05.22.14
Posted in DRM, Free/Libre Software at 10:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Darcy Padilla
Summary: A look at Brendan Eich’s musings from some months ago reveals hostility, as a matter of principle, towards DRM and some other items which suggest turf wars might be going on inside Mozilla
This sure is fascinating. Following the widely-chastised decision to embrace DRM it turns out that Eich was against the decision. We congratulated him for being a FOSS proponent who can end Mono dependence back when he was first appointed CEO and even before that. Remember that the patron of Firefox, Mozilla, was quick to embrace Ogg (we love Ogg), but later disappointed many of us by liaising with MPEG-LA (essentially stomping on the whole policy of supporting Ogg at the core). There certainly seems to be a turf war inside Mozilla. This is probably why Eich got ejected (through intense pressure on him).
With DRM and MPEG, Mozilla Firefox is no longer a FOSS browser. According to this one new blog post, DRM was why Brendan Eich had to go. “Eich stood firmly in the way of Mozilla incorporating DRM into Firefox,” says the source. Eich is a FOSS supporter, so this makes sense. Without him, Firefox can become FOSS only in the Chrome sense (FOSS with many blobs on top). Here is what Eich wrote in his site: “I continue to collaborate with others, including some in Hollywood, on watermarking, not DRM.”
He also said “DRM is about gaining leverage over “playback devices” and ultimately “users” in order to jack prices a bit” (source). To quote another take on it:
Eich stood firmly in the way of Mozilla incorporating DRM into Firefox. Now that he’s gone, and his technological authority with him, Mozilla immediately caved to Hollywood interests. It’s also interesting to note that the justification for Mozilla making this change is given as fear that users will abandon them. That demonstrates that the campaign to #uninstallfirefox was based on a sound principle, even if it was not quite as successful as I would have liked it to be.
Well, guess what, Mozilla? The treatment of Eich and promotion of DRM will do huge harm to Firefox and Mozilla. Many people disagreed with a position that Eich held outside his professional field half a decade ago, but those same people strongly disagree with the way some people in Mozilla treated Eich, not to mention the actions taken after his departure. Mozilla seems to be suffering an identity crisis of some kind. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 10:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Blackboard seems to be ‘pulling a Microsoft’ on an essential FOSS project that makes Blackboard redundant
Moodle is a fantastic and comprehensive piece of free/libre software. I use it at work. I have it installed in my own Web site as well, having set up and configured Moodle for clients. It’s an impressive collection of software for which I produced some documentation, so seeing how Blackboard is trying to ruin it feels quite personal. First Blackboard was exploring patent litigation and now it uses “embrace, extend, and extinguish” (the Microsoft modus operandi).
According to this new post, there is threat to Moodle and Blackboard is involved. To quote: “When services are not conveying but users interact the GPL does not seem to come into play. While companies like Moodlerooms allege they donate a lot of funding to Moodle, we are unable to use the source code from this deriv because it is “Cloud” based and no copies are distributed.
“I was absolutely surprised when I saw that Moodlerooms did not have a GPL notice on their website. I was confused, shocked and dismayed when I realized they were not required to have one. Honestly, they use Moodle as a backend. They use both 1.9x (GPL v2) and 2.x (GPL v3). At least, according to their Joule documentation, this is how their service works.
“They take a 1.9x course and archive it. They then use 2.x to convert this to Common Cartridge format for importing to Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard – the company who bought them or whatever – Blackboard is proprietary. Moodlerooms code and Joule is closed source even though it uses open source.
“The interface of Moodlerooms is admittedly Moodle. The look and feel is exactly Moodle. The processes on the back are not seen, but seems like a simple backup, restore, export process.
“However, maybe I want to see the code. I cannot. This is a service.”
Remember that Moodlerooms is now controlled by the biggest enemy of Moodle which is linked to Microsoft. The author of the rant does not seem to note this (perhaps unaware). █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents, Samsung at 10:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple is reportedly folding and moving away from the counterproductive war that Steve Jobs started before his death
There are indications in the media (both large and small outlets) that after vicious attacks against HTC Apple may end litigation against Samsung, quite similarly. As one person put it: “The long and drawn out battle between Samsung Electronics and Apple over the ownership of various intellectual properties may be coming to a close.”
Samsung and Apple have been in the courts for years (only lawyers won). Apple started it all because Apple is silly and it was headed by an arrogant man at the time. To quote HBR:
Look out across today’s ultra-competitive smartphone market and you’ll see something resembling the religious wars of the Middle Ages. This is no quaint summer-weekend reenactment. The weapons being brandished are devilishly constructed patents; the rules of engagement the arcane procedures of federal courts. And the havoc being wreaked — in higher prices, banned devices, and stifled innovation — is laying waste to the industry landscape.
The central battle pits Apple against everyone and everything involved with Android, Google’s open source operating system.
Android’s release, for Apple’s late founder and CEO Steve Jobs, was the ultimate heresy. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to,” Jobs is quoted as saying in a series of jeremiads, “and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40bn in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
And so Apple has. Between 2006 and 2012, the company was involved, sometimes as plaintiff and sometimes as defendant, in nearly 150 patent lawsuits around the world over various features of its iPhone — including hardware, software, and product design.
Like the religious wars of old, a complex web of alliances, side agreements, and mutual defense pacts have conspired to draw the entire industry into open warfare. Sony is suing LG. Nokia is suing HTC. Motorola (owned by Google since 2011) is suing and being sued by everyone.
Based on this other new report, Apple is close to giving up, having failed to tax Android in any significant way. Reuters says the following:
Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle all patent litigation between them over smartphone technology, ending one of the highest profile lawsuits in technology.
In a joint statement on Friday, the companies said the settlement does not include a cross license to their respective patents.
“Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform,” the statement said.
Apple and companies that make phones using Google’s Android software have filed dozens of such lawsuits against each other around the world to protect their technology. Apple argued that Android phones that use Google software copy its iPhones.
It is starting to look like Apple is admitting defeat and abandoning Jobs’ aggressive legacy. It is worth noting that Apple has launched no new major cases since Jobs died. It is a good sign because it may mean that Apple as an aggressor in the courtroom might be a dead legacy. █
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05.21.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Recently Tamil Nadu has become one of the first few adopters of open source through BOSS (Bharat Open Source Software) developed by CDAC Chennai — savinmg a lot of funds for most government departments.
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Desktop
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It’s no secret that Chromebooks–portable computers running Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are starting to succeed, especially in several niche markets. In fact, PCMag.com has a big story out on why Microsoft should be worried about Chromebooks. Among other notable points it makes, Intel has a new line of chips for Chromebooks using its Core i3 mobile processors. Intel, of course, was Microsoft’s primary partner as Windows marched forwared to market dominance.
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The sheer variety available to the Linux desktop brings with it a level of discussion and debate most other platforms do not know. Which desktop is the best? Should Linux hold onto what has always worked? Should the Linux desktop mimic what others already know? Dare Linux look and feel like OS X?
That last idea is a bit of a conundrum – one with multiple arguments. First and foremost, there is no debating that OS X is a fast-growing platform. It not only has deep roots in Linux architecture, it has been accepted by numerous types of users. There have been many attempts at “cloning” the OS X desktop on Linux. Some of those clones have succeeded, to varying levels. One in particular (PearOS) succeeded so well it was bought by an unknown American company and removed from existence. That company is rumored to be Apple (a Black Lab Linux developer announced (in a goodbye letter) he was leaving the team to join Apple “…in a Linux endeavor they recently acquired.” It’s fairly easy to put that two and two together.) But still, until there are facts, it is conspiracy, at best.
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Server
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Red Hat was flush with announcements in conjunction with the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta last week, as we covered here. The company announced that itt is open sourcing the ManageIQ cloud orchestration platform, and it also announced some important new collaboration deals surrounding OpenStack. However, one thing that also became clear in Atlanta is that Canonical’s new focus on delivering and supporting private OpenStack clouds is going to create very direct competition with Red Hat.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Renesas Electronics Corporation is increasing its engagement with Linux and The Linux Foundation to become a Gold Member. The company joins existing Linux Foundation Gold members China Mobile, Cisco, Citrix, ETRI, Google, Hitachi, Huawei, NetApp, NYSE Technologies, Panasonic, SUSE, Toyota and Verizon Terremark.
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Two companies that represent the profound changes rippling through the tech industry have joined The Linux Foundation.
Distributed Linux OS company “CoreOS” and networking software specialist Cumulus Networks announced on Monday that they had joined open source advocacy, collaboration, and support group.
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In today’s Linux news, Katherine Noyes slogs the blogosphere in search of alternatives to systemd, with little success it seems. Jesse Smiths falls into VortexBox 2.3, a distribution for music servers and jukeboxes. Jamie Watson reviews Mint 17 RC and a user survey puts Ubuntu ahead of Red Hat in the OpenStack race.
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Linux kernel debugging may soon be a bit easier for kernel developers and users in the field thanks to the work of Outreach Program for Women intern Teodora Băluţă.
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That very much includes me, btw. I think the whole “cult of personality” is pretty disturbing, and I hate how people take me and what I say too seriously. The same goes for Jobs, Ellison, Gates, you name it. I wish more people thought for themselves, and realized that the technology actually flows from all those random anonymous great engineers that are all around.
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PowerTOP remains one of Intel’s long-standing open-source utilities for trying to improve the power efficiency of Linux systems, particularly around laptops/ultrabooks and other Intel x86 portable systems. With the PowerTOP 2.6 release that happened a few days ago there’s a new look-and-feel to the auto-generated HTML reports, support for compiling the PowerTOP code-base as C++11, and there’s several bug-fixes to the utility itself.
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The latest build of this kernel features quite a few patches and fixes, covering numerous aspects. The interesting thing about it is that the latest update for this branch was released almost a year ago, which makes this the oldest kernel still updated.
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Graphics Stack
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The NVIDIA 331.79 Linux driver was just announced by NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner and it includes fixes for: a crash with the nvidia-installer, a module signing issue with the NVIDIA Unified Memory kernel module, a blank screen/flickering issue when rotating displays with Base Mosaic, a bug that caused errors for big-endian X11 clients with certain RandR requests, a bug that corrupted certain software rendering, and a bug that caused issues with EDID version 1.3 or older for systems using DisplayPort in certain configurations.
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Wayland 1.5 features a new internal event queue for Wayland display events, which allows for the client library to dispatch delete and error events immediately. On the build front, Wayland now uses non-recursive Makefiles.
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While Wayland/Weston 1.5 was just released hour ago, Kristian Høgsberg is already making plans for Wayland 1.6.
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NVIDIA has just announced that a new version of its Long Lived Branch driver for the Linux platform, 331.79, has been released and is ready for download.
The new driver from NVIDIA is not an impressive one, but again, the ones that do make it to this particular branch don’t usually gather too many major changes. There is a very simple reason for this and it all has to do with the way the drivers are handled.
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The Linux DisplayPort MST code has been working for nearly one month and it’s now undergoing further review by other upstream Linux DRM developers. Airlie wrote in a new mailing list post tonight, “So this set is pretty close to what I think we should be merging initially, Since the last set, it makes fbcon and suspend/resume work a lot better, I’ve also fixed a couple of bugs in -intel that make things work a lot better. I’ve bashed on this a bit using kms-flip from intel-gpu-tools, hacked to add 3 monitor support. It still generates a fair few i915 state checker backtraces, and some of them are fairly hard to work out, it might be we should just tone down the state checker for encoders/connectors with no actual hw backing them.”
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Mesa 10.1.4 has been released. Mesa 10.1.4 is a bug fix release which fixes bugs fixed since the 10.1.3 release, (see below for a list of changes).
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Benchmarks
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In the past when comparing the Linux and Windows performance with NVIDIA graphics when using their proprietary drivers, the performance has largely been the same. With the very latest drivers on each platform, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS seems to have an advantage over Windows 8.1 in many of the tests. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we were using the NVIDIA 337.19 Beta as the latest publicly available driver at the time of testing while for Windows 8.1 Pro x64 the 337.50 driver was their latest equivalent. As usual for ensuring accuracy and being a fair “out of the box” comparison, the stock settings were used for each operating system.
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Applications
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Take on “dependency hell” with Docker containers, the lightweight and nimble cousin of VMs. Learn how Docker makes applications portable and isolated by packaging them in containers based on LXC technology.
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Phoronix Test Suite 5.2-Khanino Milestone 2 is now available and it has working all of the fundamentals of the new Phoromatic server and client features for easily and quickly building your own open-source test farm.
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Proprietary
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Spotify is a music streaming service that comes with native clients for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux as well as mobile devices such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry, etc.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Epic Games is a company that is all too familiar with Linux and its community. The studio released Unreal Tournament 2004 for Linux at a time when no one was really giving a damn about open source as an entertainment platform. Also, the devs have always had some sort of Linux dedicated servers in place for their titles.
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Epic Games appears to be taking Linux support for Unreal Engine 4 quite seriously, per their latest blog post. They’ll also be exploring Phoronix Test Suite support so that we’ll be able to run benchmarks and test improvements of the graphics driver stack.
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Valve has just released a new update for the Beta branch of Steam, but this time it’s a little bit smaller, which means that it might be getting closer to another stable version.
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SteamOS, a Debian-based distribution developed by Valve to be used in its hybrid PC / console, has received an update for the Beta branch, a couple of fixes, and a new important package.
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Valve has a large catalog of games and some of them are pretty old, but that doesn’t mean developers don’t care about them any longer. They’ve now released a massive update for the Source engine, which applies to quite a few titles.
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SteamOS, a Debian-based distribution developed by Valve to be used in its hybrid PC / console, has received an update for the Beta branch, a couple of fixes, and a new important package.
Valve has two builds for SteamOS. One is a stable version (sort of) and the other one is a Beta (Alchemist). The differences between them are not that big at the moment, but from time to time, Valve makes some changes on the Beta side that need to be tested by the community before landing in the Stable release.
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Nuclear Throne is probably one of my favourite Procedural Death Labyrinth games right now for Linux and it keeps getting better with every update.
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Ever had those times when you didn’t have any games left to play? The gaming blues as we gamer folks like to say it. Well, if you had or are having it now all you have to do is to turn to Steam to blow it all away. According to an analysis report by Gamasutra, Steam has seen more game released in the last 20 weeks than it has released in all of 2013!
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As Valve gears up for the launch of Steam Machines at the end of this year, many third party manufacturers are showing their concerns. Their major concerns about the machines are that it is going to be a tricky system to manufacture as compared to other consoles or entertainment systems.
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Wargame: Red Dragon, a real time strategy developed by Eugen Systems and published by Focus Home Interactive, has been released on Steam for Linux.
Eugen Systems supported the Linux platform right from start and it was one of the few studios that ported its games when Steam for Linux was only in its infancy.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In Qt5, the locale support has seen a lot of improvements compared to Qt4. John Layt has done some fantastic work in contributing the features that are needed by many KDE applications, to a point where in most cases, KLocale is not needed anymore, and code that used it can now rely on QLocale. This means less duplication of code and API (QLocale vs. KLocale), more compabitility across applications (as more apps move to use QLocale), less interdependencies between libraries, and a smaller footprint.
This is one of the areas where porting of applications from KDE Platform 4.x to KDE Frameworks 5 can cause a bit of work, but it has clear advantages. KLocale is also still there, in the kde4support library, but it’s deprecated, and included as a porting aid and compatibility layer.
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I’m happy to announce that Qt 5.3 has been released. The main focus for this release was performance, stability and usability. Nevertheless, Qt 5.3 has also gotten a fair amount of new features that help make developers’ lives easier.
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KDE‘s Plasma is one of those few desktops which offer extreme cutomization, giving a user full control over the system. Those who complain that the default icon sets have not changed for ages need to understand that art & design need heavy investment (good designers are expensive) and you can’t expect new icon theme with each release – look at Android, iOS or Mac OSX. iOS just got an icon theme reboot which got mixed reviews from users.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Yorba Foundation, the prominent developer of Shotwell photo manager, has recently announced their development of a new slick and stylish calendar app for GNOME called “California.” It has now been included into Yorba’s daily PPA for testing on Ubuntu systems and looks just as promising and stylish as their minimalist email client Geary.
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Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has just reached version 2.2.2 Beta and is available for download.
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SliTaz, an open source and minimalistic Linux distribution built from scratch, has announced that a new Release Candidate in the new 5.0 branch is now ready for testing and download.
The developers have been working for a few years already on this versions of the SliTaz. This is understandable because it’s not exactly easy to build an operating system from scratch.
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Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-10, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, is now ready for download.
The Clonezilla team released a new stable version of their operating system and they made some important modifications to it, including a new Linux kernel.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of May 18, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has just reached version 4.0.2 and is now available for download.
The OpenELEC developers have been keeping themselves very busy and they’ve implemented the latest changes made available along with XBMC 13.1 Beta 2, which arrived only a couple of days ago. Nonetheless, this is considered to be a stable release even if it’s based on a Beta.
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Valve has released yet another Beta version of its Steam client, making this one the busiest weeks on record, with a new update every day.
The Steam developers have been working very hard to get a new stable version of the application, but it seems that we’ll have to wait a little longer.
This latest updated only takes care of some small issues with the In-Home Streaming: a rare crash that occurred while streaming the desktop has been fixed, and a case where the video would stop streaming, leaving audio and control unaffected, has been corrected.
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New Releases
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The Chakra team is proud to announce the first release of Chakra Descartes series, which will follow the 4.13 KDE releases.
We are excited to include the new artwork set by Malcer, codenamed Sirius. The whole Chakra experience has been improved in every detail, from the GRUB theme to the KDE Desktop.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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Red Hat Family
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Traditionally software companies have relied upon the ‘unique’ qualities of their software as the selling point, but selling free software is a different proposition. Most, but not all, of the distributions that Distrowatch currently lists began life as copies or derivatives of one or other of the generic Linux distributions – Red Hat, Slackware or Debian – each of which owed some kind of a debt to Linux pre-history in the shape of SLS or Owen le Blanc’s MCC Interim Linux, which is often claimed to be the first installable Linux distribution.
The primary role of a commercial server-based GNU/Linux distribution is not the sale of the software but of follow-up services – subscription, consultancy, installation, training, support, upgrades and maintenance. Advances to free software may come from any number of sources, but for a distribution to succeed it has to have something that differentiates it from the others, an extra layer of polish or a loyal following, and a reputation for providing good service.
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One of the most controversial things that happened on the Linux Planet over the course of the last week has been a series of stories in the Wall St. Journal taking aim at Red Hat. The first story alleged that Red Hat will not support its’ Linux customers who choose to run a non-Red Hat OpenStack distribution. It’s an allegation that Red Hat denies.
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The open-source community is beating up Red Hat for deciding to make OpenStack more enterprise-ready. Is this a replay of Red Hat’s “enterprise Linux” decision in 2003?
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Fedora
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Robyn Bergeron, project lead of The Fedora Project for over two years had decided to step down from the role. As noted in her blog, she thanked all people associated with the project and said she is “much obliged” to others for the experience she had working with Fedora till date.
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Our top story tonight Fedora project lead has tendered her resignation saying it’s about time. In other news, Linus Torvalds, father of Linux, was interviewed by TechScape’s Bill Robinson. And finally, Gary Newell blogged about his recent experiences with Linux Mint 16.
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In February 2012, Robyn Bergeron was named Fedora Project Leader for the Red Hat-sponsored community Linux Fedora Project. On May 19, Bergeron announced her intention to transition out of the Fedora Project Leader role. Bergeron has not publicly disclosed when her last day will be as Fedora Project Leader, and Red Hat has not yet announced a replacement for her.
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The Fedora Packagers are the folks behind the scenes that take all the new software coming down from upstream and build them for the rest of us to use on Fedora.
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For Fedora 21 there is the KDE Frameworks 5 feature with the goal of shipping all of the KF5 library components that can live side-by-side with KDE4. Some of the packages have already landed into Fedora Rawhide while the rest are expected in the weeks ahead. However, Fedora 21 isn’t being released until late in 2014… For Fedora KDE users right now running Fedora 20, fortunately there is a solution.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The biggest problem with any Windows operating system is the security, whether it’s about viruses or back doors, and this spyware “message” in a Linux system about Windows drivers shows just how much of a problem security is for Microsoft’s OS.
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Good news isn’t it? Yes, 5 Ubuntu derivatives all in one ISO file. One thing I like about this is no more clearing ISO files of the distros on these AIO ISO from USB drives. Mounting this AIO ISO to a USB drive saves you a lot of time. What do have to say about this AIO DVD?
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Looks like it’s time for Open Source community managers to mover on. In the month of April openSUSE community manager announced that he was leaving SUSE to join ownCloud and now Jono Bacon, the rock star community manager of Ubuntu is leaving Canonical.
Jono will be joining the XPRIZE Foundation as a senior director of community. XPRIZE focuses on solving major problems facing humanity, according to Jono.
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Digia has released an all new version of Qt, a C++ framework for creating intuitive cross-platform apps. Starting from Qt 5.2, the framework supports building apps for the Android and iOS platform. Version 5.3 adds some more features on the top of it and also stabilizes Qt for cross-platform mobile programming.
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Ubuntu is now running on the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, as per an update from Ubuntu Insigths. China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and Canonical have teamed up to run OpenStack on Tianhe2.
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With the recent release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (affectionately known as “Trusty Tahr”), there are a number of people (and organizations) that have been waiting to upgrade from LTS to LTS desktop or server. The question to ask yourself might be whether to upgrade or to re-install? The answer to that question may lie in some of the changes that have taken place between these LTS versions (a little more than two years between them), so let’s take a quick look at some of them.
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Candice Swanepoel is a South African model that seem to have a preference of Ubuntu systems and Unity. At least this is what we can deduce from her Youtube channel and the commercial she just posted.
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Flavours and Variants
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There’s quite a bit to look forward to in Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon. Changes in this release include Update Manager and Driver Manager improvements, Login Screen enhancements, a new Language Settings tool, tweaks to the Software Sources menu, and a redesigned Welcome Screen, among other things.
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Edubuntu 14.04 LTS trusty tahr is a ubuntu-derived that adds many default open source software for educational use developed by a community of developers together with educators, parents and technology enthusiasts.
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Embedded developers are able to immediately begin their evaluation, prototyping, and development today by downloading Mentor Embedded Linux Lite and Sourcery™ CodeBench Lite products, both tailored for the new 2nd Generation AMD Embedded R-Series APUs. Additionally, those developers who require support, commercial business terms, enhanced development experience, or customization services can easily migrate to commercial versions of the Mentor Embedded Linux and/or Sourcery CodeBench Professional tools.
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The Tiny Core team has announced that piCore 5.3, the Raspberry Pi port of Tiny Core Linux, has just received a new version and is now available for download.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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PQ Labs announced a tiny, signage-oriented, $109 “iStick A300″ mini-PC that runs Android 4.2 on a quad-core RK3188 SoC and supports up to 55°C environments.
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Entegra announced a rugged, modular tablet that’s configurable for a wide range of environments and applications, and supports both Android 4.2 and Linux.
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The $100 and under tablet market has mostly been the home of third-tier vendors, whose devices are as likely to be found at drugstores as at electronics retailers. Intel has been touting the promise of $100 slates using its Bay Trail processors, but we’ve haven’t seen any yet from major manfacturers. Instead, its hardware partner HP has just rolled out a new bargain-basement tablet with no Intel inside.
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The Android-x86.org is happy to announce the 4.4-RC2 release to public. This is the second candidate of Android-x86 4.4 stable release. A live CD ISO is available in the following site.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Chen says that “SlateKit Base is a small Linux distribution (binary compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 amd64), with specially configured Qt 5.2.0, Mesa 10.0.1, two web engine/renderer: the default QtWebKit, and Oxide, which based on Chromium/Blink.”
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The standard comment trolls make to FLOSS is that non-Free software is better, somehow, because you pay for it up front. I’ve seen several instances of that being false in schools. Here’s an example of a big business rolling out non-Free software. It didn’t work for them and they are stopping the rollout part way through. You don’t always get what you pay for…
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The proof that open source, properly applied, is available. Studies, such as the one recently done by Coverity, have found that open-source programs have fewer errors per thousand lines of code than its proprietary brothers. And, it’s hard to ignore the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), the group within the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that assesses operating systems and software for security issues, when they said that that while no end-user operating system is as secure as they’d like it to be, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most secure desktop.
On the other hand, the mere existence of Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday says everything most of us need to know about how “secure” proprietary software is. I also can’t help noticing how every time Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Explorer (IE), they always claim it’s the most secure ever. And, then, a new hole is found, and guess what, that same security hole is in every version of IE from IE 6 to IE 11. If IE really were being rewritten to make it secure why are the same holes showing up In Every Version??
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As a platinum member of both the Linux Foundation and the OpenStack Foundation, HP hasn’t exactly kept its interest in open source a secret. Recently, however, it upped its commitment to open source in two key areas. First, it added the OpenDaylight project — one it helped found — to its list of platinum memberships. Second, it launched the Helion portfolio and pledged to invest more than $1 billion in support of new open source cloud products and platforms.
“Our views on open source are captured by our commitment to base HP’s cloud product and services strategy entirely upon the open source OpenStack framework,” Mark Pearson, chief technologist for HP Networking, told Linux.com. “We believe openness speeds up innovation.”
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Chrome Team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 35 to the Stable channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack Juno Summit last week in Atlanta was a source of many new and exciting announcements, from both vendors and the OpenStack Foundation itself. One of the more interesting of such announcements was of a new OpenStack Marketplace. For those looking to explore their options in commercial offerings of OpenStack, from training to distributions to public clouds and more, the Marketplace is designed to help users better understand what resources are available.
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Last week was filled with soundbytes and announcements from OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, and there were also announcements of several new services and resources surrounding the OpenStack cloud platform. In case you missed some of the most important ones, here is what you need to know, whether you are considering an OpenStack deployment or already have one underway.
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During an afternoon session at the OpenStack Juno Summit in Atlanta on May 14, members of the OpenStack User Committee publicly revealed the results of the latest OpenStack user survey. OpenStack is an open-source cloud platform originally started by NASA and Rackspace in 2010 that has since grown to include many of the leading names in the technology world, including IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco and AT&T. Since 2010, there have been nine major milestone releases of OpenStack, with the most recent being the Icehouse release that debuted on April 17. The new OpenStack user study includes responses from 506 OpenStack deployments around the world. The top country for deployments is the United States, followed by China. Across the 506 OpenStack clouds, organizations are in various stages of deployments, with 210 being in development/quality assurance, 218 in proof of concept and 209 in production deployment. One of the key findings of the user survey is that OpenStack users are running different OpenStack releases and don’t always update to the latest version, for various reasons. For the OpenStack clouds running in production, the survey found that the Ubuntu Linux operating system is the leading choice. In this eWEEK slide show, we take a look at some of the key findings from the OpenStack user survey.
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CMS
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This update is a bugfix update of the previous major WordPress update 3.9 (codenamed “Smith”). WordPress 3.9.1 has been available for a few days in Fedora 20, and was recently just pushed to the Fedora 19 repos.
The 3.9 WordPress update introduced a slew of new features and refinements, including a new theme browser, improved post editing, and updates to the image editing tools.
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Public Services/Government
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Europe Commons, an online platform for the sharing, exchange and reuse of software solutions for Europe’s municipalities and other local government organisations was revamped earlier this month, during which it also received a new name – Civic Exchange. The platform collects and promotes applications and digital services that help improve public services in Europe. The platform’s consortium is doubling its efforts to find new solutions, announcing evidence-based case studies to showcase those with the most impact.
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Open government is a critical dimension to democracy. It is also difficult. If it were easy, our work would be over. Yet, open government by its nature needs constant iteration. Open government, much like open source, is grounded in collaborative and participatory processes that ultimately shape how we experience our cities, states, and country. It requires several dimensions—from releasing information to creating structures and processes to empower people inside and out of government.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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A release candidate Git v2.0.0-rc4, hopefully the final one before the real thing, is now available for testing at the usual places.
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Standards/Consortia
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To a technology director at the White House, the State of the Union is like the Superbowl. While the world is watching the President of the United States deliver an address to the nation, Leigh Heyman and his team are managing the media technology behind the scenes to create an enhanced and interactive experience for the viewers. How many of you watched the State of the Union on YouTube this year?
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A new initiative is underway by a Mesa developer to pair the OProfile system profiler with the Phoronix Test Suite for more easily finding OpenGL driver bottlenecks, etc.
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The 1,606 respondents said they saw many potential benefits to the Internet of Things. New voice- and gesture-based interfaces could make computers easier to use. Medical devices and health monitoring services could help prevent and treat diseases. Environmental sensors could detect pollution. Salesforce.com chief scientist JP Rangaswami said that improved logistics and planning systems could reduce waste.
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A spoof advert suggesting Apple’s new iOS 7 operating system made handsets waterproof appears to have fooled some users into destroying their iPhones.
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An academy chain in charge of running six state schools became the first in the country to fold today – forcing a sudden hunt for new sponsors to take them over.
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Security
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The Linux Format team genuinely hope you love this issue, as we think it shows how GNU/Linux is touching every aspect of not just the computing world, but our everyday lives too. Nothing highlights this better than our lead news story and the fallout from Heartbleed. Suddenly the world woke up and realised an open source project – OpenSSL – was a vital element in their lives, but from a near-disaster comes an amazing new solution.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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If anybody is surprised that key letters between Tony Blair and George Bush on launching the invasion of Iraq have gone missing, they have not been paying attention. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Obama and Cameron regimes have consistently and continually covered up the crimes of their predecessors, from launch illegal wars of aggression to instituting programmes of torture and extraordinary rendition and murder.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian aardvark,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. He and his brother had spotted several coatis while on a trip to the Iguaçu Falls, in Brazil, where they had mistaken them for actual aardvarks.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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So who should those of us living in England vote for tomorrow? I intend to vote Green – it seems to me that in England that is the best way to give a positive expression to the discontent with mainstream parties. I particularly hope that those who have the opportunity to vote for Rupert Read in the East of England will do so. Their support for renationalizing the railways would be enough for me, but actually I find myself in agreement with the large majority of their platform. I reproduce here an article from the ever excellent Peter Tatchell.
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How Victor Orbán launched a constitutional coup and created a one-party state.
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Censorship
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A woman in Italy is accusing Facebook of closing her account with less than 24 hours notice after she refused to remove a photo of two women kissing. Carlotta Trevisan says Facebook deemed that the image, which she described as “chaste” and “pure,” “violated the community’s standards on nudity and pornography.”
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Privacy
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…without a hearing, I was never given the opportunity to object, let alone make any any substantive defense, to the contempt change. Without any objection (because I wasn’t allowed a hearing), the appellate court waived consideration of the substantive questions my case raised – and upheld the contempt charge, on the grounds that I hadn’t disputed it in court.
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Warning of an erosion of confidence in the products of the U.S. technology industry, John Chambers, the CEO of networking giant Cisco Systems, has asked President Obama to intervene to curtail the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.
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One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched on Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.
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Civil Rights
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The TAFTA/TTIP negotiations remain almost totally lacking in real transparency, with little information about what exactly is happening behind closed doors being released to the public — and most of that coming from the EU side. This has naturally forced those excluded from the inner circle to speculate about what might be going on — and, inevitably, to fear the worst.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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LAST THURSDAY the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted by a three to two margin to move forward with chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposals to gut net neutrality rules in the USA. But what exactly does that mean? And why should we, on a small island 3,000 miles away, care anyway?
It all started in January when US internet service provider (ISP) Verizon successfully appealed against FCC Open Internet Order 2010, arguing that because internet service had been classified as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service”, the FCC had no right to enforce net neutrality rules under the common carrier regulations that had been the backbone of the 2010 rules, and a cornerstone of the Obama administration.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This is probably the most action-packed update so far – a reflection of the fact that we are now deep in the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which have been running for nearly a year. Of course, information about what exactly is happening behind the closed doors is still thin on the ground. To its credit, the European Commission has recently published its negotiating positions in five areas: chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceutical products, motor vehicles, textiles and clothing. Significantly, though, it did not publish its proposals for energy. That’s because they are far more contentious than for those other sectors.
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Copyrights
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Last Friday, Swedish Public Radio opened with the headline “Swedish Pirate Party Heading For Re-Election To European Parliament” as a fresh poll was published. This was followed by similar news from the Czech Republic. As election week opens, more is up in the air than ever – but things are looking overall positive for the movement.
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A student has been awarded a valuable Pirate Bay-related domain after successfully complaining to Denmark’s domain name dispute body. ThePirateBay.dk will now be taken away from its current owner and transformed into a special site to protest the ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay in Denmark.
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In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models. Colette wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.
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The Pirate Bay has just launched a banner campaign to support the various Pirate parties participating in the European Parliament elections this week. The notorious torrent site is running localized ads, encouraging its millions of visitors to vote Pirate.
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Send this to a friend
05.19.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Flickr user José put together this good-looking Linux Mint desktop. It features media controls and a simple launcher at the bottom. Here’s how he set it all up.
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THE impetus to learn Linux has never been stronger, given recent industry trends.
Computerworld reported in February that the demand for Linux skills is rising in the United States, and that Linux-certified IT professionals generally get fatter paychecks than most.
Now, thanks to the Linux Foundation, anyone who has an interest in learning about the popular operating system can sign up for free to join Introduction to Linux, a massive open online course on the edX online learning platform.
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To explain the idea briefly, a kernel module effectively adds a new piece of functionality to your computer. Linux operating systems start out as a blank slate, which means if you want to connect a new device for example, you need the corresponding kernel module. In the case of Netcat, their module contained their new music, and let you listen to it via your operating system.
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Tired of running Android on your Google Nexus 7 tablet? You could give Ubuntu a try… or you can take SlateKit Base for a spin. This weekend the developers launched a technical preview of the Linux-based operating system for Google’s 2013 tablet.
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Desktop
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The third iteration of Ubuntu Kylin released just last month and has already reached 1 million downloads. All versions are a desktop replacement based on Ubuntu Linux specifically geared toward Chinese users. The name Kylin comes from a FreeBSD operating system that was originally built for the Chinese Government between 2001 and 2013, and during its final years was rebranded as NeoKylin and moved to the Linux kernel.
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I was at the OpenStack Summit this week. The overwhelming majority of OpenStack deployments are Linux-based, yet the most popular laptop vendor (by a long way) at the conference was Apple. People are writing code with the intention of deploying it on Linux, but they’re doing so under an entirely different OS.
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Server
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When Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu Linux, made his keynote speech at OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, he announced many new Ubuntu OpenStack cloud and Juju DevOps initiatives.
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The Linux Foundation has added three significant names to the list of channel partners that support the non-profit consortium for advancing open source software: Rackspace (RAX), CoreOS and Cumulus Networks are now members of the Foundation, adding to its strengths in networking and cloud computing.
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Kernel Space
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On Friday the Tux3 file-system was called for review and offered to the mainline Linux kernel. Tux3 has been under development for more than six years but it seems that even after all this time and improvements, the code quality still isn’t the best and the work is being scrutinized.
XFS developer Dave Chinner came out Sunday afternoon criticizing the Tux3 code. Dave began, “I had a quick look at the code. This is not a code review – it’s a message to tell everyone else not to waste their time looking at the code right now…”
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Graphics Stack
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We’re anxious to test out Intel’s next-generation Broadwell processors but it doesn’t look like they’ll be out in time for “back to school” shopping but should certainly arrive in time for the holidays.
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Applications
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jAlbum, a suite of tools that can be used by photographers, various organizations, or casual users has received a small maintenance update. This is nowhere large enough for compare with the version 12, which was a massive upgrade for the application.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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You may remember the time when you could get disks with Ubuntu for free. I personally have one copy for my memories! Unfortunately, Canonical withdrawn that offer long ago.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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Developer Andrea Scarpino announced the availability of KDE Frameworks 5 packages for Arch Linux. Currently the packages are available in the extra repository of Arch.
Users can install the under-development version of KDE Frameworks 5 side by side with KDE 4 from the Beta 2 stage. To make this possible the packages are installed under /usr instead of /opt/kf5 as it used to be on the Arch User Repository (AUR) previously. Till date the only exception was the kactivities component because both KDE Frameworks and KDE 4 ship a kactivitymanagerd binary. To make them co-install now both the packages from KDE4 and KDE Frameworks install a kactivities virtual package on the same system under the /usr directory. The packages are grouped into two parts: kf5 and kf5-aids (PortingAids).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat said it provides commercial support for its Linux distribution regardless of which version of OpenStack its customers are using, rejecting a report to the contrary from earlier Wednesday.
“To be clear, users are free to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux with any OpenStack offering, and there is no requirement to use our OpenStack technologies to get a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription,” Paul Cormier, Red Hat president for products and technologies, said in a blog post.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is building the most used Linux distribution for the desktop, but it’s also making one of the most successful operating systems for servers. The fact that Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Openstack and Ubuntu’s orchestration tool, Juju, is running the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
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Canonical published some details yesterday about a libxml2 vulnerability in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
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Dual-booting Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux and Android on tablets and smartphones has moved a small step closer to reality with the release of a new version of the Ubuntu Dual Boot Installer. Codenamed M9, the release offers support for Ubuntu OS upgrades, along with a slew of other enhancements.
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Flavours and Variants
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The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE RC.
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The first and last pre-stable version of what will become Linux Mint 17 has been released. It will be code-named Qiana and will be an LTS (Long-term Support) release, supported until 2019. Released installation images are for Cinnamon and MATE desktop environment only and are based on Ubuntu 14.04.
The list of new features for both desktops is impressive and I think fans of Linux Mint will love Qiana even more than previous versions. While we await the release of the stable version, which should be available in about a month, here are several screenshots from test installations I set up yesterday.
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This review is aimed at people who have heard of Linux Mint but who haven’t yet given it a go.
If you are a Windows user and you are indecisive about whether Linux is really for you then this review might help you in your decision making process.
I am not advocating that you replace Windows right now with Linux Mint 16 as you would be better off waiting for Linux Mint 17 whereby you would have a supported operating system for years to come…
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The Release Candidate for Linux Mint 17 (Qiana) was released a few days ago. A lot of people have been looking forward to this release, and I am one of them. So I have downloaded both the Cinnamon and MATE versions, and installed them on several of my laptops and netbooks. As is pretty much always the case with Mint, everything went very smoothly, and it all appears to work very well.
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There’s been many requests to run some new OpenGL and 2D performance benchmarks under different Linux desktop environments. With the imminent release of Linux Mint 17 and it shipping the latest version of the increasingly-popular Cinnamon Desktop Environment, here’s a six-way desktop performance comparison using Intel graphics on Linux Mint 17.
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UAVs, also known as unmanned aerial systems (UASes), have attracted industry attention for their ability to provide birds-eye views that would otherwise require expensive, noisy manned flights. Meanwhile, consumers can now spend a few hundred dollars to fly their own spy drones via smartphone apps. Despite the excitement, there’s an equal degree of concern about the potential loss of privacy — and if you live in the wrong valley in Yemen or Pakistan, perhaps loss of life.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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The smartwatch market is continuing to grow and with Google I/O next month Android Wear will likely be a force to reckon with. Samsung currently dominates the smartwatch market thanks to its marketing power.
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The UK government has published guidance recommending that Samsung Knox is used on devices running Android 4.3 in order to keep communication secure within the public sector.
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Android
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When it comes to home screen flexibility, the iPhone is even less flexible than the Palm handhelds were back in the 1990s. By comparison, the iPhone is positively regressive.
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The competition for the company’s new ArcBook is decidely less intense. Thus far, Lenovo’s IdeaPad A10 is probably the highest profile Android notebook, though HP is apparently readying the Slatebook 14 for release soon. Lenovo is selling the A10 directly in the UK for 179 pounds, but it’s only available in the U.S. as a pricey import. In comparison, the ArcBook will cost just $169.99, less than the Chromebooks it will ostensibly compete against.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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If you ask users of the Firefox browser why they use it, a lot of them will say that they have favorite extensions that work with it. And, among those popular extensions, AdBlock Plus is among the most popular of all. However, a post from Mozilla’s Nicholas Nethercote claims that the almost 19 million users of AdBlock Plus don’t realize that bugs and some design aspects of the extension can cause it to guzzle memory, potentially slowing computers down.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Allan Clark, chairman of the board at the OpenStack Foundation, discusses new initiatives from the open-source cloud platform.
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Last week was OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, and there were enough big headlines to guarantee that OpenStack is going to remain one of the biggest technology stories of this year. In conjunction with the summit, there was a survey on how organizations are implementing OpenStack, what platforms they’re using with it, and more. And, as was found in a previous survey done by the OpenStack Foundation, respondents reported that Ubuntu is by far the most prevalently used operating system with OpenStack.
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The open source OpenStack cloud platform is not a hobbyist project, it’s a technology platform that is powering major brands today. That’s the message coming loud and clear from the OpenStack Summit here in Atlanta.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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What are we to make of Oracle announcing support for an open stack of cloud foundation software for its distribution of Linux and Xen? Are we seeing a culture clash?
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BSD
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GhostBSD is a desktop distribution that’s based on FreeBSD. The core developers are from Canada, so I think it ok to call it a Canadian distribution. The only article I’ve written about this distribution was a review of GhostBSD 2.5 back in February 2012 (see GhostBSD 2.5 review). I wasn’t impressed.
But that was then, this is now. The third alpha of what will become GhostBSD 4.0 was released a few days ago. To see how far the distribution has come since the 2.5 edition, I downloaded and installed it from a DVD image in a virtual environment. I’m still not terribly impressed, though I realize the this is only a third alpha release. The following screenshots were taken from that test installation.
This is what the boot menu looks like. This needs to change. Even PC-BSD, another FreeBSD-based distribution, has abandoned this bland boot menu.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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23. The free software movement (1983)
Early AI Lab programmer Richard Stallman was a major pioneer in hacker culture and started the freesoftware movement by launching the GNU operating system, a compatible replacement for the (nonfree) Unix OS. The last gap in GNU was filled by the kernel Linux, yielding the widely used GNU/Linux system.
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Advocates of Free Software aren’t made in a single night. When it comes to computers, software, and digital art, inspiration and motivation are of utmost importance. Terry Hancock, part owner of Anansi Spaceworks and Free Software Magazine columnist, was surrounded by all three growing up.
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Public Services/Government
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Before open data, there was FOIA. Beginning in 1967, the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) empowered the public to request access to government documents. Unfortunately, some branches of government quickly began to push back, and within the decade the infamous phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” had been devised to avoid releasing information.
This came to exemplify the adversarial relationship between the public and government. Yet public records requests (also known as FOIL, Right-to-Know, public information or open records requests, depending on where you are) remain a fundamental way in which the public is able to obtain information from government agencies under FOIA-like laws in all fifty states.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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They open up areas struck by digital exclusion. They develop autonomous Internet networks in mountainous areas, install organic solar panels, and let local Internet radio emerge. They can even transform abandoned water troughs into eco-jacuzzis. “Hackerspaces,” user-friendly spaces where technological tools are crafted, are spreading throughout the rural environment.
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Open Data
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Drafting and using open licenses for data and hardware presents both familiar old challenges (like license proliferation) and new challenges (like less developed legal frameworks and different production models). About thirty people working in these areas recently gathered (under the umbrella of the FSF-E’s “European Legal Network”) to discuss the latest work in these areas under the Chatham House Rules. This article will summarize what the group learned, and, I hope, stimulate discussion to improve the state of licensing in those areas.
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Open Hardware
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The Mamba3D printer is an affordable, high quality, all-metal, open source 3D-printer raising funds on kickstarter.
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Programming
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OK kids, so I had a bit of time recently. I’ve been hacking on Guile’s new CPS-based compiler, which should appear in a stable release in a few months. I have a few things to write about, but today’s article is on effects analysis.
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While many are still trying to figure out Cloud Computing, here comes a rival concept – Fog Computing. It’s computing that takes place at the edge of the network, closer to home. That is, computing that takes place on the devices that are nearest to you – your smartphone and other connected devices that are around you. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), or Internet of Everything (IoE).
Fog Computing is not a new concept. Like Cloud Computing, it’s just a marketing buzzword for something that’s already taking place.
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Health/Nutrition
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That’s one of the messages from a Senate hearing Thursday into a VA health-care system under fire on multiple fronts — from repeated complaints about long waits for service to unnecessary deaths.
Yet even the American Legion, which has called for VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki’s resignation, finds “veterans are extremely satisfied with their health-care team and medical providers,” according to the Legion’s national commander, Daniel M. Dellinger.
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One recent Friday afternoon, in a Mariott Hotel ballroom in Pomona, California, I watched two women skeptically evaluate their McDonald’s lunches. One peered into a plastic bowl containing a salad of lettuce, bacon, chicken, cheese, and ranch dressing. The other arranged two chocolate chip cookies and a yogurt parfait on a napkin. “Eww,” she said, gingerly stirring the layers of yogurt and pink strawberry goop. The woman with the salad nodded in agreement, poking at a wan chicken strip with her plastic fork.
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Finance
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While salaries for the top 25 highest-paid public-research-university presidents have swelled in recent years, student debt and faculty-disenfranchisement problems have grown, says a new study.
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Censorship
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The European Court of Justice has concluded that Google has to delete search results linking to outdated but lawful content in order to protect the data protection rights of individuals.
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Privacy
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We handed in our tax data sell-off petition to HMRC earlier today, along with ORG Advisory Council member Julian Huppert MP and campaign groups 38 Degrees and SumofUs. The Guardian’s just put a story up covering the petition hand-in.
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Civil Rights
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Looking for an honest US Senator my be a long shot, but we need one now to take forward the foiling of the British government’s attempts to block publication of the Senate report into torture and extraordinary rendition. Now we have got this into the mainstream media, it may have more traction. I am delighted that the Belhadj legal team have formally adopted the information that the UK is seeking to block release of key information in this report. Given that the Crown’s defence in the Belhadj case rests entirely on the argument that the USA does not want the facts revealed, that the Crown is then lobbying the USA to hide the same facts ought to be too much even for the most abject establishment lickspittle of a judge to stomach.
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Today, a coalition of 36 civil rights organisations invites European citizens to take part in a day of action to make sure that the next European Parliament defends digital civil and human rights. Through WePromise.eu, people can pledge to vote for candidates who have signed up to protect digital rights.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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While the debate over net neutrality continues to rage in the United States, the British government is planning to block European Union legislation on the matter.
It’s a surprising turn of events. Just last month, the European Parliament voted to place the principles of net neutrality into law. However, before it becomes law throughout Europe, each member country must also pass the legislation. On Thursday, the British government indicated it may veto it instead.
At issue is a new provision that critics argue would restrict the British government’s “ability to block illegal material.” The amendment made it so that only a court order would allow for the banning of content, and not a legislative provision, as originally proposed, according to RT.
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As we noted, yesterday’s FCC vote concerning the NPRM on “open internet” rules was really just the start of the process. A lot of people seem confused by this — and part of the problem is really the FCC. Tom Wheeler keeps insisting that the rules are designed to protect net neutrality and the open internet, but as lots of people keep pointing out, the rulemaking he’s proposing would likely do the opposite. Because of that, you get a ton of confusion, perhaps best shown by a simple comparison, put together by Drew Oden on Twitter of the summary from both the NY Times and the Washington Post about what happened:
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But, tragically, the powers that be among the legacy entertainment industry still seem to view net neutrality as a problem, not an important part of their future. It appears this is a combination of a few factors, led by their continued and irrational fear of “piracy.” Because of this, they seem to think that any sort of “open” internet is a problem. In fact, back in 2007, the MPAA specifically argued that net neutrality would harm its anti-piracy efforts. Similarly, both the RIAA and MPAA have lobbied strongly in the past for special loopholes and exceptions to any net neutrality rules that would allow ISPs to block content the legacy guys don’t like. In fact, one of the most famous net neutrality violations involved Comcast throttling BitTorrent connections. The Songwriters Guild of America once claimed that net neutrality would mean an end to songwriting.
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The cable industry has not been shy about handing out campaign donations to Congress. So guess who’s sending letters to the FCC arguing against Net neutrality?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The MPAA is urging lawmakers to protect young Americans from the “numerous hazards on pirate sites.” The movie industry group believes that young people may not be aware of the risks they face when visiting these sites and hopes that Senators will be able to address this cyber threat appropriately.
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There is a direct connection between copyright monopoly enforcement and mass surveillance, and between mass surveillance and lack of free speech. If you want to keep free speech, the copyright monopoly must be reduced sharply.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.18.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the newest laptops out of System76, the well known hardware vendor in Linux circles for their Ubuntu support, is the latest version of their Bonobo Extreme. While the laptop weighs 8.6 lbs / 3.9 kg, it does aim to offer extreme Linux performance.
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UK retailer Cloudsto is adding a new small form-factor, low power Linux PC to its lineup. The Cloudsto EVO is a palm-sized computer with an ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor and Ubuntu 12.10 software.
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There is a silent battle going on behind the curtains between the major operating systems. When it comes to gaming, for example, Windows is still the leader. If we’re talking about Linux, then everyone knows that it owns the server market. Mac OS X looks pretty and has a few applications that are still making the system a tool for media production. When it comes to Live systems, neither Windows nor Mac OS X can hold a candle to Linux.
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Desktop
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They did not hesitate to specify GNU/Linux for hundreds of PCs for education, although the tender-document was published from that other OS…
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Previously, I reported that there was a breakout for GNU/Linux on desktops in Canada, according to StatCounter. That continues.From the chart, one can see a gradual rise from ~1% until school was let out at many Canadian universities. Has GNU/Linux gained mindshare amongst students? Is there some kind of summer research project going on? Is some big university rolling out GNU/Linux clients? I have not been able to find any reports on such activity but I will keep hunting.
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Kernel Space
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Just as the Linux operating system has matured and blossomed since creator Linus Torvalds first released it in 1991 — expanding beyond mainframes and desktops into smartphones, cars, in-flight entertainment systems, the International Space Station and even crockpots, to name just a few examples — so, too, have Linux jobs.
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It is my pleasure to announce the release of v3.2.0 of the xfsprogs package.
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We’re still a few weeks away from the release of the Linux 3.15 kernel but open-source Intel developers have already sent in another drm-next pull request to land more of their kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 3.16.
Intel already sent in their initial intel-drm-next code for Linux 3.16 at the end of April and it included initial Intel Cherryview support, improvements to Intel Broadwell support, run-time power management for Broadwell and Sandy Bridge, Gen7 command parser work, and a lot more.
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Back in March I wrote about Tux3 might finally make it into the mainline Linux kernel and that information panned out on Friday when Tux3′s lead author, Daniel Phillips, called for its code to be reviewed and offered for it to be mainlined within the kernel source tree. Tux3 development is also moving over to a Kernel.org code repository.
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For this weekend’s Linux benchmarks we are looking at the performance of the Intel P-State and ACPI cpufreq drivers and comparing their scaling governor options when testing from an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition system running with the Linux 3.15 development kernel.
Given that there’s been renewed concerns recently about Intel’s P-State driver causing odd performance problems and other performance issues related to the scaling governor, from the Linux 3.15 kernel this week I did some fresh tests of using both the intel_pstate and acpi_cpufreq drivers while also trying out their various scaling governor choices: performance, powersave, ondemand, conservative.
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Graphics Stack
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After earlier this week doing an Intel vs. Radeon vs. Nouveau comparison using the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver code in the form of Mesa 10.3-devel and the Linux 3.15 kernel, here’s benchmark results comparing the updated open-source AMD Radeon performance on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS against the Catalyst 14.4 Linux graphics driver.
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Josh Arenson committed today the start of a “performance tests” category for Mir, as part of their built-in testing harness. The only test initially added is the OpenGL ES 2.0 port of the glmark2 test. Running this test in Mir simply ensures the performance meets a baseline threshold for ensuring no really bad regressions make it into the Mir code-base for slowing down its graphics performance.
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The installer is a very handy tool that is unique to the Intel platform. All the other developers from NVIDIA and AMD don’t even dream of providing a proper installer, but somehow the Intel dev managed to make this a reality.
“The Intel Graphics allows you to stay current with the latest enhancements, optimizations, and fixes to the Intel Graphics Stack to ensure the best user experience with your Intel graphics hardware. The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux is available for the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora,” reads the official announcement.
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Benchmarks
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The latest Linux graphics testing under the microscope at Phoronix is comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. Windows 8.1 performance with all available updates. Results from Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD hardware is coming up next week while today is a bit of a preview of the AMD numbers when using a Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” graphics card. While the open-source AMD Hawaii support remains broken, with the Catalyst 14.4 driver on each operating system, the Linux Catalyst driver with the R9 290 graphics card can outperform Windows 8.1 Pro with some OpenGL games and benchmarks.
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Applications
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There is a world of file managers beyond GNOME’s Nautilus and KDE’s Dolphin. These are perfectly good file managers, but they’re fairly heavyweight and drag in a ton of dependencies. Gentoo File Manager, Rox-filer, Xfe, and PCManFM are some excellent alternatives that are lightweight, powerful, very configurable, independent of any particular desktop environment, and well-maintained. All of them have complete graphical functionality, and also support keyboard shortcuts and command-line operations. If you’re looking for something a little different, give these a try.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.19 is now available.
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Games
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Shiny The Firefly, a beautiful 2D platformer developed by Stage Clear Studios and published by Headup Games, has been released on the Steam for Linux platform.
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Road Redemption has shown off a brand new trailer crammed full of crazy, it’s actual game-play too of the spiritual successor to Road Rash. Not sure if they ever said it was a spiritual successor, but it is heavily inspired by it of course.
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BattleBlock Theater as promised is now out for Linux on Steam bringing with it some co-op platforming mayhem and it looks awesome.
Originally the Linux version was to “follow” the Windows version, thankfully the developers were able to bring it to us on day 1.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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If all goes according to plan, we will see the official Qt 5.3 unveiling next Tuesday, 20 May. A new snapshot was released today to encourage last minute testing. If nothing serious is found, today’s snapshot will be the final packages otherwise Digia will need to spin new packages and this will push back Tuesday’s release.
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The third monthly bugfix release for Krita 2.8 is out! Download your Windows installer now, or get your distribution’s updated packages! There are quite a few bugfixes and improvements.
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The first beta of what will become the next-generation KDE Plasma workspace (KDE Next) was released yesterday. The final release is scheduled for release sometime in July (2014), so things should be moving really fast from now on. Here’s an excerpt from the release announcement:
The Plasma team would like to ask the wider Free Software community to test this release and give any feedback . Plasma Next is built using QML and runs on top of a fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack using Qt 5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma Next provides a core desktop experience that will be easy and familiar for current users of KDE workspaces or alternative Free Software or proprietary offerings.
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This is the third (and last but one) update to the 2.8 series of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active released to fix recently found issues. The Calligra team recommends everybody to update.
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The size of many widgets depend on the font as they adjust depending on the space required to fit text. The problem increases with translated versions of the text. Sebastian explains that Plasma relies on sensible font settings and metrics for better support of HDPI displays. There is a stronger emphasis on fontsize-as-rendered-on-a-given screen. The UIs are designed to fit a certain number of columns and rows of text with ample dynamic spacing, so that even translations fit well. The size of the UI elements are roughly the same size on different displays. This design seems to be received well by the users.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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If you need to solve a tricky GTK+ problem in your application, gtkparasite is a very useful tool to have around. It lets you explore the widget hierarchy, change properties, tweak theme settings, and so on.
Unfortunately, gtkparasite is a tool for people ‘in the know’ – it is not part of GTK+, not advertised on our website, and not available out of the box on your average GTK+ installation.
At the Developer Experience hackfest in Berlin a few weeks ago, the assembled GTK+ developers discussed fixing this situation by making an interactive debugger like gtkparasite part of GTK+ itself. This way, it will be available whenever you run a GTK+ application, and we can develop and improve the debugging tools alongside the toolkit.
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It’s been a long time since the Antergos release, but the developers of this interesting distribution have returned with a new version. They are using the latest GNOME 3.12 packages, but they are also working to change the default GNOME look that can be found in the stock release.
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The Zukitwo theme was one of the first to get GNOME 3.12 support, shortly after the launch of the new desktop environment. This theme only works with GNOME Shell 3.12 and GTK+ 3.12, which means that it might create problems on other systems.
According to the changelog, the progress bar has been corrected and the button border is now better focused. This should make the buttons much more visible.
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GNOME Shell development branch 3.12.x is now updated to version 3.12.2. GNOME Shell is an integral part of GNOME as this is the first application that the users are greeted with and is used frequently throughout their login. 3.12 has been received quite well by the users and till now the minor releases on this branch were quite heavy.
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The GNOME Desktop Environment (DE) has received its second maintenance update (3.12.2). Frederic Peters, a GNOME developer, announced the second update of the GNOME 3.12 stable branch a few hours ago. The update mainly focuses on consistency and security of included packages and apps. Besides the recent fix of the Airplane Mode in GNOME shell, there are many minor fixes, improvements and language translations included in the update.
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ROSA Desktop Fresh R3 is the latest edition of the Mandriva-derived Linux distribution from ROSA Laboratories, a Linux software solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. This is one of my favorite desktop distributions because the developers are actually creating original applications and system utilities designed to make the desktop easy and fun to use.
The KDE edition, which is the distribution’s flagship edition, includes a few user-friendly features that are not available in vanilla KDE desktops. That’s why it’s one I never hesitate to recommend it to new and experienced users alike. The released installation images are for KDE only. Installation images for GNOME 3 and LXDE will likely be released in about a month.
Highlights of ROSA Desktop Fresh R3 are.
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The Deepin Linux distribution is aimed at professional and normal users alike, focusing on the best user experience possible, and uses its own desktop environment, which is not something that you usually see these days.
The Deepin developers are known for their unorthodox way of doing things. The previous edition of the operating system was full of interesting features, which even included facial recognition software. Now they have returned with a brand new desktop environment and a fresh desktop ecosystem.
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New Releases
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GParted Live, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, is now at version 0.18.0-5.
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Linux Lite is a distribution based on Ubuntu LTS releases, and this is the main reason we don’t see builds made for this OS more often. Ubuntu LTS versions are only made available every two years and it takes the Linux Lite developers a while to make the proper adjustments.
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The OpenELEC developers are not waiting around for XBMC to get a new stable release and they have adopted the first 13.1 Beta 1 that was made available a couple of days ago. It’s likely that they analyzed what the new XBMC was fixing and decided it was safe to implement in their stable version.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. has spent the past decade becoming one of the dominant commercial providers of the Linux operating system, but it is now looking to expand by exploiting opportunities in Indonesia, and in the field of cloud-computing systems. Red Hat Inc., which generated approximately 1.5 billion dollars in revenue last year, is expecting double digit revenue growth over the next year. This would follow 48 consecutive financial quarters in which Red Hat has shown revenue growth, but it is nonetheless a very optimistic expectation on the part of David Yap, Red Hat’s country manager for Malaysia and Brunei. This optimism, however, is strongly supported by indicators from the Asian Pacific market.
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One of the biggest topics of discussion at the OpenStack Summit here was something that didn’t actually happen here. An article in the Wall St. Journal published on May 13 made broad allegations that Red Hat was “playing hardball” with OpenStack.
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CentOS, the open source Linux-based operating system that recently came under the purview of Red Hat, has launched a new initiative aimed at helping vendors to deploy open source virtualization technologies on the CentOS system. And the Xen Project, whose members will chair the effort, is leading the charge, according to a recent announcement.
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Fedora
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Background transparency, which was removed after GNOME 3.6 release on Fedora 2 years back is enabled once again. There were both requests from users and workarounds to make transparency work again. On popular demand, the feature is back on Fedora 20 and GNOME 3.12 COPR. Rawhide will also have it soon.
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We need your submissions to make beautiful wallpapers available for Fedora 21! The supplemental wallpaper submission process is open and we’re ready for your work!
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Stephen says that the Fedora Server Working Group is intended to be the place for development of “the next stable platform for Linux”. He explains that this doesn’t just mean downstream RHEL or CentOS, but that upstream projects should look at us and see a place to work for integration of technologies that might be in all of the various stable platforms in three years.
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Debian Family
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The new operating system from Univention is an open source infrastructure solution that can be implemented in any kind of systems and is based on Debian, which makes it a great tool for regular users as well.
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Tails has been a curiosity to us for a while now, long before Snowden made it known to the mainstream. Cropping up every now and then on Distrowatch, we acknowledged that it existed and its list of features seemed to convey that the team knew what they were doing in constructing an ultra-secure and privacy-driven Linux distro. Now post-Snowden and Heartbleed, with the need for journalists and whistleblowers to have true internet privacy, we’ve come to see Tails as a necessity in the changing tech world.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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All of this means that life in OpenStack Land is suddenly very interesting. Ubuntu leads by a considerable margin in production deployments—but that’s today. But whether it can maintain that lead will depend on its ability to build up an ecosystem to rival Red Hat’s. In the data center, it’s way behind. But in the OpenStack cloud, it’s a much more even playing field, with Canonical recently expanding its partner footprint with Microsoft, IBM and others.
It’s a new market. Canonical hasn’t won anything yet, of course, but this is the most level playing field it’s had in a decade. Game on.
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Canonical, famous for its distribution of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu, has also been very active with the popular open source cloud operating system OpenStack. The company announced a number of things at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta this week. Some announcements demonstrated the strength and speed of Ubuntu on OpenStack at hyperscale and some were aimed at making it easier to adopt OpenStack and improving interoperability.
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Canonical is working tirelessly on Ubuntu for phones, and the developers are trying to improve every aspect of the experience. One of the most important components of Ubuntu, the browser, will also receive some changes that will definitely set it apart from everything else.
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“Since changes to the Ubuntu support cycle mean that Ubuntu 13.04 has reached end of life before Ubuntu 12.10, the support cycle for Ubuntu 12.10 has been extended slightly to overlap with the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This will allow users to move directly from Ubuntu 12.10 to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (via Ubuntu 13.10). This period of overlap is now coming to a close, and we will be retiring Ubuntu 12.10 on Friday, May 16,” said Canonical’s José Antonio Rey in the original announcement.
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The VirtualBox solution is capable of running a large number of OSes, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts, not to mention a lot of other guest additions.
The developers of VirtualBox have been working hard on this latest branch of the software and they’ve already issued a few updates for the applications. This latest one is just a maintenance update, but it comes with numerous fixes that make this a mandatory upgrade for anyone who is using it.
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Flavours and Variants
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The first and last pre-stable version of what will become Linux Mint 17 has been released. It will be code-named Qiana and will be an LTS (Long-term Support) release, supported until 2019. Released installation images are for Cinnamon and MATE desktop environment only and are based on Ubuntu 14.04.
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SDG Systems has long offered the useful service of porting rugged Windows-based tablets and handhelds to Linux. Spin-offs include a 2008 port of the TDS Nomad handheld. This time, it’s the Windows 7-based Trimble Yuma 2 tablet that is being tuxified. The supplied Ubuntu 12.04 LTS distro is not to be confused with the most recent LTS release, last month’s Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The default configuration is a dual-boot system with Windows, although you can ask for an all-Linux look as well.
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The education conference in Manchester worked well for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the dedicated team it has assembled with the aim of supporting teachers. Last year, the Raspberry Pi Jamboree staged by Alan O’Donohoe was sectioned off in its own series of rooms in the vast space of Manchester Central. This year, with O’Donohoe still at the helm, all things Pi were thrown into the main conference arena. Teachers walking around the venue would spot a classroom of the future on one corner, be able to buy a Pi on another and listen to talks in one of two areas set aside for such purpose. The Pi sat centre stage and could not be ignored.
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Operating system — Debian Linux, Android
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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High fives are in order for Google’s Gmail team, as Gmail is the first Android application to notch 1 billion downloads in its belt. The feat, which actually occured a few days ago, was announced today by Google VP Sundar Pichai, who posted the achievement on his Google+ page. It was a succinct (albeit excited) recognition, though crossing 1 billion downloads doesn’t mean there are a billion people using Gmail.
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Xiaomi, a Chinese company, has just launched a new Android powered tablet, the MiPad to the market. The unique thing about this Android powered tablet is that it is powered by the powerful NVidia Tegra K1 mobile processor, thus making it stand out from the already crowded android powered tablet segment.
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SlateKit Base has been released for the Google Nexus 7 (2013) tablet. SlateKit Base is a basic Linux OS with just having Qt5 running off a frame-buffer. SlateKit Base is very simply designed and within the Qt5 environment is designed primarily for use with QtWebKit-based Slate web-browser.
The SlateKit developers have written in this morning to share that SlateKit is working now as a drop-in replacement for the Android UI stack and can be used for making a custom tablet UI using just Qt/QML, JavaScript, and the Chromium-based code. SlateKit Base has now been ported to run on last year’s Google Nexus 7 tablet as long as it’s rooted with ADB shell access and is running Android 4.4.2.
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Events
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The schedule for Google I/O 2014 is announced. It is going to be a 2 day conference (Jun 25-26) packed with technical talks, sessions and workshops from eminent Google developers and guests closely working with Google technologies. The venue remains San Francisco.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Databases
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PostgreSQL is the second most-widely-used open-source database on the market, trailing MySQL. At least some users have migrated from MySQL to PostgreSQL since MySQL was acquired by Oracle in its 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems.
Like PostgreSQL, MySQL has been retrofitted to handle NoSQL workloads.
EnterpriseDB offers a commercially backed distribution of the open-source database.
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Business
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The latest Free Software Foundation Bulletin for fall 2013 is now online. Check it out for interesting articles on free software and free software activism.
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There are several interesting things to report in this month’s update:
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The training services of Open Data Support aim to build both theoretical and technical capacity to EU public administrations, in particular to favour the uptake of (linked) open data.
After delivering eleven onsite trainings in ten different countries, i.e. Spain, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece and Estonia, and to the European Institutions, and having trained over 500 public servants on open data, we are proud to announce a second release of the training material of Open Data Support, featuring a number of improvements coming from feedback received from the trainees.
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Open Hardware
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There’s a rash of open source hardware announcements today in advance of this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California—and two are related to the popular Arduino microcontroller. While Arduino and its manufacturing partner Amtel are announcing Arduino Zero—a new high-end 32-bit version of the open-source microcontroller board—another Arduino partner is releasing a simplified version of the controller intended to make it easier for beginners to start prototyping devices with little or no knowledge of electronics.
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Programming
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Recently I posted new benchmarks showing LLVM’s Clang compiler performing well against GCC from AMD’s x86-based Athlon APUs with the performance of the resulting binaries being quite fast but not without some blemishes for both of these open-source compilers. In seeing how the compiler race is doing in the ARM space with many ARM vendors taking interest in LLVM/Clang, here’s some fresh benchmarks of both compilers on NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 SoC found by the Jetson TK1 development board.
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‘The BBC is fundamentally flawed. The system is fractured’: David Lowe at home in Torquay
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Adobe is struggling to correct a global outage that has already locked customers out of its Creative Cloud online services for nearly 24 hours.
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While we potential users may argue the pros and cons of “Cloud Computing”, those who provide cloud-computing solutions are having to work hard for a living. That’s a pleasant change to having to pay the asking price to a monopolist, eh? I like that aspect of it. It’s also very efficient in that experts who should know how to run the service will fuss over it instead of the users or their randomly-hired staff. It is an ancient truth in the history of mankind that specialization is a good thing, all things being equal.
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Something for the Weekend, Sir? Adobe’s spectacular FAIL over the last 48 hours confirmed, rather than revealed, cloud computing to be so unreliable as to be positively dangerous. Cloud computing is shite. It takes over everything you’ve got, then farts in your face and runs away giggling.
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At OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, GA, one of the topics of bar conversation was why Rackspace, one of OpenStack’s founding companies was keeping such a low profile at the show. Now we know it was probably because the company had been approached by companies looking for strategic partnerships or acquisitions.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Obama administration earlier this month quietly handed the insurance industry another loophole in the Affordable Care Act—infuriating advocates for universal coverage who say this shows that an insurance-driven health system is doomed to fail.
Announced on May 2, the provision opens the door to “reference pricing,” which allows insurance companies to set a price for medical procedures. If a patient receives a treatment that costs more, he/she will simply have to pay out of pocket. The measure is slated to apply to a majority of work-based health insurance plans and exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), according to the Associated Press.
Many worry that reference pricing will force patients to bear the burden of a costly and difficult-to-navigate medical system.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Bowling Green Republican Rand Paul says he wants to block the President’s nomination of David Barron for the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals because of Barron’s legal memos related to drones. During his time as a U.S. Justice Department lawyer, Barron reportedly authored at least two classified opinions giving the go-ahead to use drones to kill the U.S.-born extremist Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen.
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When US First Lady Michelle Obama appeared in a picture supporting the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria, she was praised for taking a stand against Boko Haram. But others quickly subverted her message and turned it into an anti-drone campaign.
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But most Americans do not know why Iranians have excellent reason not to trust our word, nor why Africans remember us quite differently than Americans suppose.
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Imagine attending your son or daughter’s or brother or sister’s wedding, a family member’s funeral, or just relaxing with friends at a local restaurant. While you may be busily living the most exciting high point of your life to the lowest grieving the loss of a family loved one, to just attending an everyday social gathering, all of a sudden your world is abruptly shattered never to be the same. Out of the blue from out of nowhere, a bomb hits and you are either dead, or barely alive suffering from life threatening injuries, or traumatized for life, forever changed for the worse. You will never enjoy another wedding, attend another funeral, or experience another emotional high or joy without sudden flashback memories of that fateful day flooding your consciousness and invading your world. Intrusive fear and panic rule your daily life where your sense of normalcy and homeostasis is forever knocked out of whack. Destroying lives is what US predator drones do every day of the week, year in and year out for more than a dozen years to thousands of innocent people in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa and no doubt other hidden places we do not even know.
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How many innocent people will the Obama administration kill before it comes clean on who these people are and why they were taken from their families, their friends and their communities? Despite President Obama’s repeated promises of more transparency, he had James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, sent a letter to the heads of the Select Committee on Intelligence seeking the removal of a provision from the proposed Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 that would have modestly required President Obama to report the number of innocent people killed in drone strikes from only the previous year. Not surprisingly, this request was granted.
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If you think that as a United States citizen you’re entitled to a trial by jury before the government can decide to kill you–– you’re wrong. During his stint as a lawyer at the Department of Justice, David Barron was able to manipulate constitutional law so as to legally justify killing American citizens with drone strikes. If you’re wondering what the justification for that is, that’s just too bad – the legal memos are classified. Sounds a little suspicious, doesn’t it? What’s even more suspicious is that now the Obama Administration wants to appoint the lawyer who wrote that legal memos to become a high-ranking judge for life.
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When you’re a member of a club that includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Russia, China, Equatorial Guinea, and Turkmenistan, you may very well be doing something you shouldn’t be doing. And that is the motley crew the United States finds itself alongside in refusing to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international treaty prohibiting the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster bombs.
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After a brief respite, U.S. drones are buzzing above Yemen once again, reportedly killing six al-Qaeda “militants” on May 12.
Hellfire missiles launched from the U.S.-piloted unmanned aircraft destroyed a car driving through the Marib province, according to a statement made by unnamed local officials. The identities of the dead were not readily available, however.
Including strikes conducted early this year, the drone war in Yemen has resulted in the death of at least 12 suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
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As robots become ever more present in daily life, the question of how to control their behaviour naturally arises. Does Asimov have the answer?
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In 13 short years, killer drones have gone from being exotic military technology featured primarily in the pages of specialized aviation magazines to a phenomenon of popular culture, splashed across daily newspapers and fictionalized in film and television, including the new season of “24.”
What has not changed all that much — at least superficially — is the basic aircraft that most people associate with drone warfare: the armed Predator.
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In his new book, “No Place to Hide,” journalist Glenn Greenwald provides new details on Edward Snowden’s personal story and his motivation to expose the U.S. surveillance state. “The stuff I saw really began to disturb me. I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill,” Snowden told Greenwald about his time as a National Security Agency contractor. “You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.”
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Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad on Sunday suggested that Boeing and the Central Intelligence Agency should be questioned over the missing Flight MH370.
“Someone is hiding something. It is not fair that Malaysian Airlines (MAS) and Malaysia should take the blame,” he said in his blog Chedet.cc.
In his 11-paragraph long post, Mahathir expressed his viewpoints and theories on the situation and stressed that something was out of place and that the media would not post anything about Boeing or CIA.
“They can land safely or they may crash, but airplanes do not just disappear. Certainly not these days with all the powerful communication systems which operate almost indefinitely and possess huge storage capacities,” Mahathir said.
Stating that he believes the tracking system on the plane was intentionally disabled, Mahathir questioned on where was the data of the plane, which was supposed to have been recorded by the satellite.
“MH370 is a Boeing 777 aircraft. It was built and equipped by Boeing, hence all the communications and GPS equipment must have been installed by Boeing.
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The arrest of four infiltrated anti-Castro militants from Miami, sent to attack military units, highlights the situation of some 20 Cuban-Americans, who upon leaving prison in Cuba are considered unwelcome by Washington.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This morning I, like any of you, was disappointed to see that the frontpage of The Times carried a story by the paper’s environment editor, Ben Webster, which read, ‘Scientists in cover-up of “damaging” climate view.’
Variations of the story had been plastered everywhere, spearheaded by Murdoch-owned outlets, repeated uncritically by others.
The Daily Mail, much loved for its objective reporting on climate change (and other stuff), declared: ‘Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in “McCarthy”-style witch-hunt by academics across the world.’
These stories were quoted approvingly by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto as “the latest reason to distrust the authority of ‘consensus’ climate scientists.”
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Finance
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Voters expected to say “no” to union-initiated referendum that would raise basic income to more than $4,000 a month.
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Widening gaps between rich and poor, the top 1% and the rest, are heating up debates, struggles and recriminations over redistributing income. Should governments’ taxing, spending, and regulatory powers redistribute income from the wealthy to others, and if so, how exactly? As opinions and feelings polarize, political conflicts sharpen.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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We’re a little late on this (past few days have been quite busy…) but Larry Lessig’s SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs has hit its first target way early. As you hopefully remember, the goal was to reach $1 million in 30 days, which would then be matched by an (as yet) unknown donor, followed by a second campaign to raise $5 million in June — again matched by a donor. The plan then would be to use the $12 million to work on a few specific Congressional races to prove that it can have an impact, and then kick off in 2015 with a much bigger campaign to have an even larger impact.
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Censorship
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A teenager walked into a Pakistani police station on Friday and shot dead a 65-year-old man from a minority sect accused of blasphemy, the second murder involving the country’s controversial blasphemy laws in as many weeks.
Rights activists said the attack, and a spike in the number of blasphemy cases, was evidence of rising intolerance in the mainly Sunni Muslim south Asian nation of 180 million people.
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A HOST of further “right to be forgotten” requests have been received by Google in the wake of a European court ruling.
The requests to remove information from Google search results include a man who tried to kill members of his family requesting that links to a news story about the incident be removed.
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The National Election Committee (NEC) admitted Friday it had axed some footage from an opposition-produced video that was broadcast on state TV Thursday night as part of an equal-airtime policy during the council election campaign period.
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The Pirate Bay’s anti-censorship browser continues to rapidly expand its user base. The Tor-based PirateBrowser, which allows people to bypass ISP filtering and access blocked websites, has already been downloaded more than five million times since its launch
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A Chinese official in charge of regulating the Internet has said Beijing must strengthen Internet security because “overseas hostile forces” are using the Internet to “attack, slander and spread rumors”, state media said on Sunday.
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Privacy
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A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA’s dragnet. Why?
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Modern American privacy law begins with Charles Katz, an accused gambler, making a call from a Los Angeles phone booth. In a now-famous opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan concluded that the US Constitution protected Katz’s “expectation of privacy” in his call. American phone booths are now a thing of the past, of course, and Americans’ expectations of privacy seem to be fast disappearing, too.
In two significant but almost-completely overlooked legal briefs filed last week, the US government defended the constitutionality of the Fisa Amendments Act, the controversial 2008 law that codified the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program. That law permits the government to monitor Americans’ international communications without first obtaining individualized court orders or establishing any suspicion of wrongdoing.
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History is filled with companies shamed by their shoddy cryptography implementations – even though the underlying maths is bang on.
In a presentation titled “Crypto Won’t Save You” at the AusCERT conference on Australia’s Gold Coast, respected cryptographer Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland took security bods through a decade of breaches featuring a laundry list of the world’s biggest brands.
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For years, the US government has accused Chinese companies of placing surveillance equipment inside routers being exported to America, but this week evidence suggests the exact opposite may be happening.
New photos implicate the US National Security Agency (NSA) in planting “beacons” into servers, routers and other network gear prior to being exported worldwide.
The Guardian originally published details May 12 of how the covert operation works, part of bombshell allegations from the new book “No Place to Hide” by Glenn Greenwald, who claims the US is doing exactly what it’s accused Chinese telecommunications manufacturers of in the past.
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According to the Washington Post, Sprint was the only telecom carrier to ask the government for their legal rationale to justify the NSA’s ever-expanding warrantless wiretapping operations back in 2010, before much of it was revealed by Edward Snowden. While Sprint was different from their fellow carriers in that they at least asked the government for justification (as opposed to saying “how high”?) Sprint’s questions didn’t last long.
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Newly declassified documents show the dilemma faced by telecommunications companies when the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) came calling.
According to a story this week in the Washington Post, Sprint asked the NSA for legal justification when it received requests for phone metadata in 2009. Reportedly, it was the only telco to require a legal rationale. The documents related to previous occasions for which the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, had issued orders.
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One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched on Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.
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Journalist Glenn Greenwald, at the centre of controversy since breaking the story about the existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programme, has told Al Jazeera that there are “many more stories to go” based on the top secret documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Greenwald also told Al Jazeera interviewer John Seigenthaler that despite accusations to the contrary — the Obama administration has repeatedly said that the leaks hurt U.S national security — “nobody has been injured or in any way harmed as a result of our reporting.”
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The document, among those unleashed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and revealed by journalist Glenn Greenwald in his new memoir, carries the assessment that Israel is a good partner to the US for joint electronic spying programs against foreign agents but practices problematic operations.
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The consequences of eliminating Fourth Amendment protections for all international communication with foreigners
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Privacy advocates are worried that a bill intended to reform the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) is being watered down before it heads to the House floor.
“Last stage negotiations” between members of the House and the Obama administration could significantly weaken provisions in the NSA bill, people familiar with the discussions say.
“Behind the scenes, there’s some nervousness,” one House aide said.
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Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM.
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All the PhDs in the world aren’t going to save you from having your own direct quotes turned against you. If anything, it only confirms what Schindler’s critics believe: that he’s pompous, arrogant and unwilling to actually engage in a debate. Instead, he prefers to belittle anyone who doesn’t hold a precious PhD in history, using his doctorate to paper over any flaws in arguments.
I can’t imagine it’s much fun to see your Twitter feed boiled down to little more than shouts of “stupid!” and continuous pointing to a framed piece of paper, but whether Schindler likes it or not, those are his words and those are his go-to rhetorical devices. For someone who frequently uses the hashtag #caring to show his contempt for the ire he provokes, he certainly can’t seem to take having his own abuse heaped on his Carebear-surrounded head.z
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Speaking at Microsoft’s TechEd North America event earlier this week, the founder of the Cyber Crime Security Forum said that hackers and government agencies can now compromise the security of the TOR network.
First set up in September 2002, TOR was originally conceived as means for Internet users from those countries with oppressive regimes to side step any state monitoring and similar controls on the web.
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Lots of folks have sent along links to the New York Times’s new executive editor Dean Baquet’s backstory, spiking an important revelation about national surveillance when he was editor of the LA Times. At Huffington Post, David Bromwich, author of a new book about the political imagination, offers his own deep analysis of the abrupt change in command at the Times in the context of coverage of the national security state.
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Cisco’s emerging markets business—the engine for the networking giant’s future growth—continues to take a hit and that situation isn’t likely to change now that it’s common knowledge that the NSA has been intercepting routers—and other IT gear—in the supply chain so it can install call-home beacons.
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Last summer, after the in-FBI-custody shooting of Ibragim Todashev, a friend of the elder Boston bomber, the Bureau told the same story they have been telling since 1993 – this was justified. Furthermore, documents acquired by The New York Times last June showed that there were more than 150 FBI shootings by agents in the last 20 years – almost half fatal – and every single one was ruled justified after internal investigations.
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Google search guru Matt Cutts says we should encrypt the entire internet. And he’s not alone. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of widespread internet eavesdropping by the NSA, the human rights organization Access is also campaigning for all websites to encrypt their connections to internet users, a pretty good way of thwarting interlopers.
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People have started taking Edward Snowden’s advice on using Web encryption to shield their movements online, according to a new study. After the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked documents on the government’s surveillance programs, encrypted web traffic has more than doubled worldwide.
In March, Snowden told a room full of tech industry workers at the SXSW Interactive conference that the only way people can protect themselves from government surveillance was to use Web encryption. He said that the United States didn’t even know all the documents he had because “encryption works.” And it looks like people worldwide are heeding that advice.
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“Zero Dark Thirty” maker nabs rights to Glenn Greenwald’s look at working with Edward Snowden to reveal reach of NSA.
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No German federal contracts will go to companies that turn over data to the NSA and other spy agencies in the U.S., and elsewhere. There may, however, be one crucial exemption.
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Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been at the center of controversy ever since breaking the story about the existence of the expansive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program, told Al Jazeera’s John Seigenthaler on Wednesday that there were “many more stories to go” based on the top secret documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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Revisionist history is looking back at past events in light of more recent information. What really happened? And no recent source of information has been more important when it comes to revising the history of digital communications than former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Today I’m really curious about the impact of the NSA on the troubled history of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) communication.
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The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool.
Documents released alongside security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data.
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Purloined formerly top-secret NSA documents are now there for the downloading, even as the calls for truth and privacy buttressed by irrefutable information, has run up against the institutional armor of the surveillance state that has little respect for public opinion or calls for “reform.”
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Today’s National Security Agency is housed in a sprawling complex in Fort Meade, Md., but, according to a recent lecturer at Arlington Public Library, domestic surveillance by the NSA was perhaps born in Arlington.
David Robarge, the CIA’s Chief Historian, told a standing-room only crowd last week about the history of espionage in Arlington, which started at Arlington Hall during World War II.
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Would you like to listen to Gweek podcasts live, as they are being recorded? Get a job at the FBI and plug into Skype, which Microsoft has handed over to US spy agencies as a kind of lovers’ gift, and you can hear Dean and me chatting away!
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As in many countries, the Snowden revelations were front page news in the Netherlands. The PowerPoint slides showing the intensity of (inter)national surveillance received considerable attention in the political arena. Special debates were scheduled, and dozens of questions were asked by members of parliament. What made things special in the Netherlands was the fact that the revelations coincided with a review of the Dutch Intelligence and Security Act (WiV, Wet op de inlichtingen en veiligheidsdiensten), a process that was then already underway.
The review committee delivered its report in early December 2013. In the meantime, the newspaper NRC reported on Dutch Snowden revelations. The documents given by ‘intermediary’ Greenwald to the NRC revealed that the Netherlands had been an NSA target between 1946 and 1968. The information that the Dutch counterpart of the NSA, the AIVD, was hacking into websites added to the impact. A third ‘Snowden’ issue was the stats showing that the NSA had access to 1.8 million telecommunications metadata. This chart had already been published some time ago but had escaped attention.
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For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence. I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email.
A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail. I asked him why he would willingly give Google copies of all his email. Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.
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Startups like Secret and Whisper have defined a buzzy new category of social media, attracting millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investments with the promise of allowing anyone to communicate with anonymity. But when it comes to actually revealing corporate and government secrets–a “whistleblowing” function that the two services either implicitly or explicitly condone–users should read the fine print.
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We’ve already questioned if it’s really true that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners (the Amendment refers to “people” not “citizens”). But in some new filings by the DOJ, the US government appears to take its “no 4th Amendment protections for foreigners” to absurd new levels. It says, quite clearly, that because foreigners have no 4th Amendment protections it means that any Americans lose their 4th Amendment protections when communicating with foreigners. They’re using a very twisted understanding of the (already troubling) third party doctrine to do this. As you may recall, after lying to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said that it would start informing defendants if warrantless collection of information under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) was used in the investigation against them.
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Whatsapp has been removed from its Windows Phone Store….bad news for all 4 Windows Phone users
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If you’re looking for an online service that has a habit of incorporating lots of the problems inherent in the approach to modern day technology, then pull yourself up a seat, help yourself to the coffee, and perhaps nab a biscuit from the jar. Because I want to talk about LinkedIn.
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Civil Rights
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The CIA could still be months away from approving the release of a long-awaited Senate report that is sharply critical of the agency’s use of harsh interrogation measures on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a request the Obama administration filed in federal court Thursday.
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Britain has tried to block the release of US ‘torture files’ that could prove how the Blair Government was complicit in the capture and ill-treatment of dozens of terror suspects, it was claimed last night.
US Senators are within weeks of publishing a top-secret report on America’s torture and rendition programme carried out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The 6,300 files will expose the horror of the CIA’s waterboarding and other tortures and could also reveal the extent of British co-operation in the programme.
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Future American historians will marvel at how long the CIA engaged in such utter unconstitutional lawlessness as the torture of its captives and drone-plane executions of alleged terrorists — including U.S. citizens — without trials, using “kill lists” provided by President Barack Obama (“Obama’s kill list — All males near drone strike sites are terrorists,” rt.com, May 30, 2012).
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Yasser Al-Zahrani was twenty-one years-old when he died at Guantanamo Bay. The US military claims he, along with two other prisoners, committed suicide in their cells. However, a new document uncovered by journalist Scott Horton and published by Harper’s Magazine strongly suggests that they were killed at a CIA black site prison.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigated the deaths of Al-Zahrani, Ali Abdulla Ahmed, and Mana Shaman Allabard al Tabi. They concluded that they had died on June 10, 2006, after taking their own lives by making a rope out of bed sheets and T-shirts and hanging themselves.
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The Obama administration is bracing for the potential of a violent backlash against U.S. military personnel, diplomats and even allied governments when a declassified version of a Senate report on Bush-era interrogation policies is released in the next few months, according to court filings and American officials.
Justice Department lawyers responding to a lawsuit seeking documents from a Central Intelligence Agency review of aspects of the interrogation program said Thursday that a response to the suit must await not only the declassification of a summary of the Senate report, but also planning to deal with potential fallout from that release.
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“The guy I sit next to on the Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., is chairing the committee, and we have done a lot of work on this issue,” DesJarlais said. “We are going to talk about why the CIA was there and the guns they had there. They were being traded legally or illegally out of the annex. Why was the ambassador there? It was an unsafe area.
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Watch the video of comrade André Ferrari speaking on behalf of the LSR at a rally of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Sao Paulo, followed by a few pictures of the protest action.
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A win for free speech (as expressed by vanity license plates) has just been handed down by the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The plate at the center of the case — “COPSLIE” — was originally deemed to be “offensive to good taste” by a lower court, which felt a “reasonable person” would be offended that the driver of this vehicle believed that cops do, in fact, lie.
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A Boynton Beach police officer is on administrative duty after a video surfaced that shows what appears to be the officer sweeping the legs out from underneath a 13-year-old boy who is in handcuffs.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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As a president who has professed to be a staunch supporter of net neutrality, Obama must voice his opposition to the proposal just advanced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a group advocating for an open Internet charges.
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Watchdog decries politicians’ claims that they “are acting in the public interest.”
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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler‘s net-neutrality proposal has sparked an outcry of protest from Obama’s earliest supporters — consumer advocates, high-tech firms and investors, and Democratic lawmakers.
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U.S. regulators on Thursday advanced a “net neutrality” proposal that would ban Internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to websites but may let them charge content companies for faster and more reliable delivery of their traffic to users.
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The Federal Communications Commission today voted in favor of a preliminary proposal to allow Internet “fast lanes” while asking the public for comment on whether the commission should change the proposal before enacting final rules later this year. The order was approved 3-2, with two Republican commissioners dissenting.
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Perhaps we need Google, Microsoft, and other defenders of Net neutrality to give us a public example of Slow Lane Internet to show everyone where the FCC is taking us
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DRM
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Dear Commissioner Malmstroem,
we are writing to you on the occasion of the international Day Against Digital Restrictions Management, which today is being celebrated around the world. We are very concerned about the security of European citizens, and we ask you to take action to protect them.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is an independent charitable non-profit dedicated to promoting Free Software and freedom in the information society. Today we would like to direct your attention to a very specific threat to the freedom and security of computer users everywhere.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It’s something of a misnomer to call TPP, TTIP and TISA trade agreements: they go far beyond traditional discussions about things like tariff removal, and are encroaching on domains that are as much cultural as economic. That is, many of things that the US dubs “trade barriers” are in fact long-standing expressions of national priorities, preferences and beliefs. That’s evident in an interesting post from Public Citizen’s Eyes on Trade blog, which explores the 2014 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (pdf).
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Trademarks
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A federal appeals court is letting stand a decision denying a trademark to a website’s banner because it could be perceived as disparaging to Muslims.
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Copyrights
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A person who claimed that the operators of Grooveshark were engaged in systematic copyright infringement will keep his anonymity, a court has ruled. The allegations, which were made in the comments section of an online news article, prompted Grooveshark’s parent company to unmask their author. They have now failed in that mission.
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This week it was revealed that following a request from a Swedish anti-piracy group, police action was taken against a torrent site hosted on Canadian soil. The general understanding is that torrent sites are currently legal in Canada, so how does a situation like this come to pass?
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Last week news broke that UK ISPs are teaming up with copyright holders to notify Internet subscribers caught sharing pirated material. The plan has been widely covered in the media, but unfortunately fact and fiction are often intertwined. So how scary are these piracy warnings really? Let’s find out.
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In somewhat of a surprise move, Canadian police have raided a local torrent site and confiscated its server. With around 10,000 members, Spavar.org was a relatively small site. However, any police action against a Canada-based site is likely to cause wider concern since the country is home to countless torrent sites, from the very small to the very large.
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The American Society of Civil Engineers is cracking down on researchers who post their own articles on their personal websites. The publisher, which owns dozens of highly cited journals, claims that the authors commit copyright infringement by sharing their work in public.
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05.17.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security at 11:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Selective reporting to breed bias against the lesser issues
Summary: New elements of FUD against GNU/Linux, ignoring much bigger issues that barely get covered at all
Since Microsoft is in bed with the NSA, many Microsoft flaws (with new ones added almost every month) are remotely exploitable and Microsoft does not even tell us about them all. It’s like a perpetual back door with the occasional change of keys.
Recently, a flaw that mostly affects shared GNU/Linux hosting was hyped up in Microsoft-connected sites by old FUD 'friends' who habitually do this. This was followed by some other coverage elsewhere, neglecting to say that the flaw is already widely patched. It was not even so severe. This was accompanied by a couple more FOSS-hostile articles in the British press, including one from a Microsoft propaganda site
citing, as usual, talking points from friends of Microsoft. There is a lot of FOSS-hostile propaganda these days, including this piece from InformationWeek that gets it wrong on many levels. This one example is a very crappy article framing it as a “religious” battle between “open source” and “commercial” as though these are opposites. Even Linux proponents like Susan Linton amplify these distracting reports, ignoring the elephant in the room, notably Microsoft. That’s where monstrous holes reside and prosper. Reporters should be pressured to investigate the real threats.
As many OEMs have found out (Sony being one of the latest), selling computers with back doors preinstalled is not a good business model [1, 2, 3]. It turns out that Microsoft not only gives a back door to the NSA but also the FBI (domestic), based on new leaks. To quote one report: “Microsoft worked to provide the FBI with court-ordered user data after the company began using encryption for customers who used Outlook, according to newly-released documents first leaked by Edward Snowden.
Here is more, which shows that not only Skype is affected. To quote: “Last July, Glenn Greenwald published a set of claims regarding a number of Microsoft services that were, especially at the time, unsettling: That Microsoft had helped the NSA “circumvent its encryption” relating to web chat on Outlook.com, that it had worked with the FBI to bring OneDrive (then called SkyDrive) into better fit with PRISM, and that government data collection from Skype had…”
It goes deeper than this, proving that people should wipe and freshly install operating systems they can trust on devices. Maybe the press focus on the elephant in this room. One site says “[s]oftware giant Microsoft has been left with questions to answer over its approach to the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) global internet surveillance programme after a new document was released implying that the NSA routinely collected data from the Microsoft cloud.” Microsoft facilitated this. It’s not an accident. But that’s not even the the bad part; it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is worse because Windows itself contains back doors and new ones are routinely added. It is not just about the so-called ‘cloud’. █
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Posted in Mono, Oracle, Patents at 6:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Now that a relatively high court in the US views APIs as a recognised monopoly we face new risks and Mono is on very shaky ground
The other day when we wrote about patents as an issue with huge implications to FOSS we took note of Microsoft- and Oracle-backed tools such as CPTN (Novell’s patents), which OIN is quite pointless against. OIN is wrongly assuming a particular strategy of patent litigation will develop, even though companies like In Microsoft and Nokia dodge to proxies like MOSAID. Here is a new piece about OIN which focuses on hardware:
The next big intellectual property battle has been forming over hardwired and programmable chips made for mobile devices that leverage Linux code. However, the Open Invention Network has strategically deployed forces to keep Linux-powered smartphones, tablets and other computer technologies out of harm’s way. Its goal is to create a patent litigation no-fly zone around embedded Linux.
OIN does not appear too have done much — if anything at all — to stop litigation of this kind. To make matters worse, look what members like Oracle have been doing, leveraging copyright to attack other OIN members.
Here is Glyn Moody’s new take on this matter. He writes:
Last week, that “idea/expression dichotomy” was dealt a serious blow by a US court. Significantly, it is the same court – the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) – that is largely responsible for the software patent mess in the US.
Indeed, CAFC has been quite notorious for this. It is worse than even SCOTUS. Well, citing this older article, Mike Masnick explains that we should all be “recognizing that APIs shouldn’t be covered by copyright…as it makes people programming on your platform more valuable since they have more options and more flexibility. The big companies who don’t like this are being short-sighted. They’re trying to lock in developers, by forcing them to only develop for their platform, but in doing so, are inherently making their own platform less valuable.”
Now we are stuck in a mess of copyrights APIs, Jose warned us about such stuff years ago, in relation to Mono. Whatever Dalvik means to Java (Oracle) Mono may mean to .NET (Microsoft). We will revisit and expand on this another day. █
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