04.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Imagine having the equivalent of four 1920×1080 monitors in a 2×2 grid, on your desk, with absolutely no seam between them. This article describes my journey towards that goal…
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Drones
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College campuses have been experimenting with the idea of using unmanned drones since early 2012. On a more larger level, drone usage has been a point of conversation since aerial warfare came to the forefront over 100 years ago. The first targeted attack from an unmanned aerial vehicle took place Feb. 4, 2002, in an attempt to kill someone the US thought was Osama Bin Laden.
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A group of people who have lost loved ones to US drone strikes in Yemen yesterday (3 April) launched a national organisation, which will support affected communities and highlight the civilian impact of the “targeted killing” programme.
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Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Republican Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, a frequent critic of “war on terrorism” policies, introduced the “Targeted Lethal Force Transparency Act.” The goal? Find out who is dying in drone strikes.
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Fein noted that during the Watergate years of the 1970s, the Justice Department stood up to Richard Nixon; no such backbone exists today, Fein said. He despaired that there is no moral outrage when U.S. predator drones kill civilians, or when the government collects massive amounts of data on American citizens.
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Munter recounted one incident in which two dozen Pakistani soldiers were killed by a U.S. drone strike in retaliation to a group of Afghan and American forces being fired upon by Pakistani border guards in November 2011. The clash, he said, strained ties between the two nations and marred the reputation of drone strikes. – See more at: http://dailytrojan.com/2014/04/02/former-us-ambassador-to-pakistan-speaks-on-past/#sthash.shc9jTHM.dpuf
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Even if we’re not at technically at war with a nation, we’re almost always still involved. We’re still creating enemies by involving ourselves wherever we see fit — sending weapons to the Syrian opposition (linked to Al Qaeda and known to kill members of the Christian minority in cold blood), flying drones over Pakistan to kill civilians, and even now drawing lines in the sand to combat Russian influence in the Ukraine. It all leads to a senseless sacrifice of lives and worsening of diplomatic relations.
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NDAA
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A bipartisan group of senators has quietly begun discussing a push to repeal or rewrite the broad law granting the president sweeping powers to wage war against individuals and groups across the globe.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine told BuzzFeed that several lawmakers have held informal conversations on possible changes to the 9/11-era rules of war on terrorism, known as the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
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PANDA is People Against the National Defense Authorization Act
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House Republicans are quietly working to insert immigration legislation into the text of the Department of Defense authorization bill that would allow so-called DREAMers to obtain permanent legal residency by joining the military, Breitbart News has learned.
CIA Torture and Deception/Lies
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A still-classified Senate Intelligence Committee report contains damning information on both the extent of US torture methods and the lies of top CIA officials about these programs, according to information in a Washington Post article on Monday.
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Senate aides and government officials continue to leak details from a classified report on the CIA’s Bush administration torture program, giving us a fuller picture of who was tortured, how it happened, and what limited information the government learned.
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The Defense Department isn’t properly keeping track of senior officials who leave the government to take jobs with defense contractors, the DOD Inspector General reported Tuesday.
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The Obama administration is violating the Convention Against Torture by delaying declassification of the report and by refusing to bring those responsible to account
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Mike Morell said Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence committee knew al-Qaeda was involved in the Benghazi terror attack from the start, but said it wasn’t publicized because the sources through which they knew that were classified.
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Venezuela
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is planning to overthrow Venezuela’s government by using student organizations throughout a wide variety of educational institutions in the country, according to an ex-CIA collaborator Raúl Capote.
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Fascism
Deception Over Expansion
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If American media seem filled these days with bellicose, jingoistic, uniform perspectives on a new Cold War, that’s probably because so many news outlets can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to framing new events in the tired terms of the last generation’s ingrained propaganda. At a time that needs fresh contemplation, even people like Amy Goodman on Democracy NOW are talking about recent events in and around Ukraine as having “sparked the worst East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War” or words to more extreme effect.
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As Western and Russian rulers rattle sabres, Simon Basketter says we must take on a system that drives the world to war
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Ukraine just happened to be a conveniently available ideal to put Americans entrenched status and Western European odyssey into spotlight but with a revamped force of achieving the strategic goals and to enhance the Russian lost vision of invincible Empire. So far, nobody could dare to disturb the progressive dream turned into attainable reality in weeks and days to foresee Crimea annexed into the Russian Federation and Ukraine being put under watchful guidance and controlled maneuverability of the Russian foreign policy objectives.
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On March 2, Secretary of State John Kerry described Russia’s action in Crimea as “an incredible act of aggression … You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said. And on March 17, President Barack Obama declared, “Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected, and international law must be upheld.”
Messrs. Kerry and Obama must be joking!
The U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan “on completely trumped up pretexts.” (If you still believe George Bush had legitimate reasons to attack Iraq, please read the transcript of his press conference of Aug. 21, 2006. There, he confessed that both his “reasons” were bogus.)
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Ukraine is a perfect example of how the US uses the worst elements of a society to do their dirty work in other countries and how the US/NATO has a problem finding honest quislings. Since the US favors the nazi coup in Ukraine they talk about sovereignty and the right to self-determination of the Crimean people is made into some outrageous business for which Russia is demonized. John McCain, the chief chicken hawk and key “moral support” figure for the US’ insurrectionists and nazis in Ukraine, urged dissidents in Russia to rise and through that the effect of Ukrainian “freedom” would spread into Russia. McCain and the rest are engaged in subversive incitement, and once again their complete lack of intelligence and knowledge has left them looking like fools to the world. Professor Edward Herman spoke to the Voice of Russia regarding these issues and more.
Clapper’s Lies
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United States intelligence officials have been scouring the personal communications of innocent Americans, the nation’s top spy chief now acknowledges, using a procedure that’s allegedly lawful and constitutionally sound.
Germany
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The United States has not responded to repeated requests for information on the NSA’s surveillance activities, Germany’s government said Wednesday.
In a reply to a written question from the opposition in the Federal Parliament, the government said both the Ministry of Interior and former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger had sent letters to U.S. officials without recieving any reply.
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‘Reform’
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Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, introduced HR 4291, the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act (.pdf), to end the collection of all Americans’ calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Both have vehemently defended the program since June, and it’s reassuring to see two of the strongest proponents of NSA’s actions agreeing with privacy advocates’ (and the larger public’s) demands to end the program. The bill only needs 17 lines to stop the calling records program, but it weighs in at more than 40 pages. Why? Because the “reform” bill tries to create an entirely new government “authority” to collect other electronic data.
Yahoo PR and encryption
NSA
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Results of a study, carried out by Chinese telecom giant NTT Communications, were released yesterday and revealed the effect that last year’s NSA revelations have had on the way corporate decision makers view cloud technology.
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“Connectivity,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview last year, “is a human right.”
If it surprises you that one of the kings of the corporate Internet would repeat a slogan used by Internet activists to mobilize against companies like his, examine the context. Zuckerberg made his remark to support and explain a new set of Facebook strategies that will, if successful, put the world’s Internet connectivity under his company’s control.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin joins us to discuss her new book, “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” Currently at ProPublica and previously with The Wall Street Journal, Angwin details her complex and fraught path toward increasing her own online privacy. According to Angwin, the private data collected by East Germany’s Soviet-era Stasi secret police could pale in comparison to the information revealed today by an individual’s Facebook profile or Google search.
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Microsoft
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Microsoft’s big investment in cloud computing—a large part of its reinvention strategy—could be derailed by concerns about U.S. government snooping and an emerging price war among the big players.
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Dick Cheney
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…Obama sounds faintly like that guy who ran to replace George W. Bush.
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But it turns out Obama was not against indulging the whims of a stubborn ruler if that ruler happens to be him. Upon arriving in the White House, he left the Bush-Cheney surveillance programs largely alone. Why? “He has more information than he did then,” one former aide confided to The New York Times. “And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration.”
The fact that Obama trusted himself with these powers is ample reason the rest of us shouldn’t. But we already had sufficient cause for suspicion. Our Constitution does not show an abundance of trust in elected officials. It rests on the belief that those in power need to be curbed and checked at every turn.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Servers
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Reuven M. Lerner starts us out this month, this time with information on how to leverage geolocation information in your Web application. Whether you want to give your Web visitors a local weather forecast or just want to present them with location-appropriate options from your Web applications, geolocation is a powerful tool. Since the Internet is global, it’s important to know where users are located. Reuven shows how to integrate geolocation awareness into your Web applications. Dave Taylor follows with the next in his series on Zombie Dice. It may feel like you’re just making a cool game, but it’s really just a ruse to help you learn something. (Well, it’s a cool game too, but you really are learning!)
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At a cloud event today, Google announced it was cutting its cloud-services prices by huge margins — up to 85 percent in some cases. But that’s not all the good news.
Google also announced general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Linux SUSE on the Google Cloud Platform
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Softaculous Ltd., the developer of AMPPS Installer that simplifies Application deployment on various Desktop and Servers, today announced the launch of AMPPS 2.3 for Linux distros. Ampps Linux will work with most of the desktop / GUI distros of linux like Fedora, CentOS, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc.
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At the Women in Tech Networking event at South by Southwest Interactive last week, Rackspace Hosting launched its new training program, Linux for Ladies, aimed at helping women get top jobs in the IT industry.
Cumulus Linux
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Midokura, a global company focused on network virtualization, today announced its partnership with Cumulus Networks, the company bringing the power of Linux to networking. The companies plan to offer a joint technology solution that will enable customers to manage workloads on virtual and non-virtualized infrastructure with a technology preview by May 2014 and a GA offering by Q3 2014. This partnership further extends the new networking open ecosystem where businesses can have the flexibility to choose between various industry standard networking hardware, network operating systems and applications.
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Cumulus Networks has announced that IXLeeds has chosen the Cumulus Linux operating system for the company’s upgraded Internet Exchange Point. IXLeeds is a not-for-profit Internet Exchange Point (IXP) based in Leeds, UK. A bid process that included Extreme Networks and Juniper Networks preceded the deployment of Cumulus.
SDN
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That said, Jessup stressed that there is still a core networking track that is still at the foundation of Interop. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is once again a popular track for discussion as networking professional seek to learn how to benefit from the new networking paradigm.
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The first wave of SDNs broke data centers free from single-vendor “blobs,” concede the architects of MidoNet, but they left a new problem in their wake.
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In a Cumulus Networks-sponsored webcast SDN panel on March 21, Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s director of technical operations, explained why the social networking website has embraced the open SDN model.
Ahmad said that when it comes to the reasons SDN makes sense for Facebook, it boils down to two key things: scale and agility. He noted that there is a lot of traffic going between machines today that runs over network infrastructure. In order to scale the network to meet the needs for increasing machine-to-machine traffic, the traditional hierarchy-based network structure isn’t a good fit.
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The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight Project conducted a third-party survey that found 95 percent of networking pros want open-source software-defined networking technologies.
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Forgetting to Change Default Password or Apply Patches
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Security boffins at ESET, in collaboration with CERT-Bund, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing as well as other agencies, have found a cybercriminal campaign that has taken control of over 25,000 Unix servers worldwide.
Dubbed “Operation Windigo” it has resulted in infected servers sending out millions of spam emails which are designed to hijack servers, infect the computers that visit them, and steal information.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Systemd
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Systemd has been working on network support for this leading open-source init system. As part of this, systemd developers have now achieved support for obtaining a network connection in less than one millisecond… With that said, systemd developers are working towards having DHCP client and server capabilities built into the init system for having a super-fast booting OS and quicker network connections when resuming the system.
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When systemd sees “debug” as part of the kernel command-line, it will spit out so much informaiton about the system that it fails to boot… The init system just collapses the system with too much information being sent to the dmesg when seeing the debug option as part of the kernel command-line parameter. Within the systemd bug report it was suggested for systemd not to look for a simple “debug” string to go into its debug mode but perhaps something like “systemd.debug” or other namespaced alternatives. The debug kernel command-line parameter has been used by upstream Linux kernel developers for many years. However, upstream systemd developers don’t agree about changing their debug code detection. Kay Sievers of Red Hat wrote, “Generic terms are generic, not the first user owns them.”
kGraft
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SUSE has released kGraft to the public, the technology it developed to deliver live runtime patching of the Linux kernel.
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Kgraft, which allows live patching of the Linux kernel without downtime, is available under the GPLv3 license
Future Releases
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The highlights covered by Daniel for “neat” i915 DRM 3.15 changes include per-process address space support (currently limited to Ivy Bridge and Haswell but Bay Trail and Broadwell support is coming), fine-grained display power domain handling, runtime power management infrastructure work, support for inheriting the firmware frame-buffer as another step in Fastboot support, a lot of Broadwell patches, improved support for frame-buffer compression, 5.4GHz DIsplayPort support, generic DisplayPort aux helpers, and large cursor support to benefit HiDPI displays. For Intel’s 4K display support, they now support 5.4GHz DisplayPort but they don’t yet support multi-stream support (MST) as most 4K DisplayPort screens expose themselves as two displays to the driver.
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There’s many bug and performance fixes that landed while some corruption fixes and other patches will land later in the 3.15 merge window. The Btrfs code was also changed to avoid using its own async threads in favor of regular kernel work-queues, in hopes of using more generic code, but it might affect the file-system’s performance.
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Hopefully the Linux kernel LTO support will finish up in the Linux 3.15 kernel otherwise Linux 3.16 so we can move onward with some benchmarks of an LTO-optimized Linux kernel to see the performance wins at the cost of greater compile times and memory usage during the compilation process. It’s worth noting that with the upcoming GCC 4.9 are also some significant link-time optimization enhancements.
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With the Linux 3.14 kernel that was released over the night, Intel UMS support was deprecated. Intel hasn’t maintained their user-space mode-setting support on Linux in about a half-decade with pushing everything these days through kernel-based mode-setting. The Radeon and Nouveau drivers have also become completely dependent upon kernel mode-setting too, with user-space mode-setting these days mostly being left to really old X.Org drivers without a DRM/KMS module. Modern Linux distributions are also beginning to drop support for these old GPUs.
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Latest Release
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After adding an extra release candidate to solidify the final result — to the tune of a week’s delay — Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Sunday unleashed version 3.14 of the Linux kernel.
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Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, formally released the Linux 3.14 kernel March 30. The new 3.14 Linux kernel follows the Linux 3.13 kernel that was released in January. Given that the new kernel carries the release number 3.14, which is a number that is also well-known as the mathematical Pi constant, there was early speculation that Torvalds might name the new kernel Pi. It’s something that Torvalds shot down early on in the Linux 3.14 development process.
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Latest Linux kernel has baked-in support for more cutting-edge ARM and MIPS processors, adds hardware support for Xen paravirtualuzation
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While no official announcement has come down yet, the Linux 3.14 kernel will most likely be released in the hours ahead.
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Kernel Level Misc.
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Jovi Zhangwei, the lead KTAP developer, has posted the 28 patches implementing KTAP on the Linux kernel mailing list and is looking for code review in hopes it will be accepted into the mainline Linux kernel. KTAP is a script-based dynamic tracing tool that has a powerful scripting language, a register-based interpreter, is considered lightweight, and supports multiple architectures. The currently supported architectures for KTAP include x86/x86_64, ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS.
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Linux kernel block maintainer, Btrfs lead developer and new Facebook employee Chris Mason revealed the news at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley on Thursday, Phoronix reported. Mason said that Facebook will trial Btrfs in its “web tier” servers, explaining that’s the easiest tier to recover if necessary, though we imagine Facebook might ask the NSA for its backup copy in the event of disaster.
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This small but important change would support a cgroup to swap to a particular file as setup by a new control file. This change is to allow the limiting of cgroups to a given swap file without being able to thrash the entire system’s swap file. With this set of three patches, individual cgroups can be limited in their swap capacity.
Graphics Stack
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While most of the open-source driver efforts around accelerating 2D with OpenGL are centered on GLAMOR, a set of patches were published today that provide performance improvements to the XA Gallium3D state tracker that also accelerate 2D using 3D driver code.
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Benchmarks
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“In the Mopping Up phase, Evangelism’s goal is to put the final nail into the competing technology’s coffin, and bury it in the burning depths of the earth. Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.” –Leaked Microsoft document
Summary: In the age of ‘Scroogled’ and other AstroTurfing campaigns we need to become more vocal, not less vocal, in support of GNU/Linux
“The year of the [GNU/]Linux desktop” is a phrase that we used earlier today. FOSS Force correctly calls the phrase “a comical punching bag for a number of years.”
We need to change that.
Just as the Pirate Bay and Pirate Party helped change the connotation of the word “pirate” (more commonly used these days to refer to copyright infringement) we ought to change the connotation of the phrase “the year of the [GNU/]Linux desktop,” insisting that this year is already behind us. Judging by the number of Android devices, this is undeniably true for “year of Linux”.
FOSS Force explains that the “phrase has been At the turn of every new year the question can be found on hundreds of Linux-centered websites.”
It adds that: “The fact is, we’ll never see “the year of desktop Linux.”” This actually relates to a later post from FOSS Force [2], which Robert Pogson responds to in [3].
Giving up on the phrase or conceding (as suggested above) would actually just serve the FUD, or in other words this would make it seem like the FUD was legitimate and true. We need to battle the FUD, not surrender to it.
Surprisingly enough, the Linux Foundation has just published an article from an FSF basher. The article itself is quite good and it is titled “Why Arguing That Windows is Better Than Linux Makes You Look Silly” (we have already rebutted many such arguments over the years).
Jim L., who have been a good proponent of GNU/Linux in recent years (even in IDG), adds his views to the article [5], but he goes as far as chastising advocates of GNU/Linux, Android, etc. Some strong GNU/Linux advocates like Robert Pogson have already responded in the comments and as my wife put it, “I would usually agree. However, a lot of anti-Linux is not fanboyism but part of ‘Scroogled’-like whisper campaigns. A lot of anti-Windows is reactionary. Some of the comments here already point this out. You cannot always turn the other cheek.”
What we need to understand id that much of the anti-GNU/Linux ‘journalism’ from sites like ZDNet (that’s what the original alludes to) can actually be traced down to editorial control. Many writers in ZDNet are connected to Microsoft (some are current or past Microsoft staff) and the parent company, CBS, works with Microsoft. Framing OS wars as two camps of “fanboys” fighting against each other is willingly putting a false image and turning a blind eye to Microsoft PR agencies, which we know are manufacturing GNU/Linux-hostile articles (‘Scroogled’ AstroTurfing is one example).
The bottom line is, GNU/Linux advocacy is often facing opposition from a corporate propaganda effort, not a grassroots effort. We oughtn’t just like the PR agents win. We ideally need to expose them. In recent years Microsoft was exposed rallying propaganda agents in sites like Reddit and YouTube. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The year of the Linux desktop.
The phrase has been a comical punching bag for a number of years. At the turn of every new year the question can be found on hundreds of Linux-centered websites.
“Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?”
The fact is, we’ll never see “the year of desktop Linux.” Not the way we imagine it anyway. Many of us long for the time when Linux will become a well known alternative to Microsoft Windows. That just isn’t gonna happen.
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He makes some good points, that don’t actually support his thesis. I can give a single counterexample that shows the error of his ways. There are places on this planet where GNU/Linux is a well known alternative OS on the desktop.
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It seems as though you can’t throw a rock on the internet without hitting an article which argues for the superiority of Windows over Linux. With titles like “Five reasons I’d rather run Windows 8 than Linux”, these articles are a dime a dozen.
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Platform wars are as old as computing itself, but they never seem to really die off and go away, they just morph into new ones as technology itself changes. Linux.com takes a look at the classic Windows versus Linux battle, and why the Windows advocates make themselves look silly by bashing Linux.
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Flawed reporting by the The Verge, which seems to be relaying some new Google-hostile spin
WITH Chromebooks sales on the rise and all sorts of other commendable moves, Google has become a king of GNU/Linux [1,2], especially when it comes to adoption by the general population. This makes Linux and Java common carriers and it makes Google really, really hated by Microsoft, which now uses attack ads against Google's GNU/Linux products (attack ads are a loser’s game).
I was somewhat shocked to see the headline “Google reportedly now requires ‘powered by Android’ branding on new phones” (deceiving Google-hostile headline) just the other day. Knowing that the publication (The Verge) is run by Patel and is often used to disseminate anti-Google or pro-Microsoft spin, I decided to look for any mention of crucial details. Indeed, as it turned out, the “powered by Android” branding is only required when using proprietary apps from Google. This has nothing to do with AOSP and it is probably fair enough (it does not even say “Powered by Google”).
When Patel was still working for Engadget he would occasionally quote lies and Google-hostile smears from Microsoft lobbyists, giving them a platform. One of Patel’s employees, who interviewed me for about an hour regarding the Gates Foundation and OLPC, told me that Patel does not like me; he does not like me because I criticised him after he had published false claims (made by someone on Microsoft’s payroll). This is not journalism. It is press-titution.
The bottom line is, be careful not to be ‘Scroogled’ by The Verge. There seems to be agenda there. Maybe therein lies the business model. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Google has also, much to the chagrin of many in the open source community, single-handedly helped Linux to become one of the most popular platforms on the planet.
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Yep. Jack Wallen is right. Canonical did a lot for GNU/Linux on desktop and server but that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions Google has introduced to the joys of Free Software, stuff you can run anywhere anyway, examine, modify and distribute. Google did that by shipping hardware running the software and selling/shipping units. OEMs pay attention to that.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Ubuntu at 5:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Canonical is abandoning a Fog Computing service which was a bad idea all along and has become even worse in the age of NSA espionage
CANONICAL is on a roll. The company is improving its stance on privacy not just by cutting some Amazon links (Amazon works very closely with the CIA now) but also by fighting against ACPI (which NSA likes to exploit for back doors) and now dropping Fog Computing. Ubuntu servers can still be set up to power Fog Computing services, but users of Ubuntu will not be pushed to upload their personal files to remote servers, and that’s a fantastic development!
A few days ago FOSS Force appropriately wrote [1] that “Richard Stallman has been trying to warn us for years that when it come to “free” online services such as cloud hosted email accounts, we’re not customers. From the moment we signup we become inventory.”
More people should have listened to Stallman. He just got some much-deserved credit in [2] and Snowden’s leaks (for which Stallman is thankful) proved him correct rather than “paranoid”. Perhaps more people will stop using ‘customer’-hostile hosted E-mail services such as GMail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, which on the face of it does not even support Windows users anymore [3] (not so well anyway). It’s all just a datagrab and people should reject it. The business model is based on privacy infringement.
So, the latest news says that Ubuntu One will soon be history [4-16]. Users should immediately get their files out of there and we strongly urge nobody to use DropBox or other such ‘alternatives’ (don’t spread personal files to yet more servers). DropBox wasn’t just on the PRISM timeline; it also changed its terms and conditions recently, supposedly to rid itself from liability for snooping. We shared dozens of links about it earlier this year and last year. A lot of the corporate press did not pay attention or even cover these serious matters, which had mostly gone under the radar while people clicked “I agree” without reviewing the changes. We don’t need an “alternative” to Ubuntu One just as we don’t need an “alternative” to Facebook. These are fundamentally bad ideas. Media hype (propaganda by repetition) somehow convinced people — even some rational people — that Fog Computing (surveillance-friendly) is a good idea and those who reject it are “Luddites”. Now we know better and we have leaked documents to prove it.
Canonical is a British company, which means that it shares space with GCHQ (the NSA’s other big brother, which helps the NSA spy on US citizens and even Europeans). It’s nothing to do with terrorism! Data on Ubuntu One should never have been assumed “private” or “secure”. Based on one of Snowden’s most recent leaks, the NSA systematically goes through files of sysadmins (news links were posted here last month), looking to harvest their passwords which they sometimes store outside work (in plain text) in order to crack networks in many countries. It’s about espionage. Many Ubuntu users are technical people who are also sysadmins, so hopefully they never got lured into Ubuntu One.
Store locally, encrypt, use only Free software, and avoid all blobs (including drivers) where possible. That’s the only way to stay secure these days. If you are a sysadmin, then you are already an “enemy” because in the NSA’s mind you help ‘guard’ the “Bad Guys” (people like Merkel) on your network. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Remember, Richard Stallman has been trying to warn us for years that when it come to “free” online services such as cloud hosted email accounts, we’re not customers. From the moment we signup we become inventory.
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Richard Stallman is the guru of computing freedom –and a great source. He started the “hack” movement as an outsider inside MIT during the Vietnam protesting era, and founded both the GNU software movement and the Free S/W Foundation.
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People who complain that “there’s no tech support for Linux” should discover that there’s even less support for Microsoft products.
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Aside from being a distraction, Canonical says the service is being shut down because “free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB – 50GB free storage.” Interestingly, this departure also marks Canonical’s departure from music streaming services; One offered a music streaming feature for songs stored on the service.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 5:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More adoptions of Chromebooks and new state-wide migrations to GNU/Linux show a trend which many have predicted for 2014
ACCORDING to new numbers from ABI Research [1,2], Chromebooks (running GNU/Linux) are really taking off as companies like Samsung [3] (Korea), Asus [4] (Taiwan) and Acer [5] (Taiwan) really ride the wave and abandon a history of Windows exclusivity on laptops. Robert Pogson calls Chromebooks the “New Thin Client” [6] because they rely on remotely-hosted services (and to a lesser degree remotely-hosted storage as well). Muktware says that Chromebooks prove “you don’t need Windows any more” [7] and now that Windows XP is being abandoned by Microsoft it is probably time to move on and leap towards freedom. Another state in India has reportedly just decided to dump Windows for GNU/Linux [8,9,10].
Citing sales of Chromebook, one editor at IDG chose the silly headline “Will 2019 be the year of the Linux desktop?”
That’s nonsense. GNU/Linux on the desktops (or laptops) has already hit key milestones and it may soon become a dominant force, even within a year or less. Chromebooks themselves run GNU/Linux, but it’s not just them that count. China is reportedly moving to GNU/Linux as well.
A lot of people have been recommending Mint as a substitute for Windows XP as of late [11-13] and they may be right, based on familiarity arguments [14]. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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In AB Research’s latest study of ultrabooks and netbooks, which is where the company places Chromebooks, it found that “An estimated 2.1 million Chromebooks shipped in 2013 with nearly 89 percent of total shipments reaching North America. As Chromebook shipments expand globally, ABI Research forecasts an increase of annual growth rate to 28 percent and reach 11 million shipments in 2019.”
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There has been significant news from Samsung on the Chromebook front recently, and some observers are wondering if the company is going to concentrate on Chromebooks in an exclusive way. The company introduced the Chromebook 2 earlier this month. It has a faux leather back and comes in two sizes — an 11.6-inch and a 13.3-inch model. The 13.3-inch model has a full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080. Samsung’s existing Chromebooks have been very popular and the Chromebook 2 is also going to make its debut in the U.K. shortly.
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We like mini desktops around these parts, but one thing that makes them less than ideal for every use case is that their price tag usually isn’t very mini. By the time you buy something like Intel’s NUC and stuff it full of all the parts it needs, you’ll end up spending somewhere in between $400 and $700, depending on the kit, parts, and operating system you decide to use.
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I have to admit that I didn’t expect much from a $300 touch-screen Chromebook, but from the second I pulled the Acer C720P out of the box I was comfortable with it.
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I have long been an advocate of GNU/Linux thin clients for efficient IT.“Her complaints have come down to zero ever since she switched to Chromebooks. So something is working right for her. So what does she do? Most of her computing is online. She checks her Facebook, all the time. She video chats with friends, she works on her office documents and spreadsheets. She watches Netflix and plays some games. She listens to music and does almost everything else that most of us do these days.
If these are also the things that you do, then you are a Chromebook user.” The difficulty of setting up the terminal server(s) has held that technology up a bit and there is a bit of difficulty getting multimedia to work. Then along came the Chromebook. The Chromebook does it all for the ordinary user and just setting up an account with Google does the rest.
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The central part of Chromebook is the operating system that powers it. Hardware wise, it’s the same hardware that runs Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s Mac. It’s the OS which separates it from the rest. Chrome OS uses the Linux kernel, the same kernel which is being used by Android, Amazon Kindle, B&N’s Nook. Linux powers stock exchanges, NASA’s missions and a lot of other things that you may not have imagined. More or less Linux is like the plastic of the modern world – it’s everywhere. Before we go into details, let’s quickly explain what is a kernel as people get scared the moment they hear the world Linux.
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Their reasoning is said to be that the hardware updates required to run Windows 8 would be too expensive to take place on a large scale. Of course, Microsoft had been expecting this recently, and have been working on an upgrade that would reduce the system requirements. Still, this doesn’t make up for all of the trouble caused by the change of the interface.
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If you’re fed up with Windows entirely, or you don’t feel like spending money on a new Windows license, now might be a great time to consider switching to Linux. There are a number of distributions that are new-user friendly, and if you’re worried that living in the Linux world means you’re doomed to memorizing terminal commands and dealing with unhelpful communities when troubleshooting, don’t be. Finding Linux help is easy these days, and many of the communities around some of the more newbie-friendly distributions are rather welcoming. Best of all, Linux is free, and you can’t beat that.
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Windows XP users are in a tough situation as that operating system draws close to its end of life. But there are many alternatives to Windows XP, and ZDNet thinks that Linux Mint might a very good one indeed.
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First, Mint’s Cinnamon interface can be set to look and act a lot like XP. Yes, you’ll have a learning curve, but it’s nothing like the one you’ll face if you move to Windows 8 or Mac OS.
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