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Links 14/6/2013: Linux Innovation Debated, Video of Megaupload Raid





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • System76 finally launches a laptop to compete with MacBook Air
    System76 has launched a laptop which puts Linux users in the same league of Windows and Mac users. Galago UltraPro is one of the lightest laptop which comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux.

    Galago UltraPro weighs only 3.8 pounds and is only is 0.75 inches thin. It features a 14.1 inch 1080p IPS matte display bringing the 1080p resolution to System76 laptops.

    System76 doesn't stop there, they are packing Intel's 4th generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, inside this laptop. The quad-core Intel i7-4750HQ Processor (Haswell),clocked at 2.0Ghz, not only enhances performance but also contributes to making the laptop more energy efficient which means longer battery life.


  • Software Company in Perth Anahata Announces Discount for Linux ARM Development Projects
    Software Company in Perth, Anahata Technologies, will be offering a 10% discount to customers willing to engage in a software development project for the Linux / ARM platfrom.


  • Can You Completely Secure Linux?
    How does Red Hat go about building and developing a secure Linux operating system? That question was asked and answered at the Red Hat Summit this week by Josh Bressers, who heads the Red Hat Product Security Team.


  • Judging Linux Innovation
    It really does means different things to different people. Sometimes it is a net new 'thing' that moves the ball forward in some way (like electricity). Then there is disruptive innovation - like the first wave of Linux - which re-thinks and improves the way things are done.


  • Linux Gets Mentioned in "13 Things that Seem Like Scams But Are Actually Really Great"


  • Server

    • Sun Microsystems Unveils Enterprise AMP Stack for Solaris and Linux
      Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:JAVA), today announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, a fully supported and integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris(TM) and Linux operating systems. The Web Stack software includes the open source, standards-based software most commonly used for Web-tier application development and services. Download the Web Stack at http://www.sun.com/webstack


    • MTN awards entire Wintel, Linux Server support contract to Integr8
      Leading ICT managed services and outsourcing company, Integr8, has been awarded the contract to provide support for the entire Wintel and Linux Server environment for telecommunications giant MTN SA.




  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 5 Episode 10
      In this episode: It looks like Rockwell was right - somebody was watching him (and us). There's a great new Raspberry Pi installer called NOOBS and the President of the US promises action against patent trolls. Ubuntu's 'bug one' has been fixed and the EFF objects to DRM in HTML 5. As ever, hear our discoveries and your opinions in this epic length podcast.


    • web2Project






  • Kernel Space

    • How Linux Foundation Runs Its Virtual Office
      Cost savings is only part of the picture behind the nonprofit's remote workforce strategy. Linux Foundation exec says the virtual office has made the team more productive and innovative, and happier in their jobs.


    • IBM to Support Linux KVM Virtualization on Power Systems
      The move will enable developers to more easily create applications for big data and the cloud on Power 7+ systems running Linux.


    • Buffer Synchronization Comes To DMA-BUF
      In recent days, Samsung has been posting kernel patches pertaining to buffer synchronization support of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism.


    • The Linux Kernel: Introduction
      In 1991, a Finnish student named Linus Benedict Torvalds made the kernel of a now popular operating system. He released Linux version 0.01 on September 1991, and on February 1992, he licensed the kernel under the GPL license. The GNU General Public License (GPL) allows people to use, own, modify, and distribute the source code legally and free of charge. This permits the kernel to become very popular because anyone may download it for free. Now that anyone can make their own kernel, it may be helpful to know how to obtain, edit, configure, compile, and install the Linux kernel.




  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments/WMs



    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • RHEL 7 is shipping GNOME Shell in Classic Mode
        RHEL 7 the upcoming enterprise Linux of Red Hat is scheduled for the second half of 2013. Around half year ago Red Hat made known that they were going to ship GNOME 3 for their desktop, so it was easy to guess that they were going to use version 3.8 since that was going to be the latest GNOME version at the time for RHEL 7 Beta.






  • Distributions



    • New Releases



    • Arch Family



    • Slackware Family

      • Linux Kernel 3.9.x and GCC 4.8.1 Goes to Slackware-Current
        Patrick has decided to leave Linux Kernel 3.8.x branch and include Linux Kernel 3.9.x branch for the next Slackware release. Both of them are not LTS, but being LTS doesn't mean that it's really that stable as expected (take an example from the previous experience of upgrading the kernel in Slackware 14.0 from 3.2.x to 3.4.x branch which caused some regressions for Intel Graphics).




    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Looks Beyond Linux For Its Next Decade Of Growth


        Red Hat's last 10 years were all about enterprise Linux. The next 10 will be about enterprise clouds.


      • Red Hat Inc : Red Hat Customer Portal Named One of the "Ten Best Web Support Sites"
        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Red Hat Customer Portal has - for the third consecutive year - been recognized by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) as one of the industry's "Ten Best Web Support Sites" for 2013. Red Hat was honored in the Open Division along with technology industry leaders Cisco Systems, Intel, Nokia Corporation, PTC, Inc., EMC, and CheckPoint.


      • EPAM Expands Open-Source Digital Services with Zend and Acquia
        Red Hat Inc.'s lead for its technology and product organizations, Paul Cormier, opened Day 2 of the ninth annual Red Hat Summit, held here on Wednesday, by explaining how some of the company's pivotal undertakings over the past 11 years will provide the springboard to where Red Hat is headed tomorrow.


      • The Planet Adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Managed Hosting Platform
        The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced the addition of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to its Planet Northstar Managed Hosting line of business. Customers with Linux, Microsoft or blended environments can now take advantage of premium managed hosting services. As one of just two Red Hat Premier Hosting Partners, the Planet Northstar engineering team will have direct access to the company’s product roadmaps and new platform features, creating a technically superior hosted environment for its customers.


      • Red Hat Debuts Linux-based OpenStack Offering
        This is a big week for Red Hat in the cloud. As we've reported, Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog recenlty confirmed that the AWS Free Usage Tier, which lets users run applications and operating systems in the cloud, now includes 750 hours of Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage. This is a good tire-kicking opportunity for those who aren't quite ready to commit to an RHEL deployment.


      • Red Hat Launches Linux-Based OpenStack Platform, Targets VMware For Control Of The Data Center
        Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider.

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.


      • Red Hat Backs OpenStack For Cloud Attack On VMware
        Red Hat has produced a fully-supported OpenStack distribution so customers can deliver open-source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, at its Red Hat Summit in Boston this week.

        The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programmes.


      • [Red Hat] Celebrating 20 years of open


      • Fedora

        • Fedora Day Four: Performance
          So I’m now a few days into my time with Fedora, and things are going well so far. The machine is all up and running, and I’m back at my keyboard working away. We now know how to make Fedora look good, but how well does it perform in practice? Let’s take a look…


        • Rawhide week in review 2013-06-11
          Another week another rawhide review post. :)






    • Debian Family





  • Devices/Embedded

    • Mini-ITX boards step up to Intel’s 4th Generation Core
      Six vendors announced embedded Linux-ready Mini-ITX single board computers (SBCs) supporting Intel’s newly announced 4th Generation “Haswell” Core i7, i5, and i3 processors. The Aaeon EMB-QM87A, BCM MX87QD and MX81H, DFI HM100-QM87 and HD100-H81D, iBase MI980, Kontron KTQ87/mITX, and Portwell WADE-8015 are equipped with Intel QM87, Q87, or H81 chipsets.

      Intel’s announcement of its 4th Generation Core (aka “Haswell”) processors last week was quickly followed by partner announcements in a variety of form-factors. We’ll get to the COM Express products soon, but first we’ll focus on six Mini-ITX boards that support Haswell.


    • Phones



    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Root 101 crowdfunding towards an open source 10-inch tablet
        There is plenty of talk of low prices when it comes to tablets. It seems many have been searching for the ‘perfect’ sub $100 tablet and while that most often seems to reflect a 7-inch model, it looks like Root 101 is aiming to launch a low priced 10-inch tablet. They aren’t going to hit that sub-$100 price point, however they have gone the crowd funding route and the pledging begins at $169.








Free Software/Open Source



  • Open source vision systems get the ARM treatment
    The combination of an ARM dual core Cortex-A9 processor and FPGA fabric in one SoC brings open source vision processing software to security and driver assistance systems, write Fernando Martinez Vallina and José Roberto Alvarez

    OpenCV is a library of computer vision functions widely used throughout the industry. Like all open source projects, the community is constantly developing and improving the algorithms, and there are now more than 2500 functions available.


  • Open-Source Standard Demo Success
    he open-source standard for collecting and communicating real-time information from manufacturing processes and factory floor equipment from a variety of vendors, has been successfully demonstrated and tested by manufacturing researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).


  • QUT launches open source lab
    An open source lab launched this week at Queensland University of Technology aims to target high school students interested in open source software development.

    The idea for the lab initially came from two students who were keen for an environment that enabled them to exchange ideas with others interested in open source projects.

    The Open Source Software Group and Virtual Lab subsequently gained the support of Microsoft, Red Hat Asia Pacific and Technology One.


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Rolls Out Web Audio API Support
        For Ubuntu, Windows and Mac: Good news for Firefox web browser fans. Mozilla has pushed out Web Audio API Support to Firefox 24 Nightly and Firefox 23 Aurora channels. The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications.






  • SaaS/Big Data

    • How non developers can contribute to OpenStack
      I have attended over dozen conferences and gave presentations/talks too on OpenStack. Most of the time I meet bunch of motivated students/professionals and one common question was "I am not a developer tell me how can I contribute to OpenStack?" My simple answer to their question was like any other FOSS project OpenStack too needs a lot of volunteers in many domains apart from developing the software. I would mention the areas in which one can contribute to OpenStack project.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Wasted time?
      The post had some good success and a few comments as well. One of these attracted my attention. The poster “jsc” – Jürgen Schmidt if I’m not mistaken – is obviously an Apache contributor and an IBM engineer who in a previous life was also a long time StarOffice/Sun employee . I’m grateful for his comment as he’s tried to present the work on the sidebar from his perspective and that’s of course always interesting to understand his points.


    • Try the new flat icon set for LibreOffice


    • 7 Improvements needed in LibreOffice templates and styles
      Yet despite the importance of styles and templates in LibreOffice, they remain as needlessly arcane and as lacking in certain obvious features as ever.




  • CMS

    • EPAM Expands Open-Source Digital Services with Zend and Acquia
      EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM), a leading provider of complex software engineering solutions and a leader in Central and Eastern European IT service delivery, announced its partnerships with Zend and Acquia, two of the world's leading open-source technology companies.




  • Healthcare



  • BSD

    • The move from Linux to FreeBSD
      About 2 months ago, I had a spare VPS at my host, Hetzner. So I decided to play with FreeBSD which was being offered for Hetzner servers and VPSes. That’s how the whole thing started. I didn’t have much problems getting the concepts because it belongs to *nix family of OSes and I have been a pure Linux user since 2008.




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Fight PRISM through the Free Software Directory
      To protect their freedom and privacy, the FSF urges everyone to avoid Software as a Service, and to support projects working for a better, safer world. One small way you can help support free software projects and encourage use of free software is to help maintain and improve the Free Software Directory.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data

      • Scotland Maps Rural Farms With Open Source, Cloud
        The way Scotland registers its crofts -- its ancient network of tiny agricultural settlements -- has been brought into the 21st century via a cloud and open source mash-up built by small tech companies.


      • EU unlocks a great new source of online innovation
        Today the European Parliament voted to formally agree new rules on open data – effectively making a reality of the proposal which I first put forward just over 18 months ago, and making it easier to open up huge amounts of public sector data. This is about the data that public authorities can lawfully put out there – a huge wealth of information about your public services, how administrations are spending your tax euros, geographical or cultural information, and the like.









Leftovers

  • Navy ends century and a half of ALL-CAPS messages
    The US Navy has reached a new milestone in electronic communications. According to a report in the Navy Times, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Scott Van Buskirk recently issued a policy directive that used something not seen before in Navy communications: lowercase letters.


  • Science

    • Mind-controlled exoskeleton lets paralysed people walk
      TWO years ago, Antonio Melillo was in a car crash that completely severed his spinal cord. He has not been able to move or feel his legs since. And yet here I am, in a lab at the Santa Lucia Foundation hospital in Rome, Italy, watching him walk.

      Melillo is one of the first people with lower limb paralysis to try out MindWalker – the world's first exoskeleton that aims to enable paralysed and locked-in people to walk using only their mind.




  • Health/Nutrition

    • Chronic Wasting Disease on the Rise in Wisconsin Deer; Will it Infect Humans?
      The rate of chronic wasting disease (CWD) is on the rise among deer in Iowa County, Wisconsin and elsewhere across the state. CWD is a fatal, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) similar to what is commonly known as mad cow disease that is caused by twisted proteins, or prions. For hunters, writes outdoors reporter Patrick Durkin, this means the disease might be affecting the herd now. For anyone who eats venison, this means greater chances that the disease could conceivably make the species jump and infect humans, according to Dave Clausen, a veterinarian whose term on Wisconsin's Natural Resources Board expired in May.


    • Monsanto hit with class action lawsuits in mystery GMO wheat case
      American Farmers have launched two class action lawsuits against biotech giant Monsanto following the discovery of unapproved genetically modified wheat growing in the Pacific Northwest. According to farmers, the company’s negligence has ruined sales.

      Though the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has never approved either the growing or sale of GMO wheat in the US, the agency began investigating its existence when an Oregon farmer found wheat growing in his fields that was resistant to Monsanto’s patented Roundup pesticide, known by its scientific classification as glyphosate.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • Former Dutch PMs facing possible charges for revealing nukes on Dutch soil
      Dutch public prosecutors on Thursday announced they are looking at possible charges for revealing state secrecy against two former prime ministers who said the Netherlands still stored tactical U.S. nuclear bombs on its soil.

      Some 22 nuclear bombs are still stored at a southern air base where they were brought during the height of the Cold War, Ruud Lubbers, who headed the Dutch government between 1982 and 1994, told National Geographic in a documentary which was first broadcast on late Saturday.


    • Nukes in Europe: Secrecy Under Siege
      The Cold War practice of NATO and the United States refusing to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere is under attack in Europe. This week, two former Dutch prime ministers publicly confirmed the presence of nuclear weapons at Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, one of six bases in NATO that still host US nuclear weapons.

      The first confirmation came in the program How Time Flies on the Dutch National Geographic channel where former prime minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed that there are nuclear weapons at Volkel Air Base. “I would never have thought those silly things would still be there in 2013,” Lubbers said, who was prime minister in 1982-1994. He even mentioned a specific number: 22 bombs.


    • Bill Clinton Suggests Obama Risks Looking Like a "Wuss" and "Total Fool" on Syria
      Bill Clinton took part Tuesday night in a Q-and-A with Sen. John McCain at a semi-private event in New York City, where the former president offered some notably sharp criticism of President Obama's handling of the ongoing war in Syria, specifically his reluctance to get involved. The event was technically closed to the press but both the Daily Beast and Politico managed to get their hands on a recording of the remarks, as tends to happen with events like this.


    • Rachel Maddow's Iran Misinformation


      Iran is not "apparently" developing a nuclear weapon. Some political leaders make claims to that effect, but there is no solid intelligence that has yet established that this is what Iran is doing. What is known is that the country has a uranium enrichment program that is regularly monitored by International Atomic Energy Agency, and that there is no evidence that the country's uranium program has any military dimension.

      As to Maddow's claim, that's just wrong. Ahmadinejad has, like other Iranian leaders, denied the country has any intention of building any such weapon. He's done so in numerous U.S. media appearances, denying any Iranian plan to build a bomb–a simple Google search would turn up too many such instances, like this interview from CBS last year (helpfully headlined "Iranian President Denies Iran Developing a Nuclear Weapon.")




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Humanity Imperiled: The Path to Disaster
      What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So, imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now—assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious—and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.

      For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.






  • Finance



  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights

    • Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as 'Terrorists'
      It’s often difficult to gauge just how much fear activists instill in the powers that be. But on Wednesday, environmental activists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline saw firsthand how much TransCanada, the corporation in charge of the pipeline, is shaking in its boots.


    • Secret Courts: 8 nightmare scenarios now possible in Britain
      Imagine suing the government for damages for torture and kidnap, and losing your case, without ever knowing the reason why. A former lawyer who resigned from the Lib Dem party over "secret courts" describes the chilling scenarios made possible by the recently passed Justice and Security Act.




  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • EU in last-minute push to convince France to back EU-US trade talks


      The European Union will try to find the right 'language' to overcome French resistance to free-trade talks with the United States today (14 June) and keep alive plans for a deal that could boost their struggling economies by dramatically increasing transatlantic business.


    • Senator Warren: If TPP Transparency Would Lead To Public Opposition, Then TPP Is Wrong


    • Copyrights



      • Kim Dotcom releases a video of Megaupload raid
        Mini documentary shows police in helicopters, handcuffs and dogs


      • Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday Is In The Public Domain; Demands Warner Pay Back Millions Of License Fees
        Happy Birthday remains the most profitable song ever. Every year, it is the song that earns the highest royalty rates, sent to Warner/Chappell Music (which makes millions per year from "licensing" the song). However, as we've been pointing out for years, the song is almost certainly in the public domain. Robert Brauneis did some fantastic work a few years ago laying out why the song's copyright clearly expired many years ago, even as Warner/Chappell pretends otherwise. You can read all the background, but there are a large number of problems with the copyright, including that the sisters who "wrote" the song, appear to have written neither the music, nor the lyrics. At best, they may have written a similar song called "Good Morning to All" in 1893, with the same basic melody, but there's evidence to suggest the melody itself predated the sisters. But, more importantly, the owner of the copyright (already questionable) failed to properly renew it in 1962, which would further establish that it's in the public domain.


      • Copyright Industry Demands, Gets Levies For Every XBox, Playstation Sold
        The copyright industry has decreed in Sweden that it will now collect levies for every XBox and Playstation sold – about €10 ($12) per unit. This levy is the “blank media” levy, originally used to compensate for private music copying from vinyl records to blank cassettes, that has crept over all boundaries. It is hard, not to say impossible, to justify the fairness in a single mother having to pay a levy to the richest rock stars when she buys a Playstation for her kids.








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Social hermits are not popular, irrespective of how many "Facebook friends" or "likes" they get
Waggener Edstrom/Frank Shaw Lied, There Are Definitely Microsoft Layoffs
Microsoft never issued a formal statement, it made allusions by proxy
Microsoft-Controlled Media With Embargo and Press Operatives
This won't be the last example of media manipulation for narrative control or face-saving "damage control"
Slop Hype Makes Our Core Technology Less Reliable and Far Less Resilient (We Pay for the Catastrophe That Follows)
Only slop-free projects can be trusted
Going for 1,000 (Days of Uptime)
universal records are vastly better
Firefox is No-Go in China, Not Even 1% "Market Share" Anymore
Given Mozilla's utterly rubbish marketing these days (politics over technical aspects), set aside the cheerleading for slop, there's hardly a chance of Mozilla Firefox reaching or exceeding 10% again
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part III - It's in His Eyes
Workers are free to draw their own conclusions
Links 21/02/2026: Tensions Over Iran and Illegal Cheeto Tariffs, Presidential Approval Sags
Links for the day
Links 21/02/2026: "Moving Away From Cloudflare", Many Layoffs or Shutdowns in Games (Including XBox/Microsoft)
Links for the day
GNU Linux-libre is a Grown-Up Today
"before that, every distro that wanted to respect its users' freedom had to remove itself all of the binary blobs that were distributed as part of the kernel Linux's so-called sources"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 20, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 20, 2026
Gemini Links 21/02/2026: "The Evil of Action" and Slop Bots Causing Great Harm Online (Not Just the Web)
Links for the day