05.17.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Besides well known devices like Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle etc, Linux is powering some of the most amazing devices around the globe and in the sky.
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Although Google is offering a limited set of developer tools for Glass — and more are on the way — the company doesn’t want to stop hackers from tinkering even further.
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We’ve seen several Linux tablets emerge over the past year or so, but examples with triple-boot capabilities are much less common.
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Server
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LONG TIME LINUX SUPPORTER IBM has opened an office in Beijing that will help developers port Linux applications to its Power architecture.
IBM has been pushing its Power architecture for over 20 years, with its RISC chips intended for use in mission critical systems. Now the firm is working with Red Hat and Suse to help Linux developers port applications to the Power architecture by opening an office in Beijing.
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Scale Computing is scaling up its server business with a new HC3x server.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: There’s a critical vulnerability in the kernel. But relax, it’s been fixed. The International Space Station is switching from Windows to Debian. But not Debian 7, which has just been released. The beginner’s programming environment, Scratch 2.0, is out and the Raspberry Pi gets a super-light camera module. As always, hear our discoveries, our reports on the challenge and your own opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Linus, has dived in to save the day. Where did the robot come from? What is it’s purpose? Can the Iron Penguin stand against it?
Find out next time. Same penguin-time, same penguin-channel.
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Applications
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Adobe Photoshop is not just a requirement for web designers, but it is a growing need of professional photographers as well. Not everyone who wants to use the Adobe photoshop can use it and the reason for it is not the lack of skills, as we all know there are plenty of tutorials available for almost every functionality of this image editing tool. The reason why so many people cannot use Adobe Photoshop or the reason why so many people are looking for open source alternatives to it is its price. The current version, which is the Adobe Photoshop CS6, costs $628.88 on Amazon.com. Now considering its price as high as it is, it is almost impossible for many people to afford it, which is why we have compiled the best 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, so you can fulfill your photoshop needs without having to spend a fortune over it.
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So, you have a machine running Linux which is also used by kids. We all know how the Web may be dangerous, especially for youngest of Internet fans. But do you know how to shield your Linux system and control what your kids do online?
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Proprietary
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Since the first free software implementation of the Active Directory Domain Controller (AD-DC) in Samba 4 became available, the large variety of potential scenarios for updating Samba 3 has made it difficult for Linux distributors to add the full set of features to their installation packages. Usually, they will choose one part or the other – the Samba 4 source code includes two daemons: samba for operating an AD-DC, and the Samba-3-compatible smbd for file server or domain member operation. However, the distribution packages usually only include one daemon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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So as usual behind the scenes I have been doing digging contacting various developers to find out if they have Linux versions planned and here are a few that got back to me! Games including Edge of Space, Battlepaths and more, all of these are currently on Desura.
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The Left 4 Dead 2 Beta for Linux has been released for a few days now, but it seems that players are not swarming it, as expected.
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Akaneiro: Demon Hunters the ARPG that draws from Little Red Riding Hood is now in Open Beta for Linux! Sadly it’s not going very smoothly and I am not impressed so far.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.
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Hi there, while we’ve been working very hard on the next Amarok feature release, the 2.8, we also haven’t forgot the majority of our users using the stable versions.
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The Calligra team has released version 2.6.3, another bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a number of important bug fixes to 2.6.2 and we recommend everybody to update.
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digiKam team is proud to announce the 3.2.0 release of digiKam Software Collection. This version include a new album interface display mode named list-view. Icon view can be switched to a flat item list, where items can be sorted by properties columns as in a simple file manager. Columns can be customized to show file, image, metadata, or digiKam properties.
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The Qt developers at Digia are moving at a pace – just over a month after releasing the Qt 5.1 alpha, they have announced the first beta of Qt 5.1. Mostly, the beta continues to deliver the features of the alpha – Qt Quick Controls, Qt Quick Layouts, a serial port module for hardware and virtual serial posts, an updated Qt Creator, support for static Qt builds, and official support for the Qt sensors module. The Android (Qt Quick 1 and 2) and iOS (Qt Quick 1 only) support has been refined in the beta release, though it is still at the level of a technology preview.
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This week I decided to do some research for the Wayland porting of the KDE Plasma workspaces. One of the features we will need in future is a Wayland session compositor which runs nested on a Wayland system compositor. Of course one could think of setups without a system compositor, but overall I think that a nested compositor simplifies the setup and allows to have all the low level technologies in one place without duplication in all the various compositors. +1 for working together.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.8.2 has been officially launched and it features a lot of fixes, documentation and translation updates, not to mention a sleuth of new features.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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New Version of NXTera 6.3 makes it possible for legacy Entera applications to run on Linux Redhat Enterprise 6 with support for SOA integrated JAVA, C, C#, FORTRAN, and COBOL applications.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.
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As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical’s next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.
Discussed just now during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit were bug-fixes and enhancements for the desktop Unity version in Ubuntu 13.10. Unity 7 improvements being planned for the October release include presenting new Unity indicators, more Unity scopes, the in-dash payments method, and selected design bugs will be addressed.
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A few days ago, Canonical reiterated its commitment to restoring the Ubuntu “community” Web portal to front-and-center of official Ubuntu websites. At almost the same moment, news hit that the Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Brainstorm site, another part of ubuntu.com that has served in the past as a vector between developers and community members. Bad timing or cognitive dissonance? Here’s a look at the details.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre, Mint founder and lead, recently announced the public release of Linux Mint 15 Release Candidate. Mint 15 brings lots of fixes, two new tools, and several new features. In fact, Clem said, “Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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The Linux Mint developers have announced a release candidate for the upcoming version of their distribution, Linux Mint 15. The release, which is code-named “Olivia”, is being built on Ubuntu 13.04 and is billed by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre as “the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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What does every development team want? New contributors!
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Crystalfontz America has announced availability of an SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) with an optional onboard 128 x 32-pixel OLED display. The tiny CFA10036x module is built around Freescale’s 454MHz ARM9-based i.MX28x SOC (system-on-chip), includes 128MB or 256MB of RAM, and houses its open-source embedded Linux OS in a microSD slot.
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Phones
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Android
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Few of the announcements at Google’s I/O conference have involved open source software, but one announcement did: Android Studio, a new IDE environment for Android application development. Although Android Studio is only an early preview at the moment, Google is looking at it to eventually become the default development environment for Android applications, replacing the current solution of the Eclipse IDE and ADT Plugin.
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The challenge with a conference like Google I/O, where the announcements arrive one after another, is to see both forest and trees. Analysis of individual announcements – such as Google’s new Pandora/Rdio/Spotify competitor All Access, or the granular pricing for its compute infrastructure – is relatively straightforward. What’s more important, however, is perceiving the larger pattern.
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The company also launches new APIs to improve Android apps
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Rumors suggested that a white Nexus 4 might appear at Google IO, and they were right. We obtained the elusive white Nexus 4 and we can confirm it’s a carbon copy of the previous Nexus 4, just with a different color casing. That might not be the most exciting news, but we also learned the white Nexus 4 would hit the Google Play store on June 10th and it would be accompanied with Android 4.3.
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Archos has announced its latest Android tablet, the 80 Xenon, will be available in June with a $199 price tag. The 8-inch tablet is 3G-ready (SIM unlocked HSPA), runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and features the gull Google Play Store experience.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Three weeks ago I mentioned that OLPC Association has been remarkably quiet about the Android-based Walmart XO Tablet which it had introduced at CES 2013 in early January. Since then things have progressed a little bit with the Web site receiving a bit of a facelift.
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Events
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The last year has been a whirlwind of activity for Apache CloudStack. Citrix proposed CloudStack for the Apache Incubator in April of 2012, and just over a year later we’re gearing up for a second collaboration conference – this time in Santa Clara, CA, from June 23-25.
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Web Browsers
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NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE COMPANY Opera has settled the £2.2m lawsuit against ex-employee Trond Werner Hansen.
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Chrome
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At this week’s Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Chrome has reached the milestone of 750 million monthly users. This number is being misinterpreted by some to mean that 750 million people are using the Chrome browser on desktop computers.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, “to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies.”
The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
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Ok, I know… the ‘E’ in Firefox ESR does not stand for ‘Enterprise’, but it should. The ESR – Extended Support Release is an effort to help organizations stay with a secure version of Firefox for longer period of times than the current fast track six-week release cycle of Firefox.
I rely on Firefox ESR and I recommend it to lots of people because it’s a much safer version of Firefox to use with custom apps that sometimes – break – with the fast release cycle of Firefox.
The most recent Firefox mainline release is version 21, while the current Firefox ESR is 17. The next Firefox ESR is currently schedule to coincide with the Firefox 24 mainline release.
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Business
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Back in April, during SugarCRM’s annual SugarCon Conference, the company announced it would integrate ProcessMaker into it’s suite of cloud-based services, allowing seamless use of business process management tools directly from the Salesforce interface. About the same time the company also announced the new SugarCRM mobile application powered by HTML5 and offering a fast, easy way to access SugarCRM’s powerful features on mobile devices.
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The OpenFlow protocol stands at the center of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution, and at the center of OpenFlow stands the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). As the revolution progresses, however, vendors are attempting to look beyond OpenFlow. Where does that leave the ONF?
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Semi-Open Source
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Talend’s data integration platform is being aimed at solving the complexity issues that surround deployment of Apache-Hadoop-based solutions. The developers have been focusing on creating Apache Pig developer tools and creating code in Pig Latin, which is said to remove the need to learn about MapReduce, the fundamental architectural element behind Hadoop. Users work with Talend’s Big Data graphical tools and that generates Pig Latin code which is then run on the Hadoop cluster; to optimise its running, a graphical mapper can be used to rework the data flow and mapping within the cluster.
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Funding
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Canadian venture capital firm Vanedge Capital has made a US$3 million Series A investment in OpenGeo Inc., a New York-based provider of commercial open source geospatial software. At the same time, the company spun out from its incubator
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The OpenGeo Suite is widely used for managing and sharing spatial data. OpenGeo has led the industry shift toward flexible, interoperable geospatial software infrastructures and will use this Series A funding to further enhance its industry-leading product and training offerings and reach a broader array of customers.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Researchers from FOKUS (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems) in Germany have released the Fuzzino data fuzzing library as open source software. The library allows existing test tools to be prepared for fuzzing and aims to make the development of new fuzzing tools unnecessary. Fuzzing is the process of testing a system for hidden weaknesses by presenting the system with random and sometimes erroneous input data.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open (government) data as it is understood nowadays can still be considered a new concept. It started to gain traction worldwide since the Obama memo in early 2009 and the launch of data.gov a few months later. Following successful leading examples of the US and UK governments we have seen open data flourishing all over the world over the last three years. About three hundred open data catalogues have been identified so far.
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The rapid rise in the number of mobile devices has led to a concomitant rise in the amount of location data available. Proprietary services are emerging to take advantage of that data, but open source has a strong foothold in the form of OpenStreetMap.
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Programming
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PHP is the latest addition to the range of languages supported on Google’s App Engine. The PaaS (Platform as a Service) already supports Python, Java and Go and, like the languages before it, PHP is being introduced first as a limited preview experimental feature.
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Standards/Consortia
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VP9 is an open source and royalty free video compression technology under active development by Google with which they hope to replace the popular H.264 standard. The development of VP9 begain in late 2011 with two goals in mind, to provide a 50% reduced bit rate compared to the older VP8 codec while maintaining the video quality, and also optimizing it to the point that it becomes superior to the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (H.264) standard as well. We have to keep in mind that H.264 is pretty old now and the same standard is getting an update to H.265 which as much as doubles the data compression rate compared to the older H.264 standard.
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Google/MPEG-LA deal showed promise, but Google’s requirement for user licenses may bring a backlash
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Health/Nutrition
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Farmers “concerned” for ruling’s implication on upcoming suits against the biotech giant
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Security
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30 million open resolvers in the domain name system and a 200 per cent increase in the number of attacks in 2012 – these alarming figures were discussed by administrators at the 66th meeting of the RIPE IP address registry in Dublin this week. A panel discussion revolved around how to motivate the black sheep to implement long overdue security measures before large-scale attacks call the regulators to action.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Canadian government doubles advertising spend on tar sands
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Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing — quite literally sometimes — with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale’s April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans’ conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding six months. The decline, the authors surmised, was most likely due to “the cold winter of 2012-13 and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted.”
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Censorship
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Around May Day, we received advance notice that the Swedish Prosecution Authority had filed a petition with the Stockholm District Court requesting the seizure of two domain names, thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se. Now, this comes as no surprise and our General Counsel, Elisabeth, has already blogged about this.
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Prosecutors in Sweden have sued the root domain registry of .SE domains to kill the domain name of The Pirate Bay. The root registry fights back heavily. This case is important to watch, as it can have thoroughly chilling results for the Internet’s domain name system if criminal secondary liability is established at the DNS level.
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Privacy
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The independent review on public data prepared by Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the Data Strategy Board, has just been published. Much of what Shakespeare recommends is very good stuff, and includes things that ORG has been proposing for some time. But we have some disagreements, particularly on the analyses and proposals around privacy.
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Civil Rights
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If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11′s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?
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Geneva 16 May 2013 – The world’s leading retail labels commit to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh before the midnight deadline. The Accord now covers more than 1000 Bangladeshi garment factories. Implementation starts now!
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Clean Clothes Campaign is calling for immediate action from all international brands following today’s collapse of the Wing Star Shoes factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The collapse of the ceiling cost the lives of at least two people, and injured seven. The workers were stitching sneakers for sportsbrand Asics when the ceiling caved in on top of them.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, addressed a press conference on 16 May 2013 at the WWW Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Berners-Lee used his address to state his support for the Marco Civil da Internet, (Marco Civil) a landmark draft Bill in Brazil that many have called ‘a Constitution for the Internet’.
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Sheriffs in 13 Northeast Florida counties announced an online system Thursday for residents to report suspicious activity they think may be terrorism-related.
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DRM
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Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In March, the Ninth Circuit declared that Canada-based BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is not entitled to protection under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA due to its conduct many years ago. IsoHunt filed a petition for a rehearing before a jury, but yesterday a Ninth Circuit panel unanimously rejected it. Isohunt lawyer Ira Rothken informs TorrentFreak that the right to a jury trial is protected by the constitution and isoHunt is now in the process of requesting a Supreme Court review.
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One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it’s more important to preserve copyright “inviolate” than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the “proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities” for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.
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05.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I don’t think the unnamed and unknown blogger who writes under the banner of The VAR Guy would argue with me if I were to say that over at his site it’s all about the money. That’s not a bad thing. The value added resellers, the VARs who are his readers, would expect nothing else.
These are guys and gals to whom hardware and software are all part of the same packet. This is the crowd who couldn’t care less about the usability of, say GNOME, for the average home user and who might even be tempted to look for loopholes in the GPL, because it would be easier to make money with free software if it wasn’t free. In other words, these are folks who’ve traditionally mainly stood firmly in the proprietary camp, where the rules for resellers have been more clearly defined. These are the dudes and dudettes who make RMS very wary whenever he sees them coming our way.
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Desktop
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Malaysia has adopted Google Apps and Chromebooks as part of the country’s plans to integrate Web usage in a bid to reform its education system.
According to a blog post by the search giant on Wednesday, Malaysia adopted Google Apps for 10 million of its students, teachers and parents. In addition, primary and secondary schools will receive Chromebooks.
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Server
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IBM is serious about expanding the footprint of the Linux operating system running on Power servers.
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Rumors are swirling that Intel Hybrid Cloud (a small business server that has cloud and managed services capabilities) has been discontinued. If true, this is the latest setback for resellers that are seeking on-premises alternatives to Windows Small Business Server (SBS), which Microsoft killed in 2012. Still, there are cloud-based alternatives — including Microsoft’s increasingly popular Office 365.
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Google and NASA have teamed up to launch a new laboratory focused on advancing machine learning. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab — hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California — will contain a quantum supercomputer that will be used by researchers from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and all over the world to pioneer breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
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Kernel Space
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Back in April, the Linux kernel developers fixed an incorrectly declared pointer in the Linux kernel. However, it appears that they overlooked the potential security implications of such a bug – particularly the fact that it is possible to gain access to almost any memory area using a suitable event_id. The developers only got into gear and declared the bug as an official security hole (CVE-2013-2094) after an exploit was released that proves that normal, logged-in users can gain root access this way.
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While there isn’t yet a release yet of Ubuntu in the Linux x32 ABI flavor, some packages now found in Ubuntu 13.04 make it easier to setup this binary interface that brings some 64-bit advantages to the 32-bit world.
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A web hosting company has publicly shared their thoughts on the Btrfs file-system for Linux. While often discussed as the next-generation Linux file-system, Btrfs isn’t fully baked for use in a production world quite yet.
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Today we’re talking about our experience with btrfs, the next-gen Linux filesystem. btrfs has been maturing rapidly over the last few years and offers many compelling features for modern systems, so we’ve been putting it through its paces on some of our backup servers.
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It’s been a while since last reporting any improved to Logitech device support on Linux or any other USB gaming mice/keyboards for Linux. However, a Phoronix reader has written in with some news.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted his feature pull requests on Monday morning for the USB, staging, driver core, and TTY/serial areas of the Linux 3.10 kernel that’s just entered development following yesterday’s Linux 3.9 kernel release.
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“Is Linux code the ‘benchmark of quality’? Well, it is very good, no doubt about that,” said Google+ blogger Brett Legree. “The main take-away point from the study should be that open source software, including Linux, is on par with proprietary software from a quality perspective. So, Linux code could be considered a benchmark of quality — it is as good as anything else out there.”
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If you’ve ever dreamed of working directly with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ted T’so or any of the other Linux luminaries, you could work your way up through the ranks of kernel developers submitting patches and fixing bugs. Or you could work as a systems administrator on The Linux Foundation’s IT team, managing the servers that they use every day to build the largest collaborative software development project in the world.
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Graphics Stack
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The modern Gallium3D graphics driver for supporting Intel Sandy Bridge “Gen6″ and Ivy Bridge “Gen7″ graphics has been merged into mainline Mesa!
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Benchmarks
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Combining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.
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Yesterday after publishing the 15-way open-source vs. closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics comparison there were some requests by Phoronix readers to also show how the LLVMpipe software rasterizer performance is in reference. For this article to end out the month are the OpenGL performance results from nine lower-end AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running with their respective Mesa/Gallium3D drivers compared to the LLVMpipe software driver in two configurations.
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Applications
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After more than a year of work, Mixxx 1.11.0 has been released recently, featuring a new beat detector, colored 3-band waveforms and many other new features as well as various bug fixes and performance improvements.
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Proprietary
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IBM is shutting the doors on Lotus 1-2-3, the software program that made the IBM PC and Microsoft household names.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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With only six days left to claim your copies, we go hands-on with every game to help you decide…
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One month after the release of X3: Terran Conflict for Linux, Egosoft has now released X3: Albion Prelude.
Albion Prelude is the latest title in Egosoft’s X3 series. X3: Albion Prelude was originally released for Windows back in 2011 and has now been released for Linux with the whole Steam Linux gaming rush and having their own Linux talent in-house.
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It differs to the usual platform game by including game types from lots of different machines (and more to come too!) and emulates their graphical style so, it makes this actually quite an interesting one!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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OpenMW, the open-source engine re-implementation of Elderscrolls III: Morrowind, has a new version out. OpenMW 0.23 features the initial implementation of NPC movement AI, item repairing, enchanting, levelled items, texture animation, basic particles, and a lot more. This release comes just ahead of Morrowind’s eleventh birthday.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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It’s been just a week since KDE 4.10.3 was announced, but 4.11 is already reaching its first milestone freeze. TSDgeos reminded developers today that the 4.11 Soft Feature Freeze happens in just one more week. What does that mean for users?
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KDevelop, the integrated development environment for KDE that’s designed for C++ support and other programming languages, experienced a major release. Several new features are presented by KDevelop 4.5.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Its interface design is the reason for its playful name, but Gnome-Pie won’t run you in circles when it comes to launching applications and getting into menus. It’s easy to set up your “pies” on the desktop so that you’ll have no problem finding your desired menu item for launch. Those weary of text-based app launchers will find Gnome-Pie to be a very productive alternative.
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GNOME 3.8.2 was released this morning and it serves as the last bug-fix release in the GNOME 3.8 series. All work now is being focused on GNOME 3.10.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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I hope you have enjoyed the first and the second parts of the Linux Screenshot Beauty Contest.
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Gentoo Family
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Let me begin this way, I am a great admirer of Sabayon for quite sometime. This Italian distro is based on Gentoo Linux and provides an enviable ensemble of pre-installed applications which just works out of the box. Those who are scared of Gentoo, Sabayon can be a good starting point. Apart from being based on one of the most popular Linux operating systems, one of the greatest USPs of Sabayon is it’s aesthetics. It comes with a very professional dark blue theme with application interfaces tweaked to match it. I haven’t seen many Linux distros doing it, to be honest.
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Arch Family
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For those of you always looking for — or at least willing to try — the newest Linux distribution on the scene, a pretty fresh candidate is Manjaro Linux, which recently announced some updates that should be appealing to users who aren’t necessarily command-line junkies.
Manjaro is based on Arch, rather than Ubuntu or Debian, which is a version of Linux known for being lightweight, fast, and minimalist in its approach. Arch has been aimed primarily at more intermediate and advanced Linux users in the past, but the Manjaro team has placed an emphasis on the user-friendly aspect of this distro.
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software solutions provider Red Hat Inc is strenghtening its presence in Asean region, especially Malaysia, through partnerships.
Its general manager for Asean Damien Wong said Red Hat would invest in partner-specific marketing, sales and technical support to promote sustainability of the channel partner ecosytem.
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Fedora
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As you may know, Ubuntu has the EasyUbuntu app that helps the Ubuntu beginners install additional drivers, with a nice graphical user interface.
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The Fedora Project, an open source collaboration project supported by Red Hat and the developer community, rolled out their first Fedora-powered high-density ARM-based datacenter servers this week in a migration that was the first time they were able to use standard tools, such as Kickstart and PXE on ARM-based datacenter hardware.
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Debian Family
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This is the last week of classes for me. I have turned in all my assignments and a handful of days until finals, so I can take today and tomorrow to write a couple of reviews at my leisure. The first will be #!.
#! should be familiar to many readers here. It is a lightweight Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox. While it is not technically a rolling-release distribution because it is pinned to the stable release, there were tons of preview releases for this version. Now that Debian 7 “Wheezy” is finally stable, so is #! 11 “Waldorf”. Since version 10 “Statler”, the Xfce edition has been dropped, so #! is back to using Openbox exclusively.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu kernel developers plan to provide security fixes and minor improvements for version 3.8 of the Linux kernel until August 2014; version 3.8 was released in February. The announcement by Canonical employee Kamal Mostafa came just days after Greg Kroah-Hartman had discontinued the maintenance of Linux 3.8; Kroah-Hartman oversees the maintenance of the stable and long-term kernels and is currently maintaining stable kernel version 3.9 and long-term kernel versions 3.0 and 3.4.
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Recently the Technical Board made a decision to sunset Brainstorm, the site we have been using for some time to capture a list of what folks would like to see fixed and improved in Ubuntu. Although the site has been in operation for quite some time, it had fallen into something of a state of disrepair. Not only was it looking rather decrepit and old, but the ideas highlighted there were not curated and rendered into the Ubuntu development process. Some time ago the Technical Board took a work item to try to solve this problem by regularly curating the most popular items in brainstorm with a commentary around technical feasibility, but the members of the TB unfortunately didn’t have time to fulfill this. As such, brainstorm turned into a big list of random ideas, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and largely ignored by the Ubuntu development process.
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A while back I started a project called the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit. The goal is simple: create a single downloadable kit that provides all the information and materials you need to go out and help advocate Ubuntu and our flavors to others. The project lives here on Launchpad and is available in this daily PPA. If you want to see the kit in action just run:
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Yesterday, it has been suggested to sunset Ubuntu brainstorm. While the arguments on the surface make a lot of sense, a bigger problem seem to be not as much in the focus of the discussion as it maybe should be.
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There has been much teeth gnashing about the removal of the ‘Community’ link from the top of the ubuntu.com site. As a member of the Ubuntu Community Council I have tried to gather my thoughts before blogging about this. Recently, I read an article that got me rather upset.
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Canonical’s Mir Display Server now has a simple demo shell as well as a multi-window compositing demo.
In continuing to monitor the public Bazaar development repository for Mir, there isn’t too much to report on this week. The only highlights were:
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For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical’s next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October.
The default desktop will be Unity 7 and it will be powered by an X.Org Server when running Ubuntu 13.10. However, the Qt5-based Unity 8 in conjunction with Mir will be readily packaged and available for those wishing to give it a go. Meanwhile, for the Ubuntu 13.10 state of the phone/tablet version, that is expected to be Mir-powered in time.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu is moving in all directions lately. They are making sure that they find themselves on tablets, smartphones, and even on televisions. With the high amount of efforts being put in to make Ubuntu the best product in the FOSS community, there have been some polarizing decisions that have managed to alienate a few longtime Ubuntu users. Ever since the decision to switch to Unity was taken, there have been many Linux users who don’t find Ubuntu as user-friendly as they used to back then. There have been forum wars, IRC battles, and a bunch of irksome blog posts about usability–or lack thereof– of Ubuntu. However, as time progressed, Ubuntu has matured quite a lot and has managed to regain its top spot as one of the most user-friendly distributions in the FOSS world.
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Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE’s KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical’s Mir Display Server from the beginning. He’s now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor.
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Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools, “Software Sources” and “Driver Manager”, make their first appearance in Linux Mint.
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In development since late last year, the Raspberry Pi camera module is finally available. The module can be purchased from RS Components or Element 14 and is based on an Omnivision 5647 5MPixel sensor which is configured to give a still picture resolution of 2592×1944 or deliver video with 1080p resolution at 30fps. It manages this in a 20x25x10mm package which connects to the Pi over a flat ribbon cable.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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We heard rumours that Samsung had plans to launch Galaxy S4 running stock Android, and it’s true! Google has just unveiled the Samsung flagship phone, Galaxy S4 powered by pure vanilla Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2.
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Android
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NEC has announced an Android smartphone that uses a water-cooling system to keep its quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro system-on-chip (SOC) from overheating. The NEC Medias X 06E integrates a liquid cooling pipe near the SOC to cool off the 4.7-inch phone, which is being marketed at Japanese women.
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At Google I/O today, Google released an early access preview version of an Android integrated development environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA. To its IntelliJ foundation, Android Studio adds an enhanced drag-and-drop GUI layout editor, Gradle-based build system, Lint tools, Android-focused wizards, and the ability to preview how apps look on different screen sizes.
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A leak tips off security enhancements in the Android update expected to be unveiled at Google I/O.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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At the moment, Canonical doesn’t allow users to download Ubuntu for Android (or perhaps it’s still not ready for prime time), and the company is rather looking for OEMs to license the software. I believe that the “perfect vendor” to take advantage of this software is ASUS, which should offer it pre-installed on its Padfone series. This way Padfone users would get an added benefit when they dock their smartphone to the tablet shell, with the ability to use real desktop apps.
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HP has finally entered the Android hybrid market with HP SlateBook X2, the first Tegra 4 powered android convertible. The 10 inch tablet connects to the keyboard directly with a dock connector and also has a touch pad for mouse operations. The screen is a bright 1920 X 1200 full HD IPS display keeping things on screen very crisp and clear.
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Calxeda, maker of ARM server-on-chip (SoC) cards, announced that the Fedora Project, an open-source development community sponsored by Red Hat, has deployed servers with its EnergyCore SoCs inside. The cluster consists of Viridis mircoservers made by a UK company called Boston.
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When I first started to learn how to code and program, as a student and during the pre-internet era, it was common practice to share your source code as you were creating it. My classmates and I assumed that was the best way for us to learn—from each other.
Almost everyone shared, except for a few. I never fully understood why they didn’t, because they would learn from others but not share thier creations afterwards. As I got older and moved into the business world of making money, I began to understand as I was faced with the obscure system of intellectual rights, patents, trademarks, and copyright (and copyleft). Of course, I often think that without these obstacles, technology could go much further and become more ethically correct. But, it seems that the focus on “information is power” is still more important. Luckily, I found out that my feelings towards this are not so weird and actually are shared by many.
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Events
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Heading to LinuxCon Japan 2013? If you’ll be attending the conference or will be in Tokyo on May 31st, we’d like to welcome you at the Gluster Community Workshop.
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Web Browsers
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For a few years now, the great debate between Chrome and Firefox has raged on. Which browser is faster? Which is easier to install? In this article, I’ll tackle each of these subjects, in addition to providing some personal insights on each of these topics.
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SlateKit Shell is a new QML-based web-browser sporting a “sliding drawer” user-interface. The WebKit-powered browser is written entirely in QML and JavaScript.
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Mozilla
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Why fix something if it’s not broken? If others prefer Chromium well then “sudo apt-get install chromium-browser” and I guess that’s just my two-cents on the topic.
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Version 21 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is out for Windows, the Mac, Linux and Android. You can download the standard browser here, and get Firefox for Android here. If you’re already a Firefox user, you should be automatically upgraded. There are quite a few enhancements in this version, including additional Do Not Track features, a Health report, social APIs and choices on the desktop and open source fonts for the Android version.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It’s no secret that Java has moved to the top of the target list for many attackers. It has all the ingredients they love: ubiquity, cross-platform support and, best of all, lots of vulnerabilities. Malware targeting Java flaws has become a major problem, and new statistics show that this epidemic is following much the same pattern as malware exploiting Microsoft vulnerabilities has for years.
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Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the open source office suite. More than 80% of these downloads have come from Windows users, with the rest of the downloads spread between Mac OS X and Linux. Over time, the percentage of Windows users has slightly increased at the expense of Mac OS X, with Linux usage hovering steady under 5%.
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Business
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As an organization or even individual there always seem to be questions when considering whether or not to make your project or code snippet open source. Many times, it starts with trying to figure out which license to use. But there are many other things to consider. We derived a list for you the next time you ask yourself: Should I open source my code?
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Project Releases
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Version 7.6 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, has been released and with it comes support for new debugging targets and a whole lot more.
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The popular Linux distribution for routers and other wireless/network devices, OpenWrt, has been christened by a new version. OpenWrt 12.09 “Attitude Adjustment” brings with it many new features.
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Public Services/Government
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If you were to list all the reasons why Obama beat Romney in the 2012 presidential race, chances are DevOps, the cloud, and open-source software (OSS) wouldn’t be on your list. They should be. As Harper Reed, the CTO of Obama for America explained in his recent Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) speech, all these technologies played a major role in the campaign. Or, as the New York Times explained after the election: “Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.”
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President of Croatia Ivo Josipović appreciates the creative and innovative spirit of the open source community. “What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative”, he was quoted as saying, while opening the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 in the country’s capital Zagreb yesterday. “Most importantly, open source brings helps to strengthen democracy.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Kuka announced a 20,000 Euro Kuka Innovation in Mobile Manipulation Award for innovative mobile manipulation applications using its Kuka YouBot service robot. The open source Kuka YouBot is equipped with omnidirectional wheels and one or two 5-DOF manipulator arms, and runs Ubuntu Linux and ROS (Robot Operating System) on an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX board.
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Blender 2.67 was released last week with a 3D printing toolbox. LGW spoke to Dolf Veenvliet, Bart Veldhuizen (Shapeways, Blendernation), and Rich Borrett (Ponoko) about the new tools and the future of 3D printing.
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Programming
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Health/Nutrition
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The NHS has spent billions of pounds on management consultants in recent years. It was profit-making private management consultancy firms (who shall remain nameless) that explored and reported on ways in which the NHS would make efficiency savings. The £20 billion pounds of ‘savings’ that were identified were built around the concept of what became known as QUIPP “Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention”.
Central to the theories around QUIPP was the idea that much more of our patients should and indeed would be treated in the home. It was argued that the successful triaging of patients would relieve much of the pressure on our NHS. The logic on the face of it appeared reasonably sound. Many patients who arrive at A&E could indeed be treated elsewhere. If a way could be successfully found to divert patients to the most suitable care setting then it was argued that savings could be made in reducing A&E admissions, and that some wards could close as a result.
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To eat these two types of fats in the right ratio, we can either eat more omega-3s or eat fewer omega-6s. Companies like DSM and Monsanto want us to do the former — so we buy their high omega-3 products (and pay top dollar for them, too!). But scientists recommend going by the other route, reducing our omega-6 consumption. One healthy way to do this is by using monounsaturated fats, like those found in olive oil.
Author Susan Allport, who wrote The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them, agrees. “The best way to up the omega-3s in one’s tissues is simply to reduce one’s intake of omega-6s,” she says. “Monsanto will try to persuade us that we can get around this elephant in the room (the large amount of omega-6s in the food supply) with their new soybean but it certainly won’t be any more effective than the advice to eat more fish has been.”
However, Monsanto does not want us to stop eating unhealthy levels of omega-6s, because their patented genes are in most of the soybeans grown in the U.S. And soybean oil is our number one source of omega-6s. (Soybean oil is often sold labeled simply as “vegetable oil.”)
So instead of cutting into their sales by switching to a healthier fat, they’d prefer to keep making you unhealthy with soybean oil. But they are willing to offer you this “band aid” fix of a high omega-3 soybean that they anticipate will be grown on less than five percent of the nation’s soybean acres. Oh, and you’ll probably have to pay extra to get it, too.
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Security
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The developers behind the Rygel home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) for the GNOME desktop environment, announced the immediate availability for download of the second stable release for the 0.18.x branch.
Rygel 0.18.2 is the second and last maintenance release for Rygel 0.18 and it incorporates numerous fixes, all in order to make Rygel a more stable and reliable release.
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Finance
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The controversy surrounding the IRS singling-out Tea Party-inspired groups seeking tax exempt status — while inexcusable — might be attributable, in part, to the agency’s failure to create clearer rules for political activity in the post-Citizens United electoral landscape, and it being inappropriately tasked with enforcing campaign finance law, tax law experts say.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United opened the door for corporations — both for-profit and non-profit — to spend on elections, 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits became the vehicle of choice for wealthy donors seeking to keep their political spending secret.
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Goldman Sachs & Co must pay more than $2.5 million to an investor who alleged the firm recommended an unsuitable investment in a private equity fund, a securities arbitration panel has ruled.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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When big-time reporters decide to try their hands at media criticism, the results are usually disappointing–but they can also be quite revealing.
So when a video of CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley started to making the rounds, the headlines associated with it piqued my interest. Over at the Weekly Standard, it was “CBS Anchor: ‘We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again.’”
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Praise for a conservative president’s breaking the air traffic controllers’ union–that’s what you hear on the liberal cable channel. (The video is below.)
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Censorship
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From Free Press’s helpful explainer of the AP phone records scandal…
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Privacy
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Tragically, Aaron Swartz, hounded by an apparently over-zealous prosecutor, committed suicide in early 2013. His just-unveiled major open-source privacy project, DeadDrop, lives on in a citizen and press protection program, The New Yorker’s Strongbox.
[...]
The Strongbox servers themselves are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast in a physically and logically segregated area at a secure datacenter, but they otherwise have no elements in common with Condé Nast, The New Yorker’s publisher. As Amy Davidson, a New Yorker senior editor wrote, “Over the years, it has also become easier to trace [email] senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that. As it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”
Aaron would have been proud.
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Civil Rights
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Florida Governor Rick Scott is under pressure from Florida moms to veto a bill that would deliver a “kill-shot” to local efforts to guarantee paid sick days for workers. The legislation, which can be traced back the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is backed by major corporate players with questionable labor records, including Disney.
In April, the Florida legislature passed a corporate-backed bill to preempt local paid sick day laws, largely in response to a small-d democratic effort in Orange County to have residents vote on the issue. More than 50,000 Orange County voters signed petitions to place a paid sick day measure on the ballot, which would be effectively blocked if Governor Scott signs the law.
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The scale and speed of the exodus of those fleeing the violence in Syria has been underlined by UN figures showing that the number of refugees has topped 1.5 million, just 10 weeks after the millionth refugee fled to safety.
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Legalisation, which comes amid rise in attacks on Palestinians and their property, could frustrate US peace efforts
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Last month the world heard the tragic news that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh, were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In an advance that makes history, Vermont’s House of Representatives passed a bill on May 10 requiring foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled. This is the furthest any such legislation has made it through the legislative process in the United States.
Vermont’s legislative session was due to end already, but negotiations over a tax bill have kept lawmakers in the capitol this week. With the Senate’s attention focused fiscally rather than on food, however, H.112 to label GMOs will have to wait to be taken up by the Senate in January 2014.
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Trademarks
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On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was “merely descriptive.”
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Send this to a friend
05.15.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM’s first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet that Big Blue is trying to light a fire under its Linux-on-Power efforts.
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In Beijing this week, IBM has announced that it is further extending its reach into China with the opening of its first Linux innovation center for Power Systems there. The center will initially be focused on Power Systems clients and business partners, and will be located inside IBM’s China Systems Center. According to the company, the new center “will make it simpler for software developers to build and deploy new applications for big data, cloud, mobile and social business computing on open technology building blocks using Linux and the latest IBM POWER 7+ processor technology.”
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The experimental Tux3 file-system has already made claims of being faster than EXT4. The latest claims out of the open-source file-system is that it’s faster than Tmpfs, which is quite a feat given its very thin layer between VFS and SWAP.
Daniel Phillips of the Tux3 file-system wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list this evening, “When something sounds to good to be true, it usually is. But not always. Today Hirofumi posted some nigh on unbelievable dbench results that show Tux3 beating tmpfs. To put this in perspective, we normally regard tmpfs as unbeatable because it is just a thin shim between the standard VFS mechanisms that every filesystem must use, and the swap device. Our usual definition of successful optimization is that we end up somewhere between Ext4 and Tmpfs, or in other words, faster than Ext4. This time we got an excellent surprise.”
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The GStreamer VA-API plug-ins have been updated with support for the GStreamer 1.0.x API.
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Graphics Stack
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One of the exciting features of LLVM 3.3 that is due out next month is the final integration of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end. This LLVM back-end is needed for supporting Gallium3D OpenCL on AMD Radeon graphics hardware, “RadeonSI” HD 7000/8000 series support, and can optionally be used as the Radeon Gallium3D driver’s shader compiler. In this article are some benchmarks of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end from LLVM 3.3-rc1 when using several different AMD Radeon HD graphics cards and seeing how the LLVM compiler back-end affects the OpenGL graphics performance.
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Kristian Høgsberg has clarified the scope and goals of Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor. Now that Weston has become somewhat of its own desktop environment, Kristian has clarified its intentions to benefit future patches.
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While the merge window on the Linux 3.10 kernel is not even open yet let alone the Linux 3.9 kernel, Intel and mobile enthusiasts already have a reason to look forward to the Linux 3.11 kernel.
It looks like the Linux 3.11 kernel — which is still several months away — will have support about finished up from the kernel-side for Valley View, the very attractive “Ivy Bridge” class graphics integrated into a low-power Intel Atom SoC. It’s also known as Bay Trail.
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A second Linux 3.10 Radeon DRM driver pull request was submitted by AMD’s Alex Deucher. The pull request sent to Red Hat’s David Airlie for the DRM sub-system mentions the “golden registers” addition as being the highlight of this batch of new open-source AMD Linux graphics code.
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The latest release of Gears On Gallium happened earlier this week (2013.04.22) and is based upon openSUSE 12.3. This new release ships all of the latest Linux graphics code as of this week — including Mesa 9.2 Git, Linux 3.9-rc6, libdrm 2.4.44, X.Org Server 1.14.1, xf86-video-ati 7.99.99, xf86-video-intel 2.99.99, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.99, and LLVM 3.3 SVN.
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Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.14.99.1, the first X.Org Server 1.15 development snapshot ahead of the official release in the second half of 2013.
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The future of the KDE desktop was planned earlier this month at a developer event held at the SUSE headquarters.
Already we wrote about the results of KDE, Unity, GNOME, and Razor-Qt developers meeting up at SUSE’s Nürnberg offices. There were also clear statements about KDE support for Wayland. Now over on the KDE web-site is a nice summary of their Plasma planning.
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Benchmarks
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A larger comparison is in the works to pit Manjaro against Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and other popular Linux distributions. However, for the increasing curiosity about Manjaro, here’s the benchmarks that are complete at the moment: Manjaro 0.8.5 vs. Ubuntu 13.04.
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When dealing with multi-disk configurations and RAID, the ZFS file-system on Linux can begin to outperform EXT4 at least in some configurations.
Earlier this month I delivered some EXT4 vs. ZFS file-system benchmarks using the new ZFS On Linux release that is a native Linux kernel module implementing the Sun/Oracle file-system. Testing was done from a single disk configuration due to the available hardware within our labs and among Phoronix readers single disk configurations being most common.
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Applications
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Simple Image Reducer may be a somewhat unknown tool, of course I say that about every piece of software I just recently discovered. As if I know about every piece of software out there, go figure. In a relatively short time this excellent low resource tool to reduce and rotate images, has become a favorite go to application.
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Developers behind the GParted utility, the popular open-source program for managing Linux file-system partitions, released version 0.16.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Introducing a new training series from CBT Nuggets, “BackTrack and Kali Linux.”
In this 40-video series, trainer Keith Barker covers the best tools for penetration testing, information gathering and vulnerability assessment. Barker explains how to use these free Linux distributions to identify weaknesses in order to strengthen network security.
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Games
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With today’s debut of the Humble Double Fine Bundle, Linux gamers seem particularly excited by the debut of the Brütal Legend game for the penguin platform.
Brütal Legend is a title developed by Double Fine and released for Windows in February, after the action-adventure real-time strategy game premiered for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in late 2009. The game was favorably reviewed and now with Linux gamers having a native client, it seems particularly exciting, and is another title now available on Steam for Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The first beta release of the Qt 5.1 tool-kit is now available. As the first major update to the Qt5 platform, this release comes with plenty of new features for developers and end-users.
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The Skrooge team is pleased to announce the release 1.7.1 of its popular personal finances management application.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The development team behind MATE, a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, released a few minutes ago, May 13, the first maintenance version of the stable MATE 1.6 desktop environment.
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GNOME Control Center, GNOME’s main interface for configuration of various aspects of your desktop, is now at version 3.8.2.
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At a recent GTK+ “hackfest” in Cambridge, some features heading into the GTK+ 3.10 tool-kit were worked on by a handful of GNOME developers.
Happening the past few days in Cambridge, Massachusetts was a GTK+ hackfest where a variety of improvements were tackled. Among the work is GTK+ 3.10 making the file chooser side-bar be a public widget (to already be used by Nautilus), proper composite containers support, baseline alignment work, and new widgets.
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I like Arch and I like Cinnamon, so for me Cinnarch Linux was an obvious fit. Except for the fact that apparently Cinnamon doesn’t work so well with Arch.
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Regular PCWorld readers may recall Cinnarch, a Linux distribution I covered last fall that combined Arch Linux with the relatively new and alternative Cinnamon desktop environment.
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The Zorin OS Team are pleased to announce the release of Zorin OS 6.3 Core, our operating system designed for Windows users. Zorin OS 6.3 builds on top of our popular previous release of Zorin OS 6.2 with newly updated software and a newer kernel out of the box. As Zorin OS 6.3 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 it is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, provided with software updates until April 2017.
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Screenshots
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After carrying out the easy Manjaro Linux installation and upgrading the system using Arch’s pacman, it was off to the races. While our ARM Linux benchmarks and 64-bit Arch Linux benchmark comparison in the past have revealed little performance advantage to Arch over other tier-one Linux distributions — contrary to popular belief that Arch and Gentoo are magically much faster on the very latest hardware — benchmarks of Manjaro 0.8.5 compared to other Linux distributions is being carried out right now. Stay tuned to the results on Phoronix in the coming days.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Debian was an early pioneering Linux distribution, and has been a pillar of the community for nearly two decades. Today, it is well-known for its comprehensive repositories of software, its careful approach to updates, its smooth package installation and upgrade process, and its commitment to software freedom. It is particularly popular as a base for customization, with notable derivatives including Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
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The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based release today. This is the release announcement:
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Sometimes, the symbolism of an act becomes more important than its actual consequences.
A case in point is the repositioning of the link to the community page on the Ubuntu home page, which has reopened the divide between Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial face, and parts of the Ubuntu community. Not only has that divide reappeared, but a possible error in tactics may have cost the community sympathy that is needed for reform.
At first, the change sounds unbelievably minor to have provoked the response it has. It is, after all, no more than a cosmetic change. Specifically, it is about the removal of the link to the Community page from the main menu on the Ubuntu home page and its repositioning in a sub-footer. The change leaves the main menu focused on product lines.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #316 for the week 6 – 13 May, 2013, and the full version is available here.
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Ubuntu Brainstorm served as a way for the Ubuntu community to nominate new ideas for the Linux operating system, comment on these ideas, and vote on the ideas should you find them interesting and worthwhile. However, now it looks like Ubuntu Brainstorm is going to be eliminated.
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There’s a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place this week to begin drafting plans for Ubuntu 13.10. This morning the initial road-map for the X.Org / Mesa graphics and display stack were discussed for the next Ubuntu Linux release.
Ubuntu 13.10 on the desktop will still be shipping an X.Org Server in configurations where Canonical’s own Mir Display Server isn’t primed. With Ubuntu 13.10 they will likely be shipping X.Org Server 1.14 or version X.Org Server 1.15 if the video driver ABI doesn’t break. While Canonical has talked about their next-generation Unity 8 interface, this apparently will be Mir-only. Those running a pure X.Org Server will be limited to the Unity 7.x world.
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Recently the Mir and Unity Next teams got Unity 8 up and running on Mir. Now, this work is still very early in development and neither Mir nor Unity Next are finished yet, but I reached out to Michael Zanetti, who is on the team, and asked him to put together a short video demo to show the progress of this work. This demo shows the phone/tablet part of the Unity 8 codebase; the final desktop version will come later.
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As Canonical works to “converge” Ubuntu, the massively popular open-source Linux operating system, across smarphones, tablets, PCs and cloud servers, it is also working to integrate the various parts of the Ubuntu Web ecosystem. So reports Canonical employee Alejandra Obregon in a recent update on the past, preset and future of Ubuntu.com and the role of the Ubuntu community within Canonical’s Web presence.
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Canonical plans dogfood-capable phones by the end of May
Canonical’s Vice President of Ubuntu, Rick Spencer, has set out a plan to make the Ubuntu phone images dog food – dogfooding is where a company’s employees use its own product for their day-to-day work and comes from the phrase “Eating your own dog food”. In his blog post, Spencer outlines the things that the images must be capable of before this plan can be put into action, namely make and receive phone calls and send and receive SMS messages, browse the web on 3G data and Wi-Fi and switch between either data mode, have the display dim when the phone is talked on, and be able to import contacts and then add or edit them. Spencer also says that when the phone is updated it should retain its user data, even if being flashed from the command line of a desktop system. All this work should be done, Spencer says, by the end of May.
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Today when going through the list of Google+ communities I saw a message in a Linux G+ community that links to a blog post in Sprial Linear that talks about GNOME developers ignoring user requests. This is heartbreaking.
The incident commenced when a user Eduard Valiauka reported this bug in GNOME’s bugzilla. A feature in GNOME 3.6′s GNOME Terminal (background configuration tab in Profile Preferences) is missing in GNOME 3.8. He described the problem with some detail and asked the GNOME Terminal developers to add back the feature in later GNOME releases.
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Canonical has released new “Raring-based” Ubuntu Touch images for the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Galaxy Nexus devices.
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Canonical will be sticking to a six-month release cycle for now with Ubuntu Linux and now that Ubuntu 13.04, the “Raring Ringtail”, has been released it’s time for 13.10. Mark Shuttleworth revealed this morning the Ubuntu 13.10 codename.
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Canonical reveals more details of its roadmap for its Ubuntu SDK, which will allow developers to use the same code base to create apps for Ubuntu running on phones, tablets and desktops.
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Can’t decide if you want a tablet or a notebook? No problem. There are plenty of hybrids that you can use either way.
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Texas Instruments (TI) announced an evaluation kit for its next-generation digital-light-processing (DLP) chipset, offering much higher resolution and brightness than its predecessor. The DLP LightCrafter 4500 is aimed at 3D imaging applications such as machine vision, quality control, dental and retinal scanning, spectrometers, augmented reality devices, and 3D printers.
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A tiny camera capable of taking five-megapixel photos and recording HD video has been launched for the Raspberry Pi.
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Nvidia announced a new name and pricing for its quad-core Android game console, as well as the unique ability to play “Steam” games wirelessly streamed from a suitably-equipped Windows PC. The $349 “Nvidia Shield,” available for pre-ordering on May 20 and expected to ship in June, features a 1.9GHz Tegra 4 SOC with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of flash storage, gaming controls, and a 5-inch, 1280 x 720px retinal IPS display.
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Raspberry Pi has received the lion’s share of attention devoted to cheap, single-board computers in the past year. But long before the Pi was a gleam in its creators’ eyes, there was the Arduino.
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The open-source game console, which rocked Kickstarter last year, earns a high repairability score from iFixit of 9 out of 10.
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Nexcom announced a network security appliance with Unified Threat Management (UTM) services based on Freescale’s new 12-core, 1.8GHz QorIQ T4240 system-on-chip (SOC). The NSA 5640 is equipped with up to 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 2GB NAND flash, mini-PCI Express expansion, eight gigabit Ethernet ports, optional 4-port 10GbE connectivity, and PowerPC Linux support.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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KGI Securities analyst Mingchi Kuo, who has been known to have accurate information regarding Apple product launches in the past, is out today with a new note that includes some surprisingly specific specs for upcoming products from Google. One of the products Kuo expects to see at Google I/O later this month is a new Nexus 7, but the note also included info on what he thinks Google has in store for the months after the event, including: an Android powered notebook, a new TV product, and even a Google smart watch.
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At the Google I/O event, Samsung is set to make a pretty big announcement. A new version of their latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, will be announced – the Google version. Now, this doesn’t mean that Google will do that manufacturing, or any major overhaul like that. What it means is that Samsung understands that some people, while they may love the device, aren’t so big on the software (mainly TouchWiz). In response, we’ll e seeing a pure AOSP version of the Galaxy S4 being prepped to launch.
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Android
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Samsung’s Exynos 5 eight-core processor may not actually function as an eight-core, but as a quad-core instead, according to an Android kernel developer. The eight-core processor, featured in select Samsung Galaxy S4 device is also expected to be featured in the Samsung Galaxy Note 3.
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NVIDIA promises to change mobile gaming with the Shield — a handheld console that’s pure Android and pure fun
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Look what showed up at a conference in Dubai, the white Google Nexus 4 in all its glory. We’ve taken a video of it and made it available for your lusting. The device was a demo unit at the Qualcomm booth at The Mobile Show so don’t expect retail availability anytime soon – that is unless Google announces something else tomorrow at the Google I/O event. Back to the white Nexus 4, the device looks great on the back and may actually give the black Nexus 4 a run for its money. However the front is still black and takes the charm away from the device. The internals were pretty much the same and the device was running an older version of Android – 4.2 to be precise.
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First-quarter 2013 shipments of “smart mobile devices,” including notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, swelled by 37.4 percent year-on-year to 308.7 million units, reports mobile market analyst Canalys. From the operating system perspective, Android grabbed a healthy majority of units shipped, at 59.5 percent.
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With software like AIDE, an Android IDE that runs on the Android platform, it is possible to develop for the mobile platform on the move, and with version 2.0 of AIDE that can now include writing C/C++ or using the IDE’s new design interface. The new version’s professional edition also features improved integration with the Git distributed version control system. AIDE runs on Android phones and tablets and offers traditional IDE features such as automatic code completion, error highlighting, refactoring and code navigation.
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The new computer should outmuscle Android consoles using mobile chips, and may be able to run the Linux version of Steambox.
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Pry open any Android-powered game console on the market today, and you’ll likely find a mobile processor — an ARM-based chip originally designed for tablets, smartphones and maybe the odd specialty device. It seems to make sense — after all, isn’t Android a mobile OS? Christopher Price, CEO of Mobile Media Ventures, doesn’t seem to think so. “Android is the future of personal computing,” Price told Engadget. “Even on the desktop.” According to Price, developers just haven’t had a chance to play with a truly powerful Android gaming machine. So, naturally, he’s building one.
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When talking about a multi-player on-line RPG, it’s hard not to draw comparison to World of Warcraft. WoW, the game and social experience is very much a benchmark for any other title of the same genre. WoW does have its critics and those that can be heard most loudly are those who write for the large mainstream outlets. There’s nothing better than a story about addiction and social exclusion in respect of a computer game. So Android has it’s own WoW? Will you be addicted? Will you give up your “real world” friends in order to play this game? Read on!
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Reports emanating from BlackBerry’s annual developer conference confirm that the firm is planning to offer the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service on other platforms.
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Google is distributing hundreds of environmental sensors across the Moscone Centre in San Francisco to monitor everything from footsteps to air quality.
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Belgium-based newcomer CloudFounders is jumping on the software-defined storage bandwagon with an open storage platform that supports OpenStack, VMware and Amazon S3.
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Supercomputers are where the latest and greatest in information technology gets to shine. It is often where the bleeding-edge in engineering gets applied to solving and answering some of humanity’s biggest problems and questions: from origins of the universe to climage change and genetics.
At the time of its launch, a supercomputer is typically built of the best processor and server technology available then. When designing such a cluster of thousands of computing monsters strung together, engineering an adequate storage system is a big challenge.
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“I wanted a tool that I could give to all of my developers and not have to worry about license fees. Open source means that I can very quickly and easily get it to all of my developers,” said Jason Huggins, cofounder and CTO of Sauce Labs. “It reduces the friction of getting contributions for people. If it is free to download and is free to use, that means you can skip the part where you talk to the sales guys.”
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JQooBe is a platform that allows users to create simple blogs, websites, and advanced applications within a community. It is developed in PHP, Ajax, and MySQL.
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I recently had the chance to catch up with Dave Lester, a soon-to-be graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a web developer who has been involved in a number of open source initiatives. Dave has been working on bringing technology together with the humanities and education through an un-conference he co-founded, and in his former role as assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. We talked about his drone hacking project, the importance of code integration, and his upcoming foray into open source at Twitter in an email interview.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is out with the Firefox 21 open source browser release today, fixing at least 8 security vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as being critical. The new release also provides new features that – depending on your viewpoint – could either improve or reduce user privacy.
One of the new features in Firefox 21 is the Health Report. Mozilla first began talking about the health report in September of 2012 as a non-invasive reporting mechanism. The report is intended to deliver information to users about the ‘health’ of the browser and its components. The report also shares that data with Mozilla.
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Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 21 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Improvements include the addition of multiple social providers on the desktop as well as open source fonts on Android.
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The lastest version of Firefox, Firefox 21, is available for download now. What will you find in this new release? A few major new features, including three “Do Not Track” options, a tune-up tool called Firefox Health Report, and performance-boosting startup suggestions.
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Mozilla Firefox may not be the most popular web browser in the world — that achievement now belongs to Google Chrome — but fans of the free, open-source web browser are as excited about the browser as ever. Firefox 20, which was released in April 2013, was a huge step forward for the browser, introducing download messenger and per-window private browsing to the iconic web browser. Now, with the release of Firefox 21, the web brower comes packed with even more excellent features.
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Social sites are a key part of online life and with Firefox we want to make it easier to use the Web the way you want. Mozilla developed the Social API to enable social providers to integrate directly into Firefox to make your browsing experience more social, customizable and personal. The Social API makes it easy for your favorite social providers to add a sidebar with your content to Firefox or notification buttons directly on the Firefox toolbar.
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Mozilla has begun shipping out Firefox 21, the latest rapid release of the organisation’s flagship web browser. Headlining the release notes is the expanded Social API support. The Social API launched last year with Facebook support allowing the company to create a more integrated sidebar for its services. Now, this is joined by support for Cliqz, Japanese social network Mixi and msnNOW.
There are, though, a few features in this release that will raise issues around ongoing privacy debates. A new interface to Do Not Track (DNT) allows users to now set the DNT flag to “please track” when accessing web sites alongside the previous options of not setting the flag at all or setting it to say “do not track”. The default remains to say nothing about the users preferences.
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Mozilla’s mission compels us to provide people with an Internet experience that puts them in control of their online lives and that treats them with respect. Respecting someone includes respecting their privacy. We aspire to a “no surprises” principle: the idea that when information is gathered about a person, it is done with their knowledge and is used in ways that benefit that person. People should be made aware of how information is collected and used. Each individual should also be able to decide whether the exchange of personal data for the services received in return feels fair. This can be challenging to achieve, especially when balanced against convenience and ease of use: people expect a fast, streamlined user experience without excessive prompts and confusing choices. But we are always striving toward this ideal.
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SaaS/Big Data
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File storage and sharing using consumer-oriented cloud services can be a security problem for companies that want to avoid sensitive data leaks. ownCloud aims to solve the issue by offering commercial cloud services installed within a company’s own datacenter. Their open source software is built on Linux and most often deployed on Linux by enterprise customers, said Markus Rex, CTO of ownCloud, via email.
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Where do open source cloud, SDN, and the Internet of Things intersect?
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The OpenNebula project has announced the release of the latest major version of its open source cloud computing framework. OpenNebula 4.0, code-named “Eagle” after the M16 star cluster, introduces a redesigned Sunstone administration interface, a number of new virtual machine features, and improvements to several of the core components of the platform. The OpenNebula toolkit is used by, among others, the European Space Agency, Fermilab, CERN, and China Mobile and provides IaaS management capabilities for virtual infrastructure in data centres.
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Databases
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MongoDB is one of the most visible NoSQL databases out there and 10Gen’s CTO is apparently one of the most hands-on coding CTOs out there. So when he was in London recently, The H just had to have a chat with Eliot Horowitz about his technical philosophy of what MongoDB is, where its going and how being an active developer informs his decision-making process:
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PostgreSQL 9.3 has begun its testing cycle with the release of its first beta. The new version brings writing support for foreign tables, including those on other PostgreSQL servers, updatable views and the ability to declare a materialised view, new JSON construction and extraction functions, indexed regular-expression-based searches, and new resilience features. Together, the changes place PostgreSQL in the position of being able to be the backbone of many enterprises’ data storage and integration systems.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Back in March and April, when the Java browser plugin was getting hammered with security holes that were being exploited in the wild, we conducted a couple of unscientific polls here on FOSS Force to determine how our visitors were handling this security crisis.
To call the problems that Java was experiencing at the time a “crisis” is not an exaggeration. If you’ll remember, the situation was considered so serious that here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security was urging everyone to disable the Java plugin.
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As the development of Apache OpenOffice 4.0 progresses, the Apache OpenOffice project is looking for a new logo to visually represent the project and now – after 40 logo submissions and over five thousand entries in a community survey – the shortlist is available. A report on the survey shows that responses came from around the world.
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CMS
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New standalone organization created to support the open source Crafter content management system.
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Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a “hook” is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.
One of the greatest challenges that Drupal adopters face, whether they are new site owners or beginning developers, is figuring out what is easy and what is hard to do with Drupal. As a developer, solution architect, technical strategist and even as the friend who knows stuff about Web sites, 60% of my discussions revolve around three questions: how long will it take, how much will it cost, and can my site do [insert cool new thing]?
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Education
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The open education landscape is set to grow a little more as Stanford University announces plans to team up with edX to build an online learning platform that universities and developers around the world can access for free.
edX, a not-for-profit online education project founded in 2012 by MIT and Harvard University, develops online learning courses for students. The project encourages collaboration between teachers, students, and faculty to fit the needs of individual institutions.
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Funding
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OpenGeo, the creators of the OpenGeo Suite, the world’s leading open source geospatial software platform, announced a $3 million Series A investment from Vanedge Capital of Vancouver, British Columbia. Simultaneous with the funding event, the company has spun out from its incubator parent, OpenPlans, and is boosting OpenGeo’s product and customer-support initiatives.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In November 2012, we finished the libthreads (cthreads) to libpthread (POSIX Threads) conversion. Converting the Hurd libraries to the pthread interfaces allows linking them together with other libraries that use this standard threading interface themselves. This project once was begun by Vicente Hernando Ara, and later continued by Barry deFreese, Thomas DiModica, Thomas Schwinge, Samuel Thibault, Pino Toscano, and now brought to completion by Richard Braun, who could not be scared by having to resolve the last remaining tricky issues before the transition could be completed.
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Challenge #7 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a function that creates an animated GIF from a datacube of 8-bit color indices and a 256 color palette. It is the third challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.
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Project Releases
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The Video.js open source JavaScript library designed for working with web video has been updated to version 4.0 and, in the process, has changed its licence from LGPLv3 to Apache 2.0. The major update is the first since Brightcove, the video platform company, acquired Zencoder, where Video.js was developed as a side project. Video.js is designed to make it simple to embed video, whether the browser is modern and supports HTML5 or legacy and relies on Flash. Creator Steve Heffernan says that he was tasked by Brightcove to work full time on the project and that the Brightcove video team have become contributors too. That focus has paid off in version 4.0 of Video.js with improved performance, new skin designs, responsive layout, accessibility and retina display support among the new features.
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Public Services/Government
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I recently spoke to Dr SPT Krishnan, Chairman, Infocomm Technologies Advisory Panel, Singapore Red Cross Society. He and his team were responsible for Donorweb, a web platform for “disseminating critical information on blood requirements and reaching prospective blood donors during normal and emergency time periods.”
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Licensing
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When it comes to using, developing and promoting software online, the numerous licenses that accompany them can be confusing for even the most adept computer user. Open source and proprietary license often go at each other head-to-head, with one promoting an accepted method of licensing whereas the latter leaves more room for interpretation. But can they work well together or are open source and proprietary license destined to drive developers and users even further apart?
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Nearly three years ago, I wrote an article exploring why at that time there were no billion-dollar companies (since then, Red Hat has finally broken through this barrier). Here’s the key point:
open source solutions save money for customers by doing away with the fat margins for existing computer companies – and thus shrink the overall market. Opponents of open source like to paint this as “value destruction” that takes money “out of the economy” – as if free software went around burning down offices and warehouses.
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Maps are nothing new; humans have been recording the layout of the world around them for close to 8,000 years. What started out as cave paintings developed into hand-drawn maps on parchment, which eventually turned into machine-printed atlases, and, most recently, into GPS guidance. While mapmaking has been primarily the job of cartography experts and companies like Rand McNally and Garmin, technology has allowed for an awesome shift, giving the power to document one’s surroundings back to the people.
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Last week, The White House published an Executive Order by which the default method for government data collection and dissemination must now be open and machine readable.
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Programming
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While it looked like the Linux 3.9 kernel would be released this weekend, a 3.9-rc8 release was warranted and is out this Sunday evening.
Linus Torvalds explained that he was hoping to release Linux 3.9 final this weekend, but there ended up being a surplus of issues that led him to tagging another kernel release candidate. In the end, Torvalds decided, “another week won’t hurt.”
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Phoronix was first to report on Friday that LLVM’s Clang compiler is now C++11 feature complete. The LLVM developers have today confirmed this information and talked about future C++ support too.
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Zach DeVito and a team at Stanford and Purdue University have published details of Terra, a new approach to generating code for high performance computing. Using Lua as a linguistic host for a new low-level language, the team have come up with a system which allows a developer to write high-level code in Lua and high-performance code in Terra, iterating code from high-level experimentation to high-performance optimised code over time. This is, though, just one of the use cases for Terra and Lua.
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Following yesterday’s branching of LLVM and the related components from trunk, LLVM 3.3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for those interested in testing the Apple-sponsored compiler.
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The developers of the JIT-compiling Python interpreter PyPy have released an alpha version of PyPy 2.0 for ARM processors. Part of the work was sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, so it’s not surprising to find the Raspberry Pi mini-computer listed as one of the supported platforms.
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The planned feature list for Python 3.4 is starting to become more defined. One of the important additions that the developers have decided on is the inclusion of an enumeration type in the standard library in the next version of the language. Enumeration types, which are also known as enums, are data types that define each possible value as symbolic constants.
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Google has released version 1.1 of the Go programming language, the first major revision of the language and its tools since it was introduced in 2012. Since then, there has been a lot of interest in the language as it offers a rich alternative to C and C++ as a basis for system and application development in modern highly connected environments. While much of the work in the update has focussed on improving performance, new features include a race detector for finding memory synchronisation problems and new functionality in the standard library of the language.
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The Google Dart developers are reviving the language’s try.dartlang.org site with a major upgrade of the site’s capabilities. Previously, the site would compile Dart into JavaScript by sending it to a server, but now, after having compiled the Dart2js compiler to JavaScript, it can run in the user’s browser. Dart was introduced in 2011 as a more structured form of JavaScript to replace the language in the browser. Dart can be run in two ways, either compiled to JavaScript or run in its virtual machine and, by exploiting the former, it has made it possible to work on or offline with the Dart2js compiler.
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The Downside Of Long Quality Articles
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Security
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US domain registrar and web hosting service Name.com has fallen victim to a hacker attack. In a recent email, the company informed its customers of an incident that potentially enabled unknown attackers to gain access to “email addresses, encrypted passwords and encrypted credit card details”. The registrar says that the private crypto keys that are required to decrypt the stolen credit card details are stored on a separate system that wasn’t compromised.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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But one of Cohen’s Post colleagues doesn’t think it’s a scandal either–just like Bush’s Iraq lies weren’t much of a scandal either.
Come again?
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The spy in the blond wig, Ryan Fogle, was not the first CIA agent to be caught by Russian security services this year, according to an interview with an anonymous Russian agent aired on state television.
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Federal Security Service says US embassy official was expelled because CIA persisted in trying to recruit Russians for espionage
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Russia says it will expel a US diplomat briefly detained in Moscow for allegedly trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer as a spy.
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The Russian foreign ministry said Fogle has been labelled as persona non grata and is to be expelled from the country. Officially an US embassy employee, Fogle is protected by diplomatic immunity.
[...]
The Russian foreign ministry said Fogle has been labelled as persona non grata and is to be expelled from the country. Officially an US embassy employee,
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THE US and Russia were locked in a Cold War-style spy scandal last night after an alleged CIA agent was seized and accused of offering millions to recruit a intelligence figure in Moscow.
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The CIA has maintained its influence over Cloudant by upping its investment in the database-as-a-service firm.
The $12m funding round sees Cloudant’s existing investors In-Q-Tel*, Avalon Ventures, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation up their shares in the company, and new investors Fidelity Investments, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital have piled in as well, the company announced on Tuesday.
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Remember the Academy Award-winning film Zero Dark Thirty? Well, last week news broke that the CIA edited the film’s script to make sure that it didn’t portray the “enhanced interrogation” program in a way that would make the agency look bad.
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The Obama administration has floated the idea of putting the CIA’s controversial targeted killing operations under the control of the uniformed armed services. But sources familiar with the still-classified program, which uses unmanned aircraft to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen, say the shift would be difficult to implement and would make little difference.
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And, despite its assertion that it warned the administration about the threat to Benghazi, it failed there, too, in not vetting properly the local militia and leaving what was essentially a CIA facility insufficiently protected.
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Attorney General Eric Holder strongly defended the Justice Department’s seizure of two-months-worth of Associated Press phone records on Tuesday, saying the leak of secret information to the AP created a national security threat.
The Justice Department obtained the phone records of the AP — from April and May in 2012 — in an effort to determine who leaked confidential information regarding a Saudi double agent who had infiltrated al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
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Allegedly the U.S. diplomat told his would-be recruit to set up a Google Gmail account to respond if he wanted to pursue such a relationship.
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Prof. George Katsiaficas of Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston has launched a federal lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over documents he seeks relating to the assassination of a former Korean premier.
[...]
His FOIA requests have also been expanded to include the Defense Intelligence Agency, because he says, “it’s possible the DIA will release documents that the CIA doesn’t have, or doesn’t want to release.”
Berman confirmed that the next step on his behalf is to serve the CIA and the Government before an appearance at the US District Court in Massachusetts will be scheduled.
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On Monday, the Associated Press revealed that the Department of Justice used subpoenas to obtain phone records of its editors and reporters from April and May 2012. The records were obtained due to the investigation and supposed leak to the AP last year that the CIA had ”thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.”
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Cablegate
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Julian Assange’s newly formed Australian WikiLeaks Party (WLP) announced that if elected, it will immediately introduce a national shield law to protect a reporter’s right not to reveal a source, as current state-based shield laws are “inadequate.”
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A national poll conducted by UMR Research found 26 per cent of voters said they were likely to vote for Mr Assange and his political party.
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By spending $4.5 million on ensuring a whistleblower does not escape from an embassy, Britain has overstepped the bounds of common sense, according to Julian Assange, who does not believe the 2015 UK election will bring any change to his fate.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Mark Zuckerberg’s complaint box is filling up.
Finance
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Goldman Sachs has been “deficient” in linking compensation to company performance, Glass Lewis said yesterday in a report, which also opposed the re-election of compensation committee Chairman James A. Johnson. ISS said in a May 8 report that shareholders should vote for Johnson at the New York-based bank’s May 23 annual meeting.
[...]
Goldman Sachs doesn’t have specific measures to help set annual pay for top executives, Glass Lewis said in the report, which gave the firm a “D” grade in linking pay to performance. ISS said the increase in executive pay for 2012 reflected stronger company performance.
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It’s not every day that a former corporate lawyer comes out in favor of stronger regulation of big business.
And it’s not every day the former general counsel of a major American corporation comes out and urges the federal government to force major corporate wrongdoers to admit to their wrongdoing.
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University of Massachusetts economist Richard Wolff on Tuesday explained that obsession over the federal deficit was based in politics, not economics.
Wolff said on the David Pakman Show that the government could not improve a struggling economy by cutting its spending. As the single biggest consumer, the government only reduced demand for goods and services by cutting spending, leading to greater unemployment.
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No one in the room appeared to catch the fact that they all were participating in an elaborate public relations ruse, set up by well-known Wisconsin spinmeister (Graul) whose claim to fame is a racist attack ad on a sitting judge, and orchestrated by a Wall Street billionaire whose name was never mentioned in the two-hour “teach-in.”
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We’re going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.
According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil.
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As we first noted here (regulation) and here (supervision), the US government has been gradually encroaching on the independence and freedom of the virtual currency. This week, as The Washington Post reports, the government escalated. The feds took action against Mt. Gox, the world’s leading Bitcoin exchange. Many people use Dwolla, a PayPal-like payment network, to send dollars to their Mt. Gox accounts. They then use those dollars to buy Bitcoins. On Tuesday, Dwolla announced that it had frozen Mt. Gox’s account at the request of federal investigators.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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On May 10, the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reported that the museum was being criticized by “conservative outlets and a pro-Israel think tank” over the inclusion in its Journalists Memorial of two reporters from Al-Aqsa TV, which is run by Hamas.
Censorship
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Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has vetoed a controversial “ag gag” bill that would hamstring citizen investigations documenting patterns of abuse of animals and regulatory violations. These investigations have led in the past to regulatory action and demanded industry changes.
As the reason for his decision, Governor Haslam cited the legal opinion of Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper, who last week called the bill’s provisions “constitutionally suspect” with regard to the First Amendment. (The First Amendment Center concurs and says that ag-gag bills “harm free speech.”)
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What’s it like inside a factory farm? If the livestock and meat industries have their way, what little view we have inside the walls of these animal-reviewing facilities may soon be obscured. For the second year in a row, the industry is backing bills in various statehouses that would criminalize undercover investigations of livestock farms. The Humane Society of the US, one of the animal-welfare groups most adept at conducting such hidden-camera operations, counts active “ag gag” bills in no fewer than nine states. Many of them are based on a model conjured by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group that generates industry-friendly legislation language for state legislatures, Associated Press reports.
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An earlier version was already adopted at the end of 2011 but, in response to demands for changes from the opposition, the National Council of Provinces (the South African parliament’s upper house) made a number of minor amendments. These concessions still fall far short of what is needed.
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These words are the reflection of my true feelings. Not long ago, scholar Zhang Xuezhong, Xiao Xuehui, Song Shinan and lawyer Si Weijiang all saw their Weibo accounts deleted. They each had large numbers of followers, who spread their words to an even wider audience. But all of a sudden their names have disappeared. Nobody knows why, or who ordered it, but we all know that a new round of a censorship campaign has commenced. As in 1957, 1966 and 1989, Chinese intellectuals are feeling more or less the same fear as one does before an approaching mountain storm: the scariest thing of all is not being silenced or being sent to prison; it is the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty about what comes next. There is no procedure, no standard, and not a single explanation. It’s as if you are walking into a minefield blindfolded. Not knowing where the mines are buried, you don’t know when you will be blasted to pieces.
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The Global Voices story quoted above goes on to describe the ways in which some of those 1.1 million followers have reacted, and how many feel that Sina Weibo is diminished by Murong’s absence. It also points out that all of his posts have been preserved and are available — but on the other side of the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Although only those with the requisite technical know-how to tunnel under the GFW using VPNs will be able to access the now-deleted messages, that doesn’t mean the Chinese authorities have really won here. After all, using censorship to silence a critic of censorship means that his 1.1 million (ex-)followers now have definitive proof of what he was warning them about.
Privacy
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Imagine you opened your door tomorrow morning and found hundreds of naked people there waiting for you. Now what if they all started telling you what they thought about something you’d assumed not many people cared about. Naked people…talking about data protection? It’s safe to say it’d get your attention.
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There’s many reasons to password-protect — or encrypt — one’s digital data. Foremost among them is to protect it during a security breach.
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News agency Associated Press (AP) has accused the US government of secretly and illegally obtaining phone records for 20 of the news agency’s phone lines. The agency has revealedPDF that its General Counsel Laura Malone was informed of the action by a letter from the US Department of Justice (DoJ). The data related to calls made over a two-month period in 2012 from AP phone lines in New York, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut and in the House of Representatives. The letter from the DoJ failed to provide a reason for its spying activities.
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Technology gives journalists unprecedented power to track down information. And technology gives lots of other people the ability to follow journalists’ footprints. Just ask the Associated Press.
Now the New Yorker magazine says it can help journalists, and their sources, cover their tracks. It is rolling out an electronic tip box it says will give leakers and tipsters the ability to cloak their identity when they reach out to the magazine.
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Feds refuse to confirm whether they cracked bomb plot with warrantless eavesdropping
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How does a small Canadian company get a contract to provide security software for top U.S. covert agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI?
Actually, it’s not that difficult, according to mobile security company Fixmo’s CEO, Rick Segal.
“Despite the Bush years of let’s go play in another war, there’s a very tight, close alliance between Canada and the USA,” Segal says.
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Civil Rights
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Anyone who has been to India or is familiar with the country knows how chaotic it can be: from the congestion on the streets of Delhi to the messy way in which democracy functions. And for journalists, covering the chaos of India can be risky business. This week alone, Indian law enforcement officials assaulted two journalists covering demonstrations in different corners of the country.
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The American academic and firebrand campaigner talks about Britain’s deep trouble, fighting white supremacy and where Obama is going wrong
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You may heard that the conservative Heritage Foundation released a dubious study about the effects of an immigration reform. The report alleged a cost of $6.3 trillion, and was quickly challenged and debunked by critics on the right and the left.
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The public lost another battle in the U.S. v. Aaron Swartz case, this one over transparency. On May 13, 2013, the U.S. District Court judge handling the prosecution sided with the government, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR and refused to make public any information in the case that any of these three entities wished to keep under seal. The ruling effectively grants the Department of Justice, MIT and JSTOR a veto over what the public gets to know about the investigation.
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Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous inbox. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.
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Ray’s excellent point is that we need more whistleblowers not less, so I should accentuate the positive and talk of how great I feel, how I can sleep at night, how I am recognized all round the world, etc. – all of which is true.
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A senior United Russia official has demanded debate be resumed in the Duma over introducing criminal prosecution for the rehabilitation of Nazism. The move comes after Russian opposition activist statements during Victory day celebrations.
Sergey Zheleznyak, deputy-speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, has declared he was insulted by some of the online statements made by members of the opposition movement on May 9, the day Russia marks victory over Nazi Germany.
Intellectual Monopolies
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The US supreme court came down solidly on the side of the agricultural giant Monsanto on Monday, ruling unanimously that an Indiana farmer could not use patented genetically modified soybeans to create new seeds without paying the company.
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Copyrights
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Canadian anti-piracy company Canipre has been teaming up with film studios to hunt down and sue alleged BitTorrent pirates. They want to change people’s attitudes toward piracy and make a few bucks in the process. However, it appears that the attitude change should start closer to home, as their own website blatantly uses photos that have been ripped-off from independent photographers.
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Send this to a friend
05.14.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Want to run Linux on the Google Computer Engine cloud? Starting immediately, Debian Linux is Google’s Linux of choice.
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NASA’s Linux-based “Robonaut 2″ is undergoing extensive testing on the International Space Station (ISS), and will soon be put to work. The humanoid Robonaut 2 will soon receive a major upgrade that will provide legs and an expanded battery pack, enabling it to perform more duties, including space walks.
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Start-up RangeNetworks is hoping that the combination of low cost and transparent software will allow it to break into the notoriously locked-down cellular network market.
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Microsoft’s kernel is falling behind Linux because of a cultural problem at the Volehill of Redmond, claims one of its developers.
The anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a response acknowledging the problem and explaining its cause.
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Could Google’s Chrome OS arrive on platforms that have hardly been discussed for it yet? According to rumblings from Google and some media reports, the answer is yes. Of course, there has been a lot of talk about possible mergers between Chrome OS and Android, and talk of Chrome OS tablets. But there are some facts about the guts of Chrome OS that could make it ideal for other applications.
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This year’s 2013 Enterprise End User Report show the world’s largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux for the third consecutive year and management’s perception remains increasingly positive.
According to a press statement from the Linux Foundation, “These advancements are resulting in more companies wanting to contribute to the advancement of Linux and understand how to benefit from collaborative development.”
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With this, it seems, Linux has conquered the final frontier, but that doesn’t mean world domination is complete. So, our question is this: Where would you like to see Linux adopted next?
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Desktop
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The Samsung ARM Chromebook is one of a few ARM devices that I prepare Bodhi Linux images for. As such I’ve owned the hardware for almost six months now and during this time I’ve used it a fair amount. The goal of this post is to provide a comprehensive review of the product to see if it is something that could be useful to you.
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Server
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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) opened a center today for computing systems in Beijing to help customers and outside software engineers develop business applications for the open-source Linux operating system.
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Rackspace’s first quarter growth wasn’t up to expectations. The company could be facing an AWS squeeze with enterprises and developers.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds released RC1 of the new kernel on the eve of Mother’s Day, together with some advice on how to treat Mum/Mom right on the occasion.
“So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at least as far as counting commits go,” Torvalds wrote in the release announcement. “Which was unexpected, because while linux-next was fairly big, it wasn’t exceptionally so.”
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Along with Linux kernel 3.9.2, 3.0.78 LTS and 3.4.45 LTS comes the thirteenth and last maintenance release of Linux kernel 3.8, as announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on May 11, 2013.
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Welcome to 30 Linux Kernel Developer Workspaces in 30 Weeks! This is the first in a 30-week series that takes a new approach to the original series, 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks. This time we take a look inside developers’ workspaces to learn even more about what makes them tick and how to collaborate with some of the top talent in all of software. Each week will share a picture and/or a video of the workspaces that Linux kernel developers use to advance the greatest shared technology resource in history.
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After being in development for more than one year, BCache was finally merged on Wednesday into the mainline Linux kernel code-base. BCache serves as an SSD caching framework for Linux by offering write-through and write-back caching through a newly-exposed block device.
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Applications
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A couple posts ago, I cooed with joy over discovering Seq24. And last post, I pointed out SFXR (now in twilight development status) for producing simple low-fi sound effects. Now here is an app which is pretty capable at most of what SFXR does, and works as a Seq24 plugin as well.
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I’ve been very busy with life and work in general and I haven’t blogged for a few months now. I finally get the chance to talk about something I worked on in my spare time.
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Instructionals/Technical
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New Linux users often ask me “what is the best way to learn about Linux?” My advice always comes down to this: install and use Linux (any distribution will do but something stable works better), and play around with it. Inevitably, you will break something, and then instead of re-installing, force yourself to fix what you broke. That’s my advice, because I’ve personally learned more about Linux by fixing my own problems than just about any other way. After years of doing this, you start to build confidence in your Linux troubleshooting skills, so that no matter what problem comes your way, you figure if you work at it long enough, you can solve it.
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Games
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A story driven, action-stealth-puzzler where you create and control your own zombie army! I fell in love when the developers emailed it in. Linux and Mac releases from day 1 will be a stretch goal, so I dug to find out why!
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A couple of months ago we talked about the possibility of a Linux version of Hairy Tales. What yesterday was pure speculation, today it has become a reality! Hairy Tales is now available for Linux at Desura, although currently only as a standalone download.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the beta release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite. This means that the calligra/2.7 branch has been created and from now on Calligra 2.7 will only see bugfixes but no new features. The final release of 2.7 is planned in approximately a month from now..
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Does this sound familiar to you? Does going to the canvas resize dialog break your workflow? Don’t be frustrated anymore! Now you can just scroll down, click and… Presto! Add those happy feet to your drawing!
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A few month have past, this my last WebMiner update. In the meantime I finished my Master Thesis, moved to a new location and started my new job. Perfect time to release a new version with the changes I have made since.
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ROSA Desktop Fresh LXDE is the end-user edition of ROSA Desktop that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. This is not the same as the LXDE edition which was released in June 2012. That one is the enterprise edition, which ships with Debian-style stable Linux kernel and software, and uses the Marathon code name. (See ROSA 2012 LXDE review
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New Releases
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A new test release of MEPIS 12, version 11.9.86, is available for testing. It may take up to 24 hours for the ISOs to appear at the mirrors.
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After a month since our last release under the name “Cinnarch”, we’re glad to announce the new name of our project and our first release being out of beta. We’re stable enough to make this step.
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We are happy to announce three new Manjaro Community Editions featuring Mate 1.6, Cinnamon 1.7, Gnome 3.8 and KDE 4.10.2. “Community Editions” of Manjaro Linux are released as bonus flavours in addition to those officially supported and maintained by the Manjaro Team, provided that the time and resources necessary are available to do so.
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of OS4 Enterprise 4.1. With this release we bring many advancements to the worlds premier enterprise Linux platform. We learned a lot from our release of Enterprise 4.0 and this release is based on customer feedback. Starting with the user interface. Many of our Enterprise customers coming from Red Hat and Oracle Linux wanted a consistent user interface that they had become accustomed to with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux and we believe we have achieved that and with some of the flare that OS4 is famous for. They also wanted features on par with what they were accustomed to on their platforms and what we came up with was perhaps the most feature rich enterprise Linux product on the market today.
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PacketFence is a fully supported, trusted, free and open source NAC solution.
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Arch Family
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In just a month since the last release of Cinnarch, during which the developers decided to drop Cinnamon for GNOME, they have produced a new release that brings a distribution that is more desktop agnostic than ever before. Cinnarch development was halted after the developers were finding it harder to synchronise the Cinnamon development with the rolling nature of Arch Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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The third stable release of the Ceph distributed storage platform, named the “Cuttlefish” edition, has enhanced Red Hat support and improvements to make it easier to deploy. Ceph, which is developed by Inktank, offers a distributed system that can be presented to users as an object storage system, a block storage system, or as a POSIX compatible filesystem. Ceph 0.61 now has RHEL 6.0 tested packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux available from the Ceph site and in the EPEL (Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux) repository; the company says it is discussing with Red Hat the possibility of including Ceph in a future RHEL.
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Debian Family
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Having a virtual machine with Debian 6 on there, I was interested to hear that Debian 7.0 is out. In another VM, I decided to give it a go. Installing it on there using the Net Install CD image took a little while but proved fairly standard with my choice of the GUI-based option. GNOME was the desktop environment with which I went and all started up without any real fuss after the installation was complete; it even disconnnected the CD image from the VM before rebooting, a common failing in many Linux operating installations that lands into the installation cycle again unless you kill the virtual machine.
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Now that Debian 7 “Wheezy” has been officially released and it’s ready to be installed on your Linux-powered computers, the developers can concentrate their full resources on the next major release, Debian 8.
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Derivatives
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Warren Woodford announced this past weekend that development on SimplyMEPIS 12 has reached Beta quality and thus he has released a test image. This release brings some newer elements, but the announcement tells of the kibosh on two of them. With little else to go on, it was time for a boot.
The graphics of SimplyMEPIS 12 haven’t changed since the alpha released last Fall. Some software version numbers have jumped, but some haven’t. The Beta features Linux 3.8.2, Xorg X Server 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, and KDE 4.8.4. GRUB 2 is default, but UEFI and GPT drive support have been “deferred.” Woodford said of that, “Unfortunately each hardware vendor is implementing the “standard” differently.” The MEPIS tools look pretty much unchanged as well.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“I don’t know what’s wrong with Canonical,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “They seem not to understand that GNU/Linux is a cooperative product of the world, and wasting resources to do things differently when existing software is working well is poisoning the well. FLOSS is the right way to do IT, whether as a developer, a distributor, OEM, retailer or user.”
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Canonical’s Foundations Team are creating a new application packaging system to sit alongside the existing “apt and dpkg” system that Ubuntu currently uses. The plan was disclosed by Colin Watson, technical lead of the Foundations Team which is responsible for the core of the Ubuntu system, in a mailing list post.
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Just a quick note to remind everyone that our next Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place this week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and is open and available to everyone to participate. This is the event where we get together to discuss, debate, and plan the next three months of work.
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Ubuntu Developer Summit is a meeting where software developers gather to discuss the next Ubuntu version changes and features.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit (uds-1305) will start tomorrow, will last for 3 days and some major possible changes will be discussed, like “click packages”, Chromium replacing Firefox as the default web browser, Unity 8 with Mir being available for testing on the desktop and more.
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n the broadest sense Chrome OS is a consumer of Google Services. But it is not alone in this role. This topic has been broadly discussed in the context of Google services for Apple’s iOS and others. I am thinking of Google Maps and Google Now.
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I’d like to give an update on upcoming plans for Ubuntu.com and to respond to recent concerns about the positioning of the community within the website.
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The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided, at its most recent meeting, to finally abandon the Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas site. The site was created in 2008 to bring together the community and developers on a collaborative crowd-sourced platform where problems could be posed, ideas for solving the problems offered and users could vote on preferred solutions. If solutions were popular they could find themselves implemented by Canonical or Ubuntu teams.
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Flavours and Variants
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As you might have seen in Jonathan’s blog post we discussed Mir in Kubuntu at the “Mataro Sessions II”. It’s a topic I would have preferred to not have to discuss at all. But the dynamics in the free software world force us to discuss it and obviously our downstream needs to know why we as an upstream do not consider Mir adoption as a valid option.
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With its new Silvermont architecture, it looks like Intel has finally leaped forward in mobile. But whether it can ward off ARM’S upcoming 64-bit ARMv8 processors is another story.
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Phones
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In a 2010 post here on OStatic, I asked this question: “Is It Too Late for an Open Source Challenge to Android?” Now, of course, we know that there are several open source smartphone strategies in the works that will be coming to fruition this year. Mozilla is moving ever closer to delivering its first phones based on the Firefox OS platform, and urging developers to build apps. Meanwhile, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth maintains that Ubuntu phones will ship in the coming months, and early reviews of the Ubuntu Touch operating system are already arriving.
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Ballnux
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It looks like all the rumors are coming together, as benchmarks have been released for an upcoming 8-inch Samsung tablet thanks to the Dutch website TechTastic. Sources at the site say they have discovered the 8-inch tablet in the GLBenchmark database, carrying model number SM-T311 (which we presume is the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0.)
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Android
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Spend five minutes browsing the tech press and there’s a very good chance you’ll come upon Kickstarter. Gone are the days when products had to be at least on the verge of release for them to get publicity; today, anyone with a cool idea can post it on Kickstarter—or one of its many clones–spread the word, and start raking in the cash they need to make it happen.
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The CyanogenMod developers have published a blog post, indicating that the release of a final version of the Android 4.2 (“Jelly Bean”) based CyanogenMod 10.1.0 is “quickly approaching the point where a ‘final’ build is due.” For this reason, the developers have now released the first release candidate for the upcoming version of their Android-based, community-developed firmware for smartphones and tablets. The team is still in the process of building images for individual devices, but once that process is finished, 40 different devices should be supported.
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First-quarter 2013 shipments of “smart mobile devices,” including notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, swelled by 37.4 percent year-on-year to 308.7 million units, reports mobile market analyst Canalys. From the operating system perspective, Android grabbed a healthy majority of units shipped, at 59.5 percent.
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Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, whose absence have led Home to just 1 million downloads since launching a month ago.
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If you’re a Google Gamer – as in, Android gamer – then there’s a bit of good news in store for you. A new leak in advance of next week’s big Google I/O conference has revealed a host of gaming-friendly features set to arrive to the Android platform in the form of a new “Google Play Games” service.
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Reuters reports news this week of Amazon.com launching an Android application store in China offering “paid” and free applications.
With this move Amazon effectively beats Google (whose store only offers free open source apps) in terms of the amount of digital content it offers to what is indisputably the world’s largest mobile phone market.
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Just like last year, ASUS is filling time before the Computex trade show by posting teaser trailers. Sporting a “We Transform” tag, its first one for 2013 features the spun metal casings, touchscreen laptops, convertibles, tablets and phones we’ve become accustomed to from the company. So what’s next?
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Few days ago we heard the rumor about a upcoming Sony flagship device which is known as “Xperia Honami”. There was another rumored model “Xperia Togari” a 6.4″ phablet to come out in the 2nd half of 2013. Sony also introduced a new Series of product lineup named “One Sony” where people can get the best out of Sony’s latest technologies in a single product. The Xperia Honami is expected to follow up the One Sony line.
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The HTC First, or “Facebook phone” as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.
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WIRED: The Android handover from Andy Rubin to you seemed sudden and mysterious to us on the outside. Was it long in the works?
PICHAI: I got to know only towards the end of the process of Andy deciding to step back. It played out in a rapid time fashion over the couple weeks prior to the actual announcement. I am passionate about computing and so to me, it was very exciting to be in a position where I could make an impact on that scale.
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Ouya has revealed it will delay the retail launch of its Android-based gaming console by three weeks until June 25th. In an interview with Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman, Polygon reports that the self-imposed delay is to ensure that the company has enough units to “satisfy all the early orders,” and to make sure there’s enough stock ahead of its public launch. According to Joystiq, Ouya has also listened to early feedback on its controller design, expanding the button holes to ensure that they no longer stick — something we noted in our review of the console.
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As supporters of open source software, our knee-jerk reaction to the question of if open development always results in better quality code is often an unqualified, “yes, of course!”. However, it may do the community good to take an objective look at the state of some of our projects, and how it reflects on the open source movement as a whole. It has been my experience that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, proprietary software is fantastic, and it would do us all a bit of good to ask why.
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The open-source RF design initiative, dubbed Myriad, has the support of US-based distributor Richardson RFPD.
Richardson RFPD will begin stocking and selling the Myriad-RF-1 board to customers around the world via its website immediately.
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The actor model is a message-passing paradigm that resolves some of the major challenges of writing concurrent, scalable code for today’s distributed systems. In this installment of Open source Java projects, Steven Haines introduces Akka, a JVM-based toolkit and runtime that implements the actor model. Get started with a simple program that demonstrates how an Akka message passing system is wired together, then build a more complex program that uses concurrent processes to compute prime numbers.
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Events
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Details are emerging for some of the most important technology conferences of the next several months, which promise to feature lots of compelling speakers and content for open source fans. The Google I/O conference begins this week in Northern California, and is likely to bring with it lots of news related to Android and Google’s phone and tablet strategies. Meanwhile, The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America, taking place September 16-18, 2013 at the Hyatt New Orleans in New Orleans, La.
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Valve Software boss Gabe Newell and Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton have been announced as keynote speakers for the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon and Cloud Open North America conferences. The two events will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana from 16 to 18 September. Newell and Upton will be joining Jonathan Bryce of the OpenStack Foundation, HP Labs Director Martin Fink, and representatives from Intel and Wired Magazine on stage as keynote speakers. The popular Linux Kernel Panel, which features leading kernel developers and maintainers discussing the future of the open source operating system, will also be back.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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While it hasn’t generated a whole lot of buzz yet, Google has begun to take the wraps off of a strategy that will allow users of the Chrome browser to easily find and run “packaged apps” just like sophisticated web apps that users of Chrome OS are used to running. In an announcement on the Chromium Blog, Google officials unveiled a developer preview of Chrome packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher. Chrome packaged apps are now available in the Chrome Web Store for anyone on Chrome’s developer channel on Windows or Chrome OS.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s WebFWD programme is seeking applications for its fourth cycle of classes which are designed to teach new innovators to build healthy businesses by embracing the best of open source and startup principles. By getting entrepreneurs to create businesses what make the Web better and more open, Mozilla hopes to ensure that future businesses on the internet are more effective in enabling an open web.
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As I noted yesterday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs (who will be leaving his CEO post this year) made very clear in comments at the All Things D: Dive Into Mobile conference that Mozilla has very ambitious plans for its new Firefox OS mobile operating system. Specifically, he sees it as an innovation-centric platform. As quoted by ABC News, Kovacs said, “We haven’t done a great job [on mobile browsing]. I’m expecting someone will do an Apple on the whole browsing experience.”
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The Firefox Australis theme that is going to be released later this year if things go as planned seems to split the community. Some users are looking forward to a modernized theme while others fear that it will change the browser that they are using in away that it is not as customizable and usable anymore.
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The upcoming Firefox OS will appear on higher-end smartphones, and not just entry-level handsets, with Sony expected to release a premium device running the operating system, a Mozilla executive said.
“Sony is known for quality and user experience. So they are targeting for very very high (end). We are in joint discussions on the kind of device and what’s the product,” said Li Gong, Mozilla’s senior vice president for mobile devices.
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SaaS/Big Data
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There are a lot of different programming languages in use today. When it comes to the cloud, thanks in part to the strong position of OpenStack, the open source Python language has emerged as being one of the most important. OpenStack is written in Python and is in used by many leading IT vendors including IBM, HP, Dell and Cisco.
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Today, open source cloud platforms are winning the IaaS battle, open source storage and file systems are expanding their footprint, and open source databases are replacing closed source rivals. Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems explains why nearly everything is being snatched by open source software
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The fourth generation of OpenNebula is the result of seven years of continuous innovation in close collaboration with its users
The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the fourth major release of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source enterprise-grade solution to build and manage virtualized data centers and enterprise clouds. OpenNebula 4.0 (codename Eagle) brings valuable contributions from many of its thousands of users that include leading research and supercomputing centers like FermiLab, NASA, ESA and SARA; and industry leaders like Blackberry, China Mobile, Dell, Cisco, Akamai and Telefonica O2.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.3, the third maintenance release of the current 4.0 series. The new version brings a number of bug fixes to the open source office suite and the binaries for Mac OS X are now signed by the Foundation and will pass the operating system’s Gatekeeper security system without user intervention.
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Business
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Many, if not most businesses use open source software tools and products every day. Some of these tools and products are constructed by their own IT developers while others are purchased from third parties, including a wide range of professionals who construct and sell software after having incorporated open source software. Most of today’s IT professionals are aware of the fact that the use of open source software requires compliance with specific open source license terms, but new challenges have emerged as a result of the development of new versions of the General Public Licenses (GPL) and the combination of GPLs.
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‘Big data’ startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies “turn multistructured data into business gold.”
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Semi-Open Source
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What is it that means one open source project takes off, while another doesn’t? There are a lot of ways to analyse this question depending on the example at hand, but a more general study of the “remixability” of online content has found a surprising correlation — there’s a trade-off between originality and the chance it will inspire new versions.
Researchers Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT and Andrés Monroy-Hernández from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University wanted to look at a particular dilemma — despite “proponents of remix culture often speaking of remixing in terms of rich ecosystems where creative works are novel and highly generative”, actual examples of it happening “can be difficult to find”, Monroy-Hernández writes on Hill’s blog.
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Project Releases
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Used by Facebook and Yahoo, the Apache Giraph project for distributed graph processing has released version 1.0. This is the first new version since the project left incubation and became a top-level project in May 2012, though for some reason it has yet to make it to the Apache index of top level projects.
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The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has announced that it will make its new map editor, which it had originally unveiled in February, available to all its contributors today. Development on the new iD editor was partly funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation and unlike the software it replaces, the new editor does not require Flash to run. The tool is written completely in HTML5 and uses the D3 visualisation library.
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Public Services/Government
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The National Security Agency has started developing a cloud computing platform intended to help secure the government’s network infrastructure, FedScoop reported Friday.
David Stegon writes NSA has reached out to the country’s open source community by allowing developers to collaborate in shoring up the cloud infrastructure’s code for the cloud infrastructure.
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The Maryland state government quietly announced its brand-new online open source data trove last Wednesday.
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US president Barack Obama is aiming to breathe new life into US information portal data.gov. Over the last two years, the portal appears to have faltered somewhat. Under an executive order issued by the White House on Thursday, data in new government and public sector IT systems will have to be stored in “open and machine readable” formats. The requirements also apply to data processing facilities which undergo modernisation or renovation, which will also be required to make information available via the US government’s open data portal.
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Openness/Sharing
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International communal house-building network WikiHouse has come to Christchurch, and could be the solution for homeowners in need of an idea or wanting to kickstart their rebuild themselves.
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The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has finally agreed to open today the source code of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines, which it will use for the May 13 elections, for review by political parties and other groups.
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Pittsburgh-based entrepreneur Chad Whitacre is approaching his online cash gift-giving startup with an earnest interpretation of being transparent.
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Next Tuesday’s Securities and Exchange Commission Credit Ratings Roundtable will include open source ratings advocate, Marc Joffe. A former Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics, Joffe has been using open source technologies to evaluate sovereign and municipal bond issuers since last year. Recently, Joffe’s group, Public Sector Credit Solutions, developed a credit scoring model for California cities at the request of a unit of the State Treasurer’s Office.
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Range Networks is releasing a standards-based hardware-software cell network that is open source from end to end using equipment and software made in the United States.
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A municipal credit research group has published credit scores for 260 California cities calculated with an open source credit model. The group, Public Sector Credit Solutions (PSCS), developed the model with a grant from the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission (CDIAC) – a unit of the State Treasurer’s Office (STO). The PSCS research, which has recently been submitted for peer review, does not represent the opinion of CDIAC or STO, nor do the credit scores reflect the views of CDIAC, STO or any other public agency.
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Open Access/Content
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Facing a possible sentence of 30 years if convicted, the 26-year-old hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last year. His family blamed the university and U.S. prosecutors for his death and sought to have the documents released without omissions.
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…law has been twisted by U.S. prosecutors to bully and intimidate security researchers, journalists, and activists…
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Open Hardware
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Over the past several years, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts, and the California-based Willow Garage made some of the biggest contributions of all. It produced a widely used robotics operating system and was the impetus for the formation of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).
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Server vendors have started shipping servers designed by the chipmaker AMD based on open-source specifications of the Open Compute Project, an open-source hardware-design community Facebook launched about two years ago.
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Programming
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One of the commonly asked questions I hear is “I want to get into programming, which language should I learn?” It’s closely followed by “I write in X but I want to do something else… what language should I be looking at?” There used to be some nicely canned answers to these questions over which the merits and demerits could be discussed over coffee or beer but the culture and practice of open source has changed that. Now, I can only give one answer… “all of them”.
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The developers of PyPy, an alternative Python 2.x implementation with a just-in-time compiler that’s “almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7″, have announced the release of PyPy 2.0. According to the developers’ benchmarking site PyPy 2.0 is around 5.71 times faster than CPython 2.7.3.
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It wasn’t until the middle of 2012 that IBM viewed LLVM as being “critical” to support but since then they have decided to fully support LLVM across all IBM server platforms. Last week in Paris at the European LLVM Meeting, one of their developers talked about the tipping point in supporting LLVM on IBM hardware and their current development status.
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Standards/Consortia
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Google has said this week that it is finishing defining the open-source VP9 video codec standard, with a final date of June 17th.
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Your idea that all interfaces should be simple, to-the-point, and touchable is the way to go. To heck with convention! We are all sick of the desktop and the whole idea of a desktop. It’s not a desktop anyway—it’s a screen and there are better things to put on it than folders and icons. These are dumb and they assume we all work in offices. Or worse, it assumes we work at all.
Just look at the old-fashioned interface. Those faux shadows and cutesy icons symbolize what exactly? This is not the interface for today’s modern user. We need representation. Something that reflects the “now.” A symbol of the public—today’s public. Like some bland, square, one-dimensional tiles. Dumbed-down to an extreme. Dopey even. Tiles say it all. And you can poke at them and move them around.
Microsoft, you nailed it!
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Pakistani politician poised to become the country’s next prime minister said Monday that Islamabad has “good relations” with the United States, but called the CIA’s drone campaign in the country’s tribal region a challenge to national sovereignty.
Nawaz Sharif spoke to reporters from his family’s estate outside the eastern city of Lahore on Monday, two days after his Pakistan Muslim League-N party won a resounding victory in national elections.
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On the agenda were “kill lists” — names of individuals whose perceived threat to America’s security made them targets for assassination by unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The kill lists, scrutinised personally by Obama at the weekly meetings, were soon expanded to become what US journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars, calls a form of “pre-crime” justice where individuals are considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of suspected terrorists.
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Throughout history, some forms of war and weaponry have been viewed with greater horror than others. Even ancient civilisations tried to codify the rules of war – jus in bello. Homer’s Greeks disapproved of archery; real men fought hand-to-hand, not at a distance. Shakespeare’s Henry V roared with anger when, at Agincourt, the French cavalry killed his camp followers. At the beginning of the last century, dum-dum bullets, a British invention, were outlawed following an appeal by Germany. Revulsion against the widespread use of gas in the first world war led in the 1920s to an international convention prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons – not that the ban stopped the British using chemicals in Iraq, or the Italians in Ethiopia in the 1930s. A landmine convention was agreed in 1997, though not signed by the US, China or Russia. Today, China, India, and perhaps surprisingly North Korea are among nuclear‑armed states that have pledged no first use, though Nato, Israel and the US have not.
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Even ex-Obama administration officials are expressing qualms about targeted killings.
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The Peshawar high court has delivered a damning verdict on the strikes. Pakistan must now move towards protecting the security of its citizens
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Palestinians say Israel uses drones to fire missiles, but Israel has never offered a confirmation.
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The strikes, Khan told the Star’s Michelle Shephard, are only “creating anti-Americanism. It is helping the militants to recruit people. Collateral damage means anyone losing a family (member) goes and joins the militants.”
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An alleged CIA agent has been briefly detained in Moscow for allegedly trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer, Russian media report.
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The CIA secretly smuggled millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai over more than a decade, The New York Times revealed. Karzai confirmed the report.
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After catching up on coverage of the Benghazi attack over the weekend, there’s something that has me very confused: why are so many journalists ignoring the fact that the Americans there were mostly CIA? Here’s how The New York Times began a Benghazi story published online Sunday: “A House committee chairman vowed Sunday to seek additional testimony on the Obama administration’s handling of last year’s deadly attack on the American diplomatic post in Libya.”
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In the first major Pakistani court ruling on the legality of the CIA’s drone campaign in the country, a Peshawar High Court judge said this morning that strikes are ‘criminal offences’. Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan ordered Pakistan’s government to ‘use force if need be’ to end drone attacks in the country’s tribal regions.
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America’s long-running courtship of Afghanistan’s mercurial Hamid Karzai got even wackier last week.
Now, things that used to be top secret — like CIA bags of cash delivered to a government famously rife with corruption — have been featured on screens everywhere. And Washington policy is looking like a comic parody of the way the world really works.
Scene One: Afghanistan’s president convenes a Saturday news conference and publicly confirms the CIA’s longtime practice of bringing him bags of money. It had been a top secret until The New York Times disclosed it April 28. Karzai explains how and why he has been spending the CIA’s millions, which is as he sees fit, accountable to no one.
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Cablegate
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The U.S. government has a hard enough time parrying foreign threats like terrorist groups and hostile nations but it’s the unfettered distribution of information in the form of software that could pose the greatest threat of all.
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WikiLeaks reveal that Indira Gandhi Government had charged two Americans under Official Secret Act. The cable says: ” Two Americans await trial in India on charges of spying and are expected to go on trial here within two months in the first case in India of Westerners. Anthony Fletcher and Richard Harcos were arrested on April 26, 1973 in Calcutta. they have been charged under the Indian Official Secret Act.” The cable also reveals that on February 19, the Home Ministry in New Delhi had issued official sanction permitting the Government of West Bengal to try Anthony Fletcher and Richard Harcos under the Official Secret Act. The trial which will be held in Calcutta has not been scheduled. The West Bengal Government has set another hearing in the case for February 27. At a preliminary hearing in Calcutta on February 13, the possibility of bail was discussed, and the decision on bail may be issued on February 27. I have instructed the Consul General in Calcutta to keep you and the Deraprtment of State informed on the progress of this case. I assume your Office will inform Mrs. Fletcher of the forgoing and I am writing separately to her in response to her letter to me of February 12.”
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Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks can again accept credit card donations today after Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. (MA) and Visa Europe Ltd., began processing payments after losing a court case.
Valitor was ordered by Iceland’s Supreme Court on April 24 to begin processing WikiLeaks payments within 15 days or face daily fines amounting to 800,000 kronur ($6,800), according to the ruling. The company was sued by WikiLeaks’s payment services provider, Reykjavik, Iceland-based DataCell, which has also lodged complaints against Visa and MasterCard with the European Commission.
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Finance
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President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday pledged to pursue a broad trade agreement between the U.S. and European Union, amid growing domestic unrest with the Obama administration’s plans to include new political powers for corporations in the deal.
Negotiations have not formally begun, but a series of meetings between U.S. and EU officials have established some ground rules and the preliminary scope of the talks. Since tariffs are already low or nonexistent, the agreement will focus on regulatory issues. That emphasis has concerned food safety advocates, environmental activists and public health experts, who fear a deal may roll back important standards.
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A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.
[...]
“It’s a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity … they were using this for road fill,” Awe said. “It’s like being punched in the stomach, it’s just so horrendous.”
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A cache of data amounting to a whopping 400 gigabytes of information leaked by bank insiders has triggered an offshore tax evasion investigation across the United States, the UK and Australia.
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Privacy
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The National Security Agency ( NSA) has released a guide to ‘help you understand how to use the internet more efficiently’.
The guide to ‘Internet Research’ is a ‘how-to’ book for its agents looking to get the most out of Google, Yahoo and other web search tools.
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In this case, I don’t know Rear Adm. Metts, but I sure found the move of this information warfare specialist interesting. Maybe the U.S. government is going to respond more actively to the stream of Chinese intrusions into American government and business computers:
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The document, however, was labeled as “unclassified” (but for official use only), so the really juicy secrets and Internet tricks are probably still filed away. There’s also a stamp on the guide that says the opinions in the guide “do not represent the official opinion of [the] NSA.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Pierre Lescure has handed in his report [fr] on culture at the digital era to French President François Hollande1. La Quadrature du Net denounces a flawed political process revealing the harmful influence of industrial groups at all levels of policy-making. How will the French government react to Lescure’s proposal to expand the scope of competence of the audiovisual media regulator (CSA) to the Internet? Will it to pursue former President Sarkozy’s anti-sharing policies and even supplement them with new ACTA-like measures encouraging online intermediaries to become private copyright police?
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Send this to a friend
05.13.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a contractor who handles much of the ISS operations, decided enough is enough after a 2008 security breach; he’s switching the “dozens of laptops” aboard the ISS to Debian 6, a Linux operating system.
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The International Space Station has decided to switch dozens of laptops running Windows XP over to Debian. What Linux fans have been saying for years—that Linux delivers greater stability and reliability for public and private computing environments—resonated with Keith Chuvala, the United Space Alliance contractor manager involved in the switch. The change at the International Space Station is all about the replacement of dozens of laptops with XP being switched over to Debian 6. Chuvala said, “We needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.”
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Ever had a virus infect your Windows computer? If you thought that headache and irritation over your home computer was bad, imagine how the astronauts on the International Space Station felt when a Russian cosmonaut brought in an infected laptop in 2008. The computer carried the W32.Gammima.AG worm, an insidious piece of malware that spread like wildfire to the other laptops on board the ISS.
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Acer and Windows 8 may be all over the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness movie, but Linux is actually the go-to platform on the International Space Station these days.
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Laptop computers essential to the day-to-day operations of the International Space Station (ISS) crew will be switching operating systems from Windows XP to Linux, according to published reports.
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This shouldn’t come as any great surprise, but Linux is faster than Windows, and at least one anonymous Microsoft developer is willing to admit it and explain why that’s the case.
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How did Linux originate, where is it presently and in which directions is it headed for the future? These are the big questions that a longtime Linux user and developer named Brian Thomason seeks to answer in a documentary film, if he can secure enough funding through a crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter. Here’s hoping he succeeds.
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I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a fantastic and honest response acknowledging this problem and explaining its cause. His post has been deleted! Why the censorship? I am reposting it here. This is too insightful to be lost.
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Desktop
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129 families like Misha Washington are scheduled for Reglue visits this year. I’ve gotten a slow start to 2013 but our goal is to provide 150 Linux-powered computers to these families. As long as I keep feeling as good as I do, I am looking forward to the challenge.
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I guess they noticed the slowdown in sales of PCs with a more limited choice. This is HP’s first notebook to be shipped with Ubuntu GNU/Linux. This is part of Canonical’s plan to take over the world.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds made a Mother’s Day gift to the world in the form of the 3.10-rc1 kernel prepatch. With this release, the merge window for the 3.10 development cycle has closed, so we know which features to expect this time around.
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Version 3.10 of the Linux kernel will include the bcache block layer cache that allows SSD cards to be used for caching significantly slower but higher capacity hard disks. Developed by a Google employee and used at Google, bcache is the second such feature to be integrated into the Linux kernel; the first one was dm-cache, which the Linux kernel has offered since version 3.9 was released two weeks ago.
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Linus Torvalds has announced the first several 3.9 kernel release candidates, following the closing of the 3.9 ‘merge window’ (period of time during which disruptive changes to the kernel and new features are merged). Merge windows are typically up to two weeks in duration (and seldom longer), though Linus has gone to great pains over the past few years to push developers not to post patches for inclusion at the very end of the window. Features merged into the kernel should instead have received heavy testing in the linux-next kernel and elsewhere, be largely complete, and posted for inclusion as early as possible during the two-week window of frantic development for a given release cycle. This is the theory, at any rate.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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The lack of quality mass-appeal games on Linux is the critics’ favourite excuse for dismissing Linux as a serious desktop operating system. We are glad to report that developments in the last few months will rob the peanut gallery of this reason for looking past Linux.
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In Valve’s continued Linux conquest, their latest titles they have ported natively to the penguin platform is Half-Life 2 and many of the add-ons.
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Linux is becoming more user friendly and mainstream with every passing year and with the passing of the Beta test for Steam you will have noticed a marked increase of games on offer. Many users are wondering if they still need to rely on Windows to use their PC as a gaming platform or if they can switch to Linux and give Microsoft the boot. This switch does depend somewhat on PC hardware, but generally Linux has proved itself to be a robust and reliable gaming platform that has been growing quietly for several years.
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Linux has finally come of age and is now a legitimate gaming platform. The release of quality commercial titles such as Left 4 Dead 2, Portal, and Day of Defeat bring real credibility to Linux as a first-class gaming platform. The bid to lure gamers away from Microsoft’s platform has also been strengthened, in part, due to the official launch of Steam for the Linux operating system back on February 14. The fact that the Steam entertainment platform is available for Linux is testament to the demand for open systems from gamers and game developers. At the time of writing, the Steam Store lists 113 Linux gaming titles, with all but two requiring payment to download. A small selection compared with Windows, but still there are are some truly fantastic Linux games to purchase on Steam. Prices are quite reasonable, with the majority of the Linux games on Steam costing under 10 pounds.
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When the Xenoid threat was discovered, human society was thrust into an era of martial law. Security became top priority, at the cost of individual liberty.
In the face of this growing oppression, many left their homeworlds in search of freedom. The Freerunners fled, to explore and settle the new frontier planets.
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As the economical crisis advances, the discontent of an entire population cannot help but outburst in Riots, where the sounds of many voices get heard at once. The Director Leonard Menchiari has been experiencing this form of protest in person, and the game “Riot” was born as a way to express it and to tell the stories of these fights. What is that triggers such a strife? What does a cop feel during the conflict? In “Riot”, the player will experience both sides of a fight in which there is no such thing as “victory” or “defeat”.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We’re really on the doorstep, this document is more or less our late constitution, it’s up to the community to choose the path from here. We’re really on the doorstep, this document is more or less our late constitution, it’s up to the community to choose the path from here.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New Releases
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The second alpha release of GNU Guix is available. It comes with a number of new features, notably…
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Finnix, a self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution (“LiveCD”) for system administrators, based on Debian, is now at version 108.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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In a study of analyst recommendations at the major brokerages, for the underlying components of the S&P 500, Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) has taken over the #155 spot from Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (NYSE: SWK), according to ETF Channel.
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Debian Family
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Google has been using its own custom version of Linux, Google Compute Engine Linux, as it loads its customers’ applications into its infrastructure as a service. It announced Thursday that it’s dropping that approach in favor of using the Debian Linux distribution.
Debian Linux is the output of the Debian open source code project. All Linuxes use a kernel produced by the Linux kernel development process, led by Linus Torvalds. But Linux distributors surround the kernel with features that may match other Linux distributions or may differentiate that particular distribution. For example, Ubuntu was an early cloud supporter when it included Eucalyptus modules; then it switched to OpenStack as its primary cloud offering.
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On April 25th, the newest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions was released — Ubuntu 13.04, codenamed “Raring Ringtail”. Every new release of Ubuntu warrants the question of what’s new and whether people should try it out or upgrade from an older release.
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Here’s an interesting bit of under-the-radar news from the channel: Canonical, on its official blog, is promoting the latest release of the Ceph distributed storage system, titled Cuttlefish. Why is that noteworthy? Because the post doesn’t mention Canonical’s Linux distribution (Ubuntu) at all, and instead focuses in large part on what Ceph is doing for Red Hat. Is Ceph that important to the open-source and Big Data ecosystems that it can bring competitors so selflessly together like this?
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ur privacy and rights to our own data mean nothing on the Internet as businesses and governments freely capture, mine, and sell as much personal information on Web users as they can possibly grab. There is no oversight or accountability, and we have little say. Sure, there are always people who shrug and say “I have nothing to hide and I don’t care.” Fine for them, but not fine for Web users who do care about this. I daresay they would care if the consequences were as immediate as multitudes of strangers entering their homes and snooping into all of their stuff, but it’s abstract and the consequences are not as obvious as physical trespass.
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I recommend Debian Wheezy to anyone. I have been using it for a couple of years before release. In the last year it has become very solid with very few bugs affecting operations on several computers. For greater assurance during installation, you can use the unofficial multi-arch cd-image with firmware blobs for some drivers.
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A stable release from the Debian GNU/Linux project is normally just that – rock-solid stable.
There may be a few minor issues here and there, but my experience, in nearly 13 years of use of the i386 port, seven years of use of the amd64 port and about four years of use of the mips port, has been very good, with just one breakage, of the package CUPS, on my workstation.
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Thanks to my friend Charles C. for this timely warning. Now that Debian 7 “Wheezy” is the official “stable” release, users of Debian 6 “Squeeze” may mangle their systems if they attempt to use the package manager to install software.
The reason for this is that the package manager maintains a list of “sources” — places where it will look for software packages — and your list of sources might specify using the “stable” distribution rather than a specific distribution. That list is located in the file /etc/apt/sources.list; here, for example, is the first source in my file:
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Kevin Gunn has issued a status update on new achievements for the Mir Display Server as well as for the next-generation “Unity 8″ user-interface.
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On April 25th, the newest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions was released — Ubuntu 13.04, codenamed “Raring Ringtail”. Every new release of Ubuntu warrants the question of what’s new and whether people should try it out or upgrade from an older release.
Unlike previous releases of Ubuntu, 13.04 doesn’t bring extraordinary new visual features which may make some people even more skeptical about this release than others. So what exactly is new, and should you really upgrade?
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Canonical has been offering pre-release builds of Ubuntu Touch for smartphones and tablets for a few months. But these early builds are pretty rough around the edges. Not only are there very few third party apps that can run on Ubuntu Touch at the moment, but the software isn’t really stable enough to run on a smartphone you plan to use every day as… well, a smartphone.
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Ubuntu Touch on Android has been a slow but steady mystery. Canonical currently offers plenty of pre-release beta or even alpha builds of their software for Android devices like the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7, and others. However, today Canonical’s own Rick Spencer promises to have stable “daily-driver” builds of Ubuntu Touch for smartphones by the end of the month.
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With Mozilla preparing to build Firefox OS smartphones with its partners, another company that started making waves with desktop machines is also venturing into the mobile world.
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The chances are good that if you’re buying a smartphone or tablet in 2013, you’re buying something with iOS or Android on it. The two operating systems loom so large over their competitors that even the entrenched, deep-pocketed Microsoft has had trouble making headway into this market with its Windows Phone, Windows 8, and Windows RT systems.
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Flavours and Variants
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What makes Linux Mint so awesome? That, in itself, is quite a question. After all, why do we use Linux? It’s one of those questions that can only be answered from the point of view of an individual’s personal approach to their experiences with the operating system itself.
For many, Linux Mint is the last bastion of non-commercialised Linux; an environment whereby they can still enjoy the pleasures of the desktop, without having to follow the trend of living in a tabletised world.
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Last year I’ve bought a new desktop computer and on this one I’ve moved from Ubuntu to Mint as “Home distribution”, but I still have as backup PC an old laptop with Ubuntu, and some days ago I’ve updated it from Xubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, these are my observations about this new release of Ubuntu.
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Distrowatch had a blurb today about how Canonical has publicly stated that they are in the process of creating a new, more portable packaging format for per-user installable apps.
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Inforce Computing has spun a Qseven computer-on-module (COM) featuring Qualcomm’s quad-core, 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 system-on-chip (SOC). The $199 Linux- and Android-ready IFC6400 COM comes with 2GB RAM, 8GB flash, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a MIPI-CSI camera input, and is available with an optional Mini-ITX baseboard.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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With the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini now expected to be introduced at the end of this month, some new pictures of the byte-sized version of Samsung’s flagship Android phone have leaked. The latest speculation is that the mini will be announced alongside the rugged Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, and the camera-centric Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom.
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Android
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Rumours about the mysterious Motorola XFON has been doing rounds since a long time, but now evidences of its existence is showing up. The documents at FCC website show a new Motorola Device which has similarities in design with the previous leaked images of the XFON.
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his is not only limited to the Android PlayStation brand but also PS Vita. We hope that this deal is successful and Sony decides to permanently waive the license fee.
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Sony launched a smaller sibling to its Xperia Z family today, the Xperia ZR. The 4.55 inch phone packs similar specs to the flagship Xperia Z and even has waterproof capabilities. In fact the Xperia ZR has better IP rating of IP58 compared to Xperia Z’s IP55 making it ideal for underwater HD video recording.
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There’s a ray of hope for people who think that Nexus 4 lacks colour options and just plain black isn’t your thing. A white Nexus 4 has been spotted in Philippines. The owner s Google+ user Ervin Sue who claims to have got it from “a local buy and sell site”.
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The interesting thing about Android’s design is how little we modified the kernel. Most embedded systems on which I have worked have made drastic changes to the kernel, only to leave user-space alone — for example, a heavily-modified “realtime” kernel but X11 for a GUI.
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In five and a half years, Android has come from nowhere to crush Apple and Microsoft in the mobile device market. How long until PC OEMs decide to take a gamble on the winning mobile OS and load Android onto PCs?
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Android powers 59% of smart phones, tablets and notebooks
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Unveiled in December of 2010, Notion Ink’s original Adam was intended to be an innovative, disruptive Android tablet that could compete with the iPad. Its primary selling point – besides a relatively high-end (at the time) dual-core Tegra 250 processor and 1GB of RAM – was a UI overlay known as Eden, which promised to make underlying the Android 2.2 more tablet-friendly. Launched to much fanfare in January 2011, the Adam never quite caught on the way Notion Ink had hoped; shipping delays, software issues, and poor build quality led the company to sell fewer units than anticipated. Two years and several versions of Android later, Notion Ink’s ready to give it another go with the Adam 2.
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The new OSI Board met in Washington DC last week. We held an effective face-to-face meeting where we discussed the progress of our plans to transform OSI into a member-based organisation. We held officer elections, once again electing Martin Michlmayr as Secretary, filling the vacancy for CFO left by Alolita Sharma by electing Karl Fogel and replacing him as Assistant Treasurer by electing Mike Milinkovich. I was re-elected as President and thank the Board for that vote of confidence in this time of change.
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What do I make of this? For such large swings it can only mean some large organization was tweaking their operating systems. It looks to me that a bunch of GNU/Linux and “8″ systems were acquired and some “7″ systems were retired or replaced with XP… The bottom line is that in one month that other OS lost a couple of percents and GNU/Linux doubled to ~2.8%.
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A few months ago, the GNU project had to withdraw its article on motivation and monetary reward, because its author did not allow them to spread it anymore. So I recreated the core of its message – with references to solid research.
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What happens when next-generation networking, cash prizes and the open-source ethos converge? Answer: The Innovative Application Awards program, which is now accepting proposals from developers seeking to build open-source software that takes advantage of OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking (SDN) features. And there’s big cash behind this endeavor to encourage investment in big-bandwidth networks, with winning proposals receiving up to $10,000 in funding.
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Events
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At the Open Source Business Conference 2013, conversations on innovation, disruption, and open source leadership dominated the sessions. The conference chair, Matt Assay, crafted a program where each presentation and conversation reinforced how traditional business strategies are being disrupted by new market dynamics. The dynamics are shifting power away from closed, proprietary corporate leadership towards open collaboration and user-led innovation. The shift is disrupting traditional business strategies, IT operation practices, and market dominance.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s mission compels us to provide people with an Internet experience that puts them in control of their online lives and that treats them with respect. Respecting someone includes respecting their privacy. We aspire to a “no surprises” principle: the idea that when information is gathered about a person, it is done with their knowledge and is used in ways that benefit that person. People should be made aware of how information is collected and used. Each individual should also be able to decide whether the exchange of personal data for the services received in return feels fair. This can be challenging to achieve, especially when balanced against convenience and ease of use: people expect a fast, streamlined user experience without excessive prompts and confusing choices. But we are always striving toward this ideal.
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Mozilla will release Firefox 21.0 on May 14, 2013 and shortly thereafter update the Beta, Aurora and Nightly channels of the browser to Firefox 22.0, 23.0 and 24.0 respectively.
The updates will be transferred to Mozilla’s ftp server first before they will be announced on the official website. If you have configured automatic updates, you should not have to worry about that though as your browser will get updated automatically when you start it after the update becomes available.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” said G. E.P. Box of Box-Jenkins fame. Today we’re going to look at a model of market share, and I hope it is a useful model. One nice property of it is that it is very easy to estimate the parameters of this model. A single survey question will do.
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A quick update on our recent logo survey for Apache OpenOffice 4.0. We called on community members to submit proposals for a new project logo. The response was huge. We received over 40 logo proposals. To narrow down the choices we sought out feedback from users. We created a survey asking users to rate each logo on a 5-point scale, from Strongly Dislike to Strongly Like, as well as give an optional comment on each logo. The survey ran for one week and 5028 responses were received. Full details of the results can be found in the Apache OpenOffice Logo Survey Report. In this blog post we want to highlight some of the highest scoring logos, recognize the designers, and talk about next steps.
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The release of Apache OpenOffice 4 will not happen tomorrow, but it is getting close. How close? Well, let’s just say it will happen soon. In months time, not weeks.
To usher in what will be a milestone release for the Free Software Office suite, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) wanted a new logo to replace the old OpenOffice logo, and requested design submissions from the community. There were 40 entries.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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One of the keys to a successful open data portal is to make it useful for the end user. Citizens and developers should be able to understand data sets without needing a PhD. I’ve been following the progress of Raleigh, North Carolina’s open data initiative, which launched a beta of their data.raleighnc.gov portal in March 2013.
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I increasingly find myself advocating political opinions I would have found anathema five years ago. I am forced to the opinion that now it is time to abolish the licence fee and end all public funding to the BBC. We should not be blinded by nostalgia; the BBC has no claim to impartiality or “public service ethic.” Nor, for the most part, to quality. Talent shows, reality TV and endless cooking and property auction programmes are not something everybody should be obliged to pay for, on penalty of not owning a television.
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Why do you include those “pre-contact” European things? Because they explain the motivations and reasons for what Europeans did. But people largely imagine North America as this timeless place and don’t recognize that pre-contact American history had just as much of an affect on post-contact history because it provides explanations of the motivations and reasonings behind indigenous peoples’ actions.
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Security
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The rise of mobile devices and persistent connectivity, as well as apps and cloud services, has put us all at potential risk when it comes to online security. Simply put, it’s no longer as basic as using strong passwords and strong encryption on websites and services. According to a recent effort by Google in making its systems more secure, the company is looking into implementing smartphone tagging, life-long tokens, and requiring two-step verification on its services.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Student living in US questioned him about pressure cooker suspected to be bomb
Used to make traditional Saudi dish and taken the pressure cooker to other Saudi friend near his house
FBI vigilant after Boston Bombers used pressure cooker to make explosive
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Cablegate
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Last July, an Iceland court ordered Valitor — formerly Visa Iceland — to reinstate donations to WikiLeaks’ payment processor DataCell or face a 800,000 ISK (about $6,830) per day. Today, the Supreme Court of Iceland has upheld that decision, and that fine, following Valitor’s appeal.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Spring went off with a bang in last weekend’s sunshine as blossom, flowers and new leaves burst out, although everything was about a month behind normal. But now even bluebells began to open this week over much of southern England, spurred on by the warm weather.
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Finance
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American investment banks dominate global finance once more. That’s not necessarily good for America
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Google will update its Wallet product at its I/O developer conference next week, but will not include the physical credit card that the company had considered launching at the event, according to sources.
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As Spanish unemployment reaches another record high, the residents of rural Marinaleda could be forgiven for feeling a little smug.
In the small village in deepest Andalusia, the joblessness remains firmly – and almost certainly uniquely within Spain – at zero. With one set of traffic lights, two bars (one jammed with football paraphernalia for the First Division side Seville) and one central avenue lined with of low terraced houses, Marinaleda looks like many villages in western Andalusia.
But huge wall murals depicting the destruction of tanks and weaponry, the binning of Nazi symbols, and a column of workers marching through the fields, are far from the usual graffiti found in such places. Nor do many villages name their sports hall after Che Guevara, or have oversized placards of doves of peace dotted on streets named after left-wing heroes such as Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda.
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Former Senator Judd Gregg is a leading candidate to run Wall Street’s biggest lobbying group, according to people briefed on the discussions.
Gregg, 66, a New Hampshire Republican who retired from the Senate last year, is being considered for the post as president and chief executive officer of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said four people who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter isn’t public.
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Gregg has served as an adviser to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. since retiring from the Senate after serving since January 1993.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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An odd couple made an appearance on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus recently: Tea Party Senator Ron Johnson and Madison’s progressive Congressman Mark Pocan. The two were invited to participate in a conversation about the national debt hosted by a local student organization and a bevy of national groups, including the Comeback America Initiative, the Concord Coalition, the Can Kicks Back, and the Campaign to Fix the Debt. On the agenda: debt, deficits, and the economy.
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Censorship
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Margaret Atwood participated in the “Get up! Stand up!” event last weekend in Toronto. It was presented by CBC Books and Random House and the host was our own, Carol Off.
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Privacy
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The Sunday Times has published an explosive piece about an exclusive deal for the sale of customer data between mobile operator Everything Everywhere and polling organisation Ipsos Mori, who in turn have tried to sell the data to the Met Police.
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This afternoon, EE called ORG to ask us about our blog. They did not question the article, but confirmed that it is their belief that IPSOS MORI employees misrepresented what the data they are offering can do.
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Civil Rights
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Yes, the Department of Justice complied with the letter of the law and responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU seeking insight into the Obama Administration’s policy on intercepting text messages from cell phones.
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The imperial system lives by searching for scapegoats (previously, there were the communists, then the subversives, and now the terrorists, the immigrants… who will be next?) on whom the desire for collective vengeance falls. That way, the system divests itself of guilt or error. But, above all, it does everything possible so that this lethal threat to the human species is not acknowledged, and transformed into a dangerous collective consciousness.
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Henry Kissinger’s quote recently released by Wikileaks,” the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer”, likely brought a smile to his legions of elite media, government, corporate and high society admirers. Oh that Henry! That rapier wit! That trademark insouciance! That naughtiness! It is unlikely, however, that the descendants of his more than 6 million victims in Indochina, and Americans of conscience appalled by his murder of non-Americans, will share in the amusement. For his illegal and unconstitutional actions had real-world consequences: the ruined lives of millions of Indochinese innocents in a new form of secret, automated, amoral U.S. Executive warfare which haunts the world until today.
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DRM
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W3C logo On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers.
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Send this to a friend
05.11.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The United Space Alliance, which manages the computers aboard the International Space Station in association with NASA, has announced that the Windows XP computers aboard the ISS have been switched to Linux. “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.”
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According to The Washington Post, U.S. service academies are ramping up efforts to groom a new breed of cyberspace warriors to confront increasing threats to the nation’s military and civilian computer networks which control almost everything these days. And guess what, they are being trained using Ubuntu OS (possibly in a virtual environment).
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The United Space Alliance has decided to stop using all Windows computers aboard the ISS, in favour of Linux—to ensure it’s systems are “stable and reliable”. Ouch.
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Today The Document Foundation announced their latest update to 4.0. Blender 2.67 brings new features like cartoon and 3D capabilities. And KDE received its latest monthly updates fixing 75 more bugs.
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I just read recently that Linux is replacing windows for the laptops at the International Space Station. The reasons for this, NASA states, is due to the operating systems reliability and ability to be customised. This caused me to think. Is there anything that Linux cannot do?
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Desktop
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For much of the last year FUD has been spread about the viability of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Either the FLOSS developers are amateurs, the ecosystem is too diverse, there’s no money to be made or it’s just broken… That’s all FUD. GNU/Linux desktops are going places. You can see that on Wikipedia and other webstats. Nowhere, not in any country Wikipedia lists is Linux below 1%. Their global average is 7.55%. Some of that is Android/Linux but they haven’t sorted that out properly. For example they show Apple’s share as iPhone 16.13% + iPad 9.05% + Mac 6.71% + iOS 0.66% and total share of Windows is 55.73%. Clearly, it’s Windows that is in decline. A year ago they were 73.38%. Nowhere is GNU/Linux share declining even as the world pumps out hundreds of millions of legacy PCs and smart mobile thingies annually. In fact it’s growing. All the major OEMs produce GNU/Linux desktops/notebooks. Some retailers even sell them. Imagine what the share of GNU/Linux would be if retailers put a fraction of
their advertising money to the task. The present share is achieved with almost no advertising, just what’s on the web.
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I am Gary Newell. I am a software developer living in Aberdeen, Scotland specialising in software for the oil and gas industry.
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Server
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Supercomputer maker Cray had been hinting that it would deliver a new cut-down version of its “Cascade” XC30 system, and the machine is being unveiled on Tuesday at the Cray User Group meeting in Napa Valley, California.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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I sat in a session today at the Interop conference, led by Stuart Bailey, a name that is familiar to me as the leader of a commercial networking vendor infoblox. As it turns out, he’s also Open Network Foundation Spec Editor, SDN Design Team Member, Working Group Vice-Chair and an OpenFlow Open Source Contributor.
Bailey went through an (IMHO incomplete) list of open source SDN networking efforts, but that’s not the point. The point is that when it comes to SDN, open source is how the industry is moving forward.
Whether it’s OpenFlow (technically an open spec) or the Floodlight SDN controller or Infoblox’s own LINC SDN controller, controlling SDN is a big area for open source.
Though to be fair, these are still early days, multiple vendors including HP and Juniper are both building proprietary controllers (that leverage open standards) and jury is still out on whether OpenDaylight will amount to anything. OpenDaylight is a big multi-stakeholder effort to build open source framework platforms (i.e. a controller) for SDN.
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The documentary provides a great insight into the Free Software/Open Source Software world and focuses on the individuals that made it happen. Brian would like to follow that up, informally, with a documentary on his own that picks up where it left off, but with more of a focus on the practical usage of Linux in the market.
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Most organisations have coalesced around VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Xen as their choice of hypervisor – the platform that supports virtualisation of their IT resources – but there is an open source alternative in the form of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine).
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Every once in a while, I crawl out from under the rock that is bugzilla and I try and look around at what others are doing in the distro kernel space. Today I was curious how Fedora and Ubuntu compare in how they configure the kernel. I’ve long thought that for all the focus the kernel gets, it should be the most boring package in an entire distro. It should work, work well, and that is about it. It isn’t there to differentiate your distro. It’s there to let your distro run. So, will my personal belief stand up, or would I find something in the configs that proves one “distro” is better than another? Let’s dive in.
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After the release of Linux kernel 3.9.1, Greg Kroah-Hartman has also announced that the twelfth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series is available for download.
Actually, Linux kernel 3.8.12 includes mostly the same changes as Linux 3.9.1 kernel, so you should check out the announcement for Linux kernel 3.9.1.
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Graphics Stack
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Similar to yesterday’s early Radeon DRM benchmarks from Linux 3.10, here’s some initial OpenGL performance results for NVIDIA GeForce hardware when using the Nouveau DRM that’s updated in the Linux 3.10 kernel.
The Radeon 3.10 DRM updates weren’t interesting when it comes to performance with no big changes, but the update does bring RadeonSI tiling and most importantly is the Radeon UVD support. With the Linux 3.10 kernel DRM subsystem pull, the only major changes are Fermi VRAM compression support and NVF0 mode-setting support. There still isn’t any re-clocking support by default or other major advancements for the Nouveau driver in Linux 3.10.
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Processor manufacturer Intel has announced that the Linux version of its SDK for OpenCL Applications is now ready for production use. The XE 2013 version of the software development kit supports the current version, 1.2, of the vendor-independent OpenCL language specification, which is designed to standardise and simplify the development of code on heterogeneous computer systems. Intel says that developers will be able to utilise the potential of OpenCL 1.2 simultaneously on the CPUs and GPUs of the third and future generation of Intel Core processors.
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Applications
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Managing files is the most basic task with computers. You apply a file manager to organize your stuff, to browse for a particular file, or to modify attributes. Just as much tasks are processed as many programs are available. Operating systems come with their own tools (GNOME uses Nautilus, KDE has Dolphin, at Mac OS X it is Finder, and Microsoft calls it Explorer) but countless other applications exist and fill more or less niches.
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While our Windows-using friends boast of tools like Photoshop and Lightroom, we, as Linux users, often find it difficult to find the right tools for specific tasks. One of the most popular reasons why Windows and Mac are still ahead of Linux is that photographers need certain tools for their work that are only available on Windows or Mac.
That said, this doesn’t mean that you have to stick with Windows or Mac if you’re a photographer. Linux too, these days, offers a variety of tools that will benefit photographers. These tools provide almost as many features as their Windows counterparts. So, if you’re a photographer tired of excuses to not switch to Linux, here are some of the best photography applications Linux has to offer.
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There’s a huge shift going on in the business world. That shift is from the standard desktop metaphor to a very web-based model. But for those that still want to hold on to the desktop model while saving some space and increasing speed, there are plenty of small footprint applications that allow just that. From nearly every corner of the business workspace, you can enjoy the small footprint; even within the realm of productivity. No matter the need, there’s probably a tiny tool waiting for you to try out.
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Samba 4 has been under development for 10 years. In that same time, the Samba 3.x series also has seen numerous releases and advancements. This parallel development has led to some confusion over the nature of Samba 4; and, some distributions release both samba3 and samba4 packages that can be installed in parallel, with varying degrees of success.
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Shutdown command works just fine, but if you want a GUI to schedule system shutdown in Ubuntu, EasyShutdown is the answer. It was a very basic app made to do just that one thing, scheduling shutdowns in Ubuntu. And it is nicely integrated with Unity launcher as well.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’m still running squeeze on my X60… and I decided that with wheezy becoming “stable”, it was good idea to upgrade. Before I started, I did back up my root filesystem (fortunately), with
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Games
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Pick one of the following scenes: a torrent is taking an age to complete; a confirmation e-mail is in limbo; or you’re on hold to a woefully inept customer services department of a woefully inept company providing a woefully inept service.
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The Humble Bundle folks have announced the Humble Double Fine Bundle. Available right now, this time you’ve got two weeks to pay whatever you want for a bundle containing DRM-free copies of the following:
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The Turbulenz game engine has been open-sourced under the MIT license.
Turbulenz is an HTML5-based game engine, but while it’s web-based, it’s quite impressive. The HTML5 game engine supports 2D and 3D content via WebGL and JavaScript. Thanks to the web nature, it’s multi-platform friendly across WebGL-supported browsers. Turbulenz can even handle Quake 4 assets.
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First of all, Half-Life 2 is now available to play on Linux through Steam. That’s according to SteamDB, which compiles information from Steam’s large and growing database of game data. The update happened late last night, but is by no means final.
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Since its release, the $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer has been hailed as the perfect all-in-one retro game console. Now, it’s easier to do than ever, and it doesn’t take any advanced Linux knowledge. Here’s how to make your own retro game console in about 30 minutes.
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The client for the digital platform Steam from Valve was taken down yesterday, for a little over 30 minutes, by a spur of hardware failures.
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You heard right, Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2 and Lost Coast are now available on Linux in Beta form!
Didn’t see that one coming! The Linux versions come as part of their Steam Pipe beta versions!
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Son of Nor is an award winning and challenging 3rd person action adventure game for Windows, Mac and Linux that can be played in single player or with up to 4 players cooperatively online or via split-screen.
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Welcome to The Funding Crowd, in which every Wednesday I’ll try to review the latest news regarding the crowdfunding of Linux games.
Here there will be room for everybody: from the 6+ digits, AAA-ish projects by professional studios, to the humble one-person teams asking for $1,000 to make their dreamed game come true. However, the focus will be primarily put on the latter rather than on the former, and the reason for this is two-fold:
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Didn’t see that one coming! The Linux versions come as part of their Steam Pipe beta versions!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Linux has the internet pretty well covered, in both the server and client space. It has not one, but several office suites to choose from, all using the internationally recognized and adopted open-source file formats. Even the gaming barrier has been broken. So why aren’t we seeing faster adoption, especially in the corporate world? Most corporate IT people will tell you it’s due to the lack of an enterprise-grade PIM.
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Patrick Volkerding has just pushed KDE 4.10.3 for Slackware-Current. Usually Eric did the push on his KTown, but since KDE 4.10.x has been included in Slackware-Current, Pat took the responsibility of building the packages, while Eric may provide updates for Slackware 14.0 users.
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Last week-end, our awesome Nick released new stable versions for almost all Xfce major components: libxfce4util, tumbler, xfce4-appfinder, xfce4-session, xfce4-panel, xfwm4, xfce4-settings, garcon, thunar, xfce4-terminal and tumbler (this is not amnesia, we got two releases in a single day for this component!).
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If you’ve read some of my articles before you’ve probably noticed something… I’m a BIG KDE Plasma Desktop fan. I’ve used it for years, and while I have honestly tried other desktops, I’ve never found any that fit my needs like the Plasma Desktop. In my day-to-day use there’s several little things I do, just little things, but they make my daily use so much easier and productive I thought I’d share them. Here’s a few of my favorites, hopefully you may find one or two of them useful.
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One of the big things we’ve accomplished on the road to Plasma Workspaces 2 is making all the desktop “chrome” use Qt Quick (nee QML). The log out dialog, the lock screen, the splash screen, the log in screen, the activity manager and widgets explorer .. everything.
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Aurélien Gâteau has announced the version 0.2.3 of Homerun, an application that brings Unity’s Dash like ability to KDE Plasma.
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Aaron Seigo just got his hands on the hardware that will be powering the Vivaldi Tablet that will be powered by KDE Plasma Active. We have him hold that sucker right up to the camera so we can take a close look at all those groovy chips and circuits.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME’s latest desktop avatar hasn’t really excited most users. The GNOME team has, therefore, put together a number of extensions to make the desktop experience more user friendly. We take a look at some of the best extensions for GNOME 3.
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Gnome Music app was being developed in three phases as explained on the GNOME Live wiki. Seif Lofty, the project maintainer, has announced that first phase is almost complete. This phase involves the setup of basic infrastructure, implementation of grilo querying, album view, songs view, artist view, playback support and porting user interface to glade.
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As I’m sure you can see, if you’re reading this, we have chosen to make a name change. FuSE Linux is now Cloverleaf Linux.
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Debian based Linux distribution CrunchBang 11 has been released. Dedicated to the speed-obsessed Ubuntu fans, CrunchBang 11 alias “Waldorf” is also dubbed by the project manager as “the most thoroughly tested CrunchBang release to date”. Maintaining it’s low-drag, no extra fluff tradition CrunchBang 11 is said to be as stable as the underlying Debian 7 “Wheezy”.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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Gentoo Family
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Slackware Family
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I was on holiday, so I was unable to create the Slackware packages for KDE Software Compilation 4.10.3 any sooner than today. This installment of KDE SC was already added to slackware-current earlier this week, but my packages are specifically for users of the stable release, Slackware 14.
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Red Hat Family
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The third stable release of the Ceph distributed storage platform, named the “Cuttlefish” edition, has enhanced Red Hat support and improvements to make it easier to deploy. Ceph, which is developed by Inktank, offers a distributed system that can be presented to users as an object storage system, a block storage system, or as a POSIX compatible filesystem. Ceph 0.61 now has RHEL 6.0 tested packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux available from the Ceph site and in the EPEL (Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux) repository; the company says it is discussing with Red Hat the possibility of including Ceph in a future RHEL.
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Fedora
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Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has announced, on behalf of Red Hat and the Fedora community, that the traditional Fedora user conference FUDCon will be re-named and re-imagined under the name “Flock”. The new format will see the developer gathering transformed into a three day conference of scheduled talks with an additional, optional day of hacking. Flock will be a more organised, traditional conference that accepts talk submissions ahead of time, in contrast to the more ad hoc FUDCon that was organised in a barcamp style.
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Korora is based on Fedora, but comes with lots and lots (and lots) of additional packages — here’s my screenshot gallery of the desktops and contents.
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The latest beta version of Red Hat’s Fedora operating system now chooses not to mask passwords by default in its installation, but should this become a standard practice?
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There’s no doubt that desktop Linux has become increasingly user-friendly over the years, but it’s equally true that some distributions focus more on ease of use than others do.
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So I had a few spare cycles this morning and thought I’d look at the memory usage of the installer in F19 Beta TC3.
The awesome Chris Lumens made this much easier back in 2011 by adding memory use logging functionality to anaconda. He wrote up his findings at the time – based on a Fedora 15 install – in this blog post.
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Debian Family
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Google is moving the default software for its rentable cloud servers from a custom version of Linux to Debian.
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After more than two years of development, the Debian project on Saturday released the long-awaited version 7.0 of its venerable Linux distribution.
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Debian’s sense of priority is very clear from the outset. After all, what other distribution these days defaults to the text-based installer and not the graphical one?
Similarly, where desktop distros sport air-brushed wallpaper or gradients based on carefully chosen colors, Debian 7.0 defaults to a minimalistic, monochromatic black and white. This default may reduce perceptual problems for the color-blind, but it is hardly a choice designed for mass appeal. The most you can say is that users will take it more seriously than the cartoon spaceships of the previous release.
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Following the release of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0, codenamed Wheezy, comes early news of “Jesse.” While it’s still really really early, it’s never too soon to move on. So, while Jesse gets her attention, Wheezy and Squeeze backport rules are tightened.
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Codenamed Wheezy, Debian 7 actually brings the GPL operating system up to speed with some of its more famous offspring, though, true to its roots, Debian’s stable release continues to focus on just that – stability.
If you’re looking for a stable, rock solid Linux distro the new Debian will not disappoint. If you prefer to have the latest and greatest software on your machine you’re better off sticking with more popular Debian offspring, such as the Ubuntu or Mint distributions.
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Let me get it straight in the beginning, if you are a real distro hopper and always looking for the latest Linux world has to offer, Debian is not the perfect distro for you. You will get bored quite easily with Debian Wheezy! As indicated, Debian stable branch is for those who look for supreme stability and awesome performance. I had used Debian Squeeze for quite sometime in 2011 and was really happy with it’s performance till I got bored and ventured to other distros offering “bleeding edge”. However, the only caveat I noted in Debian Squeeze was a daunting installation process and I wasn’t as seasoned to Linux those days as I am now.
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Now that you have installed Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ and got yourself comfortable with it, it’s now time to get some software installed on to your system system.
The first things you’ll need to do is update the repository source list. You can easily do this by performing the following with your /etc/apt/sources.list:
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Lars Wirzenius has been around since the beginning. In fact, he was a friend of Linus’ who went to the same college where Linux was born. He co-founded the Linux Documentation Project and describes himself as a “hacker, programmer, and software developer,” but Debian seems to be his passion. So, when he pens an essay, it’s probably worth reading and this time he’s thinking Debian releases take too long.
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Derivatives
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The Elive Team proudly announced today, May 6, a development version (2.1.40) of the Elive Linux operating system, now based on the newly released Debian 7.0 Wheezy GNU/Linux distribution.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to a recent message posted on the Ubuntu Devel mailing list by Colin Watson, Installer Team leader, Ubuntu might get a new, simplified packaging format and app installer which should make it easier for developers to get their software into Ubuntu. This will target, at least initially, the Ubuntu phone/tablet but it should be usable elsewhere too, even on non-Ubuntu or non-Linux systems.
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Last week I traveled to Oakland to spend a week with my colleagues at Canonical for the Client Sprint. The aim of the sprint was to ensure the many different teams working on Ubuntu Touch at Canonical are in sync and working as efficiently as possible. This largely involves ensuring that the management teams are planning their work effectively, and that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
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Canonical’s Foundations Team are creating a new application packaging system to sit alongside the existing “apt and dpkg” system that Ubuntu currently uses. The plan was disclosed by Colin Watson, technical lead of the Foundations Team which is responsible for the core of the Ubuntu system, in a mailing list post.
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By the end of this month Canonical plans to equip its employees with early versions of its widely hyped “Ubuntu phone” for testing and refinement.
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With Ubuntu’s new release out this week, i wanted to share with you how to get this working in a chroot environment alongside ChromeOS on the Acer C7. I have covered how to put the C7 into Developer mode in a previous post so won’t outline it here. Head over to http://blog.projectz.me/2013/03/26/2143841985/ for instructions on how to get that part done.
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Ubuntu is one of the most widely used Linux distributions alive today. It and its many derivatives and off-shoots are used by millions of people all around the world. As such when Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu it sends ripples throughout the open source community. The latest release of Ubuntu, version 13.04, arrived on April 25. A lot of rumours circulated over the past six months as to what would make it into the new release, whether Ubuntu would move to a rolling release model and what would happen with the Unity Dash. Now that Ubuntu 13.04 is here we can find out what direction Canonical has decided to take with its popular distribution.
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About two weeks ago my work laptop died. The motherboard just bricked itself to pieces and there was no rescuing it. As my old machine was old and decrepit, and I was going to be replacing it with something with an entirely different hard drive profile I opted to do a clean install of Ubuntu 12.4. Previously I’ve been running Kubuntu 10.4 and it’s been high time to move on.
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While Ubuntu already has its own software store, Canonical developers are now working on their own application package installer and package format.
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When people hear Ubuntu Linux, the reactions vary greatly. Some folks hiss and spit like a cornered cat, some cheer, and some just tilt their head in confusion. But from my perspective as a long-time Linux user and a supporter of what Canonical and Ubuntu are doing, one word comes to mind: Future. What do I mean? Simple. Ubuntu Linux holds the key to mass acceptance of Linux on the desktop.
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Canonical, maker of the open source Ubuntu operating system, is planning to test out living day-to-day with smartphones using its Ubuntu Touch OS before next month.
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In the words of Pablo Rodriguez: “We are very happy to see Unity becoming more mature and we are very enthusiastic about the availability of Ubuntu on tablet devices. As Java developers, we’d like our software to run in as many platforms as possible and if Canonical can produce a lightweight version of Ubuntu which can run the Java Runtime Environment in tablet devices our customer will be offered the possibility of running our desktop based enterprise applications on tablets.”
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Do you want to know how to tell real Linux geeks from people who just use it? Ask them what their favorite application packaging system is. Hardcore old-school Linux users will soon be telling you all all about RPM vs. DEB and before it’s over someone is sure to chime in about going straight to source code ala Gentoo Linux’s Portage.
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As I mentioned in a recent post, I have come to like Ubuntu 13.04 quite a bit. Raring Ringtail marks the first Ubuntu installation lasting more than a day in one of my machines since the Ubuntu 10.10 days. In fact, the more I am using it, specially after getting some updates that have improved stability, the more I am liking it. It´s been a two year hiatus and now that I am getting to love it again, I can´t help but being a bit concerned with everything I am reading about Canonical changing the core of Ubuntu.
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“Samsung are making the first Ubuntu Phone!” screams the subject field of the latest e-mail to arrive in the OMG! tips inbox.
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Ubuntu 13.04 is out, and it is one of the best releases of Ubuntu ever. The best thing about it is speed. Apparently Canonical decided to optimize its performance with mobile devices in mind rather than PCs, resulting in more aggressive performance improvements, and it feels twice as fast as 12.10.
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Surprisingly Ubuntu 13.04 still offers a complete lack of customization options for the Unity desktop, but there is a solution. Install the Unity Tweak Tool to access a variety of helpful settings that will remove all barriers. Now you can get the Unity desktop to look the way you want, and perform the way it should.
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Flavours and Variants
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ou like Lubuntu, you waited for it, you downloaded and installed it. Now you have a beautiful and fast environment running on your computer.
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There are different favour of Ubuntu that you can install depending on your preferences. Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu are some of the few popular ones. But do you know that there is a Ubuntu distro specially for the Chinese?
Ubuntu Kylin is the official Chinese Ubuntu distro and it comes with features targeted at the Chinese market. China would probably be its biggest market, but any Chinese in the World will be able to use it, and love it too.
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The actual WiFi network consists of 26 Xirrus XR-4830 arrays running a Linux-based operating system at its core.
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Embedded Linux pioneer LinuxDevices.com departed from the web earlier this week. The site became a collateral casualty of the aquisition of eWEEK by Quinstreet in February 2012, as part of a bundle of Ziff Davis Enterprise assets. Quinstreet immediately fired all the LinuxDevices staffers and ceased maintaining the site. A few days ago, the site’s plug was finally pulled and it is now gone from the Web, save for a few pages on the WayBack Machine.
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An embedded computer which is equally at home running Android, Linux Ubuntu is the first product from an interesting collaboration between US-based board firm Seco and Italian software design consultancy Aidilab.
Dubbed UDOO, the board is also Arduino-compatible which means you can use the Arduino IDE to build and upload firmware to the embedded board, without additional/external cable connections.
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Since its release, the $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer has been hailed as the perfect all-in-one retro game console. Now, it’s easier to do than ever, and it doesn’t take any advanced Linux knowledge. Here’s how to make your own retro game console in about 30 minutes.
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A fully functional low-cost single-board computer with dual Gigabit Ethernet and two USB 3.0 ports, is the MiraBox an ARM-based miracle?
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Behold, something we’ve always wanted. [Matthieu] mounted his Raspberry Pi board inside of a computer monitor. His work makes for the cheapest smart-TV modification we can possibly think of.
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Many LinuxGizmos readers are aware that LinuxDevices.com has been dormant ever since its February 2012 acquisition from Ziff Davis Enterprise by Quinstreet. Despite the lack of any updates over the past year, the vast LinuxDevices news archive continued to serve as a valuable archive of embedded Linux information, history, and memorabilia; but earlier this week, the plug was pulled and LinuxDevices disappeared from the Web.
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Marvell announced a new member of its Linux-ready Armada 300 line of system-on-chips (SOCs) designed for a wide variety of networking applications. The Armada 375 is equipped with a dual-core Cortex-A9 processor clocked at either 800MHz or 1GHz, and offers gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, SATA 2.0, and PCI Express connectivity.
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Grid2Home has announced immediate availability of ZigBee-certified software for integrating mesh-based wireless networking into Smart Grid-aware devices. G2H-ZIP now supports all major CPU architectures and physical layers, including ZigBee, WiFi, and Power Line Communications, and is usable in devices running Linux and various real-time operating systems, says the company.
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Aaeon announced a Linux-friendly ‘EPIC’ form-factor SBC (single-board computer) based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N2600 processor, which is bottom-mounted for efficient heat transfer. The EPC-CV1 supports up to 2GB RAM, offers dual-display HD video output, provides Gig-Ethernet, USB, serial, and SATA ports, and accommodates a 3G cellular module and SIM.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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A look inside Samung’s new high-profile smartphone, the Galaxy S4, shows that the South Korean electronics giant is using numerous components produced by its various internally owned subsidiaries.
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Android
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The most visible of the Android-based micro-consoles with the name that sounds like what Kool-Aid man says when he’s busting through painted styrofoam walls will delay its $100 Ouya game cube until the end of June: specifically June 25 — about two weeks after E3 wraps.
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This could be a symptom that no one’s really very interested in the Facebook Phone: the price on contract has just gone down to 99 cents. On the other hand, given the rather hinky way that phone pricing can work, it might be a symptom of it being a runaway success.
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Is a Nexus 11 tablet coming later this month? Leaked information suggests it could happen. LG’s new Optimus G Pro is here and first impressions are very positive, while a free app turns the Wii Fit Balance Board into a smart scale.
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Google has updated its Google Earth Android app to version 7.1, bringing several important improvements, most notably the support for Street View.
If you want to explore the Earth from the street level, zoom into an area and the Pegman — the little yellow guy signifying the availability of Street View — will appear in the right hand corner. Drag and drop him into a street and you’ll jump right into Street View.
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Android dominated the global smart mobile device market in the first quarter, according to a new report from Canalys.
That market — which combines smartphones, tablets, and notebooks — hit 308.7 million units in the first quarter, representing year-on-year growth of 37.4 percent, according to Canalys, which released the report on Thursday.
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Google should unveil a new version of its mobile OS next week. Here’s some of what we may see this time around, and also down the line.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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If the unscientific poll we conducted on tablet operating systems is any indication, it appears as if Canonical can depend on a community of early adopters if and when a tablet is released with Ubuntu OS preinstalled.
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Like many folks, I received a shiny new Nexus 7 tablet for Christmas. This brought me great joy and excitement as I began to plot my future paperless life. For most of the evening and an hour or so the next day, I was sure the new Android tablet would change my life forever. Sadly, it wasn’t that easy. This month, I want to dive head first into the tablet lifestyle, but I’m not sure if it’s really the lifestyle for me. I’ll try to keep everyone posted during the next few months (most likely in the Upfront section of LJ). And please, please don’t hesitate to send me messages about the ways you find your Android tablet useful at work/home/play.
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In today’s multi-platform environment many people consume content on the go using different devices throughout the day. Looking at the share of device page traffic on a typical work day in the UK, we can see that mobiles capture the largest share of page traffic in the early mornings, especially between 7am-9am as Brits consume digital content over breakfast or during their commute to work.
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I am constantly reminded of this in conversations with new clients: so much of the business world sees social media as a low-cost “channel” for marketing. Yes, social, done right, is perhaps the most cost-effective approach there is. But to focus on costs is to ignore the big benefits: the ability to scale with communities (principle = peer production), the ability to enter a wider range of conversations (principle = the long tail), the ability to surface the best ideas and give them support (principle = crowdsourcing). These principles and others either originated or were evangelized in OS communities. Some actually predated OS, and at least one (the long tail) became widely known after the birth social media. But the point I’m making here is that the principles have not been well embraced, and many organizations that profess to do social really don’t. And we shouldn’t expect them to get there anytime soon. It took many years for the OS movement to get beyond the perception that it’s all
about costs (the tide has turned, fairly recently). But without an appreciation for the principles and their provenance, it may take organizations even longer to truly embrace social.
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Many people, when they hear “open source,” think “oh boy, free software.” But making software available under open-source terms sometimes opens up a more powerful possibility: the chance to blow up existing models and rebuild them, piece by piece.
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I’m happy to announce the Version 3 release of Froide, the open source, Python-based platform for running Freedom of Information portals: allowing you to make requests to public entities by email and track responses, as well as, customize your instance to fit your campaign for government transparency.
Froide has been in development for nearly two years. It has powered the FOI portal in Germany for over a year and a half and has recently been used to launch an Austrian FoI site.
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Here on OStatic, we’ve frequently debated whether fragmentation is good for open source projects, or not so good. We’ve published posts arguing that centralized management of open source projects and documentation could have big benefits for users, and we’ve run many posts on successful forks of open source projects.
When the topic of fragmentation comes up, people often gravitate toward arguments surrounding how centralized funding could advance many open source projects, or how centralized marketing efforts could. But what about development? Recently, at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid, the developers of GIMP, MyPaint and many other free graphics applications got together and talked about an important topic: how to work together better.
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As Linux users, we tend to take programs like GIMP for granted. Thankfully, as of version 2.8.2, GIMP is available as a native application for OS X! Because everyone reading this most likely is familiar with how awesome GIMP is for photo editing, it’s worth mentioning there is another open-source photo-editing application for OS X named Seashore.
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Events
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Despite our minuscule differences and preferences in software and hardware, in the FOSS realm there is really no “us and them.” There’s just “us” to varying degrees of participation. Understand that and you’re more than halfway there.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the keynote speakers for LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America, taking place September 16-18, 2013 at the Hyatt New Orleans in New Orleans, La.
LinuxCon, which has sold out every year since its debut, is the world’s leading conference addressing all matters Linux for the global business and technical communities. CloudOpen, which debuted just last year, features technical content that addresses open cloud platforms, tools and big data strategies. It will cover technical content such as Chef, Gluster, Hadoop, KVM, Linux, OpenStack, oVirt, Puppet, the Xen Project and more.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Rackspace (NYSE:RAX), the cloud services provider (CSP) and OpenStack proponent, delivered weaker than expected quarterly earnings results today. The big question: Is the growth of cloud computing slowing down — or is Rackspace being squeezed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and other big-name public clouds?
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In a panel discussion at Interop this week, vendors and customers discussed some lessons learned along the path of server virtualization.
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Inktank, the company behind the Ceph distributed storage platform, is cuddling up close with Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) with the latest release of Ceph, dubbed Cuttlefish. The new version may better position the open-source storage system for Big Data channel partner opportunities.
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The open source cloud discussion has noticeably shifted over the past year, judging by the Live Linux Q&A video chat held Tuesday on the Linux Foundation’s Google+ page.
One big debate at the CloudOpen conference last year, for example, centered on whether the industry needed an open source alternative to the Amazon Web Services API or should simply accept it as the de facto standard for cloud applications.
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Facebook and friends’ Open Compute Project has made servers, motherboards, and power supplies more affordable for datacenters. Now it tackles perhaps its biggest challenge to date: High-end network switches.
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Business
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Funding
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The Software Freedom Conservancy has a plan to help all non-profit organizations (NPOs) by creating an Open Source and Free Software accounting system usable by non-technical bookkeepers, accountants, and non-profit managers. You can help them do it by donating now.
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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When Canadian government departments weren’t meeting accessibility requirements, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the Canadian equivalent of the Office of Management and Budget, decided to create a web experience toolkit.
“It actually became much easier for everyone to meet their requirements and a lot less costly by everyone pooling their resources into a common solution that everyone could repurpose,” said Paul Jackson, project lead for Canada’s WET, during an April 17, DigitalGov University webinar.
The toolkit is a code library and framework for web design with a heavy emphasis on accessibility, usability, interoperability, and mobile-friendly and multi-lingual features. The WET is open source, so it can be used commercially or for government, and is on GitHub, allowing it to be constantly updated, improved and added to, said Jackson.
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“Ten years ago, Open Source — notably Linux — was often labelled a ‘fad’ or destined for the ‘hobbyist’ market,” said Mark Bohannon, Vice President for Corporate Affairs & Global Public Policy at Red Hat.
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Openness/Sharing
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The OpenWorm project has been working on its virtual nematode since December 2011, with the ambitious aim of modelling the entire organism in software. C. elegans is the organism of choice for the project, because it’s also closely studied in biology labs.
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It’s not news that popular media have undergone significant changes due to participatory digital platforms. We tweet. We connect. We comment. Above all, we share. And the ability to share media has become a need and expectation in networked culture. There are already all sorts of buzzwords swirling around this topic—viral media, memes, prosumers, attention economy, Web 2.0, etc.
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Often when talking to friends and family and colleagues in the library science field I find that the number one complaint boils down to the closed/boxed-in nature of their jobs. The other day I spoke with a friend who shared her frustrations over the fact that her employer wouldn’t let her step out of her defined role to assist in other areas of the business. She had other jobs before this one and knew a lot that would help in new efforts the company was pursuing, but she wasn’t allowed to consult because it was outside of her job description. Another friend constantly talks to me about how he could offer so much more if people would just include him in the discussions that happen before decisions are made.
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If you regularly play both console games and PC games, you’ll likely be fully aware that one platform is much, much more suited to games that require you to precisely aim at things. Unfortunately, most console games do not support a full keyboard-and-mouse setup, so often times you’re left wishing the right analog stick would stop being so floaty. However, for certain console games, a light gun ends up being the true savior of aiming, but here in 2013, most games don’t utilize any sort of peripheral. If you long for the day when you could aim as well on a console as you do on a PC, a new Kickstarter project might be the answer.
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Open Data
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Health/Nutrition
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Reshma’s mother and sister, Asma, were reported to have rushed to the hospital to meet her.
Army officers co-ordinating the rescue said they were astonished by the woman’s strength. “It is incredible that someone could have survived in the wreckage 408 hours after the building came down,” said army officer Shah Jamal. “Her will to live is amazing.”
Nine people have been arrested in connection with the disaster, including the owner of the Rana Plaza and owners of the factories it housed.
Several major western retailers were being supplied by factories based in the building. Primark and its Canadian counterpart, Loblaw, have announced they will compensate the victims of the disaster, the world’s worst industrial accident since the Bhopal gas leak in India in 1984.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Stephen Hawking has been subject to vile abuse targeting his disability after it was announced he is planning to boycott a conference in Israel, hosted by the country’s president Shimon Peres.
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The reason people care, apparently, is because people died, and U.S. officials may not have told the truth about the circumstances of those deaths.
If that’s what makes this a scandal, then there’s another Libya story that should be getting attention. It’s not, and never really has, because the dead are Libyan civilians, killed by U.S./NATO airstrikes.
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This spring, three senior Obama Administration officials informed Daniel Klaidman of The Daily Beast that the CIA would no longer operate targeted killings with unmanned drones. All targeted killings using the controversial technology would from now on be conducted by the Department of Defense, which has its own drones program in place.
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Noam Chomsky was among 20 academics who privately lobbied Professor Stephen Hawking to boycott a major Israeli conference, it has emerged.
Chomsky, a US professor and well-known supporter of the Palestinian cause, joined British academics from the universities of Cambridge, London, Leeds, Southampton, Warwick, Newcastle, York and the Open University to tell Hawking they were “surprised and deeply disappointed” that he had accepted the invitation to speak at next month’s presidential conference in Jerusalem, which will chaired by Shimon Peres and attended by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
Hawking pulled out this week in protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, in the wake of receiving the letter and soundings from Palestinian colleagues. The 71-year-old theoretical physicist’s decision has been warmly welcomed by Palestinian academics, with one describing it as “of cosmic proportions”, but was attacked in Israel.
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On Saturday April 30th the Greek fascist party, Golden Dawn, attempted to create blood banks for the exclusive use of Greek nationals. Across the country, Golden Dawn members, with much pre publicity arrived at general hospitals to donate blood which they demanded was to be restricted to Greeks only. At the general hospital in Samos, as in many other places, the fascists were met by a broad coalition of opponents as well as medical staff who blocked their approach to the blood donation centre. The face off started at 9.30am and ended at 4.00 pm when the blood centre closed for the weekend. Golden Dawn members departed without success.
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Efraín Ríos Montt held to account for abuses in campaign that killed an estimated 200,000 and led to 45,000 disappearances
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There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home.
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Chris Grayling’s radical changes to legal aid could mean being represented by the same company that jails you
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Readings are taken at the NOAA-operated Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and form part of the Keeling Curve — a continuous record of CO2 measurements dating back to 1958. Bubbles found inside Antarctic ice core samples provide a longer record of CO2 in the air for the past 800,000 years.
CO2 measurements surpassed 400 ppm in the Arctic last summer, but the readings from Hawaii mark the first time prolonged levels above 400 ppm have been observed at more moderate latitudes.
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U.S. natural gas production is booming. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), production grew by 23 percent from 2007 to 2012. Now—with production projected to continue growing in the decades ahead—U.S. lawmakers and companies are considering exporting this resource internationally. But what are the climate implications of doing so?
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Finance
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The Guardian today published a photo of a bit of derelict yard where kids had been playing, as evidence that because of cuts the local council – Blackburn – could not afford a proper playground.
The reason Blackburn council cannot afford a proper playground is nothing to do with cuts. It is because. like most local governments in this country, it blows far too much money on the excellent lifestyles of fatcat senior officers. In the town hall of Blackburn there are an astonishing 16 council officers on over £75,000 per year plus allowances, gold-plated pension, car and benefits.
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More than 100 of Britain’s richest people have been caught hiding billions of pounds in secretive offshore havens, sparking an unprecedented global tax evasion investigation.
George Osborne, the chancellor, warned the alleged tax evaders, and a further 200 accountants and advisers accused of helping them cheat the taxman: “The message is simple: if you evade tax, we’re coming after you.”
HM Revenue & Customs warned those involved, who were named in offshore data first offered to the authorities by a whistleblower in 2009, that they will face “criminal prosecution or significant penalties” if they do not voluntarily disclose their tax irregularities, as the UK steps up its efforts to clamp down on avoidance ahead of the G8 summit in June.
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Slowly but surely, over the past few months, we’ve figured out exactly what bitcoin is, how it works, and what it all might come to. We witnessed events in Cyprus that put into question the current system and the U.S. Treasury issued guidance validating the legality of a brand new form of virtual money. We experienced a frenetic bubble as well as the inevitable crash.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Bills introduced in Nevada to allow machine guns on the Vegas strip, privatize public education, and thwart federal healthcare reform can be tied back to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to a new report from ProgressNow Nevada detailing ALEC’s influence in that state.
Former Nevada Senator Bill Raggio, the longest-serving senator in state history, was ALEC’s National Chair in 1993 and told an ALEC meeting in 1992 that “Those who founded ALEC in 1973 probably did not imagine that in just 20 short years ALEC would grow to become the most influential state-level organization in the country.”
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And so, the report seems to suggest, there’s something a little off about foreign leaders, nine in recent years, who’ve expelled the agency. Why else would Bolivian President Evo Morales expel an anti-poverty group from his “impoverished” country, if he wasn’t just a little bit crazy? And Russian President Vladimir Putin can’t be playing with a full deck either; he recently expelled USAID and a bird lovers group.
Of course, these leaders and other USAID critics aren’t crazy; they argue that USAID undermines national sovereignty and democracy. The story includes charges that USAID manipulates the internal politics of host nations, but it leaves the allegations unexplored and lets supporters bat them away.
[...]
And just last month, U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks revealed that USAID and its Office of Transition Initiatives had been secretly tasked with destabilizing Venezuela’s democratically elected government.
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Indeed, manipulation of broadcast outlets seems to have been in the playbook last night…
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Censorship
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It was hoped John Sweeney, known for investigation into Scientology, and controversial drugs adviser Professor David Nutt would speak at Cardiff Central Library event
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The same “Ag-Gag” laws that make it a crime to film or document egregious abuses on industrial farms may soon be used to criminalize anti-fracking activists who seek to expose environmental harms brought on by the gas drilling industry—if a bill recently proposed in Pennsylvannia passes.
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A few days after the blueprints for the world’s first printable gun were published online, Defense Distributed has been asked by the State Department to pull them down, citing possible arms trafficking violations. The blueprints, however, are still available on The Pirate Bay and many other file-sharing sites, which adds a 3D chapter to the IP enforcement debate.The Pirate Bay says it welcomes the blueprints and has no intention of taking the files down.
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Privacy
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This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while. In fact, it stems from something I noticed way back in August of last year. After digging for answers and even a couple attempts at contacting their customer support, I’ve concluded that LinkedIn is by far the creepiest social network. The primary reasons LinkedIn is the mustached, trench coat and wire frame glasses wearing mouth breather of the internet are the “People You May Know” and “People Also Viewed” features.
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Open source focused developer of the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client and Bugzilla bug tracking system Mozilla has issued a “cease and desist” notice to Gamma International.
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The ACLU has been peeking through an FBI handbook and there it stumbled across the revelation that the FBI can look at emails as long as they are at least six months old. The handbook, which was published last year, offers this advice to men in suits in the field.
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HUSBAND and wife councillors who watch CCTV of kids on their living room telly have been accused of ‘sofa snooping’.
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It’s not unusual for government officials — the very people we disagree with regarding civil liberties issues — to agree with us on consumer privacy issues. But don’t forget that this person advocated for full-body scanners at airports while on the payroll of a scanner company.
One of the points he makes, that the data collected from Google Glass will become part of Google’s vast sensory network, echoes something I’ve heard Marc Rotenberg at EPIC say: this whole thing would be a lot less scary if the glasses were sold by a company like Brookstone.
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Imagine a world in which every major company in America flew hundreds of thousands of drones overhead, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, collecting data on what Americans were doing down below. It’s a chilling thought that would engender howls of outrage.
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We’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking about the implications of consumer wearable cameras like Google Glass, and I’m sure we’ll have more to say in this space on the subject. But meanwhile, we’re pleasantly surprised to report a very trenchant analysis of the technology’s implications for our privacy by none other than Michael Chertoff.
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Civil Rights
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“You want to film something b**ch? Film this!”
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Tens of thousands of students in Chile have clashed with riot police while protesting for improvements to the education system. Police said they were attacked with petrol bombs and used tear gas and water cannons to break up protesters.
The march in the capital Santiago was mainly peaceful, but police used water cannons and tear gas to break up one group of demonstrators when they were attacked by petrol bombs.
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Today, CDT is releasing a paper analyzing the free expression implications of the proposed “Right to Be Forgotten” in the draft European Data Protection Regulation (DPR). The Right to Be Forgotten concept has received much attention since the DPR was first introduced, and while we understand the concerns that motivate the proposal, CDT continues to have serious misgivings about the DPR’s approach to the concept. As described in Article 17, the Right to Be Forgotten would put private companies in the position of balancing users’ free expression and privacy rights – a difficult task that has traditionally been the purview of courts and legislatures, and one that companies are not equipped to undertake. Further, the DPR puts a heavy thumb on the scale on the side of privacy, promising high fines if companies violate the regulation, but providing only narrowly scoped safeguards for journalistic and artistic expression.
The proposed Article 17 allows any user to request that an online service provider delete all of the data about her that the service provider possesses. If that information has been made publicly available, data controllers are required to notify third parties that link to, or have copies of, the data about the deletion request. This broad conception of the Right to Be Forgotten fails to adequately consider the free expression concerns inherent in a right to remove true, lawfully published information from the public record. Quoting and commentary are integral to free expression; yet Article 17 could chill such expression, since a deletion request would extend to third-party references to data that an individual requests deletion of. Article 80 requires Member States to make a limited accommodation for free expression, but that provision falls short of standards required by international human rights instruments. If adopted, the “Right to Be Forgotten” proposal would generate a variety of regulations to
protect free expression throughout Member States, creating a lack of clarity for both individuals and data processors regarding what standards apply to a deletion request and what balance must be struck between privacy and free expression.
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A long-fought-for bill to reform libel law in the UK received final passage and became law late last month. The Defamation Act makes many needed changes to the law and is largely a victory for free expression advocates, but its partial liability protections for website operators leave something to be desired, and pose significant risk to the ability to speak anonymously on the Internet.
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A leader of one of the youth movements behind Egypt’s 2011 uprising has been detained by security forces, officials have told reporters.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Today’s news about BT’s new sports service certainly doesn’t mean the end of the Internet, but the changes we are seeing, where Internet providers are providing parallel content delivery services does change the dynamics in the industry in a worrying way.
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The publication of the report on culture and the Internet requested by French president Hollande to Pierre Lescure – former CEO of Canal +, a major TV station owned by Vivendi-Universal – will be the object of a major media buzz in France. For those interested in what would be ambitious public policies adapted to the digital era, La Quadrature du Net brings back on the table its Elements for the reform of copyright and related cultural policies. Will those 14 propositions, attentive to the freedoms and uses of everyone, to the interests of authors and other contributors, be a part of it, or will the Lescure report perpetuate the repressive policies led by Nicolas Sarkozy?
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After 40 years, Ethernet has come to dominate network connectivity. This is in part thanks to John D’Ambrosia, a key figure in today’s Ethernet world. Currently the chairman of the Ethernet Alliance, D’Ambrosia has done much to advance IEEE standards, in particular the 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet specifications. D’Ambrosia is also set to be confirmed as chair of the new IEEE group that will define 400 Gigabit Ethernet.
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DRM
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The HTML Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today released a First Public Working Draft of the controversial Encrypted Media Extension (EME) specification, despite massive opposition from public interest organizations and members of the public.
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Today’s business models typically focus on gaining leverage with a large group of people, from software developers to end-users. Yet the behavior of many entrepreneurs suggests they’d prefer control of their intellectual property to successful adoption by millions — at least, that’s the consequence of their choices. By erecting barriers to adoption, they unwittingly discourage the very usage that would build their market and drive their success. However, CERN’s celebration of 20 years of the open Web refutes this strategy and provides a useful insight into the dynamic of gaining broad adoption.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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NZ part of International Day of Action against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
Actions are taking place across five countries today to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
‘This coordinated action is designed as a shot across the bow for negotiators as they head to the next round of TPPA negotiations in Lima, Peru starting on 15 May’, said Jane Kelsey, who is part of the international campaign.
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Copyrights
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Ofcom today released their latest research into people who infringe copyright and what kinds of factor influence behaviour change.
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The United States Department of Defense has “claimed ownership” of CAD drawings of a plastic, printable pistol. In doing so, they apparently believe they can stop the files from existing. The result is obviously the complete opposite, which calls into strong question the judgment and ability of United States Government to set Internet policy at all.
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Telecoms regulator Ofcom has just published a study into the state of online copyright infringement in the UK, with some very interesting conclusions. The researchers found that 10% of the country’s most prolific infringers are responsible for almost 80% of all infringements carried out online, but with a bonus. These plus an additional 10% of infringers spend 300% more than ‘honest’ consumers who don’t infringe copyright at all.
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05.09.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There are a lot of personalities out there in the Linux corner of the Internet. Some of them are developers, some are advocates and evangelists. Others are community enthusiasts. If you’re looking to stay updated on the Linux world, here’s a list of some of the most interesting people to follow, just to get you started.
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Laptops on board the International Space Station are set to switch to Linux.
Although Linux has been a part of the orbiting outpost since launch, laptop computers have been running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
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Well it’s spring storm season in many parts of the world, so it should come as no great surprise that we’ve had some storms here in the Linux blogosphere as well.
Just in the last few weeks we’ve had the bank that decided Windows was cheaper; we’ve had the shockingly FUD-filled FOSS survey; and we’ve had less-than-entirely-flattering words said about Linux’s waistline, to name just a few examples.
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Server
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Many cloud applications are included in the roster of compatible software, such as Red Hat JBoss Application Server and others. These make Linux perfectly suited for enterprises looking for a convenient, secure, and inexpensive cloud deployment. The growing number of businesses is proof that the operating system is the right choice. Your enterprise will most likely benefit from going in this direction if your IT team hasn’t already considered or implemented the open source, secure, and technically remarkable Linux system.
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IBM’s POWER based system revenue was also down significantly during the quarter suffering a 31 percent decline.
“Our declines were driven by both the high performance computing segment, where we had a strong performance last year, and the impact of the transition to POWER7+,” Loughridge said.
The POWER7+ server lineup was expanded in February of this year with a new range of entry level server systems.
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Linux tends to be associated with x86 hardware in a business context, but some well-known companies are running it on mainframes.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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CHIPMAKER Intel has released its software development kit (SDK) for the OpenCL Applications XE 2013 integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows and Linux.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Spicy Horse is fresh off their Kickstarter for Akaneiro, and now they’re moving on to greener pastures with the CCG/RTS, Hell Invaders for PC, Mac, Linux and mobile tablet devices.
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The game’s beta is expected to run for about two weeks and will retail for $20 when it’s released for PC, Mac and Linux.
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Some of the best things in the world are open source — that is to say that the basic code or instructions for it are available for everyone to use for free. Google’s Android operating system, for example, is open to anyone who wants to use it. That provides companies like Amazon and Ouya with the base infrastructure they needed to create unique software for their consumer-electronic devices.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Choice has always been a hallmark of the desktop Linux world, where users can select not just the distribution they prefer but also the desktop environment, among virtually countless other features.
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Plasma Active is to tablets what KDE is to desktops and laptops. Plasma Active is a joint project by the KDE community, basysKom and open-slx, and uses much of the codebase of KDE4′s Plasma Desktop to provide a clean and polished KDE-like experience on mobile devices. If you haven’t heard of this ambitious project before, check out our story on the first look on Plasma Active 3. We also recently covered a detailed tutorial on installing Plasma Active on Nexus 7.
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KDE developer Daniel Nicoletti has announced the release of colord-kde 0.3.0. He recommends upgrading to this release as “it has lots of fixes compared to 0.2.0″.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNU/Linux is ruling the roost today – it dominates almost every aspect of our lives by powering devices that we use without consciously knowing that it’s running Linux. One area where GNU/Linux is still behind is the consumer desktop market which is dominated by Microsoft.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Amazon Web Services had added Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 to its list of supported Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The release, which is available in all Amazon regions, comes two months after Red Hat released 6.4 to its existing customers.
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The UK government’s love affair with open-source technology has given software house Red Hat a shot in the arm, we’re told.
The company boasted that its government and system integrator business has grown in the “high double-digit rates” over the last three years. Red Hat, which offers various flavours of the open-source operating system Linux, said subscriptions for its software make up the majority of its revenue from Whitehall.
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Red Hat is one of the many vendors and developers contributing to the evolution and success of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, and helping to lead Red Hat’s OpenStack efforts is Senior Principal Software Engineer Mark McLoughlin.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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On the instructions of e-court committee Supreme Court of India and the Chief Justice, MM Kumar and Justice Mansoor Ahmad Mir, Judge Incharge e-Court Committee, High Court of Jammu & Kashmir, the continued training on “Ubuntu Linux Awareness Cum Training Programme under Change Management” for the Judicial Officers of Jammu and Samba districts was held on April 28, 2013 at J&K State Judicial Academy, Jammu.
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I have a theory (I know, I am full of them). Like most of you, as I have gotten older I have also tried to improve as a person. I am not just talking about being better at what I do with my career and hobbies, but I want to be a genuinely good person across the board; a good husband, father, son, friend, colleague, and dude who you bump your shopping cart into when buying milk. My theory is that people fundamentally improve by (a) making mistakes and (b) understanding and learning from those mistakes to not only prevent making the mistake again, but to also uncover the cause and effect of why the mistake was made, thus improving your life.
Now, the (probably illogical) logical continuation of my theory is that to make improvements (a) you need to make more mistakes (which opens up the opportunity for learning), and (b) you need to develop CSI-like capabilities in assessing those mistakes and their root causes. Continuing the theme, if we can figure out ways to identify ways of triggering making more mistakes in a way that doesn’t get you arrested and we can identify ways to help us understand why we screw up the way we do, we should have a golden ticket for rocking our lives. Incidentally, this theory was boiled in my head while driving out to pick up Thai food on Saturday night, so this is no Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity in terms of completeness.
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The majority of set-top boxes running XBMC are Android-powered devices. However, The Little Black Box is an Linux-powered set-top device that arrives with XBMC pre-installed.
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There’s a novel project currently raising money at Kickstarter. Called UDOO, it wants to “bridge the gap between Arduino micro-controllers and the Raspberry Pi single-board computer,” providing extra computational power and “more opportunity to your imagination.”
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The Raspberry Pi is all the rage for hobbyists in search of cheap, credit card-sized computers that can run a full PC operating system. Arduino boards have been around nearly a decade, meanwhile, powering robots and all sorts of other creative electronics projects.
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Gigahertz-class pocket-sized ARM Ubuntu rig, anyone?
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In this guest column, Linaro CEO George Grey examines the expanding ARM ecosystem, discusses emerging and “disruptive” market opportunities for ARM technology, and highlights Linaro’s recent ARM Linux software development progress, working group formation, and membership growth.
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MediaTek has already received orders for over one million units of a dual-core Cortex-A7 processor it announced May 2, says DigiTimes. Designed for affordable Android smartphones with up to qHD (960×540) displays, the 28nm-fabricated MT6572 SOC (system-on-chip) augments its dual 1.2GHz cores with integrated radios for WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, and GPS functions, as well as an HSPA+/TD-SCDMA baseband.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Consumer electronics giant LG is rumoured to be going back into the tablet market, which it ditched two years ago.
LG’s original Optimus Pad flopped quite badly. It was practically a soulless also-ran design and it was way too pricey. Since, LG has managed to regain its footing. Its phones are selling quite well, which wasn’t the case a couple of years ago. As tablets are practically just an extension of smartphone operations, it now seems poised to give them another go.
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Android
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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If what we hear from the folks at SamMobile, a news site dedicated to Samsung devices, is correct we may see an 11-inch Google Nexus soon. Not just that, Samsung seems to be working on its own Galaxy Tab 11. All that and more later this year. According to SamMobile, Samsung is planning to launch four (!) whole new tablets this year. Along with a Google Nexus 11 are Galaxy Tab 8, Galaxy Tab 11 and Galaxy Tab DUOS 7.
While Tab 8 and Tab 11 seem to be one-inch upgrades from their 7- and 10-inch Tab 2 counterparts, Galaxy Tab DUOS is whole new category in Samsung tablets portfolio because of its dual-SIM feature. The rest of DUOS’s hardware specs seem average though. We, at Muktware, wonder about Samsung’s sudden love for 8 and 11 inches.
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Finance Act 2012 introduced several retrospective amendments, purportedly ‘clarificatory’, to the Income-tax Act, 1961, with respect to non-resident taxpayers. A key amendment was the extension of ‘royalty’ to include payment toward shrink-wrapped software, connectivity charges, transponder hire charges and so on. Another significant amendment related to “indirect transfer” of capital assets located in India, thereby overcoming the Supreme Court decision in the case of Vodafone.
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A forthcoming documentary from Filament Features will feature the work of the Open Source Ecology project, which aims to produce a set of open source tools capable of building environmentally sustainable communities.
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Radio frequency (RF) signals run from about 3kHz to 300GHz. As a test and measurement designer, some of my data acquisition rates will get into the 100s of kHz, or perhaps up to 10s of MHz with a digital oscilloscope, but usually that’s all. I also typically try to use existing protocols for as much of the communication as I can, typically USB, Serial, GPIB, SPI, I2C or occasionally Ethernet, Wi-Fi or radio.
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More and more SMEs are turning to open source IT and telephony solutions for a variety of reasons, among them cost savings and the flexibility to manage systems such as scaling up or down, according to business needs.
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How fast things move from theoretical, through experimental to implementation. It was only recently that a semi-practical scheme for homomorphic encryption was invented and we already have an open source implementation in C++.
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We are pleased to announce the establishment of the Open Source Geospatial Laboratory at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
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Gluu’s open source authorization and authentication platform, OX, will enable the next generation of Toshiba Cloud TV Services to authenticate consumers and integrate with popular Internet apps.
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OSS facilitates the preservation of a wide range of information for future developments and it comes with considerable financial savings. Government institutes and PSUs are looking forward to more adoption and implementation of OSS in their IT infrastructure. The increasing awareness of open source in the public and government sector has been one of the significant developments in IT technology.
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Events
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The most awaited annual event in lives of all Googlers (developers mostly) is fast approaching. Google I/O was started in 2008. The “I” and “O” stand for input/output, and “Innovation in the Open”.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chrome users can have enhanced experience with what Google calls the packaged apps which are now available throuh the Chrome Web Store. Google had announced the developer preview of Chrome packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher a few months ago. Google enabled developers to upload their packaged apps to the Chrome Web Store and test them, but there was no way for users to find those apps an install them.
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SaaS/Big Data
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There’s more — much more — to the Big Data software ecosystem than Hadoop. Here are four open source projects that will help you get big benefits from Big Data.
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Cloud interoperability and portability seems to be a hot topic these days. This topic is one that I have a bit of experience with. Back in 2008, I had the fortune, or possibly misfortune, of starting one of the first groups dedicated to the discussion of Cloud interoperability, aptly titled, “The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum”. For a while this Google group was a popular forum for the discussion of various interop and standardization challenges, but it ultimately faded as politics, personalities and priorities shifted. Five years later, I thought I’d revisit the discussion.
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Opscode, the maker of Chef, an open-source automation platform, has announced it is collaborating with IBM to bring the power of Opscode Chef and the Open Source Chef Community to enterprise businesses.
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Opscode demonstrates significant momentum for its Chef open-source automation platform at its annual ChefConf event, including deals with IBM and Microsoft.
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Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu Server version 13.04 operating system is now listing as available for download.
This latest version features high-availability (HA) for OpenStack deployments.
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When businesses buy software, they don’t expect to take what’s off the shelf. They get everything customized as they like, open to tweak and update, and with their own privacy and data kept under lock and key.
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Databases
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Version 7 of TokuDB, Tokutek’s high performance MySQL Database storage engine, has been released as an open source community edition and as a new supported TokuDB Enterprise Edition. TokuDB has previously been a proprietary storage engine for MySQL which has specialised in handling write-intensive workloads. Developed orignally by researchers at MIT, Rutgers and the State University of New York, the storage engine uses Fractal Tree indexing, a technique based on cache-oblivious algorithms.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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At the moment most of the office suite are developed in C++ or in JavaScript. Joeffice is the first open source office suite in Java. Japplis has chosen the Apache license 2.0 which makes it possible to change the code without the need to share the modified code.
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CMS
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4. There is no training or support if you choose open source.
Um, no. Any developer who has spent time honing his open source craft can tell you that this is untrue. Just because some well-funded proprietary CMS hosts an annual conference doesn’t mean that the open source users lacks support. Open source users can find online help, forums, paid classes, local meet ups, YouTube how-tos, expensive manuals, more expensive consultants, and whizz-bang contract developers. The support and training are there; they just don’t get packaged into some monthly fee along with the CMS itself.
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Victoria Legal Aid has gone live with a new Web presence based on Drupal. Previously the organisation, which provides legal aid to disadvantaged Victorians, used the proprietary RedDot content management system.
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With a nod to the open government movement, the Arlington County Board this weekend unanimously approved making portions of the programming behind the county website publicly available.
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Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.1. The biggest feature of Joomla 3.1 is Tags, a built-in tagging system that allows dynamic tagging across content-types. Tags hasn’t been created for articles only, but rather Joomla integrated tagging into other areas of its core that made sense (e.g. contacts, feeds, etc). For example, Tags allow end-users to create lists, blogs, or other layouts that combine articles with other content types any way they like. These tags can be dynamically created from the content, without having to navigate to the Tags component, thus bringing both power and simplicity.
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Administrators of the Joomla blogging platform and content management system can now tag their content so it will be better indexed and automatically routed to the correct locations on their websites.
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Education
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Healthcare
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When the Healthcare.gov website re-launches in June, users may not notice much of a change, but on the back end, there is a lot of open-source magic going on that will make content generation and the sharing of information more seamless than it is on perhaps any other government site operating today.
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Business
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Freedom OSS is a recognized industry leader and a technology advisor to Fortune 500 companies, offering a wide range of consulting and implementation services. In partnership with some of the pioneers of the professional open source, Freedom OSS delivers consulting services and creates platforms that help clients reduce costs and improve quality of their systems and overall business outcomes by leveraging license and royalty free software solutions. Virtually all engagements of Freedom OSS are handled on a managed delivery/fixed cost basis, which we and Freedom OSS believe is another strong positive for clients, striving to optimize expenses and increase transparency and predictability of their cost structures.
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Semi-Open Source
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Developers of the Zurmo Open-Source Customer Relationship Management application today announced the release of Zurmo 1.5, an expanded version of its software with advanced reporting, a workflow engine, new marketing automation capabilities, and enhanced mobile access. All these new features are available in the Open-Source Edition of the application.
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Pedro Alves has been an active member of the Pentaho community, adding wisdom and code to the open source business intelligence software since he founded his company Webdetails five years ago.
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Funding
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With the recent high profile success of hardware and software projects raising millions of dollars through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Fabian Scherschel looks at what it takes for open source software projects to duplicate this success and the unique challenges these projects will face.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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35 new GNU releases this month (as of April 30, 2013)
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Do you believe that control over our computers is important to a free society? Do you want to help people learn why proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management are harmful? Do you want to fight for software freedom?
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Project Releases
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For about 2 years, the Blender open source 3D modelling package has included Cycles, a render engine that uses path tracing. This engine can be used to produce photorealistic images with little effort. Until now, those who wanted to render a graphical or cartoon-like image for a 3D model had to use Blender’s internal render engine for such Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR). However, this engine is quite old and doesn’t always produce convincing results. The new version 2.67 of Blender closes the gap by offering the Freestyle cartoon render engine. Freestyle uses 3D geometry to calculate lines that can either be used on their own or combined with the surface rendering results from other engines.
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Public Services/Government
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The US government is also a vocal supporter of open source software. Examples of recent initiatives include whitehouse.gov, the Federal Register and data.gov. Much of the internet is run using open source tools such as Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, while a plethora of companies have found good business cases for using open source software. Don Smith, director of technology at Dell SecureWorks, says the main reason businesses would pick free and open source software (FOSS) over proprietary technology is to save money. He also suggests that open source software frequently offers greater innovation than proprietary systems.
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So, good reasons to go for open source software, but what about security? Many people view open source software as something that can be changed or edited by anybody, much like a Wikipedia entry. That generally isn’t the case, however, as open source communities usually have mechanisms in place to prevent such random tinkering – for example, submitting new code to a peer review before it is entered into a particular project. Furthermore, Smith says one of the most common misconceptions about FOSS is the belief that it is written by amateur coders – again, typically untrue.
“The vast majority of FOSS is written by software professionals, very often employed by a company that is making money from that same software, either through subscriptions, support or professional services. It is obviously in the interest of these businesses to ensure their software works well and their coding is of high quality,” he says.
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Government departments can improve competitiveness in procurement by increasing use of open source software in an increasingly commoditised IT market, according to Tariq Rashid , head of IT reform at the Cabinet Office.
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The second Open Gov Summit took place yesterday April 25th at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, in the heart of Westminster. London-based open source consultancy Zaizi hosted the fully-booked Summit, which attracted IT professionals from central and local government and third sector organisations. The Summit revealed encouraging progress for open source in the public sector, helped by the government’s decision to adopt open standards last November. This year’s debate also emphasised the growing relevance of Cloud as organisations migrate to more open, flexible architectures and deliver applications through a wider range of devices.
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Public administrations in Greece would benefit from a campaign to increase their knowledge on open source, including how to best procure such solutions, recommends a study published on Joinup yesterday. In procurement, public administrations should request experience in managing open source projects.
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Pham Hong Quang, Chair of the Vietnam Free and Open Source Software Association (VFOSSA) has confirmed that the quality of products is the greatest concern of the agencies and enterprises planning to use open source software.
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In a victory for the free software movement, the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has started to switch more than 40,000 government PCs to open source.
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We caught up with Gavin Beckett, chief enterprise architect at Bristol city council, to discuss open data and designing smart cities
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Openness/Sharing
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An international programming project aims to create virtual nematode life.
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Biologists have counted and sorted each of the 959 cells in the millimeter-long, see-through roundworm. Now a group of coders and neuroscientists are using that data to bring that worm to life.
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Seeds might seem far from the world of high tech and free software, but they have much in common. Seeds contain DNA, which is a (quaternary) digital code much like a binary program. Just as there is free software that anyone may use and share, there are free seeds – those that are part of the ancient seeds commons, created over thousands of years, available for use by anyone. And just as free software is threatened by software patents, so seeds are equally endangered by seed patents.
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Voting
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Opposition senatorial candidate former Sen Richard Gordon asked the Supreme Court to order the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to open the source code of the 2013 ballot-counting machines for review by local groups.
Gordon filed through his lawyers on Friday, May 3, a Petition for Mandamus before the high court to allow political parties to examine and review the source code.
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Open Access/Content
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“GitHub has been inspiring, and we want to bring that in over hardware and product development,” said Nitin Rao, co-founder of Sunglass, a cloud-based collaboration platform that makes it possible for designers, architects, engineers and the like to work together on 3D models from all pockets of the world.
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Open Hardware
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Don’t ask why, but Christian Carlberg has created an open-source, hackable flashlight with a powerful, compact light beam. He says the HexBright is the world’s first open-source flashlight. We haven’t checked that claim, but we’ll take his word for it for now, as we aren’t sure why flashlights belong on the list of the “Internet of things.”
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Health/Nutrition
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Today (8 May 2013) major European retailers from five countries, including Germany’s REWE Group, EDEKA and LIDL have released the Brussels Soy Declaration in which they have pledged support for the non-GMO soy production system of Brazil.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Jehovah’s Witnesses’ current exemption from military service could extend to other groups with strong convictions, if one proposal in a new report on the matter is accepted. Alternatively, they could be required to perform civil, rather than military, service.
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Others in the Donilon-Deputy Alumni Club include Denis McDonough, who’s now Obama’s chief of staff, and CIA Director John Brennan, who was Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. (And it’s worth noting that Donilon himself was the Deputy NSA before becoming the head honcho.)
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A Pakistani court on Thursday declared that US drone strikes in the country’s lawless tribal belt were illegal and directed the Foreign Ministry to move a resolution against the attacks in the United Nations.
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PESHAWAR: Branding drone attacks on Pakistani territory as war crimes, the Peshawar High Court on Thursday ordered the foreign ministry to move a resolution in the United Nations against the strikes.
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The armed drone is being heralded as the next generation of American military technology. It can fly overheard with its unblinking eye, almost invisible to its targets below. Without warning, its missiles will strike, bringing certain death and destruction on the ground. All the while, the military pilot, sitting in a cushioned recliner in an air-conditioned room halfway across the world, is immune from the violence wrought from his or her single keystroke.
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Yemen has quickly become one of the most active theaters of operations for America’s drone fleet, though the killing of a local anti Al-Qaeda cleric underscores the rising collateral damage of the unmanned attacks.
Sheik Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a prominent cleric within his small village in Yemen, was known for preaching of the evils of the al-Qaida network, warning villagers to stay out of the group and renounce their military ideology.
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Drone Strikes Fuelling Anti-U.S Hatred as Fear Spreads in Middle East
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After the Ministry of Defence confirmed the UK’s use of armed drones in Afghanistan, anti-war protestors are set to gather outside an RAF base in Lincolnshire.
The RAF began remotely operating its Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles deployed to Afghanistan from the Lincolnshire airbase earlier this week.
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While the lethal drone strikes carried out by the U.S. in Afghanistan (where Britain is also operating armed drones), Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, get the vast majority of media attention, and rightly so, when it comes to the issue of drones being used to carry out extrajudicial killings, other countries are also engaged in the practice. On Tuesday an Israeli drone attack on Gaza City killed 29-year-old Haitham al-Mishal and wounded another Palestinian man. The attack was the “the first targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip since an Egyptian-brokered truce went into effect on Nov. 22, 2012.”
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Afghan president Hamid Karzai says the director of the CIA has assured him that regular funding his government receives from the agency will not be cut off.
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No organization in U.S. history has amassed a reputation quite like that of the Central Intelligence Agency. Often referred to by its acronym, CIA, or simply just “the Agency,” it is often regarded as the long and shadowy arm of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. It can be tempting to see the agency as force for good in the world, or at the very least a necessary evil, especially when publicly vaunted heroes like Mike Spann join because in doing so they believed they “would be able to make the world a better place to live in.” The problem is that the CIA really does not do that. In fact, most of the agency’s activities are underhanded and dishonest when they are not misguided or simply futile. Even with a poor reputation at home and abroad, the CIA has done some things that actually resulted in long-term benefits to the rest of the world, mainly by publicly failing to carry out an operation to its intended end and exposing its misdeeds to the rest of the world.
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Western diplomats, politicians and analysts have combined to float quite a few options to supposedly resolve the two-year civil war engulfing much of Syria right now.
Talk of everything from a no-fly zone to an all-out intervention has flown around the digital media and political sphere, and yet, it seems a very few have stated the obvious option: do nothing.
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It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Justice Department’s versatile and hard-working anti-bribery law. On April 22, Ralph Lauren paid an $882,000 penalty in a non-prosecution agreement that resolved FCPA allegations of bribing a customs official in Argentina to permit the import of Ralph Lauren products. On May 7, prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a criminal complaint accusing two Florida brokers of paying kickbacks to a Venezuelan state bank official who directed the bank’s financial trading business to them. The FCPA has taken some recent lumps from judges, and last year prosecutions fell off slightly from their blistering pace in 2009, 2010 and 2011. But as Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher noted in its January report on FCPA enforcement, bribery prosecution has become routine. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” the report said, warning businesses not to let down their guard.
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Cablegate
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In these audio excerpts from their extended conversation in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Chris Hedges asks Julian Assange about legal strategy and the WikiLeaks founder’s thoughts on Pfc. Bradley Manning.
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However disappointing, the Wikileaks founder’s new book offers a fascinating — and discomfiting — thesis
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But context matters, too. How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran? If Bradley Manning, the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ materials about the United States government and military, had been a North Korean border guard or a defector from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, how differently would politicians and pundits in the United States have viewed him? Were a string of whistle-blowing websites dedicated to exposing abuses within those countries to appear, surely the tone of the Western political class would shift. Taking into account the precedent President Barack Obama set in his first term in office— a clear “zero tolerance” approach toward unauthorized leaks of classified information from U.S. officials— we would expect that future Western governments would ultimately adopt a dissonant posture toward digital disclosures, encouraging them abroad in adversarial countries, but prosecuting them ferociously at home.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Sonora has become the first Mexican state to ban bullfighting, recently passing the long-awaited Animal Protection Law addressing cruelty to animals.
In a statement on Formato 21 radio, Perez Rubio hailed the unanimous vote on May 2 by the legislature of Mexico’s northwestern border state.
“It has caused quite a stir because we are the first state of the republic to pass this law. I really didn’t expect–I say this with all the honesty in the world–I didn’t expect the repercussion this would have, nationally and internationally,” said local lawmaker of the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico, or PVEM, Vernon Perez Rubio, the Global Post reports.
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Finance
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Where media define the “center” or the “middle” tells you a lot about the worldview they are promoting. The “center” doesn’t usually indicate where most of the public is, but rather where elites have determined an appropriate middle between opposing arguments. Confusing the two concepts is common (and not an accident).
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc must face fraud claims brought by CIFG Assurance North America over insurance it provided for $275 million (177 million pounds) in mortgage-backed securities, a New York state appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
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People over 65, a growing share of the US population, are suffering a crisis-ridden capitalist system. High unemployment, reduced private pensions, fewer job benefits, less job security, high personal debt levels, and falling real wages make Social Security payments more important than ever. Yet President Obama and Congress recently agreed to bargain over how much to reduce Social Security payments from current levels. That would not only hurt seniors – but also the children who help them.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Web has put a wealth of good information within closer reach than ever before—but as any Internet user knows, it’s done the same for all the heaps of misinformation out there.
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In a bizarre television and spatial anomaly on CNN this morning, the blanket coverage of two true-crime stories led two news anchors to conduct an odd “satellite” interview from the very same parking lot, background traffic and all.
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Beautiful spring weather has gardeners outside seeding lettuce and transplanting tomatoes. Community gardens are ramping up for a growing season full of hot peppers and trailing squash vines. The sewage sludge “composting” industry wants in on the action. May 6 to May 12 has been declared “International Compost Awareness Week” by the sewage sludge industry trade group the U.S. Composting Council (USCC).
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Privacy
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The 643-page tome, called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf), was just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others.
The book was published by the Center for Digital Content of the National Security Agency, and is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled “Google Hacking.”
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Cats are good at lots of things, like sleeping on windowsills for multiple hours at a time, scratching upholstery and pretending not to know their own names. Cats, however, are not good at being spies.
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Civil Rights
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An Arizona judge has denied a motion to suppress evidence collected through a spoofed cell tower that the FBI used to track the location of an accused identity thief.
The ruling means that the government may use not only evidence gathered through its fake cell tower to locate an air card that Daniel David Rigmaiden was using to access the internet, but also evidence gathered from the apartment to which they tracked him through the air card and evidence collected from a storage space and computer hard drives found in the apartment and storage locker.
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The case of a Sikh bus driver banned from wearing his turban on the job sparked animated exchanges about the right to wear religious clothing on Yle’s A-studio programme Wednesday night.
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An FBI investigation manual updated last year, obtained by the ACLU, says it’s possible to warrantlessly obtain Americans’ e-mail “without running afoul” of the Fourth Amendment.
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DRM
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A handful of myths have become common defenses of the W3C’s plan for “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME), a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) scheme for HTML5, the next version of the markup language upon which the Web is built.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Social media feeds have been full links to alarmist stories about a recent change to UK copyright law that allows for the licensing of orphan works.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.08.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Three Android-powered NASA “PhoneSat” nanosatellites deorbited and burned up in the atmosphere on April 27 after successfully completing their six-day mission. Meanwhile, the Android- and Linux-powered STRaND-1 nanosat, which was launched by the U.K.’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. and Surrey Space Centre on Feb. 25, is still orbiting, but has yet to phone home.
Despite the risks of space, a growing number of organizations are developing tiny, low-cost nanosatellites built with Linux, Android, and Arduino gear. Like the NASA and Surrey missions, many are using open source designs.
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When Austin startup TrackingPoint calls their product “Precision Guided Firearms – PGFs” they are serious about it living up to the name. We are talking about customized hunting rifles, such as the .300 Winchester Magnum, that have been fitted with scopes out of a sci-fi movie.
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Coverity has called Linux the “benchmark of quality” in its newly published 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source report. The company annually brings together millions of lines of code from open source and, using the same defect-scanning technology that it uses with its enterprise customers, scans that code for problems to produce data on defect densities.
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Linux use in the enterprise is increasing as the Linux Foundation verified last month in its Enterprise End User Survey.
In fact, more than 80 percent of respondents plan to increase the number of Linux servers in their organizations over the next five years. And 75 percent reported using Linux in the last two years in new applications, services and Greenfield deployments.
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Android TV sticks with Rockchip RK3066 dual-core processors available sell for as little as $42. But these little boxes let you turn a TV or monitor into a computer capable of running thousands of Android apps. Or if you really want to use an RK3066 stick as a computer you can install Ubuntu.
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Desktop
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Quck, when did the first Chromebooks (portable computers running Google’s Chrome OS platform) arrive? The answer is that the initial Chromebooks went on sale in June of 2011, nearly two years ago.
It’s no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. But at the same time, many users have taken notice of the low prices that these portables are offered at, and the many freebies that they come with. For example, the Acer C7 Chromebook, shown here, sells for only $199.
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I currently run Fuduntu Linux on my main desktop PC. Until just recently I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows 7, but I finally wiped Windows (hadn’t actually needed it for a long time) and installed Fuduntu, which came really highly recommended. I’m loving it so far. Meanwhile I also have a Samsung Chromebook and an Android phone. We have a bunch of other laptops in my family, but my 12-year-old son is constantly installing new distros on them (he got the Linux Diversity collection for Christmas), so I couldn’t tell you what’s on them at the moment. 
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That’s a much better deal for you than that other OS which forbids all of those things. Oh, sure, you can run that other OS but there are restrictions like a limit of 20 machines networked before having to pay extra, not sharing the software with a friend nor having more than one person at a time using it. That prevents you from getting the value you paid for in the hardware you buy. A computer knows no limits. Why accept such limitations in the software you use? As well, GNU/Linux is much easier to maintain as a few clicks updates all software in the operating system and the applications rather than you having a bunch of applications vulnerable to attack and having to do lots of re-re-reboots. Then there’s malware… In more than a decade of use of GNU/Linux on hundreds of PCs, I have never seen any malware on GNU/Linux while a high percentage of machines running that other OS have malware sapping resources.
You know you want GNU/Linux as an option when you shop for computers. Insist on it and the retailers will supply it. The manufacturers will ship it.
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On the whole, PC gaming is typically a Windows-only affair. Both Mac and Linux users have had a significantly more limited selection of games to choose from and also a more limited hardware selection too.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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A new version of the Linux kernel has been released. Numbered at version 3.9, the new release has some nifty new features, including support for SSD caching, new processor architectures, power management improvements aimed at tablets and phones, support for Chomebooks and support for Android development.
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A new Linux kernel 3.4 has been released, according to a post from Linux fellow Linus Torvalds.
Often a huge barrier for aficionados of both Tux and Android; they now play nicely as Linux kernel brings support for development on Google’s OS along with SSD caching and other Jelly Bean-sweet improvements.
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CHIP DESIGNER AMD said it is working to get IOMMU v2.5 support in the Linux kernel ahead of the first heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) chip that will come out later this year.
AMD’s upcoming Kaveri chip will be the first to support HSA, which enables the CPU and on-die GPU to access system memory. The firm told The INQUIRER that it is working with the Linux community to get IOMMU v2.5 supported in the kernel in time for the launch of its Kaveri chip.
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Support for the emerging 64-bit ARM Architecture, a.k.a. ARM64 or AArch64, will see better support with the Linux 3.10 kernel.
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Ten weeks to the day after the arrival of version 3.8, Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Monday released version 3.9 of the Linux kernel.
“This week has been very quiet, which makes me much more comfortable doing the final 3.9 release, so I guess the last -rc8 ended up working,” wrote Torvalds in the announcement email early Monday. “Because not only aren’t there very many commits here, even the ones that made it really are tiny and not pretty obscure and not very interesting.”
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Along with an assortment of other power management improvements to land with the Linux 3.10 kernel, a cpufreq driver for ARM’s big.LITTLE is being introduced. There’s also a cpufreq driver for the Exynos 5440 quad-core and the new AMD frequency sensitivity feedback support.
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I am pleased to announce The Linux Foundation is funding three Linux kernel internships through the Outreach Program for Women administered by the GNOME Foundation. These internships have a $5,000 stipend and come with a $500 travel grant to attend and speak at LinuxCon this fall. This is a great opportunity to work with a mentor and get started with kernel development, which as many articles report, is a great way to land a high-paying job.
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night announced the release of version 3.9 of the kernel. Available for download at kernel.org, Linux 3.9 brings a long list of improvements to storage, networking, file systems, drivers, virtualization, and power management.
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The developers of the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) have released version 7.6 of their tool. Among GDB’s new features are native as well as target configurations for ARM’s new AArch 64 architecture and the addition numerous new commands and options.
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A Phoronix reader, Emmanuel Deloget, has written in to share an interview he carried out on his personal blog of various ARM SoC GPU driver developers. The drivers covered include Lima (ARM Mali), GRATE (NVIDIA Tegra), Videocore (Broadcom), Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), and etna_viv (Vivante) hardware.
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The Linux Foundation offers a variety of ways to get Linux training, including online Linux training courses for those who are not able to travel to a Linux Foundation event or one of our classroom Linux training options. We recently caught up with embedded systems engineer Adrian Remonda of the FuDePAN Foundation to ask about his experience in the Linux Kernel Internals & Debugging course (LF320).
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From data centers to embedded sensors, energy use is one of the toughest issues facing computing. The Linux kernel community has already made great progress in boosting energy efficiency, but there’s still more work to be done to optimize Linux systems, with one area of focus on power-aware scheduling.
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Beyond knowing about the graphics driver changes coming for the Linux 3.10 kernel, the ALSA/sound kernel driver changes for the soon-to-open merge window are becoming more clear too.
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Systemd 202 has been released and it begin experimental work on supporting kdbus, the implementation of D-Bus within the Linux kernel. There’s also other fixes and features to this new systemd release.
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With the release of the Linux 3.9 kernel being imminent, here’s a recap of the most interesting features coming to this next Linux release.
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Graphics Stack
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The DRM graphics driver pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.10 kernel.
If you have been keeping track of Phoronix content, the pull request shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Key changes for the open-source Linux graphics drivers on the kernel-side come down to:
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Michel Dänzer of AMD has provided a set of patches that should provide for the necessary patterns and intrinsics for AMD to round out GLSL 1.30 support within their RadeonSI open-source Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards.
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One month after releasing the very first NVIDIA 319.xx Linux driver beta, NVIDIA has now released their 319.17 driver as a certified Linux driver that supports an assortment of new features.
The NVIDIA 319.12 Beta for Linux introduced support for Optimus-like functionality, initial support for RandR 1.4, improved EFI support, new hardware support, performance fixes, and a whole lot of other work.
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This new Weston back-end supports SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) remote rendering protocol as used by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on the desktop. There’s been a lot of SPICE driver activity as of late with a QXL KMS driver and talk of a potential Gallium3D wrapper driver. This new driver though isn’t out of Red Hat.
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The RadeonSI Linux driver that supports the Radeon HD 7000 series and future HD 8000 series of graphics cards can now handle compressed textures and 2D tiling.
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One week after a desktop developer meet-up, the lead developer of the KWin window manager, Martin Gräßlin, has written about the history of using KDE/KWin on the Wayland Display Server.
Martin’s blog post began by talking indirectly about Canonical abandoning Wayland in favor of Mir for future releases of Ubuntu Linux, Wayland support for KWin has been a primary goal of Martin’s for the past two years, it took a while for Wayland 1.0 to have a stable and reliable API/ABI, and then earlier this year plans were talked about the KDE/Qt5/Wayland combination.
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An extensive list of plans for the Wayland/Weston 1.2 release were shared by the project’s founder, Kristian Høgsberg.
On the Wayland mailing list, Kristian laid out his Wayland 1.2 vision. Key points from his e-mail include:
- New major releases on a quarterly basis (every 4 months) while a six month cadence was talked about long ago in the past. Kristian explains, “The motivation for this is that we have a lot of new features and new protocol in the works and a time-based release schedule is a good way to flush out those features. Instead of dragging out a release while waiting for a feature to become ready, we release on a regular schedule to make sure the features that did land get released on time.”
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At least three commits seeking to improve the performance of Intel’s open-source 3D/OpenGL Mesa driver were merged on Monday.
On the same day as bringing GL2 to Intel’s i915 Mesa driver, Eric Anholt committed a set of improvements to the Intel i965 driver that supports back from the i965 hardware up through the latest Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Valley View graphics processors. The performance improvements committed today come down to:
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Benchmarks
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While nearly all modern Intel/AMD x86 hardware is 64-bit capable, among novice Linux users the question commonly is whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of a given distribution. We have previously delivered benchmarks showing Ubuntu 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance while in this article is an updated look in seeing how the 32-bit versus 64-bit binary performance compares when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.
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One week after delivering updated Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, we have to share this morning similar results for the open-source and reverse-engineered “Nouveau” Linux graphics driver compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. While the Nouveau driver has come a long way and does support the latest Fermi and Kepler GPUs, it’s not without its share of shortcomings. Eleven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were used in this latest Phoronix comparison.
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Applications
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My last several articles have covered lots of software for doing research in the sciences. But one important area I haven’t covered in detail is the resources available for teaching the next generation of computational scientists. To fill this gap, you can use the code provided through the Open Source Physics project. This project is supported by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and it offers several different packages for doing simulations and analysis.
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Linux and other operating systems are blessed with powerful tools to retrieve and recover valuable data. However, it is not always possible to recover data on a running system. Sometimes the machine will not even boot. This might arise if the boot loader has become corrupted, there is damage to a partition, or vital operating system files have been lost. Alternatively, loss of access to the system might simply arise from a user forgetting their login password. Not being able to use the computer can be incredibly stressful. Of course, some individuals will be happy to get a computer engineer to run a diagnostic on the computer and repair the computer. However, there will inevitably be a delay in getting the machine up and running, together with a hefty invoice.
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SFXR was once one of the coolest little sound toys out there. It generates retro 8-bit sound effects – at random, with a bunch of sliders and buttons to play with. If you’re familiar with my last post exploring MIDI music production (and the techno-flavored files I was producing) you’ll see where this is going: Adding old-skool lo-fi sound effects to music tracks, quite probably using Audacity to monkey around with them.
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We try out the best photo editors on Linux
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Overdrive is one of the largest technology companies that lays down the infrastructure for libraries to loan out digital books. If you have an Android, Windows 8, or iOS device, you can read books right within its dedicated Overdrive app. Up until now, if you were a Linux user, you were often a forgotten minority.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Road Redemption takes the motorcycle combat-racing gameplay, pioneered by the Road Rash series, to the next level.
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Even if you don’t normally play video games, it’s a sure bet that you’ve heard of Atari’s 1972 arcade hit Pong. You’ve probably even played it, either in one of its many ports or in one of those arcades that also sells beer. But you’ve probably never seen it quite like this.
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As we reported in the last few days about it coming out, it has now happened! Salvation Prophecy is now available on Linux from Desura!
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Some colleagues of mine are asking users if they would pay for Linux. Given that folks pay for Windows and Mac, why wouldn’t they pay for Linux? Some of the answers so far are quite interesting. Perhaps they’re not as you’d expect.
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OpenXcom one of my favourite Open Source projects has a brand spanking new website and new release where it allows you to play the whole game!
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Linux users rejoice! Valve’s popular interactive puzzle title, Portal, is now available on Linux via the Steam client. Although the Steam Store doesn’t show the game as available for Linux yet, you can install a beta version via your Steam Library if you already own the game on any of the other platforms. Phoronix is also stating that Portal 2 will also be publicly available on Steam for Linux soon.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE Project has announced today, May 7, the immediate availability for download and update of the third maintenance release of the KDE Software Compilation 4.10 environment for Linux systems.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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While many of you, GNOME fans, are still enjoying the newly released GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, the GNOME developers are working hard on the next major version, GNOME 3.10, due for release this Autumn.
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Cinnamon, the popular GNOME Shell fork developed by the Linux Mint crew, has released a major update to their software stack.
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GOCL has been introduced, a new GLib/GObject wrapper to OpenCL for GNOME applications. This new wrapper library seeks to make it easier for GNOME software to take advantage of OpenCL.
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Desklets, a new screensaver and a Spices management component are among the major improvements of the just released Cinnamon 1.8. Like KDE plasmoids and Android widgets, these desklets can be positioned on a desktop screen’s background to display information. The new version includes three default desklets: a launcher, a clock and a photo frame; further community-developed desklets are available on the project’s web page.
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The now defunct Fuduntu team has come together to create a new distribution which they initially called FuSE Linux which was complementing Fedora and openSUSE. The distribution will be based on openSUSE, one of the most popular GNU/Linux based distribution which also contributes heavily to core open source technologies such as the Linux Kernel, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice and much more.
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Usually we say enterprises are the home for Linux operating systems across the globe. Apart from being used inside the companies for managing servers and databases, today Linux operating systems have turned out to be quite user-friendly that they are now used across homes.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS was born as a set of RPMs for Mandrake Linux. Remember Mandrake Linux? It was one of the first distros to aim for ease-of-use and user-friendliness with nice tools for system administration, a slick graphical installer, and a full complement of drivers and multimedia codecs. My first Linux was Red Hat 5, but Mandrake (initially based on Red Hat) was the first distro that gave me video acceleration and good video quality, and didn’t choke on my fancy Promise Ultra66 IDE controller. That’s right, 66 screaming megabytes per second transfer speed, which was double the poky 33MB/s of the onboard controllers of that era. Our modern SATA buses deliver gigabytes per second, but back then megabytes were enough, and we liked it that way.
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Red Hat Family
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After tallying the votes in a naming contest that kicked off in October 2012, leading Linux vendor Red Hat has announced that the product formerly known as the JBoss Application Server (AS) will henceforth be known as WildFly.
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Red Hat OpenStack, the open source company’s next big product, will grab a massive spotlight during Red Hat Summit (June 11-14, Boston). For channel partners and cloud services providers (CSPs), the summit could provide new clues about when Red Hat OpenStack will actually launch, and which CSPs and enterprises will be among the first customers to embrace the new platform.
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The GlusterFS distributed filesystem community is expanding to take in a range of other storage-related, and generally Gluster-related, projects. The change was announced by Red Hat, who acquired Gluster Inc, the company behind the cloud/cluster-oriented distributed filesystem, in October 2011. Since then, Red Hat has maintained the Gluster Community at Gluster.org while marketing the GlusterFS software as its Storage Server.
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Fedora
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An alpha version of Fedora 19 has been released, so it’s a good time to take a sneak peek at what Fedora 19 will have to offer users. As always you should note that alpha releases like Fedora 19 should be considered for testing purposes and fun only. You should not rely on it as your daily desktop distro.
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Fedora developers are running another “Graphics Test Week” and are seeking your help in evaluating the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau graphics drivers.
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Debian Family
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Just short of two weeks after the big release of Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’, I had Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ arrive on my desk for testing. I have a huge amount of respect for Debian, as do most other Linux users. It’s been around since the very beginnings of the Linux revolution in 1993, just short of 20 years. And it’s contributions to GNU, Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) and Linux over its many years make Debian one of the real-true grandfathers of Linux and is most probably the most respected Linux operating systems to date.
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Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) is out and it’s time for another review of this venerated linux project.
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Derivatives
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The recent release of Debian 7.0, also known as “Wheezy”, has triggered distribution updates of CrunchBang and aptosid. CrunchBang project leader Philip Newborough has moved CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf”, which has been in development for over a year and according to Newborough is likely to be “the most thoroughly tested #! release to date”, to stable status. Newborough, who is also known under his online handle of “corenominal”, has rebuilt the images of CrunchBang 11 for the occasion of the Wheezy release and the new images can be downloaded from the CrunchBang site.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s the end of April, so that means that there’s a new release of Ubuntu. Well, actually, no – it means that there are eight of them. Don’t like standard Ubuntu’s Mac-OS-X-like Unity desktop? Here’s where to look.
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The stable release of Ubuntu 13.04 became available for download today, with Canonical promising performance and graphical improvements to help prepare the operating system for convergence across PCs, phones, and tablets.
“Performance on lightweight systems was a core focus for this cycle, as a prelude to Ubuntu’s release on a range of mobile form factors,” Canonical said in an announcement today. “As a result 13.04 delivers significantly faster response times in casual use, and a reduced memory footprint that benefits all users.”
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I can clearly remember the day when Canonical announced Ubuntu for Android. My first reaction was – finally, the true convergence is here! The ability to turn smartphone into a full-blown PC is something we’ve been hearing about for quite some time now. And Canonical was first to make that dream into a reality. Except that the mentioned software was never released to the general public. Instead, the company decided to pitch OEMs and allow them to pre-install the application on their devices. Bad idea, considering the tight relations major OEMs have with carriers.
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The Linux kernel zRAM module allows for creating RAM-based compressed block devices and for common situations can reduce or eliminate paging on disk. The zRAM feature can be particularly beneficial for systems with limited amounts of system memory. It’s quite easy to setup zRAM on Ubuntu Linux, so in this article are some before and after benchmarks.
For some cursory benchmarks this weekend, from an old Apple Mac Mini with 1GB of system memory and Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 processor and i945 graphics, benchmarks were conducted atop Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. A variety of system benchmarks were carried out immediately after a clean Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” development installation and then again after setting up zRAM.
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The Canonical developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 13.04 based Ubuntu Touch images. These “Raring Ringtail” images, available for the Galaxy Nexus (codename: maguro), Nexus 4 (mako), Nexus 10 (manta) and Nexus 7 (grouper) – the four officially supported devices – have been described by some as “beta” images, but are in fact regression test images to ensure the transition from basing Ubuntu Touch on 12.10 to 13.04 goes smoothly.
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Ubuntu 13.04 is an upgrade that’s a downer. Not that Raring Ringtail is a total failure — it’s just that it lacks any real electricity. Yes, it is easy to use and comes preloaded with lots of apps. However, hardcore Linux enthusiasts will give this distro a pass and wait for the next long-term release.
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Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth has really big, plans to put Ubuntu on your smartphone, on your tablet and (via OpenStack). What he doesn’t offer is details on revenue.
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Flavours and Variants
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Good news for KDE fans, Kubuntu 13.04 is now available for free download. This release brings the latest stable release of KDE’s Plasma Workspaces and Applications 4.10 which brings a new screen locker, Qt Quick notifications, color correction in Gwenview and faster indexing in the semantic desktop.
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The release of Ubuntu 13.04 is less than a week away, bringing with it some refinements to the Unity interface that users either love or hate. But Ubuntu with Unity is far from the only choice for Linux lovers or those looking to avoid Windows and OS X.
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Linux system developer Canonical launched the new UbuntuKylin operating system, targeting the Chinese market.
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There is no denying that Raspberry Pi is at the top of the heap when it comes to mind-share — and profit-share — of small computers. The Raspberry Pi has revolutionized not only the way we think about small computers, but has also given us a glimpse into a future of nearly disposable, single-duty, utilitarian appliances. But the Pi does have it’s competitors, many of which we’ve reported on here at The Powerbase. One of those competitors is the Beagle Board, and for it, a fully bootable SNES appliance has been made.
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While we wait for the giants to play their hands, a number of Android-powered smartwatches are already on the market, and there’s at least one (Leikr) that runs Linux. The accompanying slideshow reveals devices of note, as well as two intriguing open source, Kickstarter-funded watches that don’t run a formal OS but offer hooks to Linux and Android: the MetaWatch Frame and the Pebble.
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Adlink announced a pair of resistive touchpanels that run Linux, Android, or Windows 7 on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3715 ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The 7-inch, 1024 x 600-pixel SP-7W61 and the 10.4-inch, 800 x 600 SP-1061 are equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, serial, and USB connectivity, and consume only 5.9 to 6.1 Watts.
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Via Technologies announced a tiny, low-power Pico-ITX SBC with optional 3G connectivity and battery power support, aimed at in-vehicle and mobile applications. The VAB-600 is based on an 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip (SOC) with on-chip graphics acceleration, offers Ethernet, WiFi, and 3G connectivity, operates from 0 to 60° C, and runs either embedded Linux or Android 4.x.
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Abalta Technologies announced an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) solution that inexpensively mirrors browser content from smartphones or tablets to Linux-enabled “head” units. The company’s Weblink IVI demo consists of a client app running on a Raspberry Pi-based simulated head unit acting as a remote touchscreen for WiFi- or USB-connected smartphones running a companion server app.
Abalta says its Weblink client/server technology can work with any touchscreen or button-controlled IVI display and can be integrated with existing IVI equipment. The Weblink IVI demo setup runs a Linux Weblink client application on a $25 Raspberry Pi Model A single-board computer (SBC).
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STMicroelectronics has released ready-to-use software drivers for communication with Linux systems,
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STMicroelectronics has released ready-to-use software drivers for communication with Linux systems.
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There’s a new player in the low-cost, ARM-based, mini-computer space. The BeagleBone Black is a $45 device which can run Linux or Android software and which can be used as a barebones computer or as the brains of a hardware project such as a robot, a home automation system, or more.
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Phones
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Today, Samsung is announcing a 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 called the Galaxy Tab 3, but to our eyes, it doesn’t look much different from the current 7-inch Tab 2. The previous Tab’s 1 GHz dual-core processor gets upgraded to a 1.2GHz chip, and the newer tablet offers 16GB of internal storage as an option — its predecessor was limited to 8GB — but the 3-megapixel rear camera and 1.3-megapixel front camera stay the same. The resolution of the Tab 3′s LCD is also unchanged at 1024 x 600, which isn’t much of a match for the 1280 x 800 display on the Nexus 7. So far there aren’t any details on price, but Samsung says the Wi-Fi-only Tab 3 will be available beginning in May, followed by a 3G model for making calls and browsing the web untethered sometime in June.
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Finnish mobile startup Jolla has appointed another new CEO and has added the former lead from HP’s now defunct WebOS group to its board.
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Android
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The recent Google app store software update has turned Barnes & Noble’s HD e-reader into a good, low-end Android tablet.
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Weight and activity trackers are an emerging trend, assisted by wearable devices like Nike’s FuelBand, the Fitbit, and Withings’ Smart Body Analyzer — but they don’t come cheap. Smartphone apps may have helped users track their fitness for a little or no cost, but until recently there was no easy way of measuring your weight and automatically uploading that data to your chosen fitness service.
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Shezhen, China-based Promate Technologies claims to have created the world’s first tablet-projector. The “LumiTab” sports a modest 1024×600 7-inch IPS screen, runs Android 4.2, and uses a Texas Instruments digital-light-processing (DLP) chip to render “incredibly sharp 1080p HD images” on walls and projection screens, according to the company.
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Not satisfied with the speed of your Android tablet? Just wait a while…and then purchase a new model with one of the three yet-to-be-released processors featured here.
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In the last Android tutorial, we looked at handling a touchscreen event. This only handled a single pointer, though. Android can handle multiple pointers at the same time, reflecting what happens when you have more than one finger on the screen at the same time. This is how multi-touch gestures (like pinch-zoom) work.
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Combining the GPS, timing and audio-processing available in Android/Linux, the problem comes down to maths and geometry. So, Android/Linux does save lives.
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Jelly Bean is now the only version of Android that is experiencing growth, which is good news for developers because it suggests that the ecosystem is getting less fragmented.
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Apple posted its March-quarter earnings on Tuesday afternoon, which means the flood gates are open for market research firms looking to detail the global smartphone and tablet markets in Q1 2013. Strategy Analytics was among the first to start pushing out numbers and tablets took center stage in a report released late on Tuesday. While Apple managed a great quarter where iPad sales are concerned, it wasn’t enough to stave off the growing army of low-cost Android slates and Apple saw big losses this past quarter in terms of global market share.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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A new version of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) operating system has been released. The Fedora-based Linux distribution now supports the forthcoming OLPC XO-4 Touch laptop.
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Barnes & Noble won’t be shutting down its own content and apps store — though we imagine most users will prefer to get apps through Google Play than through B&N. Apps previously purchased through the Nook store will still be available. The two tablets will also be upgraded to use the Chrome browser and, as full participants in the Google Play ecosystem, also get access to Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. The decision sets the Nook apart from Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, which are decidedly not part of the Google Play ecosystem and instead rely on Amazon’s own app store.
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Mobile PC shipments are expected to hit 762 million by 2017, thanks to demand for tablets and touch-screen notebooks, according to NPD DisplaySearch.
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Human beings are still worth cherishing, even if the computer can do it all, argues Simon
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The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has initiated a competition with a $50,000 prize to develop an essential component for the OpenFlow software defined networking (SDN). The ONF is dedicated to promoting SDN, where the routing of traffic in a network is independent of the underlying hardware using the OpenFlow protocol. OpenFlow is at the heart of many plans for software defined networking; for example, the recently announced OpenDaylight project uses the protocol as part of its architecture. The Open Networking Foundation’s board members include Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft, and it has an industry-wide membership.
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Open-source software throws a wrench into traditional software evaluation criteria. Here’s what to look for and what you’ll be expected to contribute.
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KVM
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IBM is not at all new to virtualization, but with its shift last month to an open source cloud architecture, the company has put a fresh effort into boosting market share for KVM, the open source Linux “Kernel-based Virtual Machine” for x86 servers.
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KVM and open virtualization are being rapidly adopted as end users look for lower-cost, enterprise hypervisors. One the major use cases for KVM is to virtualize and consolidate Linux workloads, and the pre-integration of KVM in major Linux distributions makes it easy for Linux enterprise end users to adopt KVM.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has made changes to the developer edition of Chrome running on Windows, shuffling around categories on its Chrome Web Store. Now, the “Apps” category only means the new class of packaged apps that are installed in Chrome. Packaged apps are written in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS and designed to behave much more like native apps, most notably by having the ability to run without an internet connection.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 20.0 — and a couple earlier versions I think — has a nifty little feature of its “Inspector” tool that allows you to view HTML elements as 3D objects. This lets you to graphically see the DOM structure and how elements lay against one another. As soon as the feature appeared I knew what I wanted to do with it, I wanted to use it for something it wasn’t intended for: 3D Modeling.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Databases
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Version 4.0 of phpMyAdmin, the popular web-based administration tool for MySQL databases, has been released. This latest version introduces a reworked user interface that replaces the somewhat dated HTML frames with a new tree style navigation implemented with JavaScript. Aside from the new user interface, the developers have also fixed a number of bugs and have made the documentation for the software more accessible.
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CMS
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The type of brute force attack that’s being used in this case is fairly common and is relatively easy to defend against.
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Business
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Tristan Barnum, a former Digium leader, has joined Telcentris as VP of marketing. Barnum is well-known as a pioneer of Asterisk, the open source IP BPX, within business circles and the IT channel. So what is Barnum up to at Telcentris? Here are some educated guesses from The VAR Guy.
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Identity and access management (IAM) is an integral part of online security across every industry. It is the power of effective IAM solutions that give responsible enterprises the ability to validate the identity of an individual and control their access in the organization, protecting data, information, and privacy of its employees and customers.
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BSD
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We knew it was coming and now DragonFlyBSD 3.4 has been officially released. DragonFlyBSD 3.4 brings with it a new packaging system, a new USB stack, a new default compiler, performance improvements, and more.
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Public Services/Government
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Governments of all sizes can benefit themselves and their constituents by using GNU/Linux operating systems on servers and PCs and Android/Linux operating systems on tablets and smartphones. Similarly, Apache web server, PostgreSQL database, SugarCRM customer relations, WordPress blogging, and LibreOffice are key applications capable of industrial strength information technology at the lowest cost. The Government of the United Kingdom runs its whole public domain on WordPress. The UK plans to replace much of its bureaucracy with a network of servers cutting the cost of transactions by as much as fifty times over person to person interaction. The UK plans to make Free Software (Open Source, in their terminology) the default for all changes in IT. Typically, it costs about half as much money to run IT with Free Software as with non-free software. Often savings are immediate with less need to upgrade hardware or to fight malware.
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The Swiss government is studying if it can organise procurement of open source services similar to the way it is done for Sweden’s public administrations. The Swiss government’s Federal IT Steering Unit FITSU funded the translation into German of Sweden’s open source procurement framework.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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At Open Source Junction 4 we invited attendees to present their hardware projects. Some were open source hardware, while some used consumer hardware components in conjunction with open source software to provide an innovative solution to a problem.
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Not all businesses can stand behind their products, and even fewer can stand on top of them. At LulzBot, it’s not uncommon to find the multi-talented and seriously committed team mounting their 3D printers upside down or bumping along Colorado mountain roads with a functioning 3D printer in tow—all in the interest of testing the durability and strength of their product under the most extreme conditions. And that’s only part of what makes LulzBot different.
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May 6th, 2013 will stand out in the memory of anyone involved in the 3D printing community as the day that the mass media, for better or for worse, really took notice of this rapidly evolving field. That’s because as of right now, anyone in the United States can legally download and print their own fully functioning handgun.
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Open Home Control Many open source home automation projects have relied on driving proprietary devices, but the newly created Open Home Control project aims to change that by creating a framework for hardware devices that can be integrated with open sourced home automation platforms such as the respected openHAB software.
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Programming
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While LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler already has feature complete C++11 support and the developers have already been working on C++14 features, there are some open projects where the GCC alternative is in need of some assistance.
As pointed out within the latest SVN trunk for the Clang compiler code-base in their documentation (or within the Git mirror), there’s several open work items that could use some development help. Here’s some of the highlights for the most pressing Clang projects seeking some love:
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This April marks both the eighth anniversary of Git and the fifth anniversary of GitHub, so it should come as no great surprise that the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system has been the focus of extra attention this month.
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One of the prominent features to be introduced with the LLVM 3.3 release this summer is the SLP Vectorizer. Introduced in the LLVM 3.2 release was the LLVM Loop Vectorizer for vectorizing loops while the new SLP Vectorizer is about optimizing straight-line code by merging multiple scalars into vectors.
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Standards/Consortia
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The move will enable better applications and analytics for the so-called Internet of things. Cisco, Eclipse Foundation, Eurotech, IBM, Kaazing, M2Mi, Red Hat, Software AG, and Tibco, members of the OASIS open standards consortium, will develop one version of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol.
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Science
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Robots inspired by the animal kingdom are already being designed to mimic plenty of creatures, from speedy cheetahs to slithering serpents. Now, researchers are welcoming yet another bio-inspired robot to join the menagerie: a ‘bot built to emulate the movements of baby sea turtles.
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Hardware
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Some of these characteristics are no doubt because China is still a rapidly growing market for IT but some derive from frugality and energy of the society. No one in China assumes a free lunch. No one assumes it is OK to waste resources.
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Health/Nutrition
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A federal safety official says that 79 gallons of “very slightly radioactive water” from a leaky tank at the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant spilled into Lake Michigan.
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Peru is the first country in the Americas to ban genetically modified foods, putting its food policy closer to that of Europe, than the United States or many of its South American neighbors.
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Security
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Some researchers doubt the effectiveness of Stuxnet. That seems almost immaterial. Where the wide publicity given to Chinese attacks ensures a bogeyman, the success of Stuxnet—and the low cost of developing such weapons—has become a model for other countries to follow.
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The hacker collective “Hack the Planet” (HTP) has claimed responsibility for an attack on MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) computer systems in late January, in which it claims to have briefly taken control of the university’s domain, redirected email traffic, and obtained administrator access to all .edu domains. HTP also claims to have compromised web servers for other sites, including security tool Nmap, network security service Sucuri, IT security company Trend Micro, and network analysis tool Wireshark.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Political motive revealed after Cambridge University first claimed scientist’s non-attendance was on medical grounds
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Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
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Congress isn’t actually stopping him.
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With both the CIA and MI6 secretly providing ‘ghost money’ bribes to the Afghan political establishment, it’s likely that Afghans will increasingly support a resurgent Taliban and the drug trade will be further propped up.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has recently been criticized for taking ‘ghost money’ from the CIA and MI6. The sums are unknown – for the usual reasons of ‘national security’ – but are estimated to have been in the tens of millions of dollars. While this is nowhere near the eye-bleeding $12 billion shipped over to Iraq on pallets in the wake of the invasion a decade ago, it is still a significant amount.
And how has this money been spent? Certainly not on social projects or rebuilding initiatives. Rather, the reporting indicates, the money has been funneled to Karzai’s cronies as bribes in a corrupt attempt to buy influence in the country.
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CIA spooks regularly review spy fiction for a classified in-house journal, rating John le Carré above American writers for his veracity, reports Jon Stock.
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Fox News is falsely suggesting a new Weekly Standard article proves the CIA didn’t link the Benghazi attacks to an anti-Islam YouTube video. In fact, CIA talking points obtained by the conservative magazine actually demonstrate the intelligence community believed there was a link between the attacks and reactions to the video.
Conservative writer Stephen Hayes’ piece for The Weekly Standard reported that an initial September 14 draft of talking points by the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis stated that members of an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group were involved in the Benghazi attacks, but that point was later removed by administration officials. Hayes provided images of various versions of the CIA’s talking points, including a bullet in “Version 1″ stating: “We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.”
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The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has continuously refused to refer to Chechen and Islamic Emirate terrorists operating in Russia as «terrorists». NSA analysis reports of signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts of Russian police, Federal Security Bureau (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Russian military communications, including radio, landline and cellular telephone, fax, text message, and fax, have, since 2003, referred to Chechen and North Caucasus terrorists as «guerrillas». Prior to that year, TOP SECRET Codeword internal NSA directives stated that Chechen terrorists were to be called «rebels».
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He said an arms cache in the house exploded but did not identify the suspects killed.
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…strike was the second in less than a week against suspected members…
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BRYANT: Now, I really have no clue what I’m doing with my life. Going to school at the university through the GI Bill trying to figure out the next step of my life at the moment.
MCEVERS: You’ve been diagnosed with PTSD, posttraumatic stress, yeah?
BRYANT: Yes.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The European Commission is on the verge of a trade war with China over the import of solar panels worth 21bn euros (£18bn) a year.
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Finance
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Earlier this month I wrote about Bitcoin Mining coming to the open-source Radeon Linux GPU driver. In the weeks since, Tom Stellard of AMD has made more improvements to the AMD R600 LLVM back-end that benefit the performance of Bitcoin mining.
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Censorship
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Internet activity in Syria dropped off sharply on Tuesday afternoon, according to various sources.
Internet monitoring firm Renesys tweeted this afternoon that it confirmed a “loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC. BGP routes down, inbound traces failing.”
Google later tweeted “Google services inaccessible in Syria,” with a link to its Transparency Report, which showed a complete drop in activity from the region shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern (left).
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The CIA on Tuesday selected a man to become the agency’s next director of the National Clandestine Service, a key position that involves overseeing spy operations around the world, over the woman currently serving in the role on an acting basis.
News organizations acknowledged on Tuesday that the officers’ identities are hardly a secret in Washington. But they typically withhold the names of undercover officers as a matter of policy and did so in this case, with The Washington Post, Associated Press and The New York Times choosing not to identify the man. Similarly, the woman — who would have been a controversial choice given her ties to torture tactics used in interrogations during the Bush years — remains undercover and was not identified Tuesday or in articles on her interim role a couple months back.
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OpenDNS CTO Dan Hubbard appeared on Bloomberg TV this morning to discuss the technology behind Syria’s recent Internet outage. He discusses the likelihood of government involvement vs. technical failure, and shares details on how online behavior differed after Syria’s Internet came back online.
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Privacy
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“A German court rejected eight out of 15 provisions in Apple’s general privacy policy and terms of data use on Tuesday, claiming that the practices of the Cupertino, Calif. company deviate too much from German laws (Google translation of German original). According to German law, recognized consumer groups can sue companies over illegal terms and conditions. Apple asks for ‘global consent’ to use customer data on its website, but German law insists that clients know specific details about what their data will be used for and why.”
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ORG, our supporters, Liberty, Privacy International, No2ID and Big Brother Watch will be celebrating a victory today, with the withdrawal of the Snoopers’ Charter from the government’s legislative programme.
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The draft Communications Data Bill has been vetoed by Nick Clegg and is not set to feature in Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech, which has been welcomed by civil liberties campaigners.
But a senior Liberal Democrat has accused his leader of putting party politics above national security. David Thompson reports.
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The EU Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) provides an obligation for providers of publicly available electronic communications services and of public communications networks to retain traffic and location data for six months up to two years for the purpose of the investigation, detection, and prosecution of serious crime. Considering potential uses and misuses of retained data such as traffic analysis, social network analysis, and data mining, this paper examines the suitability, necessity, and proportionality of the interference with the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection as guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
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Civil Rights
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Members of the Anonymous “hacktivist” collective have launched OpGtmo, a full-bore campaign aimed at convincing the U.S. government to shut down the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
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THEY were labelled traitors and barred from state employment, but yesterday the Irish government formally apologised for its treatment of thousands of men who deserted the Irish army to fight in the Second World War.
An estimated 60,000 men from Ireland served in the British Army, Royal Navy or RAF between 1939 and 1945. Of those, nearly 5,000 deserted the Irish armed forces to join the fight against Nazi Germany.
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Document shows agency requested removal of interrogation scene with dog, and shots of operatives partying with AK47
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Screenwriter Mark Boal asked to take out scenes showing Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
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Lawyer who drafted White House drone policy says US would rather kill suspects than send them to Cuban detention centre
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…sparked an international outcry and a fierce domestic debate…
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Witness testimony undermines administration claims that only al-Qaida leaders are drone targets
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Pursuing criminal hacking groups is high on the FBI’s list of priorities—but the bureau is adopting some hacking techniques of its own. And a Texas judge isn’t happy about it.
On Monday, a judge denied an FBI request to install a spy Trojan on a computer in an unknown location in order to track down a suspected fraudster. The order rejecting the request revealed that the FBI wanted to use the surveillance tool to covertly infiltrate the computer and take photographs of its user through his or her webcam. The plan also included recording Internet activity, user location, email contents, chat messaging logs, photographs, documents, and passwords.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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People seem really good at forgetting history. While most people realize that Google bought YouTube early on in that company’s existence, they tend to forget that this was, in part, because YouTube was beating the pants off of Google’s own online service called Google Video. The big difference? Google Video’s launch focused very much on selling videos and using annoying DRM that had to check in with a server any time you wanted to watch. It was a complete and total failure, which probably cost an even larger amount when you realize it made Google more desperate to buy YouTube.
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