03.24.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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03.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Drones
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Opposition to the deadly US drone strikes in Yemen has gained momentum after the death of a boy who was psychologically affected by a strike in 2012 in the port city of Shiher in Hadramout province.
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That war technology has uses beyond war doesn’t justify the funding of technologies whose core mission is war.
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Global human rights violators have found a large loophole in International Law and International Humanitarian Law. Exploiting this loophole they have developed armed drones to kill civilians with impunity. For the sake of the continuation of the human race, these vile killers must be condemned and stopped.
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President Obama said last May that he was placing limits on the use of drones in foreign countries, and senior administration officials have said the United States cannot exist in an inchoate state of war against terrorists everywhere (the sort President George W. Bush fantasized about) But there’s still no cut and dry, publicly available legal framework setting out when and where the government can launch drone strikes.
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The United States is refusing to participate in UN Human Rights Council talks about greater accountability for human rights violations in covert drone wars.
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Censorship
Civil Rights
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Ford was quickly convicted. At the sentencing phase of his trial, the lack of competent defense counsel again played a factor. The best mitigation witnesses who might have testified for him lived out of state—but Ford’s lawyers were unsure about the process for subpoenaing them to testify in Louisiana. It took that all-white jury less than three hours to recommend a sentence of death for the man they believed murdered Isadore Rozeman.
[...]
Just before Glenn Ford walked out of prison late Tuesday afternoon, the state of Louisiana—which had wrongfully charged, convicted, and incarcerated him for 30 years—gave him a $20 dollar debit card for his troubles. (As recently as 2011, the state gave only $10 to inmates leaving prison.) When you combine the debit card with the balance in Ford’s prison account, the total he received upon his departure from Angola was $20.04. He left, too, with some photographs and with his medicine, all in two small boxes. He left behind his headphones.
Venezuela
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Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it.
I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the right-wing protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city.
Ukraine
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Russia and the United States have each imposed new sanctions on the other over the crisis in Ukraine. President Obama made the announcement on Thursday.
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Espionage Against China
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The new portion of revelations from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, published by Der Spiegel and The New York Times, has exposed the great interest of the US secret service in obtaining data from China.
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Chinese telecom and internet company Huawei defended is independence on Sunday and said it would condemn any infiltration of its servers by the U.S. National Security Agency if reports of such activities by the NSA were true.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has infiltrated servers in the headquarters of Chinese telecommunications and internet giant Huawei Technologies Co, obtaining sensitive information and monitoring the communications of top executives, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
The newspaper said its report on the operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was based on NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former agency contractor who since last year has leaked data revealing sweeping U.S. surveillance activities. The German magazine Der Spiegel also reported on the documents.
Privacy
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Executives from Facebook, Google and Yahoo invited to Oval Office discussion amid continued frustration over lack of action
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Do read the press cover on the launch of the new Google Chromecast TV dongle . In my blog entry on the breaking of the “Social Contract” that underpins public acceptance of the way the Internet works, I mentioned the reaction at a CTF meeting when we learned that smart TV licenses require you to give permission to transmit data on your viewing habits to anywhere in the world. The gathering pace of the convergence of the worlds of the TV, mobile phone, personal computer and Internet, often with no off-switch to protect against 24 by 7 surveillance, is now truly transformative.
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US President Barack Obama has reassured internet and tech CEOs that his government is committed to protecting the people’s privacy, as he tried to allay their growing concern about the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency.
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With the troves of extremely valuable personal information collected by social media giants, it’s likely—if not already occurring—that foreign spies have infiltrated several Silicon Valley companies in the hopes of accessing your/our data, according to leading cyber security strategist Menny Barzilay.
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Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.
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Federal Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola denied a US government request earlier this month for a search and seizure warrant, targeting electronic data stored on Apple Inc. property.
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Internet firm is known to be unhappy about snooping and would be under no obligation to hand over material under Irish laws
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Australia’s Attorney-General’s department wants new laws to force users and providers of encrypted internet communications services to decode any data intercepted by authorities.
The proposal is buried in a submission (pdf) by the department to a Senate inquiry on revision of the Telecommunications Interception Act.
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A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.
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She points out that she is not alone in suffering from the UK government’s absurdly broad definition of “terrorism”: Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained for nine hours at London’s Heathrow airport, and Snowden’s lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, was interrogated there too. But the knock-on effects for journalism in the UK are particularly serious:
If Britain is going to investigate journalists as terrorists take and destroy our documents, force us to give up passwords and answer questions — how can we be sure we can protect our sources? But this precedent is now set; no journalist can be certain that if they leave, enter or transit through the UK this will not happen to them.
One likely consequence of this is that international journalists will avoid passing through the UK on the way to their final destinations. More seriously, they may be unwilling to enter the UK to visit. Sadly, given the UK’s increasingly besmirched reputation as a beacon of civilization with a free and effective press, that’s likely to be viewed by the government there as more of a feature than a bug.
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A PETITION that asks for the entire US government to be removed and replaced with technical people and Eric Schmidt as CEO is not very close to its 100,000 target.
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Journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary is the winner of the 2014 Google Digital Activism Award. Choudhary is the mind behind CGNet Swara (Voice of Chhattisgarh), a mobile phone service allowing people to post and listen to local reports in their local language using basic cellphones.
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03.21.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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After Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote talk at SXSW, he answered a question about the controversial plan to add DRM to next version of HTML. HTML 5, a standard currently under debate at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the latest battleground in the long-running war over the design of general-purpose computers. Berners-Lee defended the proposition, and claimed that without it, more of the Web would be locked up in un-searchable, unlinkable formats like Flash.
Some in the entertainment industry have long harboured fantasies about redesigning computers to disobey their owners, as part of a profit-maximisation strategy that depends on being able to charge you piecemeal for the right to use the files on your hard-drive.
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Apple does not support the Trusted Platform Module [9] that Microsoft will require all PC makers to support starting next year…
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Keurig is setting itself up to attempt a type of coffee “DRM” on the pods used in its coffee-making machines, according to a report from Techdirt. Keurig’s next-gen machines would be unable to interact with third-party coffee pods, thus locking customers into buying only the Keurig-branded K-cups or those of approved partners.
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Nintendo fans, mark your calendars for May 20, 2014. As Nintendo announced yesterday, that’s the last day you’ll be able to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play hundreds of online games on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Single-player modes for those games will still work, of course, but any parts of the games that require an Internet connection will be completely non-functional in a matter of months.
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The Unlocking Consumer Choice Act (H.R. 1123), which was introduced in March by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was widely supported by members on both sides of the aisle.
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Humble feel it would harm their reputation to ask a developer to sit out and wait for the next bundle for the sake of a Linux version.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Censorship
Traffic
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While Google Fiber has managed to get ISPs to compete in the areas it’s deployed, the project has also managed to spawn a new, misleading but entertaining phenomenon I’ve affectionately labeled “fiber to the press release.” In a fiber to the press release deployment, a carrier (usually one with a history of doing the bare minimum on upgrades) proudly proclaims that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps broadband. The announcement will contain absolutely no hard specifics on how many people will get the upgrades, but the press will happily parrot the announcement and state that “ISP X” has suddenly joined the ultra-fast broadband race. Why spend money on a significant deployment when you can have the press help you pretend you did?
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Europe
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In what some industry observers are calling a “Back-to-the-Future” moment, the need for faster and wider pipes to deliver video and other data-intense applications is driving a raft of tie-ups between mobile and cable operators that is only expected to accelerate.
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- iophk: “It’s not so much that it would create a fast lane, but that it creates artificially slow lanes which make once normal service look fast in comparison. Can the proposal be pruned of noxious riders or is it a poison pill for the otherwise consumer-friendly proposal?”
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- iophk: “Looks like certain interests are learning now to use riders on legislation.”
Control
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Community leaders in Lexington are the latest to stand at a fork in the broadband road. In September, the franchise agreement between the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and Time Warner Cable expired, resulting in a month-to-month agreement continuation. As they negotiate a new contract, local citizens have called for consideration of a municipal network.
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On a sleepy Friday afternoon last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce dropped what seemed, to many, like a bombshell: It intends to transition its coordinating role over the Internet’s domain name system—those web addresses you type into your browser—to the global Internet community.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Mass Surveillance
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In breaking the cycle, the implications of a true decentralized social network are profound.
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The debate Edward Snowden envisioned when he revealed the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans has taken a bad turn. Instead of a careful examination of what the NSA does, the legality of its actions, what risks it takes for what gains, and how effective the agency has been in its stated mission of protecting Americans, we increasingly have government officials or retired versions of the same demanding — quite literally — Snowden’s head and engaging in the usual fear-mongering over 9/11. They have been aided by a chorus of pundits, columnists, and present as well as former officials offering bumper-sticker slogans like “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” all the while claiming our freedom is in direct conflict with our security.
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Ledgett said the NSA’s core problem was that it was lousy at PR, rather than that it was invading innocent people’s privacy. The bigwig said that the former US President James Madison, one of the key writers of the US Constitution, “would be proud” that the checks and balances he helped install still worked in today’s digital age.
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Staff at the United States’ National Security Agency reportedly “hunted” system administrators because they felt doing so would yield passwords that enabled easier surveillance.
So says The Intercept, which claims this document came its way thanks to one E. Snowden, late of Moscow.
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The latest revelation from the cache of Snowden documents shows that the NSA targets sysadmins to gain access to the infrastructure that they are responsible for.
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A new report from The Intercept reveals that the NSA has been hunting and hacking system administrators the world over in order to gain access to the networks they control.
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NSA general counsel Rajesh De says big tech companies like Yahoo and Google provided ‘full assistance’ in legally mandated collection of data
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The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording every phone call made in a foreign country, according to new leaks by Edward Snowden.
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I’m seeing a bunch of folks passing around a story by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian, claiming that tech companies lied about their “denials” of PRISM. The story is incredibly misleading. Ackerman is one of the best reporters out there on the intelligence community, and I can’t recall ever seeing a story that I think he got wrong, but this is one. But the storyline is so juicy, lots of folks, including the usual suspects are quick to pile on without bothering to actually look at the details, insisting that this is somehow evidence of the tech companies lying.
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The deputy head of the NSA spying agency accused fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Thursday of displaying “amazing arrogance” in revealing US eavesdropping techniques.
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The German Bundestag announced it will investigate surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency and its foreign partners, as well as whether any German officials knew of the spying that targeted the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Germany’s Bundestag is taking a close look at Western spying activities in Germany. Spectacular results are not expected from the parliamentary inquiry, as witnesses are likely to stonewall.
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Orange has been cooperating allegedly illegally for years with France’s main intelligence agency (the DGSE). According to a newly found report by Edward Snowden and an investigation by Le Monde, the DGSE was given access to all of Orange’s data (not just metadata).
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Thankfully, there are some Americans willing to stand up and do something to slow the National Security Agency’s (NSA) construction of the surveillance state.
In Utah, for example, a group of activists is working to cut off the supply of water to the NSA’s massive Utah Data Center located near Bluffdale.
Drones
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The United States apparently wants nothing to do with a United Nations Human Rights Council discussion on whether the country’s drone strikes may violate international human rights law.
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The revelation comes from a high-level review of a complaint that the £23m BT communications line supported drone missions that had accidentally killed between 426 and 1005 civilians in the last decade in the course of strikes on suspected insurgents, according to estimates of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
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A woman dressed in a black hijab is highlighted by the glare from a computer screen as she works with forensic architects in digitally recreating her home, the scene of a drone strike in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, Pakistan where five men, one of them her brother-in-law, were directly hit and killed on Oct. 4, 2010. This is the spot where she had laid out a rug in the courtyard, she explains, and where her guests sat one evening when the missile dove into their circle, leaving a blackened dent in the ground and scattering flesh that later, she and her husband had to pick up from off of the ground so they could bury their dead. Morbidly, the reconstruction of a drone strike is similar – the gathering of flecks of information when nothing else is available: through satellite imagery and video, the length of a building’s shadow, the pattern of shrapnel marks on a wall, and the angle of a photo, can help forensic architects determine where a missile struck and determine how it led to civilian deaths.
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With drone strikes, not only is collateral damage recognized as a possible likelihood; it has become an accepted part of our foreign policy. Not only is America firing on citizens of sovereign nations, but they do so knowing that innocent people who had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time are going to die. The old saying about the path of good intentions comes to mind.
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As the weekly – sometimes daily – news stories never tire of telling us, domestic drones are coming. And as ABC News reported on March 17, they are arriving faster than the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) can suss out the rules over their use. Though it’s technically illegal, and the FAA may issue fines if they catch you, ABC reports that commercial use of drones is starting to happen whether or not the government approves – as long as it doesn’t notice.
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The Pakistani draft, which was obtained by Foreign Policy, urges states to “ensure transparency” in record-keeping on drone strikes and to “conduct prompt, independent and impartial investigations whenever there are indications of any violations to human rights caused by their use.” It also calls for the convening of “an interactive panel discussion” on the use of drones.
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For all of the nonchalant assurances that he is neither a “dictator” nor an “emperor,” Barack Obama is certainly trigger-happy with the power jokes.
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Lucien rises from bed in the early morning. He dresses quietly, careful not to awaken his wife and infant son. He walks briskly across the city of Algiers in the pre-dawn light to a square that is already thick with people, their gaze fixed on a wooden platform and rising from it the stark outline of a guillotine.
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Camus’ essay on the barbarity of the death penalty was written in 1956, against the backdrop of the executions of hundreds of dissidents during the Soviet crackdown in Hungary, as well as the execution of Algerian revolutionaries condemned to death by French tribunals. He notes that by 1940 all executions in France and England were shielded from the public. If capital punishment was meant to deter crime, why hold the killings in secret? Why not make them a public spectacle?
Venezuela
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Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it. With a wide variety of sources and people on the ground to talk to, I thought I was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But even I was not prepared for what I saw in Caracas: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city. I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.
Secrecy
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SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge-fund firm that agreed to pay a record fine to settle insider-trading charges, moved to boost surveillance by hiring Palantir Technologies, a Central Intelligence Agency-backed software maker.
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The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a critical law for making sure the public has a fighting chance to get copies of records the government might not want it to see. For more than 40 years, people have used the FOIA to uncover evidence of government waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. More benignly, FOIA has been used to better understand the development and effects – positive and negative—of the federal government’s policies.
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Sen. Mark Udall called on the White House again Thursday to declassify a report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program during the war on terror.
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Senate staffers say the agency tortured prisoners in ways that went beyond what the Bush-era DOJ approved, according to an Al-Jazeera America report.
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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s remarks in support of fellow legislator Dianne Feinstein, who is embroiled in a dispute with the CIA, ought to be the sort of thing that alarms everyone. After all, another powerful member of Congress claims that the spy agency she is charged with overseeing illegitimately resists checks on its autonomy.
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Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee believe that laws may have been broken in their bitter dispute over top secret documents relating to the C.I.A.’s detention program and who has the right to read them.
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In the nine days since Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had spied on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers investigating CIA torture programs, the issue has been all but dropped by the political establishment and the media.
Ukraine
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Putin was strongest in his accusations of western hypocrisy. His ironic welcoming of the West having suddenly discovered the concept of international law was very well done. His analysis of the might is right approach the West had previously adopted, and their contempt of the UN over Iraq and Afghanistan, was spot on. Putin also was absolutely right in describing the Kosovo situation as “highly analogous” to the situation in Crimea. That is indeed true, and attempts by the West – including the Guardian – to argue the cases are different are pathetic exercises in special pleading.
The problem is that Putin blithely ignored the enormous logical inconsistency in his argument. He stated that the Crimean and Kosovo cases were highly analogous, but then used that to justify Russia’s action in Crimea, despite the fact that Russia has always maintained the NATO Kosovo intervention was illegal(and still refuses to recognize Kosovo). In fact of course Russia was right over Kosovo, and thus is wrong over Crimea.
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The attempt to downplay Russia’s diplomatic isolation was also a bit strange. He thanked China, though China had very pointedly failed to support Russian in the Security Council. When you are forced to thank people for abstaining, you are not in a strong position diplomatically. He also thanked India, which is peculiar, because the Indian PM yesterday put out a press release saying Putin had called him, but the had urged Putin to engage diplomatically with the interim government in Kiev, which certainly would not be welcome to Putin. I concluded that Putin was merely trying to tell his domestic audience Russia has support, even when it does not.
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Ukraine’s breakaway region of Crimea will ask Tatars to vacate part of the land where they now live in exchange for new territory elsewhere in the region, a top Crimean government official has said.
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03.20.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Genode OS
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The Genode Operating System Framework has been one of the more interesting and successful open-source OS research projects of recent times. Genode OS is becoming increasingly usable to enthusiasts and is also proving to be an interesting environment for developers. A lot of headway was made for Genode OS in 2013, but there’s already a list of TODO items for the community-based operating system in 2014.
MINIX
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MINIX 3.2.1 can successfully power-up on the BeagleBoard-xM with a working frame-buffer and is “off to discover the world.” While there is a frame-buffer, networking support doesn’t yet work on MINIX. MINIX 3.2.1 has been advertised as a great fit for ARM since its small, BSD licensed, and reliable.
Plan 9
ReactOS
OpenBSD
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The OpenBSD Foundation would like your help to meet our fundraising goals for 2014. Our 2014 Fundraising goal is $150,000. This amount will ensure the continued health of the projects we support, and will enable us to help them do more, and we can avoid the distractions of financial emergencies that could potentially spell the end of the project.
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PC-BSD
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With FreeBSD 10.0 having been released and the final release of the PC-BSD 10.0 coming this week, I decided to try out the PC-BSD 10.0-RC5 ahead of the final release. While I intended to run some benchmarks of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.0 against its predecessor and compared to Linux distributions, this initial PC-BSD 10.0 encounter was cut short after about ten minutes.
FreeBSD
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Linux isn’t the only open-source operating system, and it isn’t the only one with both server and desktop components either. The FreeBSD Project is one of the earliest open-source operating system projects, with roots connecting it to the original open-source BSD Unix work performed at the University of California at Berkeley. On Jan. 20, FreeBSD 10 debuted, providing server users with multiple performance and virtualization improvements. While FreeBSD itself could potentially be used as a desktop system, the PC-BSD open-source project is the home base for FreeBSD as a desktop operating system.
BSD (General)
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EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place September 25 to 28 at InterExpo Congress Center in Sofia (see http://iec.bg/en/). Tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday, while the shorter talks and papers program is on Saturday and Sunday.
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This is a feature-focused release. New features: * ssh(1), sshd(8): Add support for key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein’s Curve25519. This key exchange method is the default when both the client and server support it.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Open Source City
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An open source city, according to Jason Hibbets, project manager in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat, in his book ‘Foundation for an open source city’, is a blend of open culture, open government policies and economic development. It is an ecosystem made up of: a culture of citizen participation, effective open government policies and open data initiatives, open source user groups and conferences, and a hub for innovation and open source businesses.
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Jason Hibbets is working to convince local governments to adapt open source ideas in their day to day operations. His book, “The Foundation for an Open Source City,” attempts to be a step by step guide for implementing open source ideas into government policies and solutions, based on his own experiences. He uses Raleigh, North Carolina, where he resides, as his example. He calls it the worlds first open source city. In a way, the small southern capital is his laboratory.
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Optics
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Optical technology is viewed as still, and likely to remain, a set of technologies in ferment – highly proprietary, tied up in intellectual property, fast changing and just not the sort of area you might try to discipline into open source standards – not at this stage..
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New user-vendor forum set to define and promote OpenFlow-based, merchant-optical networking solutions
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Automobiles
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“Today we manage a global community of engineers, consumers and designers that co-creates the product with us,” says Rogers, CEO of Local Motors. “Co-creation is about sharing ideas and working through the same problem together.”
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Nicolas Perrinn is a firm believer in crowdsourced ideas, open source development, and fan-funded projects. What’s truly innovative about Nicolas’ choice of projects however is its scope — because Perrinn isn’t just talking about building an open source hybrid electric race car. Perrinn is talking about building an open source hybrid electric race car and pitting it against the best that industry giants Porsche, Toyota, and Audi have to offer.
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Perrinn myTeam offers schoolchildren, students, engineers, enthusiasts and fans unprecedented access to contribute and share data and ideas for top flight Le Mans hybrid race car.
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Libraries
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Pew Research Center released a new study on Thursday showing that library users are more social than people who do not go to libraries. The report questioned 6,000 Americans, ages 16 and up, and found that more than two-thirds of Americans are actively using libraries. Along with actively using the library, users typically are more social than those who do not use the library. Library users also tend to be more active.
Sharing
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The most popular items in Berlin’s first “borrowing shop” are the electric drills. At least one of the local people who have registered with Leila – a little shop on Fehrbelliner Strasse, north-east of the city centre – seems to be continually fixing shelves or hanging pictures.
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It’s a transparent gun design powered by an Arduino board with colour-changing LEDs and a built-in screen to log essential information such as your kills, health, ammo, and anything else you might need. The Skirmos guns communicate via radio and infrared optics lets your game extend beyond the walls of your local laser tag death arena.
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The Shuttleworth Foundation has done me the honour of appointing me as a Fellow, starting today.
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It’s this ability to create communities that makes us different from our predecessors. As exemplars I look to my own immediate circle of electronic communities: Wikipedia, Mozilla, Open Knowledge Foundation, Creative Commons, Open Rights Group, Blue Obelisk …
Maps
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Back in 2005, a study in Nature concluded that Wikipedia — at the time, a free upstart just eking its way into the Google results — was about as good a source as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. Though it found Wikipedia had slightly more factual errors than the older reference, the study gave the website a major commendation when it needed one.
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Open Data
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So, with much help from various community members, I am pleased to say we are starting to gear up for Open Data Day 2014 on February 22.
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Mapbox makes it easy for anyone to leverage the work of the hundreds of thousands of open source cartographers from all around the world who make their work available on OpenStreetMap (OSM). Contributing back to the community is part of their mission as well. With several FOSS projects in their inventory, Mapbox has already made a serious impact in the OSM community. Their efforts revolve around two development areas: parsing data and contributing data.
Open Hardware
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Chris Clark is the IT director at SparkFun Electronics in Boulder, Colorado. He talked with Opensource.com community manager Jason Hibbets, late last year during the All Things Open conference about open hardware.
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With traditional computer vendors’ hardware sales in the proverbial toilet, one has to wonder: Where will data center hardware innovations come from? Worry not — the fine folks at the Open Compute Project held the OCP Summit V in January 2014 in San Jose, Calif., and there was no lack of ingenuity on display.
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A programmable test and measurement instrument which runs open source software developed by start-up Red Pitaya can be bought from RS later this year.
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If you fancy owning your very own open source Enigma replica a new project has launched over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website that might interest you.
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With this short guide we release today, we will explain you how to use your Arduino Yun to do something that was never accomplished before with a board of such family.
3D
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Today, we have 3D modeling software that can pack an exponential cache of information, render designs visible with incredible fidelity, and make those designs easier to adapt. BIM technology (building information modeling) has entered the workplace, too, improving coordination and productivity of all trades involved in project construction, effectively revolutionizing the manufacturing sector. This is technology that, like CAD, has undeniably been pushed forward via the open development and integration of components.
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Earlier this year, I shared my story about open source designs and my 3D printed prosthetic hand to a room of 4,600+ at Intel’s Annual International Sales Conference in Las Vegas. I joined Jon Schull on stage, the founder of e-NABLE, an online group dedicated to open source 3D printable assistive devices.
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The word “open” is certainly a buzzword in 3D printing, but what does that really mean? While many are tossing around this phrase, few actually practice an open business and product philosophy. Open source hardware (or Libre hardware), notably led by the RepRap project, is experiencing rapid, cross-industry adoption. This philosophy empowers engineers, makers, builders, and creators with unprecedented freedom to change, update, and modify their products over time.
Misc.
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As a woman in open source, I have found that the values of community, open development, and flat organizational structure appeal equally to both men and women. The ability of local organizers to freely define what type of culture they are building allows them to adapt in order to appeal to the surrounding culture, while striving to improve access.
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At the Open Technology Institute (OTI), we’ve been working on opening our user feedback process as a way to improve our internal processes and collaboration, engage our user community more, promote non-developer contributions, and think more broadly about how open source process plays a role in the Commotion Wireless project, a free and open-source communication tool that uses mobile phones, computers, and other wireless devices to create decentralized mesh networks.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Last year, I provided a look at the top legal issues from the year before. Continuing with this tradition, here is my take on the top ten legal developments in FOSS during 2013.
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The licences page breaks down a number of popular options, including MIT, Apache and GPL. Each is explained in the form of Required / Permitted / Forbidden, so it’s clear what others can and can’t do with your work.
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Creative Commons and the GPL are legal tools to facilitate sharing, and in their domains they are analogous to peer review and publication in scientific journals for scientists. However, like the conflict between free and proprietary software, there is a conflict between open access and proprietary access to scientific publications, a conflict Aaron Swartz became aware of as an activist.
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Earlier today I was looking at a source file for the OpenStack Ceilometer docs and noticed that there’s a copyright statement at the top. Now, in no way do I want to pick on Nicholas. There are hundreds of such copyright statements in the OpenStack docs and code, and this is just the example I happened to be looking at.
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The open source license you choose for your project, or for the projects you choose to contribute to, can have significant effects on how what you contribute is used. One question that has garnered quite a bit of interest recently is the fall in popularity of copyleft licenses in favor of permissive licenses. An article last year looked at the issue of large number of projects on GitHub that have no explicit license and posited the question about whether we live in a ‘post open source software’ world, where seemingly open source software has no license. After some time, GitHub agreed that licensing is important and worked to improve the situation with a license chooser.
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When I first started writing my little software programs, I borrowed some code from my chum Mike Field (a.k.a. The Mighty Hamster) who is based in New Zealand. At that time, I noticed that in the comments to his code, Mike had the line “// License: GPLv3″ (this refers to the GNU General Public License).
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Cooper has seen the benefits of open source collaboration first hand — and has learned the hard way what happens when developers don’t share code when they should. At Apple, she managed a team that developed a video chat program based on Apple’s QuickTime video format, and the code behind Quicktime wasn’t even shared with everyone inside the company. “There were some people in my group that helped write Quicktime, but because of an internal licensing struggle at the time, the QuickTime team shut them out of their own code tree,” she says. “It was really inefficient, and it really pissed me off.”
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