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03.12.12

Links 12/3/2012: Debian 5.0.10 Released, Skolelinux 6.0.4 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 190
  • Yet another Linux story

    A big task was pending since a very long time in my todo lists. It was installing and trying out Linux. Having heard about many features and praises about Linux and programming on the LAMP stack from a few of my friends and colleagues, I decided to give it a try myself. So I went about learning and researching Linux & LAMP, formatted my hard-drive, created new partitions and installed Ubuntu 11.10 (a variety of Linux that ships with the GNOME desktop environment). The first emotion I then felt was that of regret – Why didn’t I do this earlier? Why was I focused on programming in a closed-source OS environment with bloated software, and a runtime with just two options to code – VB.NET & C#. Being enlightened about the open-source legends and milestones achieved by Linux and the secure way it handles its file-system, I couldn’t help but wonder at its marvel.

  • Linux in Saigon :-)

    I was at the bookstore last Sunday and I found my first Vietnamese language Linux book. Amazing!!!

  • How Linux is changing lives in Zambia
  • The Linux Setup – Keith Milner, Telecom Engineer

    What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    I’m currently running Mandriva 2011 on both my desktop and my laptop. Depending on the project I’m on I can either be working at home for extended periods (as I am currently) or on the customer site. I recently spent a few months on a customer site in Malaysia, and in that case my laptop becomes my main system.

    I’ve previously dabbled with Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu and others, but I have generally been very happy with Mandriva. I have always preferred the KDE environment over GNOME. In the early days when KDE2 came out (and I was running Redhat) I used to compile the latest KDE releases to use on my system. These days things are more mission-critical and I prefer to have a supported, packaged system. Whether I change this in the future depends on Mandriva’s future.

    My laptop is actually a triple boot setup, and also has Windows XP on it. I often do a lot of hands-on work on customer’s systems and for this I find Linux simply much more productive and powerful than Windows. The only time I use Windows is when a customer project mandates the use of a particular piece of software. In practice I find this doesn’t happen often, but having WIndows allows me to support this when it does.

  • Linux Certificate Program Targets Newcomers to the OS

    Linux skills are in growing demand in today’s IT hiring landscape, and there are many ways to bolster those skills both online and off.

  • Desktop

    • Welcome to the pre-Post-PC era

      Joe Brockmeier wrote an insightful piece on ReadWrite entitled “What We Lose in a Post-PC World” that starts off with this: “Tim Cook, Ray Ozzie, and a host of others have proclaimed that we’re in a “post-PC world.” Well, not quite yet, but you can see it from here.”

      [...]

      Meanwhile, technology marches on and as evening falls on the pre-Post-PC era — which might be called the post-pre-Post-PC era by purists, opening another argumentative can of worms as a sideshow — Blender developers will actually get an Android version for tablets up and running, just proving the point that you can do it, but ignoring the important question around why you would make software to run on something that’s not built for the job.

    • “This Is Crazy. I Hate It.”
    • Dell Says Several Countries Have Triple-Digit Growth for GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel Xeon E5 Heads to Linux

      Linux server users won’t have to wait long to benefit from the new Intel Xeon E5 processor, announced earlier this week. Hardware vendors and Linux operating system vendors alike are ready to leverage Intel’s latest server chip architecture.

    • The Longterm Linux Kernel Cabal

      How do Linux kernel devs figure out which kernel will be the basis for their enterprise distros?

      The Linux kernel community is made up of lots of different developers working at different companies. But as it turns out, those companies don’t really control their own kernel roadmaps as much as they might think.

    • Linux 3.3-rc7
    • DRM Work Piling Up For The Linux 3.4 Kernel

      While it looks like there’s still another week before the Linux 3.3 kernel will be released and thus marking the merge window for the Linux 3.4 kernel opening, here’s some of the DRM graphics changes you can expect to see merged.

    • Got Privacy? Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Will Help Ensure It.

    • Graphics Stack

      • APITrace 3.0 Brings Graphics Tracing Goodness
      • Intel Preparing GLSL 1.40 Support For Mesa

        GLSL 1.40 is a requirement for OpenGL 3.1, which Intel is now attempting to support in Mesa now that they have OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support for their Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics driver. There’s been talk of possibly having OpenGL 3.1 in place for Mesa 8.1, which will be released this summer, and GLSL 1.40 is part of this.

      • APITrace 3.0 Brings Graphics Tracing Goodness

        APITrace was introduced in April of last year as a way to help graphics driver developers debug the graphics stack. This free software program allows for easy OpenGL API tracing regardless of driver. APITrace 2.0 was then introduced in September to support the latest OpenGL 4.2 specification and to provide other new functionality. Today the program has reached the version 3.0 milestone.

      • Radeon UVD Support Going Through Code Review

        If you have been desiring better video playback support on the open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack, the days of being frustrated may be limited. There’s some code concerning UVD — the GPU’s Unified Video Decoder engine — that will be going through internal code review at AMD this coming week.

      • What’s Left For LLVMpipe Before OpenGL 3.0

        One of the Gallium3D drivers yet not fully supporting the OpenGL 3.0 specification is the LLVMpipe software rasterizer. However, if you’re curious of what’s left before this CPU-based graphics driver can handle GL3, here’s a list.

      • X.Org’s XDS2012 Will Celebrate 25 Years Of X11

        Some new details have emerged concerning the 2012 X.Org Developers’ Summit, which will take place this September and commemorate 25 years of X11.

        First of all, while it’s not been officially announced on the mailing lists or elsewhere yet, XDS2012 is expected to happen from the 19th to 21st of September. It’s been mentioned on the XDS2012 Wiki page and elsewhere and discussed for weeks, like back at FOSDEM, but I believe Egbert Eich will be sending out the formal announcement soon.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • How To Upgrade Kubuntu To KDE 4.8.1
      • KDE 3 got upower support and more
      • Desktop Freezes in 4.8.x

        The source of the problem is the fact that kded is sometimes frozen by one or more of its modules. Plasma NM < 0.9.0 used to do several synchronous calls to networkmanagement module in kded, specially to get the signal strengh of wifi access points and 3G connections. You can imagine how often wifi access points (all access points in range, even the ones you are not connected to) can trigger signal strengh… signals :-/ Yes, every often.

  • Distributions

    • Screw this, I’m going back to Windows!

      No, I’m not. Because I never left, hihihihi. The title is a clickbait…

      [...]

      Looking ahead into the misty future, I can honestly say I do not know which Linux distribution I will be running on my current and new hardware in the coming years, but I definitely know I will be using Windows. That’s the simple reality. No, let me rephrase that. I will be running Windows XP and Windows 7, as Windows 8, if rumors are all true, aims to become the new lead champion in the moronity club. Still.

    • Linux Deepin: Ubuntu-Based Linux Distribution With A Beautiful GNOME Shell Setup

      Linux Deepin is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses a highly customized GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment. It was initially created for Chinese users only, but there are now different ISO images for both Chinese and English languages.

    • BackTrack 5 Revolution 2 screen shots
    • A Healthy Front Line of FLOSS: GNU/Linux
    • The Big Board

      I have also excluded three Linux distros that appear on the Distrowatch “Top Ten” list: Arch Linux, Slackware, and CentOS. From what I’ve gathered, Arch Linux and Slackware are better suited to advanced Linux users than to newcomers; and CentOS is primarily for “enterprise” users (those setting up servers). I’ve heard many good things about all three, but they’re probably not distros for the Goodbye, Microsoft audience.

      I’ve included PC-BSD as a representative of the BSD Unix family. While I have not tried it myself, I’m told it’s the “Ubuntu of BSDs” for ease of installation and use, and it is aimed at desktop use rather than servers.

      I mentioned several lightweight distros in late 2009; some have since gone dormant or have been discontinued. (Namely FeatherLinux, SLAX, SaxenOS, BeaFanatIX, U-Lite, Fluxbuntu, and Wolvix.) The only “dormant” distro I’ve included is Damn Small Linux, which, though not updated since 2008, is still popular and useful.

    • Arch Linux Celebrates 10th Birthday

      Arch Linux is 10 years old today. Arch Linux was started by Judd Vinet in March 2002. Judd announced the release of Arch Linux 0.1 (Homer on March 11, 2002).

    • Italian Simplicity: Semplice Linux

      Just a few weeks ago, at the end of 2011, I reviewed a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with the OpenBox window manager: SalentOS. That distribution was created by an Italian person who lives in Salento, hence the name.

      I am not sure if Italians have some extreme love of OpenBox, but very soon after that, I heard about another OpenBox-based distribution from that country. This time, though, it is based on Debian. To be precise, on the unstable branch of Debian – Sid.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Linux 8 review

        This time around, I’m reviewing Sabayon Linux 8 in its Xfce 64-bit edition. Honestly, I chose the Xfce edition because my USB stick is 2 Gigabytes, and the GNOME and KDE versions are too large to fit. But I can confirm that you can use UNetbootin to install Sabayon onto any laptop that lets you boot from a thumb drive.

        Sabayon is a distribution based on the Gentoo version of Linux. Gentoo is a long-established distribution that is one of the very few using source compilation to provide you with the software you install. While this allows you to customize your system to an unprecedented degree, it also requires the desire and the confidence to do much more “under the hood” work than most distributions expect. One of the aims of Sabayon is to make the initial installation of Gentoo painless, and they succeed in that.

    • Red Hat Family

      • “Open Source” Ideas for Nonprofits

        Open-source technology thrives by letting anybody know how it works and encouraging them to come up with new ideas and to tailor software to their own needs.

        Could your nonprofit work the same way?

        Any organization can, said Rebecca Suehle, a writer and editor at the open-source software company Red Hat, in a session today at the South by Southwest Interactive conferene.

      • interview with Jim Whitehurst

        Q. Tell me about the culture of your company.

        A. Since we were founded in the 1990s on the idea of leveraging broad open-source communities, we naturally adopted that approach in our culture long before the Facebooks of the world even existed. So we’re on the bleeding edge of what so many companies are going to face because of this whole millennial generation coming up. It just does not like this idea of hierarchy.

      • Why Enterprise Linux ?

        Last year I’ve decided to purchase a license of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (self support) to use on my home laptop. For a few years that I had not used Red Hat (or clones) for Desktop. I don’t find expensive at all the 45€’s that Red Hat charges for 1 year license, specially considering that I really don’t have to worry much about security (as the updates flow in quite nicely)…

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Updated Debian 5.0: 5.0.10 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

        The alpha and ia64 packages from DSA 1769 are not included in this point release for technical reasons. All other security updates released during the lifetime of “lenny” that have not previously been part of a point release are included in this update.

      • Debian 5.0 Gets Final Update

        The Debian project has announced the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename ‘lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

      • Updated Debian 5.0: 5.0.10 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename `lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release,
        along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

      • First “Squeeze”-based Debian Edu version released

        Debian Edu (aka “Skolelinux”) is a Debian Pure Blend specifically targeted at schools and educational institutions, and provides a completely configured school network environment out of the box. It covers PXE installation, PXE booting for diskless machines, and setup for a school server, for stationary workstations, and for workstations that can be taken away from the school network. Several educational applications like Celestia, Dr. Geo, GCompris, GeoGebra, Kalzium, KGeography and Solfege are included in the default desktop setup.

      • Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker

        Inspired by the interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a more international audience.

        While Debian Edu and Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions, and am happy to share the response with you. :)

      • Derivatives

        • Skolelinux 6.0.4

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ISO Will Still Fit on a CD
          • Take the Ubuntu User Survey 2012 Now
          • Ubuntu User Survery 2012

            Canonical the company behind Ubuntu has announced the Ubuntu User Survey 2012 Poll. The motive behind the poll is to understand how people discover, use and share Ubuntu. The poll is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The results of the poll will be shared with the community some time later.

            The poll takes hardly 5 minutes to fill in and basically looks into how you discovered Ubuntu, your use cases, and if whether you would recommend Ubuntu to your friends and others. This poll if answered by many would give answers to questions like the demographic usage of Ubuntu and many other questions. You can find the polls in the links below,

          • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin Beta Review

            Every six months, we will do a review of the latest version of Ubuntu and see what features/improvement Canonical has added to the popular distro. The next version of Ubuntu – 12.04, Precise Pangolin is now available in beta and this is particularly important since it is the next Long Term Support (LTS) version. As of all LTS version, the emphasis is always on stability over new features experimentation, so it is interesting to see how the 12.04 will perform. Let’s proceed with the review.

          • Medibuntu repositories available for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin | PPA
          • Ubuntu & Linux Hardware Support: Working With OEMs Is Key

            When it comes to improving hardware support for Linux, there are two traditional strategies: The Do-It-Yourself method, by which geeks write their own device drivers, and the Beg-And-Plead approach, or asking OEMs for open-source drivers and hoping they comply. But Canonical seems to be forging a third path by actually cooperating with upstream manufacturers to bring better hardware support to Ubuntu. Here’s how, and what it means for the lives of Linux users everywhere.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 .ISO Will Remain CD Sized

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Netrunner 4.1 Review

              Netrunner is a KUbuntu based LiveDVD distribution running KDE 4.7.4 and is available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. It takes the best of Kubuntu and adds a bit of their touch to the programs being offered. Netrunner is a distribution based for novice users of Linux.

            • The Kubuntu Commitment

              Though the KDE desktop has a few obvious advantages over Unity, Kubuntu has always played second fiddle (maybe third) to Shuttleworth’s baby, Ubuntu. While the distro has received critcism and praise in equal parts, one thing has never change. Commitment.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Linux and Open-source news overview for week 10-2012
  • LastCalc Is Open Sourced
  • Open that Software

    In a nutshell, Open Source Software aims to ‘liberate’ you of the bonds enforced by proprietary software. These bonds restrict your basic rights of freedom to choose between softwares, freedom to modify current programs etc. For more details, do check out Richard Stallman on Wikipedia (Akash has done a post on him too).

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 11 Stable Released

        Firefox users who cannot wait to update the stable channel of the web browser from version 10 to 11, can download the new version from the official Mozilla ftp server or third party download sites early. Please note that while it is unlikely that the final version will get replaced in last minute, it has happened in the past. It is recommended to wait for the official release announcement if Firefox is running in a productive environment, or if you do not need to have access to the new feature set introduced in the browser right away.

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • Skysoft Inc. adopts OpenEMR to move forward with development

      Skysoft Incorporated, and Orlando based IT Services and Software Development firm, has chosen OpenEMR as the platform to move forward with starting in 2012. Skysoft currently develops software prototypes for the United States Department of Veterans Administration. Skysoft is also developing medical prototypes in-house and will begin to integrate the OpenEMR platform with ours.

  • BSD

    • FUSE For FreeBSD Nearing Completion

      Porting FUSE to a FreeBSD kernel module has been a long-time coming. The FreeBSD FUSE kernel module port originally began as a Google Summer of Code project, but it wasn’t successful. In 2011, work on the port was restored via another year with Google Summer of Code, but at the end of the summer the FreeBSD FUSE implementation was still unstable and suffered data corruption issues. Now it seems that FreeBSD FUSE is finally getting hacked into shape and may be committed in the coming days.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Say Hello To Julia, A New LLVM-Based Project

      From the mailing list announcement, “Julia is an open source language for technical computing that strives to be in the same class of productivity as Matlab, R, python+numpy, etc., but targets the performance of C and Fortran. It is due to LLVM that julia has been able to achieve such good performance (in my opinion), with relatively little effort in a short amount of time.”

      Additional information on the Julia project is available from JuliaLang.org. “Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, mostly written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, FFTs, and string processing. More libraries continue to be added over time. Julia programs are organized around defining functions, and overloading them for different combinations of argument types (which can also be user-defined).”

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 roundup: Mozilla and Google aim to level up gaming on the Web

      Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.

      New standards are making it possible for Web applications to implement 3D graphics, handle input from gamepad peripherals, capture and process audio and video in real-time, display graphical elements in a fullscreen window, and use threading for parallelization. Support for mobile gaming has also gotten a boost from features like device orientation APIs and improved support for handling touchscreen interaction.

Leftovers

  • Microsoft goes on a charm offensive

    SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft has gone into some detail about some of the most obvious changes in the look and feel of the Windows 8 user interface.

    A long Microsoft blog post goes into some detail about the apparently subtle changes that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier to do in Windows 8. We are not convinced.

  • Security

    • Slow Down TSA Lynch Mob: That Naked Scanner Expose Video Is Exaggerated & Old News

      So, while I don’t agree with the TSA’s response to this video in which “Blogger Bob” somewhat angrily snaps back about how important TSA scanning is, I don’t think Corbett’s claims are that convincing and I’m surprised at how much press it’s been generating. Yes, the scanners are probably pointless, and it’s all security theater, but that doesn’t mean we should all stop thinking through the details on videos that potentially show some weaknesses in these machines.

    • Microsoft to patch Windows bug called ‘Holy Grail’ by one researcher

      Microsoft yesterday said it would ship six security updates next week, only one critical, to patch seven vulnerabilities in Windows and a pair of for-developers-only programs.

      This year’s March Patch Tuesday will feature three more updates and three more patches than the same month in 2011, but will fix fewer bugs than the March roster in each of the years 2008-2010, according to records kept by Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • OECD Gives Up the Oil, to the Developing World

      Now that global oil supply is a zero-sum game, in order for the five billion people in the Non-OECD to consume more oil they need a donation from us, here in the OECD. And as you can see, we are “happily” (recession, unemployment, lack of growth) giving up these energy sources as best we can.

  • Finance

    • Scott O’Malia, Commodity Futures Commissioner, Seeks To Upend Wall Street Reform (Updated)

      In a signal that partisan squabbling in the nation’s capital may be reaching new levels of rancor, a key Republican regulator is pursuing an unusual avenue to overturn a Wall Street reform rule issued by his own agency. Scott O’Malia, one of five commissioners who lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is asking a powerful White House office that has no actual authority over the CFTC to assess his agency’s work.

      If the Office of Management and Budget were to take O’Malia up on his suggestion, it would radically change the way some federal regulations are written and severely hamper implementation of a host of rules mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

    • The Financial Crisis And Shrek’s Onion Of Fraud

      In the last couple of weeks I’ve been pushing foreclosure fraud. Well, not pushing the fraud but rather arguing that foreclosure is fraud. It has to be. If a mortgage was registered at MERS, then the chain of title was broken. Broken chains mean the bank cannot foreclose. But that was MERS’s business model, and so most mortgages are “infected”. Still, there’s a lot more to it than that.

  • Censorship

    • Tesla libel suit against Top Gear fails again

      Tesla and the company’s lawyers are nothing if not determined. After a judge smacked down the electric vehicle manufacturer’s libel suit against the BBC and Top Gear for comments made about the range of the Tesla Roadster, the automaker rallied with a second, amended lawsuit. It didn’t take long for the the same judge to nix the new case, too, saying the amendment was “not capable of being defamatory at all, or, if it is, it is not capable of being a sufficiently serious defamatory meaning to constitute a real and substantial tort.”

    • Canadians To Prime Minister: Don’t Censor Our Scientists

      One of the most fundamentally insane things about government and politics is the fact that evidence-based policy is frequently not the norm. It should be common sense that you don’t create new laws and regulations without actual evidence that they will work, or even clear evidence on the scope of the problem they aim to solve. But as we know, things don’t really work that way—it’s a lot easier for politicians and legislators to make their push based on emotion and public perception.

    • Free Canada’s scientists to communicate with the public

      A scientist’s duty is to science. Researchers must be able to share their findings, and discuss their published work with peers, journalists and the public in a timely manner.

    • EFF Argues That Automated Bogus DMCA Takedowns Violate The Law And Are Subject To Sanctions

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

03.09.12

Links 9/3/2012: Linux Mint 12 LXDE is Out, Nokia Rushes Back to Linux-based Operating System

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Gartner Believes the World Owes Wintel A Living

    Gartner has predicted that 2012 will be another slow year for Wintel but 2013 will be better. They seem to feel ARM and */Linux will have no traction. The same forces that Gartner believes will give Wintel traction will also give */Linux on ARM greater traction. In fact there is nothing preventing */Linux from running on Intel/x86 systems…

  • IBM streams Linux and Windows desktop through USB stick

  • Server

    • NOAA and GNU/Linux Predict the Weather

      All IT should do the same. Look at what IT costs your organization and what performance you get or want to get in the future. GNU/Linux will give whatever performance you want at a lower price for licensing, re-re-reboots, slowing down, pleasing M$ with absurd restrictions in the EULA or authentication, and complexity. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Welcomes Nvidia, 3 Other New Members

      In a brief statement, Nvidia said that its membership in the Linux Foundation will enable it to collaborate better with “the organizations and individuals instrumental in shaping the future of Linux, enabling a great experience for users and developers of Linux.”

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.3 (Part 4) – Drivers
    • Fluendo Joins The Linux Foundation

      Fluendo, the leading multimedia software development company and GStreamer expert, announced today that it has joined The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux.

    • Linux creator Torvalds slams OpenSUSE security devs in Google+ rant

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds has posted a vitriolic rant on Google+ hammering the developers of OpenSUSE for “mentally diseased” security measures.

      Requiring users to provide an admin password to make even minor changes like adding a new wireless network or changing the time zone is “moronic and wrong,” according to the open source guru. The furious article was apparently prompted by Torvald’s daughter running into these security issues at school.

    • Greg KH: The 2.6.32 Linux kernel
    • Nvidia’s Embrace of Linux Foundation Highlights Open Source’s Growing Status
    • Lustre User Group Announces Conference Program

    • Graphics Stack

      • TitaniumGL: A Faster Multi-Platform Graphics Driver Architecture?

        After first being introduced on Windows years ago, and then FreeBSD and ReactOS support added last year, this week finally marked the release of TitaniumGL for Linux. TitaniumGL is self-described as a “freeware driver architecture” and carries a goal to support OpenGL on graphics cards with broken, bad, or missing OpenGL hardware drivers. Here are some benchmarks of TitaniumGL compared to NVIDIA’s binary GPU driver and the Mesa/Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer.

      • VMware’s Linux 3D Guest Driver Is Ready

        The vmwgfx DRM kernel driver left the staging area in the Linux 3.2 kernel, marking it as a point ready for stable production use. The Gallium3D user-space driver for VMware became properly christened in Mesa 8.0 along with the new XA State Tracker for 2D acceleration and other changes. The final piece of the accelerated VMware puzzle is now fitted: the xf86-video-vmware 12.0 DDX driver. (Read VMware’s New Graphics Architecture Is Shaping Up.)

      • Linux 3.4 Kernel Will Support Intel Medfield Graphics

        The merge window for the Linux 3.4 kernel will open up this month assuming the latest Linux 3.3 release plans work out. One of the features to look forward to out of Linux 3.4 will be the DRM driver support for Intel Medfield graphics.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Review: MadBox 11.10

      MadBox is an Ubuntu-based Openbox distribution that aims to be user-friendly as well. In essence, it is the successor to #! for the Ubuntu base. Development on MadBox and related applications like ADeskBar seemed to have ceased after version 10.10, but a few months ago (though I only found out about it a few weeks ago) a new version based on Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” was released, coinciding with the unveiling of a new website for the distribution.

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Government use of Ubuntu

            Governments are making increasingly effective use of Ubuntu in large-scale projects, from big data to little schools. There is growing confidence in open source in government quarters, and growing sophistication in how they engage with it.

            But adopting open source is not just about replacing one kind of part with another. Open source is not just a substitute for shrink-wrapped proprietary software. It’s much more malleable in the hands of industry and users, and you can engage with it very differently as a result. I’m interested in hearing from thought leaders in the civil service on ways they think governments could get much more value with open source, by embracing that flexibility. For example, rather than one-size-fits-all software, why can’t we deliver custom versions of Ubuntu for different regions or countries or even departments and purposes? Could we enable the city government of Frankfurt to order PC’s with the Ubuntu German Edition pre-installed?

            Or could we go further, and enable those governments to participate in the definition and production and certification process? So rather than having to certify exactly the same bits which everyone else is using, they could create a flavour which is still “certified Ubuntu” and fully compatible with the whole Ubuntu ecosystem, can still be ordered pre-installed from global providers like Dell and Lenovo, but has the locally-certified collection of software, customizations, and certifications layered on top?

          • Ubuntu 12.04 to ship with enhanced privacy controls

            Ubuntu 12.04 will ship with new privacy controls for the Zeitgeist event logger. Zeitgeist is the program that runs in the background of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment collecting statistics on how users interact with their computers and offering suggestions based on most-used items and applications using machine-learning techniques.

          • Got Privacy? Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Will Help Ensure It.
          • New stable series for Canonical’s Bazaar version control

            The Bazaar developers have announced version 2.5.0 of the version control system that is used by the Linux Foundation, Ubuntu, the GNU project, Drizzle and many other free software projects to manage their source code. The new version marks the start of a long-term stable series due to be supported until April 2017. Users of previous stable releases of Bazaar are encouraged to upgrade.

          • Three Reasons the Ubuntu Desktop Lags the iPad
          • Five day private cloud deployment promises low stress, high quality

            Canonical, the company behind the Linux-based OS Ubuntu, is promising a private cloud infrastructure deployment service that it says takes exactly five days to complete, costs $9,000 and comes ready for channel resale.

            Canonical delivers the Jumpstart program using OpenStack as the cloud computing architecture in combination with DevOps program Juju, which enables end users to manage expansion more easily over time.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • “Algorithms can have errors”: One man’s quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results

  • Security

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • One More Thing For Governance Day

      The basic argument is that repeat-player investment bankers provide value not by telling brainless executives whether to accept or reject a merger, but by providing intelligent decisionmakers with access and relationships, and relationships come with conflicts.

    • Chris Cook: The Ghost of Enron Past Explains Oil Market Manipulation

      I outlined in a recent post my view that the oil market price has been inflated twice by passive (inflation hedgers) investors, albeit with short term speculative spikes from active (speculators) investors: once from 2005 to June 2008; and again from early 2009 to date. In attempting to ‘hedge inflation’ passive investors perversely ended up actually causing it, and allowed oil producers to manipulate and support the oil market price with fund money to the detriment of oil consumers.

    • Fox Attacks Wages of Working-Class Maids

      Fox Business News recently ran a segment criticizing a collective bargaining agreement struck between workers and management in New York City’s hotel industry. Analysts on the program called the deal “a nightmare,” singling out the provisions raising wages for housekeepers as “shocking.” Fox’s reaction is consistent with its past coverage of worker’s issues, which has portrayed union efforts to secure higher wages and benefits for the working class as an affront to capitalism.

      The agreement between the New York Hotel Trades Council A.F.L.-C.I.O, the union representing workers in New York’s hotel industry, and the Hotel Association of New York, the trade group representing hotel owners, gives housekeepers a 29% raise in their current salary over seven years, giving them a salary of $59,823 by the time the CBA expires.

  • Censorship

    • Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident

      A “human error” carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country’s High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.

    • Paypal Pressured To Play Morality Cop And Forces Smashwords To Censor Authors
    • Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming

      The file-sharing landscape is slowly adjusting in response to the continued push for more anti-piracy tools, the final Pirate Bay verdict, and the raids and arrests in the Megaupload case. Faced with uncertainty and drastic changes at file-sharing sites, many users are searching for secure, private and uncensored file-sharing clients. Despite the image its name suggests, RetroShare is one such future-proof client.

    • The True Damage Of An Illegitimate DMCA Takedown Goes Much Further Than Simple ‘Inconvenience’

      Whenever an artist finds their own creations removed by a erroneous DMCA takedown notice, defenders of the system are quick to point out that the collateral damage is minimal and, because the supposedly “offending” post/picture/etc. usually returns to its original place, what’s the big deal? It’s just an inconvenience and a small price to pay in order for rightsholders to protect their intellectual property.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • BT and TalkTalk lose challenge against Digital Economy Act

      The government has been given the green light to implement the Digital Economy Act after the final legal challenge by two internet service providers was thrown out at the court of appeal.

      BT and TalkTalk on Tuesday lost their appeal against last year’s judicial review of the government’s controversial anti-piracy legislation on all but one ground.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Electronic Arts, identity thief?

      Identity theft is a huge problem that affects millions of Americans each year. If a crook stole your most personal information and used it to make a buck, you’d be furious.

      And, of course, that’s illegal. But if you are a corporation, you can steal all the identities you want for profit.

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • As BPI Tries To Block The Pirate Bay From The UK, Dan Bull Explains Why Musicians Should Block BPI

        Dan Bull, the UK-based musician who we’ve written about many times for his consistently awesome songs about the music industry, file sharing, copyright laws and the like has now put together another wonderful song, called Bye Bye BPI.

      • Streetlight Manifesto Proudly Boycotts Itself

        It is and has been for quite some time our position that Victory Records is an artist-hostile, morally corrupt and generally dishonest company, with whom we have had the displeasure of being associated due to a contract that was signed years ago. We’re not writing this today to air grievances, of which there are many; numerous bands’ struggles with Victory are well-documented (and many more are sealed by a court of law), so we figured we’re going to skip the allegations and try to solve the problem, as we see it.

      • Why Search Engines Can’t Just ‘Fix’ Search Results The Way The MPAA/RIAA Want

        It’s become clear in the past year or so that one key “target” in the legacy entertainment industry’s game plan is to force Google to change its search results to have “good sites” rise up and “bad sites” be pushed down. They’ve been putting pressure on search engines for quite some time now, and have even considered suing Google for not giving it the results they want. Late last year, the RIAA even put out a “report card” in which it complained that Google won’t let them program Google’s results for everyone else.

      • German Government Wants Google To Pay To Show News Snippets
      • Justices Won’t Hear Photo Site’s Suit Against Google

        The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by a nude-photo publisher that alleged Google Inc. was infringing its copyrighted images.

      • RIAA Still Doesn’t Get It: Hopes SOPA Opposition Was A ‘One-Time Experience’

        In a previous post, I looked at the first part of Andrew Keen’s interview with RIAA CEO Cary Sherman. In the second half of the interview, Sherman fields some audience questions collected on Twitter, and his answers further expose the serious problems with his understanding of what’s happening in music, what happened with SOPA, and what’s happening to his industry.

      • Can A Company Be An ‘Author’ For The Purpose Of Copyright?

        The specific case involved horse-racing tables and a dispute between two different horse-racing magazines, with one accusing the other of copyright infringement. Oddly, both magazines seem to admit that the actual data originated from neither magazine, but from the same third party: the Singapore Turf Club. Still, there appears to have been some questions about the layout and design, which could be given some level of copyright protection — but, apparently, only if it were created by “living humans.”

      • Chris Dodd: The Internet Developed Because Of Strict Copyright Enforcement

        His latest discussion on the topic came at the National Association of Attorneys General meeting in Washington DC — a “friendly” audience for Dodd. His discussion starts around the 2 hour, 10 minute mark if you want to fast forward the video. For reasons that are unclear, CSPAN has disabled embedding on this video. Either way, Dodd continues to show off that he has no idea what happened. The specific “panel” that he’s on is (of course) pretty one-sided. It involves him, old friend Rick Cotton from NBC Universal (“just think about the poor corn farmers!”) and then two university officials to talk about how they’re forced to censor the internet because of draconian laws that the MPAA pushed through (where there’s at least a little pushback on the ridiculousness of copyright law, but just barely).

      • INTERVIEW: Seth Godin on Libraries, Literary Agents and the Future of Book Publishing as We Know It

      • ACTA

        • Darrell Issa Posts Text Of ‘Unconstitutional’ ACTA For Open Feedback; Something USTR Never Did
        • Workshop Audience Barred From ‘Demonstrating’ Approval Of Michael Geist’s ACTA Takedown

          Although ACTA has now been referred by the European Commission to the European Court of Justice, it continues its passage through the various committees of the European Parliament, each of which will provide input on the final decision of whether to ratify ACTA or not. The first of these took place last week, when the International Trade (INTA) committee had a preliminary ACTA workshop. This included hearing from external experts, one of whom was Michael Geist, well known to Techdirt readers.

          It will come as no surprise to learn that his ten-minute speech succeeded in distilling the key flaws of ACTA in a highly-accessible way that left the treaty’s supporters desperately trying to undo the damage to their arguments for the rest of the day — and failing.

        • Obama Administration: ACTA Is Binding & Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Heads About TPP

          That’s interesting, because it’s what many people had assumed (and what other signatories to ACTA have been saying), but actually contradicts earlier statements from the USTR suggesting that we can ignore parts of the agreement that we don’t like or which conflict with existing US law. It also means that, as we’ve been warning, ACTA dangerously restricts Congress from passing new laws that could push back on some of the worst aspects of copyright law. Sure, Congress could ignore ACTA, but there would be substantial problems if it were to do so. In other words, ACTA is binding on the US under international law… but not under US law. Of course, international law trumps US law here, so that’s kind of meaningless.

Links 9/3/2012: KDE 4.8.1, New Wine

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Zanata: Web-Based Translation Manager For Open Source Developer

    If you are a open source software developer or a content writer you can use Zanata to translate your software strings, User interface text/String, software documentation and localized into any languages.

    Zanata is an open-source translation manager that enables a community of translators to work on localising software and documentation using nothing more than a web browser.

  • Netcraft: Open web platforms the winners

    A new survey from Netcraft has Apache, Nginx, and Google’s web servers all up, with Microsoft IIS market share dropping down, raising questions about the health of Microsoft’s related offerings.

    The Netcraft results are always interesting, because there’s always a little something for everyone. Depending on how the data is presented, a given hosted domain could be up, down, or off in the ninth dimension. So, care must be taken when qualifying the survey results.

  • TLWIR 34: Africa Embraces Free Software
  • FTA Community demands TradePub to correct inappropriate use of FTA course books

  • Events

    • CeBIT 2012: At the Open Source Project Lounge

      The Open Source Project Lounge at this year’s CeBIT – taking place in Hannover, Germany until 10 March – is as diverse as ever, with a variety of free and open source (FOSS) projects and organisations being represented by both developers and community members alike. Despite primarily being a commercial show where space is expensive, each year, projects have the opportunity to apply for free booth space, and this year, the Open Source Project Lounge is in the corner of Hall 2. The H had the opportunity to attend this, the world’s largest ICT event, and catch up with a number of the projects’ representatives.

    • Linux Training Opportunities at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

      The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit is a great time to, well, collaborate. But it’s also a really good opportunity to learn.

      We’re offering three courses at this year’s Collaboration Summit, each in a different area, to help build skills while rubbing elbows with other top kernel developers.

      Advanced Linux Performance Tuning is a deep dive into proven tools and methods used to identify and resolve performance problems, resulting in system that is better optimized for specific workloads. This is particularly for those who write or use applications that have unusual characteristics, that behave differently than kernel performance heuristics anticipate. It is a hands-on course that assume some familiarity with basic performance tools. This course is offered on Monday, April 2nd.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Developers Should Love Mozilla Boot-to-Gecko Phone

        When Mozilla announced the Boot-to-Gecko, all-HTML cell phone last week at Mobile World Congress — along with a plan to partner with Telefonica Digital to build really cheap smart phones running the Mozilla system — I wondered if it was really possible to bring such a cheap phone to market, regardless of the underlying system running the phone.

      • Mozilla Doesn’t Want Pepper for Linux Flash

        A couple week ago, Adobe announced that is was abandoning Flash on Linux to Google. The idea being that Chrome integrates Flash and Google can be the place where Linux users go for Flash.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

  • BSD

  • Project Releases

    • PhoneGap 1.5 Released!
    • Vagrant celebrates its 1.0 stable release

      Exactly two years after its first release, the Vagrant project has announced the first stable version of its open source development environment generation tool. Vagrant 1.0 allows developers to easily set up virtual machines for development and testing purposes using Oracle’s VirtualBox and a single configuration file.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • An Open Source Robotic Surgeon Could Save Your Life

      Could the surgeon who saves your life be a robot? The answer to that could be yes, if the developers of the Raven II robotic surgeon have their way. Raven II comes with a surgical robot featuring two robotic arms, a camera for viewing the operational field, and a surgeon-interface system for remote operation of the robot. “The system is powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques, including online telesurgery,” say U.C. Santa Cruz researchers who helped develop it (shown here). The code for Raven II is open source, and this robot is only one of several open source robots poised to advance healthcare.

  • Programming

    • Alpha release of Python 3.3.0 brings first syntax changes in two years

      The 3.3.0 version of the Python programming language has entered the testing phase with its first alpha release. This version marks the lifting of a two-year moratorium on changes to the language’s syntax. Proposed by Guido van Rossum as Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3003, the moratorium was designed to enable non-CPython implementations of the language to catch up to the core implementation after the Python 3.0 release.

    • A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python, an interview with author Hans Petter Langtangen

      I am a professor of mathematical modeling at the University of Oslo, but for the last 10 years I have been on 80% leave to work at Simula Research Laboratory, which carries out long-term basic research in ICT. At Simula, my main responsibility is to be the manager of a Norwegian Center of Excellence, named Center for Biomedical Computing. Our aim is to develop mathematical methods and software tools to study biomedical phenomena and thereby help clinicians in improving diagnostics and treatment. I am an active scientist and participate in several of the center’s projects. More information is found on cbc.simula.no.

    • Develop Android apps from within Android using AIDE (video)

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security

    • GitHub security incident highlights Ruby on Rails problem

      On Sunday morning, 4 March, Egor Homakov exploited a flaw in how the Ruby on Rails web framework handles mass assignments that allowed him to write a posting, delete a posting or push changes into source code on any GitHub project. Homakov had previously created an issue regarding mass assignment security on the rails issue tracker on GitHub; this was closed by the developers saying that it was the application developers’ responsibility to secure their applications. Homakov then decided to demonstrate the issue using the nearest Ruby on Rails application, GitHub.

    • At Pwn2Own Hacker Competition, Google Chrome Gets Punk’d

      Slowly but surely, the Pwn2Own hacker contest has become an important fixture in the world of testing the security of software applications, operating systems and hardware devices. Just prior to last year’s Pwn2Own competition, Apple dropped a series of important updates to its Safari browser and iOS platform, but that didn’t stop Charlie Miller from exploiting a Safari vulnerability to hack into an iPhone’s address book. The results from the 2012 Pwn2Own hacker contest are now in, and one of the major software applications to lose to the hackers this year was Google Chrome.

    • OpenSUSE, Linus’ Daughter, and a Question of Security

      “Nobody likes the idea of having to practically beat their operating system into submission,… but this is the reality with Linux,” asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “One good idea layered over another good idea added to another good idea sometimes ends up with really bad results. We don’t all want to be ‘protected from ourselves’ by more and more features that assume the user is a dummy. There’s another OS for that.”

  • Censorship

    • All Your Internets Belong to US, Continued: The Bodog.com Case

      Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world. The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.

      That is the opening of my technology law column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which continues by noting this scenario became reality last week, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond. The case involves Bodog.com, a Canadian-owned online sports gaming site and the country doing the seizing was the United States. Supporting online gaming operations will undoubtedly make governments somewhat squeamish, but the broader implications of last week’s seizure touch on millions of websites and Internet companies who now find themselves subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

    • Banned Facebook promises Chinese devs GLOBAL glory

  • Civil Rights

    • Vermonters Say: Corporations Are Not People!

      In a presidential primary season marked by the rise of “Super PACs” and an explosion of corporate spending in elections, Vermont voters have raised their voices against special interest money in politics. On Super Tuesday, 63 out of a possible 65 towns in Vermont called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. and to address the issue of corporate personhood and money in politics.

      The 2010 Citizens United decision, which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders labeled “one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever handed down,” struck down bipartisan clean election laws and declared that Congress could not limit so-called “independent” spending. After Citizens United, the 2010 fall elections were the most expensive in U.S. history, with more spending by outside groups than from the candidates themselves. The 2012 election cycle is on track to be the most expensive yet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • ACTA may already be dead

          During last week’s public workshop on ACTA, held in presence of Commissioner Karel De Gucht and moderated by MEP Vital Moreira, chairman of the INTA committee1, the manifest tension made it obvious: the Parliament and the Commission are now afraid of citizens,and of the streets. What we saw during the workshop was a parody of debate, where speakers were either members of the Commission, academics, or among the few of the remaining ACTA proponents (including the chairman of a pro-ACTA lobby2!). Nobody from authors, artists or citizen groups were allowed on the panels, despite La Quadrature’s demand to participate.

        • Danish trade minister and ACTA booster apologise for bogus piracy numbers

          Here’s a clip of a Danish TV show discussing ACTA, which Denmark has fiercely advocated in favor of. It starts with the head of a rightsholder society and the Danish trade minister quoting dodgy statistics about the extent and cost of piracy, and then demonstrates that these statistics are patently false, and finally, brings out those responsible for quoting them and gets them to admit their errors.

03.07.12

Links 7/3/2012: NVIDIA Joins Linux Foundation, Android Easily Beats iOS in the US

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup, Noah Lorang, 37signals

    Noah’s on my radar because of this post he wrote about how operating systems are becoming irrelevant. The piece points out how Noah was able to effortlessly switch from OS X to Linux. I appreciated the post because it wasn’t about the politics of free and open source software. Instead, he was writing about getting to choose the best tools for the job, an idea that sometimes gets misplaced in our conversations about Linux.

  • The “Linux” Brand

    Part of “Technological Evangelism” according to M$ is to denigrate competitive brands. In the FLOSS world, unfortunately, there is too much of that. One item is the holding down of the “Linux” brand. Two popular examples are Android/Linux and Ubuntu GNU/Linux. S

  • Kernel Space

    • OMAP4 Kernel Vulnerabilities Fixed for Ubuntu 11.04

      Canonical announced on March 6th, in a security notice, that a new Linux OMAP4 kernel update for its Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system is now available, fixing six security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers.

    • LPI announces “Linux Essentials” Program

    • Graphics Stack

      • X.Org Server 1.12 Released With Multi-Touch

        X.Org Server 1.12 is now officially available with X Input 2.2, which is the X Input extension update that formally introduces multi-touch support.

        While the release of X.Org Server 1.12 wasn’t as drawn out as MythTV 0.25, this release is coming about a month late due to Keith Packard, the xorg-server release manager, taking a bicycling trip through New Zealand. However, it’s now available following the revised release plans (and the developers are now hitting targets much better than in the past).

      • AMD Launches Pitcairn GPUs, Open-Source Not There

        Yesterday AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 7800 “Pitcairn” series as the latest hardware in their Southern Islands family to reside between the Radeon HD 7700 series and their flagship Radeon HD 7900 cards. Unfortunately, the open-source support for these latest AMD GPUs remains unavailable.

      • Turning Mesa Into JavaScript For The Web?

        Besides the recent talk about using Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe for Mozilla Firefox, there’s another interesting technical discussion happening now about using Mesa on the web to emulate the full OpenGL API using the WebGL API.

      • Radeon Gallium3D Now Sort Of Works For OpenCL
      • Plugging X.Org GPU Hot-Plugging Into Mainline

        Earlier today was the first round of comments by David Airlie regarding the finishing and up-streaming of his X.Org GPU hot-plugging support. This allows for new GPUs to be dynamically added to a running X.Org Server environment.

        Airlie has been working on the GPU hot-plugging support for a number of months, but recently it’s finally come together. In particular, he’s been playing with the USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters. David has written a DisplayLink KMS driver to top off DisplayLink’s other code and open-source support. This could also be adapted to work with dynamically hot-plugging/unplugging other graphics processors too.

      • NVIDIA Is Joining The Linux Foundation

        NVIDIA will be joining the Linux Foundation, per an announcement coming out in the morning. But for open-source Linux fans, will this be a reason to rejoice about NVIDIA potentially moving forward with open-source drivers? Don’t break out the champagne quite yet.

      • Nvidia Joins The Linux Foundation
      • A New OpenCL Back-End For LLVM Is Published

        Besides the open-source AMD Radeon support for OpenCL finally taking shape, there’s more good open-source OpenCL news: a newly open-sourced LLVM OpenCL back-end.

        Back in August I wrote about an OpenCL, GLSL back-end for LLVM that may soon open up. The work was the result of a German student writing the LLVM OpenCL back-end as part of his university thesis. OpenCL is generated from LLVM bit-code, similar to how the Emscripten project is generating JavaScript from LLVM bit-code. This work is what’s finally being opened up.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Nosonja XFCE 2012.02.29 Screenshots

    • New Releases

      • Clonezilla 1.2.12-29
      • IPFire 2.11 – Core Update 57 released
      • CeBIT 2012: Knoppix 7.0 presented

        Speaking at this year’s CeBIT Open Source ForumGerman language link, Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper presented version 7.0 of his popular Live Linux distribution. The new release is a special “CeBIT Edition” which is based on Debian “Wheezy” and uses the 3.2.4 Linux kernel. Available as a LiveDVD, it now uses UTF-8 encoding, and can run on both 32- and 64-bit systems.

      • Knoppix 7.0 release begins now

        The next major version of venerable Live Linux distro Knoppix is slowly making it’s way out the door over the next couple of days, includes some major updates to compatibility and performance

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian GNU/Linux Keeps Getting Stronger

        Look at the steepness of the bug-count for the next release (green curve) at Debian. Even as the count of packages in the repository rises, the rate at which bugs are getting killed in the release-cycle keeps rising. This shows the power of FLOSS. By using a modular layered approach, a thousand people can change the world faster than tens of thousands working in the darkness of M$. It’s beautiful that you can have the benefits of a package manager that keeps all your systems updated for applications as well as the OS at very low cost. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It works for you.

      • LLVM’s Clang Is Almost Good Enough For Debian

        Clang, the C/C++ front-end compiler for LLVM, is progressing quite quickly and is capable of building the Debian archives quite well, at least for a majority of the packages and on popular architectures.

        A Debian developer’s side project has been to see how well it would work to re-build the Debian archive (the entire distribution) using LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler rather than GCC. Apple has rated LLVM/Clang as being production-ready and it continues to find new uses, especially with the recent LLVM 3.0 release. But how well does LLVM/Clang work for building the massive Debian package-set?

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • Inside the ToyBox: An interview with Rob Landley

      A recent controversy about the legal aspects of software licensing put Rob Landley in the middle of an argument, but Landley says his real focus is on code, especially his ToyBox project – a reworking of the concepts of a project he once maintained, the Swiss-army knife of commands that is BusyBox. The H had a chance to talk with him about ToyBox, BusyBox and why he likes to work on these multifunctional monolithic utilities.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open source helicopters trivialize Europe’s ODF troubles

      While technocrats in Westminster and Brussels cringe over the question of open document formats, the US military is planning a generation of open source helicopters.

      This is not just a generation of helicopters. It is the next generation of US military helicopter. It’ll be built on open standards, and will actively court open source systems suppliers.

      The US Army issued an official request for information on the proposal last week, formally kick-starting a procurement that will make the pedestrian kerfuffle over document formats in civvy street seem, well, pedestrian.

      It has already shone an unforgiving light on the question of royalties – one that has undermined every civil administration that has attempted to implement an open standards policy in Europe.

      Weapons manufacturers and US forces made an unequivocal declaration for royalty-free standards in January through the FACE (Future Airborne Capabilities Environment) Consortium they formed in response to US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s call for a “common aircraft architecture and subsystems”.

      “The FACE Standard is an open, nonproprietary technical specification that is publicly available without restrictive contracts, licensing terms, or royalties,” the Consortium announced from its base at The Open Group, the industry association responsible for the POSIX open Unix specification.

      “In business terms, the open standards specified for FACE mean that programmers are freely able to use them without monetary remuneration or other obligation to the standards owner,” it said.

Leftovers

  • Windows 8 showdown: Face-off on whether Windows still matters
  • “8″ Down and One to Go

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • More Free Sludge! Calabasas, California Offers Free Sewage Sludge “Compost”

      Good news! The sewage treatment plant in Calabasas, California has been giving away free sludge! Free sludge, you say? That potent stew of human and industrial sewage sludge laced with flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceutical residues, phthalates, industrial solvents, resistant pathogens, and perfluorinated compounds? “Composted” sludge, which can bioaccumulate in plants grown in sludge-contaminated soil? Oh, goodie.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Secret Greece Loan Shows Two Sinners as Client Unravels

      Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start.

      On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said.

    • Goldman Sachs: Social Security and Medicare Are ‘Weaker’ Promises Than Debt

      A report released today by Goldman Sachs says that if push comes to shove, the federal government will pay its lenders before it pays Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. Debt service “should be seen as the top claim on government resources in most cases,” says the Goldman analysis.

  • Civil Rights

    • Mexico Adopts Alarming Surveillance Legislation

      The Mexican legislature today adopted a surveillance legislation that will grant the police warrantless access to real time user location data. The bill was adopted almost unanimously with 315 votes in favor, 6 against, and 7 abstentions. It has been sent to the President for his approval.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pinterest and copyright: Why you should keep sharing–and keep pinning

        Pinterest is a social site for image sharing around themes that launched in closed beta in March 2010. As the site proceeded through an invite system and finally registration requests, it gained a considerable following and was one of Time’s “50 Best Websites of 2011.” In January 2012, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined and became the fastest site to ever break 10 million unique visitors. As its popularity increases, so have concerns about whether its users aren’t just sharing their favorite things, but engaging one another in the web’s largest copyright infringement platform.

      • ACTA

03.06.12

Links 6/3/2012: Rejecting a New Mac and Vista 8; Linux 3.3 RC6 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Faithful Author Writes Novel Entirely In Tweets

    Notable science fiction and fantasy novelist Piers Anthony has now gone where no author has gone before. Twitter. Anthony, who is new to Twitter is attempting to write an entire novel using only tweets.

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 189
  • Mini Versus Micro

    The x86 personal computers have long been powerful enough to run the applications of multiple users. I have often run a whole computer lab from a single PC running GNU/Linux. I used the lab’s PCs as thin clients. There is another way to use a PC for multiple users and that is to connect multiple monitors, keyboards and mice to one PC. That is what MiniFrame has been doing from M$’s OS. M$ liked that so much that they revised their EULA for Vista to include a “single-user” requirement.

  • Ninja Block Linux computer reaches $80k crowd-funding

    The Ninja Block open source cloud automation device looks as if it could be heading into the development stage after attracting $50,000 of pledges in only a week on the Kickstarter crowd-funding website.

  • Desktop

    • Windows 8 may drive me to Linux

      I have been a Microsoft defender for decades. “No, MS-DOS 4.0 isn’t really that bad,” I pleaded to friends almost 25 years ago. “Give Windows 98 a chance” I begged ten or 11 years later. Heck, I extolled the virtues of Vista (which I did believe in, by the way) to anyone willing to listen. But in the wake of last week’s introduction of the Consumer Preview edition of Windows 8, I can say only this: Microsoft, you’re on your own.

      Never — and I’m going to repeat this for additional emphasis, never – have I been as horrified by one of the company’s products as I am by this one. (Yes, I used Microsoft Bob.) Every choice seems to have been made for a sketchy reason, and the full collection of them bears the haphazard feel of the morning after a particularly raucous college party. Scratch that: Even at my most inebriated, I’m pretty sure I would never conceive of something like Windows 8.

    • Why I Hate My Brand New Mac (APPL)

      Hands down the fastest boot-up time is Ubuntu. Without fail, 10-ish seconds after typing my password, it was ready to go. Even on an old machine. Even if I left a lot of files and apps open.

    • 1% is a Statistic. This is a Trend.

      235 million page requests last month were from Linux systems. 161.9 million from Android/Linux for 3.36% share and 1.52% for GNU/Linux. That other OS was clinging to monopoly at 74%. In April, 2009, that other OS was at 89.5%. Times are changing.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Fog: A High-Performance Alternative To Cairo

      While Cairo gets much of the spotlight when it comes to a 2D vector graphics drawing library, there’s another open-source project that claims to provide even faster performance and greater benefits; meet the Fog-Framework.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 26th February 2012
      • KDE – Best Desktop Environment of the Year

        The 2011 Members’ Choice Awards from LinuxQuestions.org has honored the KDE Community with “Best Desktop Environment of the Year”. In addition, Tech Radar has declared that KDE Workspaces are the best desktop environment. KDE innovation, performance and stability have particular appeal for users. Tech Radar reports that KDE Workspaces have “the best mix of cutting edge software and stability…”, and writes, “We were amazed by the level of comfort the users experienced with KDE.” Chris from the Linux Action Show is switching to KDE!

    • GNOME Desktop

      • We need a Gnome computer

        tl;dr we need a Gnome computer.

        This is not about choice, it is about freedom.

        A hardware platform that would be libre, that would run a libre OS, based on Gnome, Linux and GNU.

  • Distributions

    • Linux Deepin 11.12.1 screen shots
    • A look at Frugalware Linux 1.6

      The Frugalware Linux live CD is provided as a 490 MB CD image. Burning this image to a disc and booting from it brings us to an Xfce desktop environment with a pleasant blue background. On the desktop we find icons for navigating the file system and launching the system installer. The application menu and task switcher are positioned at the top of the screen. In the top-right corner of the display an icon appeared indicating network status and I was surprised to find the icon showed I was not connected. Opening a terminal I tried to ping a server and found the live CD doesn’t include the ping command. Nor does it include the FTP command-line client, nor telnet. Deciding to change gears I clicked the icon for launching the distro’s web browser. A prompt came up asking which browser I would like to make my default, though only one browser, Midori, is listed as available. Once the browser launched I found that I was, in fact, connected to the network, despite the status presented by the network icon.

    • How to Find the Perfect Linux Distribution for You

      Linux is a badass open-source operating system. Take it from a card-carrying Linux lover. But it’s not without problems. One such problem: There are nearly six hundred different versions of Linux out there—an incredibly overwhelming number to even the most experienced of Linux users. If you’ve tinkered with Linux a bit and want to move beyond the basics, here’s how to narrow down that selection and find the distribution that fits your needs.

    • Chakra 2012.02: improved, but still confusing

      I have already written about two Linux distribution releases which happened in February: PCLinuxOS and Sabayon. Although it is already March, I still would like to write a third one about just another February release. Let it be three.

    • Linux From Scratch 7.1 published

      The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project has published version 7.1 of its manual for building a custom Linux installation. The new release of the step-by-step instructions is 345 pages long and uses more up-to-date components than previous versions – for example, the 3.2.6 Linux kernel and version 4.6.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The update includes fixes to bootscripts and corrections to the text, as well as updates to 20 packages.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon 8.0 review – The love is gone

        Once upon a time, Sabayon impressed me as a cute, furry mutation of Gentoo, a distribution forged in virgin’s blood and C code. It was big, even massive, and dared fight byte for byte with the likes of Vista. While most distributions were proud to claim their minimalistic share of GB for the installation, Sabayon shouted gimme more. It was nice. Lots of fun stuff, games, a media center, whatnot. Then it went downhill.

        Between versions oh-four and oh-five, some of the fun was gone, traded for maturity that did not suit it well. In fact, I let Sabayon rest for a while before picking it up again for today’s review. Now I’m aware of its Gentoo legacy, so credits are due when they are due, but that does not make the need for a suitable, friendly desktop environment any less. Therefore, me asking, can Sabayon deliver?

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – March 5th, 2012

        * Rebuild of the Debian archive with clang
        * Debian Peru revival
        * DebConf11 final report is out
        * Debian Utsav
        * Other news
        * Upcoming events
        * New Debian Contributors
        * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
        * Important Debian Security Advisories
        * New and noteworthy packages
        * Work-needing packages
        * Want to continue reading DPN?

      • You can now run Arch & Debian Linux on a Raspberry Pi
      • Raspberry Pi gets Arch Linux
      • Raspberry Pi and Cotton Candy: Computing’s Newest Treats

        “People are going to take these [RPi] boards and turn them into commercial products; they’re going to make gonzo one-off hardware projects ‘because they can.’ They’re going to use them in ways that we can’t begin to imagine, in places we wouldn’t normally think of,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “Instead of Beowulf clusters or Lego blocks, we can now think ‘tinker toys for the mind.’”

      • Linux operating system for Raspberry Pi ready for download

        The Linux operating system for the Raspberry Pi bare-bones computer is ready to download.

      • Raspberry Pi adds Arch Linux to downloads
      • 3D-print your own Raspberry Pi case at home

        If you’re one of the lucky thousands who snagged a $35 Raspberry Pi pocket Linux system before the first run of 10,000 sold out in just a few minutes, there’s almost certainly one question on your mind–where am I going to put this thing?

        The Raspberry Pi is a full system with all the needed ports that’s about the size of a credit card. It’s definitely cheap, but it’s not exactly pretty. That’s likely because its nonprofit designers are mainly focused on their mission of getting the systems into the hands of kids across the developed and developing world to get them excited about programming.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • What Ubuntu Can Take Away From The Raspberry Revolution

            While the $25 Raspberry Pi is turning a million eyeballs, Canonical’s incessant attempts at conquering non-Ubuntuers don’t seem to be working out as hoped or planned. Even though Shuttleworth, Canonical’s benevolent dictator, has decided to go all out in order to reach his 200-million mark as early as possible, the efforts are still visibly falling short. The recent announcements including Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android have created some buzz among the non-Linuxiens, it’s still nothing compared to what Raspberry Pi has achieved in such a short span of time.

          • Here’s Top Ten Wallpapers from the Ubuntu Precise Wallpaper Contest
          • Unity Desktop Launcher

            The new Unity Launcher is a new and very significant part of the desktop environment. After logging into your system the Launcher will automatically appear along the left edge of your screen. The Launcher can be used to store and run all of your favorite applications.

          • Canonical Releases First Beta Version Of Ubuntu 12.04
          • Is Ubuntu 12.04 a Linux Game Changer?

            Ever since the Unity desktop first came to Ubuntu, I’ve been critical of it and found myself completely disinterested in it. Some aspects of this discontent may have stemmed from my refusal to try something new. But certainly Unity had some rough edges in the beginning.

            In short, Unity was a neat idea that needed more time to develop.

            With Ubuntu 12.04 just around the corner, I was shocked to discover that Unity now offers a stable and configurable desktop experience. Thanks to the HUD (heads up display), more Unity-based configuration options, support for Sandy Bridge, and improved power consumption, Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up to be a really solid release.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 Open Source OS LTS Offers More Features, Polish

            We’ve now officially entered the season that comes only, er, twice a year: the countdown to the next iteration of Ubuntu. With beta 1 of Ubuntu 12.04 now available, it’s time to take a look at what’s new — and there’s a lot of it — in the latest and greatest version of what is (probably) the world’s most popular open source operating system.

          • … for human beings

            For the first time with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, real desktop user experience innovation is available on a full production-ready enterprise-certified free software platform, free of charge, well before it shows up in Windows or MacOS. It’s not ‘job done’ by any means, but it’s a milestone. Achieving that milestone has tested the courage and commitment of the Ubuntu community – we had to move from being followers and integrators, to being designers and shapers of the platform, together with upstreams who are excited to be part of that shift and passionate about bringing goodness to a wide audience. It’s right for us to design experiences and help upstreams get those experiences to be amazing, because we are closest to the user; we are the last mile, the last to touch the code, and the first to get the bug report or feedback from most users.

          • First Beta of Ubuntu Version 12.04 Features Many Improvements

            Late last week, after a long alpha release test period, which we covered here, the first beta version of Ubuntu 12.04 (dubbed Precise Pangolin) became available. You can get it and read about it now, although the Ubuntu Wiki warns that this beta is primarily for developers and testers at this point. This new version of Ubuntu is a major upgrade. Here is more on what to expect from it.

          • Unity Desktop Lenses

            One of the most popular features of the new Unity desktop are the Lenses. You can uses lenses to sort and search for items inside the Unity dash. For example, a lens for music will allow you to filter your searches for all of your music items and display music only in your search results. There are several lenses that can be added to the dash, each providing its own impressive functions as well.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 Global Menu News Update: HUD Lands In Unity 2D

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Time to eat humble raspberry Pi – Linux is NOT a processor

      First and foremost Raspberry Pi are a UK not-for-profit foundation.

      Though the credit-card sized naked motherboard does contain many ports including USBs and an SD card reader, it does not include a wireless mouse, screen or carry case.

      The peripherals are left up to users to find and build. Sort of.

      The two authorised resellers Premier Farnell/Element 14 and RS Components provide bundle packages that include all the bells and whistles to make it easier for users to build their own computers and create their own software programs.

    • Educators and Leaders Are Praising Low-Cost Raspberry Pi Devices

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Hardware Profile: exciTe 10 LE

        Just one more entry in the Hardware Profiles category, where I profile upcoming and available mobile devices powered by Linux-based operating systems (distributions, as we like to call them). This one is an Android tablet from Toshiba.

      • Get A KDE Spark Tablet RIGHT NOW!

        Potential buyers have been clamoring over the new KDE Spark tablet. Though predicted to perform otherwise, demand has been incredibly high as suggested by the sheer volume of pre-orders over at Make-Play-Live. Well, you don’t have to wait in line…

        The Spark tablet is really just a re-branded unit. At first, €200 doesn’t seem like a lot of scratch, but once you get familiar with the intimate details of the hardware, you find something here that you might not be able to carry with you as a daily-driver. I must say however, the allure of this rather nice looking experience is enough for me… Now, how well will this run on a Touchpad??

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Canada Lobbies Against US Banking Reform

      You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They’ve got a lot of nerve.

      This past week, our own finance minister, Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest proposal to regulate the U.S. banking system.

      Their interventions followed a concerted effort by American bank lobbyists to spark international opposition to U.S. regulatory reforms.

      What a shameful spectacle! Less than four years ago, the world was holding its breath for fear the crisis in the hyper-deregulated U.S. financial system would cause a second Great Depression. Now Canada and other foreign governments, cheered on by U.S. banking interests, are doing their best to block U.S. legislation that would curb the industry’s worst excesses.

    • Federal judge weighs whether to let regulators rein in oil speculators

      A federal judge on Monday refused to halt efforts by a key regulator to limit excessive speculation in the trading of oil contracts — which is driving up oil and gasoline prices — but hinted that he might soon rule in favor of Wall Street and let speculation go unchecked.

      Robert Wilkins, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, declined a request for a preliminary injunction to halt the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from implementing a congressional mandate to limit how many oil contracts any single financial speculator or company can control.

      However, Wilkins told both the CFTC and lawyers for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swap and Derivatives Association that he expected to make a ruling soon on whether to hear the case. His line of questioning left both sides with the impression that he was concerned about how the regulatory agency has proceeded.

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • 03/03/2012

      Talks on a free trade agreement between Canada and the European Union may take months longer to complete than initially planned as Canada seeks the best possible deal, Ottawa said on Tuesday.

      The agreement is particularly important for Canada, which is seeking to diversify exports away from the giant U.S. market.

      The two sides still have to settle contentious issues such as whether to amend Canada’s Patent Act to give more protection to European drug firms, a move the Canadian generic pharmaceutical industry opposes.

    • Blood in the water: Reports from the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forum

      I’m in Melbourne to advocate for free software users and developers at the latest round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), and I’m chomping at the bit to share a little good news with you all. The tone of the discussion here has turned much more friendly to us—and it’s thanks to your activism.

    • Rampant GMO Contamination Unchecked by Judge

      A judge in New York sided with Monsanto and against organic farmers in the first case of its kind seeking to protect famers from being accused of patent infringement upon unitentional contamination by Monsanto’s GMO seed.

      Organic farmers sought a judgment against Monsanto to protect themselves from being sued for patent infringement when their crops are unintentionally contaminated with the company’s genetically modified (GMO) seed, was dismissed in federal district court in New York by Judge Naomi Buchwald called the plaintiffs’ concern an “intangible worry, unanchored in time.”

    • Trademarks

      • THQ Trademarks ‘Evolve’

        On the 22nd of February, video games publisher THQ filed a trademark with the United States Patent & Trademark Office for a property called “Evolve”.

        It is still unclear what the term stands for, but we know that it pertains to “computer game software; video game software; downloadable video games.” Gamespot requested more information on the patent, unfortunately a THQ representative responded by saying “Sorry, no, we don’t comment on filings.”

    • Copyrights

      • In Copyright Enforcement, Ought Implies Can

        These two pieces are largely addressing different questions. Ruffini and Salam point out that the federal government have been pouring resources into anti-piracy efforts, and restraining individual liberty in the process, for decades. These efforts haven’t been very effective, and there’s no reason to think that the even greater efforts Hollywood advocates will be much more effective. So, they argue, Hollywood needs to recognize that the war on piracy can’t be won decisively and take pragmatic steps to deal with this reality.

        VerBruggen responds by insisting that piracy is wrong. He’s right, but this doesn’t get him as far as he thinks it does. This isn’t just an abstract exercise in moral philosophy. The government has limited resources, and a long list of problems to deal with. The question isn’t “should the government try to stop piracy,” it’s “how many resources should the government devote to combatting piracy as opposed to other problems.”

      • ACTA

        • SOPA, ACTA and the TPP: Lessons for a 21st Century Trade Agenda

          The ham-handed attempts by the U.S. entertainment industry to rein in online piracy, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), triggered an earthquake of public backlash that led to one of the quickest legislative collapses in modern history. In one day, fueled by Internet blackouts and user protests, the once “slam dunk” legislative effort to censor the Internet and make websites liable for “infringing” user content quickly became politically untouchable.

        • Assessing ACTA: My Appearance Before the European Parliament INTA Workshop on ACTA

          The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has mushroomed into a massive political issue in Europe in recent weeks with protests in hundreds of cities across the continent. Much of the focus has been on whether the European Parliament will give its approval to the agreement. The focal point of attention within the EP has been on the INTA committee, which holds a public workshop on the issue today. Interest in the workshop has been incredible – there are apparently 800 registrants with thousands more expected to watch the live stream.

        • The Plans To Bring ACTA Back To Life

          Following the initial discussions in the European Parliament and the overwhelmingly negative workshop that was held on 1 March, ACTA is close to dead in Europe. What are the strategies for bringing it back to life and how will this impact on other similar initiatives? How can activists ensure that our great success so far can be maintained?

          The original intention was to adopt ACTA in May or June 2012, with the Commission Communication on review of the IPR Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC (also known as “IPRED”) being launched at approximately the same time. The Commission’s “roadmap” for the review of the Directive is available here.

          The protests in the streets and the lack of support in the European Parliament created two big problems for the European Commission. Firstly, there was a significant risk of losing the Parliament vote and, secondly, the (successful) campaign against ACTA would create problems for the new proposal on the Enforcement Directive.

          The European Commission therefore decided to refer ACTA to the Court of Justice of the European Union in order to “de-couple” ACTA from IPRED. This leaves the way open for the launch of a legislative proposal in November/December. However, it is quite likely that these will be delayed to some extent.

          It has to be said that, while we would disagree with the Commission on a lot of aspects of IPRED, the Commission services working on the dossier do recognise many of the problems with the Directive and have ambitions to improve the legislation. They would, for example, seek to implement the rules against abuse of the Directive more effectively, in order to prevent disgraceful use of personal data, as in the ACS:Law case. The problem is that these positive proposals may not survive internal discussions in the Commission and the approach of the Parliament so far has been far from enlightened.

03.04.12

Links 4/3/2012: Cory Doctorow on Code Visibility, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.8

Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Windows 8 offers no management help for ARM devices

    Organizations looking to deploy Windows 8 on ARM-based (WOA) devices will have to do so without being able to manage them, according to a Microsoft advisory outlining the business benefits of the new operating system.

    While WOA scrimps on battery life, it falls short in management and compatibility with legacy applications, making it less than ideal for business.

  • Finance

    • Satyajit Das: Pravda The Economist’s Take on Financial Innovation

      The Economist sees financial innovation as positive; regarding it in the same sense as charity and goodwill to one’s fellow creatures. The reader is told that: “Finance has a very good record of solving big problems, from enabling people to realise the value of future income through products like mortgages to protecting borrowers from the risk of interest-rate fluctuations.” The definition of the “big problems” of our time is obviously subjective.

  • Censorship

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Dear Big Newspapers: Keep Putting Up Silly Paywalls And Clear The Internet Field For Us ‘Newcomers’

      Apparently it’s a week of paywalls for a bunch of big newspaper websites. Newspaper giant Gannett announced that all of its newspaper websites with the exception of USA Today, will go paywall by the end of the year. The system will allow between 5 and 15 article views before you’re locked out. And then, the news broke that next week, the LA Times will be launching its own paywall. Again, it will allow 15 “free” article views per month, but then require payment — with the price being a rather astounding $3.99/week.

    • Copyrights

      • Yes, Online And Offline Rules Are Different… Because Online And Offline Are Different

        In the past we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of claiming that the internet is some sort of “wild west” without laws just because some people don’t like the laws covering the internet. Clearly, there are plenty of laws that deal with the internet. What people really mean when they call the internet “the wild west” is that they simply don’t like the laws — and specifically that those laws don’t fit into the analogy they have crafted for the internet.

      • Inside Views ‘Balanced’ Copyright: Not A Magic Solving Word

        It was obviously a moment of some embarrassment for the US Department of Commerce and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Hardly two weeks after more than 100 NGOs and a few individuals, mostly located in the global South, requested that these two agencies postpone the upcoming Africa IP Summit, this is exactly what has happened to the session originally scheduled for Cape Town, South Africa in early April. But what about their substantive criticisms of the ideology, themes and speakers for this conference which were made in a 7 February open letter to WIPO Secretary General Francis Gurry? According to the NGOs, the original Cape Town event was promoting ‘an unbalanced IP agenda’ and they instead wanted a ‘balanced forum’ that would endorse a ‘balanced’ intellectual property agenda across the world. This article takes up the question: is balance the answer?

      • Kim Dotcom Gives TV Interview Where He Insists The Charges Against Him Are A Joke

        Generally speaking, if you’re facing criminal charges, it’s probably not a wise idea to give public interviews to the press, and I don’t see how doing this helps him in any way. He more or less lays out his expected argument concerning the copyright infringement claims, which are pretty much what you’d expect: that they followed the DMCA, took stuff down on request, and even gave copyright holders special access by which they could take links down themselves. Dotcom is clearly very well versed in the legal issues here, and he’s choosing his words extremely carefully, but it still seems a bit silly to reveal such arguments outside of court, and it could come back to haunt him later (you can bet US prosecutors are pouring over every word to figure out what they can hang him on.

      • UK Government Pressuring Search Engines To Censor Results In Favor Of Copyright Industries

        One of the most insidious aspects of recent Internet policy-making is that much of it is taking place behind closed doors, with little or no consultation — think of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. But there’s another dangerous trend: the rise of “informal” agreements between the copyright industries and Internet service providers.

        With the implicit threat that tough legislation will be brought in if voluntary agreements aren’t drawn up promptly enough, governments are using this technique to avoid even the minimal scrutiny that consultations on proposed new laws would permit. This allows all kinds of bad ideas to be forced through without any evidence that they will help and without the chance for those affected to present their viewpoints.

      • TV Networks Gang Up To Sue Aereo; Do Copyright Rules Change Based On The Length Of A Cable?

        The TV networks hate, hate, hate this because they’ve been raking in oodles of cash from carriage fees from the cable and satellite guys. That’s how much cable and satellite has to pay to “retransmit” the local broadcast channels, and it’s become a huge, multi-billion dollar business that the TV guys have no interest in giving up in any way, shape or form. It’s the reason why you probably hear stories on a regular basis about some cable or satellite network will no longer carry a certain broadcast channel… leading to a lot of posturing and such before one side eventually backs down (often after a short blackout period).

      • EMI Sneakily Trying To Pretend Many Of Its Artists Can’t Reclaim Their Copyrights
      • Artist and Hacktivists Sabotage Spanish Anti-Piracy Law

        In an attempt to sabotage a new anti-piracy law that went into effect today, hundreds of websites in Spain are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites all link to an “infringing” song by an artist loyal to the protest, who reported the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests.

      • Lawsuit Against US Copyright Group For Fraud & Extortion Moves Forward

        US Copyright Group was the first of the US-based copyright trolls, suing thousands of individuals in a single lawsuit, trying to get them to pay up (rather than going through an actual trial). US Copyright Group is really a front for a DC law firm, Dunlapp, Grubb & Weaver. One of its very first “big” lawsuits was against about 5,000 people for supposedly partaking in the sharing of Uwe Boll’s Far Cry. Of course, as we had noted, there was a pretty big problem in the Far Cry lawsuit, in that the US copyright registration was filed too late for many of the accusations of infringement.

      • Copyright kings are judge, jury and executioner on YouTube

      • ACTA

        • Time To Go: Why EU Commissioner De Gucht Has Disqualified Himself From Handling ACTA

          Even though the European Commission has referred ACTA to the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament continues to examine the treaty in its various committees. Earlier this week, the one dealing with International Trade met for a preliminary discussion. One of the key speakers was the Commissioner responsible for ACTA, Karel De Gucht, who naturally tried to make light of the many problems that have been raised in recent weeks.

          But as the text of his speech makes clear, he did a poor job. For example, in an apparent attempt to distract attention from the real issues, he brought up the irrelevant and widely-condemned DDoS attacks on the European Parliament, perhaps hoping to spread around a little guilt by association.

03.02.12

Links 2/3/2012: BackTrack 5 R2, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta 1, PHP 5.4

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Spring Hadoop makes Java/Hadoop interaction easier

    SpringSource, the VMware division that is the home of the Spring framework for Java, has announced Spring Hadoop; this brings support for Spring, Spring Batch and Spring Integration to Apache Hadoop applications. This will allow Spring application developers to make use of data and computing capabilities of Hadoop compute clusters as an analytical tool. The project has been developed over the last few months, according to developer Costin Leau, who introduced this first release.

  • Hadoop: How open source can whittle Big Data down to size
  • VMware Hatches Spring Hadoop Cross-Breed for Big Data
  • Weekend Project: Take a Tour of Open Source Eye-Tracking Software

    Right this very second, you are looking at a Web browser. At least, those are the odds. But while that’s mildly interesting to me, detailed data on where users look (and for how long) is mission-critical. Web designers want to know if visitors are distracted from the contents of the page. Application developers want to know if users have trouble finding the important tools and functions on screen. Plus, for the accessibility community, being able to track eye motion lets you provide text input and cursor control to people who can’t operate standard IO devices. Let’s take a look at what open source software is out there to track eyes and turn it into useful data.

  • DreamHost Planning Software Spinout

    Los Angeles-based hosting provider DreamHost, the provider of web hosting and managed hosting services, is planning a new, open source software spinout, the firm revealed this week, as it looks to leverage its work on the Ceph open source project for distributed storage.

  • Security in obscurity is a wrong thing to follow: Harish Pillay

    As the global community and technology architect, Harish Pillay is a part of the community architecture group, which comprises a core group of Red Hatters who interface between Red Hat and the Open Source community. Harish joined Red Hat from Maringo Tree Technologies, an open source consultancy, training and services company, he co-founded in 2002. He was also the Founder/CTO of Inquisitive Mind – an e-learning services company – founded in 1999. Excerpts from an interview:

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Front Ends and Connectors for Working with Hadoop are Arriving

      At one point, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–was an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are looking into tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more. Cloudera and Hortonworks are leading the pack among these Hadoop-focused companies.

      Front ends for working with Hadoop, which make it easier to sift large data sets, are also appearing. Talend, which offers a number of open source middleware solutions, is out with a new one, and Microsoft is making it easier to work with Hadoop from the Excel spreadsheet.

  • Databases

    • How to Choose An Open Source Database

      If you are an application developer or a database administrator, you already know the importance of Relational Database Management Systems. RDMSs store data in a reliable and flexible manner and facilitate its easy retrieval – and of course, they can be manipulated using Structured Query Language (SQL).

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The bright future of LibreOffice

      Formed out of Oracle’s neglect of the OpenOffice.org project by a community uprising in 2010, LibreOffice quickly gathered a critical mass of developers to work on it, drawn from a diverse set of backgrounds and motivations. They hunkered down on the tasks that had been hard to address while the project was in the hands of Sun Microsystems (where I was once employed), such as removing unused code from the project’s two-decade legacy or making it possible for a beginner to get involved through Easy Hacks. A year and a half later, there’s much to show for their efforts, yet so much more to do.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • GlassFish 3.1.2 released

      Version 3.1.2 of GlassFish, the Java application and web server, has been released by Oracle, one year after the release of GlassFish 3.1 and seven months since the release of the Java 7 compatible GlassFish 3.1.1. The updated server is described as the successor to the earlier 3.0 releases and is recommended as an update for all current GlassFish users.

    • FreeNAS 8.0.4 updates Firefly, Transmission and Samba

      The FreeNAS Project has announced the availability of a new stable release, version 8.0.4, of its open source FreeBSD-based network-attached-storage operating system. The maintenance update to the 8.0.x branch of FreeNAS includes a new version of the Firefly media server (1696_6), which adds compatibility for iTunes 10.5.2 or later, and updates the Transmission BitTorrent client to version 2.42. Samba has been upgraded to version 3.6.3, fixing several bugs and addressing a security vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS).

    • NGINX 1.1.16 development version arrives

      Igor Sysoev, the developer of NGINX has released version 1.1.16 of his web server software. The project aims to provide a stable, high performance alternative to more traditional competitors such as Apache HTTP Server or Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services).

    • PHP 5.4 Release Brings Many Changes

      PHP 5.4.0 was officially released today as a major advancement over the PHP 5.3 code-base.

      Among the many improvements to PHP 5.4 is support for language traits, a shortened array syntax, a built-in web-server, compatibility changes, and many other improvements.

    • PHP 5.4.0 brings new features
    • PHP 5.4 Will Make the Web Faster

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Innovate or Legislate

    The Internet’s enemies have proven vocal, organized, and effective, while the vast majority of consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs it has enriched have proven anything but, and the fight over SOPA must be understood in this larger context.

  • Kicking the Tires on Pinwheel and Talking to Founder Caterina Fake

    On February 16, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake announced private beta testing for Pinwheel, an online “Flickr for Places” type of service. Fake sent me an invitation to try out Pinwheel and answered a few questions about her new project, which is built and powered by Linux and open source solutions.

    First, I should clear up some potential confusion about the Pinwheel name. Another photo-sharing service, Pinweel, also launched in February, and the nearly identical names are bound to cause confusion with users. Pinwheel’s service focuses on sharing photos, location, and notes, whereas Pinweel specializes in group photo sharing.

  • Antitrust: Commission opens proceedings against MathWorks

    Brussels, 1 March 2012 – The European Commission has opened a formal investigation to assess whether The MathWorks Inc., a U.S.-based software company, has distorted competition in the market for the design of commercial control systems by preventing competitors from achieving interoperability with its products. The Commission will investigate whether by allegedly refusing to provide a competitor with end-user licences and interoperability information, the company has breached EU antitrust rules that prohibit the abuse of a dominant position. The opening of proceedings means that the Commission will examine the case as a matter of priority. It does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation.

  • Interoperability, Standards and Market Power

    At the heart of the matter is the power that a dominant player can wield once it becomes the center of an environment of products and services that grow up around its technology. Regulators recognize that the evolution of such ecosystems can have favorable market effects, such as the rapid proliferation of clone computers and tools developed by independent software vendors (ISVs) that occurred once the “WinTel” PC operating system/processor platform became ubiquitous.
    On the other hand, US and EU regulators, as well as Microsoft competitors, took Microsoft to task for over-exploiting the dominance it achieved through its control of the MS-DOS, and then Windows operating systems. One way in which Microsoft was alleged to have exploited its position was by dragging its feet in sharing interoperability information with Lotus and Apple when it introduced new versions of application software, such as its Excel spreadsheet application.

    More recently, Apple swept the marketplace almost clean of competition in the portable music device space, while allowing a host of third party docking stations and other products to be produced in connection with iPods. While the iPhone no longer enjoys comparable dominance in the smart phone category, its early success gave rise to a similar explosion of synergistic third party goods and services.

    In each case, while many other vendors enjoyed success in selling products and services for use in connection with these new Apple products, some ISVs complained that Apple’s App store rules and processes were overly restrictive and not always consistently applied. For their part, some customers chaffed at the control that Apple has tried to assert over what software can be used on its devices, voiding the warranties of customers that insisted on “jailbreaking” their iPhones to run whatever software they wished on the devices they had bought and paid for.

  • Security

    • Phishing via NFC

      At the RSA Conference 2012, McAfee’s Chief Technology Officer, Stuart McClure, and several of his colleagues, have demonstrated a whole range of different attacks on mobile devices. For example, they demonstrated an attack on an NFC (Near Field Communication)-enabled smartphone: the attacker simply attaches a modified NFC tag to a legitimate surface such as an advertising poster. For their live demo, the researchers used a Red Cross donations appeal such as those seen at bus stops in various cities across Europe.

  • Finance

    • JPMorgan Chase CEO: Newspaper Industry Pay ‘Just Damned Outrageous’

      The chief executive of the biggest bank in the United States says journalists are ridiculously overpaid.

      At the company’s annual investor day, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called the percentage of newspaper company revenue paid out to employees “just damned outrageous,” according to Bloomberg News. “Worse than that, you [the media] don’t even make any money!”

    • The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse

      Doc Zone has traveled the world – from Wall Street to Dubai to China – to investigate The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse. Meltdown is the story of the bankers who crashed the world, the leaders who struggled to save it and the ordinary families who got crushed.

      September 2008 launched an extraordinary chain of events: General Motors, the world’s largest company, went bust. Washington Mutual became the world’s largest bank failure. Lehman Brothers became the world’s largest bankruptcy ever – The damage quickly spread around the world, shattering global confidence in the fundamental structures of the international economy.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • CMD Receives an “Izzy Award” for ALEC Exposed

      The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College has selected the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) for its annual “Izzy Award,” which recognizes outstanding achievement in independent media. CMD was recognized for its ALEC Exposed project, and shares this year’s award with Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who was recognized for his exceptional reporting from Tahir Square. The award is named for the legendary I.F. Stone, the maverick investigative journalist who challenged Joe McCarthy’s scare campaign and was the first to question the Gulf of Tonkin hoax.

    • Sewage Sludge Rash? Texas Musical Fest-Goers Blame “Dillo Dirt”

      Nine months before tens of thousands flocked to a popular music festival in Austin, Texas, the concert park grounds were spread with sewage sludge. It was autumn of 2009, and sewage sludge was used as a “fertilizer” to make the grass — parched from prior dry seasons — green. But it rained the weekend of the festival, turning the grounds into a huge mud pit, with a stench that one concert-goer described as the smell of “pig manure,” with the consistency of pudding.

  • Censorship

    • Does Guernsey Really Want To Become Famous — And Ostracized — For Introducing Image Rights?

      That last paragraph underlines one of the key problems with image rights. Like the UK’s infamous libel laws, such rights might enable the world’s rich and powerful to censor stories that presented them in an unflattering light, by invoking their “image rights”.

      The same article quoted above talks about how the “legislation will define the rights of an individual to protect their own image and balance those against the freedom of news reporting and the public interest.” But a new law — especially in completely uncharted areas as here — is likely to require a number of detailed court cases to establish its contours. That’s going to be expensive, and not something that news organizations can lightly undertake, to say nothing of lone bloggers, which gives those with deep pockets a powerful weapon against the media.

    • Sherlock confirms that ‘Irish SOPA’ has been signed into law

      JUNIOR MINISTER SEÁN Sherlock has this afternoon confirmed that the controversial statutory instrument that reinforces online copyright laws in Ireland has been signed into law.

    • LEAKED: the video Olympics Authorities want banned

      Creating parodies goes to the heart of comedy and is one of the most effective ways to highlight social issues.

      But parodies of films and music aren’t allowed under UK copyright law, unless you have explicit permission of the copyright owner. I didn’t know this either until this week.

      Below is a satirical video leaked to Liberal Conspiracy that parodies the London 2012 Olympics using 3D animation. It is a political video that may have infringed copyright.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • GOP Senators To Unveil Rival Cybersecurity Proposals

      Two weeks ago at a hearing on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which is being championed by Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., aired a laundry list of concerns about that bill.

      “If the legislation before us today were enacted into law, unelected bureaucrats at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses – which own roughly 90 percent of critical cyber infrastructure,” McCain said of Lieberman’s bill. “The fundamental difference in our alternative approach is that we aim to enter into a cooperative relationship with the entire private sector through information sharing, rather than an adversarial one with prescriptive regulations.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Devises Entirely New Wireless Troll Toll

      In 2005 then-AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week that because people use Google, Google should help pay for AT&T’s network deployment (or as Ed put it, Google “ain’t usin’ his pipes for free”). ISP executives have long tried to offload upgrade expenses on to others, adding a new content toll despite the fact both content companies and consumers already pay a considerable sum for bandwidth. Whitacre’s comment triggered years of ugly network neutrality debate, and now AT&T is back with another idea.

    • Does the UN take over the Internet?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • How The US Trade Rep Is Trying To Wipe Out Used Goods Sales With Secretive TPP Agreement

      For a while now, we’ve been covering the gradual legal assault on the First Sale doctrine and beyond. The First Sale doctrine, of course, is what lets you resell a legally purchased book without having to first obtain permission from the copyright holder. Of course, copyright holders generally hate the First Sale doctrine, because it often means that their products have to compete against “used” versions of their own products as well. Of course, this view is very shortsighted and economically ignorant. A healthy used or resale market has been shown to increase the amount people will pay for new items — because they recognize that there’s a secondary market and they can recoup some of what they paid for the original. Thus a healthy secondary market, contrary to what some believe, can often improve the health of the primary market.

    • Copyrights

      • Funny How Sensitive Hollywood Gets When You Threaten To Mess With Its ‘Fundamental’ Structure

        One of the key points in the SOPA/PIPA debate involved Hollywood — and the MPAA’s Chris Dodd and Michael O’Leary in particular — dismissing the worries of folks in the tech industry about the rather fundamental changes that these laws would make to both the technological and legal frameworks of the internet. Anytime such a thing was brought up, it was dismissed out of hand. This was most noticeable during the original SOPA hearings in November, where a number of experts were pointing out their concerns with how SOPA would undermine basic internet security principles… and O’Leary dismissed them with a simple statement about how he just didn’t believe those concerns to be true.

      • Has The Megaupload Shutdown Been Good For The Entertainment Industry?

        One of our most vocal (yet anonymous) critics posted an off-topic comment on a totally unrelated story mocking us for not having covered the story of how Hollywood has been saved (saved!) thanks to the shutdown of Megaupload. Of course, the reason we hadn’t covered the story was because we didn’t know about it. He referenced a couple of French news reports, which I hadn’t seen until I had some time just now to catch up on some old comments. He could have submitted the stories, but he insisted that it would be a total waste of time because we ignore any story that we disagree with. That’s pretty funny, considering many, many of the stories here are ones that challenge our views. And, I’m especially interested in reports of actual data, even if it conflicts with other data we’ve seen in the past. In fact, I’m especially interested in such stories, because my focus is figuring out what’s really happening and understanding what’s actually best for culture and society. So data that actually challenges my assumptions is some of the most useful data around.

      • If Major Labels Are All About Helping Artists, Why Do We Keep Seeing Artists Calling Out Their Labels For Screwing Them?

      • ACTA

        • Rottification of ACTA

          Today the ACTA workshop turned out to be a catastrophy for ACTA proponents. Not because issues raised by MEP or participants were very tough, they weren’t. A toxic mix of clear cut academics speakers Geist/Geiger and then Sander and the Maastricht study butchering the agreement. We witness a slow “rottification” of ACTA.

        • ‘We, The Web Kids’: Manifesto For An Anti-ACTA Generation

          One of the striking features of the demonstrations against ACTA that took place across Europe over the last few weeks was the youth of the participants. That’s not to say that only young people are concerned about ACTA, but it’s an indication that they take its assault on the Internet very personally — unlike, perhaps, older and more dispassionate critics.

03.01.12

Links 1/3/2012: Raspberry Pi and Cotton Candy, EU Censorship Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Penguins Seen Over California

      California shifted from 1.5% to 18%. What’s with that? Google has only 10K employees in Mountain View, not enough to change the share in California that much.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Of Fanboys and Distribution Menageries

      Opening the word processor is a rare thing for me. I usually make do with LaTeX. But it is needed sometimes, like when you have a desire to write for your blog, and the writing will end up copied and pasted anyway, and you want a completely unrelated way to start your post. That done, let’s start:

      Our first topic of discussion is distribution menageries. Some people, with a drive I confess I cannot even begin to understand, install distributions. I am not talking about building a stable desktop for yourself with Scientific Linux and putting a Fedora or Arch next to it to play with latest innovations and software, I am talking about those people who install (and I took this list from an anonymous from Ubuntu Forums) Ubuntu 10.04, openSUSE 12.1, Ubuntu 11.10, Xubuntu 11.10, Mint Linux 12, Windows 7 and the last Kubuntu. Agreed, not everyone goes that extreme, but it is common to see people who installed 2 or 3 spins on same Ubuntu and something like a nonworking BSD. They speak of this on public forums without embarrassment; and as it happens, there is no embarrassment to be felt as all they get are pats on the back. This gives me, so conveniently, a way to introduce our next topic of discussion: Fanboys or fanbots, whichever you prefer. People who write window$, M$ (winzort is popular here) and claim that Microsoft is out to conquer the world. This last world conquering part is what really angers me; after all, world domination should be goal of every self respecting nerd; do not discriminate against Linux people, please.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2012
      • ClearOS Community 6.2.0 Beta 3 Released

        ClearOS Community 6.2.0 Beta 3 has arrived! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, Beta 3 includes the following new apps: Content Filter, Flexshare, Samba, Remote Server Backup, Print Server, Password Policies, and Network Visualizer. New apps in the Professional Edition include: Google Apps Synchronization, Active Directory Connector, and Central Management. This will be the last beta as we head toward a final release. We will soon be able to put those Duke Nukem jabs behind us ;-)

      • CentOS, RHEL and Scientific Linux 4 reach their End of Life

        The CentOS and Scientific Linux projects have stopped maintaining the series 4 versions of their Linux distributions. According to the “End of Life” (EOL) notifications by CentOS and Scientific Linux, there will be no further security fixes for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4-based distributions. Users will, therefore, need to switch to other versions.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source software brings benefits to Katikati Computers

    When Michael Pavletich and Glynn Smith found themselves running identical businesses six years ago, they decided they better join forces. Their operations in Katikati had the same business approach and philosophy and they also shared a love of motorcycling.

    However, though the partnership works well, Pavletich admits running a small business like Katikati Computers can be trying when one of them is away. Early in January, for example, Pavletich was effectively tied to the shop, while Smith was on holiday. Foot traffic and phone calls come and go, creating peaks in work that can only be overcome by coming in early and taking some work home.

  • SaaS

    • The Wild West of Big Data

      It is very easy to compare the atmosphere of this year’s Strata Conference and the big data ecosystem to the atmosphere of the Linux and open source ecosystem around the turn of the century.

      (And yes, I get a little trill in my fingers when I get to type “turn of the century.”)

      The comparison is not literal: I made this observation to someone I met at here at Strata this week and he dug into me a bit on how his company’s offerings were not related to open source technologies.

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • Regina Holliday advocates patient engagement at HIMSS12

      Patient care has always been vital to healthcare. At the same time, patient engagement has always been frighteningly low. Patients have been passive players in their own care, depending on and assuming that ‘doctor knows best.’

      Today’s patients, however, are becoming consumers of healthcare. They are more informed about their options and with more information at their disposal they are becoming more vocal than ever about their expectations for care.

      In the past, gaining access to medical records was difficult at best. Now, as paper records are being replaced with electronic data, patients will have an opportunity to take greater control of their healthcare records.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Unreleased Elliott Smith, Deerhunter on Kickstarter Comp for Open Source Project CASH Music

      CASH Music is a not-for-profit open software project based in Portland, Oregon that will offer musicians and labels free, open source tools necessary for independently marketing their music. (“What WordPress did for bloggers, we’re doing for musicians,” they say.) The organization, led by Maggie Vail (formerly of Kill Rock Stars) and Jesse von Doom, is currently raising funds on Kickstarter.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Eurogreens: Dear Mr. President, where is our Info?
    • Code for America Meets Austin

      It’s hard to believe my team has been in Austin for nearly four weeks already. As part of the 2012 Code for America Fellowship program, we’re nearing the end of our residency: five weeks of interviews, meetings, events and information gathering. Code for America is a non-profit based in San Francisco that partners teams of developers and designer with cities around the country to encourage innovation in government and civic engagement.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • California State Senate bill seeks to create open source textbook library

        College students may find relief from high textbook prices in a California State Senate bill that would create a free open source textbook library.

        State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduced a bill Feb. 8 that would fund a library containing open source textbooks for the 50 most popular lower division courses at the state’s colleges and universities. Students could download the textbooks for free or pay about $20 for a hard copy.

        On March 3, the bill — which asks for $25 million in state funding to create the open source textbooks — will be eligible for discussion in committee hearings. But that funding request can change as the bill moves through the hearings, according to Steinberg spokesperson Alicia Trost.

    • Open Hardware

      • An open-source robo-surgeon

        RAVENS have a bad reputation. Medieval monks, who liked to give names to everything (even things that did not need them), came up with “an unkindness” as the collective noun for these corvids. Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, however, hope to change the impression engendered by the word. They are about to release a flock of medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic surgery.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • EU Censorship Plan With A Cheesy Name: The Clean IT Project

      Those last two sentences are particularly ominous. First, because they show no awareness that any attempt to “clean” the Internet inevitably affects everyone else’s online freedom. Given that there are no hard and fast rules about what is terrorism, the past teaches us that there is always collateral damage in the form of over-reaction — not least because people understandably err on the side of caution in this area.

  • Privacy

    • Privacy commissioner has concerns with Google’s new privacy policy

      Canada’s privacy commissioner has expressed concerns with Google’s new privacy policy, asking the Internet giant to clearly explain how it plans to use personal information it collects from users.

      In a letter to the company sent Thursday, but released publicly Friday, Jennifer Stoddart said Google’s new policy appears to have loopholes where users may unwillingly have their personal information used in ways that make them uncomfortable.

  • Civil Rights

    • Lawful Access Signals Canada Is Open to ‘Big Brother Inc.’

      Privacy International, one of the world’s leading privacy organizations, last year released the results of a multi-year investigation into the shadowy world of the commercial surveillance industry. Dubbed “Big Brother Inc.,” the investigation placed the spotlight on dozens of companies that specialize in covert surveillance technologies that are typically sold directly to governments and law enforcement agencies.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA
    • Organic Farmers’ Preemptive Lawsuit Against Monsanto Patents Tossed Out For Being A Bit Too Preemptive

      Monsanto has quite a track record of going after farmers for making use of its “patented” seeds, even in a case that involve seeds that blew onto a farm from a neighboring farm. So, it wasn’t entirely surprising to see a group of organic farmers preemptively sue Monsanto last year, asking for a declaratory judgment that they did not infringe. However, the judge in the case has now dismissed the case, noting that for a declaratory judgment, there has to be a real conflict, and Monsanto keeps insisting that it won’t sue these farmers. From a legal standpoint, this argument makes sense (and the declaratory judgment standard can be pretty high in some cases — especially if no direct threat has been issued). But, it still seems unfortunate. Given Monsanto’s past actions in other cases, even if it says it won’t sue now, plenty of farmers are reasonably scared about what will happen down the road. But, for now, they just have to wait and hope that Monsanto seeds don’t show up on their farms…

    • Business Software Alliance’s latest weird argument for stronger IP laws

      The Business Software Alliance has found a newly imagined detriment of Canada’s supposedly sub-par intellectual property laws – make sure you’re sitting down for this shocker – it’s slowing down the advancement of cloud computing.

      It’s the latest of many poxes that have stricken Canada as a result of our outdated IP enforcement and copyright protection regime, all of which have been fastidiously documented by this interest group representing the world’s largest software companies.

    • Copyrights

      • Would You Rather Be ‘Right’ Or Realistic?
      • Artist Sues Sony Over Background Used in Music Video (Exclusive)
      • Company That Issued Bogus Takedown Says It Was All A Mistake, Apologizes

        ote about how a totally bogus DMCA takedown notice, coming from an “anti-piracy” firm called Armovore, deleted a key Techdirt blog post about SOPA/PIPA from Google’s search results. That post apparently got some attention within Google, who kicked off an expedited review and reinstated our site and a few others. Soon after that, we got a couple emails from folks at Armovore, and they also posted some comments to the site, in which they apologized, and said that it was an “early” version of the technology. To their credit, they “accept full responsibility for the mistake” and insist that while that takedown was an automated keyword-based effort, they now only do manual takedowns. They even apologized that multiple people reached out to apologize.

      • ‘Towards Flexible Copyright?’

      • ACTA

        • David Martin and the straw man about boarder searches in ACTA

          In fact, I never read these article about iPod searches at the customs or heard an advocacy group in Europe to make that consumer case. I only heard about the straw man of the ACTA defenders that there were these “misconceptions” of critics, even at times when ACTA was yet in a preparatory phase. Actually, as you see from the text, it wouldn’t even be even a misconception though it is a side topic. A distraction.

        • Karel De Gucht’s Fake ACTA Debate

          Last week, the Trade Commissioner De Gucht, the same who recently declared he was “not afraid of the anti-ACTA demonstrations”, went on to explain why, considering the wave of criticism on ACTA, he is now turning to the European Court of Justice to assess whether ACTA would be detrimental to fundamental rights1.

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