/Linux world. This week we are publishing the interview of Patricia Santana Cruz who was played a critical role in the release of the latest version of Cheese.

  • SNAFU—Situation Normal, All Fouled Up! | The Joy of Programming

    The stories of software development projects in crisis are amazingly familiar to all experienced programmers and managers. In this column, we’ll see which aspects of projects in crisis are strikingly similar and how they relate to bugs.

    A software product is inseparable from underlying software process which resulted in creating it. Though bugs are technical in nature, it is the software development process that has the most impact on resulting in bugs. To illustrate this, see what happens in a new software project when – Raphus cucullatus, nicknamed Dodo – was given the responsibility of managing the project.

    All is well: Dodo kick starts the new project with a team of experienced developers. Dodo thinks that software can be produced under tight deadlines and creates a project plan. The customer is satisfied with the plan.

  • Announcing Penny Red

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tagesschau.de awarded for the use of Open Standards

    Today the ARD internet platform Tagesschau.de will receive an award for the use of Open Standards at the “Document Freedom Day”. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII) for offering the broadcasted shows also in the free video format “Ogg Theora”.

    In Berlin FSFE and FFII will hand over a certificate and a cake with the “rOgg On!” label on to Sven Bruns, technical manager at tagesschau.de. In Hamburg, Sabine Klein, vice editorial director of tagesschau.de will accept a DFD cake on behalf of the editorial team.

  • OASIS ODF 1.2 Committee Specification Approved

  • Approval of OpenDocument Version 1.2 as Committee Specification(CS)

    Approval of OpenDocument Version 1.2 as Committee Specification(CS)

  • INT: ODF 1.2 is approved as a Committee Specification

    On 17 March 2011, the Technical Committee (TC) of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument or ODF) officially and unanimously approved ODF 1.2 as a Committee Specification.

    The ODF TC is in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of standards for electronic business and web services, and which is the designated maintenance body for the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 IS26300 format. The next stage of the approval process is the official vote within OASIS to adopt this specification as an OASIS standard.

  • Celebrate Document Freedom Day!

    Today marks the annual observance of Document Freedom Day (DFD), a global day for document liberation.

    On this important occasion, let’s all recognize that progress has been made to promote and use open standards and to liberate documents. In January, India’s Department of Information Technology published its draft Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (IFEG), which lists ODF on its approved standards for e-governance in India.

  • HTML5 browser-based media player: plays your mp3′s & works offline

    “Yawn – yet another music player?” might be your first reaction at the sight of yet-another media player gracing the pages of OMG! Ubuntu, but this one is actually rather special.

    The HTML5-written media player runs in the browser (so what?) but is designed to play back your local media (oooh!): your entire music library can be added and played through it (super neat).

  • HOWTO: Unchain Yourself from Proprietary Formats

    Today being Document Freedom Day, I’m taking stock of how unencumbered my digital lifestyle is — both on the consumption as well as on the production side.

  • Document Freedom Day: UK releases Government ICT Strategy in .odt

    Today, the United Kingdom’s CabinetOffice released is official Government ICT Strategy – not only in .pdf and .doc, but also in .odt!

Leftovers

• Council loses £2.5m claim against Big Blue

  Southwark Council’s claim for £2.5m in damages from IBM for supposedly faulty software has been dismissed.

  The court found that IBM had delivered the system as requested in 2007. It was bought through a framework agreement between the Treasury and IBM.

• “Duty of Care”: Yesterday’s Hearing in Utah St. Court on Rosenberg v. Google

• Google and Oracle File Claim Construction Statements & Fight Again About Discovery – Updated

  Google and Oracle have each now filed Claim Construction Statements, along with supporting declarations, in the Oracle v. Google patent litigation, and the previous dustup over discovery has broken out once again, with Oracle writing to the judge whining about Google’s responses to Oracle’s Interrogatories numbers 4-16.

• Why Unix Is Superior

  The motivation of the post was a discussion in ##unix on Freenode.

  1. The command line interface.
  2. Various shells, including their script syntax.
  3. Builtin programming language support for many languages.

• The rather petite Internet of 1995

  As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.

  Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima radioactive fallout nears Chernobyl levels

    Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.

    The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside the plant.

  • Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor

    The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.

    The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.

    Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have “lost the race” to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

• Finance

  • Brooksley Born Questions Lloyd Blankfein Over AIG And Derivatives Risk

    Since we can’t watch Lloyd on trial in the Galleon case, we present the next best thing – a few minutes of last January’s FCIC hearing with Brooksley Born, who warned more than a decade ago about a derivatives nightmare before being professionally silenced by Greenspan, Summers and Rubin.

  • Goldman Special Situation Profit Seen at Risk With Volcker

    For Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Special Situations Group, disasters can be a source of some of the biggest profits. Now the secretive investing operation faces its own potential calamity.

    Goldman Sachs already has shut two units that made bets with the company’s money because such proprietary trading by banks will be prohibited under the Volcker rule approved by Congress last year. Still, the Special Situations Group, known as SSG, continues to make investments and named a new global head last month. Executives have argued that SSG shouldn’t be affected because it’s more of a lending than a trading business.

  • Proprietary Trading Goes Under Cover: Michael Lewis

    A few weeks ago we asked a simple question: Why are the same Wall Street banks that lobbied so hard to dilute the passages in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill banning proprietary trading now jettisoning their proprietary trading groups, without so much as a whimper?

• Privacy

  • ‘Creepy’ app threatens the privacy of social network users

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Apple’s ‘App Store trademark’: A farce of Jobsian proportions

      Microsoft has once again stood up to Apple’s epically ridiculous attempt to trademark the term “app store”, filing another request that the US Patent and Trademark Office deny Apple’s trademark application in full.

      “Apple cannot escape the hard truth: when people talk about competitors’ stores, they call them ‘app stores.’ You don’t have to look far to find this generic use – The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs,” reads Microsoft’s latest filing with the US Trademark and Patent Office.

Clip of the Day

Japan Tsunami at full height from the ground level.

Credit: TinyOgg

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Editor’s Note: Picking Ourselves Up, Dusting Ourselves Off

• IBM

  • The Era of Open Innovation

    In 2011, Linux is a fundamental component of IBM business—embedded deeply in hardware, software, services and internal development. It is present in every IBM business, geography and workload, and its use only continues to increase.

• Applications

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Understanding Permissions Under GNU/Linux Systems

    • Installing Dovecot 2 on CentOS

    • How to post content to a WordPress blog from the command line

    • Firefox 4 Sync step-by-step

    • Setting Up FTP^H^H^H SFTP In A Hurry For File Uploads Using OpenSSH

    • Debian Squeeze 6.0 Installation Over SSH

  • Games

    • Spiral Knights, New Game From the Makers of Puzzle Pirates Coming to Linux this April

      Three Rings Design, known for developing innovative online games like Puzzle Pirates, is coming up with a new multi-player online RPG, Spiral Knights on April 4th.

• Distributions

  • Reviews

    • REVIEW: GhostBSD 2.0 (LiveCD)

      Looking at GhostBSD from the view of a migrating Windows user, again there is nothing wrong with what’s on offer here but I think for someone who has led a Windows lifestyle, they are going to want more “bells and whistles”. I say that though with a little reservation since I have seen nothing from the developers which suggests its specifically aimed at such a user.

      For established Linux users, again, I cannot see anything which would tempt them over. I say that not to create flame as I would really love to say that GhostBSD offers something really special, much hard work has obviously gone into this but as it stands I can best sum up the distro as: stable, solid and “does what it says on the tin”.

      The homepage for GhostBSD is certainly starting to look the part. I say starting because it has typos and incomplete sections to it. I would stress that this is not a harsh criticism because a lot of hard work has gone into the distro and its very generous of the GhostBSD devs to spend their time working on this great project. With that in mind I think new users will not be filled with confidence in a project where the site intended to promote it has so many obvious errors and omissions. This is a shame because GhostBSD is in no way lacking functionality or stability and I think errors on its homepage will undersell GhostBSD.

      In closing, I would expect it’s a welcome release for established GhostBSD users but new users may find that it’s neither polished or packaged as fully as they would like.

  • Red Hat Family

    • S&P 500′s Top Performers :RHT , NVDA , MU

      Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is the S&P 500′s top performer this morning with the stock trading at $46.77 representing 17.01% versus the previous trading session. Shares of Red Hat, the world’s leading open source technology solutions provider have defined support at $38.47 and resistance at $41.98.

    • Red Hat Global Support Team Honored as a Leader in Support Excellence

    • Piper Jaffray Reiterates OW Rating, $57 PT On RHT

      “Strong demand for open source Cloud infrastructure drove billings growth of 31%, materially above consensus of 17%. Results correlated to our recent survey findings, which indicated resellers finished above plan and observed an improving pace of business,” Piper Jaffray writes. “We see ongoing catalysts, as inroads into the large Windows market have only just begun and RHEL6 adoption won’t peak for 6 to 12 months.

    • Red Hat profit up as sales increase 25%

      Red Hat Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 46.09, -0.25, -0.54%) said Wednesday its fourth-quarter net income rose to $33.5 million, or 17 cents a share, compared to $23.4 million, or 12 cents a share in the same period a year earlier. The provider of open-source business software said total revenue for the period ended Feb. 28 rose 25% to $244.8 million. On an adjusted basis, Red Hat said earnings for the quarter were 26 cents a share. Red Hat said earnings benefited by 2 cents share in the quarter, thanks to the U.S. research tax credit. Analysts polled by FactSet Research had expected Red Hat to report adjusted earnings of 22 cents a share, and $235.9 million in revenue.

    • Red Hat, Micron climb after financial reports

      Investors sent shares of Red Hat Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. higher Tuesday evening after each company issued quarterly results that surpassed Wall Street’s projections.

    • Red Hat Close to Resistance

    • Red Hat Closes in on $1 Billion in Revenue

      Three years ago, Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that his company would be the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in revenues. Red Hat is now nearly there.

  • Debian Family

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu technical board: no non-free software by default

      • Ubuntu nixes Netbook Remix for good, starting Natty Narwhal

        Canonical has nixed Ubuntu Netbook Remix from it’s plans, and it will not appear starting version 11.04, which is also Natty Narwhal. So we say goodbye to an experiment that lasted a few distros at the time netbooks were the “in-thing.”

        The core around Ubuntu Netbook Remix will now be integrated an edition called Ubuntu Desktop edition for laptops, Ubuntu said in a blog entry on March 9.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • AriOS Review – Yet Another Ubuntu Derived Linux Distro

          Recently, the distribution AriOS made it to DistroWatch’s database. I had read Dedoimedo’s review of AriOS earlier, where he said that it is a user-friendly and very pleasant distribution to use, and it is much better than its predecessor mFatOS. Intrigued, I decided to try it out.

        • Tux Which Does Not Exist…

          I managed to get Zorin OS 4 distributive downloaded. This OS has several versions, and some of them are not free. You need either purchase DVD with distributive or donate to get a download link. But there are still Core and some other versions available for free. Moreover, Core is available in 32 and 64 bit. My choice was for 32 bit.

• Devices/Embedded

  • LiMo 4 spec adds support for Linux tablets

    The LiMo Foundation says it has approved four mobile device class specifications for the LiMo 4 mobile Linux stack. Citing first-time tablet support plus three different smartphone specs, the Foundation projects commercial releases within multiple LiMo classes starting in the second half of this year.

  • Phones

    • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Nokia – No More Symbian Phones After 2012

    • Android

      • Google Holds Honeycomb Tight

        In the great mobile-device wars, Google (GOOG) has portrayed itself as the open-source crusader doing battle against the leaders in proprietary software—Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Research In Motion (RIM:CN).

        Unlike its rivals, Google makes the underlying code for its popular Android operating system publicly available, and anyone can access it and tailor it for use in mobile phones, tablets, television set-top boxes, even automobiles.

      • Java creator hangs his shingle at Google

        The Java world got a bit of a surprise this morning when Java creator James Gosling revealed that he is now working for Google.

        In his blog entry today, Gosling announced the news in brief fashion:

        “Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying ‘no’ to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.”

        One can only imagine the opportunities Gosling has been offered since he left his former employer Oracle last year. But Google, it seems, is his next landing pad.

      • Android on top in the US, Microsoft in decline

        he latest quarterly statistics showing US smartphone market share show Microsoft’s task with Windows Phone 7 is daunting, as the new OS is already losing ground. The latest US smartphones figures from comScore cover November of last year through the end of January, and while the figures are largely as expected the drop of market share by Microsoft is a bit of a surprise.

      • The Android OS Update Problem

        The reasons that Android phones are either slow to get system updates, or fail to get them entirely are pretty clear. The process of getting an update ready to push to a handset is decidedly non-trivial:

        1. Google creates, tests and releases a system update.
        2. Handset manufacturers take the system update and apply their vendo-specific tweaks to it (MotoBlur, HTC Sense, etc.), then test it on their various devices.
        3. Carriers then test the update, certify it, and push it out to the handsets.

      • Google Announces Nexus S 4G

      • Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi Coming To Canada This April

        Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi, the Android-powered tablet will be available in Canada this April.

      • Why Android Could Help Amazon and the Kindle Threaten the iPad

        Quick, across the entire history of Amazon, and all the types of products that the site has sold, what is its top selling product ever? The answer is that the Kindle eBook reader is, and that feat was attained while the Kindle functioned as a reading device, without the bells and whistles found on popular tablet devices. No Harry Potter book or other product comes close to the sales Amazon has reaped from the Kindle, and those sales have, of course, driven sales of lots of content from Amazon. For these reasons, and because of the increasing unpopularity of Apple’s policies regarding in-app purchasing, the Kindle could emerge as the biggest competitor to Apple’s iPad, if Amazon plays its cards right.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open Source Junction: cross-platform mobile apps

  The open source mobile app space is getting increasingly crowded. The recent opportunities for developers to produce and distribute mobile apps through a range of app stores is taking the developer world by storm. If, as the saying goes, all people dream of writing a poem at least once in a lifetime, then perhaps there aren’t many developers out there either who haven’t dreamed of building a great mobile app themselves.

• Why What FOSS Needs is a Unified Message

  Of course, the FOSS movement has had notable leaders over the years, ranging from Linus Torvalds to Richard Stallman, but there is no single charismatic leader who regularly keeps open source and open standards topics alive in public conversations. While one person with enough charisma might make a big difference, though, what FOSS really needs is more unified messaging, and on the commercial open source front, more unified marketing.

• Open source communities: trust vs. control

  u can succeed in starting an open source community:

  * Be honest with those people you are trying to recruit about your reasons for working in open source. Clearly state your goals and how you will measure success for yourself and the community.
  * Contribute your code, but accept improvements or better solutions.
  * Give up sole control of the project to a more democratic leadership in order to get a better code base that you can use, at a lower development cost to yourself. Don’t stack the leadership group with cronies or puppets.
  * Don’t act like a prima donna just because you started the project.
  * Trust that if you and everyone else plays fairly but works hard, you’ll get something of great value that many can use.

• FFmpeg Becomes Multi-Threaded Happy

  Last week following a dispute among several core FFmpeg developers, FFmpeg was forked as libav. The group remaining in the “FFmpeg” this week have now merged the ffmpeg-mt branch to their SVN trunk code-base. This is the code that’s been worked on now for nearly three years to provide multi-threaded decoding support in FFmpeg.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Talk to your computer with chrome 11 beta!

      Chrome 11 beta is loading with a handful of amazing features. In this post we will review them briefly!

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 4 Released! What’s There in Store For Linux Users?

      Firefox 4 is finally released today by Mozilla that brings a feature packed, fast, minimal and a secure next generation web browser to the world.

    • How to get a newer version of Iceweasel (aka Firefox) on your Debian box

      So how do you get Iceweasel/Firefox 3.6 or even 4.0 on your Debian Squeeze, Lenny, Wheezy/Testing or Sid/Unstable box?

    • Iceweasel update today in Debian

    • Installing Firefox 4.0 (.deb Package) On Ubuntu 10.10

    • Why I Think All Browsers (Mozilla Firefox Included) Will Survive

      Mozilla Firefox 4 is out, and I’m using it now. It’s now fast enough and stable enough that it has rekindled some of the old excitement I felt when I first started using Mozilla Firefox and when I started using a new version of the browser. At the same time that I started using it, I saw this article (Ed Bott, ZDNet) which posits why Microsoft Internet Explorer will survive and Mozilla Firefox won’t, and I felt like I should respond to it.

• SaaS

  • Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing

• Education

  • How To: Founding an Open Source Software Center at a University

    Raising open source awareness in any organization is a very important, and sometimes difficult, task. Particularly important is open source awareness among college students. These are the engineers and computer scientists of the next generation who will be able to usher these modern practices into their workplace. This article discusses the process that was used to form the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), a very successful open source center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GCC adds Bionic C support on Android

  • GCC 4.6 Release Series

  • Document Freedom Day

  • Registration for ABLEconf 2011 Opens

• Programming

  • Tiny Core Fraud on Source Forge

    If you watch new projects that are added to source forge then two weeks ago you might have noticed that Tiny Core Linux was added to their projects.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Open Network Foundation to Promote New Network Architecture

    This morning brings news of what may become another new and important consortium – the Open Network Foundation (ONF). This time the goal is to adapt network architecture to streamline its interoperation with cloud computing. And while the news is intriguing, the way in which it has been broken is a bit odd, on which more below.

Leftovers

• [Old] IT panel endorses adopting Google

• Science

  • Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies At 84

    Paul Baran, whose work with packaging data in the 1960s has been credited with playing a role in the later development of the Internet, has died at age 84, his son said.

  • Researcher Nabs $500K to Work On “Green Software”

    A computer scientist from Binghamton University has recently scored about a half million in funding–$450,000 from the National Science Foundation, and $50,000 from Google–that will help support his interested in “green” software development.

  • Jean Bartik, last of the original ENIAC programmers, 86

    Jean Bartik, the last of the original ENIAC programmers, died this morning. She was 86.

• Security

  • MySQL.com Database Compromised By Blind SQL Injection

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • China activist Liu Xianbin jailed for 10 years

    A Chinese democracy activist has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power.

    Liu Xianbin was charged after writing a series of articles calling for democratic reforms.

    He was convicted after a trial lasting only a few hours; the third time he has been sent to jail for his activism.

    Dozens of lawyers and activists have been arrested or detained in China recently following calls for Middle East-style protests.

  • Chapeau Sarkozy – the brilliant strike against Qaddafi

    The escalation and the attack on Qaddafi’s Lybia to enforce the no-fly zone is a brilliant strategic move of Nicolas Sarkozy and the French nation. Sarkozy’s right wing challenger Marine Le Pen took a more traditional French position, and voiced scepticism in recent days. Even Internal Market Commissioner Barnier intervened in the matter, a highly unusual move for an EU official. It is common knowledge that France had good relations with Qaddafi which makes the French intervention and Sarkozy more credible. Even the abstention of Germany in the UN security council perfectly fits the scene because it strenghtened the leadership of the neighbour on the matter.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Nuclear Optimism and the Reality of How Humans Price Risk

    The cataclysm visited upon Japan this March has produced an understandable debate over the future of nuclear power. As so often is the case, however, these post-crisis conversations presume the freedom to decide new policy choices when such choices, by society, have already been made. Decades after the advent of nuclear power, this modern energy source still provides only 5% of total global primary energy supply. Reality tested, risk adjudicated, and cost denoted, nuclear power has been given more than enough time to be adopted. We can talk all we like. There is little reason for nuclear optimism. | see: Global Energy Use by Source 2010 (estimate).

• Finance

  • Credit Unions Want Their Money Back – IRA Takes on PMI

    I got into writing financial blogs three years ago for one reason. It was the mortgage insurance industry “PMI” that got me out in the open. I saw first hand what a terrible concept this was. I saw (in advance of the problem) that PMI was going to result in a mortgage explosion for the country. Of course it did.

    I had a family member working at one of the big PMI firms. I argued with them regarding the insanity of what they were doing. Before the crisis the response was always the same, “We’re doing God’s work of getting people into their own homes. Plus we’re making a boatload in the process.”

  • Goldman Sachs’s Revelatory E-mails: 2006-2007

    It is interesting that Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, is appearing before the court as a witness for the prosecution of Rajat Gupta, ex-member of Goldman Sachs’s board. Blankfein confirmed that Gupta violated the company’s “confidentiality policies” when he gave tips to outsiders about Goldman Sachs’s financial position.

    It’s the pot calling the kettle black!

  • Goldman Sachs and the Mortgage Market

    This part of the memo ( pages 7-10 with footnotes omitted) explains Goldman Sachs’s Conflict Between Proprietary and Client Trading, and its Shorting the Mortgage Market. It is easy to see the role that Goldman Sachs played in bringing the financial system to its knees and the CEO was not above lying about the profits GS made.

  • Goldman Sachs: Here’s What You Are

    If someone described a bank by what it does rather than by what it says, he/she would find that getting high fees for risky and poor quality products is what matters; that creating junk CDOs for investors and using CDSs for making a huge profit is common practice; that taking a short position on the toxic mortgage market and thereby cashing in with billions of dollars at others’ expense is the way to do business; that taking advantage of clients’ positions and creating a conflict of interest is not material; that paying a small fine for a civil action suit where clients were not properly informed is a small price to pay for profit; and that, finally, using naked CDSs on assets it did not own to bet against the mortgage market and making huge amounts of revenue for itself shows little in the way of ethical conscience. That would be Goldman Sachs!

  • Pension funds to lead suit vs. Goldman over Abacus

    A Manhattan federal judge on Friday named three pension funds as co-lead plaintiffs in an investor lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc to recover losses tied to the Wall Street’s bank’s alleged misleading statements about Abacus, a product linked to subprime mortgages.

  • All My (Economist) Friends Get High: California Jobs

    California reported its job numbers on Friday, and once again it was not good news. Although total California employment in January “rose” to 15.905 million people, this is only because December was revised down from 15.945 million to 15.878 million people.

  • US equivalents

    IT HAS long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. These days, it would rank eighth, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? Taking the nearest equivalent country from 2009 data reveals some surprises. Who would have thought that, despite years of auto-industry hardship, the economy of Michigan is still the same size as Taiwan’s?

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • US military creates fake online personas

    The $2.76m contract was won by Ntrepid, a Californian firm, and called for an “online persona management service” that would enable 50 military spies to manage 10 fake identities each.

    The personas should be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent”, a US Central Command (Centcom) tender document said.

  • Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

    The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

    A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

    The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

  • Twitter Powers of Ten

    This is essentially the situation we find ourselves in with Twitter. They do have APIs that can be used to query their user data. But it is all “rate-limited”, meaning only a certain number of requests can be made per IP address per day. So it is impossible to get a running stream of all activity (a “video”) or even a snapshot of all activity at a single time (a “still camera”). But what we can do is access the “Twitter Public Timeline“, which will give you the most recent 20 tweets. This can be queried every 60 seconds, up to your daily limit.

    I’ve been capturing the Twitter Public Timeline since late 2009. I have now nearly 6 million records, each one containing the message, of course, but also the name of the user and their “Followers” and “Following” count at that point in time. I started doing scatter plots of this data and was amazed at the detailed structure evident in the data, that illustrate some interesting ways in which Twitter is being used. No single graph can show it all, so I’m giving you a series of charts, each one showing an area of the Following/Followers phase space 10ox larger.

  • Is Samsung’s New Galaxy Tab Fibbing About Its Figure? And About Those Galaxy Tab Fans…

    [FURTHER THOUGHTS: Did Samsung mean for us to understand that these were imaginary users or not? The more I think about it, the more befuddled I get. The Raw Feed's Mike Elgan points out that the company's PR director earnestly described the "project" during the event in a way that made it sound real. And commenter Karl notes that Samsung referred to the users' tales as "true-life stories." But the bits with Hess and Kolinski are so profoundly artificial that they could have involved Madge the Manicurist and the Maytag Repairman. Actually, Kolinski seems to be channeling a certain real-life "leading New York real-estate CEO."]

• DRM

  • PS3 hacker’s lawyers fire back at Sony

    First up, they object to SCEA’s attempts to establish jurisdiction of the case in Northern California. Hotz lives and works in New Jersey, and, as an individual and not a corporation, really doesn’t have the cash on hand to traverse the country defending himself in a district court on the other coast.

    SCEA claims (PDF) that some of the people who jailbroke their PS3s lived in Northern California and thus, it should be where the case is tried. Hotz’s lawyers argue that this is an effort to stack the deck in SCEA’s favor, as the U.S. District Court of Northern California has historically sided with technology companies over individuals.

  • Sony Opposes Hotz’s Motion to Dismiss – Updated 4Xs

  • Hearing (Telephonic) on Searching Hotz’s Hard Drive Set For March 28

  • Hotz Ably Fights for His Motion to Dismiss – Tells Court SCEA’s Case Doesn’t Belong in CA

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Intellectual Property: Silly or Sinister?

    Now imagine that some lobbyists have staked out part of Antarctica and brought suit in federal court against tourists who trespassed on “their” land. Fine, you say: After all the lobbyists got there first. Replace “Antarctica” with “ideas” and you have the surreal world of “intellectual property.” Unfortunately, while you and I cannot both mine for gold in the same spot, we can certainly make use of the same idea, and therein lies the heart of this story.

    A good spot to start the tale is in 1998, when a panel of judges ruled that software was patentable, thereby starting the intellectual property equivalent of the California gold rush (State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group). Every child knows how to answer the door: “Knock knock.” “Who is there?” But what if I taught a computer how to say, “Who is there,” and patented the idea? Absurd, you say. Well, we all understand how to run an auction—but do not try doing it with a computer because the holder of U.S. Patent 7,702,540 (also known as e-Bay) will sue you. And that in a nutshell is what software patents are all about.

  • Copyrights

    • Google Books Settlement Rejected

      We applaud the rejection by Judge Denny Chin of the Google Books class action settlement with authors and publishers regarding the digitization of books. SFLC filed a letter with the court on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and author Karl Fogel, urging the court to reject the settlement as it was last proposed and asking the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.

    • Judge rejects Google’s attempt to create a universal library

      Google’s vision of a universal library archiving all books ever published on Earth is once again at odds with laws protecting the authors of those books.

      A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a settlement deal Google hammered out with publishers over its controversial Google Books archive, saying the proposed agreement went too far in giving Google control over the digitalization of books.

      “The question presented is whether the [settlement agreement] is fair, adequate, and reasonable,” Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court in New York City wrote in his 48-page ruling. “I conclude that it is not.”

Clip of the Day

PullQuote

Credit: TinyOgg

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• We want more Linux presentations inside shopping centers!

  Last october I wrote about the first Italian presentation of Free Software inside a supermarket chain because it looked to me, and still looks, a wonderful idea that should find many followers worldwide, since it proves that Free Software isn’t a boring topic best left to software professionals.

  When I published the Italian version of that article I got some congratulation and this critique from Italy, born out of the fact that the article explains how and why Coop (the supermarket chain) promoted Gnu/Linux even if (as of october 2010) they didn’t use it internally or sell computers with Gnu/Linux preinstalled…

• Read Kindle books on your Linux PC

  Andrei Pushkin at blogkindle.com has put together a short tutorial on how to get the Kindle for PC app running on his Ubuntu operating system. The solution, which you can probably guess if you’ve spent any time with Ubuntu or other Linux OSes, is to use Wine 1.3 or higher, which is a new enough version that you have to install it through a terminal window and not the software repository.

• Linux for Mobile Users

  The smart mobile user shouldn’t overlook Linux. The question is, which distro should you pick? You’ll get a different answer depending who you ask.

  You’ll probably be pointed in the direction of Arch for performance, Debian for stability and Ubuntu if you want easy access to the biggest collection of apps. If that’s not enough choice to make your head spin, Slackware has its fans too – particularly among people who use older laptops.

• 5 Reasons why kids should use Linux

• Desktop

  • 7 Reasons to Use the Ubuntu Linux Operating System

    Everyone has heard of Windows and OSX. But what about the safe, secure, and open source operating system called Ubuntu Linux?

    People may have heard of this one, but they may have also heard that no programs run on it, it’s old or outdated (which is not true), and it’s hard to
    use.

    Well these five reasons should put your worries at ease, and maybe even convert you.

    [...]

    I highly recommend it.

• Server

  • Watson vs Carbon Life Forms (Day 1)

    While I am amazed at how well he can assimilate knowledge, I am also amazed at how much knowledge he holds. There is no Internet connection. The range of topics was quite vast from Beatles songs, to cough, cough, a reference to Grendel and Beowulf (the literary version).

  • London Stock Exchange: The road to Linux

    The London Stock Exchange’s move to Novell SUSE Linux based systems and a new matching engine written in C++ – set live on its main market on 14 February 2011 – was a major decision taken shortly after the appointment of a new chief executive two years ago. The systems replace a Microsoft .Net setup, with programs written in C# and running on Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server.

  • London Stock Exchange tackles closing auction system problem

    The London Stock Exchange has taken steps to resolve a system problem that occurred at 4.30pm yesterday (Tuesday), which saw a delay to the start of the closing auction and knocked out automatic trades during a 42 second period.

  • Freedom Box: Freeing the Internet one Server at a time

    Free software isn’t about free services or beer, it’s about intellectual freedom. As recent episodes such as censorship in China, the Egyptian government turning off the Internet, and Facebook’s constant spying, have shown, freedom and privacy on the Internet are under constant assault. Now Eben Moglen, law professor at Columbia University and renowned free software legal expert, has proposed a way to combine free software with the original peer-to-peer (P2P) design of the Internet to liberate users from the control of governments and big brother-like companies: Freedom Box.

• Kernel Space

  • Atheros wifi free software laptops

    I looked for an Atheros wifi free software laptop for a long time without finding anything that was still in production.

  • Graphics Stack

    • What NVIDIA’s Linux Customers Want

      Last week when talking about NVIDIA looking to expand its Linux team (hire more engineers), I asked what else NVIDIA Linux customers wanted that already wasn’t offered by the proprietary driver for Linux / BSD / Solaris operating systems. Aside from the obvious one, of many desktop users wanting NVIDIA to support some sort of an open-source strategy, other expressed views are listed below.

    • Intel Graphics On Linux Still Behind Windows, With Sandy Bridge

• Applications

  • LCA: Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail

    The Sendmail mail transfer agent tends to be one of those programs that one either loves or hates. Both its supporters and its detractors will agree, though, that Sendmail played a crucial role in the development of electronic mail before, during, and after the explosion of the Internet. Sendmail creator Eric Allman took a trip to Brisbane to talk to the LCA 2011 about the history of this project. Sendmail is, he said, 30 years old now; in those three decades it has thrived without corporate support, changed the world, and thrived in a world which was changing rapidly around it.

  • BookmarkBridge Looking Kind of Rickety

    Installing beta versions of software is usually less of a risk with open source apps than with commercial third-party apps. BookmarkBridge has stagnated with version 0.76 beta. It also is not uncommon to find plenty of beta applications distributed through Linux distro repositories. I found that if an app is available through a repository, it will work as described.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Change the Position of Control Buttons in Ubuntu

    • Collaborate Using LibreOffice Writer Changes and Comments

    • Weekend Project: Scrub Files and Old Hard Drives Securely on Linux

  • Games

    • Purity

      A long time ago, on the old FreeGameDev forum, I heard of Purity; an original game based on the idTech3 engine.
      Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago.
      But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting:
      In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you have to get you to the end.

• Desktop Environments

  • WTF Desktop Environments: GNOME, KDE And More Explained

    You can customise nearly every last inch of your Linux installation to fit your liking, and it starts with choosing the right desktop environment. Whether you’re a Linux beginner or you’re just looking for a new interface, here’s an overview of how desktop environments work and how to pick the right one for you.

    Windows and Mac OS X come with pretty specific graphical interfaces (you know, the windows, the skin, the system toolbars, etc.) that aren’t really built for customisation. With Linux, you can fully customise not only how your desktop looks, but even its functionality, and the settings available in its preferences. If you’re a beginning Linux user, you may have heard of popular desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, or others — but what do they all mean? Here, we’ll discuss what desktop environments are, and how to try new ones out on your existing Linux installation.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Geotag Photos with Open GPS Tracker and digiKam

      You don’t need a fancy camera with a built-in GPS receiver to geotag your photos. An Android device with the Open GPS Tracker app and digiKam can do the job just fine. The app lets you track your route and save it as a GPX file which you can then use to geocorrelate your photos in digiKam.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Snow Sabre, Uni – Two Elegant Mac Icon Themes Ported to GNOME, Looks Very Neat!

• Distributions

  • FOSDEM 2011: building distro bridges

    FOSDEM. I finally got to the “blog about it” todo I took from there. I have to talk about the distribution collaboration panel discussion Jared Smith (Fedora Project Lead), Stefano Zacchirol (Debian Project Lead) and myself led on Sunday (video here). We discussed what barriers there are to cross-distro collaboration and what to do against them.

  • Reviews

    • Comparing CTK Arch Live and ArchBang

      Verdict
      1. ArchBang
      It’s more mature and gave me less trouble, from the boot process to recognizing the network to letting me do things like take screenshots and gauge RAM usage for this review. That said, the disabling of repositories by default is a little annoying.
      2. CTKArchLive
      It’s a younger project, to be sure, and it does things its own way rather than trying to emulate a particular project, but the fairly serious boot and network problems relegate it to runner-up.

  • New Releases

    • Berry 1.07

    • SystemRescueCd 2.0.1

    • 2/15/2011: Parted Magic 5.10

      It seems like it’s been longer than a month, but it’s time for a new release. The most notable changes are the Linux 2.6.37 Kernel, GParted 0.8.0, and the move back to Firefox as the default web browser.

    • GhostBSD 2.0 Beta Release

      We the developing team of GhostBSD would like to announce the release of GhostBSD 2.0 x64 beta. This Flavor is only a live cd as of the moment. There are great improvements on the look, feel and the speed of this release. Some of the things that were done to the new release was our new logo, bug fixes, New live cd file system, and improvements to GDM where there is no more white screens during booting. GhostBSD 2.0 is base on freebsd 8.2.On GhostBSD 2.0 you will see Gnome 2.32, Rhythmbox 0.12.8_3, Pidgin 2.7.7, Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird 3.0.11.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS 2011 KDE: A Review and Retrospective

      PCLinuxOS is a great distro for individuals who favor rolling updates, performance, and a dedicated community. If you’re a first-time Linux user or if you favor aesthetics over technological prowess, better choices are available.

    • Mageia Alpha 1 Released: Visual Preview

      Mandriva fans and users have a reason to cheer and keep trust in the system they love, as an Avatar of Mandriva is taking shape. Mageia, the fork of Mandriva, has hit the alpha 1 version. The version is only meant for developers and not for ordinary users as it is “alpha” and not ready for use. However, the version does promise that we will be seeing a final stable release in June as Romain stated in an exclusive interview with Muktware.

    • This is MAGEIA!

      That’s the installation: a real piece of cake.

    • Mandriva Linux 2011 Alpha 1: A Quick Peek

      Hey! Did you notice the penguins? I like them! The black and blue pattern is reminiscent of my Mepis 8.0 wallpaper (my favorite).

  • Debian Family

    • Debian 6 Offers Updated Applications, Few Rough Spots

      Debian 6 is also available in a LiveCD version, similar to what other Linux distributions offer, which enables users first to try out the operating system before installing it on their hard drives.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Increasing Its Diversity

        In a blog post, Bacon highlights some key points that show the dedication of Canonical and the Ubuntu Project about combating the issue of so few women participating in Open Source events and communities. Those highlights include: adoption of an anti-harassment policy, a page on the Ubuntu Women site for UDS, UDS stories page, as well as the UW teams discussing how to provide support for this diversity effort.

      • A Kernel By Any Other Name

      • Canonical Re-licenses Ubuntu Wiki to CC BY-SA

        Elizabeth Krumbach on behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council announced in an email to various mailing lists, and posted on the Ubuntu Fridge that the licensing for the Ubuntu wiki will be CC-BY-SA and barring a “substantial number of objections” this change should take place in approximately one month.

      • DanRabbit on the Ubuntu One Desktop

        Hey Ubuntu One and Design fans! This is my first post here, and I have to say I feel priveledged to be able to write to you all. Recently I’ve been working with the Ubuntu One team on the desktop syncing apps, and trying to give them some special attention. I feel like these apps have the potential to be such an important part of not only the Ubuntu experience, but also the experience of users who may not have converted over to Ubuntu yet.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Dear Nokia We Know You are Confused- Just Don’t Try Confusing Us

        The argument put forward by Steven Elop, the Microsoft shareholder turned Nokia CEO, is that going with Android would have made them just one more OEM with little chance of differentiation…fragmentation anyone? But by choosing Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 he argued, would help create a third force in a two horse race, referring to Apples iOS and Google’s Android. I’m assuming all that Elop sees is what he’s telling us.

      • The Nokia N900- Long Live the Device

        Then there is the Voip integration on the device. At the time of the release, it really was ahead of the it’s time. Simply enter your Skype and Google Talk credentials and you have the two Voip networks integrated into your phone calling function.

    • Android

      • Google to merge smartphone and tablet versions of Android

        Google has promised Android updates will arrive every six months, with the next full version bringing together the best of the smartphone and tablet editions.

        The Android roadmap was laid out by Google’s executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, who was delivering a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

        Regarding the follow up to Gingerbread (version 2.3 of Android) and the tablet-focused Honeycomb (version 3), Schmidt said: “you can imagine the follow up will start with an I, be named after dessert, and will combine these two.” That version is expected to be called “ice-cream sandwich”.

      • Motorola’s 3LM Acquisition is Focused on Android in the Enterprise

        However, a startup company run by a group of ex-Google employees, dubbed Three Laws Mobility (3LM), has its eyes squarely fixed on the market for security software on Android smartphones, which could boost Android’s presence in the enterprise market.

      • GetJar Snags $25 Million As It Looks to Ride Android Growth

        Independent mobile app store GetJar announced it has grabbed $25 million in Series C funding as it looks to become the premier open Android market. The San Mateo, Calif.-based start-up’s latest round was led by Tiger Global Management, and Accel Partners, which participated in earlier rounds, will also contribute. The latest investment brings GetJar’s total funding to $42 million.

      • Mozilla: Firefox 4 for Android to Ship in a Few Weeks

        The Mozilla Foundation expects to release the final code for the Firefox 4 browser for Android mobile devices in a few weeks, with one more beta version to be released in the next week or so.

        The latest version of the mobile browser has a sync feature that allows users to replicate information contained in the desktop version of the browser on their Android device, including bookmarks, saved passwords, open tabs and browsing history, said Jay Sullivan, vice president of products for Mozilla, during an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday.

      • The dual-core ‘phone’ that runs Android and Ubuntu

        There’s more than enough glitz and smartphone glamour at Mobile World Congress to keep me writing previews well into next week, but when I dropped in at the ARM stand, it was something a little unusual that drew my attention.

        On the edge of a narrow bench sat a rattly-looking development unit – the kind of device phone and chip makers use to test hardware before squeezing it into the shiny, sleek chassis I’ve seen so many times over the past three days. But that’s not the interesting part: ARM was using it to demonstrate the benefits of multicore mobile processors, the sort so many of the new devices this year are set to employ.

      • Acer shows laptop lid look tablet

        Wireless connectivity? 2.4GHz 802.11n W-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 – it’s “upgradeable” to 3.0, Acer said. And some models will incorporate quad-band HSPA 3G.

        There’s a gigabyte of Ram on board, plus a choice of 16GB or 32GB storage, to which you can add Micro SD cards of up to 64GB capacity.

  • Tablets

    • Tablet wars: Those with the most and best apps win

      Personally, I think the market will end up supporting two top contenders: the iPad and the best tablet that runs Android 3+. Then there will be a strong #3, but with far less marketshare than the top two. Though it is really too early to make a fact-based prediction, I would not be surprised if that #3 eventually was a WebOS tablet from HP.

      Samsung may be #4, but after that all other contenders will have share lost in the error term. That is, something, but so small that the top contenders’ share and revenue will dwarf it. Put yet another way, share so small that executives at the companies will ask themselves why exactly they are in the market at all. I think Microsoft will not be a significant player here.