04.15.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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What is Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) in education and how can we get more students involved? HFOSS is open source software that has a humanitarian purpose such as disaster management, health care, economic development, social services, and more. Experience with undergraduate participation in HFOSS shows it can both motivate students and provide excellent learning opportunities. There is also an indication that it can help attract and retain female students.
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The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the second largest agency of the US federal government. It employs more than 280,000 people, and with an annual budget close to $150 billion it provides health care services to close to 8.7 million patients, and benefits to close to 23 million veterans.
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Where is the federal government on open source adoption and where is it going?
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In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let’s start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace.
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04.14.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With the official retirement of Windows XP, the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and surprisingly healthy software and gaming ecosystems (yay, Steam!), there has never been a better time to switch to Linux. Linux will also run very well on any old, Windows XP-era hardware that you might still be using, too — and if you’re anxious that you’ll be filled with switchers remorse after nuking your Windows installation, don’t worry: dual-booting is a cinch as well, extremetech reported.
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A wealth of other programs, many free, is available to augment the Ubuntu experience. If a user would like to edit some of the photos organized within Shotwell, for example, Krita and GIMP are two free image-manipulation programs that rival the functionality of Adobe Photoshop. In fact, Ubuntu presents users with a one-click option to download Krita when opening a Photoshop file for the first time.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Last year I wrote an article called “Linux Podcasts and Magazines” which listed some of the best magazines and podcasts about Linux. Having looked back at that article I am aware that it could have gone a lot further as there are loads of podcasts that could have been named.
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Kernel Space
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A few hours ago I wrote about the most interesting features for the Linux 3.15 kernel from my perspective as it didn’t look like anything else interesting would be introduced this late in the merge window before the imminent 3.15-rc1. However, this time I’ve been happily proven wrong with Clang patches being added to the Linux 3.15 kernel.
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The x86 platform driver update was pulled today for the Linux 3.15 kernel, which includes new notebook support.
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For the Linux 3.15 kernel were already a lot of Btrfs bug and performance fixes, but now late into the 3.15 merge window have been some more fixes.
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Early on in the Linux 3.15 merge window there were improvements to significantly speed-up suspend and resume for systems, but now there’s another late merge of a patch that has the capability of speeding up the resume time from suspend by 7~12x for at least some laptop/desktop systems.
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The first release candidate to the Linux 3.15 kernel is now available and it marks the close of the kernel merge window for about two months. Linux 3.15 is poised to be a very exciting kernel release.
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Graphics Stack
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For any early GTX 750 owners, before getting too excited, the support is very preliminary. For the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti graphics cards I tested them today on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 doing a clean install and then using the latest daily Linux 3.15 kernel package from the Ubuntu mainline kernel archive. With both graphics cards, the system booted up fine on Linux 3.15 with the Nouveau DRM driver taking care of the kernel mode-setting for this hardware. In fact, it mode-set correctly for dual-link DVI on a 30-inch Samsung 2560 x 1600 display for these two mid-range graphics cards.
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There’s stable release updates out this Sunday evening for the X.Org Server.
Matt Dew has announced the releases of xorg-server 1.14.6 and 1.15.1.
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A few days ago when word got out that Civilization: Beyond Earth is coming out for Linux, many speculated and wondered whether this game would be the launch title for AMD’s Mantle graphics API to be introduced on Linux. It’s already been confirmed that Beyond Earth will feature a Mantle renderer to complement OpenGL, but will AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver bring support for Mantle?
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Benchmarks
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Our latest benchmarks of AMD’s AM1 Platform this weekend is looking at the performance impact of the DDR3 memory frequency on the overall system performance while running Ubuntu Linux. The AMD Athlon 5350 APU was tested with DDR3 at 800MHz, 1066MHz, 1333MHz, and 1600MHz (the maximum for these current socketed Kabini APUs).
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An individual has been doing a lot of benchmarks recently from various lightweight window managers ranging from Openbox to Fvwm2 to Fluxbox with Compton and Awesome and Cairo-compmgr.
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Applications
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LiVES 2.2.3, a simple-to-use, powerful video editor and VJ tool that allows users to combine real time and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files, is now available for download.
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YaRock lets you browse your local music collection based on cover art but obviously, it also lets you easily search and filter your music collection, providing various views such as artists, albums, tracks, genre, years, etc. and it includes features such as: music collection database (SQLite 3), playlists support, can play radio streams, Mp3Gain tag support for volume normalization, Last.fm scrobbler, command line and Mpris interfaces, smart playlists, favourites support, automatically downloads cover art and more.
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The concept of app stores, though popularized by Apple, followed by Android, has been around for a long time. In fact, Linuxians know that it was in the penguinian world of software that the concept of app store basically originated. A software housing a collection of apps stored in a convenient location was something Linux users have loved and still love.
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Panda Security, a cloud security solutions provider, unveiled new features for its Panda Cloud Systems Management (PCSM) remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution. The latest version of PCSM allows administrators to manage Linux, Mac and Windows devices, along with smartphones and tablets.
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Proprietary
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PaintSupreme is a powerful image manipulation tool available for Linux, with support for various painting tools, layers and effects, and written using Qt3. The paid version costs $5.99, however a trial version is available for those interested in a commercially supported alternative to Photoshop on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Have you heard of speed reading? Me neither. At least not before a startup called Spritz raised 3.5 Millions in seed money to develop an API that supposedly allows a user to read 1,000 words per minute.
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Wine or Emulation
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On the eve of Independence Day, folks who believe in the right to control their own software and computers will be celebrating a different kind of independance; the release of the latest LTS offering from Ubuntu. On Thursday this week Canonical (the guys behind Ubuntu) will be releasing the latest version of their version of the operating system-version 14.04- code named Trusty Tahr. This is a Long Term Support release that will receive support and updates for the coming five years which would be ideal for business and all late adopters. Late adopters are all those people that still have a Windows XP machine humming somewhere in their house.
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Games
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The PlaneShift role playing game, which is open-source on both the client and server ends, is out with version 0.6.1 that represents a few months of improvements.
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One of the users of Reddit named ‘Moyels’ has posted a quote, which suggests that Star Citizen might get the support for Linux after all.
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There’s no perfect amount of time to spend in a world that’s almost destroyed itself, but Wasteland 2 wants to give you at least a couple of days to savour the terrifying sights. Developer inXile Entertainment thinks an “average new player” should take about 50 hours to complete the upcoming RPG, according to a new update detailing the game’s march toward release.
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Sid Meier’s next major game release in the Civilization franchise will see a native Linux game port.
Many Phoronix readers have been writing in this weekend about news out of PAX East 2014 of not only Civilization: Beyond Earth coming out later this year but that it will see a native Linux port. Beyond Earth is a new science-fiction-themed game within the Civilization series.
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A spiritual successor to Sid Meier’s intergalactic classic Alpha Centauri has been officially announced, and it brings the promise of treats for PC gamers including support for AMD’s low-level Mantle application programming interface (API) and cross-platform gaming on Windows, OS X and Linux – the latter to include Valve’s SteamOS.
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CD Project, the developer of the Witcher franchise has announced a while ago that they plan to extend into the Linux territory and it’s very likely that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition will be ported to the open source platform. Now it’s your chance to buy the game at a ridiculous price.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop project has graduated to version 2.2 and it’s a very large update for this GNOME3-forked environment.
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On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 2.2!
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Cinnamon 2.2 was released today, bringing various improvements to the System Settings, HiDPI/Retina Display support, client side decorations support along with other interesting refinements.
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I took a look at the issue of gender in open source a while back in an article on ITworld. I noted in that article that I had worked for and with many different women over the last twenty years in my technology career. The women I worked with served in many different roles: IT managers, vice presidents, art directors, web producers, editors, editors-in-chief, marketing managers and plenty of other roles.
In short, the women I’ve worked with over the course of my career have been at pretty much every level in technology publishing. But, as I noted in the ITworld article, they all had one thing in common: THEY. JUST. DID. IT. They didn’t get into technology because of an outreach program, they got into it because it was the career that they desired based on their own individual personalities.
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The 2014 “Journées du Logiciel Libre” took place in Lyon like (almost) every year this past week-end. It’s a francophone free software event over 2 days with talks, and plenty of exhibitors from local Free Software organisations. I made the 600 metres trip to the venue, and helped man the GNOME booth with Frédéric Peters and Alexandre Franke’s moustache.
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You might feel that the names of Nitrux and Numix sound a little familiar. The developers involved with these are responsible for numerous icon packs and themes for the Linux systems, and Nitrux also has its own Linux distribution called Nitrux OS.
The collaboration between two teams has been going for quite a while, and the upcoming operating system that has been promised by Nitrux and Numix finally got a face. Until now there were only glimpses and teases, but the Linux community can now get a good look at Ozon OS.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat enables its customers to migrate Linux subscriptions to Google Compute Engine, Citrix integrates NetScaler as a remote services blade for Cisco Nexus 7000 switches and Verizon launches a Secure Cloud Interconnect service to enable enterprises to connect more than one cloud seamlessly and securely.
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Following a recent FutureGov “Ask the experts” article, Red Hat’s Harrish Pillay, the Global Head for Community Architecture and Leadership, responds to another query from a FutureGov reader on when open source is free and when it’s not.
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Cloudian to Address Red Hat Summit Audience Along with Red Hat and Other Major OpenStack Partners on Advantages of OpenStack
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Fedora
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It’s certainly looking like Fedora 21 will premiere with a massive amount of features, perhaps the most ever. Fedora 21 already has a ton of features but another large batch of proposals have been submitted for this next major Linux distribution release due out at the end of 2014.
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Debian Family
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Tails is a kind of computer-in-a-box. You install it on a DVD or USB drive, boot up the computer from the drive and, voila, you’re pretty close to anonymous on the internet. At its heart, Tails is a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity. It comes with several privacy and encryption tools, most notably Tor, an application that anonymizes a user’s internet traffic by routing it through a network of computers run by volunteers around the world.
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MakuluLinux Mate Imperium Edition has been released a few hours ago, and being based on Debian Testing, I took it for a test drive. This is a good opportunity to have a look at the latest MATE 1.8, since Ubuntu Trusty only includes the 1.6 version in the repositories, and for the Mint release we’ll probably have to wait for about another month.
But except for MATE, some very interesting choices make MakuluLinux Imperium Edition stand out: it comes by default with applications like Steam, Wine, PlayOnLinux and even the Kingsoft Office suite instead of LibreOffice. Upon installing MakuluLinux, you have the possibility to choose which components will be installed and which not.
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The MATE Live desktop is shown below, it is exactly what I expect from Makulu — beautiful wallpaper, bright colourful icons, and lots of interesting-looking additions scattered around the screen. The Installer icon and an Installation Guide are on the upper left corner of the screen.
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The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 1003 developers, 401 developers voted using the Condorcet method.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“It’s been ages since I haven’t been able to say it, but… we have a new promoted image (#294)! This image is now the best ubuntu Touch image we never had. It’s been a tedious path to get there, so we hope you will enjoy it! People on the devel channel will be able to get the new scope design experience as per numerous other features and bug fixes since latest promoted image (#250). This, week-end, multiple images have been spinned. Some blocker fixes, some regressions went in and are now fixed,” said Canonical’s Didier Roche.
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The Meizu MX3 was announced on an official basis last year, but it seems as though this particular smartphone is going to roll out over in the U.S. some time in the third quarter of this year, which is still a fair number of months away. Well, the Meizu MX3 holds the distinction of being one of the first smartphones that will ship with Ubuntu Linux, although one can always make do with an Android-powered version of this smartphone. The Ubuntu version of the Meizu MX3 was shown off at Mobile World Congress in February.
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The developers have made a lot of improvements in their latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and the Linux community is waiting for the release with great interest. One of the main reasons for this anticipation is the fact that Canonical made some important changes to the operating system and now it’s somewhat different from Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander), which is the current version.
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The Ubuntu developers have changed their policy regarding the support period of non-LTS versions of Ubuntu, starting with the 13.04 version. This created a strange situation where Ubuntu 13.04, which had nine months of support, reached end of life before Ubuntu 12.10, which was the last with 18 months of support.
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Flavours and Variants
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Windows XP has officially died today as Microsoft pulls the plugs that leaves millions of users as juicy targets for crackers and cyber criminals and there will be massive attacks on these systems so it’s extremely important for Windows XP users to move away from this dead OS. There are two options for such users – either they upgrade to heavily criticized Windows 8 (which may not even work on their current hardware) or they simply move to Linux.
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VirtualBox, like any hypervisor, likes all the system resources it can get. Therefore, if you want to migrate your old XP box to Linux Mint and you have an older PC, you may not be able to use VirtualBox to run XP. In my experience, you could squeeze XP on top of Linux Mint and VirtualBox on a system with 1GB of RAM, but it’s going to be ugly. You want at least 2GBs of RAM and a 1GHz AMD or Intel processor.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung has always come across as a bit of a sleazy company to me. Something about the company has always just rubbed me the wrong way. Whenever I see a Samsung ad or read a story about them I feel like I’ve been slimed. It’s a feeling akin to dealing with a used car salesman or an insurance salesman, you just know that they are full of crap and you feel dirty after dealing with them.
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Android
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Lockheimer, who joined Google in 2006, was called by Samsung’s lawyers as a witness to demonstrate how the popular Android operating system was well into development before the first generation iPhone was introduced in 2007.
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Apple shipped less than half as many tablets as Android in Q2, representing 28.3% of the market compared with Android’s 67%. One year ago, during the second quarter of 2012, the two operating systems shipped almost equally.
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Android 4.4.2 (KitKat) was released some four months ago on the Nexus 4, 7, 10 and Google Play Edition phones that existed at the time. If you’re an avid follower of all things Android, then you may have figured that it’s just about time for Google to release another incremental upgrade to their dominant OS. A recent report from Android Police points to the rumoured ‘dogfooding’ (slow and controlled roll out of software for testing etc) of 4.4.3 to members of Google outside of the Android team. A move like this can only mean one thing. The Android team is confident and are ready to test it on a wider scale, before making it available to everyone.
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For about a year now, Google has been working on an Android version of its Chrome Remote Desktop app and new reports from Engadget, PCMag and other outlets claim that it is imminent. The origins of the project go all the way back to a short post from The Chromium Team, and many people have been waiting for the ability to access a remote computer or device from Android.
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Moto G is the device that is turning things around for Motorola. The company has already accepted that the device is their most successful smartphone ever. According to latest data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Motorola is currently owing 6% share in the British smartphone market.
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The Taiwanese smartphone maker has plans to ship the HTC One M8 Google Play Edition in the next two-three weeks, but you will be glad to know that the kernel source is just a click away. The company has published the open source files for this device on its developer site, HTCdev.
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Kunkel says, “think of the open source foundation like Android.” The world’s most used mobile operating system can support free, paid, proprietary, or open source apps. There are great, decent, and downright terrible apps, but they’re all supported on nearly any Android device, from the soon-to-be-coveted Samsung Galaxy S5 to the budget-friendly burner.
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While the subject of open source used to be confined much more to software than to electronics and hardware, several changes over the past years have made it more universal. The advent of the 3D printer and other open source hardware projects along with Kickstarter as a vehicle for funding have made it much easier to bring a project to the open market than ever before.
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Linksys has started shipping a new router, and it’s touting its latest offering as the first consumer-grade Wi-Fi router to provide thorough wireless coverage throughout the home through its four external antennas.
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The Open Source Initiative has announced the results of a ballot by its members to select new directors for its board. The outcome sees more diversity and strong community skills introduced, signalling new horizons for the 15 year old organisation.
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In the Iron Man movies, Tony Stark uses a voice-controlled computer assistant called J.A.R.V.I.S. It manages the lights and security system in his home, helps him pilot his Iron Man suits, and even assists with his research. Some of this is still very much in the realm of science fiction, but not all of it. Inspired by the Iron Man movies, two Princeton students have built a J.A.R.V.I.S. for the real world.
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Box is getting into the mix, unveiling its own open source repository showcasing at least 20 projects to-date.
Amid content and metadata SDKs for Android, iOS, Windows, and Java, more distinctive projects include the Box Anemometer (a MySQL slow query monitor) and the curiously-named Stalker, a jQuery plugin allowing elements to follow a user as he or she scrolls through a page.
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Lauren Egts is a student who loves technology. She teaches children and adults alike about computer programming, presenting about Raspberry Pi and Scratch at local area Mini Maker Faires and at the Akron Linux User Group. She’s enrolled in the Hathaway Brown School’s Science, Research, and Engineering program, and is a member of her school’s robotics team, The Fighting Unicorns. She also won a 2014 Ohio Affiliate Award for Aspirations in Computing from the National Center for Women in Technology.
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SaaS/Big Data
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CloudStack became an Apache Top-level Project (TLP) back in March 2013, and is the open source muscle behind many cloud deployments. Originally donated to Apache by Citrix, CloudStack depends on community contributions to keep its feature set growing and its security hardened. This week, CloudOps, which provides private, public and hybrid cloud solutions for enterprises, announced security enhancements that the company has contributed to Apache CloudStack and the availability of their implementation and managed services for Apache CloudStack 4.3.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has quietly published a roadmap for its legacy Sun SPARC and Solaris platforms.
Big Red’s not offered a whole lot of detail, confining itself to the single slide below.
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CMS
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Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to custom apps to Intranets, today announced the election of Sarah Watz as the President of Open Source Matters (OSM). The non-profit provides organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. Watz is the first-ever internationally based president of OSM.
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More than 3 percent of the web runs on Joomla, with the platform being used for everything from websites to blogs to custom apps to Intranets.
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Education
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Stanly Community College is using Student Success Plan (SSP), open source case management software from Unicon, to better engage at-risk students and promote student success. The Albemarle, NC, institution serves 10,000 curriculum, continuing education and basic skills students.
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The Association for Computing Machinery’s annual meeting of their Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education is one of the largest academic computing meetings there is. This year’s event featured a full-day workshop on teaching open source practices, tools, and techniques by engaging students as contributors to humanitarian projects such as Ushahidi, OpenMRS, Gnome Accessibility, and others. TitanPad was used for collaborative notetaking during the event, and this article is a result. You could call it a crowd-sourced article.
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Free and open source solutions are a common component in the ICT infrastructure of Heanet, Ireland’s National Education and Research Network, serving about one million students and staff in the country’s research and education institutes. Such tools are chosen over proprietary alternatives whenever possible, says Glenn Warren, one of Heanet’s IT security specialists.
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I first read about Chris Whittum in an article on Fosters.com. Once I read that he was interested in using open source software in education, I knew I had to learn more about him. After working in education, Chris decided to share his knowledge in an eBook called: Energize Education Through Open Source: Using Open Source Software to Enhance Learning. This resource focuses on how schools can use open source to continue to offer great lessons to students without the high price tag of similar proprietary products.
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It’s Open Library Week at Opensource.com, and we’re celebrating open source tools and methods for libraries with a contest.
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Business
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Henning Ogberg and Jennifer Stagnaro from SugarCRM explains how open source platforms can be a good source of revenue
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How do you earn money from something that’s given away free? We look at five methods which have been successfully used by companies.
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Collaboration might seem to come naturally to open source developers, but the Linux Foundation tell Sean Michael Kerner that it’s also a business decision
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source is no stranger to the enterprise, but most businesses compartmentalize — open source for this, proprietary software for that. Is some of each the best of both worlds, or could businesses benefit by taking the 100 percent open source plunge? IDC’s Michael Fauscette and Red Hat’s Tim Yeaton kick around some of the issues surrounding full open source adoption in the enterprise.
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BSD
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Point releases to the LLVM compiler infrastructure are finally becoming a reality with the LLVM 3.4.1 release being just days away.
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In a little over a month, I’ll be heading out to Ottawa to attend BSDCan 2014. I’ve been a regular at BSDCan since 2006, attending every year since except 2008 — I wanted to go that year too, but other business (actually the business of getting out of a company I’d helped build) kept blocking my preparations even though I had a fresh book out with the first edition of The Book of PF published late 2007.
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GhostBSD 4.0 Alpha 2, a FreeBSD-based operating system that relies on Xfce LXDE, MATE, and OpenBox desktop environments, has been released and is now available for testing.
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The second ALPHA build of the 4.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available on SourceForge for the amd64, i386 architectures.
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Pre-orders tend to arrive early (before official release date), grab the chance to have early access! You won’t be the winner if you just learned about it now, since at least one guy on misc@ has already beaten you to it 
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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These are direct-conversion transceivers which can be configured for experiments and evaluation of signals in FM and TV broadcast reception, prototyping a GSM base station with OpenBTS, developing with GNU Radio GPS, Wi-Fi and ISM.
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We are pleased to announce the sixth alpha release of GNU Guix.
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Using the AMD Athlon 5350 AM1 APU with its four “Jaguar” cores operating at 2.05GHz, I ran some benchmarks from Ubuntu 14.04 Linux comparing the performance of binaries compiled under GCC 4.8.2 and this week’s GCC 4.9.0 RC1. Is GCC 4.9 better able to exploit the potential out of AMD’s Jaguar microarchitecture? Let’s see.
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The GCC 4.9 compiler that’s about to be released has many improvements, including in the area of LTO (Link-Time Optimizations), but you must still have a fair amount of patience to compile with LTO support.
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For those curious about the impact of modern compiler tuning CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when using the GCC 4.9 compiler with an Intel Core i7 “Haswell” processor, here are many benchmarks of many C/C++ code-bases when testing a variety of compiler optimization levels and other flags.
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Whew! We’re in the midst of the last week of the MediaGoblin campaign! As you may already know, we already beat our first milestone. This means we’ve unlocked the most core and exciting things: federation and 1.0 support.
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Public Services/Government
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Licensing
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Many of our readers will already know that as Android is built using the Linux Kernel as its foundation, companies that manufacture smartphones, and mobile processors that run Android must provide source code. This is because the Linux Kernel (and many other libraries that Android depends upon) is licensed using the GPL (the GNU General Public License) which, in a nutshell, requires those that use GPL code or software to redistribute their changes and such in the same manner. This sort of practice is what allowed Open Source Software to take off in the first place, and keeps free software getting better and better and of course keeps things free for users like us.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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There was a time when working in the library I found it very frustrating (as many librarians do) that there were so few options for software that actually did what I needed. In libraries we’re so used to there being this vendor=software model. Where one vendor controls a product and while there might be other similar products, they too are controlled by a vendor.
This is why libraries need to take a closer look at open source software. By removing the “owner” (aka the vendor) from the equation we get a lot more freedom to make software that does what we want, how we want, when we want. One of the hardest thing to teach libraries who are switching to an open source solution is that the power is now in their hands to direct the software!
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Programming
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Right now Fracture supports decompiling ARM binaries but x86 is actively being worked on and there’s also plans for supporting PowerPC and MIPS. While progress is being made, there’s many features that still need to be handled like conditionals, complex language structs, high-level type recovery, and other features.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Life Sciences Consortium of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer today announced the launch of the Project Data Sphere initiative, a platform designed to facilitate the sharing, integration and analysis of data from phase 3, comparator arm cancer trials.
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Back in December, last year, we told you that a universal laptop charger standard was in the cards for this year and now we’re hearing reports that the European Union wants to cut down electronic clutter by obliging OEMs to adopt an universal charger for mobile phones and tablets, as well. This way, you won’t have to ditch your previous charger whenever you buy a new one. And, to be frank, not all of us are that conscious and decide to recycle, so it all turns out to be electronic waste which puts in big danger our environment.
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The quality of support from a software community is key to the lifecycle of a technical standard, says Chris Ulliott, Technical Director at the UK’s Technical Authority for information assurance, CESG. “We love open standards, they make life easier.”
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Science
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This study also examines social media behaviors quite broadly; there are probably specific industries or jobs where social media use would be beneficial or even within job requirements. Future research should investigate such positions in particular.
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IBM physicist and spintronics pioneer professor Stuart Parkin has been chosen as the recipient of the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize for the invention of the ‘spin-valve’ read head technology.
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Children growing up in severely disadvantaged circumstances can experience drastic chromosome ageing. By the time they are 9 years old their telomeres – the caps on the ends of chromosomes that shrink each time cells divide – can be as short as those of someone decades older. And a particular combination of genes seems to make children flourish in nurturing environments but suffer in harsh environments.
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Concerned Oklahomas gather to protest the airing of Cosmos, citing the show’s agenda is ‘clearly anti-Christian and biased against creationist values.’ Citizens have threatened to vote to ‘secdee’ [sic] from the United States during the 2014 gubernatorial and ballot issue election if Cosmos is not formally removed from all Oklahoma based television networks.
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Hardware
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However, at a recent gathering of like-minded Linux users, I learned that many of my peers hadn’t actually made the move to SSDs yet.
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Chinese chip maker Allwinner sells more ARM-based chips for Android tablets than just about anyone, but the company is starting to look beyond the Android space.
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If you want to know embargo’d Intel Xeon news, don’t wait or sign away your life, just look out for Samsung press releases. Yeah we know this particular bit of news will shock absolutely no one, but Samsung did blatantly break an NDA and directly name the Intel product involved so it became news.
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Health/Nutrition
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Food regulation in Australia can be baffling sometimes. It’s so easy to walk into a supermarket and fill your trolley with foods that can potentially undermine your health like litres of soft drink and cheap doughnuts. Yet if you want to buy hemp seed, a source of vitamins and minerals and a rich source of protein and healthy omega-3 fat, it’s still officially banned for use as a food.
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Security
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Wunsy the African grey flapped his wings and squawked after attacker pushed owner to the ground, sending him fleeing
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A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client. Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit.
David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to gain access to personal data of students and faculty. But he says his employer and the university failed to take action on the report, and the vulnerability remained in place even after a data breach exposed more than 300,000 students’ and former students’ Social Security numbers.
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Most enterprise security organizations are unlikely to have a spamming refrigerator on top of their list of things to worry about. But news earlier this year that an Internet-connected fridge was co-opted into a botnet that sent spam to tens of thousands of Internet users is sure to have piqued the interest of at least a few.
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Google recently held a security competition in Vancouver. One of the biggest highlights of the competition is that well-known hacker, George Hotz, who goes by his online name of Geohot has bagged a $150,000 prize from Google. This was reported by the International Business Times.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Iraq war is rightly seen as a defining low point in Blair’s career, but the damage he did does not stop there
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Let me explain why writing the introduction to today’s post by TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse is such a problem. In these intros, I tend to riff off the ripples of news that regularly surround whatever subject an author might be focusing on. So when it comes to the U.S. military, if you happen to be writing about the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” really, no problem. Background pieces on that pile up daily. How could you resist, for instance, saying something about the U.S. refusal to send an aircraft carrier to China for a parade of Pacific fleets (after the Chinese refused to allow Japanese ships to participate)? It’s mean girls of the Pacific, no? Have an interest in the Ukrainian crisis? Piece of cake, top of the news any time — like those curious pro-Russian protestors in eastern Ukraine who tried to liberate an opera house in the city of Kharkiv, mistaking it for city hall, or the hints that U.S. troops might soon be stationed in former Soviet satellite states. Or, say, you’re writing about threats in cyberspace — couldn’t be simpler! Not when you have Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel offering an amusing assurance that the country that launched the first cyberwar and is ramping up its new cybercommand at warp speed “does not seek to militarize cyberspace.” And, of course, any day of the week U.S.-Iranian relations are a walk in the park (in the dark). At the moment, for instance, the Iranian nominee for U.N. ambassador — previously that country’s ambassador to Belgium, Italy, Australia, and the European Union, but once a translator for the group that took U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran in 1979 — has been declared “not viable” by the Obama administration. In a remarkable act of congressional heroism, the U.S. Senate, led by that odd couple Ted Cruz and Chuck Schumer, has definitively banned him from setting foot in the country. Mean girls of Washington? Who could resist such material?
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She alleged the archipelago is “among the most militarised areas in the world”, saying some 1500 soldiers and 2000 civilian military personnel are stationed there amid a population of just 1000.
Ms Kirchner, who has a track record of controversial statements about the islands, said the British military manages its entire South Atlantic deployment and its electronic intelligence systems from there.
Britain called the claims “wholly false” and said UK forces numbers have declined to the “minimum necessary to defend the Islands”.
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As if we needed any more evidence that the Obama administration-backed “rebels” in Syria are fighting alongside our avowed enemy, al-Qaeda, a story published days ago in Britain’s The Independent puts another brick in that wall.
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The woman said she only bought organic fertilizer for her hibiscus plant, but DEA agents and Shorewood police raided her house and arrested her.
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The unabashed collusion of two torturing security states in concealing the truth of their despicable acts – including complicity in the torture of women and minors – and blocking criminal prosecution of the guilty is a sign of how low public ethics have sunk. Fortunately there are still a few people in the British Foreign Office disgusted enough to leak it.
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Former UK army captain Mike Martin, shows the Afghan war as it is, rather than how our political and military leaders would like us to see it, and the picture that he paints is often jaw-dropping.
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Transparency Reporting/Wikileaks
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WikiLeaks unveiled a draft of “The Future of Internet Governance,” the guidelines for a meeting between representatives from 12 countries, including France, Germany, and the United States, and hosted by Brazil.
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Hajar Hamalaw, an Iraqi-born journalist living in Germany, wanted to name is his son after the government secret-spilling website “WikiLeaks.” The German government said no.
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While both Snowden and Assange have been hailed as heroes by those who favor more transparency and more accountability, both have demonstrated different attitudes about the possible impact their leaked information could have. Snowden has said he is working with journalists who are using their discretion in deciding what parts of the leaked information should be published.
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Army Private Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence for leaking reams of classified information is out of proportion with the offences for which she was convicted, the lawyer who will represent her in court-martial appeals said Tuesday.
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The UK authorities are trying to block their own report on Afghanistan.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We must stop climate change. And we can, if we use the tactics that worked in South Africa against the worst carbon emitters
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The column by Breakthrough’s Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus is a good example of what’s known on the Internet as “concern trolling”–shedding crocodile tears over the prospect that climate advocates they have done their level best to undermine might not be getting their message out effectively. And what’s the problem with their messaging?
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As head of his village, Prajob Naowa-opas battled to save his community in central Thailand from the illegal dumping of toxic waste by filing petitions and leading villagers to block trucks carrying the stuff — until a gunman in broad daylight fired four shots into him.
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According to a new study, over 76,600 people could become employed by green transportation businesses, and 10,000 lives would be saved, if major EU cities adopted Copenhagen’s bicycle sharing system.
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Finance
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When organized interest groups or economic elites want a particular policy passed, there’s a strongly likelihood their wishes will come true. But when average citizens support something, they have next to no influence.
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There is hysterical emphasis today on preventing the abuse of the system by a tiny proportion of fraudsters (known as scroungers). But the abuse lies elsewhere; in the Department of Social Security. They do not aid their staff or their clients’ health, and they undermine everyone’s security.
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Economist Thomas Piketty’s message is bleak: the gap between rich and poor threatens to destroy us
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On Friday, the Minnesota House approved raising the state minimum wage to $9.50 per hour. According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), it’s the fifth state to hike the minimum wage this year, following Delaware, West Virginia, Connecticut and Maryland, which just approved its hike earlier this week.
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The Queen has been dragged into the row over payday loans firm Wonga… as she owns its luxury multi-million pound HQ.
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As the ASA bans a Wonga TV advert Citizens Advice encourages members of the public to report other irresponsible adverts to get them off air.
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Censorship
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ORG is running a project to end the imposition of web blocking by ISPs and the Government. Here’s how we’re getting on and how you can get involved.
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Starting this weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times and the other titles in the Sun-Times Media group will temporarily cease to run comments with our articles.
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Privacy
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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston sought to quell the uproar over the appointment of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the company’s board of directors, saying in a blog post Friday that Rice’s appointment won’t change its stance on privacy.
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The guerrilla graffiti artist Banksy is believed to be behind an artwork which has appeared on the side of a house in Cheltenham. The Gloucestershire Echo reported that the owner of the house, Karren Smith, 48, said she saw men packing a white tarpaulin into a van at about 7.30am on Sunday. She said: ‘They were taking it down and putting it into the back of the van. I thought it might be something to do with the police, like when a crime happens. I saw these people looking and then saw the graffiti. It’s pretty good. It livens up the street.’ The work, on the corner of Fairview Road and Hewlett Road, surrounds a BT telephone box and is already drawing fans. The new artwork comes in the wake of the storm over surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden
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EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one third of the U.S. population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.
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The US government’s troubled military trials of terrorism suspects were dealt another blow on Monday when proceedings were halted after an allegation surfaced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.
Judge James Pohl, the army colonel overseeing the controversial military commission at Guantánamo, gaveled a hearing out of session after barely 30 minutes on Monday morning, following the revelation of a motion filed by the defense stipulating that the FBI approached an unidentified member of the team during the course of an investigation into how a manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed found its way to the media.
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There’s no word on the price Google paid, but Facebook had been in talks to acquire the company earlier this year for a reported $60 million. Presumably, Google paid more than that to keep it away from Facebook.
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Pair awarded highest accolade in US journalism, winning Pulitzer prize for public service for stories on NSA surveillance
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Civil Rights/Torture
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Days ago, the Obama administration demonstrated its dedication to the indefinite detention of Americans, as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by submitting a brief asking a federal judge to throw out a case challenging the constitutionality of that provision.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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(knight725)
Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they don’t compete because their service areas don’t overlap, and that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that don’t currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast. This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of what’s involved in this merger — broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Robert Steele, one of the bosses at anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp, has expressed outrage with BitTorrent Inc. In an often incomprehensible rant he accuses the company and its founder of profiting from piracy. To become a good citizen, BitTorrent should add a blacklist of pirate torrent hashes to their leading file-sharing client uTorrent, he suggests.
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Most people affected by piracy are very happy to point the finger at sites like The Pirate Bay, but what if people were too scared to talk about the sites where their content is being made available illegally? What if, in some strange world, the sites hosting the pirated videos were the ones paying for the content in the first place?
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Sony’s drive-by copyright takedown illustrates the harm old business models can do to new approaches like open source
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City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Unit has been making waves recently against so-called ‘pirate’ websites but its current funding is only a temporary arrangement. In an effort to remove uncertainty, the Prime Minister’s Intellectual Property Advisor is calling on his boss to commit to the permanent funding of the unit to extend its existence beyond 2015.
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For years, we followed the important iiNet case in Australia. Hollywood studios, which ran a group called AFACT in Australia, wanted to “set an example” of why ISPs should be liable for copyright infringement done on their networks, and deliberately chose iiNet to sue, believing the ISP was too small to mount a serious challenge. Instead, iiNet fought back strongly, making really strong points about how ridiculous it was to pin the blame on an ISP. The result was a complete victory for iiNet. It won at the district court, at the appeals court and finally at Australia’s high court.
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KVM
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KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) is a leading open source virtualization technology and an important tool in any Linux administrator’s handbook, especially with the increased adoption of cloud technologies such as OpenStack and the need for hypervisors to better manage compute, network and storage resources. The “potential” of KVM for enterprises is incredibly valuable far beyond its origins – just like Linux. After a year of contributing patches to the KVM community, IBM is announcing today that a Power Systems version of KVM, PowerKVM, will be available on IBM’s next generation Power Systems servers tuned for Linux before the end of the quarter.
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ElasticHosts
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Cloud could finally prove cheaper than on-premise thanks to a new Linux-based technology that renders cloud hosting half the price of Amazon Web Services (AWS), it is claimed.
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Cloud-hosting firm ElasticHosts has launched Elastic Containers, an Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that claims to save companies money by charging them only for consumption rather than capacity.
Misc.
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Since Facebook’s Carlos Bueno wrote the canonical article about the full stack, there has been no shortage of posts trying to define it. For a time, Facebook allegedly only hired “full-stack developers.” That probably wasn’t quite true, even if they thought it was. And some posts really push “full-stack” developer into Unicorn territory: Laurence Gellert writes that it “goes beyond being a senior engineer,” and details everything he thinks a full-stack developer should be familiar with, most of which doesn’t involve coding.
[...]
LAMP dates back to the days when HTML was trivial, and all computation was done on the server. JavaScript was a toy language that helped to glue things together in the browser, but that was all. JavaScript has evolved into a serious, fully capable programming language in its own right, and CSS is almost there. If you are going to be a full-stack programmer, you certainly need to understand the platform on which the real front end of your application is running. The MEAN stack, Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node, a more up-to-date take on LAMP, shows how JavaScript has evolved into a platform of its own.
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Intel, Broadcom, Mellanox, and Cumulus Networks jumped on board last November, contributing specifications and software that will bring the project closer to a finished design. They weren’t alone, though: Software-defined networking vendor Big Switch Networks in January donated what it calls Open Network Linux (ONL) to the project.
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ARM
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ARM Compiler 6 is beginning to use the LLVM/Clang compiler.
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Velocity of open source Clang and LLVM combined with the stability of commercial products improve code quality, performance and power efficiency on ARM processors
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With the release of Compiler 6 today, ARM moves from a proprietary architecture to one based on open sourced Clang/LLVM. Although there is going to be a lot contributed back the greater DS-5 Ultimate Edition are initially not going to be as fully open as SemiAccurate would like.
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UK microprocessor-design company ARM has decided to move to an open-source compiler for the latest release of its software development tools, moving away from its own technology.
Raspberry Pi
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Seven tutorials for seven days as we take you from Pi beginner to Raspberry Pro, and we also show you how to develop Android apps with Python in Linux User issue 138
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Soon, there could be Pi in just about any device that needs embedded computing power. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new version of the Raspberry Pi platform that is aimed at a whole new class of devices and applications. Called the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, the new product puts all of the Pi’s core functionality onto a small board the size of a laptop memory module, allowing it to be plugged in to custom-built hardware.
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As we’ve reported many times, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi has emerged as one of the biggest open source stories anywhere over the past couple of years. It’s attracted all kinds of developers and tinkerers, is now running many different flavors of Linux, and there is even now a supercomputer consisting of many Pi devices lashed together with Lego pieces. In some of the more exotic new applications for Raspberry Pi, it’s being used in music, robotics and security scenarios.
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The compute module contains the guts of a Raspberry Pi (the BCM2835 processor and 512Mbyte of RAM) as well as a 4Gbyte eMMC Flash device (which is the equivalent of the SD card in the Pi). This is all integrated on to a small 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector (the same type of connector as used for laptop memory*). The Flash memory is connected directly to the processor on the board, but the remaining processor interfaces are available to the user via the connector pins. You get the full flexibility of the BCM2835 SoC (which means that many more GPIOs and interfaces are available as compared to the Raspberry Pi), and designing the module into a custom system should be relatively straightforward as we’ve put all the tricky bits onto the module itself.
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With the new Compute Module, the Foundation manages to pack the Raspberry Pi’s SoC with 512MB of memory and 4GB of storage onto a board the size of your standard DDR2 laptop memory. The Compute Module is seen above to the left of the standard PI unit. It’s not entirely a size thing here though, the company is looking to offer a more universal version of the system, stuffing it on a board with a much more standard connector. This will allow developers to implement the system in whatever way they want as opposed to being tied to the traditional Pi I/O.
Qualcomm
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Qualcomm revealed 20nm, 64-bit Snapdragon SoCs featuring Cortex-A57 and –A53 CPU cores, 4K video encoding, LTE Advanced, DDR4 RAM, and more.
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Qualcomm announced this morning their next-generation 64-bit processors for what they hope yields “the ultimate connected mobile computing experiences” with a ton of new features and capabilities.
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This is all done at 20nm compared to Beast’s 45nm and about 100 watts less power waste. I probably wouldn’t even have a fan to annoy me, not on the PSU, and not on the CPU. Beast’s replacement will likely be just big enough to hold a few hard drives or SSDs. Qualcomm will ship in 2014, probably just in time for Christmas.
Development
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Embedded Linux Pioneer Launches Yocto Project-Based Linux BSPs for Boards in the Freescale Vybrid Controller Solutions Ecosystem
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Habey unveiled a tiny, open-spec, Freescale i.MX6-based SBC that runs Ubuntu and Android, and features stackable daughter boards, PoE, and wing extensions.
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Mainline Linux kernel support enables ease of migration by providing consistent access to new devices and the latest features
Open Hardware
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For more advanced robots, there will be other available parts such as an infrared distance sensor. TinkerBots’ use of the Arduino-compatible micro-controller platform enables older enthusiasts to dabble in programming (C) for their TinkerBots creations.
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I bought an Arduino Mega and started putting together the custom electronics in the form of a daughter board (Arduino calls them “shields”). However, it needed to be a standalone unit, so what could I do for user interfacing to the Mega that was flexible? Touch screens.
Novena
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At 8-years old, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang appreciated the fact that his Apple II came with schematics and source code because it allowed him to figure out how it worked.
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Andrew “Bunnie” Huang lists a bunch of reasons why you’ll want his open-source laptop, the Novena. You can modify it yourself so that its battery will last however long you want it to. You can inspect the software to see if there’s any present from the National Security Agency. And you don’t have to pay a tax to any big corporation just because you want to do some computing.
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In a post-Edward Snowden’s disclosure world, where people and companies are seriously exploring options to keep their digital data and communication secure from NSA (or other illegitimate) snooping, here’s some good news.
Project Novena is alive and kicking, promising to bring you the world’s “almost” fully open source laptop. And it doesn’t just have open source software, but open source hardware. Hardware with open designs for anyone to manufacture and implement as they deem fit.
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Hackers Bunnie Huang and Sean “xobs” Cross have launched a fundraiser for their open source laptop, the Novena. It looks very different from its prototype, but the idea behind it remains the same: a computer with transparent and easily modifiable hardware and software.
Mods
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The last time I wrote about the best hacks available for a board, I had so much to choice between; now instead, writing about Arduino Yún and all of its best hacks, it was difficult to me to find really good projects, because the platform is so young. While Raspberry Pi had a strong community, Arduino Yún is still growing up.
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High End
Old Computers
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The Zorin developers have always marketed their products as the perfect Windows alternatives and they’ve had some success with this strategy. Their operating systems are regarded as good replacements, with familiar interfaces that can help people running away from Windows OSes to better adjust to a Linux distribution.
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Single-purpose
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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 0.18.0-2.
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“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of April 7, 2014,” reads the official changelog.
The Linux kernel has remained the same, 3.13.6, and this is one of the most recent ones available. It’s very likely that the next development version will feature Linux kernel 3.14.
Distrohopping
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Various distro spin makers have made two unwritten laws that I very much disagree with:
A) A distro spin of desktop blah should have only programs built with the same widget library that desktop blah uses
B) A distro spin should only ship / pre-install one program for each application category
I mention this because I’m a big KDE fan but KDE-only distro spins do not include my preferred browser (Firefox) nor my preferred office suite (LibreOffice, not that I use an office suite much) because they aren’t QT-native applications. While LibreOffice does a better job of integrating with KDE than Firefox does, both drag with them quite a bit of GTK baggage… which is considered “bloat” by many spin makers.
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CAELinux
SparkyLinux
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I think it started when I installed the same Linux distribution with the same set of applications, configuration and layout as mine, to my wife’s and then to my colleague’s computers. Then somebody asked me why should I not try to share my point of view with more people.
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The SparkyLinux 3.3 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie,” just like the previous versions. The developer usually releases versions with various desktop environments, but this is just the Base, which means that it’s only for command-line fans.
AVLinux
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The really interesting and important thing about the AVLinux distribution, of course, is the Multimedia capability included in it. The Audio menu is shown to the right, above. Well, at least part of it is; it has so much in this category that it doesn’t even fit on one screen! Audio players, mixers, editors, synthesizers, analyzers, and pretty much anything and everything you can think of in this category are included.
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Arch Family
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Starting with the 32-bit ISO labeled 2014.04i (“i” as in infinite) this is our first version of a Rolling Release and based on the excellent Manjaro/(Arch).
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Manjaro 0.8.9, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has just received its third update pack.
Fedora
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Another round of features have been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee for this year’s Fedora 21 release.
Debian Family
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Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, APT (Advanced Package Tool) is the default command-line package manager for Debian, Ubuntu and their derivative systems. Recently, APT has reached version 1.0, after 16 years since it was recently developed. Ubuntu’s Synaptic and Ubuntu Software Center run both apt in the background, for managing deb packages.
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MakuluLinux 6 MATE, a Linux distribution based on the Debian testing branch, Jessie, that provides stability, speed, and a modern desktop, is the first in the series and it will be available for download on April 14.
Ubuntu and Derivatives
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Numix Icon Packs is a small project developed by Numix project team focused to create high quality GTK themes and icons for Linux desktop. Their goal is to make a “difference” in theming and to present you a modern and stylish desktop without damaging its usability while at it, and quite frankly, up until now they seem to have done a pretty great job.
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After wiring into the car’s communications system, forum user “nlc” was able to find a number of ports and tap into the data flowing to the center console and navigation screens. Others soon joined in the fun and amongst the slightly esoteric bits of information the “hackers” eventually discovered was that the sub-system runs on a version of Ubuntu operating system, which is a Linux variant.
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With Ubuntu 14.04 closing in to the release date, which is set for April 17th, I took Lubuntu for a spin from the daily live ISO image. Lubuntu is the most lightweight distribution in the Ubuntu family (the other one being Xubuntu which uses Xfce), using LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), as well as a set of applications intended to be low on resources.
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Okay, I have two socket 939 machines with XP collecting dust. Nevertheless they are quite stable and more than meets the requirements to run any version of Linux.
One has four gigs of RAM and the other two and both processors are AMD. I was wondering what you think of Mint and if there is another version of Linux you would recommend for the beginner.
Gentoo Family
PCLinuxOS
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I will have to migrate it to a newer version of PCLOS. But I will do that during Easter. The thing is, I am not sure if I want to do it. The current install of PCLOS has everything I need to work and play (it even runs the game Braid on Desura), so… why fixing it if it is not broken?
Slackware Family
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“We include Xfce4, the gimp, firefox, cups, exaile, popular multimedia plugins, and many other programs to maximize the desktop experience. Also new is an update to our very own installer, this was written from scratch and is a major improvement from previous installers. This is a RC release so final is soon to follow after initial peer testing,” notes the developer in the official announcement.
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Salix MATE 14.1 Beta 1, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on the MATE desktop environment, is ready for testing and download.
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Karen Sandler
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The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems and as a result is freezing non-essential expenses. The GNOME Foundation has eliminated their cash reserves leading to this dire situation, but should be recoverable in the months ahead. The GNOME Foundation got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women (OPW) and managing the program (and funds) for a number of other participating organizations. The GNOME Foundation staff and board fell behind in their processes with being overwhelmed by administering OPW. GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women is explained as “The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software.” They’ve had around 30 interns for their most recent cycle.
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Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Karen M. Sandler is the Conservancy’s new Executive Director. “Bradley M. Kuhn, outgoing Executive Director, gratefully passes the torch to his long-time colleague Karen Sandler. While Kuhn’s work as Conservancy’s President and on its Board of Directors remain unchanged, Kuhn’s new full-time staff role is titled “Distinguished Technologist”.”
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Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity based in New York, announced today the addition of a talented new member of its management team. Karen M. Sandler, formerly Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, begins today as Conservancy’s new Executive Director.
Mutter-Wayland
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GNOME’s Mutter-Wayland compositor requires EGL/KMS rendering back-end support and this currently isn’t supported by software-based drivers that aren’t backed by an actual GPU with hardware acceleration. However, developers are working to allow the swrast driver and LLVMpipe to work with this back-end rather than adding any FBdev/Pixman support to Mutter-Wayland. The primary use-case is to get Mutter-Wayland running in virtual machines where there is no accelerated GPU driver with DRM/KMS support (i.e. mainly outside of VMware’s VMWgfx world).
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Wayland branch is now (yesterday) merged into Mutter master and that also brought some small changes to GNOME Shell, i.e, changes in build, changes on checking when Wayland is the compositor.
Software
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The GNOME EasyTAG application is a simple, open-source way for editing audio tags within popular audio file formats. The much-revamped EasyTAG 2.2.0 is now available.
West Coast Summit
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This being last day of the hackfest, people started to disappear in the afternoon. Before that, we had a planning session for Wayland in GNOME 3.14, and came up with a number of concrete tasks and goals.
Participation
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With 3.12 out the door, it’s time to think about what we want to be doing for 3.14. I have a long list of design projects that I want to work on for the next release, but I also want to spend some time on how the GNOME project is working and how we can improve it.
One of my reoccurring interests is how we, as a project, can ensure that each module is in a healthy state. We want modules to have active developer teams around them, and we want it to be easy for people to get involved – not just because it is good for our software, but also because openness is an important part of our mission.
This interest in helping people to contribute isn’t just reserved for new, inexperienced contributors. There are experienced coders out there who are interested in GNOME but haven’t found a way in. Even members of the GNOME project itself don’t always know how to contribute to different apps and modules.
Misc. GStreamer Developments
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Previously there were a few sinks based on OpenGL (osxvideosink for Mac OS X and eglglessink for Android and iOS), but they all only allowed rendering to a window. They did not allow rendering of a video into a custom texture that is then composited inside the application into an OpenGL scene. And then there was gst-plugins-gl, which allowed more flexible handling of OpenGL inside GStreamer pipelines, including uploading and downloading of video frames to the GPU, provided various filters and base classes to easily implement shader-based filters, provided infrastructure for sharing OpenGL contexts between different elements (even if they run in different threads) and also provided a video sink. The latter was now improved a lot, ported to all the new features for hardware integration and finally merged into gst-plugins-bad. Starting with GStreamer 1.4 in a few weeks, OpenGL will be a first-class citizen in GStreamer pipelines.
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The GStreamer 1.4 release that will happen in a few weeks time is officially making OpenGL a “first class citizen” and can be used by all platforms / operating systems supporting this open-source multimedia framework.
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Kubuntu
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Kubuntu versions usually ship with a pretty standard set up of KDE, and Trusty makes no exception. You will find the clean, default and usual KDE interface, but fear not, for it is highly configurable and you can practically make it look and behave in any way you like it. Kubuntu Trusty will ship in four days with one of the latest and bleeding edge versions of KDE, 4.13.0.
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Windows XP has officially died today as Microsoft pulls the plugs that leaves millions of users as juicy targets for crackers and cyber criminals and there will be massive attacks on these systems so it’s extremely important for Windows XP users to move away from this dead OS. There are two options for such users – either they upgrade to heavily criticized Windows 8 (which may not even work on their current hardware) or they simply move to Linux.
KDE Applications
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In 2005, a friend told me about Ubuntu, and since then I discover it. I love the open source philosophy, I think it’s a great project and all those who participate are awesome people!
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As I probably already mentioned somewhere there is currently quite some energy going into the work of bringing more and better KDE applications to the Mac platform.
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The project plugin works by automatically reading a simple json file and providing the information found there to various parts and plugins in Kate.
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Thanks to Georgiy Syptchenko from Krita Russian Community [0] Krita’s translations into Russian got significantly improved recently!
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For a long time now we have had kmymoney.org, and used that in all our documentation. That has made it easy to change now. After migrating all useful content from the Sourceforge site, all we had to was change the IP address in the DNS and, voilá! the new site is online.
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04.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Snowden and Journalists
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Two reporters central to revealing the massive U.S. government surveillance effort returned to the United States on Friday for the first time since the story broke and used the occasion to praise their exiled source: Edward Snowden.
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Reform
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With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it’s time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren’t they doing more to stop it?
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Revelations about the National Security Agency’s most controversial surveillance program, which centers on the bulk collection of hundreds of billions of records of Americans’ phone conversations, were quickly greeted with calls for reform by major internet powerhouses like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo last year. But all four companies, along with dozens of other major tech firms, are actively opposing an initiative to prevent NSA spying known as the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, leaning on secretive industry lobbying groups while they profess outrage in official statements.
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The recent ruling by the Obama administration that telecom carriers, rather than the National Security Agency, would be responsible for warehousing telephone metadata is a complete joke.
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One of Obama’s NSA reforms just makes the problem worse.
Obama
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But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.
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Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Barack Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.
Cost Analysis
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This past Monday, I had the honor of moderating a panel organized by students at the American University Washington College of Law’s National Security Law Brief, on Understanding the Global Implications of the NSA Disclosures on the U.S. Technology Industry. The panel (Elizabeth Banker (ZwillGen), David Fagan (Covington), Joseph Moreno (Cadwalader), Gerard Stegmaier (Wilson Sonsoni) and Lawrence Greenberg (Motley Fool)) was stacked with practitioners who are navigating, on a daily basis, issues related to data privacy, transparency, and cooperation with law enforcement/government requests, among other related issues. As we explored during the discussion, there are a number of recent media and other reports describing the “fallout” for U.S. industry as a result of the disclosures. So, at least two questions arise: first, are the reports to be believed, and second, if so, will there be a lasting impact, or is this only temporary?
Japan
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Last December the ruling Liberal Democratic Party rammed one of the most controversial bills in Japan’s postwar history through the Diet, or parliament, with an uncharacteristic lack of debate. The “Protection of Specially Designated Secrets Act” passed even as opposition politicians knocked over desks, chairs, and one another while trying to reach the podium to block it. Outside, nearly 10,000 protesters formed a human chain around the government building and chanted, “No Return to Fascism!”
Germany/Europe
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In a testimony delivered by video-link from Moscow, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed to EU parliamentarians that the US NSA is actively spying on human rights organizations such as UNICEF and Amnesty International.
Deception
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The NSA engages in this fear-mongering not only publicly but also privately. As part of its efforts to persuade news organizations not to publish newsworthy stories from Snowden materials, its representatives constantly say the same thing: If you publish what we’re doing, it will endanger lives, including NSA personnel, by making people angry about what we’re doing in their countries and want to attack us.
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Last week, National Intelligence Director Gen. James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans’ emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of their telephone conversations that have been stored in NSA computers, without warrants obtained pursuant to the Constitution. That the NSA is doing this is not newsworthy — Edward Snowden has told the world of this during the past 10 months. What is newsworthy is that the NSA has admitted this, and those admissions have far-reaching consequences.
Since the Snowden revelations first came to light last June, the NSA has steadfastly denied them. Clapper has denied them. The recently retired head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, has denied them. Even President Obama has stated repeatedly words to the effect that “no one is reading your emails or listening to your phone calls.”
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It was recently revealed that the NSA’s top-secret offensive security unit, a specially designed hacking group, can infiltrate systems at the speed of light through everything from satellite and fiber-optic connections
Data ‘Leaks’
Turkey
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Turkey’s largest military eavesdropping base, which is run under the country’s national intelligence agency, has been named the Signal Intelligence Directorate (SİB), in efforts to remodel the agency, inspired by the functioning of the NSA and the CIA in the United States.
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World View: New claims say Ankara worked with the US and Britain to smuggle Gaddafi’s guns to rebel groups
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The CIA has been training more than 1,000 rebels in Jordan in a program financed by Saudi Arabia. The rebels, blocked by Islamist militias in southern Syria, failed in two operations to establish strongholds in Syria.
PRISM CCTV
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Google is trying hard to register ‘Glass’ as a trademark for its wearable computer glasses. However, the search giant hasn’t been able to get through its bid with the US trademark office.
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Google is about to make its biggest push yet to get Glass in the hands of as many people as possible. The Verge has obtained documents indicating that the company will open up its “Explorer Program” and make Glass available to anyone who wants to purchase a pair, possibly as soon as next week. It’ll be a limited-time offer, only available for about a day, and only US residents will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 device. Google will also include a free sunglass shade or one of its newly-introduced prescription glasses frames along with any purchase. An internal Google slide shows that the promotion may be announced on April 15th, though all the details of this program have yet to be finalized.
Ukraine
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Arseniy Yatsenyuk promises devolution to local government in hope of staving off demands for their independence from Kiev
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World attention has focused on Ukraine recently. With President Victor Yanukovych making his exit and a new government formed, events shifted to Crimea, with accusations that the Russian military took over the region.
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The US has also come under attack from human rights groups for its use of drones against suspected terrorists but which has also killed many civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Recently, the UN Human Rights Council published a Special Rapporteur’s report which detailed the deaths of civilians caused by US drone attacks, and raised many questions of possible violations of international human rights law.
Torture
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Senate committee found CIA interrogations and detentions to be ‘brutal’ and urges administration to release report as quickly as possible
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The lengthy report took four years to complete and still remains largely shrouded from public view. The treatment of 100 detainees was addressed — this, even though the official administrative line has long been that far fewer suspects were interrogated at CIA black sites. The report expressly states that the CIA misled the media and the public about the effectiveness of cruel and unusual interrogation. “The CIA manipulated the media by co-ordinating the leak of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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We finally have been favored with the most inevitable leak in the history of the republic. Somebody’s sent the Senate committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program, and its description of what was done in our name, out into the world. This will light a fire under some asses in the Executive branch, I’m thinking. It ought to get people thrown in jail. (h/t to Martin Longman for the PDF.)…
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A classified U.S. Senate report found that the CIA’s legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation techniques that critics say amount to torture was based on faulty legal reasoning, McClatchy news service reported on Thursday.
The Central Intelligence Agency also issued erroneous claims about how many people it subjected to techniques such as simulated drowning, or “water boarding,” according to the news service, citing conclusions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report obtained by McClatchy.
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A controversial torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee paints a pattern of CIA deception about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods used on terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to leaked findings. The committee said it will ask the Justice Department to investigate how the material was published.
The McClatchy news service late Thursday published what it said are the voluminous, still-classified review’s 20 findings. It concludes that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” failed to produce valuable intelligence; the CIA misled the Bush administration, Congress and the public about the value of the harsh treatment; the agency employed unauthorized techniques on detainees and improperly detained others; and it never properly evaluated its own actions.
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Congressman Keith Ellison is among 40 House Democrats calling on President Obama to quickly declassify portions of a report on the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques.
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One U.S. interrogator, speaking to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity, explained the “enhanced interrogation” program as being “the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.”
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CIA operatives called things like waterboarding “enhanced interrogation methods.” But the only adequate word to describe them is “torture.”
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Fresh claims emerge of high-level British government involvement in the programme
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Drones
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Schiff is co-sponsoring the drones report bill with an unlikely ally, Rep. Walter Jones. The North Carolina Republican is a mostly staunch conservative and Schiff a reliable Democratic vote on contentious issues. But Jones has broken with Republicans sharply in recent years over civil liberties issues and foreign policy generally.
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The Freedom of Information Act is a critical law for making sure the public has a fighting chance to get copies of records the government might not want it to see. For more than 40 years, people have used the FOIA to uncover evidence of government waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. More benignly, FOIA has been used to better understand the development and effects — positive and negative — of the federal government’s policies.
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Because Arab Americans and American Muslims have been waiting to see when the Obama administration would finally act to end Bush-era ethnic and religious profiling guidelines and practices, I was troubled to read press accounts this week indicating that US attorney general Eric Holder may be proposing to keep in place many of the programmes that have so compromised our rights. American Arabs have been waiting for five years for the administration to end these practices. Now we fear that they may not.
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…United States’ earliest days, the country tried to win the respect of the world by faithfully adhering to international law.
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Mohamed Sakr and Bilal al-Berjawi had been friends since childhood, and they were both stripped of their citizenship within months of each other. After losing their citizenship, both were targeted for drone strikes. It took two separate attempts to kill al-Berjawi, while Sakr was successfully killed with one bombing. American officials, who supplied the drones, and British officials have denied the accusation that the governments are attempting to skirt due process laws by removing citizenship prior to assassination, though they did admit that the same intelligence may have led to both actions.
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On April 4, a federal court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s killing of three American citizens in two drone strikes in 2011.
The complaint was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the families of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son.
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Relatives of victims of US drone strikes in Yemen have come together and formed the National Organisation for Drones Victims aimed at crusading against the controversial US programme and bringing justice to victims.
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Al Gawili said that he lost two of his relatives in a drone strikes in Khawalan, northern Yemen in January last year. He said that his relatives had nothing to do with Al Qaida and were hit by drones when they were dropping unidentified passengers off another area”.
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