07.14.15
Links 14/7/2015: Android in Enterprise, TOP500 Has 486 on GNU/Linux
Contents
GNU/Linux
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Linux Top 3: VirtualBox 5, Point Linux 3.0 and OpenSUSE Leap 42.x
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Desktop
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HP 455 G3 Ubuntu laptop – Linux on a budget
Canonical’s Ubuntu can be run on just about any x86 machine with a recent and compatible BIOS so who buys pre-loaded machines? HP clearly thinks there is a market for such a thing and recently announced three 15.6-inch laptops running the operating system, competition for a similar range of systems made by Lenovo aimed at the same market.
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Why Linux is More Practical Than OS X
OS X is a solid operating system for those who enjoy Apple’s vision of the ideal desktop. It offers access to pro-level applications that many industries rely on. Yet it isn’t always the most practical operating system for the casual end user. In fact, in some cases, it’s completely overkill.
In this article, I’ll explore why I believe Linux is a more practical solution than OS X, if local techs would simply bother to support it. This article isn’t about which platform is “better.” Instead, it’s a matter of which platform is more practical.
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OS X versus Linux: Which is more practical?
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Server
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How to get systems administrators and developers to agree with Docker
The use of Docker as an application container management system has become standard practice for developers and systems engineers in the space of just two years. Some like to say that haven’t seen such a technological advance since OpenSSH. Docker is now a major player and is widely used in cloud systems architectures. But more than just that: Docker knows how to win developers over.
Let’s take a look at an overview of what we’ve done with Docker, as well as an assessment of the future and of the competition that is appearing on the horizon.
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Supercomputing Power Stagnates as Tianhe-2′s Speed Remains Unchallenged
…485 out of 500 systems were using Linux…
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10 Fastest Machines Look Familiar on New TOP500 List
At No. 2 was Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan, the top system in the United States and one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list, achieved 17.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
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China’s Tianhe-2 still king supercomputer, but US has more systems in top 500
Still, according to Top500, Chinese companies’ influence in the supercomputing industry is rising thanks to Lenovo, which has three systems in the top 500 under its own brand and another 20 jointly with IBM.
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HP, Intel bolster high performance computing alliance
The challenge for these HPC players is that workloads can be delivered via pay-as-you go cloud models. It’s not clear what types of enterprises will rent HPC vs. build systems.
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VMware’s Photon torpedoes the competition
VMware introduces Project Photon: a lightweight Linux operating system for cloud-native apps. Star Trek and Einstein references aside, VMware’s Project Photon appears to be more than a particle or a wave.
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Kernel Space
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Trinity Linux System Call Fuzz Tester Effectively Suspended
Dave Jones, a former Linux kernel engineer at Red Hat, is effectively suspending the future public development of his Trinity system call fuzzer.
Dave had been developing Trinity for the past several years as a Linux system call fuzzer with the original intention of finding Linux kernel bugs — oopses, etc, not particularly security bugs. However, he has grown frustrated by many people using Trinity without contributing back to the project. Additionally, there’s many using Trinity for trying to find security issues and not submitting their Trinity changes back upstream.
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The Companies Most Active On The Systemd Mailing List
In part due to the recent news item about an NSA researcher looking at KDBUS and then having written a mailing list parser for finding how many Intel developers work on their open-source driver, for curiosity sake, here’s a look at the companies most active on the systemd mailing list.
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Systemd – What You Need to Know
Unless you have been living under a rock, or worse – you don’t care much about how Linux works, you must have heard of systemd, the (relatively) new init system replacing the old and outdated SysV init recently adopted by most major Linux distros.
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Here Is Why The Linux 4.2 Kernel Is Messing Up On Some Ubuntu Systems
The Linux 4.2 kernel that’s currently under development ships many new features, but as I’ve been writing about for a while and tweeting, the 4.2 Git code hasn’t been booting on many systems in my test lab for over one week. Various Phoronix readers have also been able to reproduce these different kernel panics that happen almost immediately into the boot process. Here’s the root problem affecting Linux 4.2 on my daily Linux benchmarking systems…
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Broadcom Is Baking North Star 2 Support For The Linux Kernel
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Kernel 4.0 Will Reach EOL Next Week, Kernel 4.0.9 Being The Latest Update From The Series
As you may know, Kernel 4.0.8 has bee recently released, but Kernel 4.0 will reach end of line soon.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced that Kernel 4.0.9 (which will be released next week), will be the last release from the series, the users being advised to upgrade to Kernel 4.1:
“Note, there will only be one more 4.0-stable release, please start moving to 4.1-stable at this point in time, you have been warned.”
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Linux Foundation Increases Access to IT Courses With Materials Available in Spanish and Portuguese
The Linux Foundation is seeing increasing interest among early career IT professionals for basic Linux system administration (SysAdmin) skills as an entry point for a lucrative career.
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The Core i7 5775C Is Still Running Into Issues On Linux
I wrote earlier this month about kernel panics when trying to test the i7-5775C Broadwell H socketed processor on Linux. I ended up finding a workaround to improve the stability and that was by enabling the “CPU OC Fixed Mode” from the UEFI/BIOS on this particular Z97 motherboard, after my original Z97 test motherboard wouldn’t even boot up with the i7-5775C when equipped with the latest, Broadwell-supporting BIOS. Since then I bought a third motherboard to see how the situation plays out.
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Benchmarks
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Trying Out One Of The Cheapest, Sub-$40 SSDs On Linux
If you are in the market for a new solid-state drive but aren’t too concerned about speed or storage capacity but just need something very affordable to get the job done, the ADATA SP600 is available in a 64GB model for less than $40 USD.
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Applications
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Speeding up less
Often when doing performance analysis or debugging, it boils down to stare at long text trace files with the less text viewer. Yes you can do a lot of analysis with custom scripts, but at some point it’s usually needed to also look at the raw data.
The first annoyance in less when opening a large file is the time it takes to count lines (less counts lines at the beginning to show you the current position as a percentage). The line counting has the easy workaround of hitting Ctrl-C or using less -n to disable percentage. But it would be still better if that wasn’t needed.
Nicolai Haenle speeded the process by about 20x in his less repository.
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[ANN] Release of Bugzilla 5.0
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RcppGSL 0.2.5
A new version of RcppGSL arrived on CRAN a couple of days ago. This package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package.
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gettext-0.19.5 released
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IceCat 31.8.0 release
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QMPlay2 Gets a New Release, Mostly Fixes
In the past I have reviewed QMPlay2, a video player using ffmpeg and the Qt 5 toolkit, which gets updated often and ships with some great features. The latest version is 15.07.12, released yesterday, and brings several fixes over the previous release.
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Proprietary
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Free Helm soft synth arrives for OS X, Windows and Linux
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Look Mom! I’m on the Internet!
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Vivaldi Web Browser Gets Fixes for Zoom, UI, Rendering, and More
Vivaldi, a web browser built by one of the Opera founders and his team, has been upgraded once more, and the developers seem to be preparing to exit Technical Preview 3 and enter the next stage, Technical Preview 4.
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StorageCraft ties together backup, disaster recovery of Windows, Linux systems with all-new ShadowProtect SPX
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Instructionals/Technical
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How To Install Kernel 4.1.2 on CentOS 7, Via Repository
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12 Useful PHP Commandline Usage Every Linux User Must Know
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Improve the performance of function calls with OpenPOWER ABI
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How to insert code snippets on the command line without executing them
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Monitoring Networked Devices Powered Status
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Install The Ajenti Control Panel And Ajenti V On Ubuntu
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Install MongoDB 3.0 on Fedora Linux (Server/Workstation)
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Ubuntu 14.04 upstart and bonding
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How To: Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 4.1.2 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint Systems
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Turning Off the Mute Button
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Write Nagios Plugin Using Bash Script
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How to install PlayOnLinux on Linux
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How to secure your PDF documents with passwords (and how to crack them if needed)
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How to Install SiteBios, A Linux Control Panel with Full Lamp Stack
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How to monitor free disk space at Amazon EC2 with Cloud Watch
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Package repositories FAIL
Elad kindly told me that if I install the GStreamer codecs, and disable Flash, it should work. I didn’t have those codecs on my not-for-watching-TV machine, so I set to it.
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Games
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Steam for Linux Gets Multiple Updates in Just Two Weeks
Valve has released a sleuth of updates for the Steam client, and the developers are preparing for another major stable update. The Linux platform didn’t get any special attention, but many of the improvements made apply to all the supported OSes.
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Alien: Isolation Might Arrive on Linux
Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival game developed by Creative Assembly, a studio mostly known for its Total War series. From the looks of it, a Linux version might just be in the works.
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Vendetta Online 1.8.344 MMORPG Has Better Anti-Aliasing Support for Intel GPUs
Guild Software has published details about a new double update for their popular Vendetta Online science-fiction massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS operating systems.
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Volgarr The Viking Action Platformer Now On GOG For Linux
Volgarr the Viking is a highly rated game that mixes action and platforming, and it’s now on GOG for Linux.
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America’s Army: Proving Grounds Developers Apparently Looking At A Linux Port
It seems a developer of America’s Army: Proving Grounds sent an email to Phoronix to mention they are looking to port it to Linux.
Take this with a grain of salt since it’s Phoronix, but it has been on Linux before and dropped, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
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Alien: Isolation Looks Like It’s Coming To Linux, Oh God, Don’t Make Me Play It
Alien: Isolation is a terrific horror game, and a franchise I get extremely excited for. Alien: Isolation is also one of the few “Alien” based games that wasn’t a let down.
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Albion Online Summer Alpha On Linux!
Today I’d like to cover a game I didn’t know existed only a few days back, a game out of a genre that is heavily under represented on our beloved platform, a(n old-school) sandbox MMORPG named Albion Online!
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An Awesome Developer Response To A Comment On The Linux Version Being A Waste Of Time
A developer working on ‘X Rebirth’ responded to a user claiming they are wasting their time on the Linux version, and it’s a great response.
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Legend Of Grimrock Now Playable Again On Linux For Nvidia 900 Series
Legend Of Grimrock has sadly been unplayable for anyone on Linux with an Nvidia 900 series chip (like the 970), until now. The developers just put up a Linux beta, and it works.
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Unturned, A Highly Rated Free To Play Survival Game Released For Linux
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Samorost2, Machinarium Collector’s Edition, To The Moon & Botanicula Now On GOG For Linux
Heads up GOG fans, they just recently released some more great Linux games to build up your DRM free collections. It’s really great to see them getting a bit quicker at it now, and building up their Linux catalogue is a must.
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Postal 2 For Linux Finally Has A Big Update, Includes Steam Workshop
Postal 2′s Linux version has been lagging behind the Windows build for a long time, but no more. RunningWithScissors took the port in-house, and it’s now updated. Originally the port was maintained by Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, but he was too busy.
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Are Intel Iris Pro 6200 Graphics Fast Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?
While I’m still working on my full Intel Core i7 5775C Linux review of this socketed Broadwell processor with Iris Pro Graphics 6200, and still working through some strange issues, I do have some Steam Linux gaming figures to share tonight for those interested in how Intel’s latest-generation Iris Graphics are performing with the open-source Mesa driver stack.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Five lightweight Linux desktop environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Chakra GNU/Linux Gets KDE Apps 15.04.3, Wine 1.7.46, Thunderbird 38.1, Firefox 39
Neophytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux development team has posted news about the latest updates introduced in the current stable release of the rolling-release operating system.
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Chakra: KDE Applications 15.04.3 available
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Calligra 2.9.6 Office Suite Lands with Numerous Fixes
Calligra is an integrated suite of applications for office, creative, and management needs. A fresh update has been released for the application, and it looks like the developers still have plans for this branch.
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Brief Notes on My digiKam Workflow
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KDEPIM report (week 27)
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME is Better and the Practically of Linux
In Linuxville today Eric Griffith demonstrated why GNOME is better than KDE and Attila Orosz explained what you need to know about systemd. Reviews of Semplice 7, Mint 17.2, and Mangaka caught my eye and Matt Hartley compared Linux to OS X saying, “I believe Linux is a more practical solution than OS X.”
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GTG Preferences — REMADE!
It seemed to take forever. Endless PR reviews, improvements, code refactoring and hours spent working on editor, removing deprecated icons or search.
[...]
Without some exhausting descriptions, take a look at the current additions to the Getting Things GNOME!
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GNOME Foundation AGM 2015
This year’s GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting will be held on the 8th of August at 15:45 (CEST). As with previous years, it is being held at GUADEC [1]. This year’s conference is at the Folkets Hus [2] in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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GNOME’s Gnote Note-Taking App Gets New Features, Under-the-Hood Improvements
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Diary of a new board member
The GNOME Foundation Board can often be a bit opaque. Generally it works in the background, and while you can get a sense of some of its activities through the minutes, it is easy to forget that the board is out there doing its thing.
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Distributions
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Reviews
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Review: SolydK 201506
Originally, I wanted this post to be a comparison test. Specifically, I wanted to compare SolydK to the KDE edition of Manjaro Linux. However, it turns out that Manjaro Linux uses KDE 5 (I know this is a deliberate abuse of notation), while SolydK uses KDE 4. That doesn’t sound like a fair comparison, so I’m splitting these into separate reviews.
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Mangaka Is an Artful Blend of Simplicity and Style
If you prefer to tweak your Linux settings to the max, you will find Mangaka and its Pantheon desktop a bit too limiting. However, if you want an unusually gorgeous background and a very simple Linux OS that has little or no learning curve, the Linux Mangaka distro can be a real joy to use.
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Semplice Linux 7 and the vera desktop
It has been a few years since I last reviewed Semplice Linux. The Debian-based distribution has changed in recent years and some people asked if I would revisit this project. According to the distribution’s website, “Semplice is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian Unstable (Sid) with the goal to provide a simple, fast, lightweight and cool environment.” In itself, this description is not unusual. What sets Semplice 7 apart is the project’s unique desktop environment, called “vera”. The vera desktop is briefly talked about in the project’s release notes. The new desktop environment is based on GTK3 libraries (the same libraries which act as the foundation for the GNOME and Cinnamon desktops). The vera desktop ships with a new power manager, a screen shot utility and its own control centre panel. The release notes also mention vera ships with an interactive tutorial to help new users get acquainted with the young interface.
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New Releases
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Developmen Linux Update Brings the L Stopped
On July 12, 2015, the developers of the nOS Linux kernel-based operating system announced that they would no longer be involved in the development process of the rolling-release distribution.
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Solus OS Now Boots in 3.5 Seconds
A new day, a new Solus update. The developers are keeping themselves busy, and they are working to improve the operating system constantly. The latest might not look like a major upgrade, but the devs have managed to refine the boot time considerably.
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New Manjaro Linux Update Brings the Latest AMD Catalyst Drivers, Linux Kernel 4.1.2
On July 13, the Manjaro Linux development team, through Philip Müller, had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of the fourth update for the stable Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 distribution.
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SystemRescueCd 4.5.4 Moves to Linux Kernels 3.14.48 and 3.18.18 LTS
On July 13, François Dupoux, leader of the SystemRescueCd project, has informed users about the immediate availability for download of another maintenance release of his Live CD Linux distribution.
According to the brief changelog, which we’ve attached at the end of the blog post, the SystemRescueCd 4.5.4 release brings updates to both the standard and alternative kernels, as well as new versions of some of the most essential core components, which include e2fsprogs, xfsprogs, and btrfs-progs.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Zorin OS 10 RC Screenshot Tour – A Gorgeous New Design for a Different OS
A new version of Zorin OS has been released over the weekend, and it comes with a ton of new stuff, not to mention an updated desktop design. We now take a closer look at this distro to see what’s so special about it.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Enjoy another video of the Scion release!
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Openmandriva – a brief review
I had only recently reviewed Mageia5, when I noticed an announcement for OpenMandriva 2014.2. So I was mistaken that Mageia was what was left of Mandrake/Mandriva. OpenMandriva is another fork that continues.
I have tested only from the live media. I did not do a full install to a hard drive. So this is a more limited review than I gave for Mageia5.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSE expands partner programme for 64-bit ARM chips
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ARM gains more ground in the data center as SUSE joins the 64-bit party
The move, like so many of its other announcements lately, comes as a response to long-time rival Red Hat Inc, which launched a program to court manufacturers dealing in processors based on designs from the British semiconductor powerhouse all the way back last year. Both vendors hope to seize the rise of software-defined environments made up of small, low-cost servers that benefit from the power efficiency of ARM chips.
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SUSE Launches Partner Program to Bring SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 to 64-bit ARM Processors
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AppliedMicro’s X-Gene(R) Processor Enterprise Software Ecosystem Continues Rapid Growth With SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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Channel role key as Red Hat ramps up global cloud plans
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Red Hat program manager advocates DevOps methodology
Patricia Bogoevici started off as a software developer and has graduated to consulting on Agile and DevOps projects. At the recent Red Hat Summit, Bogoevici and her co-presenter Josh Minthorne presented a talk about using Agile and DevOps methodology to achieve faster production deployment.
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Red Hat Launches Expansive Global Cloud Ecosystem with Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program
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Red Hat launches global ecosystem for open hybrid cloud building
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Red Hat enriches channel partner programme
Open source solutions vendor Red Hat has announced the global launch of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider programme, replacing Red Hat’s existing Certified Cloud Provider programme.
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Red Hat, SAP and Intel talk ‘innovative infrastructure’
Speakers from Red Hat, Inc., SAP SE, and Intel discussed their collaborations and innovations as part of the open-source community during a General Session at the 2015 Red Hat Summit. In keeping with the open spirit, the session started with highlights from the Enable Project, which designs and distributes open-source, 3D-printed prosthetics at no cost to individuals.
[...]
After sharing an excerpt from “Open Source Stories,” Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, took the stage to celebrate the victory of open source over the past few years. He cited the Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” He went on to say, “I’m here to tell you today that Linux and the open-source community have won. And they’ve completed the Gandhi quote here. They can now check the last box.”
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Sees Large Outflow of Money
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Stocks to Track – Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT), Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC)
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Short Interest Update of Red Hat, Inc.
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Company Shares of Red Hat, Inc. Rally 2.16%
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) rose by 2.16% in the past week and 0.45% for the last 4 weeks. In the past week, the shares has outperformed the S&P 500 by 2.17% and the outperformance increases to 1.29% for the last 4 weeks.
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Red Hat Expands Certified Cloud Provider Program
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Red Hat beefs up cloud partner programme as ecosystem broadens
Red Hat is replacing its existing cloud provider programme with a revamped one it claims will help provide better support for distributors, managed service providers and systems integrators. The company said the move was in response to what it sees as a broadening ecosystem of partnerships in cloud.
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Fedora
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The VirtualBox and Fedora 22.
I like very much the new Virtual Box and Fedora also, because it’s fast (~ 1 min) and I don’t need to start another hardware to test my linux stuff.
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Updated Fedora 22 live isos are now available
I am happy to announce the release of F22-20150629 update lives.
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Steam made easy
The Steam repository has received some love; changes to the Steam package will also be pushed in RPMFusion after a bit of feedback.
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Remi Collet: PHP version 5.4.43, 5.5.27 and 5.6.11
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Fedora 23 call for Test Days
Bit late blogging about this, but roshi sent out the Fedora 23 Call for Test Days at the end of June.
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Linux AIO Gathers All the Fedora 22 Live CDs into a Single ISO Image
The developers of the Linux AIO project have been glad to inform us about the immediate availability for download of new builds of their Linux AIO Fedora project, which is now based on the latest stable Fedora Linux release.
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Debian Family
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Debian Unstable And Ubuntu 15.10 Will Be Using GCC 5 As The Default Compiler
The Debian developers have decided to make GCC 5 the default compiler in Debian Unstable, but Debian 9.0 Stretch will be most likely using GCC 6 as default. Also, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf will adopt GCC 5 in a short time.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s Unity 8, Mir, and LXC for Xapps Received Major Improvements [corrected link]
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Latest OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Have Not Affected Supported Ubuntu OSes
A new set of OpenSSL vulnerabilities have been identified, and all Linux distributions have been quick to implement patches in order to close these issues. As it turns out, none of the supported Ubuntu OSes has been affected, and no patch has been released.
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Dekko Native IMAP Email Client for Ubuntu Touch Shows Desktop Convergence
Dekko is a native IMAP email client for Ubuntu Touch and is coming along just fine. From the looks of it, developers are not only working to make it work on the phone but to also scale and properly function on the desktop as well.
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Lenovo Laptops Preloaded With Ubuntu To Be Sold in India Starting at Rs.48,000
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Ubuntu Touch to Get Enhanced SMS Capabilities with Next Update
The Ubuntu Touch platform is getting some major improvements in the coming months, and it looks like the SMS function is finally getting the attention it deserves.
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Two Django Vulnerabilities Fixed in Ubuntu OSes
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Unity 8′s 3D Task Switcher for the Ubuntu Desktop Is Evolving
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You Can Now Install Most of the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps on Your Ubuntu Desktop
Another week has passed, and Canonical’s David Planella has sent in his regular report that informs us about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Community Team.
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Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Drops Desktop Cube as Default for Compiz, for Now
Ubuntu MATE 15.10 has a few windows managers, and one of those is Compiz. From the looks it, the developers of the distro are making some changes so that the entire Compiz experience is more enjoyable and more stable.
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New Media Player in the Works for Ubuntu Touch to Replace Grooveshark
Grooveshark is no more, and the service was also removed from Ubuntu Touch, but the developers are working to replace that with something else, and it looks like something is in the works.
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UEFI Firmware Update Support To Be Backported To Ubuntu 15.04
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Devices/Embedded
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Linux-friendly EtherCAT controller expands via PCIe
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Phones
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Tizen
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Next Gear Tizen Smartwatch could launch in August in the US, with the Note 5
Samsung Electronics usually has their big reveal of their next big Smartphone (Note x) in September, at the IFA Event in Berlin since 2011, but it looks like Samsung are looking at moving it to mid-August, according to a person familiar with the matter. The reason behind the move is that they wanted a bit more room between their announcement and Apple Inc unveiling of the next iPhone.
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Android
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Now Send Directions to Your Android Device From Desktop Google Maps
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Send places from Google Maps to your Android device
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Android Wear reportedly getting watch-to-watch sharing features
Google is launching brand new watch-to-watch communication features for Android Wear that are not unlike those on Apple’s Watch, according to Phandroid. Users will reportedly be able to send each other doodles, photos, stickers, messages and more using a feature called “Together.” That’s pretty similar to the Apple Watch’s Digital Touch, which allows users to relay tap patterns, drawings and even heartbeats to each other. Oddly, Android Wear users who want to share items may need to use the same the same watchface, as the feature isn’t system-wide. However, Phandroid admitted that its information on that aspect “is quite old.”
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Google may add doodle, emoji sharing between Android Wear smartwatches
Apple Watch users can send each other doodles and emoji, but those with Android Wear smartwatches haven’t had the same luxury.
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The Next Version Of Android Wear Will Reportedly Include Watch-To-Watch Communication And Interactive Faces
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Google is going to one-up the Apple Watch by launching an Android Wear messenger
Google is planning to release a mysterious new watch-to-watch messaging service during its next Android Wear update, according to tech website Phandroid.
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The best Pebble fitness app just got better for Android users
Since last fall, Pebble smartwatch users have been able to count their steps and track their sleep, but they’re on their own in deciding which third-party fitness app to use.
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Apple, with 20% of sales, takes 92% of smartphone profits [Ed: citing just one obscure firm called Canaccord Genuity]
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It’s almost impossible to make money selling Android phones
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Apple’s Share of Smartphone Industry’s Profits Soars to 92%
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BlackBerry’s Android Phone Confirmed: Company Registers 2 Secured Android Domains
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BlackBerry is living in an Android world, and here’s why you should care
Blackberry and Android usually don’t go together in one sentence, but that’s about to change. The shrieks and awe built around the prospect of a Blackberry smartphone running Android is in full force this week after the revelation that BlackBerry has purchased two Android-centric domain names: AndroidSecured.com and AndroidSecured.net.
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What AppBugs is really saying about Android app security
A new “security app” for Android claims apps like the ASTRO File Manager are vulnerable. Jack Wallen challenges this claim.
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Diving into Android M: what else is new in Preview 2?
Last week Android M Developer Preview 2 arrived on scene. That very day I released our first “Diving into M” post for the second preview, which highlighted the changes to the launcher and the ability to now edit the status bar with the Tuner UI tool in the developer options.
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[Update: Nexus 9] Android M Developer Preview 2 Nexus OTA ZIP Roundup
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Google Photos keeps collecting your pictures even after you delete the Android app
If you dabbled with Google Photos when it was launched last month but decided it wasn’t for you, make sure you also turn photo backup off in your Android phone’s Google Settings menu, or else you’ll continue uploading new pictures to the service. Nashville Business Journal writer David A. Arnott discovered the quirk when hundreds of family photos appeared on Google Photos, even when he’d deleted the pictures and uninstalled the app itself from his phone.
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VanillaAOSP ROM brings Android 5.1.1 Lollipop OS update to Nexus 5: How to install
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Google launch Ethernet adapter for Chromecast
Google has launched a new Ethernet adapter for it’s Chromecast device. The aim of this accessory is to let you connect your Chromecast directly to your router to create a fast and reliable connection for your Chromecast. The Ethernet adapter has a central hub that plugs into the wall, this will provide power to the Chromecast via a USB cable.
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First Click: Google’s Android chief is wrong about technology’s role in the family
Wait — wait just one second. As a parent, I take umbrage with Pichai’s absolutist response. Especially since the Android OS he’s in charge of can be found on 80 percent of all smartphones sold worldwide.
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Lava Android One 2.0 Set for Release in India This Week; What we Know so Far on Google’s Affordable Nexus Phone
Unlike last year’s budget Android One series, the upcoming Google phone is said to come packed with upgraded hardware and is expected to retail under mid-range category, thus filling the gap between entry-level and the top-end Nexus series.
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Android Makes Strides in Enterprise Embedded Market
In May, Google revealed a small-footprint operating system called Brillo, a version of Android for Internet of Things applications that will arrive in a developer preview in the third quarter. It will work with a cross-platform communications framework called Weave that will arrive in Q4.
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Free Software/Open Source
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Minimal object storage with Minio
Go is opinionated, and influenced heavily by Google’s use case, but Minio doesn’t mind inheriting Google’s way of building infrastructure software. Go is not as mature as Java yet, and it still has some rough edges when it comes to tooling and garbage collection; however, Go is ready for developing production-grade software. The next release of Go 1.5 implements efficient concurrent garbage collection and address the tooling issues.
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NSA Releases New Open Source Cyber Tool; Linda Burger Comments
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NSA cybersecurity tool now publicly available
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NSA launches new security tool in attempt to win back public trust
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Stormy Peters heads Cloud Foundry developer relations
News from last month, but important enough to revisit — Cloud Foundry Foundation has appointed Stormy Peters as vice president of technical evangelism.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Thunderbird 38.1 Brings Fixes Only
As you may know, Thunderbird is an open-source e-mail client and chat client developed by Mozilla. Among others, it has support for email addresses, newsgroup, news feed and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) Client, managing multiple accounts. Also, it has support for different themes and its power can be extended by plugins.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mirantis announce ‘cloud-in-a-box’ Unlocked Appliances
Mirantis have announced the launch of Mirantis Unlocked Appliances, a programme to allow customers to buy flexible turnkey OpenStack appliances. The appliances are certified and delivered by ‘Certified Rack Partners’, for now this list is limited to a Redmond based company called Redapt.
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Docker Machine with OpenStack, Cinder’s incremental backup explained, and more OpenStack news
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Docker Container or Shipping Container?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Business
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Non-Open/Openwashing
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SmartBear ‘Opens’ SoapUI Open Source API Testing Tool To Monitor Live Systems [Ed: "opens" in scare quotes has got to mean openwashing]
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BSD
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FreeBSD 10.2 Beta 1 Now Ready for Download and Testing
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GhostBSD 10.1 BETA2 now available
We are pleased to announce the availability GhostBSD 10.1 BETA2 MATE & XFCE which is available on SourceForge for the amd64 and i386 architectures.
Before going further I will like to say a special thanks Ovidiu who recently join back the project and Andrea who join the project, they have help to make GhostBSD better, add up new feature and fixed issue.
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GhostBSD 10.1 Beta 2 Brings Back Xfce To Complement MATE
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Openness/Sharing
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What organizations can learn from open culture and technologies
Look at distributed systems, decentralized computing, open source, and lean principles. With these and other technical initiatives, we’ve pushed boundaries and improved our applications, our networks, our companies, and our lives.
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Open Source Core Advances
In late June, Berkeley held a workshop to get to know what research has been underway on RISC-V. RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) originally developed at Berkeley and based on established reduced instruction set computing principles. It is a minimal, modular ISA ready for hardware implementation, freely available to both academia and industry.
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Open Data
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An introduction to big data from Opensource.com
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Open data: government ‘needs to go much further’, says Cabinet Office minister
The government needs to open up far more of its information and move to a culture of making decisions based on data not targets, Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock MP has said.
During a speech in London today, Hancock (pictured) praised progress since 2010 on opening up public sector data, with 20,000 datasets now published on the government’s portal data.gov.uk.
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Programming
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HHVM 3.8 Brings More Performance Improvements For Hack & PHP
Facebook developers today announced the release of HHVM 3.8.0, their interpreter for PHP and their own Hack programming language.
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Perl CFLAGS and LDFLAGS change
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Out with the old code, in with the new
Bruce Eckel is the author of Thinking in Java, Thinking in C++, and a number of other books on computer programming. He’s been in the computer industry for 30 years and periodically gets frustrated and tries to quit—then something like Scala comes along and offers hope and sucks him back in. He’s given hundreds of presentations around the world, and enjoys putting on alternative conferences and events like The Java Posse Roundup.
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Code Version Control Problem
Code version control using Git or SVN seems like too trivial to some small project, but today’s experience taught me a lesson.
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Standards/Consortia
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Effective IPR Policies and Standards Organization Success
Once upon a time, if you asked a standards setting organization (SSO) what its intellectual property policy rights (IPR) policy was, you’d get a simple answer: “We own the copyright in everything we produce.” Today, if an SSO that develops standards in the technology arena were to give an answer like that, it would find that its members were heading for the exits.
What’s changed, of course, is that information technology has infiltrated almost every aspect of our existence, and that includes standards development as well. For example, an SSO that used to limit its attention to setting construction standards relating to heating and ventilation installations will now also host working groups developing standards for sophisticated building control systems.
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How to win the copyleft fight—without litigation
The Software Freedom Conservancy’s Bradley Kuhn is probably best known for his work in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL). Enforcement-by-litigation might get the headlines, but Kuhn treats the courts as a last resort.
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4 Indians among 32 Young Leaders named by Asia Society in New York
Choudhary is a technology lawyer and an online civil liberties activist. She is the founding executive director of SFLC.in, a pro-bono legal services organisation based in New Delhi that focuses on free speech and expression, privacy, software patents, network neutrality, internet governance and access to knowledge.
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Leftovers
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True confessions: I wrote for an Internet content mill
The list goes on; it’s seemingly infinite. Such search terms offer insight into both our fears (“how bad is caffeine during pregnancy”) and desires (“bronies”). And thanks to thousands of poorly paid freelance writers looking to pick up some extra cash or toiling for wages, the results we’re served in these vulnerable moments are often hastily scribbled, poorly written, ungrammatical filler text. This old world relic represents a time when getting to the top of Google rankings wasn’t dependent on the quality of information you supplied but how many people linked to your site.
This kind of text—the equivalent of fast food or hangover-friendly TV—is the preserve of content mills, an Internet subculture where for-hire workers are tasked with writing vast amounts of online copy for a pittance. Today, when more media outlets and self-publishing tools exist than ever before, such word factories somehow continue to exist.
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Science
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Solved? How scientists say mystery craters were formed in northern Siberia
A new expedition to the craters in Yamal, in northern Russia, shows how they have rapidly altered since they were first noticed last year, but also indicates the possibility that not all the craters were formed in identical ways. The holes – first noticed last year – intrigued and perplexed scientists from around the world, initially provoking a number of explanations as to their cause, the most outlandish of which was that they were caused by stray missiles or even aliens from outer space.
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Mammal–Carnivorous Plant Mutualism
A pitcher plant species in Borneo attracts bat inhabitants by reflecting sonar signals from the flying mammals, advertising a cozy roost, and getting nitrogen-rich guano in return.
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Security
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Security advisories for Monday
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rolling expired certs
My cert expired after a year because that seems to be the thing to do. I imagine there’s some nebulous threat model where somebody stole my server key and has been impersonating me for the past six months, but now they can’t. Although, if they stole the old key, they can probably steal the new key. I suppose we do this because revocation doesn’t work, but a six month half life is a long time to sit exposed.
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Hacking Team claims terrorists can now use its tools
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Hacking Team: government-sponsored cyberattack company likely hacked by another country, it claims
An elite cyberattack group that was employed by governments and agencies was probably hacked by another country, it has said — and the attack has led to its powerful hacking tools being released into the wild.
Hacking Team was hacked last week, revealing private emails and documents as well as insights into its tools. The leaked documents showed many of the vulnerabilities that were being used by the group — such as a bug in Adobe Flash that can be exploited to get complete control of a computer — which has meant that anyone can counteract them as well as use them for their own ends.
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Flash HOLED AGAIN TWICE below waterline in fresh Hacking Team reveals
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Adobe to Patch Two More Zero-Day Flaws in Flash
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Mozilla blocks Flash as Facebook security chief calls for its death
After yesterday’s news that Facebook’s new chief security officer wants to set a date to kill Flash once and for all, the latest version Mozilla’s Firefox browser now blocks Adobe’s vulnerability-riddled software as standard. Mark Schmidt, the head of the Firefox support team at Mozilla, tweeted that all versions of Flash Player are blocked in the browser as of its latest update, accompanying the news with an image showing a raised fist and the phrase “Occupy Flash.”
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Can we kill Adobe Flash?
Yesterday the usual tech news outlets were buzzing over an accidental tweet which the media incorrectly interpreted as Mozilla was ditching flash (Blame The Verge for the chain reaction of copied news articles) entirely as a policy. While that is not the case, I was just as excited as many at the faux-news. This got me thinking: what would it really take for the web to kill Adobe Flash? Could Mozilla really make such a move and kill Flash on its own if it wanted to?
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No Flash 0.5 – still fighting the legacy
Last week I released No Flash 0.5, my addon for Firefox to fix the legacy of video embedding done with Flash. If you are like me and don’t have Flash installed, sometime you encounter embedded video that don’t work. No Flash will fix some by replacing the Flash object with a HTML5 video. This is done using the proper video embedding for HTML5.
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Facebook’s New Security Chief Calls On Adobe To Kill Flash
This message comes after it was revealed that the recently hacked “Hacking Team” was using Flash zero-day vulnerabilities to hack journalists, activists, governments and more. Alex Stamos, like other security experts, must have also gotten tired of hearing about so many security vulnerabilities that Flash has had during its entire lifetime.
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How to disable Flash Player: Why now’s a better time than ever
Now more than ever, leaving Adobe Flash Player on your system is looking like a dubious proposition.
While Flash has long been a popular vector for malware, last week’s security breach of surveillance software firm Hacking Team underscored just how vulnerable Flash can be. Hacking Team was relying on at least three unpatched Flash exploits, which cybercriminals immediately adapted for their own nefarious uses. Adobe is scrambling to patch the exploits, but at least one remains unfixed as of this writing.
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Linux Foundation serves up a tasty dish of BUGS [Ed: FUD theme]
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Linux tools infested by huge bugs [Ed: FUD theme]
Dubbed the Census Project the initiative has been finding an embarrassing number of flaws in common core Linux system utilities that have network access. Some of them have nowhere near enough development relative to their importance.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Texans to “practice counter-insurgency” while U.S. special forces participate in Operation Jade Helm
In response to the multi-state military exercise organized by the federal government, a group of very concerned Texans have organized what they’re calling “Counter Jade Helm,” in which “citizens will participate in an unofficial fashion to practice counter-insurgency, organizational and intelligence gathering and reporting skills.”
Operation Jade Helm begins on July 15th, but as the media is barred from covering the exercise, citizen surveillance is the only option that people like retired firefighter Eric Johnson have to assuage their concerns about what the SEALs, Green Berets, and Air Force Special Ops are actually up to.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years
A newly unearthed missive from Lenny Bernstein, a climate expert with the oil firm for 30 years, shows concerns over high presence of carbon dioxide in enormous gas field in south-east Asia factored into decision not to tap it
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This is what it’s going to look like when 20 feet of sea level rise swallows America
It’ll take awhile, but according to a new paper published in the journal Science, the planet’s on track to see sea levels rise by at least 20 feet — and that’s only if we manage to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a target many believe we’re already doomed to surpass.
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How the Biggest, Most Expensive Oil Spill in History Changed Nothing at All
A hulking rig is engulfed in flame. It’s sinking, spitting out a giant plume of smoke in the process. A firing squad of rescue ships are dousing it with ocean spray. Eleven men are already dead.
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Finance
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Yanis Varoufakis full transcript: our battle to save Greece
Yanis Varoufakis: I’m feeling on top of the world – I no longer have to live through this hectic timetable, which was absolutely inhuman, just unbelievable. I was on 2 hours sleep every day for five months. … I’m also relieved I don’t have to sustain any longer this incredible pressure to negotiate for a position I find difficult to defend, even if I managed to force the other side to acquiesce, if you know what I mean.
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The Laziness Dogma
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Authors Guild: ISPs Should Monitor and Filter Pirated Content
The Authors Guild has sent a letter to the U.S. Congress asking lawmakers to strengthen current copyright law. To stop dozens of millions in claimed losses, the authors want to increase liability for Internet service providers and make it mandatory for the companies to monitor and filter pirated content.
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Australian woman jailed in Abu Dhabi for ‘bad words’ posted on social media
A 39-year-old Australian woman has been arrested and jailed in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates after she was found guilty of “writing bad words on social media”.
West Australian Jodi Magi remains in jail and it’s not known how long she will be held for.
Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill reports.
SOPHIE MCNEIL: In February, 39-year-old Jodi Magi took a photo of a car in her apartment block in Abu Dhabi that was parked across two disabled parking spaces without any disability stickers.
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Seven in ten Sky internet users block out porn: Now rival providers face pressure to follow suit
Almost three-quarters of Sky’s internet customers have opted to block online pornographic websites after being forced to choose.
The company announced an automatic block on harmful sites six months ago in a bid to prevent children from stumbling across hardcore images and videos.
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China’s new Internet law introduces stricter censorship, surveillance powers
Powers to require online surveillance, remove content, block foreign web sites and shut down parts of the network are contained in the draft of a new Internet security law recently published by the Chinese government. Although these approaches have all been used in the past, their legal basis has sometimes been unclear. If approved, the new law will make it much easier for the Chinese authorities to force compliance from Internet service providers, which will have major knock-on effects for users in the country.
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Privacy
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Privacy talk at DEF CON canceled under questionable circumstances
Earlier this month, several news outlets reported on a powerful tool in the fight between those seeking anonymity online, versus those who push for surveillance and taking it away.
The tool, ProxyHam, is the subject of a recently canceled talk at DEF CON 23 and its creator has been seemingly gagged from speaking about anything related to it. Something’s off, as this doesn’t seem like a typical cancellation.
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Feds can read every email you opened last year without a warrant
It’s no longer a surprise that the government is reading your emails. What you might not know is that it can readily read most of your email without a warrant.
Any email or social networking message you’ve opened that’s more than six months old can also be accessed by every law enforcement official in government — without needing to get a warrant. That’s because a key provision in a law almost three decades’ old allows this kind of access with a mere subpoena, which doesn’t require a judge.
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All Instant Messaging Could Be Killed In The UK Within Weeks
UK Prime Minister David Cameron is pressing ahead with new powers that plan to stop people from sending any form of encrypted messages. Under the rather Orwellian “Draft Communications Data Bill” (nicknamed Snooper’s Charter) the legislation proposed would require ISPs and mobile providers to maintain records of each user’s internet browsing activity (including social media), email correspondence, voice calls, and mobile phone messaging services and store the records for 12 months.
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How the NYPD Uses Facebook to Surveil, Entrap and Arrest Teenagers
In October 2012, then-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced a new initiative, called “Operation Crew Cut,” which would target gang activity by focusing on so-called street crews. Kelly doubled the size of the anti-gang unit to 300 police officers, assigned to the task of surveilling teenagers on Facebook. Many of these kids are under 18, some as young as 12, and just about all of them are black and brown, from low-income neighborhoods. The officers involved are encouraged to make fake Facebook profiles in order to spy on individuals’ Facebook statuses. The operation often entails reading private Facebook messages between friends and is sometimes coupled with phone and video surveillance. Soon press releases were coming out of the NYPD offices announcing dozens of alleged gang members had been arrested due to the Crew Cut initiative.
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Warning – Firefox Has You in the Pocket
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Hacking Team’s ‘Project X’ Wants To Spy on Tor Users
After the Edward Snowden revelations and the rise of deep web marketplaces, more and more people are using the anonymity network Tor to take back their privacy or access hidden sites, sometimes to break the law.
In response to this trend, surveillance tech company Hacking Team let slip last month that they were working on a solution to de-anonymize users of Tor for their customers, which include US law enforcement agencies and authoritarian regimes. After the massive Hacking Team leak last week, details of a work-in-progress system to monitor Tor and other encrypted traffic have emerged.
Called “Project X,” Hacking Team’s method proposes to re-route a target’s internet traffic before it enters the Tor network, so it could be monitored by the company’s clients. This is described in two PowerPoint presentations included in the 400 GB Hacking Team breach.
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Civil Rights
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Man arrested after charging iPhone on London Overground train
A man has accused British Transport police of being “overzealous” and “ridiculous” after he was arrested for charging his iPhone using a socket on a London Overground train.
Robin Lee, a 45-year-old artist based in Islington, was handcuffed and taken to a British Transport Police station on Caledonian Road after his arrest for “abstracting electricity”.
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Teenager handcuffed by police after giving £1 to a homeless man wins £5,000 pay out for unlawful detention
A student who stopped to give money to a homeless person was handcuffed by a police officer who thought they were swapping drugs.
Apprentice George Wilson, from Wallasey, received a £5,000 pay out after police accepted he had been detained unlawfully.
A shocking recording of the incident reveals that when Mr Wilson denied he was behaving in a drunk and disorderly manner, as police had alleged, the officer replies: “That’s not how I’ll write it up pal.”
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Nicky Hager heads to court over raid
Investigative journalist Nicky Hager is set to make his case against a police raid on his Wellington home.
Mr Hager will appear in the High Court in Wellington today for a judicial review into how police obtained a warrant for, and undertook, the raid on October 2, 2014.
The 10-hour search of Mr Hager’s home was part of the police investigation into the hacking of Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater’s emails, which were given to Mr Hager by anonymous hacker Rawshark and formed the basis of his book Dirty Politics.
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Oscar and Pulitzer Award-Winning Journalist Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government To Uncover Records After Years of Airport Detentions and Searches
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Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government to Find Out Why She Was Repeatedly Stopped at the Border
Over six years, filmmaker Laura Poitras was searched, interrogated and detained more than 50 times at U.S. and foreign airports.
When she asked why, U.S. agencies wouldn’t say.
Now, after receiving no response to her Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to her systemic targeting, Poitras is suing the U.S. government.
In a complaint filed on Monday afternoon, Poitras demanded that the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Security release any and all documentation pertaining to her tracking, targeting and questioning while traveling between 2006 and 2012.
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Ross Ulbricht Is Tutoring Inmates, Keeping a Pet Mouse in Prison
More than a month after being sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, convicted Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht is trying to keep his head up and help other inmates out, his mother Lyn said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Mega’s biggest shareholder leaves board
Mega’s biggest shareholder, Shen Zhao Wu, has left the board of the file storage and encryption firm and transferred his stake to a Beijing-based Chinese national just days after a constitution re-write made it easier to go public, while Auckland businessman William Yan increased his influence over the company after an entity linked to his wife took a small shareholding.
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Pirate Bay’s founders acquitted in Belgian court
The four founders of the piracy website, The Pirate Bay, have been acquitted on charges alleging criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications in a Belgian court. The court decided that because they sold the website in 2006 that they could not be held accountable for what the site was used for afterwards.
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Pirate Bay Founders Acquitted in Criminal Copyright Case
Four key Pirate Bay figures have a little something to celebrate this morning. After standing accused of committing criminal copyright infringement and abusing electronic communications, yesterday a Belgian court acquitted Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström.
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