11.18.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.7-rc6

  • Download Linux Kernel 3.7 Release Candidate 6

    Linus Torvalds announced last evening, November 16, that the sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel is now available for download and testing.

  • Linux Kernel 3.6.7 Is Available for Download

  • Automatic NUMA Balancing Is Quick To Balance

    Automatic NUMA Balancing has been quick to advance as it prepares for eventually merging into the mainline Linux kernel.

  • Graphics Stack

    • New Catalyst For Linux Driver Improves Performance

      Weeks after NVIDIA released a new Linux driver to massively improve its OpenGL performance in large part to make the Source Engine and Valve’s games run better on Linux, AMD is out with a similar Catalyst update. The latest Catalyst Linux beta is said to bring “significant performance improvements” for Left 4 Dead 2.

    • OpenGL ES 3.0 Support Soon Going Into Mesa

      Intel is planning to soon begin merging the OpenGL ES 3.0 support patches into mainline Mesa.

      Since the unveiling of the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification in early August, Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have had a “GLES3″ branch of Mesa where they have been working to enable this next version of OpenGL targeted towards mobile and embedded devices.

• Applications

  • Top 6 Web Server Performance Testing Tools

  • Proprietary

    • Developer Details How to Get Netflix Running on Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • What to do after you install Ubuntu 12.10?

    • Using the GNOME Evolution address book with Mutt

    • How to Use the Hosts File in Linux

    • Setting Up Your Raspberry Pi For Headless Use With SSH

    • How-to: Get started with MySQL

    • Many more words on volatile ranges

  • Games

    • Valve’s Linux Beta Is Ramping Up

      While there exists bypasses so individuals can launch the Steam Linux client without their account being one of the ~1,000 beta testers, you need to be part of the selected group to access the Source Engine games that have been ported over to Linux. The beta began last week but Valve Software’s Linux developers say they have been regularly adding more people to participate. “We are adding more participants on a regular basis.”

    • Egosoft plans new Linux ports for X3

      Linux Game Publishing recently lost the license they had for selling the X-series of games. Now, we know why. The developer Egosoft is taking care of the porting themselves and aims to sell X3 with all the expansions (some of which were not previously released on Linux) on Steam.

    • Egosoft Porting X Series Game To Linux

      With Valve now officially working on Steam for Linux many game developers have decided that it is time to port their games to Linux. One of those is the German developer Egosoft. According to recent forum post in the Egosoft forums they have decided to hire C and C++ programmers with OpenGL experience and SDL skills. They have mentioned that they would want to port their X series games to Linux.

• Desktop Environments

  • Shale offers freedom and security – but it could be a trap

    At last, it seems, a new source of energy might liberate us from this conflict – fossil fuels trapped within dense rock for millennia that we are now able to free, thanks to advances in engineering unthinkable a decade ago, and that are available in countries from Britain to Australia. But those same fossil fuels, much higher in carbon than their conventional counterparts, are likely to unleash runaway climate change that could put paid to any hopes of a low-cost – and low-risk – energy future.

  • John Hayes must resign for the sake of all our futures

    Cameron’s failure to discipline either Hayes or Heaton-Harris is not just about politics – it’s about avoiding climate catastrophe

  • Wind power: video reveals Tory MP’s contradictory views

  • Enlightenment E17 Alpha 3 Brings Many Changes

    It was just a few days ago that Enlightenment E17 Alpha 2 was released but there’s already a third alpha of this window manager expected to finally debut next month after more than one decade of development.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Kwort 3.5 released

    • AUSTRUMI 2.6.0

    • Manjaro 0.8.2 LXDE Edition released

  • Gentoo Family

    • Gentoo Developers Fork udev

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß

      Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email. After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of the people behind the German “IT-Zukunft Schule” project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm welcome to Angela Fuß.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 12.10 with Nvidia – No, no, no, no, no, NO!

          Depending on your understanding of the time-space continuum, several days or several minutes ago, I reviewed Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal on my SSD-ed laptop. For the lack of a better word, the distro sucked. There were too many issues, and it’s hardly the worthy successor to Pangolin. The only question remaining is, can it redeem itself on some proper high-end hardware, not that a dual-core, 2GB, Intel graphics, SSD laptop is a weakling either.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Samsung India Launches the Samsung Galaxy Note II Incredible Art Piece

      Here’s how it works: If you are an Indian Resident who is 13 years or above, you can help Samsung break the world record for the most artists contributing to a single art piece. The current world record holder is Great Britain with 201,958 contributions. The initiative is being overseen by the Guinness Book of World Records.

    • Kobo Arc Arrives in Canada, United Kingdom and France

      Kobo Arc, the 7″ Android tablet has hit the shelves across Canada and the United Kingdom and will be heading to France on Monday.

      It features Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and a 1.5GHz OMAP 4470 dual-core processor, with a choice of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions. You’ll get 10 hours on a single charge, has a 1.3 MegaPixel front-facing camera, built-in microphone, and 802.11 WiFi.

Free Software/Open Source

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

• Events

  • OpenSource Language Summit

• BSD

  • FreeBSD.org intrusion announced November 17th 2012

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

  • DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

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

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

  • Hackers obtained access to FreeBSD servers

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

• Project Releases

  • GNU automake 1.12.5 released

• Programming

  • Clang Can Analyze Code Comments, Generate Docs

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

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

  • Pairing A C Compiler With QEMU’s Code Generator

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

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

Leftovers

• following in ethically-challenged footsteps of Scalia and Thomas

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

• Science

  • Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy

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

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

• Security

  • What do we do about untrustworthy Certificate Authorities?

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

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

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

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Tony Blair and the protesters who keep trying to arrest him for war crimes

  • Miners’ strike: police to be investigated over ‘battle of Orgreave’

    South Yorkshire police are to be investigated for possible assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office over the infamous “battle of Orgreave” during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

  • Over 39,000 killed in 20 months of Syria conflict: activists

  • Thousands of police march in Spain austerity protest

  • Damn right, George Bush should face criminal proceedings for waterboarding

• Cablegate

  • Bradley Manning deserves Americans’ support for military whistleblowing

    Thanks to WikiLeaks, US citizens are better informed about wars prosecuted in their name. We owe Manning honour, not jail time

  • Assange and the Attack on the Republic of Ecuador

    Today we talk of geopolitics and the freedom of information. But what is happening today technically (ie politically) began on 12 December 2008, though some say September of that year, but it took four years for the shock waves to reach Europe and America.

    The issue relates to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the Republic of Ecuador.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

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

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

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

  • Fukushima fish ‘may be inedible for a decade’

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

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

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

• Finance

  • Economists: US Wages Stagnant for Over a Decade

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

  • Slovenia Should Sell Assets to Lure Investors, Goldman Says

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

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

  • Occupy hatches plot to destroy payday loan industry

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

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

• Censorship

  • Yelp Takes Down Review That Sparked Legal Threat

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

  • Christian wins case against employers over gay marriage comments

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

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

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

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

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

  • Restrictions to Internet free speech: Assange and Manning

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

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

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

• Privacy

  • UK government threatens firms over hidden customer data

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

  • German police stop man with mobile office in car

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

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

• Civil Rights

  • Taliban Oops Reveals Mailing List IDs

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

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

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

  • Leaders should be sacked for incompetence, not cheating

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

  • Why smart people do dumb things online

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

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

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

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

    Allegedly.

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

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

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

    [...]

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

  • Website Calls Out Authors of Racist Anti-Obama Posts

  • In UK, Twitter, Facebook rants land some in jail

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

• Internet/Net Neutrality

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

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

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

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

• Intellectual Monopolies

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

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

  • MEPs demand better evaluation of GMOs

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

  • Copyrights

    • Dan Pink Offers ‘Access’ As A Reward For Helping Promote His Book

    • Unsealed Megaupload Seizure Warrants Reveal Use Of Flawed Logic… And An ‘Undercover Computer’

      Last month, we wrote about how the EFF, representing Kyle Goodwin, had asked the US district court handling the Megaupload case to unseal the warrants for the seizures of Megauploads domains and servers. The court has now ordered the documents unsealed. To be honest, there isn’t too much surprising in them. There are some huge leaps to assume that hosting a cloud service somehow makes you criminally liable for what people do on that service. In fact, part of it ridiculously argues that the “proof” of criminality is the fact that the DOJ had alerted Megaupload to some infringing files, and those files had not been taken down. However, as Megaupload’s lawyer points out, the “alert” was in the form of asking for cooperation, which Megaupload granted, and not to “interfere” in the investigation. Taking down the videos would be interfering.

    • U.S. judge in MegaUpload case partially unseals search warrant

      The documents had been under seal since January, when the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia charged the company and managers, including founder Kim DotCom, with criminal copyright violations, money laundering, and wire fraud.

    • House Republicans: Copyright Law Destroys Markets; It’s Time For Real Reform

      Right after the Presidential election last week, Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala penned an opinion piece suggesting that one way the Republicans could “reset”, and actually attract the youth vote, would be to become the party of copyright reform. We had actually wondered if that was going to happen back during the SOPA fight, when it was the Republicans who bailed on the bill, while most of those who kept supporting it were Democrats. Since then, however, there hadn’t been much movement. Until now. Late on Friday, the Republican Study Committee, which is the caucus for the House Republicans, released an amazing document debunking various myths about copyright law and suggesting key reforms.

    • Yes, The Pirate Party Is A Silly Name, And That’s Why It Works“

    • Pirate Bay cofounder now suspected of “attempted aggravated fraud”

    • Pirate Bay co-founder suspected of serious fraud and another data intrusion

    • That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform

      So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that post to see the details. The report had been fully vetted and reviewed by the RSC before it was released. However, as soon as it was published, the MPAA and RIAA apparently went ballistic and hit the phones hard, demanding that the RSC take down the report.