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01.06.13

Links 6/1/2013: Steam Extending Games Sale, CIA Whistleblower Blown

Posted in News Roundup at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Miriam Ruiz, Debian Developer/Engineer

    Another Debian developer! Miriam has a low-drama setup. She simply uses Debian to do what she needs to do. I find it interesting that she desktop hops a bit (she’s now working with GNOME), but at the same time, it’s very cool that she’s open to trying new desktop environments. In general, her setup seems to be evolving over time, which is inspiring to those of us who are a bit entrenched in our own workflows.

  • Desktop

    • How Windows 8 has opened up a Window for Linux World Domination

      Earlier this year, Windows 8 was launched with great expectations. Microsoft banked on it to be a game-changer both for the tablet world as well as the desktop computer world. According to Redmond, the latest iteration of the most popular operating system in the world is a bridge between the tablet and the desktop. With a sleek, redesigned, and touch-friendly interface, Windows 8 was all set to become yet another milestone for Microsoft.

      However, Steve Ballmer’s expectations were crushed when the early reviews didn’t turn out to be that good. Windows 8, along with its contentious Metro interface, was criticized for its lack of usability and confusing design. Many users posted videos of their friends and family having a hard time figuring out how to use the software. In fact, the dramatic departure from the familiar Start-button oriented user interface has irked many users.

    • The Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Edition

      Over the last year or so I’ve managed to divest myself of most of my Apple products in a project I call #noapple. The last remaining piece of Apple equipment I used frequently was an 11-inch MacBook Air (MBA) that I would dual boot with OS X and Ubuntu.

      I was able to use it mainly booted to Ubuntu, but there were certain things that were a little bothersome. For example, the trackpad driver under Ubuntu wasn’t nearly as smooth as it was under OS X, and it was extremely sensitive, having little of what is called “palm detection”. Quite frequently, in the middle of typing something, the cursor would jump to some random part of the document when my palm barely brushed the trackpad.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Phone Spotted in a Bar, Supposedly

            Ubuntu on phones is a bold move from Canonical and they will need a lot of money for the marketing campaign. They can also start by forgetting or taking pictures of their phones in a bar, somewhere.

            This is a really old tactic and it’s not really effective anymore. Forgetting or spotting a phone in a bar might have been interesting a few years ago, but so many other companies did it that it’s no longer an effecting tool.

          • Android Central 121: CES preview, Ubuntu is back(ish)
          • Saturday’s Big Question: Is the Ubuntu phone for you?
          • Ubuntu Phone System Requirements

            Ubuntu Phone OS has been unveiled and it has received pretty stellar response so far. If you didn’t see it in action yet, check out the video below.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Netrunner 12.12 review – Starts low, ends high

              Netrunner 12.12 is not a perfect distro. But it is so much better than what its live session can give you. In fact, this is probably the most critical part, because people often judge distributions and decide whether to use them based on the few minutes of live CD testing. And considering what Netrunner can offer you, you might almost be tempted to give it a pass. But do not.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • The CuBox Pro Is An Open-Source Computer That Measures 2-inches Cubed

      If you’re a computer enthusiast and you’re not content with buying ready-to-use computers off the shelf and you don’t mind tinkering around the operating system, then open-source computer systems are probably the sort of device you’re after. Well if you are you might be interested to learn that SolidRun has taken the wraps off their latest offering, the CuBox Pro which is an upgrade over its predecessor and comes with 2GB of DDR3 RAM on board, which according to its creators makes it the world’s first ARM-based open source development platform to support 2GB of DDR3 RAM. The CuBox Pro will measure 2-inches cube and weighs 91grams and comes in either high polish or matte finish.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android Appalooza: Take note

          Now that the new year is here, you might be feeling a little crazy trying to organize all of those resolutions in your head. I’ve always found that jotting down those thoughts helps with the process of putting goals into action. Fortunately, there are plenty of apps available in the Google Play Store that offer this sort of thing: a place for Android users to put down their streams of consciousness, store photos that haven’t been archived, or leave a mental note.

Leftovers

01.05.13

Links 5/1/2013: Fedora 18 Delayed; Civil Rights Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Netflix makes cloud Janitor Monkey open source

    Netflix, the popular online video service that makes extensive use of public-cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has made code for one of the tools it developed to make its cloud-using life easier open source.

    Netflix developers built Janitor Monkey to automate clean-up of unused cloud resources, such as virtual-machine (VM) instances and cloud-storage volumes, or “Elastic Block Storage” (EBS) volumes in AWS parlance.

  • Another Satisfied Customer of FLOSS

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • A simulated FirefoxOS experience

        Your editor has frequently written that, while Android is a great system that has been highly beneficial to the cause of open mobile devices, it would be awfully nice to have a viable, free-software alternative. Every month that goes by makes it harder for any such alternative system to establish itself in the market, but that does not keep people from trying. One of the more interesting developments on the horizon has been FirefoxOS — formerly known as Boot2Gecko — a system under development at Mozilla. In the absence of any available hardware running this system, the recent 1.0 release of the FirefoxOS simulator seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for what the Mozilla folks are up to.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OPENNEBULA 2012: YEAR IN REVIE

      Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.
      As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

  • Licensing

    • Different Software Licenses

      There are times where one might be inclined to use a different license, e.g. the BSD license or even a license similar to the openmotif license. At least that’s the theory since what I really did was release source code with no license mentioned at all, kind of an ad hoc free/open software release. So I’m going to mellow a bit and say if someone wants to use a different but still open/free type license then I’ll accept that and not argue about it.

Leftovers

  • Why I Hate Microsoft

    It’s still not time to treat M$ as a normal business. They don’t yet work for a living, making $hundreds of thousands per employee per annum doing little more than shipping licensing agreements to OEMs. Certainly their OS is not worth what people are paying for it and M$ still attacks other businesses, most recently spreading FUD about Google at FTC, which dropped the matter after Google agreed to make a few changes. Google makes far more per employee per annum but they do work for it making huge server-farms do much of the work. That’s smart and does not harm competition. It’s time the rest of the world became smarter and dropped M$ as a “partner” in anything.

  • Journalism Is Not Narcissism

    Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation’s college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.

  • Italian authorities fine Apple another $264K over product warranties

    Apple’s changes to its product warranty policies in Italy have been enough to satisfy investigators, but not before the company was slapped with one final fine totaling $264,000.

  • Apple Must Pay Chinese Authors for Copyright Infringement
  • Google Muscles in on Microsoft’s Turf

    Google is muscling in on Microsoft ’s turf as it wins over more business customers with its cloud-based software.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell ship wreck debacle

      Shell has admitted that the Kulluks generators are wrecked. The weather forecast for today is strong winds and high seas.

  • Finance


    • Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness

      At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting.

    • What is behind the US fiscal cliff standoff?

      The phrase ‘fiscal cliff’ invokes images of an economy spiralling to the bottom.

      It was that image that was supposed to force politicians on Capitol Hill to work together to avoid the simultaneous expiration of tax cuts as well as the implementation of deep spending cuts.

    • Fiscal Cliff Follies: Political Theater Distracts From Key Problems With the Fix

      Extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income continue to enable the richest and largest individuals and enterprises to manipulate the economy and control the political parties. The result is an economic structure disinterested in a democratically focused way out of crisis and decline.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Perks of Being an American

      In the final days of the 112th Congress, President Obama signed two last minute bills. Both were extensions of highly controversial Bush-era policies. Both were scheduled to expire January 1, 2013. And both owe their passage largely to calamitous predictions that the sky would fall if they weren’t reauthorized in time.

    • Lawyers For The One Case Where There’s Proof Of Warrantless Wiretapping Decide Not To Appeal To Supreme Court

      Now, the lawyers representing Al-Haramain have decided that they will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, on the belief that the “current composition” of the court works against them. In other words, they believe that the current Justices on the court would side with the appeals court in rejecting their case, and then that would be precedent across the country (unless Congress changed the law, which it’s unlikely to do). The “hope” then is that somehow, down the road, someone else somehow gets evidence that they, too, were spied upon without a warrant, and it happens in a different district, and (hopefully) that circuit’s appeals court rules differently, setting up a circuit split. Oh, and that by the time that happens, the “composition” of the court shifts enough that the court actually respects the 4th Amendment. In other words: none of this is likely. Instead, the feds retain their ability to spy on people without warrants in direct violation of the 4th Amendment.

    • DHS TO PICK UP $6 BILLION TAB FOR CYBER SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS AT EVERY DEPARTMENT

      The Homeland Security Department is footing a potentially $6 billion bill to provide civilian agencies with the technology and expertise needed for near real-time threat detection, DHS officials said this week. The White House has demanded so-called continuous monitoring since 2010, but many agencies did not have the resources or know-how to initiate such surveillance.

    • Score one for the thicket

      WHILE everyone was watching the fiscal-cliff debacle, Congress and Barack Obama decided that they could still eavesdrop on Americans’ putatively private conversations without putting themselves to the trouble of obtaining a warrant.

    • The 2013 NDAA Signing Statement: No Better Than the 2012 Version
    • European Court orders damages for CIA torture victim

      In mid-December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg awarded damages of €60,000 to Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. The judges accepted that Macedonian security services had illegally seized El-Masri at the end of 2003, subjected him to abuse and finally handed him over to agents from the CIA.

    • Activist clear trash near NC CIA contractor’s base

      Stop Torture Now has committed to collect trash from the road outside the airport under the state’s “Adopt-a-Highway” program.

    • Obama may pick Pentagon, CIA heads next week

      President Barack Obama may round out his new national security leadership team next week, with a nomination for defense secretary expected and a pick to lead the CIA possible.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet”

      In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It’s a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.

    • REBUILDING THE WEB WE LOST

      We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It’s become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written and has inspired great responses.
      But the most important question we can ask is: How do we rebuild the positive aspects of the web we lost? There are a few starting points, building on conversations we’ve been having for years. Let’s look at the responsibilities we must accept if we’re going to return the web to the values that a generation of creators cared about.

    • China’s legislature adopts online info rules to protect privacy

      The decision bans service providers, as well as government agencies and their personnel, from leaking or damaging users’ digital information, as well as from selling or illegally providing this information to others.

    • China requires Internet users to register names
    • China closing Web loophole

      Michael Anti, a Beijing-based critic of Web censorship, believes the current pushback on the Web reflects paranoia over incoming President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on official corruption. Local officials could be pressuring propaganda departments to curb freedom of speech online, he said. “Officials hate the Internet,” Anti said. “They’re afraid of being victims of the anti-corruption campaign.

    • China’s New Internet Law Legalizes Deletion of “Illegal” Content, Bad News for Sina Weibo

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Tough Times for Trolls and their “Copyright Negligence” Scheme

        Despite at least five smackdowns by federal judges, copyright trolls are still accusing Internet subscribers of “negligently” allowing someone else to download porn films without paying. Last week, subpoena defense attorney Morgan Pietz fought back by asking the Northern California federal courts to put all of the open “negligence” cases filed by a prolific troll firm in front of a single judge – a judge who already ruled that the “negligence” theory is bogus.

01.04.13

Links 4/1/2013: Bodhi 2.2.0, Semplice Linux 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.03.13

Links 3/1/2013: Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled, Linux 3.8-rc2, KDE 4.9.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The year of open source in libraries

    If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was or if they had heard of Koha, I heard “no” a lot more than I do now. Now, people call me up and ask me to come to their libraries to speak about open source and help them find the right products for their library. Now, I hardly ever hear, “We can’t pick open source because it’s too immature.” Instead people contact me to ask what they have to do to get their hands on the latest and greatest release of Koha. It’s because of these changes that I’m seeing in the library professionals I meet that I proclaim 2012 the year of open source in libraries!

  • Happy New Year & Browser and OS stats for 2012

    I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year on behalf of the entire LQ team. 2012 has been another great year for LQ and we have quite a few exciting developments in store for 2013, including a major code update that we originally had planned for late 2012.

    Unfortunately, 2012 has been another quiet year from a blogging perspective, but I do regularly post to the LQ twitter account. Posting more lengthy commentary here is something I’ll try to be more cognizant of this year.

    [...]

    Operating Systems
    Windows 53.56%
    Linux 35.54%

  • The Web browser wars continue, and #1 is… well, that depends on whom you ask
  • TECH TALK: Open source is legal software alternative

    Despite the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.

  • January 2013 Project of the Month: DosBox
  • Open Source in 2013
  • NeuroDNet – an open source platform for constructing and analyzing neurodegenerative disease networks

    Genetic networks control cellular functions. Aberrations in normal cellular function arecaused by mutations in genes that disrupt the fine tuning of genetic networks and causedisease or disorder.

    However, the large number of signalling molecules, genes and proteinsthat constitute such networks, and the consequent complexity of interactions, has restrainedprogress in research elucidating disease mechanisms. Hence, carrying out a systematicanalysis of how diseases alter the character of these networks is important.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/armv6: what’s new and exciting?

      First of all we tried switching default cache type from write-through to write-back type. It should have increased performance but instead opened a can of worms. Memory corruption debugging led to L2 cache driver on Pandaboard, EHCI driver code and subsequently to busdma code. Whole process took quite a few days full of hair-pulling and nagging various people and ended up in committing USB fixes and Ian Lepore’s busdma patches. PL310 (L2 cache controller) driver is being tested at this very moment. Original issue (WB caches) still stands and postponed till next year.

    • FreeBSD Moves Along On ARM Support
    • NetBSD 6.0.1 Released, Brings Bug-Fixes

      For those of you currently on NetBSD 6.0 or are using NetBSD 5.x as your operating system but have been wanting a reason to upgrade, the first NetBSD 6.0.x point release has surfaced.

    • FreeBSD Jumps Quickly On LLVM/Clang 3.2

      While just released on Friday, FreeBSD has already pulled LLVM/Clang 3.2 into its “head” repository and will be pushing it into the FreeBSD 9/Stable series in the weeks ahead.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Cassandra 1.2 arrives as foretold

      Cassandra, the distributed, column-oriented NoSQL database, has been updated to version 1.2, says the Apache Software Foundation. Version 1.2 of Cassandra sees the official release of CQL3, which was introduced in beta in April 2012′s Cassandra 1.1 release. CQL is the modelling and query language for Cassandra that borrows, syntactically, from SQL to offer a more familiar database environment for developers. CQL3 allows for multi-column primary keys and many other changes, which are now established.

    • Apache Puts Out Cassandra 1.2 NoSQL Database

      The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Cassandra. Version 1.2 of the Cassandra big data “NoSQL” distributed database introduces several new features to the open-source project.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source

      A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

      The new IT strategy on Thursday evening got 36 votes in favour and 20 against, reports one of the city council members, Matthias Stürmer. He described the new approach as “ground breaking”. One year ago, the city council adopted a motion for Bern to develop an open source strategy. The council now takes a further step, asking for an IT strategy that increases the use of open source and that aims to achieve long-term cost savings.

  • Licensing

    • Unlicensed FOSS: Major Mistake for Developers

      One disturbing trend is the posting of FOSS modules without licenses. Simon Phipps focused on this problem in his recent blog, particularly on the problems raised by the terms of service at Github. James Governor, the founder of analyst Red Monk, is quoted by Simon as stating: “”younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github” http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046. Ironically, this approach will undercut the major desire of most FOSS developers: the broad use of their code. The lack of a license ensures that the software will be removed from any product meant to be used by corporations. Corporations are very sensitive about ensuring that all software that they use or which is incorporated in their products is properly licensed. I have worked on hundreds of FOSS analysis and the response to software without a clear license is almost always “rip it out”.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The men who would save Mali’s manuscripts

    Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed graves and shrines associated with Sufism this year. Ancient manuscripts are not directly threatened, but some fear they are next.

  • Why Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike is ethical

    Q: There has been much coverage of the hunger strike by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. I’m not interested in the politics — instead, I want to address the ethics of a hunger strike. Look at what it really is: a person slowly commits suicide to pressure others into giving what he or she wants. The most unethical part is that thousands of Canadians are encouraging Spence in her suicide by supporting her. It’s one thing for a child who didn’t get a toy to swear never to eat again, but we should expect more from a community leader.

  • iPhone ‘Do Not Disturb’ bug to self-destruct on Monday

    Users of Apple’s iPhone will have to wait until Monday for its latest bug to fix itself.

  • MorphOS Still Being Toyed With For PowerPC

    MorphOS, the Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system, is still being experimented with on PowerPC hardware. The latest effort out of the MorphOS camp is to make the operating system work on the IBM PowerPC G5.

  • Fox asks appeals court to stop Dish’s ad-skipping DVR, right now

    Fox Broadcasting, having lost a key court ruling last month, is more eager than ever to kick Dish Network’s new ad-skipping Hopper DVR off the market.
    Last month, a federal judge found that Dish’s DVRs probably don’t break copyright law, ruling that the Hoppers can stay on the market and operate normally while Fox proceeds with its lawsuit. Fox is arguing that it can’t wait, and it says that Dish’s product has the potential to do serious damage to various aspects of the ad-supported TV business. As promised, it appealed the lower court decision and has now filed its opening brief at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (PDF via Deadline.com).

  • Fujitsu Comes Up Empty in Koh’s Courtroom

    “They were very hardworking,” he said. “They dug down surprisingly deeply. They spent a lot of time going through documentary evidence.”

  • EU’s tougher Google deal derails FTC agreement

    European regulators appear headed toward a dramatically different conclusion to their antitrust probe of Google than their American counterparts — a binding agreement that could cost the search company dearly if violated.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

    • Zanu PF leaders defy party WikiLeaks warning

      Zanu PF has warned its bigwigs to watch their mouths when meeting with American envoys amid revelations that party “stalwarts” last week clandestinely met United States ambassador Bruce Wharton.

    • A Tale of Two Diplomatic Asylums: Julian Assange and Chen Guangcheng
    • WikiLeaks:1988 Indian Payoff To LTTE Revealed – 520 Million Indian Rupees To Tigers

      “Major Sri Lankan Papers April 15 have head lined a report (First published in the April 3 London Observer) which quotes both Indian High Commissioner J.N. Dixit and an LTTE spokesman in Madras that Indian Prime Minister Gandhi agreed in late July to pay the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a monthly stipend to compensate for lost Tax revenues following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

    • What Is an Assange?

      This week, I was proud to join the board and help launch the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a new organization which plans on crowd-funding for a variety of independent journalism outlets whose prime mission is to seek transparency and accountability in government. You can read about the first group of four organizations — which includes the National Security Archive, MuckRock News, and The UpTake and WikiLeaks — here.

      Recently, I sat down with George Washington Law School professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and my close friend Kevin McCabe to discuss WikiLeaks’ impact on transparency, the government’s response, and the comparison to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (also a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation). (And see a previous conversation with Jonathan Turley here.)

      WikiLeaks was extralegally cut off from funding after two Congressmen successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard and PayPal into refusing to do business with the journalism organization in late 2010. We hope that the Freedom of the Press Foundation will become a bulwark against these types of unofficial censorship tactics in the future.

    • US spies on Assange in UK Ecuador Embassy

  • Finance

    • Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR

      Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

    • It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over: Wall Street Gears Up for Austerity Battles of 2013

      For better or worse, a bill passed Congress in the wee hours of 2013 averting the much-hyped “fiscal cliff” for now and raising taxes on couples making over $450,000 and extending a lifeline of unemployment benefits to 2 million Americans.

      But the vote is not so much an ending as a beginning to the austerity battles of 2013.

      As the economy continues to stagger, the search for a “grand bargain” on taxes and critical social programs is likely to roll from fiscal cliff to debt ceiling negotiations into the annual budget battles. While some feel that a “grand bargain” is less likely than “death by 1,000 cuts,” the ongoing debate will continue to pose serious risks for average Americans who will need to stay engaged.

    • Google India fined $13.8M for false accounting

      Search giant’s Indian arm accused of misleading tax authorities by underdeclaring revenue from AdWords and evading taxes through international transactions, but Google India denies the claim.

    • Paulson Named in ACA’s Revised Goldman Sachs CDO Suit

      Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund, was named as a defendant in a proposed revised lawsuit by ACA Financial Guaranty Corp. (MANF) against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) over a collateralized debt obligation called Abacus.

      Paulson and Goldman Sachs conspired to induce ACA to provide financial guaranty insurance for the Abacus deal, which was “doomed to fail,” the firm said in papers filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. ACA, which sued Goldman Sachs in 2011, is seeking court permission to file a revised complaint adding Paulson as a defendant.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Online gift shop blocked by mobile networks

      This is an online shop – meaning the block was affecting their ability to sell their products. The block was spotted and reported to Virgin Mobile in early December. The problem has not yet been fixed. So the block was in effect over Christmas, and will have affected the site’s ability to reach their market in one of the more important retail periods of the year.

    • State of Freedom of Speech in Tunisia in 2012

  • Privacy

    • Facebook rejects German demand to allow fake names
    • Microsoft Scrutinized by EU Privacy Watchdogs for Policy Changes

      Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s policy changes for its Internet products including Hotmail and Bing are being formally examined by European data protection regulators for potential privacy issues.
      Updates to Microsoft’s services agreement, which took effect Oct. 19, are being formally reviewed, EU privacy regulators wrote to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and the head of Microsoft Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s and France’s data protection commissions are leading the examination, according to the Dec. 17 letter, obtained by Bloomberg News.

    • EU Investigates Microsoft for Policy Changes in Hotmail, Bing

      Microsoft made the policy changes on October 19

      Microsoft just can’t catch a break from the European Commission.

      The EU now plans to investigate the tech giant’s recent policy changes and how they may affect the privacy of its users. The policy changes were in regards to Microsoft’s Internet services like Bing and Hotmail.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • After ACTA: Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement

      Not content with dedicated treaties developed under the aegis of WIPO, the copyright industries saw such general trade agreements as yet opportunity to impose their maximalist agendas. This led to chapters dealing with intellectual monopolies like copyright and patents not only being added to such agreements, but becoming the tail that wagged the dog. That can be seen from the fact that ACTA was killed in the European Parliament last year precisely because the chapter dealing with copyright and patents was regarded as so flawed that it vitiated the entire treaty, which had to be rejected despite other sections that were viewed very favourably by many MEPs.

      Moreover, in the current negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is a kind of ACTA for the Pacific rim, it is once more the disproportionate demands of the copyright and patent world that threaten to scupper the entire treaty as countries rebel at the onerous terms the US is trying to impose.

      That means the otherwise welcome trade agreement between EU and US is bound to have a similar chapter that attempts to push through many or most of the bad ideas that infected ACTA. There’s already a precedent for this in CETA, the Canada-European Union Trade Agreement that I wrote about back in October last year. As I noted, the criminal sanctions there were directly modelled on ACTA’s.

    • Copyrights

      • London ‘crime unit’ to target downloaders as part of UK copyright and patent initiatives

        Vince Cable, the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable outlined several different measures, including a sped-up patent processing service that can deliver patents in just three months — it currently can take years — as well as informational campaigns aimed at younger individuals that are more likely to engage in pirating copyrighted material. Cable also said that a special crime unit, aimed specifically at illegal downloaders, would be created in partnership with the City of London police.

01.01.13

Links 1/1/2013: digiKam 3.0.0, Android-Based Game Console Ships

Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Resolve to more open in 2013
  • Open Source Speech Recognition Tool, Simon, Gets An Update
  • Five Biggest Open Source Developments in 2012
  • Tech Jobs In 2013: Open Source All The Way Down
  • The H Year: 2012′s Wins, Fails and Mehs

    Welcome to The H’s look back at 2012. We’ve broken down the events of the year by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say “Meh”. From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source software to the worst mis-steps in the community.

  • Kolab Systems spearheads an open-source solution for the third pillar of productivity: groupware

    Why is the founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe currently leading a for-profit software company in the groupware space?

  • Egyptians decide Open Source is the Sphinx’s bollocks

    Open Sauce appears to be a major victor of the Arab Spring which led to a change of leadership in Egypt.

    It appears that the nation which worked out how to build the world’s largest public building with just copper tools, has decided that proprietary software is a bad thing.

    Egypt is apparently drawing up plans to cast out the Voles, Oracles, Apples and other followers of Apep, into the Lands of the West in favour of a decent open sauce plan for its public software projects.

  • Events

    • Google DocCamp 2012: Book sprints

      There are three new books about free software thanks to Google’s 2012 Summer of Code Documentation Camp. The week-long event started off with an unconference, but the main objective was for each participating project to produce a cohesive, book-length work of documentation. All three projects delivered, and thanks to the arrangement made by FLOSSManuals with a local printer, 30 copies of each book were in print late Friday evening. FLOSSManuals has the sprint process down to a science, which is good news for open projects of all stripes, but it is still feeling out how best to sustain the sprint’s energy after the participants part company.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS AppDays Hackathon Brings Mozilla’s Coveted OS Too India!

        No one needs an introduction to Mozilla. Yes, the makers of the Firefox internet browser. For years, Mozilla has been encouraging open web standards, trying to promote the web as a platform for all. And with the advent of HTML5 things have gotten much simpler with almost everything being able to be implemented in web. With HTML5, developers would no longer have to worry about creating applications intended for cross platform usage – if based on web-standards, it runs on any platform with a standard compliant browser! Building apps is quite easy as well.

      • Mozilla Firefox in 2012

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • 2012 Trends and 2013 Predictions for Open Source eCommerce

      I’ve been writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) shopping carts for a decade now, and many carts have risen and fallen in popularity during that time. For the past five years I’ve tracked the popularity of OSC carts every month by doing an exact Google search and recording the results. This doesn’t track the actual number of carts installed, and popularity can be positive or negative, but over time it becomes more and more valuable as the search results mirror the life cycle of a cart. Carts that are becoming more popular show rapid increases in the number of search results. It is possible to see exact the month a cart peaks in popularity. Year-to-year results are even more revealing.

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Simon 0.4.0 Speech Recognition System Released

      Version 0.4.0 of the Simon open-source speech recognition system has been released. This release, which represents years of development, brings many improvements.

      Simon 0.4.0 for speech recognition brings a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system, and much more. The main user-interface of Simon has also been reworked for improved usability.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • “Sit. Stay. Good lamp!”

        Shanshan Zhou had a longtime childhood fantasy: she dreamt her otherwise static belongings would suddenly begin to play with her—she used to pretend they were alive. So when it came time to do a project for her Physical Computing class at Victoria University-Wellington, she took the opportunity to turn an inanimate object into “living art.” Zhou gave character to an object which, despite its lack of human features, could now connect with people.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 is now stable and “feature complete”

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.

      Although this new stable version is not yet a W3C standard, it has been called “feature complete” a this stage.

Leftovers

  • William Baer Confirmed as Justice Department Antitrust Chief

    William J. Baer was confirmed by the Senate on Sunday as the government’s top antitrust lawyer, placing him in charge of the Justice Department division that reviews corporate mergers and prosecutes price-fixing cases.

    Amid the heated negotiations to reach an agreement to head off large tax increases and vast spending cuts in the new year, the Senate voted 64 to 26 in favor of Mr. Baer, a prominent antitrust lawyer at the law firm Arnold & Porter.

  • Haiku: BeOS for the 21st Century

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Report: $91 million spent on secret NSA tests probing domestic computer systems
    • Privacy group gets NSA files on utility research

      Files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and provided to CNET show that the National Security Agency (NSA) under its secret Perfect Citizen program is looking at the computerized systems that control large-scale utilities, checking for vulnerabilities including power grid and gas pipeline controllers. The U.S. government relies on commercial utilities for electricity, telecommunications, and other infrastructure requirements The program seeks to carry out “vulnerability exploration and research” against computerized controllers involved in these utilities.

    • NSA secret cyber security testing no longer secret
    • Pentagon Looks to Fix ‘Pervasive Vulnerability’ in Drones

      In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.

      Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.

      Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA Sued To Release NYPD Spying Report

      A non-profit government watchdog has sued the Central Intelligence Agency to uncover information about its controversial collaboration with the New York City Police Department’s counter-terrorism surveillance program. The suit, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Dec. 20, seeks to force the release of a report by the agency’s inspector general into whether it violated legal prohibitions against spying on American soil. In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the agency was deeply involved in training the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit, which spied on Muslims in New York even when there was no evidence they had committed any crimes.

    • Drone victim to appeal ruling over UK support for CIA strikes in Pakistan

      A Pakistani man whose father was killed by a US drone strike is to appeal a judgement in a case seeking to determine the legality of intelligence sharing in relation to GCHQ assistance in CIA drone strikes.

      Noor Khan – whose father was killed in a CIA strike on a peaceful meeting in March 2011 –issued legal proceedings in March of this year against the Foreign Secretary in order to clarify the British Government’s reported policy of supporting the CIA’s covert campaign of attacks on his home region of Waziristan, using remotely-controlled robotic aircraft.

      Supported by legal action charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day & Co, Mr Khan’s legal challenge asserts that this practice are illegal. British law makes it clear that in these circumstances UK intelligence staff and those who direct their actions could be committing various criminal offences, including conspiracy to murder.

    • Senate report: FBI, CIA, intelligence officials caused confusing Benghazi explanations
    • NDAA Threatens Americans’ Constitutional Rights and Should Be Vetoed By Obama
    • Crossover Drones

      The rapid advance of drone technology has sparked interest by police and sheriff offices in acquiring drones. This new eagerness of many nonfederal law enforcement agencies to acquire drones has been also closely nurtured by the federal government.

    • Drones: More Than Mechanized Warfare
    • Imran Khan | Ground the drones in 2013

      Although 2012 saw an accelerating drawdown of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) forces in Afghanistan, a grim aspect of that decade-long war—reliance on air strikes by unmanned drones—continued unabated. Indeed, those attacks were stepped up, with America’s use of drone warfare in Pakistan reaching an unprecedented height over the past year. With President Barack Obama re-elected and no longer facing the pressure of a campaign, it would be in America’s interest—and certainly in the interests of my country, Pakistan—to use the first year of his new term to de-escalate the violence.

    • Interesting revelations from the OWS FBI files
    • EGYPT PROSECUTORS INVESTIGATE POPULAR TV COMEDIAN

      Egyptian prosecutors launched an investigation on Tuesday against a popular television satirist for allegedly insulting the president in the latest case raised by Islamist lawyers against outspoken media personalities.

  • Cablegate

    • GREEN LEFT REPORT #11: Christine Assange, Carlo Sands + more

      The final Green Left Report for 2012 features Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange, on why the Australian government fears WikiLeaks, the problems of the corporate press, and the WikiLeaks releases that impacted the most on her.

    • Syrian rebels eulogise Aussie ‘martyr’

      The man’s name and date of birth correspond with that given for one person in a secret 2010 cable sent by the US embassy in Canberra, detailing people to be added to the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database. However, his family deny he was a member of any extremist group.

    • Ethiopian Review’s 2012 Person of the Year

      Because of Julian Assange’s effort, the world knows that heroic Ethiopians such as Andualem Aragie, Eskindir Nega, Reeyot Alemu, Woubshet Taye, and countless others are languishing in jail after being falsely accused of terrorism by a regime that is bankrolled by the U.S. Government and the European Union, and assisted by China.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • King Coal Gets a Boost through ALEC

      As Americans experienced epic droughts, freakish hurricanes, and other extreme weather over the past few years, many are eager to see our nation secure a sustainable energy supply for the future that won’t break our climate. But others – most notably the polluting fossil fuel industries – are eager to double down on the same old technologies that are responsible for the climate crisis in the first place.

    • The GOP House Is Dysfunctional By Design

      In short, John Boehner has committed himself to a set of principles for operating the House that makes the body fundamentally dysfunctional. A functional legislative body either needs a mechanism for the majority leader to get members of his caucus to toe the party line, or he needs the ability to “reach across the aisle” to get the votes he needs from the minority. John Boehner lacks the former, and by ruling out the latter he’s effectively painted himself into a corner where he might not be able to get any piece of “fiscal cliff” legislation passed by the full House of Representatives.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Make No Mistake, Corporate Ed Reform is Hurting Kids

      Corporate Education Reform hurts children. This truth needs to be said a million times over. No longer can we allow reformers to hide behind the rhetoric of reform and ignore the realities. Words like “poverty is not destiny” “high expectations” “quality school options” and “choice” all mask the very real impact of these reforms. There are consequences to the disruption of school closings, to purposeful disinvestment in neighborhood schools, to layoffs of experienced educators, to the haphazard expansion of largely low-quality charters.

      As most who read this blog know, I work in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Unlike many teachers out there who see only their small window of the reform world, I get to see the cross-section. Students cycle through my program so quickly (too quickly, thanks to massive cuts in mental health services) that I hear dozens of stories a week from all over the city and surrounding suburbs. And what’s happening out there is beyond heart-breaking, it is wrong. Kids have come in to the hospital with massive anxiety, depression, and aggression related, in part, to school policies. I have students who report fear of “getting jumped” on the way to schools across town after their neighborhood school was shut down. I’ve had kids with school refusal due to the very real fear of a dangerous bus route through rival neighborhoods. Young people are afraid of the increases in violence and gang activity as kids from all parts of the city are thrust together in schools whose only response to the rage is zero tolerance lockdown. There is no healing, just ignoring and punishing the problem, pushing the fights off of school grounds. Almost every child I work with from the neighborhoods targeted for the brunt of school reform has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They have difficulty sitting still, are quick to react to any perceived threat with violence or aggression, cannot concentrate on school work, and have come to hate the experience of school. And yet all they get from school leadership is school closures, fired teachers, and false choices.

    • We Need Your Help! Join Our Fight to Keep 3D Printing Open

      A few weeks ago, we asked for your help to identify patent applications that threaten to stifle innovation in the 3D printing community. Now more than ever, it’s critical to make sure the free and open source community and others who work in the space have freedom to operate and to continue to innovate.
      With your help, we have identified a lineup of top-priority patent applications that seem both overly-broad and dangerous to the free and open source community. Now it’s time to find proof that these patent applicants do not deserve the monopolies they are asking for: that what they are trying to patent was known or was obvious before the patent was filed.

    • Copyrights

      • New Zealand’s largest paper calls Kim Dotcom “good for this country”

        Kim Doctom could fill his own Year in Review list for 2012. The Megaupload mega-personality planned a cloud music service called Megabox. He unveiled a new domain, Me.ga, only to lose it in a preemptive strike by the African nation of Gabon. There were even rap songs and accusations against Joe Biden.

        But hanging over all that was Dotcom’s ongoing soap opera in New Zealand. On January 20, 2012, 76 police officers raided Dotcom’s mansion on behalf of the US and took him into custody for extradition to face charges of racketeering, money-laundering, and copyright infringement. Twelve months later, the legal woes aren’t over, and Megaupload remains down… but Dotcom is being invited to ceremonially turn on Christmas lights in the country.

      • The File Sharing Lawsuits Begin: Thousands Targeted at TekSavvy

        Given recent reports that a Montreal-based company has captured data on one million Canadians who it says have engaged in unauthorized file sharing, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before widespread file sharing lawsuits came to Canada. It now appears that those lawsuits are one step closer as TekSavvy, a leading independent ISP, has announced that it has received a motion seeking the names and contact information of thousands of customers (legal documents here). To TekSavvy’s credit, the company insists that it will not provide subscriber information without a court order and it has sent notices to affected customers.

      • Hollywood and Google Square Off Over Pirate Search Results

        The MPAA is still not happy with Google’s efforts to reduce online piracy and says that the search giant continues to facilitate a “staggering amount of copyright infringement.” For their part Google is warning policymakers of the damaging effects the recent surge of DMCA takedown requests is having on the flow of information online. Both Google and the MPAA agree that the current DMCA takedown procedures are not ideal, but the solutions both parties have in mind are quite different.

      • Copyright disappears books
      • Apple fined by China court for copyright violation

        A court in China has ordered Apple to pay compensation to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.

12.31.12

Links 31/12/2012: openmandriva.org Emerges, Many New Android Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

12.30.12

Links 30/12/2012: PulseAudio 3.0, GNOME Adds Privacy

Posted in News Roundup at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Limerick migrates to Zentyal’s open source email solution
  • Integreen Brings Open Source Traffic Monitoring To Italy

    The best way to fight an enemy is to start by learning everything you can about it, which is exactly what the team at Integreen are looking to do in the Italian city of Bolzano. By using the latest technology and banking on open source software, Integreen hopes to provide the city management with enough traffic and environmental data to help them more effectively implement environmentally conscience programs such as mass transit.

  • OpenGamma updates its open source financial analytics platform

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome to End Silent Extension Updates

        When it comes to their Internet browsers, users can get quite picky about how much automatic updating they want to take place. For example, in an OStatic post at the end of last year on how the Mozilla Firefox browser would begin silently updating itself (in keeping with Google Chrome) our readers disagreed widely on whether they wanted Firefox to do so.

  • SaaS

    • HPCC: An Open Source Big Data Competitor to Hadoop

      We’ve written before many times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and as the Big Data trend grows, Hadoop training and support solutions are proliferating.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.2.6 leads Oracle virtualisation update

      The developers of Oracle’s VirtualBox have announced a maintenance update to the lead version of their virtualisation platform. Version 4.2.6 is released along with maintenance releases of older branches of the software: 3.2.16., 4.0.18 and 4.1.24. The changes in 4.2.6 are focused on stability and on correcting a number of regressions – there are no new features. Fixes include ensuring that stale virtual machine events are not sent to resetting VMs, fixing the appearance of text in the GUI, corrections to the 3D support, fixing hangs with some storage and adding network rate and disk usage to the metrics.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Zurmo sets out to enchant the open source CRM space

        Being “fed up with the existing open source CRM applications”, the team at Zurmo have released their own open source customer relationship management (CRM) software – Zurmo 1.0. The CRM software, which has been in development for two years, includes deal tracking features, contact and activity management, and has scores and badges that can be managed through a built-in gamification system.

        Zurmo 1.0 has been translated into ten languages and features a RESTful API to further integration with other applications. Location data is provided by Google Maps and Geocode. The application’s permission system supports roles for individual users and groups, and allows administrators to create ad-hoc teams. The application is designed to be modern and easy to use and integrates social-network-like functionality at its centre, which functions to distribute tasks, solicit advice, and publish accomplishments.

  • Funding

    • Crowdfunding Piwik 2.0

      Piwik is a Free Software Web analytics application. If you run a website, it is what you use when you do not want to use Google Analytics or any other third party solution.

  • BSD

  • Project Releases

    • LLVM 3.2 released
    • LLVM 3.2 now available

      A few days after the intended release date, the LLVM developers have announced the availability of version 3.2 of the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The LLVM project encompasses a set of compiler tools such as the C/C++/Objective C compiler Clang, the runtime compiler library compiler-rt, the low-level debugger LLDB, a C++ standard library libc++ and the VMKit JVM which uses LLVM for static and JIT compilation.

    • MediaGoblin 0.3.2 “Goblinverse” Released

      After initial stages of fundraising campaign, the developers have published a new release of MediaGoblin, the only full “free as in freedom” media sharing software. This software is a part of the GNU project and aims to give users full freedom to share, upload and use all kind of media on their servers without using some expensive services out there or losing their privacy, freedom or control over their data.

    • TomEE 1.5.1 more than just a maintenance update

      In the latest update to the Java servlet container Tomcat, the TomEE development team has done a lot more than just fix a few bugs. TomEE 1.5.1 includes an option to improve classloader customisation and the ability to inject remote initial context into TomEE clients.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

12.29.12

Links 29/12/2012: Calculate Linux 13, Finnix 107

Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 2012′s 5 Most popular Linux stories

    Taken as a whole, 2012 was a great year for Linux. The most popular stories, however, were more about the day-to-day happenings of Linux then the big picture.

    2012′s top Linux story was The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. The title said it all. We’d long known that Google uses its own house-blend of Ubuntu on its PCs, but it wasn’t until this summer that Google finally revealed exactly how its workers use Ubuntu,

  • External Desktop Hard Drives, Backup Software, and Linux Part 3
  • The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE – and it always will be

    The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive.

    That doesn’t mean we won’t see Linux on a tablet, but you’ll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop – clinging to a tiny percentage of the market.

    There is of course Android, which does use a Linux kernel somewhere under all that Java, but when Canonical or Red Hat talk about building Linux tablets, obviously Android is not what they have in mind.

  • Five reasons 2012 was a great year for Linux

    The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception.

  • 9 Major 2012 Events That Will Influence the Linux Desktop in Coming Years

    2012 was the year that the Linux desktop diversified.

    Two years ago, users could choose between two or three desktop environments. But by the end of the first quarter of 2012, they had at least eight choices, with more on the way.

    Similarly, the year started with LibreOffice as the main office suite. But halfway through the year, LibreOffice was joined by Apache OpenOffice as well as Calligra Suite.

  • Torque 3D Engine Is Wanting To Come To Linux

    Many Phoronix readers have written in over the past few days about the new effort to bring the Torque 3D Game Engine to Linux. The desire for Torque 3D coming to Linux is because the engine developers believe Linux is turning into a commercially viable platform for gaming.

    Torque 3D is the game engine out of Garage Games as the successor to the original Torgue Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) but with modern functionality like deferred lighting, NVIDIA PhysX, and modern shaders. The original Torque Game Engine had been originally developed in 2001 for the Tribes 2 game but it’s been developed much more extensively since its inception.

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Great Powersavings with Kernel 3.7.0
    • Linux 3.8′s features staked out

      Linus Torvalds has announced the first pre-release version of Linux 3.8, releasing it on the “longest night of the year”. As previously reported, it includes support for the Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS), which has been designed for use on flash storage devices such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and internal storage in devices such as cameras, tablets and smartphones.

    • The Linux Kernel in 2012
    • What Didn’t Make The Cut For The Linux 3.8 Kernel

      While there’s a lot of features that are new to the Linux 3.8 kernel as covered in The Feature Overview For The Linux 3.8 Kernel, there’s also several promising new features and functionality that didn’t make the cut for this next kernel release.

    • Linus Torvalds Celebrates Today 43 Years of Uptime

      Linus Torvalds is one of the most influential people in the Linux world and among the most active figures that promote open source as a real alternative.

    • CM Storm QuickFire TK Keyboard in Linux

      When one says mechanical keyboard you think gamers, at least I did. Gamers prefer mechanical keyboards because the physical act of typing is more precise. That’s it in a nutshell, the feedback provided by mechanical keyboards gives gamers another edge over the game and opponents. So, one may think Windows, because gaming in Linux is rarely as competitive. But I’m here to tell you a Linux user, not even an avid gamer, can and does love her new CM Storm QuickFire TK.

    • Linux Top 3: Hello ARM, Goodbye 386

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Work in progress to improve keyboard shortcuts in Xfce
    • The triumph of convenience

      A few years ago, my neighbors asked for help securing their computer. They were running Windows, so my knowledge was limited, but I did set up a separate administrative account and add passwords to their regular accounts. When I looked at their computer a month later, they had removed both — and were back to getting viruses and malware along with their movie downloads. Their explanation? That my simple safeguards were “too inconvenient.”

      “Let me get this straight,” I wanted to say (but didn’t). “It’s too inconvenient to spend ten seconds typing a password, or twenty logging into a different account to install software. But it’s not too inconvenient to have your computer at the shop every few months to scrub it clean and to sometimes lose files because you haven’t bothered backing them up.”

    • Awesome 3.5 Window Manager Released

      Awesome, the dynamic X window manager written in C and Lua that started off as a fork of dwm, is out with its version 3.5 “Last Christmas” release.

    • Linux Google Drive Client Insync Gets Xfce And Mate Desktop Integration

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE To Get Improved Multi-Monitor Handling

        A new screen manager is being worked on for the KDE desktop to dramatically improve the multi-monitor experience by making it work “auto-magically” or at least be “super simple” to configure.

        Dan Vrátil and Alex Fiestas have been working on writing a brand new screen manager for KDE to overcome the current configuration shortcomings of the current settings panel. As Fiestas wrote today on his blog, “We are trying be as smart as possible adapting the behavior of it to each use case making the configuration of monitors as simple as plugging them to your computer.”

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 16th December 2012
      • KDE’s Krita Gets Its Own Stichting Krita Foundation

        The Krita community has created Stichting Krita Foundation to support the development of Krita through funding. The foundation will also help the community by organizing creative and open content projects like, Comics with Krita DVD. The have done some funding before where Lukáš Tvrdý was sponsored before actual development work and currently they are sponsoring Dmitry Kazakov, who is working on Krita performance improvements.

      • RIM Proposes A Donation Of $10,000 To Qt Project Hosting

        Qt is one of the most important projects for both commercial and non-commercial players, especially in the embedded space. Now RIM is trying to lure Qt developers for the success of BlackBerry. If you are a developer of Qt apps RIM is offering a great deal for your Qt applications under Blackberry Qt porting program.

      • Qt 5 Is Here, Digia Claims It’s Qt For The Future

        The Qt project and Digia, the company behind Qt framework, have released the most awaited C++ framework for developers, Qt 5.0. The company claims that it’s one of the best releases till date and has invested a significant amount of time behind this release. It’s an overhaul of the Qt 4.x series and makes Qt fit for the future.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 2: Still king of the Linux desktop

        It seems fair to say that Linux users enjoy a degree of choice that’s unmatched by the proprietary players in the desktop computing world, what with the wide variety of both distributions and desktop environments from which they can choose.

      • The Coming Gnome

        The last few years have been troubled for the Gnome Project. Once a premier desktop environment for Linux, it has seen its market share diminish amid user dissatisfaction over Gnome 3 and accusations that the project was ignoring users. Yet, over the last six months, something important has been happening: Slowly and quietly, the members of Gnome have started trying to turn the situation around.

      • GNOME Whiteboards: Calendar, Maps and Power Updates!

        There is a nice Search in Calendar, by Reda, a support for two batteries and plugged devices in Power Panel, by Allan and some mockups in Gnome Maps, by Andreas.

        Keep on mind that these are just early designs that may never arrive in GNOME the way they look now, or the may arrive at all!

      • 2013: The year of Gnome security

        The goal that Gnome board of directors set for the upcoming year is to improve the safety features of our favorite desktop environment by implementing and integrating special tools and features.

      • Evolution 3.7.3 Brings Numerous Fixes

  • Distributions

    • My first GNU/Linux distros

      These were my 2 first GNU/Linux distros that I used on my home desktop (actually, I met with GNU/Linux a little earlier – the very first GNU/Linux distro that I saw, it was RedHat 9.0).

    • This Weekend in Linux: Mint, Slax, and KNOPPIX

      Several familiar names cropped up in the news the last few days. The Mint team finishes out their lastest family tree and the Slax guys has rushed out a couple of bug-fix updates to the recently released 7.0. And KNOPPIX got an update too.

    • ArchBang Linux 2012.12 Review – Lightweight Arch
    • From newb to expert – best Linux distro for YOU!

      You know how I like to rate distributions at the end of each year? Yes, you do. However, while I do try to make those articles be as impartial and fair as possible and encompass as broad spectrum of users as possible, they ultimately reflect one man’s experience, me. Not bad, given my awesomeness, but still.

    • Another year, another totally different top 10 Linux distros

      Between the new innovations that emerge practically every day and the fairly constant rate of change in general, things never stay the same for long in technology.

    • Booting A Modern Linux Desktop In Just ~200MB

      Unlike many of the Linux distributions out there today that are little more than minor user-facing changes to Ubuntu or another tier-one Linux operating system, Slax for the past many years has followed its own dance. Slax, a LiveCD Linux distribution built around Slackware, is very lightweight and calls itself a “pocket operating system” as with the most recent release it can fit a full Linux OS with the KDE4 desktop in about 200MB. Slax is also intended to be quite easy for others to modify and create custom images via Slackware packages and Slax modules. The recent Slax 7.0 release was the first update for the open-source operating system in several years. For those interested in knowing how this very lightweight and customizable operating system can work so efficiently, Tomáš Matejícek, the Slax creator, has written an exclusive Phoronix article about the process.

    • When should you switch to or install a new Linux distribution?
    • Puppy Linux 5.4 Review – New Dog, New Tricks

      Presented in two formats based on two distros, which version of Puppy stays true to the commitment of being small and fast?

    • New Releases

      • Calculate Linux 13 released
      • Finnix 107 released
      • Manjaro 0.8.3 has been unleashed!
      • Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15 Is Powered by Linux Kernel 3.2.35

        Steven Shiau proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 18, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.

        Being based on the Debian Sid repository as of December 17, 2012, the Clonezilla Live 2.0.1-15 operating system is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.35 and incorporates various improvements, bug fixes and updated translations.

        This release also blacklists the floppy module from the kernel, just because none really uses a floppy drive anymore. But, in case you’re one of those people who still use a floppy drive, you will be able to manually load it by running the “modprobe floppy” command in a terminal.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 3 beta 1 waits for your tests

        Finally here is Mageia 3 beta 1. This first beta release was a bit tricky as it comes with some major new features in installer. GRUB2 has been included as an option for now.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Switching policy types in Gentoo/SELinux

        When you are running Gentoo with SELinux enabled, you will be running with a particular policy type, which you can devise from either /etc/selinux/config or from the output of the sestatus command. As a user on our IRC channel had some issues converting his strict-policy system to mcs, I thought about testing it out myself. Below are the steps I did and the reasoning why (and I will update the docs to reflect this accordingly).

      • Gentoo 20121221 Screenshots (12/21/2012)

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO: We have a “massive” potential next year

        Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says “the state of the union at Red Hat is strong.”

        Whitehurst took a break from running the billion dollar company to blog about accomplishments over the past year, as well as to look ahead to what he called “massive” potential in 2013.

      • A Red Hat for All Seasons

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) is a success story for troubled times. The economy falters? No problem. Southern Europe on the brink of collective bankruptcy? Sure, but sales are growing there anyway. Corporate IT budgets trimming down? Hey, that’s actually a business opportunity!

      • IBM taps Red Hat for cut-throat priced Linux on big supers

        Big Blue has been talking about the Power7-based “Blue Waters” supercomputer nodes for so long that you might think they’re already available. But although IBM gave us a glimpse of the Power 775 machines way back in November 2009, they actually won’t start shipping commercially until next month – August 26, to be exact.

        The feeds and speeds of the Power 775 server remain essentially what we told you nearly two years ago. Today’s news is that the Power 775 is nearly ready for sale, and the clock speed on the Power7 processors and system prices have – finally – been announced.

      • Red Hat CEO: We’ve Grown So Fast That Employees Spread This Crazy Rumor About Me

        What does it feel like to be the CEO of a super-hot company as it crests the billion-dollar-revenue mark and grows to 5,000 employees?

        Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says that it’s hard to notice the changes. Then something happens to make you realize you are the boss of a very big place.

      • Red Hat Makes $104 Million Cloud Management Bid with ManageIQ Acquisition

      • Fedora

        • Are you FedUp with Fedora 17? Upgrade to 18 ;)

          Fedorians have a nice sense of humor, and FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the new upgrading tool for Fedora 17->18 and beyond, that replaces PreUpgrader.

          Earth survived from Mayan prophecy, end of days didn’t come, and Fedora 18 release will make it at Jan 8, 2013 -hopefully ;)

        • Fedora 19 will catch up GNOME 3.8 with a 4 months release cycle!

          After the 2 months delay and the 8 months release cycle of Spherical Cow, Fedora now will try to make a “Speedy Gonzales” release inside in just 4 months. This is the shortest release cycle that Fedora ever had from its day one – Nov 2003, Yarrow / GNOME 2.4 / Linux 2.4.19.

        • Fedora 18 Will Include LibreOffice In The LiveCD

          One of the gripes of the Fedora users, and mine as well, was that it doesn’t come bundled with any office suite. Users have to manually install LibreOffice or Calligra to get some work done. This is changing now. The LiveCD of Fedora 18 Spherical Cow will be shipped with LibreOffice installed. This is a great step from Fedora developers towards usability. This change is pushed by Bill Nottingham to Fedora 18.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – December 24th, 2012

        Welcome to this year’s twenty-fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

        * Bits from the DPL
        * Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests
        * Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin
        * Other news
        * New Debian Contributors
        * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
        * Important Debian Security Advisories
        * New and noteworthy packages
        * Work-needing packages
        * Want to continue reading DPN?

      • A word on bitcoin support in Debian

        It has been a while since I wrote about bitcoin, the decentralised peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the state of bitcoin in Debian again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package is now maintained by a team of people, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :) But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt Corallo in a PPA for Ubuntu, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the Debian package.

      • Realtek ALC883 on Debian laptop

      • Derivatives

        • Knoppix 7.0.5 Is Based on GNOME 3.4 and KDE 4.8

          Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD, made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by an automatic hardware detection and support for many video cards, SCSI and USB devices, is now at version 7.0.5.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Unity, what a concept!

            The Unity desktop environment is something which has intrigued me a lot over the past year or so. My interest has partly been in the strong reactions, for or against the environment, from Ubuntu users. The other key point of my interest has been that I’ve really only used the desktop in short bursts and, as a result, I don’t feel I’ve really got a feel for it. Once every six months I will install Ubuntu, play with Unity for a few days, not long enough to unlearn the habits I’ve picked up from using other desktop environments, and then I’m off to another distribution and another desktop. In these quick looks at Unity I’ve certainly encountered things which rubbed me the wrong way, but I’ve also caught sight of design features which struck me as being beneficial. Or they would be beneficial if one were to use them long enough to form new work patterns. At any rate, I wanted to find out how I would feel about Unity if I used it long enough to unlearn old habits, behaviour learned after over fifteen years of using desktops with approaches different from Unity’s. With that in mind I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on one of my machines and tried to use Unity as much as I could while still taking time to test other Linux distributions. Right upfront I want to say that it took about a week for the old habits to fade away and for using Unity’s controls to become reflex rather than considered actions. Little things like moving the mouse pointer to the right of the window instead of the left have long been actions performed automatically and they were hard to break. This led to several days of jerking the mouse right, then back left to close windows or minimize them. There was also some trial and error at first finding the best way to handle window organization, launch applications and deal with window grouping on the launch bar. Typically, I have found I am most comfortable with setting up multiple virtual work spaces, populating them with related applications and switching between the work spaces. This allows for a small number of open windows in each space and avoids programs grouping on the task switcher. Unity, on the other hand, while it does allow for multiple work spaces, the desktop appears to be much better suited to having few windows open at a time and I slowly came around to typically using one workspace and grouping program windows together, switching between windows rather than work spaces.

          • Top 10 Things Ubuntu Is Doing Right

            Over the years, I’ve watched Ubuntu develop into quite the impressive Linux distro. While Ubuntu definitely has room for improvement, it does offer the casual user an outstanding experience overall. In this article, I’ll share the areas where I think Ubuntu is raising the bar on Linux for the masses.

          • Top 10 Ubuntu Apps of 2012
          • The Meritocracy

            Thus going after someone like Canonical and calling what they doing spying actually hurts the promotion of free software. What they are doing is a huge step in the right direction.

            Having run a business based on free and open source software for a decade, you can imagine that I am a big fan of it. Last year, for a variety of reasons, I decided to make the jump to using a desktop based on Linux. I tried a number of options, but the one that worked for me, the one that “stuck”, was Ubuntu. Using it just comes naturally, and I’ve been using it for so long now that other desktops seem foreign.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 297
          • ‘Unredirect Fullscreen Windows’ Now Enabled by Default in Ubuntu 12.10

            ‘Unredirect Fullscreen Windows’ option is finally enabled by default in Ubuntu 12.10. Compiz developer Daniel Van Vugt and his team has done lots of work in past few months to make sure that all the bugs related to this feature are fixed.

          • Canonical Supplies New Tools for Linux Evangelists

            Ubuntu may not quite be a religion, but it has its committed evangelists all the same. And now, Canonical has made their jobs easier with the release of an official “Ubuntu Advocacy Development Kit.” Will Ubuntu fans soon be showing up on your doorstep, asking you to convert? Probably not, but the move is an interesting endeavor nonetheless.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux round-up: A bunch of Mints for Christmas

              All the Linux Mint Editions have arrived just in time for the holidays – Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce dekstops, and Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 6 with Cinnamon and MATE desktops.

            • Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” KDE released!
            • Linux Mint 15 New Features
            • Linux Mint 14 KDE: One of the best KDE distros of the year

              Linux Mint does it again! The thing I admire about Linux Mint is the ability to work on any type of system and refined interface that it brings on the table – every time! When I reviewed the Mint Maya KDE, I was wondering if I had seen any KDE distro more complete than this. With the Mint Nadia KDE release my impression has changed. This edition not only looks gorgeous but the KDE bloat-wares are gone to actually give the users a more functional set of applications.

            • Linux Mint 15: What’s Cooking In The Out Of The Box Operating System?

              I now refrain from comparing Linux based distribution because what my needs are could be different from yours and what works for you may not work for me, but I am really impressed with Linux Mint in the ‘out-of-the-box’ experience department, it’s becoming one of my favourites along with openSUSE and Kubuntu.

            • A week with elementary OS Luna: Could this be the start of something big?

              It is not far-fetched to say, open source and its poster child, Linux, is going through a golden period. The emergence of internet has a lot to do with the popularisation of open source way of thinking. But in the world of Windows and Macs, what makes Linux tick? Redhat was the first to explore Linux’s potential. But Redhat had a very enterprise centric approach. And in 2004, Ubuntu came along with the focus firmly back on end-users. This kick started a flurry of activity and a number of new Ubuntu based Linux distros started to sprung up. The latest one being elementary OS Luna. And this brand new OS has a lot going for it.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Zanata, an open source translation platform

    Zanata is an open source translation platform written in Java that offers translation memory, an online translation editor, and workflow integration with REST APIs and command-line tools. For translators, it is a web browser-based translation environment where previous translations provide context for their work. For software developers, it’s an integration tool that provides a centralized localization repository along with translation tools that save time and resources.

  • Taking open source foundations to the next level

    Given that now even some small open source projects are forming their own foundations, Glynn Moody thinks that perhaps open source foundations have come of age. He suggests that the time may now be right for the formation of an umbrella foundation to help share best practices, legal advice and other information and support.

  • Open Source: A Golden Age of Development

    Open source used to be an aberration — now it is an imperative. If you’re not using or developing open source projects, you’re putting your business at risk. That’s the message from Black Duck Software and Forrester, as recently presented in a webinar describing Open Source software and innovation.

  • Most ‘open source’ a good way to get software cheaper TECh TALK Nick Delorenzo

    DESPITE the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run to hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.

  • How open source shaped our world in 2012
  • Protect choice and freedom in technology by choosing open source solutions

    I remember first meeting Jeffrey A. “Jam” McGuire in person at DrupalCon Denver. We talked about communities, music, and shared ways to show why open source is a better way. Even before meeting him, I could tell from my first interaction with him that he was passionate about Drupal and open source. He’s becoming an in-demand Keynote speaker and presenter at Drupal and other business and software events around the world. He’s already a staple for the Intro to DrupalCon session and always seems to incorporate music and singing as part of the performance.

  • OpenPhoto: Elegant photo hosting in an open source package

    Think of all the photos and videos you’ve stored on various devices and social networks over the years. Enter: OpenPhoto, a new, open source platform all about gathering them into one place and never losing them. Their software imports your photos from Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram, and there’s an app for the iPhone (Android coming soon).

  • The founder gap: Why we need more women in open source

    At the same time, women make up an estimated 2% of the open source community, far lower than the percentage of women in computing overall, estimated at around 20%. Is it any wonder that women founders are so rare in Internet-related startups, when many of the founders come from a population that is 98% male?

  • Mahout, There It Is! Open Source Algorithms Remake Overstock.com

    Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.

  • Free Tools for Perfect Holiday Photos

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • OpenStack Set to Tackle Open Source Federated Identity in the Cloud

      The OpenStack open source cloud platform started out with only two components: Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Nova originally came from NASA and Swift came from Rackspace.

      Over the course of the last two years, OpenStack has expanded beyond NASA and Rackspace and has been embraced by many large tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, AT&T, Cisco and Intel among others. As OpenStack participation has grown, new capabilities have been added, including most recently the Cinder block storage project and the Quantum networking project. Cinder and Quantum both debuted in the recent Folsom release.

    • Dell Cloud and HP Cloud: OpenStack Twins or Different DNA?

  • Databases

    • NSA’s Super-Secure Database Dodges Bullet From Senate

      For Gunnar Hellekson — a chief technology strategist at Red Hat who closely follows the government’s approach to open source software — this language posed a threat not only to Accumulo but to open source project across the government. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see that same ‘adequacy criteria’ applied to all open source software projects,” Hellekson wrote earlier this year. “Got a favorite open source project on your DoD program, but no commercial vendor? Inadequate. Only one vendor for the package? Lacks diversity. Proprietary software doesn’t have a burden like this.”

      From where Hellekson was sitting, it was obvious that Accumulo was very different from the likes of Hbase and Cassandra. “When Accumulo was written, it was definitely doing new work,” he told us. “Some of its differentiating features are being handled by other pieces of software. But other core concepts are unique, including the cell-level security…. That’s an incredibly important feature, and to do it properly is incredibly complicated.”

      But it appears the Senate has now backed down. In that joint House-Senate statement on the DoD bill, Accumulo is cited by name. “[The Department of Defense] has already determined that the Accumulo database that NSA developed using government and contract engineers is a successful open-source project that is supported by commercial companies,” the statement read. “[We] expect that future acquisitions of Accumulo would be executed through such commercial vendors.”

      Those commercial vendors include Sqrrl. But Oren Falkowitz isn’t quite ready to celebrate. “Obama still has to sign it,” he says. “I wouldn’t jump for joy until it’s actually a law.”

    • If MySQL falters, what do you replace it with?

      The MySQL relational database serves as a back end for millions of websites, and powers millions of non-Internet data-handling applications. In 2009 ownership of MySQL passed to Oracle when it bought Sun, which had acquired MySQL the previous year. Since then developers and IT managers have worried that Oracle would someday cease support for MySQL because it competes with the company’s profitable proprietary database products. This fear may be justified. In August, Alex Williams wrote at TechCrunch, “Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.” We tried to get Oracle to rebut that accusation, but multiple emails and phone calls did not get a response. Does this mean it’s time to move from MySQL to another open source database – and if so, which one?

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice.org vs LibreOffice

      Although there are many others, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are the two 800lb gorrillas of the open source office suite world. One or other comes bundled with pretty much every Linux distro out there.

      Without OpenOffice.org, it’s fair to say that the OpenDocument format would never have stood a chance of becoming an open standard. Pretty impressive, when many open standards haven’t had anything like the same success (how many people – even hard core Linux users – commonly spurn mp3 files for ogg vorbis?). Because (nearly) everyone needs a word processor and spreadsheet, OpenOffice.org has long been one of the open source poster children to encourage take up – “Why pay $$$ for Microsoft Office when this is just as good and you can have it for free?”.

    • Bugzilla-Assistant
    • The Document Foundation 2012 in Review

      Italo Vignoli today published lots of cool graphs and stats demonstating the growth and other accomplishments over the course of 2012. From the growth in number of contributors to high-profile roll-outs to increasing numbers of downloads, 2012 has been a banner year. He said, “Looking back, it has been amazing.”

      Starting with the contributor list, LibreOffice had 379 contributors at the start of the year, but that number had grown to 567 by Christmas 2012. The Document Foundation also announced 14 LibreOffice releases in 2012 and the team is currently working on LibreOffice 4.0, which should be released in February 2012.

    • The Future of LibreOffice and Other Office-Suites
    • Is Oracle Java 7 Update 10 Going to Improve Security?

      The Oracle Java Development Kit 7 Update 10 (JDK 7u10) release provides new updating and control capabilities that go beyond what Java users have enjoyed in the past.

  • Education

    • Open source groups warn Greece will waste millions on school software

      Advocates of free and open source are warning that the Greek government is going to waste millions of euro on proprietary software licences for the country’s schools. They are calling on the Ministry of Education to cancel its latest procurement. “Favouring proprietary software while ignoring the potential of open source, constitutes a choking of the educational process.”

  • Healthcare

    • Healthcare slow to adopt, not to adapt: Promise for open source in 2013

      Open source in healthcare remains in its infancy. This year saw some great activity with open source in health. Our community covered medical devices with available source code, electronic patient records, open product design and 3D printing, crowdfunding, and big data. These big ideas and innovations, but I predict that as more people take personal responsibility for their health in 2013, the greater the demand will be for faster, more affordable solutions… read: open source.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Piwik FOSS Web Analytics Tool to Get Crowdfunded

      Ever since OStatic’s inception, we’ve been fans of the Piwik online analytics application, which is a free, open source alternative to tools like Google Analytics. For example, we discussed Piwik in our roundup of open source tools aimed at web developers. When it comes to doing web analytics, it’s beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with Google Analytics or on its own.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.1 Official Release Nears as PC-BSD 9.1 Debuts

      PC-BSD is a desktop based derivative of FreeBSD and typically PC-BSD releases follow FreeBSD releases. That’s not quite the case with the new PC-BSD 9.1 release which is actually coming out *before* the official release of FreeBSD 9.1

      FreeBSD 9.1 was originally set for official release at the end of October but has been hit by some delays. Though an official announcement has not yet been made the primary FreeBSD mirror currently has FreeBSD release ISOs available (ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.1/)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Government of India Generates Hundreds of FLOSS Promotional Videos
    • EU Commissioner Kroes articulates benefits of open source and open standards
    • FOSS satisfies government regulations

      Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) Open source software adoption by the U.S. Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or a designated country.

    • EC postpones its guideline on ICT standardisation and procurement

      The European Commission will postpone until early next year the publication of its guideline on how to make best use of ICT standards in tender specifications. Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, in a video speech on Friday said that the guideline should ensure that public authorities get the most value from open source and open standards. “And also that open source suppliers can compete fairly in tenders.”

    • What government can learn from open source

      I wanted to share my notes with you all from this TED talk with Clay Shirky. You can watch the video—and I recommend that you do—but since I took notes I figured I’d share my textual summary as well!

    • DARPA and Defense Department look to a more open source future

      As the United States military marches further into the age of networked warfare, data networks and the mobile platforms to distribute and access them will become even more important.

  • Licensing

    • European Union’s open source licence to become compatible with GPLv3

      The European Union’s open source licence, EUPL, is to be revised, aiming to make it compatible with the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 and other licences. A public consultation begins today on Joinup, with the publication of a first draft and a background document on some of the proposed changes.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • How open source is disrupting visual art

      If you’ve seen an unbelievable interactive projection or a mind-blowing piece of generative video art, odds are you’ve come across openFrameworks, an accessible programming platform that has helped create projects like Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald’s Faces, a real-time face-substitution project, the EyeWriter graffiti headset from F.A.T. Labs, and Chris O’Shea’s playful, Monty Python-inspired Hand from Above, among many other works of technology-based art. What makes openFrameworks and similar coding tools like Processing so powerful in an artistic context is that they are open source, free for any artist to use and hack to their own ends, and are made by artists, for artists.

    • Open Data

      • Digital Agenda: Turning government data into gold

        The Commission has launched an Open Data Strategy for Europe, which is expected to deliver a €40 billion boost to the EU’s economy each year. Europe’s public administrations are sitting on a goldmine of unrealised economic potential: the large volumes of information collected by numerous public authorities and services. Member States such as the United Kingdom and France are already demonstrating this value. The strategy to lift performance EU-wide is three-fold: firstly the Commission will lead by example, opening its vaults of information to the public for free through a new data portal. Secondly, a level playing field for open data across the EU will be established. Finally, these new measures are backed by the €100 million which will be granted in 2011-2013 to fund research into improved data-handling technologies.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Should Instagram automatically license photos under Creative Commons?

        Instagram has undergone several big changes lately, most noteably taking away the ability to quickly view Instagram photos on Twitter. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom described this update during the LeWeb Internet conference in Paris as Instagram’s evolution, and explained that the company would naturally change as it grew.In an article from Business Insider on December 6, Alyson Shontell calls for Instagram to make a bolder move: to publish all photos under Creative Commons unless the photographer specifically changes their publishing license.

    • Open Hardware

  • Standards/Consortia

    • New NIST Document Offers Guidance in Cryptographic Key Generation

      Protecting sensitive electronic information in different situations requires different types of cryptographic algorithms, but ultimately they all depend on keys, the cryptographic equivalent of a password. A new publication* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aims to help people secure their data with good keys no matter which algorithm they choose.

    • HTML5 Still Not a Standard Until 2014

      The W3C announced today that the HTML5 definition is now complete. This is a big deal for the web and all of us that work and use it…but it’s not end of the story.

      The definition is not a final standard for HTML5, though it is an important milestone. HTML5 will not likely be a full bona-fide standard until mid 2014 according to what Jeff Jaffe told me during a conference call today to talk about HTML5.

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