05.11.15

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Links 11/5/2015: Linux 4.1 RC3, OpenELEC 6.0 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom firms join MIPS open-source push

    Qualcomm Atheros, Lantiq (part of Intel) and Broadcom have appointed representatives to the board of the Prpl (‘purple’) Foundation, organisation set-up by Imagination Technologies to support open-source software on the MIPS architecture.

  • Events

    • OSCAL Open Source Conference Albania – DAY 1

      Held in Tirana and with attention on gathering free libre open source technology users, developers, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the same idea. Oscal aimed to inform and promote that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone. The conference is supported and organized by Open Labs, the community that promotes free libre open source culture in Albania since 2012.

    • User stories at Summit and more OpenStack news

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Big data challenges? Look at your people, not your technology

      As anyone pursuing a big data initiative knows, every big data strategy really has two components: the technology and the people. The technology part is actually very simple to solve, relative to the people. As long as you’re not trying to crack big data problems with relational database technology from 2004, this piece of the equation shouldn’t be a big scary beast.

    • Pivotal rolls out Hadoop distro update, new query optimizer

      Just a few months ago, Pivotal announced that it would open source its entire big data stack: the Pivotal HD distribution, Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal GemFire real-time distributed data store, Pivotal SQLFire (a SQL layer for the real-time distributed data store), Pivotal GemFire XD (in-memory SQL over HDFS) and the Pivotal HAWQ parallel query engine over HDFS. These updates, says Michael Cucchi, senior director of Outbound Product at Pivotal, underscore Pivotal’s continued commitment to supporting that open source strategy.

  • CMS

  • Education

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source, beyond technology

      Here at Opensource.com, the staff, community moderators, and contributors strive to show how the ideas underpinning open source go beyond technology and apply to all aspects of life and society. Imagine organizing a conference around that idea.

    • Open Hardware

      • What if a robot can sense what you think

        Surrounded by small yet sturdy pieces of 3D-printed plastic, a Macintosh and a couple of 3D-printers, sits 22-year-old Diwakar Vaish at New Delhi-based A-SET Training & Research Institute’s robotics lab watching a robot move its mechanical joints to groovy songs from old Bollywood movies. Vaish, who has a faint smile playing along his lips while watching the show, has jolted the robotics sector with his new first ever 3D-printed humanoid robot.

      • Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Diesel

        But what about the motors themselves? For his entry to The Hackaday Prize, [Shane] is designing an open source engine. It’s small, it’s a two-stroke, and it’s diesel, but it’s completely open hardware; a great enabling project for all the open source dirt bikes and microcombines.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Khronos Group Releases Final SYCL 1.2 Specification

      The Khronos Group today announced the official release of the SYCL 1.2 specification. SYCL is the Khronos Group’s single-source heterogeneous programming language that serves as an abstraction layer for utilizing OpenCL while writing standard C++ code.

Leftovers

  • Google killing PageSpeed website service

  • Hardware

  • Security

    • Top OpenStack Security Dev from Nebula Didn’t go to Oracle, He Went to Netflix

      Lots of chatter in my news feeds the last few days about Oracle allegedly hiring most of Nebula’s OpenStack devs. Trouble is it’s not entirely accurate.

      [...]

      I can’t speak to the rest of Nebula staff, and no doubt some of them have landed at Oracle – but not all.

    • The Internet of Things to take a beating in DefCon hacking contest

      Hackers will put Internet-connected embedded devices to the test at the DefCon 23 security conference in August. Judging by the results of previous Internet-of-Things security reviews, prepare for flaws galore.

    • The Increasing Problem Of FOSS Mailing List Flooding Attacks

      Recently, I have received a large amount of subscription confirmation emails. These mails are from public mailing lists, especially lists of Free and Open Source Projects, included but not limited to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, GNU Project, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Qt. The “subscribers” are from multiple IP addresses. After I shared my experience to social networks, I have found more than 10 victims of the same attack, included a famous Chinese tech-blog writer. One of us received more than 10k email for 24 hours. Some of our emails have already stopped operating and refusing all new incoming emails.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Killing of Osama bin Laden

      A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’

  • Censorship

    • The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face

      Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she said, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller promises to continue with such “freedom of speech” events. ISIS is now threatening to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the right and the center-right have essentially blamed her for the gunmen’s attack, just as far too many, last January, surreptitiously pardoned the Kouachi brothers and, with consummate perfidy to human decency, inculpated the satirical cartoonists they slaughtered, saying “Charlie Hebdo asked for it.”

  • Privacy

    • Snoopers’ charter set to return to law as Theresa May suggests Conservative majority could lead to huge increase in surveillance powers

      The Conservatives are already planning to introduce the huge surveillance powers known as the Snoopers’ Charter, hoping that the removal from government of the Liberal Democrats that previously blocked the controversial law will allow it to go through.

      The law, officially known as the Draft Communications Data Bill, is already back on the agenda according to Theresa May. It is expected to force British internet service providers to keep huge amounts of data on their customers, and to make that information available to the government and security services.

    • US reviews use of cellphone spying technology

      Faced with criticism from lawmakers and civil rights groups, the U.S. Department of Justice has begun a review of the secretive use of cellphone surveillance technology that mimics cellphone towers, and will get more open on its use, according to a newspaper report.

    • 7 reasons why the feds shouldn’t mess with encryption

      Information security professionals were overwhelmingly opposed to a plea to rethink encryption by the Department of Homeland Security at last week’s RSA conference.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • You Can’t Defend Public Libraries and Oppose File-Sharing

        Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

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DecorWhat Else is New

  1. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 01, 2021

    IRC logs for Wednesday, December 01, 2021

  2. EPO Staff Committee Compares the Tactics of António Campinos to Benoît Battistelli's

    The Central Staff Committee (CSC) of the EPO talks about EPO President António Campinos, arguing that “he seems to subscribe to the Manichean view, introduced by Mr Battistelli…”

  3. Prof. Thomas Jaeger in GRUR: Unified Patent Court (UPC) “Incompatible With EU Law“

    The truth remains unquestionable and the law remains unchanged; Team UPC is living in another universe, unable to accept that what it is scheming will inevitably face high-level legal challenges (shall that become necessary) and it will lose because the facts are all stlll the same

  4. Links 1/12/2021: LibrePlanet CFS Extended to December 15th and DB Comparer for PostgreSQL Reaches 5.0

    Links for the day

  5. EPO Cannot and Will Not Self-Regulate

    The term financialisation helps describe some of the activities of the EPO in recent years; see Wikipedia on financialisation below

  6. [Meme] Germany's Licence to Break the Law

    Remember that the young Campinos asked dad for his immunity after he had gotten drunk and crashed the car; maybe the EPO should stop giving diplomatic immunity to people, seeing what criminals (e.g. Benoît Battistelli) this attracts; the German government is destroying its image (and the EU’s) by fostering such corruption, wrongly believing that it’s worth it because of Eurozone domination for patents/litigation

  7. EPO Dislikes Science and Scientists

    The EPO's management has become like a corrupt political party with blind faith in money and monopolies (or monopoly money); it has lost sight of its original goals and at this moment it serves to exacerbate an awful pandemic, as the video above explains

  8. Links 1/12/2021: LibreOffice 7.3 Beta, Krita 5.0, Julia 1.7

    Links for the day

  9. Links 1/12/2021: NixOS 21.11 Released

    Links for the day

  10. IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 30, 2021

    IRC logs for Tuesday, November 30, 2021

  11. Links 1/12/2021: Tux Paint 0.9.27 and WordPress 5.9 Beta

    Links for the day

  12. [Meme] EPO Administrative Council Believing EPO-Bribed 'Media' (IAM Still Shilling and Lying for Cash)

    IAM continues to do what brings money from EPO management and Team UPC, never mind if it is being disputed by the patent examiners themselves

  13. The EPO's Mythical “Gap” Has Been Found and It's Bonuses for People Who Use Pure Fiction to Steal From Patent Examiners

    The phony president who has the audacity to claim there's a budget gap is issuing millions of euros for his enablers to enjoy; weeks ahead of the next meeting of national delegates the Central Staff Committee (CSC) tells them: "Events show that the delegations’ concerns about functional allowances have materialised. The lack of transparency and inflation of the budget envelope gives rise to the suspicion that high management is pursuing a policy of self-service at the expense of EPO staff, which is difficult to reconcile with the Office’s claimed cost-saving policy, and to the detriment of the whole Organisation."

  14. Video: Making the Internet a Better Place for People, Not Megacorporations

    Following that earlier list of suggested improvements for a freedom-respecting Internet, here's a video and outline

  15. Links 30/11/2021: KDE Plasma 5.23.4, 4MLinux 38.0, Long GitHub Downtime, and Microsoft's CEO Selling Away Shares

    Links for the day

  16. A Concise Manifesto For Freedom-Respecting Internet

    An informal list of considerations to make when reshaping the Internet to better serve people, not a few corporations that are mostly military contractors subsidised by the American taxpayers

  17. Freenode.net Becomes a 'Reddit Clone' and Freenode IRC is Back to Old Configurations After Flushing Down Decades' Worth of User/Channel Data and Locking/Shutting Out Longtime Users

    Freenode is having another go; after “chits” and “jobs” (among many other ideas) have clearly failed, and following the change of daemon (resulting in massive loss of data and even security issues associated with impersonation) as well as pointless rebrand as “Joseon”, the domain Freenode.net becomes something completely different and the IRC network reopens to all

  18. Jack Dorsey's Decision is a Wake-up Call: Social Control Media is Just a Toxic Bubble

    The state of the World Wide Web (reliability, preservation, accessibility, compatibility etc.) was worsened a lot more than a decade ago; with social control media that’s nowadays just a pile of JavaScript programs we’re basically seeing the Web gradually turning into another Adobe Flash (but this time they tell us it’s a “standard”), exacerbating an already-oversized ‘bubble economy’ where companies operate at a loss while claiming to be worth hundreds of billions (USD) and generally serve imperialistic objectives by means of manipulation like surveillance, selective curation, and censorship

  19. IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 29, 2021

    IRC logs for Monday, November 29, 2021

  20. Links 29/11/2021: NuTyX 21.10.5 and CrossOver 21.1.0

    Links for the day

  21. This Apt Has Super Dumbass Powers. Linus Sebastian and Pop_OS!

    Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission

  22. [Meme] Trying to Appease Provocateurs and Borderline Trolls

    GNU/Linux isn’t just a clone of Microsoft Windows and it oughtn’t be a clone of Microsoft Windows, either; some people set themselves up for failure, maybe by intention

  23. Centralised Git Hosting Has a Business Model Which is Hostile Towards Developers' Interests (in Microsoft's Case, It's an Attack on Reciprocal Licensing and Persistent Manipulation)

    Spying, censoring, and abusing projects/developers/users are among the perks Microsoft found in GitHub; the E.E.E.-styled takeover is being misused for perception manipulation and even racism, so projects really need to take control of their hosting (outsourcing is risky and very expensive in the long run)

  24. Links 29/11/2021: FWUPD's 'Best Known Configuration' and Glimpse at OpenZFS 3.0

    Links for the day

  25. President Biden Wants to Put Microsofter in Charge of the Patent Office, Soon to Penalise Patent Applicants Who Don't Use Microsoft's Proprietary Formats

    The tradition of GAFAM or GIAFAM inside the USPTO carries on (e.g. Kappos and Lee; Kappos lobbies for Microsoft and IBM, whereas Lee now works for Amazon/Bezos after a career at Google); it's hard to believe anymore that the USPTO exists to serve innovators rather than aggressive monopolists, shielding their territory by patent threats (lawsuits or worse aggression) and cross-licensing that's akin to a cartel

  26. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley's Long Career Serving Microsoft's Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub's GPL Violations Machine)

    Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley was promoting .NET (or Mono) since his young days; his current job at Microsoft is consistent with past harms to GNU/Linux, basically pushing undesirable (except to Microsoft) things to GNU/Linux users; Tomboy used to be the main reason for distro ISOs to include Mono

  27. Dr. Andy Farnell on Teaching Cybersecurity in an Age of 'Fake Security'

    By Dr. Andy Farnell

  28. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 28, 2021

    IRC logs for Sunday, November 28, 2021

  29. Links 29/11/2021: Linux 5.16 RC3 and Lots of Patent Catch-up

    Links for the day

  30. By 2022 0% of 'News' Coverage About Patents Will Be Actual Journalism (Patent Litigation Sector Has Hijacked the World Wide Web to Disseminate Self-Promotional Misinformation)

    Finding news about the EPO is almost impossible because today’s so-called ‘news’ sites are in the pockets of Benoît Battistelli, António Campinos, and their cohorts who turned the EPO into a hub of litigation, not science; this is part of an international (worldwide) problem because financial resources for journalism have run out, and so the vacuum is filled/replaced almost entirely by Public Relations (PR) and marketing

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