03.21.15
Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This week in Linux news, Linux talent is in high demand, a middle school club is fostering the next generation of IT experts, and more. Here are five must-reads in the world of Linux and open source for this week.
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Desktop
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I didn’t just buy Google’s new Chromebook Pixel. No, I bought the high-end model with the 5th-generation, 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-5500U processor with 16GBs of memory and a 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD) for $1,299. And, I’m not the only one. That top-of-the-line Chromebook Pixel is sold out. Why would I spend this kind of money? Because the Pixel 2015 is worth it.
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We have been hearing rumors about affordable Chromebooks powered by Rockchip processors ever since last year, but we are yet to see something palpable in this regard.
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Server
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Co-founder Solomon Hykes reflects on the startup’s roots in Paris, its failed first effort to get containers moving, and how Docker then became a fast-growing data center hit.
Docker turned two years old Wednesday, and what an impact it has had at such a young age.
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Kernel Space
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While this winter brought many exciting milestones for Linux and open-source fans, there’s also some milestones/features hoped for this winter that haven’t yet come to fruition.
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Applications
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Kodi 14.2 Helix is a stable bug-fix release over the existing Kodi 14 series. The 14.2 version is the second and final planned bug-fix release before Kodi 15. With today’s Kodi 14.2 RC there’s a handful of bug-fixes.
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Insync 1.2 was released today, bringing a new HTML5 UI along with improvements such as an ignore list, improved nested selective sync and more.
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You turn to an outstanding email client. If you’re unsure which Linux email clients support Gmail, read on and maybe you’ll find one that perfectly suits your needs and taste.
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MPV is a free and open-source media player that uses the ffmpeg backend, with a basic interface, yet support for all the formats that ffmpeg can handle (including MKV or AVI). In this article I will take a look at this player’s features, show some of the commands used to control it as well as give installation instructions for Ubuntu and Mint.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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It’s been a while since the last release of the Wine software used by hundreds of thousands of Linux and Mac OS X users to install applications that only work on Microsoft Windows operating systems. Wine 1.7.39 is a development release and it comes three weeks after the Wine 1.7.38 version that introduced multi-channel audio support.
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Wine 1.7.39 has been released a few hours ago, bringing several new features in DirectWrite and DirectX Media Objects, as well as the usual bug fixes common to each release.
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CodeWeavers announced today the release of CrossOver 14.1, the latest version of their Wine-based program for running Windows applications/games on OS X and Linux systems.
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Games
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©Disney Interactive and Lucasfilm games are back! They say third time’s the charm, we’re hoping you agree. Today, we’re uncovering a true treasure trove of long-lost intrigue, action, and peril – digital premieres, beloved adventures, (and a shooter, but that’s just another kind of adventure, isn’t it?) all DRM-free and ready for your loving digital embrace…
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A few more Linux games benefit from consistent discounts on Steam, some of them stretching throughout the weekend as well. Doom & Destiny is a 2D single-player turn-based jrpg (Japanese role playing) fantasy adventure game in which you fight hundreds of enemies, explore the universe, use various spells and weapons.
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Steam has turned into a treasure trove of Linux games, and now you can save a lot of money with Steam’s 2K 10th anniversary sale. Games are up to 80% off and there are some notable games for Linux including Bioshock Infinite and Civilization V.
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If you have held off buying some of our bigger game ports recently, now is a great time to buy classics like Borderlands 2, XCOM, and the newly ported Bioshock Infinite.
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In the latest update on the Majestic Nights Steam store page, the developers have mentioned Linux support is being worked on, and testers are needed!
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This week’s release of BioShock Infinite for Linux reinforces the common recommendation by Linux game developers that those seeking the best support and performance should use the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver. Here’s an initial look at the BioShock Infinite performance on Ubuntu between AMD and NVIDIA graphics.
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Available exclusively from Bundle Stars ( http://www.bundlestars.com ) for two weeks only, the bundle retails at $2.49 USD, a 97% saving off the combined recommended retail price of the individual games.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A few weeks ago, during a little break from studies, I’ve finally found some time for installing Plasma 5 on my Arch Linux workstation. Before a not too deep period of usage I’d like to share with you my impressions on the current state of Plasma.
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I have initiated coverity scan for 96 KF5 repositories out of 233 available to kdesrc-build. All the rest didn’t build on my machine either because debian still ships Qt 5.3 or for some other reason. The scan has found 610 new defects, and there are more pre-existing ones that were found two years ago.
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The last official release of the kdesrc-build tool to build KDE was 1.15.1, nearly three years ago. For some perspective, this is when we were in the process of preparing KDE Software Compilation 4.9 for release, and nearly 2 years before the first technological preview of KDE Frameworks 5.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GLib2 library component used in the GNOME desktop environment has been updated recently in preparation for the final release of GNOME 3.16. Its code is now in freeze and no other major changes will be injected in the final GLib2 2.44.0 release. Prominent features include support for HTTP proxies in GIO, a new GTask:completed property, and proper support for multiple main contexts in GUnixMountMonitor.
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.1.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.1 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.36 kernel which has some critical security fixes.
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Natanael Copa has announced earlier today, March 20, the immediate availability for download of the third maintenance release for its terminal-based Alpine Linux computer operating system. Alpine Linux 3.1.3 includes an updated Linux kernel package, as well as a number of bug fixes over the previous version.
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Arch Family
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Among others, it brings several bug fixes for the AMD and Intel GPUs and solved some ALSA issues.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.
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Red Hat is poised to beat estimates for a few reasons: a strong historical track record of crushing analyst earnings estimates, strong EPS and revenue growth rates, and solid recent price momentum. We’ve found through historical modeling that these factors tend to give an indication of an impending earnings beat. We’ll also look at short interest heading into earnings as short sellers tend to be very sophisticated and are quite good at predicting bad news.
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project — mythically known as the “bleeding-edge distro” which only experienced users can use, but which in reality can be used easily by anyone from kids to grandmothers — understands the unique connection between diversity and open source. They are looking for a Diversity Advisor, and they’re seeking your help.
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We have pushed the script into Fedora’s cmake package (currently in rawhide and (soon) in F22 but eventually I’d like to have it in F20 and F21 too) so all packages that will be rebuilt after this will get the automatic Provides.
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Debian Family
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I found out that all my debian machines switched to systemd without my consent, with just a standard apt-get ugrading.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has recently introduced a new Internet of Things (IoT) platform that uses the Ubuntu Snappy technology to power the connected enterprise, as well as to bind data, processes, devices, and people together, thus remodeling raw data into real-time actionable intelligence.
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Among others, it helps the users learn the basic tasks on their Ubuntu Phone, gives information about Scopes and Web Apps, provides info about the Ubuntu Store and Settings and shows the users other useful information.
The latest version available is Ubuntu Help 0.1, which can be easily installed via the Ubuntu Touch App Store.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, Martin Wimpress, the lead developer of Ubuntu Mate and Mate Desktop has recently announced that Tilda, a drop-down terminal emulator, will be set the default terminal emulator of Ubuntu 15.04 Mate.
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Innovative Integration’s Linux-friendly “ePC-Duo” data acquisition box offers an Intel Core i7 CPU, a Spartan-6 FPGA, dual XMC slots, and dual 10GbE ports.
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A new VDC Research study projects that Linux and Android will continue to increase embedded market share through 2017 while Windows and commercial real-time operating systems (RTOSes) will lose ground. The study suggests that the fast growth of IoT is accelerating the move toward open source Linux.
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Axiomtek’s “PICO840″ Pico-ITX SBC features a quad- or dual-core Intel Atom, and offers multiple video ports, plus GbE, SATA, serial, USB, and Mini-PCIe I/O.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Samsung TV SDK Team has today released Samsung Tizen TV SDK 1.4. Downloads are available for Windows, Linux and also Mac OSX that will enable developers to begin developing for the Tizen TV platform. The tool set includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a light-weight TV Simulator for testing web apps, and a TV Emulator.
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Android
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The weekly Android apps roundup has been on hiatus since the end of 2014 in favour of a monthly collection, but there’ve been plenty of comments on related apps articles requesting a return to a more regular column.
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Google just released Google Maps updates for both iOS and Android this past Wednesday. In the case of the iPhone app, there are some great new features that we took a closer look at in a recent post. Unfortunately, the update to the Android version of Google Maps wasn’t quite as exciting, with the only changes for Google Maps v9.5.1 listed as bug fixes and “tap the blue dot to get quick info on your current location.”
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Outside of the subsidised market, the Galaxy S6 is going to be a pricier handset off-contract, and the halo effect of this may help the perception around the handset. April is going to be an interesting month for the South Korean company, and we’ll be following the fortunes closely here on Forbes Tech.
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Earlier this week we finally received good news regarding the original Moto X Android 5.0 Lollipop update. After months of waiting and silence from the manufacturer and Google, it looks like the 1st generation Moto X will finally be seeing an update to Lollipop in the near future, and here’s what to expect.
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Android users can download Android Auto on Google Play starting today. To celebrate the occasion, Pioneer has introduced a long-awaited new line of receivers called Network Entertainment eXperience (NEX) that are compatible with Google’s new software.
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Announced back in January by a group of ex-Google employees, the Jide Ultra Remix could be in your hands later this year for around $400. However, through the company’s upcoming Kickstarter campaign, it can be yours for a measly $40, reports Liliputing.
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Google is finally delivering a few perks that didn’t make the cut when it rolled out Android Lollipop.
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Android 5.1 isn’t one of those massive life-changing releases that’ll have you tapping the ‘look for updates’ button frenetically for days on end; but nor is it one of those minor upgrades with only bug fixes and technical improvements. Here are the cool new features you’re going to get with the new Android—once it eventually arrives on your phone.
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Starting a new project as open source feels like the simplest thing in the world. You just take the minimally working thing you wrote, slap on a license file, and push the repo to Github. The difficult bit is creating and maintaining a community that ensures long term continuity of the project, especially as some contributors leave and new ones enter. But getting the code out in a way that could be useful to others is easy.
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During the past few years, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) have emerged as the next big thing in networking. As a result, we’ve seen established networking standards development organizations (SDOs) such as the ITU, IETF, TMF, among others, leap on the bandwagon to address SDN and NFV.
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The full blog can be viewed here and it includes a link to a recording of the panel discussion on Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. featuring five of its board members, including AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) ‘s Margaret Chiosi, and Hui Deng, principal staff at China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL)’s Research Institute.
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It has been a whirlwind two months since I joined OPNFV in January. I recently spent three weeks on the road getting to know our community and seeing OPNFV in a broader market context, and it’s been a great experience. Our technical committee chair Chris Price wrote about our recent Meet-up and Hackfest and the only thing I’ll add to his great summary is that I was highly impressed by the passion and collaborative attitude I witnessed during those events. It’s not always an easy thing for a diverse group of people all working for different companies to come together and form a coherent community, but we are definitely on our way.
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CAVO and OSI recognize that advances in open source development can provide citizens and governments the opportunity to ensure that everyone’s vote is counted accurately and securely without being held hostage to private vendors nor aging, outdated infrastructure. Innovation through open source development will provide communities the capacity and certainty to administer elections for this century and keep the promise of democracy, namely that your vote will always count.
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The new personal voice-activated assistant was created by developers at the university’s Clarity Labs. Unlike its commercial lock-in counterparts, Sirius is free and can be easily customised. Anyone can contribute to the open-source project via GitHub, with the code released under the BSD license making the software free both to use and to distribute. The project is supported by Google, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation.
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Tutanota is a German open source encrypted email startup lauded as a direct alternative to Google Gmail
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Now, with an eye toward optimizing the performance of open source distributed SQL query engine Presto, Facebook has designed a new Optimized Row Columnar (OCR) file format reader for Presto, and it is open sourced.
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Events
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ApacheCon North America brings developers and users together to explore issues and provide educational experiences for building open source solutions. The Apache community is among the most robust in open source with hundreds of thousands of applications deploying Apache Software Foundation (ASF) products and code contributions by more than 3,500 committers from around the world.
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SaaS/Big Data
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At its core, the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is a pluggable framework that enables multiple products and services to be plugged in. The OpenStack Neutron (formerly known as Quantum) project is the leading-edge networking project within OpenStack, providing a framework into which multiple SDN vendors can plug to enable agile networking services.
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Databases
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Nordic ticket giant to develop open source on chips, tickets and beer.
Open source database technology company MariaDB has announced Nordic Transticket as its latest costumer.
Previously with Oracle-owned MySQL, the ticketing company, a rising rival to European Ticketmaster, reached a peak in user data with 150 Gigabytes.
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 5 is almost in shape to be released with the latest status update on this big GNU compiler update showing a significant drop in the number of high-priority bugs.
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Licensing
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A long-standing dispute over proprietary software developers’ use of licensed open source software code ultimately could be settled in a case against VMware. “[Developer Christoph] Hellwig sees his creation being used commercially,” noted tech attorney Ray Van Dyke. “VMware feels persecuted for using a bit of free code. Now, a German jurist will make a decision sometime in the future.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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For many students, textbooks are too expensive and some do not buy them at all; which educators say needs to change.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University psychology professor Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani says when he saw a growing number of his students not buying books, he made the switch from the traditional method to something more modern.
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Programming
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Google’s announcement said they were providing an exporter to GitHub.
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According to the data, running drupal 7.27 on PHP 7 is 4.23 percent faster than running it on HHVM, that number rises to 25 percent faster for those running earlier builds of the in-development Drupal 8 release.
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RPM of PHP version 5.6.7 are available in remi repository for Fedora 21 and remi-php56 repository for Fedora ≤ 20 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
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It’s been over three years since the last major Open64 compiler update and development of Open64 seems more or less over. This open-source compiler with a long history vanished from the web this week and some question whether its website will even return.
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Security
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True, some operating systems, such as Red Hat Linux Enterprise (RHEL), aren’t greatly impacted by these latest problems. But if you’re using any operating system that uses OpenSSL 1.0.2 or OpenSSL versions: 1.0.1, 1.0.0 and 0.9.8, it’s another story.
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When the National Security Agency’s ANT division catalog of surveillance tools was disclosed among the myriad of Snowden revelations, its desire to implant malware into the BIOS of targeted machines was unquestionable.
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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved a convicted felon who is a former member of a domestic terrorist organization for expedited airport security last year, according to a report released this week by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.
The report alleges that the TSA cleared the June 2014 passenger, whose name was not revealed, despite the fact that the traveler had not submitted paperwork for its PreCheck trusted passenger program. The traveler was recognized by security agents at the airport.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The United States began its invasion of Iraq 12 years ago. Yesterday, a previously classified Central Intelligence Agency report containing supposed proof of the country’s weapons of mass destruction was published by Jason Leopold of Vice News. Put together nine months before the start of the war, the National Intelligence Estimate spells out what the CIA knew about Iraq’s ability to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. It would become the backbone of the Bush administration’s mistaken assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and posed a direct threat to the post-9/11 world.
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In Congress, Rogers led efforts to pass broad new legislation to expand government and private sector surveillance. He also maintained friendly ties to the business and K Street community — relationships that may have influenced his quiet move through the revolving door.
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Transparency Reporting
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Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño responds to recent reports Swedish prosecutors will seek to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Assange has never been charged over allegations of sexual assault, yet he has been holed up in the embassy since 2012, fearing that if he steps outside, he will be arrested and extradited to Sweden, which could lead to his extradition to the United States — which is investigating Assange over WikiLeaks publishing classified documents. “We are pleased to see the Swedish prosecutors say that they now want to take the statements from Julian Assange at our embassy,” Patiño says. “But at the same time, we are concerned that 1,000 days have gone by, 1,000 days with Julian Assange confined in our embassy, before they say that they are going to do what they should have done from day one.”
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British police claim a criminal investigation they launched into journalists who have reported on leaked documents from Edward Snowden has to be kept a secret due to a “possibility of increased threat of terrorist activity.”
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General David Petraeus has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified material and will serve no jail time for his actions. Let’s give the same deal to Edward Snowden.
True, their crimes are different: Petraeus gave classified info to his biographer and girlfriend, Paula Broadwell. Snowden gave classified info to the American people.
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An attorney for Julian Assange said the WikiLeaks founder is likely to remain at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as long as the United States pursues a criminal investigation of his organization.
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On the evening of April 3, 2013, a battered blue pickup truck slowly crossed a bridge from International Falls, Minnesota, to the border station at Fort Frances, Ontario. The family inside — a clean-cut middle-aged couple and their dark-haired 28-year-old son — looked like any other vacationers heading north. The father handed over their IDs to the border guards. “We need the protection of the Canadian government under the U.N. convention against torture,” he said. “Because our son was tortured by the FBI.”
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But she believes that what she saw was true: the agrochemical company’s culpability in 13,000 deaths, the CIA’s role in the anthrax attacks. She tells more than Matt had recalled, stories that sound too incredible to be true: a report that says the CIA explored plans to put anthrax in a New Jersey bay in order to drum up support for the war. “That’s what they were going to do,” she recalls, “And I remember reading that and saying [to Matt], ‘OK, all right, I know you’re not crazy.’”
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There’s been a lot of controversy over how Hillary Clinton apparently used a mail server running in her Chappaqua, New York, home when she started her tenure as secretary of state. But if you want to know what she’s using now, all you have to do is point your browser at it—you’ll get a login page for Outlook Web access from a Microsoft Exchange 2010 server. And so will anyone who wants to brute-force guess her e-mail password or simply take the server down with a denial-of-service attack. (This is not a suggestion that you should.)
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Greece has been much in the news recently as the Syriza government tries to deal with the country’s massive economic problems. We hear plenty about its high-level negotiations with the EU; what we don’t hear about is the Greek government’s innovative use of openness to tackle key issues in everyday life.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Danny Schechter, groundbreaking media critic and legendary producer for both corporate and alternative media, died on March 19 at the age of 72.
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Censorship
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Two days ago, we wrote about a remarkable example of regulatory capture and potential corruption. SEC enforcement chief Andrew Bowden, before an industry audience at Stanford Law School, on a panel moderated by KKR board member, Stanford Law professor and former SEC commissioner Joseph Grundfest, made fawning remarks about the private equity industry. Bowden repeatedly called PE “the greatest,” and made clear that he was so awestruck by its profits and seemingly attractive investor returns that he was urging his teenaged son to seek his fortunes there. This was troubling not simply because Bowden, as the SEC’s exam chief, looked to be soliciting, on a plausibly deniable basis, employment for his child from the firms he supervises. Bowden had described widespread lawbreaking in private equity in an unusually blunt and detailed speech last May. But almost immediately, he began walking his remarks back at conferences with the industry and in interviews with private equity publications. We’d charitably assumed the change in posture was due to outside pressure, but it may actually be due in large measure to Bowden’s unduly high regard for the industry, which appears to have tarnished his judgment, badly.
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The French Interior Ministry on Monday ordered that five websites be blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism. “I do not want to see sites that could lead people to take up arms on the Internet,” proclaimed Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
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In early January, Ars Technica reported on a swatting attempt on an Oregon home—notable in particular because the intended target no longer lived at the address in question. In the 24 hours after publication of that piece, an Ars staffer became the target of an online harassment campaign which began with the posting of private, personal information, a practice known as doxing. That doxing, just like the failed swatting attempt, originated with posts on the imageboard known as 8chan. (Users disagreed with use of “8chan” rather than spelling out “8chan users” in the headline.)
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Privacy
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Additional Declassified Documents Describe CIA Domestic and Foreign SIGINT Activity
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Over the past several years, mainstream news outlets have conveyed a litany of cyber doomsday scenarios on behalf of ostensibly credible public officials. Breathless intimations of the End Times. The stuff of Hollywood screenplays. However a recent statement by the U.S. intelligence community pours a bucket of cold water over all of this.
It turns out that all the talk of cyber Armageddon was a load of bunkum. An elaborate propaganda campaign which only serves as a pretext to sacrifice our civil liberties and channel an ocean of cash to the defense industry.
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According to journalist Glenn Greenwald, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has stated that the US and UK spy agencies threatened to cut Germany out of the intelligence-sharing loop if it gave safe haven to NSA whistlebower, Edward Snowden.
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Many people around the globe might assume these days that the U.S. government can enact some shady magic called the NSA to access any email it wants, even if that shady magic is considered by some to be illegal.
But how many people—particularly U.S. residents—know that the American government technically has perfectly legal access to everyone’s emails, so long as it says those digital notes might be useful for an investigation and the emails are more than 180 days old?
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The facial recognition pilot program launched last week by US Customs and Border Protection, which civil liberties advocates say could lead to new potentially privacy-invading programs, is just the first of three biometric experiments that the feds are getting ready to launch.
The three experiments involve new controversial technologies like iris and face scanner kiosks, which CBP plans to deploy at the Mexican border, and facial recognition software, according to a leaked document obtained by Motherboard.
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Now Cisco is taking matters into its own hands, offering to ship equipment to fake addresses in an effort to avoid NSA interception.
I don’t think we have even begun to understand the long-term damage the NSA has done to the US tech industry.
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During our four sessions, we spoke to teenage girls about how people lose control of information about themselves online. Within five minutes of the opening workshop we were getting questions about whether Facebook could read their messages, and it only got more interesting.
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Civil Rights
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A senior Chicago police commander in charge of a major unit operating out of the controversial Homan Square police warehouse has resigned, the Guardian has confirmed.
The news came as attorneys for three Homan Square victims announced that they would file the first civil rights lawsuit over the facility with the aim of shutting down the complex likened by attorneys and activists to the domestic law enforcement equivalent of a CIA “black site.”
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Attorneys for former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who was found guilty on nine felony counts involving unauthorized disclosure of classified information, argued yesterday that the Sterling verdict should be set aside in view of the misdemeanor plea agreement that was recently offered to former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus for mishandling classified information.
Sterling’s attorneys suggested that the disparate treatment of the two cases was attributable to improper considerations of rank and race.
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Manning would go on to leak more documents showing US complicity in Iraqi abuses, going back to 2004. None of those documents were classified more than Secret. Her efforts (in part) to alert Americans to the abuse the military chain of command in Iraq was ignoring won her a 35-year sentence in Leavenworth.
Compare that to David Petraeus who pretends, to this day, Maliki’s corruption was not known and not knowable before the US withdrew troops in 2011, who pretends the US troops under his command did not ignore, even facilitate, Maliki’s corruption.
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Preliminary results from an autopsy on the body of Otis Byrd, whose body was found hanging from a tree in rural Mississippi, strongly suggest the death was a suicide rather than foul play, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.
“It looks like that,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because authorities are planning to make an announcement at a later news conference. But he said, “that’s where they are headed” — with a finding of suicide.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The FCC’s pubication of the new Net Neutrality rules is continuing to draw a lot of analysis. Some Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate have sharply criticized the FCC order, and want Congress to pass a bill that would enact some Net Neutrality protections.
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One of the most contentious disagreements in the net neutrality debate in the U.S. over the past year has been over whether the new rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission amount to regulation of the Internet.
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03.20.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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You have ignored persistent Linux myths and decided to give Linux a try. How do you ensure that your transition to the new OS is smooth? Stick to the following five rules and you should do just fine. It’s time to get over your fear of failing at Linux.
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I find interesting the weekday rates of usage. */Linux usage is growing every day of the week. Android/Linux seems to be getting more usage at home on weekends but weekday use is also growing. Chrome OS is getting more usage weekdays, perhaps at schools. It’s all good. FLOSS should be used in all ways every day of the week. Finally there is competition on retail shelves. I was in Walmart yesterday. The space left for that other OS is shrinking and sad. The notebooks appeared to have heavy black steel bars laid over them to prevent theft, as if anyone wanted them… Not one of the few working notebooks had anything useful onscreen. It was just a list of features or “welcome”… One desktop was underneath the shelves still in a box. I was the only human being near that shelf.
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Server
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One of the main goals at both Red Hat and at Docker is to make this statement less true. My team at Red Hat is continuing to try to take advantage of other security mechanisms to make containers more secure. These are a few of the security features we are working at implementing and how they might affect Docker and containers in the future.
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Kernel Space
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Intel has been a leader in the Linux kernel community for almost two decades – and was named the no. 1 corporate contributor to the kernel for 2014, according to the recent Who Writes Linux report. The company’s influence also extends into the broader open source community, where Intel stands out as a model for how to effectively engage in projects and incorporate open source strategy into product development.
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Intel previously committed an H.265 / HEVC video decoding API to the video acceleration VA-API interface. The Intel VA-API developers have now complemented that by adding a HEVC encode API to this open-source GPU-based video acceleration library.
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Jiri Slaby has announced today the immediate availability for download of the Linux kernel 3.12.39, a LTS (Long Term Support) release aimed at servers and embedded devices where stability is extremely important. This maintenance release of Linux 3.12 kernel includes a great number of changes and updated drivers.
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Graphics Stack
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Besides NVIDIA announcing yesterday the $999 GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics card that will soon be reviewed under Linux on Phoronix, NVIDIA also announced the Digits DevBox: a $15,000 USD Linux-powered system.
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Applications
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Many problems in science and engineering are modeled through ordinary differential equations (ODEs). An ODE is an equation that contains a function of one independent variable and its derivatives. This means that practically any system that changes over time can be modeled with an ODE, from celestial mechanics to chemistry reaction rates to ecology and population modeling.
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Twitch Indicator is, like its name suggests, a www.twitch.tv appindicator. In case you’re not familiar with Twitch, this is a popular live streaming video platform that primarily focuses on video gaming.
The purpose of Twitch Indicator is to track the channels you follow and notify you when they go live. Besides notifications, which can be turned off from the indicator settings, the list of live channels is displayed in the indicator menu and clicking on any channel will open its Twitch page in your default web browser.
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Rygel, an open-source home media solution that allows users to easily share all kinds of multimedia files to various UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) devices has been recently updated to version 0.25.3 as part of the GNOME 3.16 Release Candidate desktop environment.
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Proprietary
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Opera Software, through Helge Andre Gjølme, has announced earlier today, March 19, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Opera 29 Beta web browser for computers, supporting the GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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CodeWeavers, through Josh DuBois, had the pleasure of informing us today, March 19, about the immediate availability for download of the CrossOver 14.1.0 software update, a commercial application that allows users of the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems to install and use Windows apps.
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Games
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I do enjoy looking over games more than, for example, networking tools. Sometimes console tools are intended for discrete applications and discrete audiences, and if I lack the experience needed to make them work, it can be a little frustrating.
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Yesterday BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux as the latest high-quality game being ported over from Windows. Judging from the comments, this is going to be one of the more popular Linux games for the time being. The good news is I’ve adapted the game for serving as our latest Linux gaming benchmark.
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The PiPanther robot is a smart, fast vehicle that you control using the Ubotia app on your smartphone. As it explores rooms, you can set up battlefields anywhere and fight your friends using the Ubotia software. Plus you can customise the tank with your own attachments. But there’s just 15 minutes to go now [Ed: PiPanther’s Kickstarter clock is counting down] and we only have 22% [of €5,000/$5,900]. It’s not enough, unfortunately.
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Dreaming Sarah has been available in an open Linux beta on Steam since December, but got a proper release last week. The game was made available DRM free for Linux on Desura and Itch.io yesterday and is currently on sale at a reduced price on Steam and Itch.io.
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Today we take a look at ‘In Exilium’ that was recently released on Steam. It’s an interesting looking and simple hack and slash RPG.
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Descent returns in Descent: Underground! With a big goal to hit, and tons of time left this could easily be funded.
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Testing before the release, I was getting over 100FPS, and a patch just before release nerfed it down to 30FPS and below, but the great news is this patch is giving me a solid 60FPS, so while not the same as before, it is a solid and commendable improvement considering they can’t replicate it their end.
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Hey there Linux gamers, today we are happy to inform you that a new Crimson Bundle game sale is taking place these days and it includes no more than 10 awesome games for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Worlds of Magic is a good looking 4X strategy game that has been in early access for a while, but that ends now. The game has reached the point of a full release.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The Linux distro poll is over and we’re crunching the numbers for an article to go up later today. However, first we want to introduce our second annual Desktop Environment poll.
It only seems fitting, somehow, that we would follow up our what’s-your-distro poll with a Linux desktop poll. After all, we see and interact with our desktop everyday — but we never “see” our operating systems — meaning most users actually have a better understanding of their desktop environment or window manager than they do with the underlying distro. So much so, that many users — especially outside of the *nix world, often think of their desktop environment as the operating system.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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David Revoy will be teaching Krita, with a focus on concept art and the challenges of digital painting — and he’ll introduce the new features we just released with Krita 2.9! Sarah Laufer has founded her own animation studio, regularly gives Blender courses in San Jose, and is now, of course, in the Netherlands for Project Gooseberry. She will focus on animating characters. François Gastaldo is an Open Shading Language expert and that’s the topic of his master class, while François Grassard from University Paris-8 has led the transition to free tools: Krita, Blender, Natron. He will talk about his experiences, but also about camera tracking, 3D integration and particle systems.
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In a few weeks (April 11-12) the KDE e.V. board is going to have an in-person board meeting in Berlin.
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This is mainly a bugfix release with two minor new features. The first one is a new page in a pairing wizard. Instead of closing the wizard when it finishes, a success page is now shown to the user to indicate device setup was completed.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Frederic Peters on the behalf of the GNOME release team announced the GNOME 3.15.92 release today, which serves as the release candidate ahead of the GNOME 3.16 official release at month’s end.
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The GNOME PERU FEST 2015 event took place last Friday 13th, March in Centro Cultural PetroPerú. Special thanks GNOME Foundation for sponsoring us all again, as well Fedora, Infopucp, La Bouquette, Nexsys, PetroPerú and IBM.
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We’ve announced a yesterday that immediate availability for testing of the Release Candidate version of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment. The GNOME Control Center application has also been updated as part of this RC (Release Candidate) release of GNOME 3.16 and includes a great number of changes that we have listed for you in the next paragraphs.
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The GTK+ 3.15.12 toolkit has been released recently as part of the GNOME 3.16 RC (Release Candidate) desktop environment and it introduces the last changes to be implemented in the final GTK+ 3.16.0 released, which will be distributed alongside GNOME 3.16, due for release on March 25, 2015.
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Reviews
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There are many different distributions that use Ubuntu as a base, but one you might not have heard of is Black Lab Linux. Black Lab Linux uses…you guessed it…a cute black labrador retriever as its mascot, and the distro itself is focused on providing a compelling and easy to use desktop version of Linux. Toward that end they’ve tried very hard to create a desktop distro that someone coming from a Mac or Windows could jump in and use, even if they are completely new to Linux.
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There’s nothing functionally wrong with Lubuntu. It’s not bad. It’s simply not interesting. It’s meat without flavor, it’s a hybrid car, it’s accounting lessons at the local evening school, it’s morning news, it’s a visit to Pompei while blindfolded. There’s no excitement. You need a lean distro? Fine. Xubuntu. Problem solved. It’s that simple. LXLE does offer some small advantages over this distro, but not by a great margin. Maybe there’s a limit to how fun LXDE can really be. Alive does not mean lively.
I liked this desktop environment in the past, but it’s stagnated. It hasn’t evolved at all, and its competitors have left it far behind. And that reflects poorly on Lubuntu, which, despite a calm and stable record of spartan behavior, has left with me an absolute zero of emotional attachment toward it. That’s not good. It’s 6/10 not good. Now, almost four years since my last Lubuntu review, that’s quite bad actually. Overall, you shouldn’t pass on this distro, and perhaps Utopic + LXDE is the perfect match for your aging hardware. But in most cases, you can happily replace it with Xubuntu, and everything will be just as fine, only far more fun. And that brings us to the end of this review. Fire away thy angry emails.
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New Releases
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Both Linux and open source have come a very long way. But all of those strides could so easily be undone by the constant proliferation of tools such as Popcorn Time. And now, even a Linux distribution, ChaletOS has included Popcorn Time by default. The ChaletOS could be one of those Linux distributions anyone and everyone could use and love. After all, it offers an interface that is as close to Windows 7 as any Linux desktop has ever achieved (thanks to Xfce). Average Windows users will be right at home with an arsenal of applications that easily covers their work and personal needs. But then, the developers throw in Popcorn Time. What makes this doubly odd is that ChaletOS is hosted by Google.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The GNOME Shell graphical design has a touch of a minimalistic ergonomics resembling some MacOS concepts. The user may easily concentrate on the job with the help of compact and ergonomcal GUI elements. Laptop users are especially encouraged to use GNOME Shell.
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Arch Family
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There are many different Linux distributions available, but few provide as much direct control over your computer as Arch Linux. One of our bloggers here on ITworld shares his thoughts on why he picked Arch Linux as his desktop distro, and why you might want to consider it as well.
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Arch Linux is “a lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.” It’s also known as a rolling release distribution that is characterized by frequent updates rather than periodic reinstalls. Arch has remained in Distrowatch.com’s top 10 Page Hit Ranking since 2009 and was once a darling of the Linux blogosphere. Swapnil Bhartiya today posted five reasons folks should “roll with Arch Linux.” Elsewhere, Red Hat had an interesting day on Wall Street and Jack Wallen said Popcorn Time isn’t the kind of application distributions should be including. And finally, a new poll was posted to bring some fun to your Thursday evening.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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LINUX DESIGNER SUSE and Apache Hadoop vendor Veristorm are teaming up to bring Hadoop to IBM z and IBM Power systems.
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Red Hat Family
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Trade-Ideas LLC identified Red Hat ( RHT) as a “barbarian at the gate” (strong stocks crossing above resistance with today’s range greater than 200%) candidate.
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Open source solution provider Red Hat has announced a new emphasis on enterprise mobility, leveraging its enterprise-grade open source technologies. This focus is in response to the demand for faster and continuous development cycles that challenge traditional IT infrastructure and development methodologies. Red Hats efforts includes services that companies to become more mobile-centric and evolve in a way that supports both the agility of new mobile initiatives and stability of core IT.
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 Workstation’s GNOME 3.16 desktop makes almost everything easy using a standard point and click interface. But one of the best reasons for using it is the power you can also get in the Terminal app. There’s a world of power available through that command line. And the new Terminal job notifications keep you in touch with the command line, even if you’re doing something else.
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We announced last week the immediate availability for download and testing of the Fedora 22 Alpha operating system, which included the Live Workstation edition with the latest development version of the upcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, and an Xfce spin that brought us the latest Xfce 4.12 desktop environment.
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I’ve been a bit lazy on the ARM kernel status updates. There wasn’t one at all for 3.18 but the fact was, that while there was lots of under the hood improvements for ARM/aarch64, the new device support or improvements from a user’s point of view was positively boring so I never bothered!
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It took a while to get all the ingredients together, but we baked up a delicious batch of new Fedora Badges and they’re fresh out of the oven.
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I’m Maria Leandro, known also as Tatica and I work as a photographer on my own business, Tap.Pics. I work exclusively with Open Source tools, which has made my life quite interesting. I started with Linux back in 2005 and since then, I have never felt the need of change my OS. It started (like many other people), at college, and it became part of my personal and professional life. All my works have been related directly to Open Source technologies, including teaching and organizing events.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Linux Mint Debian 2 has an official release candidate available for download. Linux Mint Debian 2 RC offers the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments.
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The Linux Mint crew has released the first release candidates of Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 “Betsy” with the Cinnamon and MATE desktop spins.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It was brought to our attention that a new application is now available in the Ubuntu Touch Store that helps users get a better Ubuntu phone experience by offering a wide variety of tips and tricks for Ubuntu devices.
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The kit arrived the Friday before Thanksgiving, and I wasted no time getting to work. I didn’t need another computer running Linux at home, so my interest in the Raspberry Pi focused on what its hardware could offer that my laptops couldn’t.
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Aaeon’s rugged, fanless “Boxer-6614″ box-PC runs Linux on a quad- or dual-core Celeron SoC, and offers 8GB RAM, HDMI and VGA, dual GbE, and dual mini-PCIe.
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Phones
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Announced one year ago, Google’s Android Wear software is available on a half-dozen different smartwatches, ranging in price from $200 to $300. All of those smartwatches, whether they’re the Motorola Moto 360, LG G Watch R, or Sony Smartwatch 3, are from traditional consumer electronics and smartphone makers. Today, Google is announcing a partnership with Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer that will put Android Wear on luxury timepieces for the first time.
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Your next Android Wear watch could be a TAG Heuer. Intel and Google are today announcing a partnership with the iconic watch brand that will result in a TAG-branded Swiss watch powered by Android Wear.
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Watch out Apple: Swiss company Tag Heuer is developing its own smartwatch with tech rivals Google and Intel.
The high-end watch maker says its smartwatch will run on Google Inc.’s Android Wear platform and Intel Corp.’s technology.
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Android
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Android 5.1 Lollipop, which has already been rolled out over-the-air (OTA) to the Google Nexus 6 phablet, has reportedly started rolling out over-the-air to Google’s 2013 flagship smartphone, the LG-made Nexus 5. The OTA rollout of the update does not come as a surprise, as Google has already provided a Android 5.1 Lollipop factory image for the LG-produced Android stock phone. The firm has also listed a new Android Lollipop image for Nexus 6 on its Google Developers page.
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If there’s a better way for Amazon to celebrate its Android app store’s birthday than by offering a bunch of solid paid apps for free, we don’t know what it is. Beginning immediately and likely ending at some point in the near future, Amazon is offering a huge sale on paid Android apps. There are 34 apps in total, and they would normally combine to cost more than $100.
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Android Auto has gone live, for devices running Android 5.0 and up, so long as users have a car stereo system that’s compatible with the in-car software. For now, that means a range of Pioneer headings, which are already available for sale in the U.S. and the U.K.
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Google today updated its Android Device Manager service with support for Android Wear. In other words, you can now find your lost smartphone using your smartwatch.
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It seems that Huawei is apparently unhappy with the amount of freedom they have to personalise the platform to cater to their own wishes and help differentiate their devices to those of their competitors. The whole User Interface (UI), apps and menus can not be changed or any additional features added to the OS like they can do with Android. The only thing they can do is add their own watch faces. That’s it!
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Just about every time the tiresome Android vs. iOS debate rears its ugly head on the Internet, the argument is made that Android is better because developers have the freedom to do practically whatever they want. While there is definitely some truth to the notion that Android apps have capabilities iOS apps do not, it obviously doesn’t make Google’s mobile platform inherently better than Apple’s.
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Google’s Android Auto smartphone interface for cars is finally hitting the road as the first aftermarket units become available for sale this week. In the US market, the new Pioneer AVIC-8100NEX, AVIC-7100NEX and AVH-4100NEX models will all feature Android Auto integration.
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A collection of articles from educators, students, advocates, parents, and more who are implementing open source in education and working toward a more open knowledge base for everyone.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack open source cloud platform has grown in popularity in recent years as a pathway to enable multiple types of applications and services in the cloud. One such application class is databases, which are enabled by way of the Trove database-as-a-service project that first became part of OpenStack in April of 2014 with the Icehouse release.
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OpenStack remains the open-source community’s cloud of choice, mustering tens of thousands of minions as it marches on toward cloudy relevance. That same community has turned OpenStack into a morass of competing projects and priorities, but there’s one area where OpenStack dearly needs even more community:
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Open-Xchange announced on Thursday that it has completed a merger with email server software provider Dovecot OY. Under the terms of the merger, Dovecot will become a subsidiary of Open-Xchange.
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Funding
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The program is dubbed Cloud Foundry Dojo and will be located in EMC’s Kendall Square office, at 11 Cambridge Center. It will begin this summer and could help train about 150 developers this year, according to Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.
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Somewhat controversially, Kelly said MongoDB’s example raises a big doubt as to whether it, and other open-source NoSQL startups, such as Basho Technologies Inc., Couchbase Inc., and DataStax Inc., will ever be able to turn a profit in a market Wikibon estimates will be worth just $1.825 billion by 2017.
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BSD
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AsiaBSDCon 2015 happened last week in Tokyo, Japan. Besides learning about OpenBSD’s custom-built HTTP/web server, there was also a presentation entitled “OpenBSD Sucks” by one of the OpenBSD developers.
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I am pleased to announce the availability the fist ALPHA build of the 10.1-RELEASE Release cycle which is available on SourceForge for the amd64 and i386 architectures.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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First, we must understand why we can’t make hardware free the same way we make software free. Hardware and software are fundamentally different. A program, even in compiled executable form, is a collection of data which can be interpreted as instruction for a computer. Like any other digital work, it can be copied and changed using a computer. A copy of a program has no inherent physical form or embodiment.
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Openness/Sharing
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Some open source texts need to be as accessible, powerful, efficient, and fault-free as a GNU/Linux server.
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Programming
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GXUI is a new cross-platform user interface library developed at Google for their Go programming language.
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Health/Nutrition
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Crisis in mining industry could bring economic benefits and opportunities for other sectors and place greater emphasis on corporate social responsibility
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Security
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The vulnerability was widely discussed earlier this week in social media threads such as this one. It was discovered by David Ramos of Stanford University, who agreed to withhold publishing proof-of-concept code that exploits the bug until server administrators have had time to patch the security hole. Based on today’s description of the bug, however, it likely won’t be hard for other people to independently develop exploits.
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The latest OpenSSL security vulnerabilities were made public today with four CVEs being addressed.
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Security may be a process, not a product, but security patches are definitely a product. Some reflections on a few recent experiences making security sausage, er, patches.
I appear to have found myself in the position of OpenBSD sausage grinder even though it’s not a great fit. It’s not in my temperament to care about yesterday’s problems after they’re fixed, nor am I enthusiastic about long term support. I mostly run current, so I don’t have much personal interest in fixing stable. Unfortunately, I wrote the tool used for signing patches which somehow turned into a responsibility for also creating the inputs to be signed. That was not the plan!
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Well, ISIS is openly committed to a policy of genocide–not only against non-Muslim minorities like the Yazidi (New York Times, 10/21/14), but against entire Shia denomination of Islam (“Shia have no medicine but the sword” is an ISIS slogan) who make up two-thirds of the population of Iraq. Thinking that that makes ISIS a bad choice to rule Iraq requires you to think of Shi’ite Muslims as human beings, I suppose.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Pump too much groundwater and wells go dry—that’s obvious.
But there is another consequence that gets little attention as a hotter, drier planet turns increasingly to groundwater for life support.
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Finance
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The one thing that is supposed to be helping is the newly announced “Help to Buy ISA”. The stated aim is to support those who are saving to buy a house – but the reality is that the Government is doing nothing more than bribing people to take on excessive debt – to keep up the lending that keeps house prices unfathomably out of reach for so many.
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Privacy
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As reported in Wired, GCHQ’s development of hacking technologies is completely absent of external regulation, and their bosses at the Foreign Office lack the ability to understand what they are doing.
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Spies will target IT staff with access to infrastructure and information, says NSA whistleblower in a video-link interview at CeBIT in Hannover.
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These are our first impressions on reading the Intelligence and Security Committee’s key recommendations in its Privacy and Security Report.
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A decade ago, it was rare to hear politicians speaking about the need for a free, open Internet — and even rarer to meet one who understood what that meant. Despite the number of foot-in-mouth inanities mumbled by today’s crop of technologically ignorant pols, it was much, much worse then.
And of course, today, every issue is a digital issue: you can’t talk about the economy, security, health or education (let alone elections) without talking about digital rights.
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Let’s take a few examples. Privacy is one of your most important rights. Yet most people tend to think of privacy as a question of private life, the choices you make about your person and the things that make you uncomfortable. In the digital world, privacy is a question of personal information, automated judgements and profiling. Many people want to know everything they can about you, because they can – or hope they can – make money out of this. GCHQ perhaps wants to know if you are a threat; and they help the NSA get to know you in case you are politically or economically interesting.
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German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said.
The vice chancellor delivered a speech in which he praised the journalists who worked on the Snowden archive, and then lamented the fact that Snowden was forced to seek refuge in “Vladimir Putin’s autocratic Russia” because no other nation was willing and able to protect him from threats of imprisonment by the U.S. government (I was present at the event to receive an award). That prompted an audience member to interrupt his speech and yell out: “Why don’t you bring him to Germany, then?”
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took part in a debate on data security on Wednesday at the CeBIT IT trade conference, via video link from Moscow.
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With every iPhone, iPad and iPod comes a set of densely worded documents informing you that by using these gadgets you’re giving up a ton of highly sensitive information. It’s perfectly legal for Apple to gobble up all this personal data because you’ve basically said it’s allowed to do so. Worse, you might not even realize that you have.
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Shane Tusch faked his suicide in an attempt to test the authenticity of Facebook suicide prevention tool and got detained for 72 hours
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Customs boss Carolyn Tremain has told MPs the department would only request travellers hand over passwords to their electronic devices if it had a reason to be suspicious about what was on them.
The department unleashed a furore last week when it said in a discussion paper that it should be given unrestricted power to force people to divulge passwords to their smartphones and computers at the border.
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PRESSURE GROUP PRIVACY INTERNATIONAL has published a court document that it claims reveals government support for broad and alarming GCHQ surveillance powers.
Privacy International, and others, have challenged the government on its use of surveillance technology, and the government has stoutly defended its actions on each occasion.
Now Privacy International has published a court document relating to two court cases initiated last year against GCHQ that challenge what Privacy International claims is invasive state-sponsored hacking that was revealed by Edward Snowden.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) this week called out the FCC, saying its recently passed net neutrality rules have “the exact opposite” effect on protecting an open Internet.
The Federal Communications Commission last month voted 3-2 in favor of reclassifying the Web as a Title II telecom service— “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed,” according to Chairman Tom Wheeler.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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While we are in the midst of the current battle to end the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions here in the US, we can’t lose sight of the broader global fight being waged via the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Strategic Partnership Agreement. If you aren’t familiar with TPP, it is a multinational trade agreement being developed through a series of secret negotiations that are pushing a host of restrictions. From making the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions global, to spreading the threat of software patents around the world, to extending copyright indefinitely, these secret negotiations present a plethora of threats to user freedom.
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Copyrights
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The results of a new poll published today in Iceland indicates that the Pirate Party has just become the country’s most popular political party. According to the results, almost a quarter of all citizens would vote Pirate today. Speaking with TF, movement founder Rick Falkvinge describes the result as an “extraordinary accomplishment.”
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The Pirate Party now measures as the largest political party in Iceland, according to a new survey from the Icelandic market and research company MMR which regularly surveys the support for the political parties in Iceland.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.19.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In a nutshell, I just replaced a 2011 HP Mini netbook with a 2014 HP mini-notebook. Both run Linux. Thank you, HP.
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Desktop
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A while ago, Google finally rolled out the second-generation Chromebook Pixel we had all been eagerly waiting for.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced the immediate availability for download and upgrade of new maintenance releases for Linux kernel 3.19, 3.14, and 3.10, all of them bringing approximately the same improvements, bugfixes, and updated drivers.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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You can create an STL file using OpenSCAD and then use the Slic3r program to convert an STL file into a g-code file for your printer. I’ll take you through this process, below.
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Yesterday I learned about a tool that’s going to change my daily behavior working on servers.
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Games
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Ashes of The Singularity is a large scale real time strategy game from Stardock & Oxide Games that should see a Linux release.
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Endless Legend for Linux started off so well only to fall flat on its face months later. Sadly, it now seems Endless Legend will not be coming to Linux, as the developers state it’s really not a priority any more.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We have now reached the end of the development cycle and here comes a release candidate for you to download, build, and test. Enjoy it as fast as you can, the final release is scheduled next Wednesday.
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As expected, the GNOME development team, through Frederic Peters, has announced earlier today, March 18, the immediate availability for testing of the GNOME 3.16 RC (Release Candidate) desktop environment. The release is dubbed internally GNOME 3.15.92.
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Q4OS is intended to be more than a community-supported general purpose Linux distro. The Trinity desktop provides a lightweight KDE environment and the Q4OS platform shows strong potential for business use. This distro could provide an interesting alternative for home and small business use, when the missing pieces between the current beta and a 1.0 and beyond release history are added.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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Installing Arch Linux is a bit like building your own house. You have to dig the foundation, erect the walls, build the roofs, run the plumbing and electrical wiring around it … and all the rest of it. In other words, installing Arch Linux is not at all like renting an apartment, just moving in, and letting the landlord take care of everything else.
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Red Hat Family
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The root cause of this has been traced back to our source code analysis group and the mass scans performed on the Fedora versions prior to RHEL 7 rebase. These scans were performed using a couple of source code analysis tools including Coverity and cppcheck and the warnings were addressed as normal bugs. This explanation is also supported by the decreasing number of found use-after-frees in Fedora from versions 17 to 19, which served as basis for RHEL 7. Interestingly, other weaknesses like buffer access problems and overflows are unaffected, which is probably combination of a) inherent difficulty of their detection via code analysis and b) large number of false positives, making the developers less inclined to address these types of warnings.
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It’s one of those eternal problems between developers and operators that even DevOps can’t entirely solve. System administrators want the most stable operating system possible, while programmers want the latest and greatest development tools. Red Hat’s solution for this dilemma has been to take those brand spanking-new tools, test them out on the latest stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and then release them to developers.
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Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis is every cloud commentators dream. They’ve got the perfect story – high growth, massive funding and sufficiently frequent newsworthy content to keep people entertained. In the past the dramas have revolved around Mirantis’ strained relationship with Red Hat, things are moving up a notch today with the company throwing a barb in VMware‘s direction.
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Fedora
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One of the new offerings with the Fedora 22 release is a Vagrant box for the Atomic host. While we’re a few months away from the final release, we have an alpha out last week and test candidates for Fedora 22 beta spinning up as we speak. Ready to try out one of the Vagrant boxes? We’ll step through downloading and running the boxes for libvirt/KVM and VirtualBox.
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Fedora 21 XFCE is fedora 21 featuring XFCE desktop version 4.10, include applications that will enhance your productivity. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment that is designed to be speedy, It loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources. The Fedora Xfce Spin is a high-quality Xfce experience for Fedora users and developers. Enjoy the benefits of the Xfce desktop’s clean and quick interface. Get more done faster, and run your desktop on this innovative Fedora platform.
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Increased diversity is crucial to the future of open source. A range of contributors from varying backgrounds brings broader experience to the table, which makes for healthier projects — and ultimately better software. To make Fedora a more diverse community, the Fedora Council (our new governance and leadership body) has an open position for a Diversity Advisor, and we need your help to find the perfect person for this role.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Clement Lefebvre announced a few minutes ago, March 18, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate versions of Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 “Betsy” Cinnamon and MATE, two computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and built around the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments created by Linux Mint developers.
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The RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 2, codename Betsy, has been announced earlier today by no other than the father of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre. Both Cinnamon and MATE editions of LMDE 2 have been released for testing and we were asked by our users to create screenshot tours.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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David Callé has announced earlier today that he developed a web-based application for the developer.ubuntu.com website designed from the ground up to allow anyone to create Web Apps for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system that powers the awesome Ubuntu phones everyone talks about these days.
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Rohith Madhavan has announced today the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 operating system for the Raspberry Pi 2 computer board. The new binary image of Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is dated March 14, 2015, and brings several interesting features and improvements.
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Canonical has been talking about its mobile plans for quite some time, promising that it will one day create a truly all-encompassing ecosystem that bridges the gap between mobile and desktop systems.
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Five years have passed since the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and as such on 30 April they’re putting the Lucid Lynx release at an end-of-life state with no future support updates — including no more security updates. Those wishing to move on without wiping the system(s) should upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and after that they’re then able to move onto Ubuntu 14.04, the newest Long-Term Support release.
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Do you remember Ubuntu 10.04? Well, we do, and we can tell you that while the Desktop version is no longer supported since May 9, 2013, the Server edition will be supported until April 30, 2015. Back then, when Ubuntu 10.04 was announced, all LTS (Long Term Support) releases were supported 3 years on the Desktop and 5 years on the Server.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu 15.04 development is in full swing and it’s looking like our 10th anniversary edition will be a classic. We’re the first distribution to ship a stable version with Plasma 5, the desktop which is getting tech journalists excited. My new favourite desktop they say. A masterpiece in the making they’re calling it. The most exciting release in a long time they exclaim.
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It was recently brought to our attention that the main PPA (Personal Package Archive) software repositories of the current stable release of the Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system have been re-organized and in order for users to receive the latest software updates, they must manually add a new PPA into their distributions.
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Need a truly portable Linux computer? Over on NODE, Chris Robinson shows how build a Linux-powered computer inside of a USB charger for ultimate portability.
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Phones
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Android
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The smartwatch market is filling up with unique hardware designs to suit your tastes, but many of them share identical software features, as they are running Google’s Android Wear OS. Huawei recently joined the smartwatch market with its announcement at MWC 2015, but the company is apparently unhappy with the lack of freedom offered by the Android Wear platform.
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Google is losing the battle to establish Android Wear as the de facto platform of the smartwatch and wearables movement. Recently passing just over one million downloads of the Android OS client app from the Google Play Store, the combined effort of Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, Asus, and Sony has not led to a breakout hit. That’s before the juggernaut of Apple Watch, and Pebble’s second major iteration of software and hardware, overpower the market.
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Last week, Google started rolling out a Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update to replace Android 5.0.2 Lollipop and Android 5.0.1 Lollipop. Android 5.1 Lollipop is a substantial upgrade for Nexus smartphones and tablets and today, we want to take a look at five things you need to know about Google’s Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
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Google is introducing a new age-rating system for Android apps and games on its Google Play store, while also revealing a new policy of reviewing apps before they are published on the store.
The new age-rating system will see Android developers completing a questionnaire about their app or game’s content before it is published, rather than simply choosing a rating.
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Pebble OS-based smart watches are social creatures. Let’s teach Flappy Tux to get in touch with Android smartphones
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The number of apps claiming to sharpen your mind through daily mental calisthenics has exploded. Many of them are excellent at making brain training and language learning fun, offering a better way to kill some time on your phone or tablet than smashing candy pieces.
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LG L90 is the affordable smartphone went official a year ago with a 4.7″ display, Snapdragon 400 chip, and an 8MP cam all running on Android KitKat OS. It is pretty much the same phone as the LG G2 mini, but with front keys instead of the iconic rear control deck.
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According to Luciano Carvalho, an engineer at Motorola, the DROID Turbo on Verizon is to receive an update straight to Android 5.1, bypassing all versions of Lollipop before it. Not to waste resources, the reasoning to skip other builds is stated to be Verizon’s urge for the device’s software to highlight VoLTE (HD Voice), which is native to Android 5.1. Beyond that, no other reason is listed.
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Having Nintendo’s games on other platforms is something we’ve always asked for, and it seems like the Japanese gaming giant is finally giving in to that plea. The company has confirmed that they are in partnership with mobile game publishing house DeNA to release games under the Big N banner on smartphones and tablets later this year.
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Neptune launched a WiGig-connected “Neptune Suite” on Indiegogo, comprising an Android smartwatch, a barebones phone and tablet, and a keyboard and TV dongle.
Neptune, which launched the full-featured, Android-based Neptune Pine smartwatch last year, tipped a Neptune Duo product in February that was to comprise an autonomous smartwatch that controlled a “dumb” smartphone. The Duo concept, which essentially flips the typical smartwatch paradigm on its head, has now blossomed into an Indiegogo project called the Neptune Suite.
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Events
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The Kolab Collaboration Suite has been adopted by companies and governments around the world, making it one of most successful “poster children” for Free Software and Open Standards. In order to chart the next steps forward, the Kolab community is excited to announce the inaugural Kolab Summit to be held in The Hague on May 2-3, 2015.
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Charlie Kravetz said he was a little nervous at SCALE 13x. Not only had his presentation slides gorped about a week ahead of the expo (he got them back together and working, of course), it was Charlie’s first time speaking in front of a group. And the message he wished to convey in his talk, “Accessibility in Software,” was an important one.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The convergence of OpenStack-based cloud computing and the telecom industry is continuing apace. We’ve reported on Red Hat’s partnership with Telefonica to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications technology into OpenStack. And we’ve covered Canonical and Juniper Networks’ partnership to oversee co-development of a carrier-grade, OpenStack solution.
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The Apache Software Foundation is putting together what looks like it will be one of the better open source events of the year: ApacheCon North America, to be held in Austin, Texas, April 13th – 16th. Austin is a fun place to visit, and the agenda for ApacheCon looks excellent. You can register by March 21st to take advantage of the earlybird pricing and here are more details on the event.
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Project Releases
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OpenSSH 6.8 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.
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OpenSSH 6.8 was released this morning and with this version a lot of their internal code was refactored to make OpenSSH more library-like.
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OpenSSH, the world’s most popular open-source, 100% complete SSH (Secure Shell) protocol that also includes SFTP (Secure FTP) client and server support, has been updated today, March 18, to version 6.8. This release includes a great number of new features and many bug fixes to make OpenSSH more reliable and stable than ever.
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Licensing
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When you think of GitHub, you think of open source software. Of course, just putting your code on GitHub doesn’t make it open source; you still need to explicitly choose a license for your code that allows others to use it. A new look at the number of projects on GitHub made available under open source licenses reveals that a significant number of developers aren’t doing that. However, recent efforts by GitHub to encourage project maintainers to license their code and to simplify the process appear to be bearing fruit.
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Openness/Sharing
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Today pianist Kimiko Ishizaka and MuseScore.com made their recording and score of Johann Sebastian Bach’s collection of solo keyboard music, called the Well-Tempered Clavier, available to the public domain so anyone can download and fork it.
The project is called the Open Well-Tempered Clavier. And of the piano performance, critic Grego Applegate Edwards says, “In all the years, all the versions, I have never heard ‘Book 1′ done better than on the new recording by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka.”
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OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.
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Open Data
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The Open State Foundation has published the budgets and spending data of Dutch local governments for the years 2012-2013. Visitors to the openspending.nl portal can download the raw data, view the data of a specific local government, or compare the data of two governments.
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Open Hardware
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The original founders of Arduino—the popular programmable DIY electronics kit—appear to have had a falling out. And that might bring about what could be the world’s first open-source hardware fork, a sort of developer schism that’s much more common in the software world.
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Science
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The GNU part comes from the Pratchett universe. In clacks code, G is an instruction to send a message, N instructs the clack operator not to log it, and U instructs the recipient to turn it round at the end of the line and send it back.
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Security
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Android has been around for years, and it has seen its share of malware, even in Google’s official Play store. Although third-party security vendors had to jump in and come up with a line of defense against ill-intended apps, Google had the inspiration to introduce the Bouncer app-vetting system that kicked malicious apps out of its marketplace.
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So, almost every company do this appears to be giving ease of use priority over any real security. Besides using static keys and trusting broken SSL connections, they don’t include a way to easily update the firmware or software on these IoT devices. That means 90% of the devices will never be updated. That makes thieves happy.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Do you remember Iraq? How about its capital Baghdad? In the campaign to bring “Democracy” to that nation, the United States and its Western allies were able to utterly destroy that country. Now, the Kurds have their own independent region, the Shi’a control Baghdad and the south, and the Sunnis are somewhere in the northeast and eastern part of the country. Iraqi libraries have been destroyed (Baghdad library being a prime example), its monuments pulverized (the ancient city of Babylon was used as parking lots for US tanks, the national museum of Iraq was looted, and its objects can now be purchased on e-bay). Its power grids, roads, bridges, homes and much more were made extinct. The war to bring “Democracy” to Iraq has brought close to a million deaths and injuries in Iraq and an average death toll of 500 a day since 2008. The country has in a sense lost its cultural, social and moral fabric. That is why Daesh has been created and one can say a truly monstrous group, whose moral stance is unlike anything that we have seen in recent times is ravaging it. They have killed people and destroyed the cultural heritage of that region. One only has to mention the Mosul Museum which held artifacts from ancient Assyria amongst others, and the Mosul library which held the treasures of ancient Christianity in the East, which were all destroyed. According to President Bush, at the time of his tenure, about half a million Iraqis had died, and now the numbers may be closer to seven hundred thousand.
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Although the “violent bona fides” of ISIS are “not in doubt to anyone paying attention,” Adam Johnson, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, notes that, “much of the ISIS threat — namely that which targets the West — has been habitually overstated by an uncritical media.”
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Transparency Reporting
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The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
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Censorship
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We had been noting, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, how the country that then held a giant “free speech” rally appeared to be, instead, focusing on cracking down on free speech at every opportunity. And target number one: the internet. Earlier this week, the Interior Minister of France — with no court review or adversarial process — ordered five websites to not only be blocked in France, but that anyone who visits any of the sites get redirected to a scary looking government website…
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Privacy
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The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers.
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The man who implemented an illegal dragnet admits that governments (only authoritarian ones, he suggests? or does the use of such methods make a government authoritarian?) might exert control via the Internet.
If it weren’t for Cheney’s long history implementing just that type of monitoring (certainly on the rest of the world, and to an extent on Americans), I might think he’d been hanging around with Edward Snowden!
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Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge.
Evidence of the fake Facebook account was found in a cache of files provided by the Mall of America to Bloomington officials after a large Black Lives Matter event at the mall on December 20 protesting police brutality. The files included briefs on individual organizers, with screenshots that suggest that much of the information was captured using a Facebook account for a person named “Nikki Larson.”
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Now the uninitiated reader might have formed the impression that the Tor Browser was just some sort of slick repackaging of Firefox plus some add-ons, and that you can just use the browser of your choice with a suitable proxy setup and quit your BSD.whinging. They might assume that. I used to think that long ago but then I started to look into it and realized it’s a little more involved…
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You are travelling by plane to see your newborn grandchild. As you board the aircraft, the cabin crew address you by name and congratulate you on the arrival of a bouncing baby boy. On your seat, you find a gift-wrapped blue rattle with a note from the airline.
In Twitter data strategy chief Chris Moody’s vision of the future, companies surprising their customers like this could become an everyday occurrence – made possible because Twitter is listening.
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In a long-overdue nod to both privacy and security, the administration finally moved Whitehouse.gov to HTTPS on March 9th. This followed the FTC’s March 6th move to do the same. And yet, far too many government websites operate without the additional security this provides. But that’s about to change. According to a recent post by the US government’s Chief Information Officers Council, HTTPS will (hopefully) be the new default for federal websites.
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For quite some time now, we’ve been covering how various law enforcement agencies have been using “Stingray” (or similar) cell tower spoofing devices to track the public. Beyond the questionable Constitutionality of such mass surveillance techniques, what’s been really quite incredible is the level of secrecy surrounding such devices. We’ve written about how the US Marshals have “intervened” in various court cases to hide info about the use of Stingrays — and even telling local law enforcement to lie about their use of the devices. We’ve written about law enforcement officials claiming “terrorism” as the reason for needing Stingrays, but then using them for everyday law enforcement. We’ve written about the company that makes Stingrays, Harris Corp., forcing police to sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from revealing any info about their use. It also appears that Harris Corp. misled the FCC to receive approval for its mobile tower spoofing capabilities. Some police departments have even withdrawn evidence rather than talk about their use of Stingrays.
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Civil Rights
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The comedian, whose full name is Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, was arrested on January 14 after writing “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” on Facebook.
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A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a woman to 70 lashes after she allegedly insulted a man on the messaging service WhatsApp.
The 32-year-old, who has not been named, admitted to insulting the man but also refuted the verdict, according to reports in GulfNews.com and other local media.
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Now that it’s pretty much settled that the public has the right to record the police*, legislators are now moving to peel back this begrudgingly “granted” First Amendment protection.
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If one Texas lawmaker gets his way, it would be illegal for regular folks to get close to police and record video of them.
This proposal comes at a time of heavy police scrutiny nationwide, after an officer shot a teenager to death in Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson police have been assaulted, too, in recent days.
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03.18.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The sheer number of Linux apps available today is mind boggling and one category in particular has exploded over the last few years … productivity tools. While there are a few well-known apps such as LibreOffice and NeoOffice (both forks of OpenOffice), there are many more tools that will make your work easier. Here are seven killer Linux office productivity apps you may not know about … and note that many of them are also available for OS X and Windows, so if you have to hop between operating systems, you can keep at least a semblance of consistency.
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Remember Chris Robinson over at NODE? He was the guy who built the handheld Raspberry Pi-powered Linux terminal we wrote about back in January. Now he’s back with an even smaller Linux project for you to make – one built into the body of a USB charger.
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Desktop
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After announcing the unique, one-of-a-kind Black Lab Sphere computer, Black Lab Software was proud to introduce today a new device called Black Lab Pup, which is a mini PC powered by the MATE edition of the Black Lab Linux operating system. Despite its name, Black Lab Pup is not a Puppy Linux-based computer.
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Dell has released a new version of its Linux workstation. The Dell M3800 Developer Edition laptop is geared toward…you guessed it…developers. Ars Technica has a full review of the Dell M3800, and notes that the specs of the Linux version match those of the Windows version.
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Server
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In May 2014, HP and Foxconn announced a joint venture to build a new class of cloud servers. Today at the Open Compute Summit, HP and Foxconn publicly displayed the first fruits of the venture in the form of the new Cloudline server product family.
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Docker is getting lots of buzz for its potential to improve application development and deployment – and deservedly so.
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In December 2013, Google announced that its cloud platform was supporting a fledgling open source project called Docker. Outside of a tight-knit community of evangelical software developers, the news went largely unnoticed.
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NVIDIA HAS ANNOUNCED Digits DevBox, a Linux-powered mini supercomputer, at its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in California today.
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Kernel Space
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OSU demonstrated its speedy, bipedal ATRIAS robot withstanding a barrage of kicks and dodgeballs. ATRIAS runs on ROS and a real-time Xenomai Linux kernel.
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Linus Torvalds released the final 3.19 kernel roughly on cue, noting that “nothing all that exciting happened [since the 3.19-rc7 release candidate], and while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn’t any reason for it.” As mentioned in last month’s issue, the new kernel includes a number of exciting new features: support for Intel’s MPX Memory Protection Extensions (which we covered in detail previously), a new HSA driver for AMD GPU devices, enhanced RAID 5 and 6 support in Btrfs, and the final promotion of Android’s Binder IPC mechanism out of the kernel’s staging tree. As usual, KernelNewbies have an excellent summary of the various patches with links to commits.
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The way Linux system boots up is quite complex and there have always been need to optimize the way it works. The traditional boot up process of Linux system is mainly handled by the well know init process (also known as SysV init boot system), while there have been identified inefficiencies in the init based boot system, systemd on the other hand is another boot up manager for Linux based systems which claims to overcome the shortcomings of traditional Linux SysV init based system. We will be focusing our discussion on the features and controversies of systemd , but in order to understand it, let’s see how Linux boot process is handled by traditional SysV init based system.
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Graphics Stack
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If I were a game programmer, I’d be salivating at the bounty of cutting-edge souce code that’s available free of charge. Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 are open books for anyone who wants to take a peek, and they’ve now been joined by PhysX. Nvidia has put the full source for PhysX 3.3.3 and its clothing and destruction components on GitHub.
[...]
In an apparently separate effort, the PhysX SDK has been expanded from its Windows roots to cover Android, OS X, and Linux. The SDK and source have been released through Nvidia’s GameWorks repository, as well. Instructions to gain access are available here.
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Applications
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MPV, one of the trendiest video playback applications today, sees a new maintenance release that brings some important enhancements and repairs nasty issues discovered in the previous releases of the software. The third point release of MPV also updates the documentation and cleans up the source code.
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As a Linux system admin we love to download and upload larger files using bit torrent clients from command line or from terminal. This can be possible with the help of rTorrent, it is command line Bit Torrent client available on Linux like operating System.
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Linux doesn’t lack notes-taking applications at all, and Papyrus comes as a new addition to the large number of such programs.
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Folder Color is a file manager extension available for Nautilus, Nemo and Caja, which until recently could only be used to change individual folder colors. The tool was updated yesterday with a new feature: you can now use it to easily change all the folders colors with a click:
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The development cycle of the forthcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment continues with the second Beta version, due for release in the upcoming days. The GNOME Control Center component has been updated to version 3.16 Beta 2, a release that brings a number of fixes, a couple of enhancements, as well as updated translations.
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The Empathy IM (Instant Messenger) client has been updated on March 16 with a handful of changes and improved translations. The most important change is the removal of Facebook chat support, as Facebook will shut down its integrated chat service in favor of the standalone Messenger app.
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We announced the other day, March 16, that ownCloud Client 1.8 would bring some interesting features, as the first Release Candidate version was made available for download and testing to users worldwide on March 12, 2015. Today, ownCloud has just announced the immediate availability of the final version of ownCloud Client 1.8.
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The 3.4 release introduces new features into the CMS such as improved front end module editing, decoupling of weblinks, composer integration, Google new reCaptcha and security improvements by implementing UploadShield code which can detect most malicious uploads by examining their filenames and file contents. Please note: Due to technical reasons we have had to disable the Install from Web Service. We are working to get it back online as soon as possible. To find extensions please use the Joomla! Extensions Directory.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Really enjoyed the article on W00tsec about pulling RAW picture images from memory dumps and thought it would be cool if you could use the same process to pull information from a remote system’s memory using Kali – and you can!
In this tutorial we will see how to pull a Word document from a remote machine’s memory, parse it for text and view it in Kali Linux.
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Games
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Overall: A good version, mostly for its flexibility. The wallpaper is a nice effect. The only one I recall with the option for ‘bots, which is an interesting twist. Thanks again to archive.org for keeping this one around.
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StarCrawlers is a role-playing game set in a futuristic space universe, in which you command a crew of renegades that work for various corporations, and can hunt bounties, sabotage rivals or conduct corporate espionage.
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The developers of Isbarah kindly sent in a testing key of their intriguing looking action platformer now it’s on Linux, so I took a look and gave it a run.
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Executive Assault is a new blend of first person shooter and real time strategy, and the developer has openly said a Linux version will come.
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To get this out of the way first; the port is done by Virtual Programming, so it’s using their “eON” technology. The argument for and against it has been done to death somewhat, so let’s leave that at the door please.
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Now that Bioshock Infinite has been released for Linux, and we have taken a little time with it, we can release some thought patterns on it.
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2K Games promised at the end of 2014, on their Twitter account, that the awesome BioShock Infinite game would arrive on Linux starting early 2015. Today, we can confirm that BioShock Infinite is available on Steam for Linux, but it appears that the game only works with the proprietary video drivers from Nvidia or AMD. Intel video cards are out of the question for the moment!
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The Inner World is a traditional point-and-click adventure game that I’ve had my eye on since it released for Windows more than a year ago. It’s featured in the Humble PC & Android Bundle 12 along with indie classic VVVVVV and the popular Costume Quest and Shadowrun Returns, and three other Linux games.
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GCW-ZERO runs a version of open source Linux. It’s developed by the community so expect regular updates. There are about 70 games included with the GCW when you first power it up. These include original games as well as new takes on classic games. OpenSonic and MiniSlug are great examples of that. They are fun and simple. If you miss the days of “easy to pick up and play” Atari, Sega and Nintendo games, you’ll love what’s included on the GCW-ZERO.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Digia / The Qt Company has finally managed to get Qt 5.5 into a shape for branching and as a result the alpha version is now available for early testing.
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Last summer I worked on porting Pairs to KDE Framework 5, but since a lot of code was really depending on KDE 4 we needed to rewrite 60% of the code. Of course my two week of vacation weren’t enough for the job. I also had some simple Google Codein tasks to help me going, and then last month KDE-Edu ask me to join forces with GCompris and deprecate Pairs.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME desktop may have declined in popularity, but GNOME technology remains more popular than ever. In fact, if you tally the number of users today on leading desktops, well over a third run applications designed for GNOME. Not even KDE, GNOME’s long-time rival, exceeds this popularity.
Part of the popularity of GNOME technology is due to the GTK+ toolkit, one of the first and most mature for free software. In the last few years, KDE’s Qt toolkit has come to rival GTK+, but GTK+ remains a frequent choice for developers.
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The release of the GNOME 3.16 RC (Release Candidate) desktop environment is imminent, with the final version being unveiled next Wednesday, March 25, 2015. Numerous core component, libraries, and applications of the acclaimed and controversial open-source desktop environment have been published in the last 24 hours on GNOME’s FTP site.
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Built on top of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, UberStudent 4.1 “Epicurus” is a customized distribution designed for secondary and post-secondary education. A blurb on the UberStudent website describes the distribution as “Red Hat for education.” I was intrigued by this claim and wondered if some customization on top of Ubuntu could really do for education what Red Hat does for enterprise. So I gave UberStudent a try and was very impressed with what I found.
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Reviews
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Installation was easy and uneventful, as is almost always the case with Mint distributions. The best news at this point is that this release is still not cursed with the UEFI installation problem that the Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint distribution has – namely that it uses the same EFI boot directory name as Ubuntu.
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Makulu
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Another Makulu Bombshell ! – the next Makulu Unity Alpha 1.2 continues to push boundaries ! – Definitely a Must Watch :
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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Seven years ago this operating system was among the top ten listed on DistroWatch; these days Zenwalk is relatively obscure at 113th place. So not many people noticed when, earlier this year, a new version came out – a prelude to the upcoming 8.0 release. The result is a lightweight Linux setup, compatible with SlackWare packages, that’s fast to set up and comes with a complete suite of software for everyday use.
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Red Hat Family
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The U.S. Army alone has over 200,000 instances of Red Hat OSS deployed…
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Fedora
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As we’ve reported earlier this month, the GNOME Project is working hard to release the next major release of its GNOME desktop environment. Among the highlights of GNOME 3.16, there’s a redesigned notification system that has been integrated into the existing Calendar apple from the main panel.
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Fedora 21 released in December, and the next day the development team started planning for Fedora 22 release including starting feature planning and scheduling, and the Fedora 22 Alpha was released on March 10th.
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Debian Family
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Like a rite of spring, the annual campaign for Debian Project Leader has begun. I’ve been watching these elections since 1999, and reading the platforms of the current three candidates (headlined, inevitably, as apt install dpl-install), I’m reminded about how Debian has evolved over the years.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Sirius is an open-source virtual assistant, a bit like Apple’s Siri (pictured above), Google’s Google Now, or Microsoft’s Cortana. But unlike those well-known helpers—and like Linux itself—Sirius is an open platform anyone can use and contribute to, from universities to startups. It’s currently being tested on Ubuntu, and you can download and install it on your own Linux PC today… if you’re particularly adventurous.
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Yep, Pioneer’s the first to bat with Android Auto products officially available. The line of in-dash units revealed at this past CES is available for boatloads of cash, depending on what you need out of your vehicle’s in-dash system.
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Phones
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Android
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Jack Wallen addresses how Lollipop perfectly illustrates how the Android upgrade process is broken.
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We review Samsung’s Galaxy S6, its most exciting flagship phone in years, rocking an all-new design, updated fingerprint scanner, awesome camera tech and a lot more besides…
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The latest development code of Ubuntu’s Mir display server now supports multiple displays when using the Ubuntu Phone/Touch Android base.
If you’re running an Ubuntu Touch/Phone device where it’s running off Android/CyanogenMod, with a forthcoming update there will finally be support for using multiple displays on the devices that have a HDMI/display output.
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If you haven’t had a chance to check out the early builds of Android 5.0 Lollipop on the OnePlus One, fret not: the official release is just around the corner. OnePlus recently revealed the release dates for Android 5.0 Lollipop for both its OxygenOs and CyanogenMod 12S versions of the smartphone.
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Last week, Google started rolling out a Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop update to replace the device’s Android 5.0.1 Lollipop update. Android 5.1 Lollipop is a substantial upgrade for Nexus smartphones and tablets and today, we want to take a look at five things you need to know about Google’s Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
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Google’s new Android 5.1 Lollipop update brings tons of enhancements and fixes to owners of the Nexus 5, Nexus 7, Nexus 6, and more. It also, according to Nexus users, brings some problems of its own. With that in mind, we take a look at how to solve some of the common Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop problems we’ve seen in the days after its initial release.
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Google has fixed a troublesome memory leak issue affecting some Nexus devices that run the latest version of Android.
Last week Google released factory images of the Android 5.1 update for its own brand Nexus devices and already device owners are piling on to Google’s Android bug tracker with complaints about a severe memory leak. The bug is causing some Nexus devices’ RAM to deplete over a few days of usage.
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Last month developer Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh managed to get an Android Wear-based smartwatch to display notifications from an iPhone, even though Google’s wearable OS doesn’t support Apple’s mobile devices (at least, not yet).
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Even as phones and tablets begin to rival computers and gaming consoles in terms of graphics and processing power, we still have to deal with watered-down ports of popular game franchises. It’s an unfortunate truth of the industry, but NetherRealm Studios wants to break the mold with Mortal Kombat X on iOS and Android.
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Google Now, the card-based dashboard that provides a custom overview of what’s coming up on your schedule, how hellish your commute will be, what news you might like to read and more, is an immensely helpful tool for Android users. Google is about to make it a whole lot more powerful.
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Last month, we wrote about the upcoming Neptune Duo, a dual-device offering that included the Hub, a smartwatch capable of running Android Lollipop independently, and a phone-sized display accessory. The company is now offering a bunch of mobile devices to complement the Hub.
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On Monday, March 16th at SXSW in Austin, Texas, Yahoo is holding a Fanboy Smartphone Challenge. They’ll be putting an Android enthusiast and an iOS lover head to head in the ultimate fanboy showdown. Thanks to a little bit of luck and years of praising our Lord and Savior, Matias Duarte, I have been chosen to represent the Android faithful in glorious battle.
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Google’s brand new Android 5.1 Lollipop update for Nexus devices brings fixes for lingering Android Lollipop problems. It also appears to deliver some problems of its own. With that in mind, we take a look at five things you need to know, right now, about Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop problems as we push further away from its roll out.
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Android Auto is probably the Android platform of least general public concern, but it’s an exciting one, if you ask me – who doesn’t want Google Now in the car? Still, if you’ve not been paying close attention to Auto news in the past few months very closely, you might not have noticed that Android Auto is… not actually officially released.
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The second Red Hat Open Innovation Symposium (OIS) was recently held in conjunction with the Red Hat Challenge, a knowledge-based competition opened to tertiary students from Asia, tasked to develop and build their own applications using open source software. At the OIS, Red Hat also launched Fedora 21.
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Currently the OS X version is stable (although you’ll need to use Homebrew to install it) as are Ubuntu, Archlinux, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Scientific Linux 7 (note that not all stable versions BaseX are available on all versions of target operating systems (e.g. openSUSE 11.4 can only run BaseX 7.9 while openSUSE Factory can run BaseX 8.0). Debian GNU is in development.
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Oguz Bastemar, CTO for Nubisa (the company behind JXcore) announced the news in the blog post JXcore is now Open Source.
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Once primarily the purview of small businesses, educational institutions, and cutting edge start-ups, the entire spectrum of organizations — including the world’s largest enterprises — now are adopting open source solutions.
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Start-up company Layer is ready to open its new messaging platform to everyone starting today. The San Francisco based company claims to offer the infrastructure and developer tools to bring “iMessage” quality messaging services into any third party app.
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Google has launched PerfKit (perfect software development kit – geddit?) an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that.
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The Eclipse Foundation announced new releases of two open-source Internet of things (IoT) projects based on the OASIS Message Queue Telemetry Transport or MQTT standard protocol.
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These are great questions, and my point of view has probably changed in some ways over time. I have been involved in open source since the start of my engineering career, participating with great open source foundations such as Apache, and then seeing a prototypical example when I got to join Chris DiBona’s open source program office at Google. This is truly learning from the master. Not only is Chris on the list of “I would work for that guy again in a heart beat!” but he was fantastic at providing the frameworks that allowed engineers to get the most out of open source, while also helping the business.
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Plenty of companies are now releasing open source projects in the hopes that other companies will help improve their software, but Facebook stands out because its projects actually end up being used by so many others. A startup called Datastax built an entire company to support users of Facebook’s database Cassandra, and now even Apple is exploring the use of Facebook’s ambitious server designs in its data centers.
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Frontline is building open, configurable tools that make it easier to connect and translate systems using the world’s most distributed technologies.
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Events
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This event marks a couple of important anniversaries for us. It’s been 15 years since the first official ApacheCon, which we held in Orlando in march of 2000. (There was an earlier ApacheCon, but the Apache Software Foundation hadn’t been incorporated at that point.) It’s also been 20 years since the initial release of the Apache HTTP Server, the project that started it all, and one of the most influential projects in all of the open source landscape. We’ll be celebrating that by having Brian Behlendorf, the instigator of Apache httpd, keynote. But although he might spend some time nostalgically looking back, he’ll be setting the tone for the rest of the event by mostly looking forward.
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Open source software specialist Obsidian Systems has announced the next event in its ongoing networking and information series, or Free Beer Sessions, will take place on 12 March.
The theme for the year will be: “The power of open source” (organisers have neither confirmed nor denied that it may have something to do with ‘Dutch courage’ and being able to handle… open source).
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google wants to make sure that embarrassing ‘blue-screen-of-breath’ in the shop window doesn’t have to be a thing anymore – it’s aiming squarely are replacing windows as a dominant platform in the digital signage industry, thanks to new updates that add to the Google browser’s single app kiosk mode. These include a new Chrome sign builder, an app builder for fully-interactive kiosk software, and new continuous reporting and rebooting tools for spotting errors in signage deployments and fixing them on the spot.
[...]
Chrome and Chrome OS powering digital signs may not seem like a huge deal in terms of most people’s daily usage, but it’s an angle on Chrome OS outside of education and consumer-focused hardware that may not be readily apparent, but that nonetheless could help push Chrome as a whole forward, and have implications for the consumer track later on.
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Mozilla
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David was most recently at Nokia where he served as Vice President of Advanced Engineering and focused on leading the global hardware and software engineering teams to accelerate new mobile product development. He brings with him significant experience in mobile, software architecture and engineering management having held executive leadership positions spanning engineering and marketing at Nokia, Sun and Bell Labs.
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A few hours after we’ve reported that the final build of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 36.0 web browser is available for download, Mozilla made the official announcement on the Firefox website. Now, we’re announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release for the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 37.0 web browser, due for release on April 7, 2015.
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack Congress, a project aimed at providing “policy as a service” for OpenStack clouds, is a project I’ve had the privilege of being involved in from very early days. I first mentioned Congress almost a year ago, and since then the developers have been hard at work on the project. Recently, one of the lead developers posted a summary of some pretty impressive performance improvements that have been made with Congress.
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The open-source OpenStack platform is all about enabling organizations to harness physical and virtual resources to enable a cloud deployment. The open-source Kubernetes project, which is managed by Google, is all about enabling clusters of Linux containers.
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When big names including GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS, AltiScale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, Splunk, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Teradata, and VMware announce a new alliance to create and push for big data technology using open source, it’s hard to ignore.
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Pivotal is one of fifteen leading vendors launching a major new open source big data platform to drive enterprise data innovation – president Scott Yara sat down with Information Age to tell us why
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Updates to HP’s Helion OpenStack and Helion Development Platform solutions, in addition to enhancements to HP Helion Eucalyptus, have been announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress.
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Google’s open source elves have released MapReduce for C (MR4C), an open source framework to run native C-language code in Hadoop.
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Hadoop is about to get a lot less complicated. A number of the largest big data vendors, including IBM, Hortonworks and Pivotal, have joined forces to standardise the base platform for the open source software.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has announced today the immediate availability for download and update of a new maintenance release of its VirtualBox 4.3 virtualization software for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. VirtualBox 4.3.26 brings a number of improvements and fixes that have been discovered in the previous release, VirtualBox 4.3.24.
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CMS
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Is open source the next big thing? At least that’s what it seems, based on a burst of unrelated news in the past month. As CMSWire writer Miles Kehoe explained a few weeks ago, “Open source software has gone from quirky and free to mainstream for the enterprise.”
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Education
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As part of its mission to promote student success, Jefferson College in Missouri is working with Unicon to implement Student Success Plan (SSP), open source case-management software that provides “a holistic coaching and counseling model for integrated planning and advising services.”
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Business
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Sikka was quoted in an interview with the Press Trust of India (PTI) last month describing patents as “a scourge on the software industry” and a “tremendous disservice”, adding: “You see the amount of undue attention that companies focus on these patents… I think the software industry and its strange fixation on patents is absolutely wrong and is actually not at all productive to innovation.”
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“We have to start these new themes, design-thinking, investments in the open-source platform. But, those are small today and will become bigger over time,” he said.
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BSD
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Berkeley Software Distribution, abbreviated as BSD, is a UNIX operating system derivative, developed and distributed at the university of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995 by a group of programmers (Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Kenneth Thompson etc…) at the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Last I heard SCO was all but bankrupt, but apparently five years later a claim against IBM for $5 billion is still pending. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield discusses how Debian has changed over the years and if that was for the good. In other gnews, the GNU Manifesto turns 30 this month.
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Three decades from that manifesto, the world of free and open source software has grown to include many hucksters and people who see only the dollar sign when they think of this genre of software. People have even started trying to undermine Torvalds.
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Licensing
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The days of open source software free lunches are rapidly coming to an end, and that means enterprises that fail to stick to the terms of open source licenses can expect to be sued.
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Openness/Sharing
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Since 2011, the Open Compute Project (OCP) has been building and proposing specifications to enable new classes of servers and data center gear. Cole Crawford has been a key figure in OCP, serving as the group’s Chief Operating Officer from 2012 to 2013 and as an executive director from 2013 to this month. Crawford is now taking his OCP experience and funneling it into a startup called Vapor.
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These flat-packable kits are designed to boost urban agriculture, ranging from flower & vegetable production to worm composting to backyard chickens and beekeeping, and require no tools for assembly.
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One of the biggest areas in which 3D printing is making its largest impact, is within the field of prostheses. Whether it is prosthetic leg sockets, custom prosthetic hands and arms, or even prostheses that replace missing parts of the human face, 3D printing is making huge advancements, not only in the technology available, but to the bottom line of patients’ bank accounts as well.
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Rob Martin’s hobby of building 3-D printers has grown into a business that sees the Department of Technology graduate working with educators across the state and individuals in the community.
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Telefónica, Orange, Engineering and Atos have announced a new partnership during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, to build and support standards for smart cities through the FIWARE Open Source Community.
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Open Data
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Information about French companies, collected and centralised by InfoGreffe, will now be freely accessible. French Members of Parliament have voted in favour of article 19 of the draft Loi Macron (named after Emmanuel Macron, Minister of Economic Affairs, who supports the law). The article, which states that InfoGreffe information will now be available as Open Data, was approved in February.
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Developing more interactive, visual and user-friendly maps could help academic researchers better communicate their findings, according Suzanne Blier, a Harvard professor.
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The State Department marked the recent Open Data Day by touting the one-year anniversary of MapGive, an open data platform that provides its worldwide posts access to open source information and enhanced humanitarian preparedness via mapping and satellite imagery.
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Open Access/Content
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As that last point suggests, this report is very closely aligned with open licences and open access, and readers of this blog will find much to applaud in it (they will also be pretty amazed that such a report was presented to the UN at all.) About open access, it says:
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A report publicized in The New York Times last week found that using electronic “open-source” textbooks can save college students hundreds of dollars during their college education. According to the report, the College Board estimates that the average cost of books and supplies during an academic year is between $1,200 and $1,300. In order to curb the costs of attending Cornell, we at The Sun urge faculty members to experiment with open-source books to facilitate wider adoption throughout the University.
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Open-source textbooks are written through a collaboration between professors and experts under an open license. Students can download them for free or print them at a low cost, according to The New York Times. Compare that to the average cost for books and supplies per year at a typical four-year college — between $1,200 and $1,300.
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Open Hardware
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The PIRX was released nearly two years ago and now the device is poised to reach a wider community with the announcement that they plan to give out the design in the form of a free and ready for non-commercial use set of files.
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The PLEN2 can carry small items, dance around, or play a game of soccer on your desktop and you can make it all happen via a smartphone or PC or a whole range of inputs like motion control, facial expressions, or, for that matter, your brain waves.
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Those luckily enough to own a 3D printer and enjoying building a Raspberry Pi robot, or would like to start, may gain more inspiration from this awesome Pi Tank robot.
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Razer has announced a significant expansion of the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) platform it unveiled at CES earlier this year. Several new companies are joining OSVR, bringing the total number of partners up to 50, spread among HMD and peripheral manufacturers, publishers, and developers.
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Hardware
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An effort to tightly knit together graphics chips, processors and other hardware to boost things like video search on your desktop has taken a step forward.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The FBI’s preference for easily-investigated terrorism is well-documented. We’re routinely assured that all sorts of domestic surveillance tech and agency opacity is necessary to protect us from a whole host of threats, but for the most part, the terrorists “apprehended” by the FBI seem to be people who’ve had the misfortune of being “befriended” by undercover agents and/or confidential informants.
When over 90% of the funding, idea generation, transportation and motivation comes from those saving us from terrorism, we have reason to be worried. While the FBI performs its predatory handcrafting of “extremists,” the real terrorists — who don’t need someone else to provide weapons, money and motivation — are still going about the business of terrorism.
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Transparency Reporting
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Civil liberties advocates are adding another strike to the Obama administration’s record on transparency: on Monday, the White House announced that it is officially ending the Freedom of Information Act obligations of its Office of Administration. That office provides broad administrative support to the White House—including the archiving of emails—and had been subject to FOIA for much of its nearly four-decade history.
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Michael Ratner says the real threat to Assange is the continuing espionage investigation against him and Wikileaks – March 17, 2015
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Today marks the 1,000th day WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spent in political asylum inside Ecuador’s London embassy. For the first time, Swedish prosecutors have opened the door to Assange’s departure with a request to question him in London. Assange has never been charged over allegations of sexual assault, but has been holed up in the embassy since 2012, fearing a Swedish arrest warrant could lead to his extradition to the United States. We speak with Assange attorney, Michael Ratner, who says an interview with the prosecutor may result in no charges, and even if Assange were convicted of these allegations, “he has done all the time he would have to do… so the whole case is essentially a bogus way of keeping him in that embassy.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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They’ve been asleep since before the dinosaurs roamed Earth and now we’re waking them up.
Long-dormant, 300-million-year-old fault lines across Oklahoma are being “reawakened” by recent small earthquakes that have been previously linked to fracking, scientists reported in a new study out this week.
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Finance
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This statistic provides a pretty compelling snapshot of the severity of our income gap: In 2014, Wall Street’s bonus pool was roughly double the combined earnings of all Americans working full-time jobs at minimum wage.
That sobering tidbit came from a new Institute for Policy Studies report by Sarah Anderson, who looked at new figures from the New York State Comptroller and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average bonus for one of New York City’s 167,800 employees in the securities industry came out to $172,860—on top of an average salary of nearly $200,000. On the other side of the equation were about one million people working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
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Anti-capitalist protesters clashed with riot police near the new headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt on Wednesday and set fire to barricades and cars, casting a pall over the ceremonial opening of the billion-euro skyscraper.
Nearly 90 police were injured by stones and unidentified liquids hurled by a violent minority from within the thousands-strong protest, police said. Some protesters said they were injured when police used pepper spray.
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“Britain is walking tall again” claimed George Osborne today, as he argued the British economy is now growing “faster than any other major advanced economy in the world”.
However, while the pace of economic recovery has finally picked up, figures released by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) today confirmed that overall Osborne has presided over the slowest economic recovery in British history.
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Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.
The corporate powers, from Seattle’s mayor to the Chamber of Commerce and the area’s Democratic Party, are determined she be defeated, and these local corporate elites have the national elites behind them. This will be one of the most important elections in the country this year. It will pit a socialist, who refuses all corporate donations—not that she would get many—and who has fearlessly championed the rights of workingmen and workingwomen, rights that are being eviscerated by the corporate machine. The elites cannot let the Sawants of the world proliferate. Corporate power is throwing everything at its disposal—including sponsorship of a rival woman candidate of color—into this election in the city’s 3rd District.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wow, so Leonhardt knows what Obama and Clinton really “consider,” “want,” “see” and “think.” That’s impressive, but readers may want to be somewhat skeptical. After all, most of us recognize that politicians don’t always reveal their true thoughts. We know what they say their priorities are, but only a mind-reader would try to tell us what they really think.
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Privacy
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The information shared today by Le Figaro regarding the upcoming French Bill on Intelligence, ahead of its presentation before the Council of ministers on Thursday 19 March, only confirms earlier concerns. While this new law was announced as an important overhaul aimed at protecting fundamental rights, the securitarian instrumentalisation of the deadly events of January is bound to lead to an incredible drift in state surveillance practices. La Quadrature du Net calls on citizens and their elected representatives to oppose this bill.
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Like most technical people, I’m not impressed but very worried about the erosion of our civil rights, through the NSA spying and in other ways. And I am sure I share with others the impression that if only politicians and the general public knew more about the problem, we wouldn’t make such bad decisions.
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Germany based encrypted email startup, Tutanota, is taking its service out a beta next week — after a year of testing and almost 100,000 users signed up to send and receive secure email.
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Civil Rights
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The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines the corporate media’s coverage of citizen’s resistance to corruption and abuse in the US legal system.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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After 30 years, the dot-com (.com) top-level domain (TLD) continues to dominate the Internet, but now faces more challengers than ever.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Democratic lawmaker says tightly-controlled briefings on Trans-Pacific Partnership deal are aimed at keeping US constituents ignorant about what’s at stake
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As the Obama administration gives House Democrats a hard sell on a major controversial trade pact this week, it will be doing so under severe conditions: Any member of Congress who shares information with the public from a Wednesday briefing could be prosecuted for a crime.
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House Democrats are criticizing President Obama’s administration for holding a classified briefing on trade with top administration officials, saying it’s an attempt to push a trade program in secret.
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Copyrights
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With the Digital Agenda being a key part of the Juncker commission’s drive for jobs and growth and Commissioner Oettinger promising copyright reform and an end of geo-blocking, a group of business and foundations have written to Jean-Marie Cavada MEP (ALDE, FR), the chair of the European Parliament’s Copyright Working Group demanding that he open up consultations to a wider range of stakeholders.
New Europe has seen the letter.
The French MEP is at odds with many parliamentarians and the European Commission, being supportive of the current scheme, which has come under sustained criticism from many quarters.
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Send this to a friend
03.17.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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What are the Asian Penguins? That’s a simple question that has a complicated answer. Are they a student club? Yes. Are they a tech support group that takes care of some of our school’s computers? Partly, yes. Are they also a movement for change that challenges our students to improve people’s lives through the power of open source technology? Most definitely, yes. Simply put, the Asian Penguins are a Linux users group.
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It quit working. It slowed down. It collected malware. It re-re-rebooted. Well, schools still find that with “7”.
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Desktop
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Like most people, I find myself using the same VoIP options everyone else is using. Thankfully, these days there are far more options available than what we might think. Today, I’ll look at these options and also explore up-and-coming alternatives as well.
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Almost two years ago, we closed out our review of Dell’s first Linux-powered Developer Edition laptop with some words of wisdom from my former uber-sysadmin mentor, a fellow named Rick, with whom I worked at Boeing for many, many years. Rick is now retired and living the life of an itinerant world-traveling SCUBA master, but he’s been hacking on Linux since around the time Linus first dropped the kernel on comp.os.minix. I lamented to Rick that I was having a hard time coming up with an angle or hook for the XPS 13 Developer Edition, because it all just worked—Dell got it right, and it was a great piece of kit. It was maybe even a bit boring.
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Server
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Docker, Inc., the corporate sponsor of the popular container technology toolset, has been in the news recently for its acquisitions. Last month, Docker acquired startup SocketPlane, and said that SocketPlance could help add standard networking interfaces to Docker to make multi-container distributed apps easily portable. And Docker, Inc. has also acquired Canadian startup Kitematic and its eponymous, popular open source software tool. “The Docker experience is enhanced through Kitematic and its graphical user interface (GUI)-driven workflow that automatically installs Docker on a user’s Mac to build, ship and run Docker containers in just minutes,” says the announcement.
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Kernel Space
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Much like the Linux kernel development process itself has evolved as a function of development, I suspect the code of conduct will be the same. That is to say it will be self-regulating without some kind of rigid system of policies.
The simple truth is that the vast majority of Linux kernel development is done by those that work for companies. Since LKML is all in the open, and it’s clear to see who works for whom, I suspect that various corporate masters already have policies in place as well.
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Stephane Graber is a software engineer at Canonical Ltd. where he is a project leader for LinuxContainers.org, including LXC. In this video he takes us on a tour of his home office in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and answers our questions about his work space.
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Benchmarks
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At the last USENIX/LISA conference, I gave a talk on new Linux performance tools: my open source perf-tools collection. These use existing kernel frameworks, ftrace and perf_events, which are built in to most Linux kernel distributions by default, including the Linux cloud instances I analyze at Netflix.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With the Sprint behind us and the Freeze coming up next month, the VDG has made it’s agenda for the coming weeks, and I figured I’d share some highlights I’m working on, and a couple I’m personally looking forward to.
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Attention prospective Google Summer of Code students: the student applications window has begun.
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If you haven’t contacted the relevant KDE subproject yet (including umbrella projects Kubuntu and Calamares) to submit your proposal for review, it is high time to do so. Take a look at our Google Summer of Code project ideas page, pick one or more of our exciting project ideas, dazzle us with your proposal and hack your way to ultimate glory this summer! A nice paycheck is also part of the deal.
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Qt 5.5 is branched from dev and we now have the Alpha packages available. Main focus of Qt 5.5 is to polish and improve existing functionality, but as always there are also some new exciting features to talk about. With Qt 5.5, Canvas 3D is fully supported and a technology preview of long awaited Qt 3D is included. Qt 5.5 also introduces mapping support with a Qt Location technology preview. Qt 5.5 Alpha is the first step towards Qt 5.5 final release planned to be available in May.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I have been mentoring Sanskriti Dawle as part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Sanskriti has been working on a usability test of GNOME, an update from my own usability testing which I also shared at GUADEC 2014.
I encourage you to watch Sanskriti’s blog for the final results, but I wanted to share a view into her excellent work. You might treat this as a preview of Sanskriti’s results.
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The Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming and anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment will be released later this week, and its developers have already started uploading packages to the main FTP server for testing purposes before the final release gets out.
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Jacque Montague Raymer, the developer of the MakuluLinux computer operating system has published earlier today a new video on YouTube, this time showcasing an upcoming edition of its Linux distribution, MakuluLinux Unity.
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Reviews
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Christine Hall at FOSS Force today wrote that Canonical’s deal with the devil may signal Ubuntu’s swan song topping today’s Linux news. Linux Tycoon Bryan Lunduke reviewed the Dell M3800 with Ubuntu and Jamie Watson tested six pre-release distributions. To top that off, we have four reviews and a Linux Mint Debian teaser.
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‘KaOS’ supports 64-bit CPU architecture only, and when compared to the previous release, the ISO disc size is actually reduced by around 300MiB and now the total size is around 1.4GiB. Despite the obvious KDE Plasma & Qt 5.0 adaptation, ‘KaOS’ now uses a new installer called ‘Calamares’ which was initially added to ‘KaOS’ in last December.
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Ubuntu MATE is currently available in two versions. There is long term support release labelled 14.04 and a short term support release with newer software carrying the version number 14.10. I decided to try out version 14.10 for a week. The project provides release notes for the distribution. Essentially, it looks as through the project takes Ubuntu, strips away the Unity desktop and replaces it with MATE. Most applications, apart from those relating directly to configuring the MATE desktop, appear to be the same across both distributions. The version of Ubuntu MATE I downloaded is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds and the ISO file is 980MB in size.
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Bodhi Linux provides options to download 32-bit, 64-bit, legacy and Chromebook version. I chose 64-bit ISO, about 612 MB in size. I created a live USB using Linux Mint Image Writer on a 4 GB USB drive. First I did a live boot on my laptop and then installed it to a 100 GB drive to understand Bodhi’s performance better.
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New Releases
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The Evolve OS development team, through Ikey Doherty, had the pleasure of announcing earlier today the immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta release for the upcoming Evolve OS Linux distributions. Evolve OS Beta 1.1 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.19.1 and systemd 218. In addition, this new Beta release of Evolve OS includes the GCC 4.9.2 and Clang/LLVM 3.5.0 compilers.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Some of you noticed that the ROSA company has silently pushed the ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 GNOME computer operating system onto its servers last week without making a public statement about what new features and improvements introduced in the refreshed distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Serious businesses use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its near-twin brother CentOS for their servers. The question today for CIOs using or RHEL and CentOS is: When should they upgrade to RHEL 7.1 and/or CentOS 7.1?
RHEL 7.1 is the first minor release of RHEL 7, which launched in June 2014. This new version adds improved development and deployment tools, enhanced interoperability and manageability, and additional security and performance features. This release, like all RHEL versions, will be supported for a 10-year life-cycle.
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, December 18th. The company reported $0.42 EPS for the quarter, beating the analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.40 by $0.02. The company had revenue of $455.90 million for the quarter. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $0.42 earnings per share. On average, analysts predict that Red Hat will post $1.58 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.
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As open source has grown in popularity over recent years (both for private and commercial use), also have the number of misconceptions about open source and its use, particularly in enterprise environments.
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Now Red Hat is looking to resolve that challenge with its new company vision. On Tuesday, the company announced a new initiative for the mobile enterprise, focusing heavily on helping developers from across both ways of thinking talk to and work with each other, with better tools for building slick mobile software that also meets the needs of the business.
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Red Hat has announced its vision to help organisations succeed in the mobile-first economy.
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Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.
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Fedora
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The LXDE Spin of the Fedora Linux distribution is the last in our screenshot tours for the Alpha release of the upcoming Fedora 22 computer operating system based on the Linux kernel and various other open-source technologies.
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Fedora 22 Alpha was officially unveiled on March 10 and until now we gave you detailed information about each of its Spins, including screenshot tours for the Workstation (GNOME), KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE/Compiz editions. It is now time to talk a little about the Cloud Edition of the upcoming Fedora 22 Alpha.
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After the long delay between Fedora 20 and Fedora 21, the hope is that Fedora 22 will restore the traditional release cadence. Last week the first alpha for Fedora 22 was release, starting the countdown toward general availability in May.
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Fedora 22 Workstation will include the new GNOME 3.16 release. This release has a new notification design that’s less intrusive and easier to use.
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To get the very best out of the GNOME desktop environment, within Fedora, you need to learn and remember the keyboard shortcuts required to navigate the system.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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LMDE 2 “Betsy” just got approved for an RC release. So if you could go ahead and NOT find tons of bug in it that would be great
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Linux Mint has always been at the forefront of making elegant tools for users. Now the Linux Mint developers have come up with a better bluetooth configuration utility called Blueberry. Blueberry will ship first in Linux Mint Debian 2 before being added to other versions of Linux Mint.
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Imagination Technologies is a British company that has recently entered full production of a board based on MIPS computer architecture. The single-board computer has been designed to allow developers to create applications for mobiles, gaming, Internet of Things, and wearables.
The MIPS Creator CI20 is billed as a high-performance, fully featured Linux and Android development platform. The board includes an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC which is built around a dual-core MIPS32 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, and Imagination’s PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The Creator CI20 comes with a price tag of or £50, which is significantly more expensive than the Raspberry Pi 2. CI20 is an open platform with technical manuals, schematics and source code freely downloadable. You might be interested in my Raspberry Pi 2 review together with this article.
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The Timesys LinuxLink tool suite now supports Freescale’s i.MX6 SoloX SoC, including support for Freescale’s MQX RTOS that runs on the SoC’s Cortex-M4 MCU.
Timesys, which has long supported Freescale’s i.MX6 system-on-chip family with its LinuxLink embedded Linux development platform, has now added support for the new SoloX variant. Freescale’s i.MX6 SoloX combines a 1GHz Cortex-A9 core with a Cortex-M4 microcontroller unit (MCU) specializing in real-time processing. As Timesys explains it, the combination enables the SoC to “run a UI-rich OS while still benefitting from fast real-time responsiveness.”
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Qualcomm’s Raspberry Pi-sized “DragonBoard 410c” SBC runs Android or Linux on the quad-core Cortex-A53 based Snapdragon 410, and offers WiFi, BT, and GPS.
Qualcomm Inc. subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies has unveiled the second single board computer to comply with 96Boards Consumer Edition hardware specification from Linaro’s new 96Boards.org community project and standards organization. Qualcomm’s DragonBoard 410c follows 96Boards.org’s flagship, CircuitCo-built HiKey board. The HiKey, which similarly supports Android and Linux, was the world’s first 64-bit, ARMv8 hacker board. The DragonBoard 410c won’t ship until summer, so it’s unlikely to be the second. At 85 x 54mm, both SBCs are nearly identical in size to the 85 x 56mm Raspberry Pi.
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Phones
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Tizen
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It’s now time for you to get better acquainted with the Tizen Samsung Z1 Smartphone, its User Interface (UI) and also the User Experience (UX). The Z1 benefits from running Tizen, which means it is a smooth fluid experience that can be customised to suit your specific needs.
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Android
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Android Wear consists of Android with the addition of wearable user interface (UI) extensions. It’s a complete operating system capable of autonomous app execution. The Apple Watch, on the other hand, acts more like a dumb terminal connected to an iPhone host. At this point, WatchKit apps seem to be designed for presenting and interacting with notifications.
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5.1 also makes many small interface changes, documented in the gallery above. Notification and volume controls have seen improvement, and the OS has been tweaked and polished all over.
In addition, 5.1 brings built-in support for dual SIMs (previously something OEMs had to add) and HD Voice support.
Android 5.1 is one of the smaller minor version Android updates, down there with versions 4.2 and 4.3. But it brings a few nice changes and thankfully seems to solve many of the Nexus 6 performance problems.
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Right now is a horrible time to buy a new Android phone though we realize that there are many people that simply can’t wait for the new crop of devices to arrive. With those people in mind, we take a look at what we think represent the five best Android phones money can buy during the month of March.
Earlier this month, Samsung and HTC announced successors to the Galaxy S5 and One M9, two of the biggest smartphones from 2014. Those successors are the Samsung Galaxy S6 (and Galaxy S6 Edge) and HTC One M9. Both are set to arrive in the United States in the near future and both look like they will immediately become two of the hottest Android phones on the market. If you can wait, you should wait to weigh them against the current crop of phones.
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Once a piece of software is installed on a user’s system, how do you keep it updated? While Linux users typically have a package management system to pull latest versions from a repository of their choice, users of other systems aren’t so lucky. We have developed an open source tool to assist in this process, based on an open source protocol from Google know as Omaha.
Several years ago Google released an open source protocol called Omaha (otherwise known as Google Update) as a part of its Chromium project. The protocol is intended to make the updating process of complicated desktop software easier.
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In business today there is an emphasis on leveraging big data analytics in order to improve customer service. There is much to derive about consumer behavior and market trends that can all be found in the stacks of incoming data received by customer service industries such as contact centers, for example. So, how is open source software relevant to the customer service industry? As of late, many organizations are opting for open source solutions, rather than proprietary software, to augment customer service data analysis.
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The Republic of Ireland celebrates its national holiday St. Patrick’s Day this week, when the rivers flow green and the Guinness flows too. This small country has produced some world-reknowned open source and free software developers, and we’ve rounded up a few in honor of St. Paddy’s Day.
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Unfortunately few organizations have anticipated the influence of mobile and digital consumerization. Combined these two trends have forced many businesses, including banks and financial services companies, to rethink how they engage customers. The impact to IT is two-fold: (1) the CIO and IT are no longer the sole custodians of what systems and software, including mobile apps, the business can use; and (2) IT must is now mandated to roll-out applications faster-to-market to stay relevant to the Lines of Business. Another stark reality is that IT budgets aren’t growing proportionately to these developments. Hence, IT has to do more with what it has.
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The Times and Sunday Times is following in the footsteps of Vox Media and NPR by releasing its own open-source image creation tool
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A team of researchers from the University of Michigan are demonstrating the digital personal assistant in Turkey.
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Aiming to optimize performance of open source distributed SQL query engine Presto, Facebook has designed a new Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file format reader that supports columnar reads, predicate pushdown and lazy reads.
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Events
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If we can accept for the sake of argument that this is not a unique adjustment of Oracle’s, but a pattern replicating itself across a wide range of businesses and industries, there are many questions to be answered about what the impacts will be to the industry around it. Of all of these questions, however, none is perhaps as important as the one I have discussed with members of the Eclipse and Linux Foundations over the past few weeks: what does the shift towards as-a-service businesses mean for open source? Is it good or bad for open source software in general?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Seamonkey has an interesting history, in that it is both older and younger than Firefox. Older, because originally it was built from Mozilla Suite code (for those of you that don’t know, Mozilla Application Suite is the parent of Firefox, and was originally built from the code of Netscape Navigator which was open-sourced in 1998).
Seamonkey is also younger than Firefox in that Seamonkey’s first version, 1.0, was not released until 2006, 2 years after Firefox 1.0. Quite a few people are not even aware of the existence of Seamonkey or the Mozilla Suite, thinking that Firefox was the successor to Netscape Navigator, created deliberately to enact their vendetta against Microsoft for their monopolistic practices that killed Netscape. But glorious fantasies aside, Mozilla Application Suite was the real successor.
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The Masche project, started in mid-2014 as part of Mozilla’s Winter of Security (MWOS) program whose goal is to involve students in building security tools, has been executed by students Agustin Martinez Suñé, Marco Vanotti, Nahuel Lascano, Patricio Palladino, aided by Professor Alejandro Furfaro, and advised by Julien Vehent, one of the members of Mozilla’s Operations Security team.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Pivotal will open source the core components of Pivotal Big Data Suite, the next generation big data solution built to help customers accelerate the value they get from their big data.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A new development version for the next maintenance release of the acclaimed LibreOffice 4.4 office suite has been announced today, bringing a wide range of enhancements and bugfixes that improve the overall stability of the software on all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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Education
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Data scientists frequently find themselves dealing with high-dimensional feature spaces. As an example, text mining usually involves vocabularies comprised of 10,000+ different words. Many analytic problems involve linear algebra, particularly 2D matrix factorization techniques, for which several open source implementations are available. Anyone working on implementing machine learning algorithms ends up needing a good library for matrix analysis and operations.
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Funding
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that it has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization for the 11th consecutive year.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman, who published his manifesto in March of 1985, has been known to say that, “with software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users.”
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Project Releases
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Today, we’re happy to release the best ownCloud Desktop Client ever to our community and users! It is ownCloud Client 1.8.0 and it will push syncing with ownCloud to a new level of performance, stability and convenience.
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Licensing
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A war of words has ensued since Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig and the Software Freedom Conservancy filed a lawsuit against VMware over GPLv2 compliance in the company’s ESXi line of enterprise hypervisor operating system products.
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Filings from the Free Software Conservancy (FSC) in Hamburg, Germany accused the company of failing to release the source code for the open source products that is included with ESXi, following a three-year dispute over the matter.
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Openness/Sharing
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For medical researchers, the tens of thousands of people who recently signed up to participate in studies on asthma, Parkinson’s disease, and other medical conditions by using Apple’s ResearchKit marked a watershed moment in research. Researchers hailed the possibilities brought by the new open-source software framework designed to aid medical studies, all from the screen of the iPhone, with vastly expanded participant pools, more rapid data collection, and better information overall.
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Open Data
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The open source movement is one of the most powerful forces pushing technology forward. It’s easy to forget that not long ago, startups had to raise tons of money from VCs to license Oracle or a web server. Today any tiny startup has access to the best tools in the world.
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Security
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Whenever a server is accessible via the Internet, it’s a safe bet that hackers will be trying to access it. Just look at the SSH logs for any server you use, and you’ll surely find lots of “authentication failure” lines, originating from IPs that have nothing to do with you or your business. Brute-force attempts (such as “dictionary attacks”) try different passwords over and over to try to get into your box, and there’s always a chance that they eventually will succeed. Thus, it’s a good idea to apply these “three Ds” for your security: detect intruder attempts, decide when they’ve gone “over the top” (past what would be acceptable for honest-to-goodness typing mistakes), and deny them access at least for a (longish!) while.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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First up is the now-notorious press conference hosted by the campaigning group, Cage, in which the Research Director, Asim Qureshi , claimed that MI5 harassment of Emwazi was the reason for his radicalisation. Emwazi had complained to Cage and apparently the Metropolitan Police that over the last six years MI5 had approached him and was pressurising him to work as an agent for them. According to Cage, this harassment lead to Emwazi’s radicalisation.
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A Syrian man arrested in Turkey last month for allegedly helping three British schoolgirls join Islamic State militants told police he was in touch with Canadian officials as far back as 2013 and had helped a dozen other people cross into Syria, according to Turkish media reports.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister revealed last week that police had arrested the man, who he said had been working for another country’s foreign intelligence service. Mevluet Cavuolu would not name the country in question but said it’s part of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State extremists and is not the United States nor a member in the European Union.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Facebook has updated its community guidelines to make what can and cannot be shared on the social network crystal clear.
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The websites of an atheist association, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Kurdish separatist organization are blocked to Turkish Internet users. But many sites that promote extreme Islamist messages — even some that are outright sympathetic to the Islamic State, the militant organization that has marauded through Iraq and Syria — escape Turkey’s censors.
A hallmark of the decade-long leadership of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., has been a crackdown on freedom of expression. Yet what Turkey chooses to censor reflects the Islamist values of the government, critics say. With the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, this dynamic has been set in sharp relief, highlighting the deep divide between Turkey and its Western allies in the fight against the militants.
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Privacy
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Every time you email someone overseas, the NSA copies and searches your message.
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Closely monitoring your child’s mobile phone or tablet use is a contentious issue. But if it is something you believe you should be doing and you trust an overseas company with your child’s communications data and metadata, then the TeenSafe monitoring software is now available in Australia.
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Many of my friends and coworkers have an unreasonable trust in our government’s intentions. Part two is for them. It discusses what’s at stake and why we don’t want to behave like mindless sheep. Again, Schneier provides example after example of the harm caused while the supposed true goals are rarely met.
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Last week, Fusion reported that Hertz had been updating the navigational devices in its rental cars to include cameras that have a full view of the interior of the vehicle. The update, which began in mid-2014, happened quietly and so far has only impacted about thirteen percent of Hertz’ fleet. Still, that number troubled those who noticed the tiny unblinking eye staring back at them.
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Civil Rights
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County prosecutor Robert McCulloch is paraphrased as saying Williams “was involved in the demonstration that was wrapping up when the incident took place”–though one of the charges against him is “firing a weapon from a vehicle,” which is an unusual place to be if you’re taking part in a protest.
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Under Michigan law, the police agency seizing the property gets to keep it. In 2013, law enforcement agencies in the state seized and kept more than $24 million in property and cash.
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The New York Police Department has identified two officers who used agency computers to sanitize Wikipedia entries about incidents of police brutality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Universal Music Group has hijacked several YouTube videos of Bjorn Lynne, an independent musician from Norway. The world’s largest music corporation is now running advertisements on videos of music tracks Lynne created, and is refusing to correct the mistake.
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Belgian Internet providers have won their court case against music group SABAM, which had demanded a 3.4 percent cut of all subscriber fees to compensate artists. The court ruled that ISPs are a mere conduit and can’t be taxed as a public broadcast medium.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Dell has offered a Linux (Ubuntu) option on some laptops (and servers) for a few years now. Considering my general love for all things Linux, combined with my (often) overpowering desire to play with new hardware, it’s rather odd that I’ve never gotten my hands on a Linux-powered Dell laptop.
That rather egregious offense has now been remedied.
Right in front of me sits the Dell M3800 Mobile Workstation – a 15.6-inch laptop that doubles as a Linux-powered desktop replacement.
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Panic was starting to creep in, and was pushing the anger level even higher. ‘OK, run gparted and see exactly what Windows has done to me,’ I thought. And…nothing. Empty. The entire hard drive was unallocated space.
Time to rant. Microsoft, I hate you! I hope that each and every one of you is condemned to an endless purgatory of trying to recover corrupted Windows systems!
OK, with that rant out of the way, what to do? The prospect of installing Windows from scratch was unappealing beyond description.
On top of that, even if I got it installed and running again, I would have to go through the fight to get UEFI boot configured to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and that in itself is a basically never-ending struggle because Windows keeps trying to ‘reclaim’ first boot.
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The more people discover the wonders of GNU/Linux, the faster that desktop monopoly sinks.
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Server
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Oracle has released a new secure-boot version of its Linux, but the new issuance is attracting criticism that it’s not actually secure.
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And since nobody is still able to compile things from scratch, everybody just downloads precompiled binaries from random websites. Often without any authentication or signature.
NSA and virus heaven. You don’t need to exploit any security hole anymore. Just make an “app” or “VM” or “Docker” image, and have people load your malicious binary to their network.
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Kernel Space
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A few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the fourth Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming and highly anticipated Linux 4.0 kernel. According to Linus, Linux kernel 4.0 RC4 is a small release that includes many driver updates and ARM changes.
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On the other hand, I was also heartened by what does not appear in the above paragraph. There is no assertion that the Linux kernel community’s processes are perfect, which is all to the good, because delusions of perfection all too often prevent progress in mature projects. In fact, in this imperfect world, there is nothing so good that it cannot be made better. On the other hand, there also is nothing so bad that it cannot be made worse, so random wholesale changes should be tested somewhere before being applied globally to a project as important as the Linux kernel. I was therefore quite happy to read the last part of this paragraph: “we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submission and eventual result to ever decrease.”
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The challenge is to take the v3.19 Linux kernel code implementing Tiny RCU, unmodified, and use some formal-verification tool to prove that its grace periods are correctly implemented.
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Benchmarks/Performance
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The ext4 filesystem causes a number of scaling and performance issues which Jan Kara, Linux kernel engineer at SUSE, addressed in his presentation at The Linux Foundation’s Vault storage conference last week.
Ext4 represents the latest evolution of the most-used Linux filesystem, ext3. In that regard, ext4 can be considered a deeper improvement over ext3 than ext3 was over ext2. (Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to ext2.)
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Applications
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The GNOME development team announced recently the immediate availability for download and update of the second maintenance release of Evince document viewer for their GNOME 3.14 desktop environment. Evince 3.14.2 is a mainly a bugfix release that repairs several issues discovered in the previous version of the software.
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Qomp (Quick Online Music Player) is a minimal music player written in Qt, with a basic interface, support for local files and online music streams.
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ownCloud, through Klaas Freitag, has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming ownCloud Client 1.8 for all supported computer operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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flareGet, a full-featured, advanced, multi-threaded, multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux and other platforms, has received an update and quite a few fixes.
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HomeBank is a free, open source, personal finance and money management application that can be used to manage your daily and monthly finance details easily as well as effectively. It has built-in powerful filtering tools and graphs that will help you to analyze your everyday transactions. It is a cross platform tool which will work on almost all common devices and operating systems, including Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.
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Almost a month ago, we announced the release of Nautilus (Files) 3.16 Beta 1, which brought various fixes and improvements to the default file manager application of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment. Today, we announce the second Beta release of Nautilus 3.16.
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The third maintenance release of the stable Git 2.3 branch has been released bringing several bug fixes and performance improvements to the world’s most popular distributed revision control system that lets developers interact with GitHub to upload the source code of their programs.
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Mounting volumes from the console, without the need for background daemons or automounting tools, has been near the forefront of my Linux experience for years now. If it makes any difference, I’ve tried other options but still rely on mostly the same solution and setup that I did eight years ago.
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It should be fairly obvious what’s happening there: logintop10 parses through your wtmp file (which was at /var/log/wtmp on my Arch system) and comes back with an array of login statistics. Output is to an HTML file of your choosing, with very clean formatting and with a little color here and there.
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Make ASCII art, talk to your computer and play text adventures. Your Linux command line isn’t just for work: it can be weirdly entertaining, if you know the right commands.
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Since there is still no official version for Linux, many apps are trying to be Evernote alternatives, more or less successfully. Although it’s possible to run Evernote in Wine, it’s a good idea to find a native note-taking app for Linux that suits your needs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Windows
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The Linux community is one full of passion. From the outside it may seem strange why a small percentage of people around the world care so much about an operating system, after all it’s merely a tool or set of tools used to complete certain tasks.
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Games
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The Hero of Kendrickstone is a single-player interactive, text-based novel game launched on Steam on March 13, in which you have to save the city of Kendrickstone from an evil wizard.
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Last week we celebrated 1000 games on Steam for Linux. But as Liam says, quality is more important than quantity. So I took a look at game no. 1000: Parallax.
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I’ve messed with the open source Nouveau driver once in a while but recently I decided I’d like to properly test how well Nouveau would be able to handle my day-to-day computer activities.
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It’s no secret that a lot of people are impatiently waiting for the promised Linux port of Divinity: Original Sin, but we have a little more insight as to why now.
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Bundle Stars do have some really sweet deals now and then, and the Crimson Bundle is certainly one of them.
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It will release for Linux at the same time as Windows thanks to Aspyr Media, and it now has a trailer.
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It looks like yet another bigger game is heading to Linux, and it’s Spec Ops: The Line this time! A Third-Person modern military Shooter designed to challenge players’ morality by putting them in the middle of unspeakable situations.
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A petition aimed at Blizzard, which was asking for Linux support, has gathered a lot of attention from the Linux community, but not for the important answer from Blizzard’s CEO. The author of the petition made the stupidest and most uncalled-for comments following Mike Morhaime’s response.
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Age of Wonders III, a turn-based fantasy strategy developed and published by Triumph Studios, will arrive on the Linux platform.
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Sentinels of the Multiverse is quite a fun looking title that was ported to Linux last month, and sadly it got buried in my growing inbox.
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Nightside is a traditional real time strategy game, so you build a base, gather resources and finally, you assemble your army to conquer your foes.
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Aspyr Media have confirmed it will all launch on Windows, Mac and Linux together! Good to see them keeping up with the DLC.
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Dying Light is an FPS developed and published by Techland on Steam for Linux. The makers of the game have just released a new patch that comes with some important performance improvements.
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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has been a great success on the Linux platform, especially since it was released alongside all the other platforms. Now the latest DLC announced will be made available on Steam for Linux as well.
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Velocity 2X is a great looking shoot em up that was previously only on Sony consoles, and now FuturLab is teaming up with Sierra to bring it to other platforms, and that includes us too!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Qactus, a Qt-based OBS notifier, is out in the wild. Version 0.4.0 is the first release.
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Over the last weeks I concentrated my KWin related work on trying to integrate the Xwayland server properly. Xwayland is an interesting step on the way to Wayland as it maps X11 windows to Wayland surfaces. But it also needs an X11 window manager to manage the X11 windows. Overall it allows us to start integrating Wayland into the compositor without too much breakage. It’s still X11 after all, so our existing code base continues to work. And gruadually functionality can be replaced with the Wayland equivalent, so that we can afterwards start integrating proper Wayland clients.
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Macaw-Movies is a movie collection manager. It is now about to be in the KDE Family! And that’s really awesome.
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It can show the IBus panel icon in KDE5. KDE5 no longer enables notification area by default so this version communicates with KNotification via DBus instead of GtkStatusIcon.
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Below is a screenshot of MuseScore 2.0, which will be released very soon.
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So we met the freeze deadline to get our port to KF5 released with KDE Apps.
What does it change? you have a changelog, but it doesn’t explain what’s behind.
Being based on KF5 makes Kdenlive future-proof and opens doors for potential new horizons (platforms, design)…
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The Calligra development team, through Cyrille Berger, has announced earlier today, March 15, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first maintenance release of the Calligra 2.9 office suite for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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The Calligra team has released version 2.9.1, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite in the 2.9 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.9.0 and we recommend everybody to update.
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I improved kdebugsettings (and increased version to 0.3).
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The first bugfix release for Krita 2.9 is out! There are now builds for Windows, OSX and CentOS 6 available. While bug fixing is going on unabated, Dmitry has started working on the Photoshop layer style Kickstarter feature, too: drop shadows already work, and the rest of the layer styles are coming.The goal is to have this feature done for Krita 2.9.2, which should be out next month. And we’re working on a new Kickstarter project!
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Krita really is more focused to creating images from scratch without being chained to imitating traditional media as close to possible. I’ve tried quite a few programs, but Krita is the program that works the best for me, maybe because I like both traditional and digital media.
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I like cinema and I like to draw motion pictures. I do not like very much to draw static pictures but I can. I studied traditional painting for eight years in the art school and after that I’ve continued to do it myself for 36 years. I like to learn painting even more than to paint.
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The idea came when I was browsing the Krita forums in search of a drawing challenge and the only thing that came up was on Facebook. Not everybody has or wants Facebook, so we’ll have this challenge on the forum.
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During the past few years at Gluon Project we chose to adopt OCS (Open Collaboration Services) protocol in our distribution system, developing a minimal and working server and client that works on GamingFreedom.org. Gluon, however, never went into full production so people couldn’t test our infrastructure and the distribution system never went above the “experimental phase”.
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It has been quite some time since we asked you to share your experiences with Virtual Desktops and Activities. Meanwhile we have been thinking through the enormous amount of feedback you provided. It was very inspiring. Thanks a lot for contributing!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I’ve been hacking the gtk3 vclplug for LibreOffice recently, here’s the before image after scrolling up and down a few times. UI font not rendered the same as the rest of the desktop, bit droppings everywhere, text missing from style listbox, mouse-wheel non-functional
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New Releases
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The LXLE team has announced earlier today, March 11, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta versions LXLE 14.04.2 and 12.04.5 SMS Editions, introducing UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support in the 64-bit ISO images. The distribution also switches to SeaMonkey as the default web browser.
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John Martinson has announced recently the immediate availability for download and testing of the third maintenance release of its Robolinux 7.8 Linux distribution, which now features new powerful security and privacy applications designed with a single goal in mind, to keep users safe at all times, online and offline.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro development team was proud to announce today, March 13, the immediate availability for update of a new Manjaro Update Pack, dated 2015-03-13 (stable). This is the fourth update to the Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 computer operating system, and it brings exciting features and performance improvements.
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One day after announcing the fourth update for Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, the Manjaro developers released the fourth Preview version of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Xfce 0.9.0 and Manjaro Linux KDE 0.9.0 distributions. The Xfce edition comes now with a tweaked and patched Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, promising the best Xfce experience possible.
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Slackware Family
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Seven months after the VideoLAN team released version 2.1.5 of their VLC player, we are treated to two new releases. There is a version 2.1.6 bugfix release, but that is not really getting attention. Everybody’s eyes are focused on the brand new 2.2.0 release. For the first time in the history of the VideoLAN Client, nowadays better known as the VLC player, there are simultaneous releases for most Operating Systems, including Android, iOS, Windows RT and Windows Phone. Of course there’s a release for Linux too (ok… and Windows) so I built you all some packages for Slackware (compatible with 14.1 and -current).
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Red Hat Family
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In the past Red Hat Product Security assigned weakness IDs only to vulnerabilities that meet certain criteria, more precisely, only vulnerabilities with CVSS score higher than 7. Since the number of incoming vulnerabilities was high, this filtering allowed us to focus on vulnerabilities that matter most. However, it also makes statistics incomplete, missing low and moderate vulnerabilities.
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So I’ve still been working on the virgil3d project along with part time help from Marc-Andre and Gerd at Red Hat, and we’ve been making steady progress. This post is about a test harness I just finished developing for adding and debugging GL features.
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That’s the latest plan put forward by the folks in Raleigh, as Red Hat unveils three new products — two of them software, one a partner program — intended to put the company at the center of all matters container-related.
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Fedora
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Just tested the Fedora 22 Scientific Alpha RC3 image today with the test scripts/programs.
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Design Suite Alpha 22 is available for downloading along the Workstation edition of Fedora 22 Alpha which is based.
The spins includes plugins for both Gimp (Gmic), Inkscape (support of making tables) and Blender (LuxRender). Shutter, a screenshot tool for desktop, is added at the request of Design Team.
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Debian Family
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My name’s Neil, I’ve been involved with Debian for over 10 years now. I’ve held a variety of roles, from the SPI board, writing policy and secure testing team, to being one of the Release Managers for Squeeze and Wheezy.
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Earlier today, I posted a mail to debian-devel about how approximately 25 RC bugs affecting Jessie have been unblocked. As mentioned, I planned to age some of them. The expected result is that about 18 of them will migrate tonight and the remaining 7 of them will migrate tomorrow night.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu MATE 15.04 comes with a very interesting application that allows user to color the newly created folders and to even assign a small number of symbols to it.
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The default Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet wallpaper was revealed a few minutes ago.
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This change affects Ubuntu desktop (and all Ubuntu desktop flavors) and cloud/autopkgtests (snappy was already using systemd) but not Ubuntu Touch.
According to Martin Pitt’s announcement, Ubuntu Touch can’t use systemd yet because most platforms currently run an ancient 3.4 kernel and “there’s some porting work to do on the upstart jobs”.
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Canonical revealed that a number of Oxide vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 operating system
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Ubuntu Vivid Vervet 15.04 is on its final approach to release at the end of next month. Here is a highlight of one of the features that I have helped to land.
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Flavours and Variants
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At the request of a single user, Martin Wimpress, the developer of the famous Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system modified the donation page of the distribution by adding support for Bitcoin donations, which means that you can now donate Bitcoins to the project.
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I had long been attracted to the idea of using Linux. When Microsoft ceased to provide security patches for XP I got an excellent independent computer shop to install Lubuntu on my netbook for me. This allowed me to get used to the ways of Linux, and experiment with different programs. Any fears I may have had regarding ease of use were soon forgotten, and despite my experimentation, installing and uninstalling lots of programs, the system remained far more responsive than XP.
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What do you do when the default Bluetooth confirmation utility is less than ideal for your users? Why you dive in and improve it! This is Linux after all!
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Raspberry Pi is nothing short of a revolution. This credit-card-sized, $35 computer has created an entire breed of makers and enthusiasts who are doing amazing things with this device. The device is developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation which was established by the technical director and ASIC architect for Broadcom, Eben Upton in May 2009.
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Phones
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Android
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USB Type-C, featured on Apple’s new MacBook and Google’s new Chromebook Pixel, is coming to Android phones. In a video from Google which goes over the benefits of USB Type-C, product manager Adam Rodriguez states that the company is very committed to the new spec, and that upcoming Chromebooks and Android phones will see it in the near future.
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Sony officially announced that the Lollipop update for both the Xperia Z3 and the Xperia Z3 Compact is indeed rolling out as we speak.
While Samsung, HTC, and LG were updating a fair amount of their top-end smartphones with Android 5.0 Lollipop, Sony took its time and did not release a firmware refreshment for its top-end devices. Well, it might be late for the Lollipop party, but this doesn’t mean that it’s not attending at all.
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For all you Android Lollipop users out there, Google just began pushing out its first major update to its Material Design-dressed OS, and unlike some updates that are usually just for “stability and performance,” Android 5.1 actually comes with some stuff you’re definitely going to want to know about.
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Recently, a “leak” popped up and rekindled the hopes of all those fans that swear by the name of Nokia. A device named “Nokia 1100″ (an obvious nod to one of Nokia’s most successful phones ever) was caught in a benchmarks website, bringing Android 5.0 and a MediaTek chipset in tow. The device was claimed to be bound for 2016 (when Nokia can once again put its name on a smartphone).
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Sony has started rolling out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update for the Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z3 Compact in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
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IBM is entering the tablet market — sort of. The company plans to sell a modified Samsung Android tablet this summer with extra security capabilities, aimed at government users.
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Lookback — a user testing app that was co-founded in Sweden first as a side project by Spotify engineers before striking out on its own with funding from Index and others — has made its first acquisition: it has acquired a UK startup called Reissued, the company behind screencasting app QuickCast, which had 15,000 users and 500,000 screencasts recorded on its platform, from customers that include the likes of Twitter and Basecamp.
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Saving time is good. Free is good. Combine the two and you may have a winner. Here’s a list of assorted Android apps that deliver on both.
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The great thing about Android is that it never gets boring. You can tailor it exactly to your liking, making it feel completely different from one day to the next. If you get bored easily, it’s exactly the software for you. And it’s a big reason why Jon recently made the switch from his iPad mini to the Nexus 9.
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Google’s Material Design aesthetic is supposed to be the new standard for Android design, but not all apps have made the transition to the catchy new look.
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That tiny USB Type-C port you’ve seen on the latest MacBook and Chromebook Pixel? Don’t be surprised if you see it on your smartphone soon. In a video accompanying the new Chromebook, Google’s Adam Rodriguez says that his company is “very committed” to the new USB spec and that you’ll see it on both Android phones and more Chromebooks in the “near future.” It’s a vague promise, to be sure, but it’ll matter a lot in the long run. Type-C delivers brisk USB 3-level speeds (and eventually, 3.1) without requiring a gigantic connector, and the reversible design means you won’t have to inspect your phone to make sure you plug the cable in the right way.
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Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop mobile operating system update has officially been announced earlier this week, and the tech company’s flagship Nexus devices are already the first to roll out the patch, but with Motorola being a manufacturing partner on some Nexus devices, we can’t help but wonder when the Moto line will get the latest upgrade.
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Owners of Sony’s current flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z3, have been waiting patiently for the update to Android 5.0 Lollipop and it looks like the wait will finally be over next week.
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This week, Google announced the availability of Android 5.1, with multiple bug-fixes, security additions, and device protection in software. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Sony today has announced the rollout of the previous buggy Android 5.0 to its latest handsets, more than nine months after 5.0 was announced.
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Google’s decision to remove Silent Mode from the stock Android 5.0 Lollipop update left millions of people feeling perplexed and confused. The trusty Silent Mode was replaced with ‘No interruption’ mode, which flat out switched off all notifications on your phone – from alarms to the LED light. Now, Android 5.1 makes some amends by giving you more control over the Interruptions system, bringing it more in line with the Silent Mode of yore (and most other phones out there).
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We’ve heard a number of rumors about Google launching its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), codenamed Nova. According to reports, the service will source wireless service from Sprint and T-Mobile, but it will rely on Wi-Fi networks to bear most of the weight of both data and voice services (though VoIP). While the details of this plan still aren’t clear, another piece of the puzzle just emerged that indicates Google is going to offer its own virtual private network (VPN) service, and it may be targeted specifically at Nova subscribers.
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If you like some granular control over synced accounts, you probably ran into a little roadblock with Android 5.0. If you wanted to manually sync items in one of your accounts, the button to do that was missing. Well, at least, sort of. In its place was “cancel sync,” even though there was nothing to cancel. That should have only been present after initiating a sync manually with the “sync now” option. None of that worked in 5.0. With Android 5.1, though, everything is back to normal.
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We’re back with a new installment of Android Authority this week after a two week hiatus for MWC. The show itself has been a blast, but we all had even more fun on the sidelines, just catching up with each other, meeting new people, and getting to hang out with fellow bloggers and journalists from the Android community. Check out a short gallery from the show here: it’s just a taste of an experience that we try to share with you at every show.
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On Android devices, the popularization of active display and imitators has basically negated the need for built-in LEDs. After all, what more can a blinking light tell you than a screen? Luckily, crafty developers are finding other uses for the neglected multicolored diodes. One app for Android, LED Music Effects, turns your device’s LEDs into a basic music visualizer.
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While mobile-app developers are concentrating their efforts on supporting Apple’s and Google’s mobile operating systems, one group hopes to make the Web a place for apps too.
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System optimization tools and apps are fairly popular on desktop PCs but also on mobile devices. They promise to free up space, memory or remove privacy-related information from the device they run on.
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And finally is the place where you can catch up with all the news blips that you wouldn’t have seen on the pages of Wareable yet. It’s a one-stop-shop for getting up to date with the little stories you may not be aware of.
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Earlier this week Google announced and released the highly anticipated Android 5.1 Lollipop update for most Nexus smartphones and tablets. However, the updates are slow to arrive for all users, and some may want to install Android 5.1 on the Nexus 6 right now. This guide will show you how to install the brand new Android 5.1 Lollipop update so that you can try out Google’s latest version of Android right now on your Nexus 6.
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It’s hard to downplay the influence of open source software on the spectacular rise of data science. From my perspective as a technology consultant, open source isn’t just an interesting aspect of the data science revolution; it’s absolutely critical.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For quite some time now, I’ve been following Rust, a new(ish) programming language by Mozilla. It’s been around for a while, but recently it’s been attracting a lot of buzz. Around the new year, I finally decided to take a deeper look into the language.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is on a roll thus far in 2015, advancing many open source projects that are making a difference in the cloud and on the Big Data scene. Recently, we covered the advancement of Apache Drill to a top-level project. It is billed as “the world’s first schema-free SQL query engine that delivers real-time insights by removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed.” We’ve also covered Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley
Now, also on the data front, the ASF has announced the availability of Apache HBase v1.0, a distributed, scalable, database for Apache Hadoop and HDFS.
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Mirantis, focused on OpenStack, has announced a new initiative that integrates Kubernetes with OpenStack, letting developers deploy containers on OpenStack in what the company claims takes only minutes. The integration gives developers immediate access to Kubernetes clusters with Docker containers without needing to set up infrastructure. According to Mirantis, developers will be able to seamlessly move entire environments between OpenStack private clouds and public clouds that support Kubernetes, such as Google Cloud Platform.
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Last October, I wrote about a particular aspect of providing HA for workloads running on OpenStack. The HA problem space for OpenStack is much more broad than what was addressed there. There has been a lot of work around HA for the OpenStack services themselves. The problems for OpenStack services seem to be pretty well understood. There are reference architectures with detailed instructions available from vendors and distributions that have been integrated into deployment tools. The upstream OpenStack project also has an HA guide that covers this topic.
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Eucalyptus officially released support for AWS Cloudformation back in 4.0.0 but with the latest release of Eucalyptus i.e. 4.1.0 this support is now out of tech preview mode. What this means for the cloud users is that they can use Cloudformation just like they use it on AWS and get official support from Eucalyptus for it. Yes our support is not just paid support but we have a very extensive community to help you get started or solve your problems.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Nowadays company employees are often dispersed across the globe and collaboration tools turn out to be of current importance in achieving shared goals. OnlyOffice is a platform for small and medium business that enables teams to manage projects, customer relations and documents in one place. Linux users can take advantage of open source version and start to collaborate on projects hosted safely on their own servers. ONLYOFFICE is a cloud business service that enables you to manage projects, customer relations and documents in one place.
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BSD
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Owing to its historic roots as a derivative of the original Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD), OpenBSD includes a great deal of old code. Many files bear copyright notices from the year 1980, and in some cases, even older. Although not explicitly stated as a project goal, keeping OpenBSD modern is an important part of satisfying other goals, such as portability and correctness.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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coreutils is the project that implements about 100 of the most well known and used utilities on any GNU/Linux system. These utilities are used interactively, or extensively in other programs and scripts, and are integral to the standard Linux server distros used today. Originally these utilities were implemented only considering ASCII or sometimes implicitly other unibyte character sets, but many of the assumptions break down in the presence of multi-byte encodings. As time has gone on this has become more of an issue as this graph representing the rise of UTF-8 use on the web indicates.
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Why the name “userops”? As you may have guessed, this is a pun on the term “devops”; the idea is that we also care about configuration management and deployability, but we aim for a different audience. Devops, as the name implies, focuses on liberating developers in the world of deployment, particularly developers who have to deploy a large number of machines for $LARGE_CORPORATION at their job. Userops, on the other hand, aims at liberating users in the world of deployment. You shouldn’t have to be a developer to take advantage of network freedoms and run network-oriented free software. After all, the free software world generally agrees that it makes sense that users of desktop software should not have to be developers, and that “user freedom” takes priority over “developer freedom”… the freedom of $LARGE_CORPORATION, while not something we object to, is not really our primary concern. (Though of course, if we build solutions that are good enough for end-users, corporations will probably adopt them, and that is fine! It just isn’t our focus.)
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The Greens in the German parliament want the Foreign Ministry to revert back to open source software solutions on its workstations. The ministry in 2010 abandoned its open source desktop strategy, pressured by staffers struggling with interoperability problems. The Greens are now asking the ministry to justify the proprietary licence costs it has made since then.
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The vision behind the open source and big data initiatives underway in the federal government is far more ambitious than just a series of technology projects, but aims to further transparency, citizen engagement and achieve a major shift in agency culture.
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Licensing
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VMware thinks it will be possible to find an amicable resolution to the lawsuit alleging it has pinched parts of the Linux kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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In the quarter century since its creation, the Web has been a printing press and broadcast studio for millions of people whose voices would otherwise have been heard by only a few close friends. It opened a whole new world of sharing, and today nearly three-quarters of all Americans say digital technologies have improved their ability to share their ideas and creations with others, according to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center.
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The Commission has helped Member States to transpose the directive with the publication of a series of guidelines, he added. “Open access is now mainstream,” he said, adding that the Commission was engaged in a policy of openness within the Digital Single Market program.
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Open Data
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Information about French companies, collected and centralised by InfoGreffe, will now be freely accessible. French Members of Parliament have voted in favour of article 19 of the draft Loi Macron (named after Emmanuel Macron, Minister of Economic Affairs, who supports the law). The article, which states that InfoGreffe information will now be available as Open Data, was approved in February.
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Open Access/Content
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The price of textbooks continues to be a cost barrier for postsecondary students, even though some states are making notable efforts to bring those costs down. Open Educational Resources are an emerging policy option as states, postsecondary systems and institutions consider how to best develop libraries and collections of OERs
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Open Hardware
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Marius Kintel released a major new version of OpenSCAD, a 3D solid modeling application popular with the makers movement and 3D printing communities.
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Programming
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Gnome Terminal is good enough for my needs. I do have a problem of too many terminal windows… I have tried Terminator (a tiling single-window / multiple-tabs terminal). However during development the things I use shell for, should be part of the IDE directly: changing projects, opening/closing/navigating/creating files, invoking build, invoking debug, “refactoring” (sed). I think I do want to try out a pull-down terminal for temporal look-ups together with a tiling “main” terminal. Or ideally ditch it all together. Emacs does provide multiple terminals, but when I did that I ended up with “inception” -> launching an instance of emacs, inside the terminal, inside emacs…
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Go, a Google-developed open source language intended to focus on simplicity and efficiency, has been getting a lot of attention lately. Launched late in 2009, the statically typed language is perhaps best known for its use in the development of the red-hot Docker container platform. “Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming,” a FAQ on Go reads.
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To get some idea of what I mean by this, suppose you are a happy consumer of R packages, but want access to, say, the latest, greatest releases of my distribution package, sadist.
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For those who don’t know, dolt is a wrapper and replacement for libtool on sane systems that don’t need it at all. It was created some years ago by Josh Triplett to overcome the slowness of libtool.
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Standards/Consortia
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Government use of open ICT standards are fundamental for smaller ICT companies and for innovation in society, concludes Professor Björn Lundell of the University of Skövde (Sweden), following a three-year research project. “Open standards promote a healthy, competitive market.”
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Health/Nutrition
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I’m not a journalist, but as of this morning I know what it feels like to be part of the biggest leak in NHS history.
Published on openDemocracy, the memorandum of information for the £700m sell-off of Staffordshire cancer services is now available for the 800,000 directly affected and 3 million indirectly affected patients to read online.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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March 9, 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World War II’s deadliest day.
More people died that night from napalm bombs than in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But few in the United States are aware that the attack even took place.
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What’s behind the Obama Administration’s recent imposition of sanctions against Venezuelan officials, and its claim that Venezuela threatens U-S national security? Gloria La Riva and Roger Harris address this question.
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IN THE VIDEO, Sami Osmakac is tall and gaunt, with jutting cheekbones and a scraggly beard. He sits cross-legged on the maroon carpet of the hotel room, wearing white cotton socks and pants that rise up his legs to reveal his thin, pale ankles. An AK-47 leans against the closet door behind him. What appears to be a suicide vest is strapped to his body. In his right hand is a pistol.
[...]
Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.
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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) stood by his decision Sunday to send a letter on a burgeoning nuclear deal directly to Iranian leaders. He insisted on Face the Nation that “Iran’s leaders need to hear the message loud and clear” that an Obama-brokered deal might not last past the end of his administration without congressional approval, despite a stern letter from the White House Sunday night urging senators to hold off on congressional intervention.
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Transparency Reporting
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The State Department said Friday it was unable to automatically archive the emails of most of its senior officials until last month, which could mean potential problems for historical record-keeping amid criticism of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office.
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The State Department shut down large parts of its unclassified email system today in a final attempt to rid it of malware believed to have been inserted by Russian hackers in what has become one of the most serious cyber intrusions in the department’s history, U.S. officials told ABC News.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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About half the population of the South Pacific Island state of Vanuatu has been left homeless by a devastating category 5 cyclone that flattened buildings and washed away roads and bridges. Aid agencies say Cyclone Pam killed at least eight people, with the death toll expected to rise as rescuers reach more far-flung areas. Vanuatu has a population of about 250,000 and is made up of more than 80 islands. Disaster relief officials and relief workers are still trying to establish contact with remote islands that bore the brunt of winds of more than 185 miles per hour. We are joined by Alex Mathieson, former Vanuatu country director for the aid group Oxfam.
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Will isn’t the only prominent climate change denier given a prestigious soapbox by the Post.
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Britain’s first “poo bus”, which runs on human and household waste, goes into regular service this month.
Powered by biomethane gas, the Bio-Bus will use waste from more than 32,000 households along its 15-mile route.
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When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was made head of the Senate committee in charge of NASA’s funding, I (and many others) were appalled. Cruz is a science denier, flatly claiming global warming isn’t happening.
This is an issue, since many of NASA’s missions are directly focused on examining the amount, extent, and impact of that warming. And rightly so.
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Finance
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Gigaom’s investors are still hopeful that the company has value, and are continuing to shop it: The sales pitch is that the site itself still generates traffic and ad revenue, and the company’s events business could still draw attendees and sponsors. Some people affiliated with Gigaom believe that Time Inc., International Data Group and O’Reilly Media are all looking at the property. All three companies declined to comment.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Another striking omission from these articles, about a speech in which Netanyahu talked about Iran’s “aggression in the region and in the world,” were words like “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” “occupation” or “Gaza”; none of these came up in any of the five articles. USA Today headlined its piece “Netanyahu: Stop Iran’s ‘March of Conquest’”–as though it were Iran, not Israel, that has conquered, occupied and in some cases annexed its neighbors’ territory.
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Privacy
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A judicial advisory panel Monday quietly approved a rule change that will broaden the FBI’s hacking authority despite fears raised by Google that the amended language represents a “monumental” constitutional concern.
The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules voted 11-1 to modify an arcane federal rule to allow judges more flexibility in how they approve search warrants for electronic data, according to a Justice Department spokesman.
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A majority of Americans have not altered their online behavior in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations detailing widespread US government electronic surveillance activities, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Monday.
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Vigilant Solutions’ automatic license plate readers are everywhere, even places where you wouldn’t expect them. Like, mounted on private companies’ vehicles. This isn’t new. BetaBoston investigated the private ALPR growth industry early last year. Unfortunately, there’s been very little good news to report since then. In fact, there still isn’t.
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According to the Fusion article, Hertz doesn’t seem to be telling anyone about the camera, on the grounds that the company doesn’t plan to use it, and so there’s nothing for customers to know. But if and when it does announce its presence, there will be precisely the problem Techdirt mentioned last week: that people in front of it would naturally be worried they were being spied upon — even if assured to the contrary — and would start constraining their speech and behavior.
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This week I got an angry email from a friend who had just rented a car from Hertz: “Did you know Hertz is putting cameras in rental cars!? This is bullsh*t. I wonder if it says they can tape me in my Hertz contract.”
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Civil Rights
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An elected Sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who was attending a community meeting in Boynton Beach, Florida, reportedly told the group to run over protesters that were blocking the road.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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While the FCC’s new net neutrality rules are certainly a step in the right direction for consumers, it’s aggressively premature to uncork the champagne. There are still ISP lawsuits waiting in the wings, not to mention the fact that a 2016 party shift (and subsequent FCC leadership change) could very quickly dismantle ten years of grassroots activism in the blink of an eye. And then there are the rules themselves and the FCC’s dedication to them; as noted last week, it’s difficult to know just how useful the new Title II-based rules are going to be until we see precisely what the FCC defines as actionable behavior.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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On 23 and 24 March 2015, you will examine the proposed amendements to the report of MEP Julia Reda on the reform of the directive on copyright. More than 500 amendements have been tabled, the large majority of which aim at emptying it from its substance. Julia Reda’s draft report responds to the aspirations expressed by a large number of citizens: they wish to access, to share and t more widely culture and knowledge in the digital environment. La Quadrature du Net calls the MEPs of the JURI commission to preserve the progress in this report and in particular those that strenghten the positive rights of individuals in culture.
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Julia Reda, German Pirate Party MEP, has presented a report promoting a series of measures to harmonise some aspects of copyright.
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France’s cultural industries have shown their determination to fight European copyright reform plans. A parallel movement among members of the European Parliament hopes to have the Electronic Commerce Directive re-examined as part of the reform package. EurActiv France reports.
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History repeats itself. Unlicensed home manufacturing of copies was never the cause of the copyright industry’s business problems; they created those all on their own. It’s not the first time they’ve appointed a scapegoat for their own failures to get public funding, either.
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After years of debating U.S. Internet subscribers now have Government regulated Net Neutrality. A huge step forward according to some, but the full order released a few days ago reveals some worrying caveats. While the rules prevent paid prioritization, they do very little to prevent BitTorrent blocking, the very issue that got the net neutrality debate started.
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In the beginning of The Pirate Bay’s history the site was in Swedish. It was made by Swedes for their community. Other countries had their own file sharing sites but they got shut down.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.15.15
Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you still have an old PC, you’re in luck. A new Linux distribution based on Lubuntu will give any old PC a new lease on life, designed for non-technical users and optimized for popular web sites.
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You might be a Linux user and not even know it yet. It happened to me: I was a Windows user for years, but was doing all kinds of things that should have taught me I’m a Linux user at heart. Only when I switched did all these things make sense to me.
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Server
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SANDISK HAS ANNOUNCED a series of open source projects for the Ceph platform based around its flash products.
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Kitematic, an Open-Source project that received funding from the government of Canada, could help to push Docker technology on to more systems.
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Docker is buying SDN vendor SocketPlane. Financial terms of the deal—considered a talent and technology acquisition—have not been disclosed.
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Two months after first announcing Machine, Swarm and Compose, Docker rolls out the three orchestration tools.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week we are joined by Simon Phipps and Patrick Masson to talk about the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a global non-profit that supports and promotes the open source movement. Among other things, the OSI maintains the Open Source Definition, and a list of licenses that comply with that definition.
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Kernel Space
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The 2015 Linux Jobs Report comes from The Linux Foundation, in conjunction with Dice, and includes data from hiring managers (1,010) and Linux professionals (3,446).
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Over 200 attendees are set to meet at the 1st annual Kansas Linux Fest for a weekend-long program of training, talks and workshops from the 21st to 22nd of March at the Lawrence Public Library in Lawrence, Kansas. The conferences is free and open to all people, being run by the non profit Free/Libre Open Source and Open Knowledge Association of Kansas and the Lawrence Linux User group. There is also no need to pay or preregister for the conference, but tickets are available and seating preferences will be given to those who have registered. Donations are accepted via online ticket sales, or at the door.
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LMAX Exchange, the world leading FCA regulated MTF for global FX trading and the UK’s fastest growing technology firm, today announced it has become a member of the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development.
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Getting on for seven years ago, I wrote an article on why the Linux kernel responds “False” to _OSI(“Linux”). This week I discovered that vendors were making use of another behavioural difference between Linux and Windows to change the behaviour of their firmware and breaking things in the process.
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Graphics Stack
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Graphics card powerhouse Nvidia hasn’t been having very much fun lately. First, the company took an Internet wide beating from gamers after selling a 4 GB graphics card (the GTX 970) that wasn’t really a 4 GB graphics card, resulting in the $300+ purchase choking on high-end resolutions (or when using, say, Oculus Rift). After months of complaints and a false advertising suit, the company finally took to its official blog to acknowledge that the company “failed to communicate” its graphics card’s limitations to the marketing department and “externally to reviewers at launch.” Yeah, whoops a daisy.
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Time sure seems to fly by: OpenGL 4.0 turned five years old today. The sad part is that Mesa still doesn’t fully implement the GL 4.0 specification.
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Applications
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There are occasions when I require a Voice Over IP (VOIP) session. The single most pressing demand is podcast interviews ─ of which I do a lot. When I need to record an interview, the path of least resistance is recording a VOIP call. That, of course, requires a VOIP client. For the longest time, the only VOIP client of note was Skype. Even though Skype was purchased by Microsoft, it still remains one of the most user-friendly VOIP clients available. And considering Skype’s user-base, it is often considered the de facto standard software for the task.
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I was tempted to skip over groove-dl because my list of stream ripper tools is starting to devolve into a tool-per-service array, and when things become discrete and overly precise, I start to fall toward the same rules that say, “no esoteric codec playback tools.”
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Supposedly, mined’s real claim to fame is support for multicode characters or alphabets beyond the stale 26 letters that comprise Western language. If you need access to those glyphs, mined might be something to look into.
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Kovid Goyal had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, March 13, the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release of the powerful and acclaimed Calibre eBook manager and converter utility for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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darktable, one of the best open-source applications for editing RAW files under a Linux kernel-based operating system has been updated recently with a great number of changes, several bug fixes, RAW support for more cameras, white balance presets from several Panasonic cameras, as well as new standard/enhanced matrix and noise profiles. darktable 1.6.3 is available for download right now from Softpedia.
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Finding a good music player for Linux is not an easy task. A few big name projects, like Amarok and Songbird, have come and gone throughout the years, but none of them have been stable enough to match the staying power of iTunes, Winamp, or any of the other music players available to non-Linux users.
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I consider myself neither a technophile nor a technophobe. Yet every once or twice a year, I discover a piece of software so well-designed and useful that I spend whatever spare time I have learning it as thoroughly as possible. For the past couple of months, that software has been has been the paint program Krita. Now, with the 2.9 release coming out today, suddenly I have another long list of new tools to learn — and I couldn’t be happier about having new features to learn.
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Kdenlive is powerful multi-track video editor, which supports DV, AVCHD and HDV editing. The developer has announced that the Kdenlive will be a part of the KDE Applications family, starting with the 15.04 branch.
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GCompris, an educational software suite providing fun activities for kids aged 2 to 10, has been upgraded to version 15.02 and is now available for download.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Often questions come up about the meaning of FileIDs and ETags. Both values are metadata that the ownCloud Server stores for each of the files and directories in the server database. These values are fundamentally important for the integrity of data in the overall system.
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Games
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…many AAA game titles were confirmed to come to Linux/SteamOS in this year.
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Steam’s love affair with Linux continues, and the infatuation is paying off in spades for Linux gamers.
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Valve confirms that its next games, not to mention the SteamOS operating system will use the Vulkan API, the next-generation OpenGL iteration made by the Khronos consortium of companies, which includes not only Valve but also Nvidia, AMD, and much more.
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Three Linux games benefit from consistent discounts on Steam during this weekend. Dead Island, a horror first-person action game taking place on a tropical island crawling with zombies, is available for 4,99€, with a 75% discount. The offer ends Monday, March 26. Dead Island has single-player and multi-player modes.
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0 A.D., a beautiful, 3D real time strategy game developed by Wildfire Games, has reached Alpha 18 this Friday, getting features such as a new game mode, in-game technology tree, while the support for formations has been re-implemented (after it was dropped in A17). Alpha 18, codenamed Rhododactylos, comes with some new features, so let’s see what’s new in this release.
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Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital have just released the awesome Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number game on Steam for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, but it appears that many users have some issues with keyboard and mouse, as it would appear that the game grabs both peripherals but does nothing with them. Some say that it’s an issue regarding the mouse being recognized as a joystick.
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Valve has announced a Steam sale simply titled ”STEAMOS SALE” with interesting games that are already available and games that they claim are heading over to the platform. The list seems to include some quite big titles too!
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Valve’s decision to create its own Linux distribution called SteamOS electrified the world of Linux gaming. But after more than a year how have Valve’s efforts really helped Linux gaming? Ars Technica took a look at where Linux gaming stands in light of Valve and SteamOS.
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Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is a revamp of one of the platformers I used to love, so how is it on Linux?
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Not to be confused with the X (X11/X.Org) Server, Egosoft’s X Rebirth is now publicly available in alpha form for Linux gamers.
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On the other hand, that does suggest I can approach it from a fairly neutral angle, and given my long-standing infuriation with games like Star Fleet Battles or my long-standing infatuation with games like the Star Trek arcade game, I think I am familiar enough with the genre to make an honest appraisal.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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While Cinnamon 2.4 was released with a lot of important changes, Cinnamon 2.6 bring even more exciting changes. Among others, it will have full systemd support, panel support for multiple monitors will be added, support for client-side-decorated windows will be implemented and the users will be able to switch and add search provides easily.
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The culmination of over eight months of work, Krita 2.9 is the biggest Krita release until now! It’s so big, we can’t just do the release announcement in only one page, we’ve had to split it up into separate pages! Last year, 2014, was a huge year for Krita. We published Krita on Steam, we showed off Krita at SIGGRAPH, we got Krita reviewed in ImagineFX, gaining the Artist’s choice accolade — and we got our first Kickstarter campaign more than funded, too! This meant that more work has gone into Krita than ever before.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The largest part of this move away from Nepomuk, was the creation of Baloo. This project was often sold under the misnomer of being KDE’s new Semantic Search engine. I often feel that the description, while containing a ton of buzz words, really does stray away from what it really meant to be Semantic.
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Konqi is female, male and nothing at all. Just take a look at the ensemble above and you’ll see that there are a lot of different Konqis, different colors and some might be male, some female and some something else. So there’s no specific need for an additional female version of Konqi as we’ve already female Konqis. But there is always need for new Konqis…
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KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization again this year, and I’ve already been contacted by several students looking to do a Google Summer of Code project with KDE. Prospective Summer of Code students usually have lots of enthusiasm, and they often write great proposals with little or no help, but sometimes these proposals might not be structured well or lack key information.
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In the past couple months I’ve been busy porting KDE Telepathy project over to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. I’m happy to announce that the ports have been completed and after about a month of testing, KDE Telepathy was moved to join the KDE Application releases with the nearest release being the 15.04 one. This should ensure more regular releases with new version every 4 months.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A new stable release of the GNOME Control Center application of the GNOME 3.14 desktop environment has been released recently with support for NetworkManager 1.0 network connections manager utility used in many open-source desktop environments, including GNOME.
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Linux doesn’t have a single look and feel, as there are several operating systems based on Linux; these are called distributions (distro). The jury is out on which is the best Linux distro, but that’s just a technical comparison. The best distro for you is what matters, and when you are switching, that is usually the distro most akin to which OS you are coming from.
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Reviews
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On 16th February 2015, Clemens Toennies has announced the release of Netrunner 15, a desktop Linux distribution based on Kubuntu 14.10 and featuring the new KDE Plasma 5.2.0 desktop: “We are proud to announce the official release of Netrunner 15 ‘Prometheus’. Netrunner 15 is revised from the ground up – as the first distribution, it officially ships the new KDE Plasma Desktop 5.2. Therefore, an upgrade from previous Netrunner series with KDE 4.x is neither officially available nor really recommended. This release is 64-bit only. What’s new? This release features the brand new KDE Plasma Desktop 5.2, packed together with the freshly released KDE Frameworks 5.7 and Qt 5.4. It takes a great deal of Oxygen and a little of Breeze and mixes them into a blend of tradition and modern. All previous settings and add-ons have been carefully restored to work in this new environment. With Netrunner 15 we took the chance to ship a finely revised set of applications.”
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New Releases
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Jerry Bezencon, the creator of the Linux Lite computer operating system has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the upcoming Linux Lite 2.4 distribution. While the stable version of Linux Lite is 2.2, the 2.4 Beta release brings all sorts of new features, updated applications, bug fixes, and performance improvements.
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The sixth maintenance release of the OpenELEC 5.0 operating system for the Raspberry Pi computer board has been released today, March 14, brings a number of updated components, as well as various improvements over the previous release, OpenELEC 5.0.5.
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OpenELEC-5.0 is the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-4.2.
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After two weeks of development we are proud to present to you another preview of our next stable release, Manjaro 0.9.0. This time we ship XFCE 4.12 tweaked and patched to have the best XFCE experience possible!
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Barry Kauler, the famous Puppy Linux creator, was proud to announce a few hours ago, February 26, the immediate availability for download of his Quirky 7.0 GNU/Linux operating system, dubbed April. This version comes as a major upgrade for the previous release, Quirky 6.2, and includes a number of new and attractive features, such as gorgeous desktop powered by JWM (Joe’s Window Manager), as well as some of the latest Linux technologies.
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The latest Ozon OS “Hydrogen” beta is based on Fedora 21 and it uses GNOME Shell (3.14.x), customized with various extensions. And of course, since Numix Project and Nitrux S.A. are known for their beautiful design work, Ozon OS ships with gorgeous GTK, GNOME Shell and icon themes, which you can see in the screenshots throughout this post.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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After two weeks of development we are proud to present to you another preview of our next stable release, Manjaro 0.9.0. This time we ship XFCE 4.12 tweaked and patched to have the best XFCE experience possible!
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The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of Manjaro KDE 0.9.0 Pre4 computer operating system based on the Linux kernel 3.19, KDE Plasma 5.2.1, as well as the latest KDE Applications 14.12.3. This release migrates to an all-new and complete hardware-accelerated graphics stack based on OpenGL(ES).
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Slackware Family
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I prepared packages for you (Slackware 14.1 and -current) for the latest Chromium browser and its optional Widevine plugin. In the Chrome Releases blog you can read the announcement for Chrome/Chromium 41 to the Stable Channel (full version is 41.0.2272.76).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has introduced enhanced containerization features and better integration with Microsoft Windows services, among other features, with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1.
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As we covered, Red Hat has announced the releases of Red Hat Releases Enterprise 7 Atomic Host and Red Hat Releases Enterprise 7.1 update. In addition, it is evident that Red Hat is responding to the enormous popularity of Docker and container technology. The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host removes all utilities residing in the stock distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that are not required for running Docker containers. The move effectively gives Red Hat an operating system/container offering to bring to enterprises.
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Fedora
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With Fedora 22 having entered its alpha freeze this week along with the software string freeze and change checkpoint deadline, here’s a recap of some of the towering features of this six-month update to Fedora 21 and the second release under the Fedora.Next strategy.
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The MATE/Compiz Spin of the Fedora Linux distribution has also been updated along with the announcement of the Fedora 22 Alpha operating system, as reported on Softpedia a few days ago.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Tails, the Amnesic Incognito Live CD distribution of GNU/Linux based on Debian and used by Edward Snowden, has reached version 1.3 on February 24, 2015. This release introduces new applications, updates core components, and fixes annoying bugs from previous releases of the product.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 15.04 Beta 1 was announced today with “a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing.” Ubuntu and a couple of its derivatives were included in a list of distributions recommended for new users yesterday. The Ubuntu MATE project announced they’ve been accepted as an official member of the Ubuntu family with their Beta 1 and Serdar Yegulalp reviews LibreOffice 4.4 at InfoWorld.com today.
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The popular German news website Spiegel Online has published a hands-on review of the Bq Ubuntu Phone, which is due to ship to successful Flash Sale buyers later this month.
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Tom Kijas posted a few minutes ago on Launchpad what appears to be the new wallpapers of the forthcoming Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) Linux operating system, due for release on April 23, 2015. They can be downloaded as a zip package here.
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Back in 2013, Juniper Networks announced Contrail, a network overlay platform for software-defined networking for enterprises and cloud service providers. The company also announced that the Contrail source code would be open. Now, Juniper Networks and Canonical have expanded their existing partnership and they will oversee co-development of a carrier-grade, OpenStack software solution as part of Contrail Cloud.
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Dimitri John Ledkov of Intel has added support to the Ubuntu-Drivers-Common framework for having CPU family detection and being able to install the appropriate CPU microcode update packages depending on the reported processor family. It’s basically just making sure the right CPU microcode packages are installed rather than having them not installed or having all of them in place.
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Is there room for another mobile operating system?
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The Ubuntu Touch operating system is developed on two branches, the development branch which receives the new features fast and the RTM version, which is focused on stability and usability.
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Chinese smartphone brand Meizu, often looked at as the next Xiaomi in terms of outdoing major brands, had recently announced the open-source Canonical Ubuntu-powered MI Note. It now looks set to take this handset outside China and make it international.
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Canonical has just fixed a regression caused by an ICU update that was supposed to fix a number of vulnerabilities, for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. A new update has been issued and the problem has been corrected.
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The Ubuntu Wireless Mouse is a new device sold through the official Canonical store. It’s a bizarre-looking mouse and we’ll take it for a spin to see if it’s really something that people might want or if it’s just a nightmare.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu MATE community has been very active and supportive of the project, so much so that someone has just released a version of the Ubuntu MATE distro for Raspberry Pi 2.
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Nitrux has presented the Nitrux OS, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that will power the NXQ mini ARM PC. It’s using a KDE desktop and it’s not like anything you might have seen before.
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As we’ve reported earlier, Canonical is preparing to announce the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release for its Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Kubuntu, as well as Ubuntu MATE, which became an official release this week.
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With the Kubuntu 15.04 release due out in April it’s using the Plasma 5 desktop by default. This morning I tried out the latest daily ISO snapshot of Kubuntu 15.04 to see how this bleeding-edge KDE Linux desktop experience is panning out. Simply put, Kubuntu and the latest KDE experience is doing quite well.
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The Raspberry Pi has wide community support, and a fully compatible but much faster Pi 2 with more RAM is a great thing to see. At the lower end of the price range shipping costs can account for a significant part of the total purchase price. I was able to find local distributors of the Pi 2, some of which offer free shipping.
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This week’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona focused primarily on phones and tablets, but also featured major new processors, game consoles, smartwatches, and more. Our slideshow of the top 10 products running Linux or the Linux-based Android isn’t called the “Best of MWC” since the proof is in the use, and also in the pricing. Many of these products have yet to be priced, and most have yet to ship. Yet, they’re all significant in one way or another, and should influence other products that appear through 2016.
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Embedded World, which was held this week in Nuremberg, Germany, lacks the glamor and headlines of next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Yet, along with showing off the usual circuit boards, the show coincided with the debut of two interesting new system-on-chips that combine Linux-friendly ARM Cortex-A cores with microcontroller units (MCUs).
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Once a year, like clockwork, March 14 rolls around and people around the globe celebrate Pi Day. Unlike many other holidays, Pi Day doesn’t have specific rules for how to celebrate. In the past, I’ve joined friends for a 3.14(ish) mile Pi Day run, visited a science museum (which included a pi exhibit) with my daughter, and simply indulged in a slice of Key Lime pie.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Tizen is a Linux based Operating System that is standards based such as W3C Web standard. The Operating System is suitable for Smartphones, tablets, vehicles and wearable and also the Internet of things (IoT).
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Android
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Google has announced that it’s working on a new mobile payments framework named Android Pay. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google exec Sundar Pichai confirmed that this would not be a new product for users, but an “API layer” that allows other companies to support secure payments on Android in both physical stores and via apps.
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The key difference between Android Pay and other payments offerings is that Google is not building out a product, but rather an API layer that merchants and companies can leverage to support secure payments from Android devices and apps.
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Android 5.1 Lollipop has a little secret: it hides Google’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) in its folds.
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Google is reportedly working on a new version of Android, turning the mobile OS into a platform for virtual reality.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google has a small team of engineers working on a version of Android for virtual reality apps to run on.
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Google officially announced the coming of Android 5.1 Lollipop earlier this afternoon, followed by a statement in the same blog post that they would be pushing it out to devices today. T-Mobile confirmed soon after that they would be pushing out Android 5.1 Lollipop to the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and Nexus 7 2013 models on their network beginning today as well. While the updates may begin today(even though there is not much day time left)Google had yet to start pushing the Android 5.1 Lollipop source code up to AOSP, which is where developers can go to grab all the necessary files and use the code to work with and create awesome custom ROM experiences based off of the latest Android version of software, as well as use the code to make any changes or updates to their apps.
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Major tech companies like Apple and Microsoft have been able to provide millions of people with personal digital assistants on mobile devices, allowing people to do things like set alarms or get answers to questions simply by speaking. Now, other companies can implement their own versions, using new open-source software called Sirius — an allusion, of course, to Apple’s Siri.
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Open source code is no longer exclusively used by eager web developers in the tech industry. In fact, global industries that serve the healthcare, education, and government markets are now experiencing the benefits of open source code as well. Once they become familiar with the specifics of open source software license management, non-technology businesses are easily able to improve industry specific practices in new, innovative ways.
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In a move that starkly reflects not only the changing market landscape for networking equipment but also HP’s willingness to adapt to new realities, the vendor will collaborate with Taiwan-based Accton Technology to develop and manufacture open networking switches and Cumulus Networks will provide the Linux-based networking operating system to drive the hardware.
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They’re passing the reins to several original Storify members, who will keep the service running. Herman’s plan is to focus on raising his newborn son, while Damman will build out his open-source whisteblowing tool Tipbox.
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OPNFV, the open source collaboration for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), is extending its reach with the launch of a new conference, the OPNFV Summit, which project leaders hope will bring together networking companies, service providers and open source developers.
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The network virtualization revolution is set to gain a new event as the Open Platform Network Function Virtualization Project announced plans to host its first OPNFV Summit Nov. 11-12.
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Automotive industry group, the GENIVI Alliance, announced that Renault and Nissan will launch a new joint program to deliver a In-vehicle Infotainment IVI system based on software GENIVI software for low-to-mid and high-class Renault and Nissan vehicles globally and will be supplied by Robert Bosch GmbH.
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Midokura is out this week with its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) 1.8 SDN release, which is based on the open-source MidoNet 2015.01 milestone.
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I recently attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. There was a kick-off panel on the opening day and then a couple of days of working group style presentations around OPNFV. The work comes under the sponsorship of the Linux Foundation and hopes to establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of Network Function Virtualization. (You can also read the ETSI definition of NFV). There’s a really good description of the intended work and architecture on the OPNFV site.
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Collaboration with ONOS and ONF is aimed at accelerating the commercialisation of the SDN ecosystem.
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The company, called Percepto, is currently raising funds on Indiegogo. Percepto will offer a camera that can be mounted to your existing drone. You can then download apps to your mobile phone that can interact with the camera in different ways.
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Trying to explain why open source works, you can of course point to the Cathedral and the Bazaar by Erik. But the kernel development process shows it happening ‘in real time’, every day, and that’s a major reason why I so enjoy reading the weekly LWN.
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Former head of product at Flickr and Bitly, Matt Rothenberg recently caused an internet hubbub with his Unindexed project. The communal website continuously searched for itself on Google for 22 days, at which point, upon finding itself, spontaneously combusted.
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Company says its R1010 package gives data scientists a collection of statistical functions and a massively parallel Big Data discovery platform.
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Pinterest announced yesterday that it’s making the workflow management software it developed to manage big data pipelines, called Pinball, available as open source. Now anybody can use the same technology that Pinterest uses to manage the flow of work on Hadoop and other cluster resources.
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Seeking out open source solutions is second nature for Red Hat IT. It’s in our DNA, and it’s what we believe in. And while our passion for open source is shared with many IT leaders, I still encounter CIOs who cite concerns about security, intellectual property, talent, and existing vendor relationships as reasons they aren’t comfortable with open source solutions. Here’s what I say when I hear IT leaders identify these as barriers:
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The Jenkins CI community, which is made up of practitioners using open source Jenkins, has announced the Jenkins CI open source project has passed the 100,000 active user mark worldwide becoming one of the largest install bases of any open source continuous integration and continuous delivery platform.
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Up to 80 different systems putter around in many cars. The complexity has come to a limit. Within the “Visio.M” research project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research with a total of 7.1 million euro, scientists at the Technische Universität München have developed a two-tier IT system that reduces this complexity drastically. Now the researchers put their ‘Automotive Service Bus’ under an open-source license.
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Events
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The Varnish Software series 2015 is off to a great start and next stop is wonderful Copenhagen. To respond to last year’s popularity of the series in Scandinavia we decided Copenhagen would be one of the first cities we’d visit.
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The main events include an Opensource Olympiad (coding contest + open source quiz), Hardware Project competition and App Idea contest. Three workshops on – Mozilla Webmaker, Python and How to be a Maker (Arduino/Raspberry Pi based Development) will also be organised.
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A group of three Linux kernel developers kicked off the Linux Foundation Vault storage conference on Wednesday morning by hashing out proposed changes to the kernel and the stack from the Linux Storage Filesystem and Memory Management Summit (FS&MM), which took place earlier in the week.
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Web Browsers
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Most of us give a considerable time of ours to Internet. The primary Application we require to perform our internet activity is a browser, a web browser to be more perfect. Over Internet most of our’s activity is logged to Server/Client machine which includes IP address, Geographical Location, search/activity trends and a whole lots of Information which can potentially be very harmful, if used intentionally the other way.
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Chrome
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The newest Chrome Beta channel release includes support for ES6 Classes and several new features that allow developers to create more immersive web applications. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla changed the development priority for Thunderbird a few years ago and said back then that it was no longer investing resources into an e-mail client, which they said would no longer be relevant. Now it looks that Thunderbird adoption is on the rise despite Mozilla’s predictions.
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Mozilla’s goal of high quality plugin-free gaming on the Web is taking a giant leap forward today with the release of Unity 5. This new version of the world’s most popular game development tool includes a preview of their amazing WebGL exporter. Unity 5 developers are one click away from publishing their games to the Web in a whole new way, by taking advantage of WebGL and asm.js. The result is native-like performance in desktop browsers without the need for plugins.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The last few months have seen eBay Inc. move from the sidelines of the open-source analytics ecosystem into the heart of the action with the introduction of two projects that push the envelope on large-scale data science. The pivot mirrors a broader shift in the ecosystem that the most recent of the additions accelerates.
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Mirantis is a firm that calls itself a “pure-play” OpenStack company.
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With the rise of cloud computing, ownCloud has been getting a lot of attention for its flexibility, and because interest in private clouds is on the rise. There is a huge community of contributors surrounding the open source version of ownCloud, and ownCloud Inc. continues to serve enterprise users.
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It was all the way back in 2008 when OStatic broke the story about a cloud computing project at U.C. Santa Barbara called Eucalyptus, and recently we visited with Rich Wolski, the original UCSB Professor behind the cloud platform, for an interview. Fast-forward to today, and Eucalyptus Systems is under the wing of mighty Hewlett-Packard.
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Analytics and big data are top strategic priorities for many CIOs, and rightfully so. Most organizations are sitting on a goldmine of data, but they have not begun to mine it to uncover the real transformative value. Unfortunately, many IT leaders remain on the sidelines because they think investing in analytics would be too costly.
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Elasticsearch is an open source search and analytics engine created by Shay Banon back in 2010. The solution uses a common interface and can be used to provide scalable search and is itself based on the Apache Lucene project which is a free open source information retrieval software library. Since starting the open source initiative, Banon’s Elasticsearch company has gone on to raise almost $105 million. Perhaps more importantly than the money they’ve raised however is the traction the project has seen – Elasticsearch sees some 700,000-800,000 downloads per months and has been downloaded 20 million times since the inception of the project.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Trillian (yes, obviously a Hitch Hiker’s reference) Mobile’s RoboVM was created in 2010 as an open source project to turn our planet’s 10 million Java developers into business and consumer mobile app developers for both iOS and Android devices — quite a claim & challenge.
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LibreOffice also has a more robust development community behind it and a more aggressive release cycle. OpenOffice tends to follow a more steady and conservative path. Although this could mean that LibreOffice is more prone to bugs in their releases, the product is also more likely to provide innovative features. Even so, they’re both very stable products that offer many benefits, and each one is well worth a test drive.
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Education
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Purdue, in its perpetual quest to cut corners and save money, is working to expand its use of open-source software, potentially saving students upward of $1 million.
The software, developed by Michigan State University in 1992, is called the Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach, or more commonly known, LON-CAPA.
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Healthcare
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The competition for the Department of Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) is entering its next phase and open-source EHR technology is no longer in contention, according to multiple reports.
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The Defense Department’s next electronic health record will not be based on the open source architecture that supports the Veterans Affairs Department’s EHR.
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The executive director of the Health Data Consortium highlighted some of the companies he thinks are overcoming some of the barriers to making health data more widely available and useful for clinicians and patients. It was part of a keynote Chris Boone gave at the MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum in Chicago this week.
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Business
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Kurt: The concept of open source software has changed the world. Our platform wouldn’t exist in its current form without open source software. Every day, different components of our products run on Nginx, Node.js, Docker, MongoDB and many other open source technologies. Open source is very important to what we do.
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Funding
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The list of mentoring organisations for Google Summer of Code 2015 has some surprising omissions. The Linux Foundation and Mozilla are among those missing from the list of just 137 open source organisations.
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Open-source database company MariaDB, has raised $3.4 million from Russia’s Runa Capital. In October 2013, the firm had secured $20 million in Series B round. Till date, including this round, the company has received a total capital of $31.9 million.
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An open source project is getting significant investment from a major American corporation.
Believe it or not Walmart, the mega retailer, has spent more than $2 million on the Hapi project, which is a “rich framework for building applications and services” that “enables developers to focus on writing reusable application logic instead of spending time building infrastructure” according to its website.
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BSD
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2014 was the most successful year to date for the OpenBSD Foundation.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Future posts will dive deep into open source and its relationship to autonomous devices, but first, let’s take a few paragraphs to level-set why open source might be an ideal option. First, full disclosure: I’m an advocate of open source software, so I’ve seen proof that a community of shared ideas and projects that can be modified, improved, and distributed freely can be a better way to develop technology. Being able to see the code, learn from it, ask questions, and offer improvements is the open source way.
While it might seem counterintuitive, open does not mean less secure. In fact, the opposite is often true. Because the development process is collaborative, bugs, flaws, and vulnerabilities can be found sooner, and more often, and fixed more quickly. By granting access to the code, more people can work to solve issues. It’s been said about open source that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” More eyes and greater transparency can lead to fewer vulnerabilities and greater security.
As with any system, it’s important to only use well-maintained projects and to patch regularly to safe-guard against vulnerabilities. We’re all aware that hazards may linger in even the best of code. The fact is, in any system, open or closed, vulnerabilities exist and may actually be exploited by those with knowledge of their existence. It just seems logical that, with open source transparency, it’s likely to be more difficult to exploit something while everyone is watching.
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Licensing
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Christoph Hellwig, supported by Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy), has initiated a lawsuit in Germany against VMware for alleged violations of the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, an OSI approved license. If you aren’t following the case yet, it’s worth starting with the statements published by Conservancy, the Free Software Foundation, and VMware.
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Openness/Sharing
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The open-source intelligence analysts of World War II had a huge advantage unavailable to their predecessors in previous wars thanks to the changing media landscape of the 1930s and ’40s.
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Food Rising has created a couple of videos to walk makers through the home build process and the print files needed to produce the necessary 3D-printable parts using a t-glase filament-compatible printer are freely available for download at Food Rising’s website, though pre-build systems are also being offered for sale. The non-profit is also raising funds to donate systems to 250 schools across the United States.
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Open-access research into drug discovery has arrived in South America, with a ground-breaking collaboration between leading scientists in North America, Europe and Brazil to provide completely free and open research results to the world.
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In the past, this has been expensive to do. Anyone wishing to create apps for the task would have had to hire a costly team of coders. But that has now changed. This week Apple—in an announcement a little more sotto voce than that of its watch—introduced the world to a suite of software called the ResearchKit, which will make it possible to create scientific apps that work with its mobile devices more easily and cheaply. The ResearchKit is “open source”, meaning anyone who wants to will be able to use it to design data-collecting apps that take advantage of the features of those devices. Because it is open source, people will be able to customise and share code, which will encourage innovation.
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Last summer, we wrote about the rise of open journalism, whereby people take publicly-available information, typically on social networks, to extract important details that other, more official sources either overlook or try to hide. Since then, one of the pioneers of that approach, Eliot Higgins, has used crowdfunding to set up a site called “Bellingcat”, dedicated to applying these techniques. Principal themes there include the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), and the civil war in Syria.
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Hope this will help for enthusiasts and developers to deeply understand hardware part of DVB card.
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How often have you taken a prescription drug during the last year to treat an illness? Did you pause to ponder what you would do if you had not had access to the drug? Or did you perhaps consider how long it took the drug to be developed, and how long it will be possible to use it for? In the case of antibiotics, there is a real fear that many well-known drugs will cease to be effective against bacterial infections as the bacteria adapt ‘around’ the drug. What about if you are in a developing country, in a remote area, or on the way to Mars — how would you get that new drug? Also, what about the promise of personal medicine? Soon we are going to know more and more about our individual medical needs, driven by personal data arising from personal genomics as well as the promise of cheap sensors that record our motion, behavior, vital signs, bio-chemical markers and so on.
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For anyone looking for a capable robotic arm for automation of an industrial process, education, or just a giant helping hand for a really big soldering project, most options available can easily break the bank. [Mads Hobye] and the rest of the folks at FabLab RUC have tackled this problem, and have come up with a very capable, inexpensive, and open-source industrial arm robot that can easily be made by anyone.
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If you’re looking to increase openness and transparency in your IT organization, chart a deliberate course. That’s particularly important if you join a company where IT is a four-letter word and hasn’t been set up to deliver. I knew I had my work cut out for me when I arrived at the American Cancer Society and our president said to me, “Half your job is going to be rehabbing the image of IT, and the other 100 percent is going to be delivering a world-class IT organization.”
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Smart homes could make our lives easier. But they could also end up being a real pain. Devices from competing companies might not want to talk to each other. Your gadgets might collect personal data and sell it to advertisers without you knowing about it it. The company you bought your hardware or software could close down, rending the product you shelled out big bucks for practically useless. Your whole house could become a botnet.
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Open Data
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While it’s not on everybody’s radar just yet, the Open Data Platform, recently announced by Pivotal, is shaping up to be, well, pivotal in the Hadoop and Big Data market. Meanwhile, here have been a lot of rumblings about how Pivotal itself is radically shifting its Hadoop strategy.
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Open Access/Content
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Rutgers-Camden senior Moira Cahill tapes a note to a poster board, recording the amount one of her fellow students spent on textbooks this semester. Cahill is a member of the campus chapter of NJPIRG, which was advocating an open source alternative for textbooks in the school’s student center, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015. (Staff photo by Jason Laday | South Jersey Times)
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Four years into a campus initiative aimed at reducing textbook costs by making course material available for free online, University of Massachusetts students and staff are pushing for more faculty to use this option.
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About 65 percent of college students don’t buy textbooks because of cost, said Matt Magalhaes, the affordable textbook campaign coordinator for MassPirg at the University of Massachusetts.
Textbooks can cost students $1,200 a year.
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Yes, we can Google every question, search every bit of information by the click of a button. But if you are looking for a structured learning experience from experts and certified instructors, for instance, to learning the basics of engineering or simply a complete awareness course on Ebola, you now have a one-stop destination.
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Open Hardware
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Over the past few years we’ve seen an explosion of “open” models, which emerged as a result of several different factors. The general motivation behind this movement includes the ability for the free sharing of resources and tools in an effort to promote economic efficiency by improving access to a much wider group of stakeholders.
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It was only summer of last year when HP began making a lot of noise about its commitment to cloud computing overall, and the OpenStack platform in particular. Now, the company is moving its cloud strategy into high gear. It announced the HP Helion brand in 2014, and pledged to commit $1 billion over the next two years on products and services surrounding OpenStack, under Helion’s branded umbrella.
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You probably heard of Google’s Project Ara endeavor, which aims to allow users to build modular smartphones, based on their own preferences and needs.
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Recently, we did a story on an engineer who had 3D printed a wirelessly powered Tesla desk lamp. Created by David Choi, it was able to be powered without any wires connecting it to the source. It was quite the clever creation, and Choi received a lot of positive feedback on his design.
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Programming
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Programmers prefer GitHub and Bitbucket
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Given this week’s release of HHVM 3.6 I decided to run some new performance comparison tests of PHP vs. HHVM.
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Your old smartphone has a greater destiny than your junk drawer. Believe it or not, you can turn it into, say, a mini-PC or media streamer. Assuming it packs both USB On The Go support (OTG) and a Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) compatible port, there’s a ton of additional functionality lurking under that its hood. Heck, you can even use a smartphone with a broken screen for this.
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As long as you stick to closed source software, DRM, restrictive licences and patent laws to maximise your profits, you heavily contribute to inequality and powerlessness around the globe.
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Science
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Last night, Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for his portrayal of famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. The critically acclaimed film, which has also been controversial among viewers with disabilities, traces Hawking’s journey from a cocky PhD student at Cambridge to the celebrity scientist and unofficial face of ALS that we know today.
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Security
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A team of security consultants is set to undertake a major independent audit of OpenSSL as part of a multi-million dollar initiative by the Linux Foundation to improve the security and stability of core open source projects.
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It’s now been a bit more than two months since OpenDaylight dealt with the the “netdump” vulnerability reported in August. The good news then was that we fixed the vulnerability and we were able to fix it and ship a new release of ODL with the fix in four days once we knew about the vulnerability. I want to echo Dave Meyer’s comments in saying just how impressive that is and how well the OpenDaylight community comes together when something needs to be done. The list is much longer than this, but in particular, Robert Varga and David Jorm were absolutely critical in pushing things through quickly and efficiently.
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A vulnerability found in Dropbox SDK for Android can be exploited by an attacker to cause apps using the software development kit for Dropbox synchronization to upload the data to an unauthorized account.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.
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About $1 million of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s money, given to a secret Afghan government fund in 2010, ended up in al Qaeda’s possession after it was used to pay part of a ransom for a diplomat kidnapped by the terror group, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
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Seemingly unfazed by the outrage his comments on Fox Business Channel have caused, the former US general who thinks the only solution to the Ukraine conflict is to “start killing Russians” has defended his stance, again speaking to Fox.
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And how exactly is poor Venezuela, a nation of 29 million, with a small military upon which it spends just 1% of GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world (the US spends 4.5% of GDP on its own bloated military), a threat to the US?
Well, according to the new executive order, some of Venezuela’s leading officials have “criminalized political dissent” and are corrupt. That’s about it. There’s nothing in there about Venezuela threatening military action against the US, or promoting terrorism, or threatening Americans.
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Venezuela received strong backing from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) Saturday afternoon, at an emergency summit addressing the recent aggressions from US President Barack Obama.
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Fleets of assorted aircraft were deployed to circle day and night and relay radio signals from the sensors back to Nakhon Phanom, a military base on the west bank of the Mekong River in northeast Thailand that was so secret it officially did not exist.
The base hosted a whole variety of unacknowledged “black” activities, but at its heart, behind additional layers of razor wire and guard posts, sat an enormous air-conditioned building, the largest in Southeast Asia, that was home to Task Force Alpha, the “brain” of the automated battlefield.
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A protest is underway near Creech Air Force Base northwest of Las Vegas. It’s centered on allegations that the United States Air Force is operating an anti-terrorism drone program that is killing innocent civilians.
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A while back I attended a robot expo in Tokyo. It was actually kind of depressing.
Robots are supposed to be sexy, but much of the technology on display was for old people — you know, intelligent dolls that sense when a dementia patient is trying to get out of bed, engaging them in simple conversation long enough for a human helper to arrive — that sort of thing. Even the cool stuff like powered exoskeletons was being marketed as a way to help young people lift invalid octogenarians into the tub.
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The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.
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New reports indicate that America’s reliance on drone warfare in the Middle East could be in jeopardy, but not for legal reasons.
It’s not politics or ethical investigations that are the latest threat, but the simple fact that drone operators are calling it quits in record numbers. Plagued by the trauma of civilian deaths and a heavy workload, drone operators are quitting faster than they can be replaced, and the Air Force is at a loss on what to do, TomDispatch reports.
Currently, about 1,000 drone pilots work in the program, but the Air Force would ideally like to have 1,700. This goal has proven difficult to accomplish, though, since for every 180 pilots that graduate from training annually, 240 quit.
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A raft of data suggest our remote-controlled war games are taking a steep psychological toll on their players
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THE US drone war across much of the Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis — and not because civilians are dying, or the target list for that war or the right to wage it are in question in Washington. Something basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.
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Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans in Congress have deployed a strategy that has worked remarkably well for them: oppose, obstruct, and sabotage the Obama administration at every turn.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, said in 2010.
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White House concerned that Russian-backed separatists are violating cease-fire agreements in eastern Ukraine and keeping out international monitors
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A year ago SISMEC pointed out that, although most of the victims of U.S. drone strikes have ostensibly been “militants,” the White House definition of “militant” is extremely vague (generally, any fighting-aged male). Moreover, the purpose of the program isn’t to target any and all possible combatants, but instead to eliminate high-value targets from international terror organizations who pose a substantial threat to the U.S. homeland. So the best measure of the “hit-rate” of the drone program wouldn’t be to compare the number of civilian casualties v. militants, but instead to ask how many of the total dead were the sort of high-value enemies the program is supposed to be targeting. If we approach the question from this angle, the hit-rate of the drone campaign is abysmal, despite the fact that most of its victims have been “militants.”
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A United States drone was flying overhead as the Philippine military conducted a raid against alleged Islamic militants in an operation that ended with 44 police commandos dead in a field, according to reports.
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An internal Air Force memo reveals that the US military’s drone wars are in major trouble.
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Totaling more than 150 documents, the cache of correspondence is only the second batch of bin Laden letters released by the government. Offered up in evidence by U.S. attorneys in the Brooklyn trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani alleged to have been involved in al-Qaida bombing attacks in Manchester, England, in 2008 and ’09, the letters provide an insight into what life was like for bin Laden as he hid out while U.S. forces were trying to locate and kill him.
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A five-day anti-drone protest at Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada, last week culminated in a massive blockade on Friday of the two gates leading into the base, repeatedly blocking traffic for an extended time during the early morning commute. Over 150 activists from at least 18 states participated. Thirty-four were arrested and charged with trespassing or blocking the roadway into Creech AFB, the most critical U.S. armed drone base in the country.
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State-led assassinations are not a novelty in international affairs; they have been with us from medieval to modern times. What is significantly different today however is the systematic basis in which assassination is delivered from above the clouds via Predator drones. As a method targeted killing was supposed to be left on a dusty shelf, and revisited only during dire security crises when other means of changing the course of events have been fully exhausted. Instead, compiling kill-lists and striking specific individuals has evolved into a routine monthly event – a trademark US policy praised by the political elites and accepted by the American people.
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The Americans turned an instrument of surveillance into a weapon, and they have become a hallmark of Barack Obama’s presidency. Yet the talk of “precision” is deeply problematic
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John Kaag, coauthor of ‘Drone Warfare,’ says a ‘disturbing mix of provincialism and exceptionalism’ is the reason why Americans are more concerned about domestic drone usage than military drones used in targeted killing abroad.
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The Australian government will spend $300 million to purchase several unmanned ‘Reaper’ drones from the US if the Defence Force case for the unmanned vehicles is accepted.
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Australia has decided to follow the United States down the path of armed drones, capable of killing people across the world at the touch of a button.
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Drone operators are not in immediate contact with the real world, literally, thanks to the phenomenon known as latency…
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By 1967, Brown was out of the Marines. Two years later, he joined Vietnam Veterans against the War. Brown said that, years later, his partner Cat recognized that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 2002, the United States was preparing to go to war against Afghanistan, which caused Brown to feel anxiety. “I was very stressed out. I was working the graveyard shift in the post office. One night, I was seeing double. I tried to go outside but never made it.” Brown had suffered a stroke. After being taken to the Buffalo Veterans Administration Medical Center, Brown learned that he had a congenital hole in his heart. In addition, his blood pressure was very high. After recovering from his stroke, Brown worked at lowering his blood pressure by walking three miles quickly every day, he explained.
One of the reasons that Brown chose to protest against UAVs is that “drone pilots get post- traumatic stress disorder. They hunt and kill people by day and then, in the evening, they go home to their families,” Brown said.
Brown talked about the plans for the 107th Airlift Wing of the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station’s mission to change from C-130 planes to MQ-9 Reaper UAVs.
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The goal of this document is to gather into one place, in the briefest form possible, everything one needs to know to work toward an end to war by replacing it with an Alternative Global Security System in contrast to the failed system of national security.
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U.S. drone makers are expecting a surge in sales of military and civilian drones to Gulf states after the State Department eased export rules last week, industry executives said on Tuesday.
U.S. aerospace and arms companies have been pressing the U.S. government for years to ease restrictions on foreign sales of unmanned aerial vehicles – UAVs or drones – arguing that other countries such as Israel are overtaking them.
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I began by asking when is it ever right to kill, and I answered that this is a question we would put to the state in which we have granted God-like powers. Yet, if the state, which is little more than men and women like ourselves after all, is granted the power’s of divinity how can mere mortals be trusted to wield the lightning?
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This deeply false dichotomy between supporting terrorists or agreeing with any and all US foreign policy was one that the Bush administration leaned on in tough times. Nearly 14 years after 9/11, and 12 years since the war in Iraq started, the hamfistedness of the propaganda already feels a little anachronistic. But that’s only because so many people now agree that the war was bad. We’ve had mushy liberal pundits from Jonathan Chait to Ezra Klein offering their decade-later self-flagellation. And we’ve marveled that otherwise smart people like the late Christopher Hitchens, or unrepentant comic book villains such as former Vice President Dick Cheney continued to defend the war long after it had gone out of fashion.
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First, why have elements within Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite provided financial backing to ISIS?
Alastair Crooke, a British expert on political Islam, believes part of the answer is that ISIS ideology is virtually identical to the worldview embraced by many Saudis. In 1741, the Ibn Saud clan joined forces with Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of an especially fanatical version of Islam. Together, they brutally gained control over most of the Arabian Peninsula and judged all non-Wahhabist Muslims as apostates. In 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia declared itself a nation with Wahhabist Islam as the state religion. Today, Saudi sources spend more than $100 billion promoting the Wahhabist brand within the Islamic world.
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Nevertheless, the mystique of “high value targeting,” especially when inflicted by supposedly unerring precision weapons or super-elite Special Forces commandos, isn’t going to go away any time soon. The public loves it of course, which comes as no surprise given our steady diet of Hollywood promotion in movies like Zero Dark 30, Lone Survivor, American Sniper. But so do our leaders, and they ought to know better. Decades of experience indicate that striking at enemy leadership in expectation of significant beneficial effect invariably leads not only to disappointment, but also to unexpectedly unpleasant consequences.
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Drone attacks are no less violent or disturbing than the murder of Damiens. But they’ve been placed in a different context that makes them palatable to a majority of Americans (though not to most of the world). They’re not public spectacles. They are the natural extension of an omnipresent surveillance system. And they’re embedded in the rule of law (or so their supporters claim).
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The three Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE shut their embassies in Sanaa earlier this month
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Iraqi officials say they are close to victory in an Iranian-backed offensive to reclaim the city of Tikrit from the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Iraqi forces and Shiite militias have reclaimed swaths of the city without the aid of U.S. airstrikes. The gains come as ABC News reports Iraqi military units trained and armed by the United States are under investigation by the Iraqi government for war crimes. Videos and photos on social media appear to show militia members and soldiers from elite units massacring and torturing civilians and displaying severed heads.
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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), a U.K.-based nonprofit, has been documenting U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan since the beginning of this year. On Tuesday, the group reported five confirmed airstrikes that have killed between 35 and 44 people in 2015.
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Islamabad High Court (IHC) has summoned IG Police Islamabad Tahir Alam today due to non registration of murder case against CIA chief and legal counsel under court’s orders in respect of two persons killed in drone attack in Mir Ali at South Waziristan in 2010.
Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui has remarked “ thousands of Pakistani children are being martyred and no one sheds tears. Are they insects that no one is there to raise voice in their support.
He further remarked “ if murder case of two persons killed in drone strike is not registered under court’s orders then contempt of court proceedings will be initiated against the IG Police Islamabad. The court job is to protect life and property of citizens.
Mir Ali drone attack case came up for hearing in IHC Tuesday Advocate Mirza Shahzad Akbar and Zahoor Elahi appeared on behalf of the petitioner in the court.
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The government through its report filed in the court has taken the plea that the matter of registration of murder case of two persons against the former chief station CIA and legal counsel, involves legal complications as it can affect Pakistan ties with foreign countries.
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Al Qaeda stockpiled weapons using covert CIA cash funneled to the murderous terrorist group by Afghan officials as part of a $5 million ransom for a hostage diplomat.
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Co-founder of CODEPINK anti-war organization Medea Benjamin said that the US government had been hiding the civilian casualties caused by the drone strikes in the Middle East, Somalia and Afghanistan.
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In rare remarks about a sensitive issue, the director of the CIA confirmed today that the U.S. government works with foreign intelligence agencies to capture and jointly interrogate suspected terrorists.
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SoCIAl media and other technology are making it increasingly difficult to combat militants who are using such modern resources to share information and conduct operations, the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency said on Friday.
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Social media and other technology are making it increasingly difficult to combat “extremists” who are using such modern resources to share information and conduct operations, the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has said.
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The CIA now is so firmly entrenched and so immensely well financed – much of it off the books, including everything from secret budget items to peddling drugs and weapons – that it is all but impossible for a president to oppose it the way Kennedy did. Obama, who has proved himself a fairly weak character from the start, certainly has given the CIA anything it wants. The dirty business of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is one project. The coup in Ukraine is another. The pushing of NATO’s face right against Russia’s borders is still another. Several attempted coups in Venezuela are still more. And the creation of a drone air force for extrajudicial killing in half a dozen countries is yet another. They don’t resemble projects we would expect from a smiley-faced, intelligent man who sometimes wore sandals and refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel during his first election campaign.
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This is the first picture of a Russian policeman jailed for 15 years for handing over Kremlin secrets to the CIA.
Roman Ushakov, 33, from Krasnoyarsk, was found guilty of high treason for allegedly receiving 37,000 euros from his American handlers – hidden in a ‘fake rock’.
The police major confessed to flying to Britain and other foreign countries to meet US agents after making contact with them via a CIA website.
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President Barack Obama has repeatedly promised to protect whistleblowers from prosecution and punishment, even though he has used the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations.
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The Foreign Ministry is backing a new book outlining CIA actions in Ecuador to raise public awareness of interventions committed by the organization.
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The government of Ecuador wants its citizens to know all about the dirty tricks that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engaged in during the 1960s in their country. To this end, the Ecuador Foreign Ministry has published and distributed copies of the book The CIA Case Against Latin America (pdf), written by Philip Agee, Jaime Galarza Zavala and Francisco Herrera Arauz.
Agee is a former CIA officer who exposed the spy agency’s clandestine operations in Latin America from 1960 to 1968 in his own book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1975.
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Newly revealed documents show that the Ecuadorean military was part of Operation Condor.
After reviewing declassified CIA documents, the Ecuador’s Attorney General Galo Chiriboga revealed Wednesday that former Ecuadorean President Jaime Roldos could have been murdered, a theory that has surrounded the 34-year old case.
President Roldos was the first democratically elected president after Ecuador’s last military dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1979.
Chiriboga made his claim after reviewing several CIA documents that show the Ecuadorean army participated in the Operation Condor, during the 1970s and 1980s.
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Newly declassified CIA documents show that the United States tried to mislead the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran’s nuclear energy program through the provision of doctored evidence.
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Evidence emerging from a CIA leak case could change the outcome of United Nations’ assessments of Iran’s nuclear program, Bloomberg reported Friday.
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The Hazzm movement was once central to a covert CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, but the group’s collapse last week underlines the failure of efforts to unify Arab and Western support for mainstream insurgents fighting the Syrian military.
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In recorded comments made for a documentary of the accession of Crimea into the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin revealed that he had been readying Russia’s nuclear arms during the height of the Ukraine crisis.
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Transparency Reporting
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Julian Assange is taking his appeal to Sweden’s highest court in a final attempt to persuade a Swedish judge that the arrest warrant against him should be lifted.
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Police monitoring of the Ecuadorean embassy in London all these years has cost “millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money,” Pilger noted.
While many have speculated whether the recent developments in Sweden would break the stalemate, Ratner said that Washington would play more of a role in his client’s fate.
“Sweden is not Julian Assange’s problem,” he said. “His problem is the United States.”
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The case of Matt DeHart, a former U.S. drone pilot turned hacktivist, is as strange as it is disturbing. The 29-year-old was recently denied asylum in Canada, having fled there with his family after — he claims — he was drugged and tortured by agents of the FBI, who accused him of espionage and child pornography.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Unfortunately, many agricultural water contractors may face a second year of receiving no water from the project – an unprecedented situation. In addition, reduced amounts of water are expected to be available from the CVP for urban uses, although Reclamation anticipates having adequate supplies to provide for unmet health and safety needs for these water users.
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Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), received significant funding from energy companies while publishing studies that suggested solar activity, rather than human-generated greenhouse gasses, was causing dramatic shifts in global climate. Soon, whose work is frequently cited by conservative politicians to support their skepticism of the human role in climate change, accepted more than $1.2 million from fossil-fuel companies over the past decade, according to documents obtained by environmental group Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act. During that same period, Soon failed to disclose any the financial conflicts of interests to publishers of his scientific studies, violating journals’ ethical guidelines in several cases, The New York Times reported.
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FAIR examined ABC, CBS and NBC transcripts from January 25 (as the Northeast’s first blizzard approached) through March 4, looking at all mentions of cold, snow and ice. Over the same time period, we studied coverage of heat, warmth and drought across the West and Pacific Northwest.
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Finance
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For over three years the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), an organization of Canadian citizens, has battled in court to return Canada’s Central Bank. The Bank of Canada’s initial purpose according to its charter was making interest free loans to municipal, provincial, and federal governments for “human capital” expenditures (education, health, other social services) and /or infrastructure expenditures. Yet for the past four decades it has acted as an interest-gathering agent for private global banking firms.
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Regular readers of my blog Beat the Press know that the over-valuation of the dollar is one of my pet themes. There are two big issues with the over-valuation.
The first is macroeconomic: An over-valued dollar makes US goods and services less competitive internationally. If the dollar is over-valued by 20 percent against other currencies, then it has the same impact as if we were to impose a 20 percent tariff on all our exports and give a 20 percent subsidy on imported goods. Needless to say, this leads to a much larger trade deficit than would be the case if the currency were not over-valued.
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Finally, the story of the “Big Scare” doesn’t quite fit the data either. Saving as a share of disposable income is now lower than at any point except the peaks of the stock and housing bubbles. By the measure of how much consumers are spending, they do not appear scared. Similarly, the investment share of GDP is back to its level of 2005-06, a period in which firms were not obviously scared.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Apparently, in the domestic sphere, shunning people of color who have “grievances” is the sum total of what it means to “love America.”
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Censorship
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If you want to post naked pictures or videos of people on Reddit without their consent, you only have a couple of weeks to do so. As of March, the site is imposing a ban on content of an explicit nature that the subject has not given permission to be posted.
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Blogger users risk having their blogs removed from public listings if they feature graphic nudity or explicit content. Starting on March 23, any Blogger blog found to contain offending pictures or videos will be converted into a private blog that can only be seen by the owner and those, erm, explicitly invited to see it.
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In all three cases, the building owners had asked to have the show closed because of safety worries – particularly following last week’s attacks in Copenhagen.
On Tuesday the organisers are meeting to decide where to go from here.
The director of Library 10 told the paper that the building’s owners and police are studying the security issues surrounding the show, and that it may still be possible for it to re-open at the library.
The exhibit includes work by 10 leading Finnish cartoonists, including well-known names such as Pertti Jarla and Milla Paloniemi.
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Privacy
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Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.
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Newly released records show that Florida law enforcement agencies have been using stingrays thousands of times since at least 2007 to investigate crimes as small as a 911 hangup. They also seemingly obliquely refer to stingrays in police reports as “electronic surveillance measures,” or even as a “confidential informant.”
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So what can we learn from this Lenovo/Superfish/Komodia/PrivDog debacle? For users, we’ve learned that you can’t trust the software that comes preinstalled on your computers—which means reinstalling a fresh OS will now have to be standard operating procedure whenever someone buys a new computer.
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China is no longer using high-profile US technology brands for state purchases, amid ongoing revelations about mass surveillance and hacking by the US government.
A new report confirmed key brands, including Cisco, Apple, Intel, and McAfee — among others — have been dropped from the Chinese government’s list of authorized brands, a Reuters report said Wednesday.
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China has put a hold on a draft counter-terrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over sensitive information to government officials, a senior U.S. official said in a good sign for Western businesses who saw the rule as a major impediment to working in the world’s second largest economy.
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It’s 2015—when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores. It’s happening for profit, for an “improved user experience,” and because developers have flocked to “free” plugins and tools provided by data-vacuuming companies.
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So far, we know that the Justice Department, the FBI, and President Obama have said that law enforcement should be allowed to break into consumers’ encrypted data with a warrant. Now, we can add the NSA to the list.
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In short, the metadata brought Schock down. Of course, as we’ve been describing, anyone who says that we shouldn’t be concerned about the NSA’s surveillance of metadata, or brushes it away as “just metadata,” doesn’t understand how powerful metadata can be. As former NSA/CIA boss Michael Hayden has said, the government kills people based on metadata.
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Cellphones didn’t just arrive in Pakistan. But someone could be fooled into thinking otherwise, considering the tens of millions of Pakistanis pouring into mobile phone stores these days.
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ADDRESS BOOK CONTACTS LIST EMAILER LinkedIn has settled a class action lawsuit that came its way after 6.5 million users’ passwords were stolen in a hacking incident.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden didn’t mince words during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Monday when he said the NSA and the British spy agency GCHQ had “screwed all of us” when it hacked into the Dutch firm Gemalto to steal cryptographic keys used in billions of mobile SIM cards worldwide.
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Kaspersky malware probers have uncovered a new ‘operating system’-like platform that was developed and used by the National Security Agency (NSA) in its Equation spying arsenal.
The EquationDrug or Equestre platform is used to deploy 116 modules to target computers that can siphon data and spy on victims.
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Researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have uncovered more evidence tying the US National Security Agency to a nearly omnipotent group of hackers who operated undetected for at least 14 years.
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Wikipedia will take legal action against the National Security Agency and the US Department of Justice challenging the government’s mass surveillance programme.
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Kaspersky’s researchers also published a list of URLs that the malware uses to “phone home” and pass information back to agents. Now, the NSA could use random, gibberish domains, but those look suspicious. So, instead, the agency registered and ran second-rate domains like newjunk4u.com and nickleplatedads.com. (Aside: Is that nickel plate dads or nickel-plated ads?)
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A former NSA and CIA director says only members of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance have the privileged status of America’s most intimate friends. Other nations are doomed to remain out of that club indefinitely, he told a Washington-based think tank.
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New Zealand’s eavesdropping agency used an Internet mass surveillance system to target government officials and an anti-corruption campaigner on a neighboring Pacific island, according to a top-secret document.
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New Zealand spies programmed an internet mass surveillance system to intercept messages about senior public servants and a leading anti-corruption campaigner in the Solomon Islands, a top-secret document reveals.
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The Senate intelligence committee advanced a priority bill for the National Security Agency on Thursday afternoon, approving long-stalled cybersecurity legislation that civil libertarians consider the latest pathway for surveillance abuse.
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New Zealand intelligence is spying on its neighbors throughout the Asia-Pacific region, intercepting mass data and sharing it with the National Security Agency in the United States, according to documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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New Zealand is spying indiscriminately on its allies in the Pacific region and sharing the information with the US and the other “Five Eyes” alliance states, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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While the Snowden files have previously been made available via Greenwald’s personal website and the American Civil Liberties Union, now a University of Toronto graduate, George Raine, has created the Snowden Surveillance Archive to allow you to search all the documents released so far.
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A team of Canadian journalists and political researchers have teamed up to create the world’s first fully indexed and searchable online database of Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance revelations.
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A group of Canadian researchers and journalists have built the world’s first fully-indexed and searchable online database of Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance documents. The team behind the Snowden Surveillance Archive hopes the database will help the public use Snowden’s revelations to become more aware of how governments are spying on citizens.
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At the end of last week it looked like Tom Mulcair and the NDP caucus were going to rise to the occasion on one of the great threats to Canadian civil liberties and Canada’s activist community in many years, Bill C-51.
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A Yahoo executive has publicly challenged the National Security Agency (NSA) over encryption “backdoors”.
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Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at Yahoo, said that if technology companies were obliged to provide “backdoor” access to their systems for the US government, they would face heavy pressure to do the same in China and Russia.
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EFF writes a very angry letter asking United Nations to write a very angry letter to the US
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In the past year, American and British intelligence agencies have made headlines for some of the world’s most high-stakes and far-reaching security missteps and ethical violations: from the NSA’s surveillance scandal to the CIA torture report to MI5’s botched handling of “Jihadi John”. You would have to be living under a rock to have missed these stories, and even if you were, these agencies could no doubt track you down – and monitor your texts! LOL!
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In the summer of 2013, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden met with two journalists in a hotel room in Hong Kong. What he told them – that the NSA was spying on all of us – changed the way citizens in democracies viewed their governments. The documentary on Snowden, “Citizenfour,” just won an Oscar and has been re-released in theaters.
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The visit was more than just a courtesy call. With the legal authority for the NSA’s phone data dragnet set to expire June 1, Rogers needs his enemies. Reformers are girding for a fight with congressional leaders, and the looming deadline to reauthorize several Patriot Act provisions gives the former group unprecedented leverage.
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Just when you might have thought that the NSA couldn’t have another way to spy on us along comes Hello Barbie, a version of Mattel’s iconic toy that adds audio capture and response to the doll. The way the doll will work is when your child presses the button on a Hello Barbie doll, whatever they next say will be recorded and transmitted over WiFi to the Internet to be processed by Mattel’s partner, ToyTalk, and a relevant response generated and sent back (Internet lag not withstanding).
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Critics of the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone records see a strong chance to rein in the mass surveillance program by June.
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Why spy? That’s the several-million pound question, in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Why would the US continue to wiretap its entire population, given that the only “terrorism” they caught with it was a single attempt to send a small amount of money to Al Shabab?
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President Obama has criticized a Chinese plan to force US tech companies to install backdoors into their products for sale in the country. Without stopping for a moment to consider the phrase about glass houses and stones, he told Reuters that China would have to change its stance if it wanted to do business with the US.
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Want to know why forcing tech companies to build backdoors into encryption is a terrible idea? Look no further than President Obama’s stark criticism of China’s plan to do exactly that on Tuesday. If only he would tell the FBI and NSA the same thing.
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It’s been nearly two years since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents to the media revealing the existence of a massive government spying program that scoops up data on millions of Americans’ private phone and Internet communications without their knowledge or consent.
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The launch of the ICANN-Brazil-led internet power grab dubbed NetMundial has been cancelled for a second time, raising questions over its continued existence.
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In this day and age of domestic surveillance, it’s seems odd that any public official should be given the opportunity to house private email servers in their home. Although Hillary Clinton did not break any specific laws, and both Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell also used private emails at times, there are unique circumstances with ‘Emailgate’ that warrant a unique resolution to the scandal.
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Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the Bundestag (German parliament) inquiry into spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), asked security experts to examine his phone after suspecting he might have been hacked – only for it to be tampered with in the post.
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Former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden was heckled at the Conservative Political Action Conference after he called himself an ‘unrelenting libertarian’.
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New Zealand’s prime minister John Key insisted that the revelations were wrong, but then refused to explain why, telling a press conference he had “no intention of telling you about how we do things.” Meanwhile, former GCSB chief Sir Bruce Ferguson admitted that “mass collection” of data was indeed being undertaken in the Pacific, and said it was “mission impossible” to eliminate New Zealanders’ communications from the data being swept up.
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NSA mass surveillance practices could continue to be around for a long time, no matter who is elected in the 2016 US presidential elections, as both the Conservative party and the Republicans still want it around, according to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept.
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The British government has admitted that its practice of spying on confidential communications between lawyers and their clients was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
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Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat and one of the sharpest critics of the Obama administration’s domestic surveillance programs, isn’t satisfied with the changes to those programs and he wants to know why President Obama hasn’t just stopped the NSA bulk-data collection.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Wyden bluntly warned that even after the NSA scandal that started with Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the Obama administration has continued programs to monitor the activities of American citizens in ways that the public is unaware of and that could be giving government officials intimate details of citizens’ lives.
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China is backing away from US tech brands for state purchases as NSA revelations continue to make headlines in newspapers all around the world.
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Leading national security hawks Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., likely agree. The duo admit they don’t use email.
“I don’t email at all,” McCain told the National Journal last week. “I have other people and I tell them to email because I am just always worried I might say something. I am not the most calm and reserved person you know.”
Graham, on the other hand, appears never to have caught up with the Internet revolution. “You can have every email I’ve ever sent. I’ve never sent one,” Graham told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program Sunday.
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The committee also judged that the UK’s laws authorising surveillance are outdated and should be reformed in the next parliament.
In the course of their 149-page report, the committee came to a variety of conclusions about what is and isn’t surveillance, what is intrusive, and what agencies should look at. We’ve examined four of them below, and set out what it means for your emails, calls records – and browser history.
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Besides Apple, Microsoft was also a target, and a story published on The Intercept suggests that CIA specialists might be able to break into BitLocker, the Microsoft software which encrypts hard drives.
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Apple, that’s who. Or Microsoft, or any of the other vendors whose products US government contractors have successfully exploited according to a recent report in the Intercept. While we’re not surprised that the Intelligence Community is actively attempting to develop new spycraft tools and capabilities—that’s their job—we expect them to follow the administration’s rules of engagement. Those rules require an evaluation under what’s known as the “Vulnerabilities Equities Process.” In the White House’s own words, the process should usually result in disclosing software vulnerabilities to vendors, because “in the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest.”
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The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work.
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The Justice Department’s newest electronic dragnet–plane-mounted “dirtboxes” that can slurp thousands of cellular phone ID’s from the air — was originally developed by the CIA to hunt terrorists in the Middle East, The Wall Street Journal reports. Now however, it’s being used domestically to track American citizens. That’s not good.
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Civil Rights
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A homeless man is speaking up after an officer responded violently to his request to use a restroom Sunday.
A witness caught the incident on a cellphone camera. In the footage, the man, Bruce Laclair, is seen walking near a Downtown Fort Lauderdale bus station. An off-duty Fort Lauderdale Police officer, Victor Ramirez, trails Laclair while putting on rubber gloves. “I’m not [expletive] around with you. Don’t [expletive] touch me,” Ramirez is heard yelling while pointing at Laclair.
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The DHS is in the (relatively) newly-minted business of securing the homeland against all comers — mostly terrorists of the foreign and domestic varieties. Whether it’s done out of paranoia or just the overwhelming need to look busy every time the national budget nears a vote, the DHS has gone overboard in its assessments of potential threats. The shorter of the two lists it has compiled by this point would be titled “Not Terrorists.” Over the years, the DHS has conjectured that terrorists are hiding in food trucks, using hotel side entrances, exercising their First Amendment rights, possibly years away from graduating high school… etc.
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On a chilly Sunday evening in December, a smattering of parents and small children trickled into a graffiti-covered concrete building on the grounds of the DC Jail. It was the last day to visit with prisoners before Christmas Eve, and some of the visitors were wearing Santa hats or bearing presents. The only thing missing was inmates. Three years ago, Washington, DC, eliminated in-person visitation for the roughly 1,800 residents of its jails and installed 54 video-conferencing screens in this building across the parking lot from the detention facility. The screens were installed, at no expense to taxpayers, by a Virginia-based company called Global Tel*Link (GTL), which had scored a lucrative contract for the facility’s phone service.
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The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
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The practices undertaken at the Homan facility are alleged to include detaining people without documenting their arrest, beatings, keeping detainees shackled for hours at a time, refusing attorneys for detainees access to the facility, and detaining people while refusing them legal counsel for up to a full day. These practices, by the way, weren’t reserved for the mature, but were happily visited upon minors, because when you’re going to go evil there is no point in half-assing it. Do these types of practices sound familiar to you? Would it help if the detainees were in orange jumpsuits and had the tan of a Cuban sun upon their skin? You get the point.
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A helicopter swoops over a palatial mansion as armed gunmen burst in, jamming cartridges into their shotguns, preparing for an epic firefight. Pretty soon bullets are tearing up the interior as bodies crash through glass walls, and grenades pass the camera in slow-motion arcs. Quickly, the action cuts to a high-speed car chase, with vehicles plummeting along LA’s iconic storm drains. The shooting never stops.
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Until last summer, pretty much anyone buying or selling sex in the San Francisco Bay Area used myRedBook.com. For more than a decade, the site commonly referred to as RedBook served as a vast catalog of carnal services, a mashup of Craigslist, Yelp, and Usenet where sex workers and hundreds of thousands of their customers could connect, converse, and make arrangements for commercial sex. RedBook tapped into the persistent, age-old, bottomless appetite for prostitution and made it safer and more civilized. The site was efficient, well stocked, and probably too successful for its own good.
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Actually, if we shall not overcome partisan rancor, it will be because of reporting like this, which duplicates and does not investigate the claims made about voting reform. Will voter ID and restrictions on early voting “help prevent voter fraud,” or is such fraud “nearly nonexistent”? The Times can’t say, but can only say what others say, as if there were no objective reality that the paper could report on directly.
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Thousands of demonstrators have united across Canada to take action against proposed anti-terrorism legislation known as Bill C-51, which would expand the powers of police and the nation’s spy agency, especially when it comes to detaining terror suspects.
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This is the fourth article (PART1, PART2, PART3) in a five-part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece uses Coalinga State Hospital in California to illuminate the corruption that is taking place inside the justice system’s institutions.
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In February 2009, the Senate intelligence committee gathered in a soundproof room to learn the stomach-churning details of the brutal interrogations the CIA conducted with its first important al-Qaida prisoners.
Committee aides distributed a report based on a review of messages to CIA headquarters from two of the agency’s secret overseas jails. Included was a 25-page chart with a minute-by-minute description of 17 days during which the first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was kept awake, slammed into walls, shackled in stress positions, stuffed for hours into a small box and waterboarded to the point of unconsciousness.
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The dream of flight, even from its earliest days, was shadowed by the desire for power. Before the First World War, in 1911, the Italians were dropping bombs out of early wooden aircraft on north African villages. In the Twenties, the British sought to control ungovernable desert dwellers in their Middle East territories by hurling explosives from biplanes. Today’s objections to drones – crewless aircraft piloted via computers, and used to fire missiles – are to do with the fact that they swerve any liberal sense of justice. Their technology may be astounding, but the fear and outrage they evoke is more than 100 years old.
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The Bush administration was so adamant in its public statements against torture that CIA officials repeatedly sought reassurances that the White House officials who had given them permission to torture in the first place hadn’t changed their minds.
In a July 29, 2003, White House meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet went so far as to ask the White House “to cease stating that US Government practices were ‘humane.’” He was assured they would.
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On January 5, 2010, the chief of the CIA’s secretive paramilitary operations division accused one of the agency’s elite undercover operatives of financial shenanigans and getting too friendly with a female colleague.
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Newly minted Guardian columnist Chelsea Manning, the Army whistleblower currently serving a 35-year sentence for divulging classified military documents to WikiLeaks, argues in a new column that the officers behind the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-9/11 torture and detention program must be held criminally accountable, contending that U.S. intelligence personnel were complicit in a torture regime that was “unethical and morally wrong,” as well as “very illegal.”
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Successful intelligence gathering through interrogation and other forms of human interaction by conventional means can be – and more often than not are – very successful. But, even though interrogation by less conventional methods might get glorified in popular culture – in television dramas like Law and Order: Criminal Intent, 24 and The Closer and movies like Zero Dark Thirty – torture and the mistreatment of detainees in the custody of intelligence personnel is, was and shall continue to be unethical and morally wrong. Under US law, torture and mistreatment of detainees is also very illegal.
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The CIA tortured suspected terrorists on Polish soil.
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The Lithuanian legislature decided against a new inquiry into a secret US torture facility in the country, despite a damning US Senate report released three months ago which indicated its existence.
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Lithuania’s parliament will not hold another parliamentary inquiry into alleged CIA prisons in the Baltic country after the U.S. Senate published a report on torture, the speaker of the parliament said on Friday.
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The Lithuanian Seimas will not renew a parliamentary inquiry into alleged CIA prisons, despite evidence in a US Senate Report suggesting that the Baltic nation kept a secret prison.
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The CIA tried to gain access to Hamas through backchannels despite a US government ban on contact with the Palestinian Islamist movement, the spy cables show.
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The leaked cables show that Obama threatened the Palestinian president because the PLO was seeking to upgrade its U.N. status.
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According to the Al-Jazeera report, a Central Intelligence Agency agent was “desperate” to make contact with Hamas in 2012, according to intelligence files leaked to Al-Jazeera.
Al-Jazeera reported that the US listed Hamas as a terrorist organisation and had no contact with the group officially.
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The December release of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s so-called “torture report” shocked the nation with the gruesome accounts of extreme interrogation tactics employed by the CIA in the war on terror.
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A powerful political thriller in many ways reminiscent of All The President’s Men, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film about the Watergate conspiracy, Kill The Messenger tells the true story of a dogged investigative reporter for an unfashionable Californian newspaper, who uncovered what he called a ‘dark alliance’ between the CIA, Nicaraguan rebels and cocaine traffickers.
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The Department of Defense, after consultation with the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency, has released via Mandatory Declassification Request an early Pentagon study of intelligence operations at Guantanamo (along with accompanying slide presentation). It is very heavily redacted, with whole pages blanked out.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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After having their wrists slapped for more ham-fisted neutrality abuses like throttling and blocking, ISPs have been increasingly clever when it comes to ways to abuse their stranglehold over the uncompetitive broadband last mile. On the fixed-line broadband front the major net neutrality battlefield is currently interconnection, with ISPs accused of allowing their peering points to tier 1 operators and content companies to deteriorate in order to glean new direct interconnection payments. This effectively has shifted one major portion of the neutrality debate from the user’s connection to the edge of the network.
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Over the last few months we’ve discussed how FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai has been waging a one man war on net neutrality and Title II using what can only be described as an increasingly aggressive barrage of total nonsense. Back in January Pai tried to claim that Netflix was a horrible neutrality hypocrite because the company uses relatively ordinary content delivery networks. Earlier this month Pai one-upped himself by trying to claim that meaningful neutrality consumer protections would encourage countries like Iran and North Korea to censor the Internet.
[...]
That said, as a former Verizon lawyer, Pai doesn’t really give a damn about transparency. Phone and cable companies absolutely adore the lack of transparency that allows them craft abysmal anti-consumer regulations on the state and federal level every day. Similarly, were Pai’s party in office pushing an agenda he liked (like oh, letting Verizon do effectively whatever it likes, no matter how anti-competitive) you can be fairly sure his love of transparency would be notably absent from the conversation. Still, Pai’s attempting a futile Hail Mary attempt to delay this week’s vote because he just loves transparency so much it hurts.
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We just accomplished something very important together. Today, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted for strong net neutrality protections.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As the White House doubles down on its attempt to pass legislation to fast track secret trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, their oft-repeated refrain about these deals’ digital copyright enforcement provisions is that these policies would not alter U.S. law.
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The Internet is celebrating Fair Use Week, and it’s a great time to look at what Congress might do this year to help or hurt the fair use rights of artists, innovators, and citizens. After nearly two years of U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearings and vigorous conversations within government, industry, and the public, it seems like we might see some real proposals. But other than a few insiders, nobody knows for sure whether major changes to copyright law are coming this year, and what they might be.
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For a few years now, we’ve been writing about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and how we’re quite concerned by many aspects of it. In particular, we’re quite concerned about the intellectual property provisions — which leaks have shown are tremendously problematic — as well as the corporate sovereignty provisions, which negotiators like to call “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS) because it sounds so boring. Of course, the biggest concern of all is that these deals are negotiated in total secrecy, with the various negotiators refusing to reveal the agreed upon text until it’s a done deal and the public is unable to comment on it or suggest changes and fixes.
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Copyrights
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As you may have heard, last night was the Oscars — Hollywood’s favorite back-patting celebration. However, as a recent study found, films that were nominated for Oscars saw the number of unauthorized downloads and streams surge, as people wanted to make sure they had seen these celebrated films. Films like American Sniper and Selma saw a massive increase in unauthorized downloads after being nominated. The company that did this study, Irdeto, argues that these unauthorized downloads represent a major loss for the films’ producers — but it seems like there’s another explanation: the MPAA really ought to be targeting the Oscars for encouraging infringement.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.14.15
Posted in News Roundup at 9:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For thin clients to keep pace with the latest developments in the data center, they need up-to-date software clients and protocol standards. The earlier the firmware becomes obsolete, the more often the hardware is replaced. In order to avoid this, IGEL is releasing a further update for its IGEL Linux v4 firmware.
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The 2015 Linux Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and Dice was recently released. This forecasts the Linux job market based on a survey of Linux professionals and hiring managers. It found that managers are looking for more evidence of formal training and certifications when hiring Linux professionals.
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Whether you’re a Windows XP refugee, looking for a way to keep a faithful computer running securely, or just someone who’s naturally curious, I highly recommend you check out our list of the best Linux distros and jump right in. You can trust the people who make Linux, and even join them if you want to.
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And a few are threatening to go to Linux.
Microsoft keeps removing things that people like and use and that is adding fuel to the fire as well.
So Maybe it is Microsoft who is endanger of collapsing and not the P.C.
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Desktop
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Most people are happy with inexpensive Chromebooks. Some people, and I’m one of them, want top-of-the-line hardware and were willing to pay $1,449 for the Chromebook Pixel back in 2013. Now, Google will soon be releasing a Chromebook Pixel 2.
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Server
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For the first time since its original release last April, Horizon can manage systems with both Windows and Linux applications and desktops.
VMware released a new version of its all-purpose Horizon 6 virtualization package, continuing the expansion of its next-gen virtual desktop product line.
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It has been a while since I wrote the first two articles in my series on Docker security. This article will give an update on what has been added to Docker since then and cover new functionality that is going through the merge process with upstream Docker.
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Kernel Space
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Nicolas Dichtel and Thierry Herbelot pointed out that the directories in the /proc filesystem used a linked list to identify their files. But, this would be slow when /proc directories started having lots of files, which, for example, might happen when the system needed lots of network sockets.
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Today we have some good news for all users of the Linux 3.18 kernel, as its status has been changed to LTS (Long-Term Support) on March 11, which means that it will be supported with patches for at least two more years from today.
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The world of Linux kernel development can be a contentious place, marked by enthusiastic debate, spirited disagreement, and occasional out-and-out temper tantrums. But a “patch” authored by senior developer Greg Kroah-Hartman is looking to raise the tone a bit.
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Linus Torvalds has taken a lot of criticism for his…er…blunt responses to Linux developers over the years. But now the Linux Foundation has set up a “code of conflict” that might change the way Linus interacts with developers.
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The Linux kernel now has its own Code of Conflict, stating: “if anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable [in mailing list discussions], that is not acceptable”. For some people, this has been a long time coming, but for others, it could just force artificial politeness on proceedings when frank opinions would be more effective.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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The binary translator and interface is similar to existing projects such as Cygwin and Cooperative Linux, as measured in this GitHub comparison. But Foreign LINUX is unique in that it serves as a low-level emulator that only implements kernel system calls and uses the original, unmodified system libraries to improve emulation accuracy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In a sad turn of events, but not exactly surprising, the President of Blizzard responded to the petition calling for Blizzard to support Linux, the answer is obvious, but what’s sad is the response from the petition creator.
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For almost a decade now, the Linux gaming community have been requesting and requesting and requesting for you to show some love towards us. Sadly you have constantly ignored our requests.
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Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is the brutal conclusion to the Hotline Miami saga, set against a backdrop of escalating violence and retribution over spilled blood in the original game. Follow the paths of several distinct factions – each with their own questionable methods and uncertain motivations – as unforeseen consequences intersect and reality once again slips back into a brilliant haze of neon and bloodshed.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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A window manager is software for an operating system that manages the placement of open windows. There are many window managers for Linux. Each one manages applications differently.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE has announced today, March 13, the immediate availability for download and update of KDE Frameworks 5.8.0, a collection of over 60 add-on libraries for the powerful Qt GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit. This release brings a great number of improvements over the previous version, KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, which was released on February 14, 2015.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Florian Müllner of the GNOME Project has announced the immediate availability for testing of Mutter 3.16 Beta 1, as part of the recently released GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 desktop environment. Mutter, GNOME’s default window and compositing manager, is in charge of displaying and managing your desktop via OpenGL technologies.
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The GNOME Photos app has been recently updated as part of the second Beta release of the forthcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, due for release on March 25, 2015. GNOME Photos 3.16 Beta 2 bringing a number of fixes and updated translations detailed below for your reading pleasure.
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Linux has always been the outsider’s operating system. Even more hipster than Apple’s iOS and completely off the radar of most Microsoft Windows users, the open source OS umbrella covers an ever increasing collection of mutations and flavours, known to its users as distros (short for distributions).
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The newsfeeds weren’t overflowing this evening, but there were a few bright spots. First up, Tecmint.com is running a new series called My Linux Story featuring folks sharing their journeys to Linux. Elsewhere, Justin Pot asked can we really trust Linux and Computer Business Review today listed their choices of distributions for new users.
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Linux has always been the outsider’s operating system. Even more hipster than Apple’s iOS and completely off the radar of most Microsoft Windows users, the open source OS umbrella covers an ever increasing collection of mutations and flavours, known to its users as distros (short for distributions).
For the beginner such choice can appear overwhelming, and so CBR has pared it down to the five most accessible.
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Reviews
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The Korora distribution is available in four editions — Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE and Xfce. There was previously a MATE edition, but at the time of writing that flavour of Korora appears to have been discontinued. Each edition of Korora is available for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 machines. Since I tried the default GNOME edition of Fedora a few months ago I decided to get some variety by installing Korora’s KDE edition. The download for Korora’s KDE flavour is 2.5GB in size.
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Sabayon offers four editions of the distribution — GNOME, KDE, Xfce and Minimal. Each edition is available for 64-bit x86 machines exclusively. I opted to download the KDE image which is 2.2GB in size. Booting from the live media brings up a boot menu where we can choose to launch a live desktop environment, run the system installer, install a media centre edition of the distribution or install Steam Big Picture. We can also choose to launch a console only mode, handy for trouble-shooting problems. I will come back to the media centre and Steam interfaces a little later.
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Ubuntu derivatives are many and varied. Most build on the same base, and then add a new work environment in order to infuse the distro with a unique spin. LXLE 14.04.1 does this by applying an almost namesake desktop environment on the latest LTS Ubuntu release, and so a new fork is born.
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I spent several more days playing with Kubuntu Vivid dev branch, testing Plasma, to see what more it can do. Sure, there are bugs and niggles, the repositories are sometimes quite slow and bits and pieces go missing, so you have to wait a few hours or days before you can have a successful update cycle. Some of the functions still do not work, some work inadequately, there are visual inconsistencies and other problems. But all in all, Plasma is progressing nicely, and it’s about to kick some major ass very soon. Let me show you. A sample of what I had the pleasure of doing one Saturday evening.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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The Chakra team is happy to announce the third release of the Chakra Euler series. This is a maintenance release to fix some installation issues and provide all the updated packages that landed in the stable repositories since the previous release. The main new feature is that our ISO now supports booting and installing on UEFI systems! Please follow the instructions carefully on how to achieve this.
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Finally I had enough free time to get Kde Plasma on my Arch Linux workstation.
Installation was pretty easy but understanding how things work now was not because there are some differences with Kde4.
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We’re happy to report that the recently released Mozilla Firefox 36.0 web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 31.5.0 email and news client are now available in the main software repositories of the Arch Linux computer operating system.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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OpenSUSE is one of the top GNU/Linux based operating systems on Distrowatch. It’s also one of my favorite OSes and is a great desktop distro for average, new, and advanced Linux users alike.
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The SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5, now generally available, offers an updated infrastructure-as-a-service platform.
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Red Hat Family
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Oracle, through Michele Casey, had the pleasure of announcing today, March 13, the general availability of Oracle Enterprise Linux 7.1, a computer operating system designed for enterprise environments and based on the Linux kernel.
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Red Hat’s technology powers the Internet infrastructure and has benefited from the open source involvement of its community of users.
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Daniel Farrell is a Software Engineer, recently upgraded from an intern, on Red Hat’s SDN Team. He has been working on SDN-related projects since he entered the industry, which was right as SDN started to pick up speed. From a non-technical perspective, Daniel enjoys craft beer, biking, SCUBA diving and travel.
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Fedora
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Fedora 21 Workstation added the ability to log in and run a Wayland session from the login screen (GDM), leaving the login screen itself running using the older X protocol. This is changing with a new feature in Fedora 22 enabling the login screen to run on Wayland by default.
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Debian Family
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If someone characterizes systemd as an “init system,” you may safely assume that s/he is either utterly clueless or deliberately obfuscating the discussion. Calling systemd an init system is like calling an automobile a cup holder. Not even Lennart Poettering pretends that systemd is anything but the “Core OS” (sic).
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Anytime I’m forced to use Windows or OS X I instantly find myself missing the specific features I enjoy on the Linux desktop. More specifically, it’s the post-installation enhancements that make using someone else’s computer near painful.
In this article, I’ll share my favorite Ubuntu Linux enhancements and how I use them to get more value out of my desktop experience.
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We have some really great news for you today, as BQ announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that a new flash sale of its BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone would take place tomorrow morning, March 12, starting 9 AM CET (Central European Time).
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Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS have been updated in order to repair a few Apache HTTP Server vulnerabilities that have been identified.
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Canonical has published details in a security notice about an eCryptfs vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS that has been found and corrected.
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The MK80LE runs Ubuntu 14.04 Linux and supports hardware-accelerated video when using the VLC media player. As far as I’m aware this doesn’t mean that all Ubuntu apps can take advantage of the computers PowerVR G6230 graphics, but it does at least mean that you shouldn’t have problems playing HD video.
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After a three-year gestation period, the Ubuntu operating system is finally on real, live smartphones that are being sold to consumers. However, don’t expect a huge retail or advertising push for the platform on phones this year, according to Ubuntu’s top mobile executive.
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Canonical has finally got skin in the mobile game, putting its first Ubuntu phone on sale in Europe last month.
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As it promised last week in a teaser video, Canonical – the software company founded by South African born entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth – has brought prototypes of the second phone to run its Ubuntu operating system to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.
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As expected, Canonical was present at Mobile World Congress 2015 with a really nice and spacious booth to promote the latest innovations implemented in the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server computer operating systems, as well as the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
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Systemd has generated lots of heated discussions online, with many Linux users expressing their anger and fears about it on various sites. Now Ubuntu, one of the biggest and most used desktop distributions, has switched to systemd in the beta version of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.
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The Ubuntu Phone sold well after its initial release. But will it succeed over the long haul against rivals like Android and the iPhone? Datamation looks at what the Ubuntu Phone has to offer and considers its chances for success.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint Debian Edition is a distribution built on Debian rather than Ubuntu and it’s been in the works for quite some time. It’s still under development and it’s not really a surprise that the devs are getting much closer to their goal.
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If you have “broken the ice” with GNU / Linux through Raspberry Pi already, here is a board that allows you to jump into the real professional world, with all the needed support and with totally “Open” instruments and, why not, in an enjoyable way. Arietta G25 is the “mascot” of a series of professional boards designed and made in Italy by Acme Systems. That also provides support to its boards for the next 5 years.
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The CubieTech octa-core Allwinner A80 based “Cubieboard4″ SBC goes for $125, competing with LinkSprite’s $129 Beta Arches and Merrii’s $300 H88 Hummingbird.
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Logic Supply unveiled two rugged, Intel NUC “ML100″ mini-PCs: one with two GbE ports based on a Bay Trail Celeron, and one with Intel’s 5th-Gen Core CPU.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation make it pretty clear that Raspbian is the recommended operating system for the Raspberry Pi series of computers. Most of the Foundation’s documentation and support directs users to Raspbian. The downloads section of their website does list other operating system images. But there are many more images available, and one really piqued my curiosity; a Ubuntu 14.10 / Linaro 15.01 “developer” image. Unlike Raspbian, this image is compiled for ARMv7/armhf.
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The Raspberry Pi has been a tremendous success story, ever since the low-cost development board first appeared in 2012. Among enthusiasts and educators it’s sparked an interest in “real” computing, unseen since the halcyon days of the 1980s, and it’s also inspired an army of copycat devices. Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is building on that success with the long-awaited successor – the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. See also: The eight best uses for your Raspberry Pi
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Raspberry Pi celebrates its third birthday today. Well actually it doesn’t, as the super-affordable ARM GNU/Linux computer was launched on February 29 2012, in what was (obviously) a leap year, but it’s close enough.
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Phones
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Android
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I love my latest Android device (see the March 2015 issue’s Open-Source Classroom column for details), but for some reason, it won’t automatically connect to my Bluetooth headset. When I turn on my headset, I want it to connect to my Android device so I can start using it right away. In order to make it connect, I have to go into the settings app, then Bluetooth, and then tap the device to connect. Thankfully, there’s an application that makes life a lot easier.
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The Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge have been out for almost a week and a half and they seem to have already gathered a lot of positive feedback.
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Google has finally announced the long awaited Android 5.1 update after its not-so-secret debut on Android One devices in the Philippines. This new build of Lollipop is rolling out to Nexus devices right now, but what’s in it? The official changelog was severely lacking in detail, but now that it’s hitting devices we can see all the tweaks to this version of Android. Let’s check it out.
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Much to the delight of Apple fanbots everywhere, Apple has now fully unveiled the Apple Watch. The watch, which was previewed in September, will go on sale April 10 and ship on the 24th. Based on its brand name, styling, accessories, and battery life claims, it will likely be a big hit — at least as far as smartwatches go.
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Tech attracts passion like no other consumer product vertical. And the Android vs iPhone debate is PC vs Mac for the digital native generation. We all love our gadgets, but some people take things to extremes. Here at Macworld UK we aim to protect you from these extremes of Android fandom, and we believe that forewarned is forearmed. So here is our spotters guide to the seven types of Android fanboy you can expect to encounter on the internet. We’ve left it gender neutral in order to leave no-one out (but in our experience the worst behaviour is exclusively male: in Fandroidism as in life).
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Huawei has unveiled its first smartwatch, a circular Android Wear-powered device.
Compatible with smartphones running Android 4.3 or higher, the device features a 1.4-inch Amoled display with a resolution of 400 by 400 pixels resolution (286ppi). It also includes a heart rate monitor sensor, a six-axis motion sensor, and a barometer.
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That’s been one of the more surprising stories to come out of this year’s Mobile World Congress. Huawei, a colossal company that makes most of its money on networking equipment and infrastructure, has launched its most overt play for consumers yet by unveiling its first smartwatch. The Huawei Watch is a circular device that looks closer to a traditional watch than the Moto 360, LG G Watch R, or any other Android Wear product to date. One week before Apple is set to reveal the final details of its own watch, Huawei has presented a very different vision informed by the principles of classical watch design.
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I’ve news. Starting today, I will be working full time in a new role. I’m now a Director at the global consulting firm WiPro in their Open Source practice, advising both customers and implementation teams on open source issues concerning software selection, community engagement, license compliance and more. You’ll find me at a variety of conferences and events, and I’ll continue to write for InfoWorld and others.
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SageTV was a cross-platform media center application and digital video recorder tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. I say “was” because Google acquired the company in 2011 and used the technology for its Google Fiber TV service.
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My two biggest dreams growing up were to be either a firefighter or a space explorer. Though I didn’t get to do either of those things, I satisfy the former via being a volunteer in prevention with Cal Fire, California’s state fire department, and the latter by reading everything I can get my hands on about space—both fiction and non-fiction.
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Open source has come a long way in the past 30 years and is entering the consciousness of most modern cultures. When thinking of open source projects, people categorize them several ways: governance structure, type of product platform, programming language, utility, technical details (language written in), industry sponsored or fully independent, and more.
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Are we, as a group, more interested in enforcing a specific set of behaviors, or are we more interested in fostering a culture of respect, collaboration, and participation? To view interlocutors as “offenders” ensures the former. I’m much more interested in the latter.
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Trying to explain why open source works, you can of course point to the Cathedral and the Bazaar by Erik. But the kernel development process shows it happening ‘in real time’, every day, and that’s a major reason why I so enjoy reading the weekly LWN.
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Eric Raymond’s How to Ask Questions the Smart Way was published in 2001 and has been very popular ever since. It gets referenced on my local Linux User Group mailing list with some frequency (usually alongside an admonishment to stop top-posting). To be sure, it contains a lot of good advice for how to perform research, how to frame a question, and what salient information is generally a minimum required to solicit help.
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A startup fresh out of private beta offers a three-way intersection between machine learning, the API economy, and open source developers’ need to monetize their creations.
Algorithmia, which launched privately last year, allows users to build algorithms, make them available as a Web service, and monetize them.
The service can be used in two basic ways: either by calling algorithms available in the system via its REST API (with examples provided), or by writing and submitting the algorithms to be used. Each algorithm has its own interactive console page, so they can be tried out directly on the Web without needing to write and implement code. Many of the algorithms are original creations; others are implementations of existing software, such as a tokenizer based on Apache OpenNLP.
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Events
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OSDC Nordic is an upcoming open-source friendly community-oriented event, held May 8th – 10th in Oslo.
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The free software movement is a global phenomenon, and we want the LibrePlanet conference to reflect that. That’s why, wherever you are, you are invited to participate remotely by watching the livestream and participating in the discussion via chat.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released an open source memory forensics tool that some college students designed and built during the company’s recent Winter of Security event.
The new tool, known as Masche, is designed specifically for investigating server memory and has the advantage of being able to scan running processes without causing any problems with the machine. Masche runs on Linux, OS X and Windows and Mozilla has posted the code on GitHub.
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Mozilla, in the latest version of its Firefox browser has introduced support for the newly finalised HTTP/2 network protocol along with other features. Firefox 36 is currently only available for Windows, OS X, and Linux desktop systems.
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Today, we are announcing that Firefox 38 will take further measures to secure users’ communications by removing support in WebRTC for all DTLS cipher suites that do not support forward secrecy. For developers: if you have a WebRTC application or server that doesn’t support PFS ciphers, you will need to update your code.
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With the launch of Unreal Engine 4.7, Epic Games has added the ability to export to HTML5 as a regular part of their Windows binary engine releases. One of the world’s most advanced game engines is one step closer to delivering truly amazing content right in your browser. With this addition, developers will be able to create content in Unreal Engine 4.7, immediately compile it to the Web, and launch it in their browser of choice with the click of a button.
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Mozilla’s Firefox 36 debuts with support for HTTP/2 protocol as well as 17 security advisories for vulnerabilities that have been patched in the open-source browser.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Now here is an interesting open source project that has been flying under the radar: The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which stewards more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, announced the availability of Apache Tajo v0.10.0, the latest version of the advanced open data warehousing system in Apache Hadoop.
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Databases
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To learn more about RethinkDB, we caught up with Slava Akhmechet. Akhmechet is the founder of RethinkDB, the company with the same name as the open source project. Before founding RethinkDB, he was a systems engineer in the financial industry, working on scaling custom database systems. He is currently a PhD student on leave from a program in Computational Neuroscience at Stony Brook University.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Stross is a long-time Linux user who only uses Word because the publishing industry expects he will. But he’s not alone in loathing the necessity to do so: fellow UK science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds says the application “drives me to distraction.”
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The developers behind LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite forked from OpenOffice, have sweated and bled to advance the toolkit over the past couple of years. The effort has paid off: It’s a no-brainer to recommend LibreOffice over OpenOffice, thanks to Libre’s consistent release schedule and the increasingly polished quality of the product.
Now for the bigger question: Can you recommend LibreOffice in the same breath as Microsoft Office? The short answer: Maybe. To its credit, LibreOffice 4.4 handles old- and new-school Microsoft Office documents better than ever before — no small feat considering how prohibitively complex such documents can be. If you plan on using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office, know that document compatibility is still a roll of the dice — but with each revision LibreOffice is improving the odds.
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CMS
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Joomla! is a highly-extendable content management system (CMS) licensed under the GNU GPL written in PHP that readily scales from small websites to large projects. Joomla was designed with extensibility in mind — a wide variety of extensions are available for the needs of the audience. Importantly, Joomla can be easily adapted to a wide variety of use cases, including as for a corporate intranet, as an e-commerce platform, or for web presence and information, as is the case for the Guggenheim Museum website, which runs on Joomla.
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Business
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Increased interest in privacy issues – particularly in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region – is driving interest in new software security solutions. This has combined with a change in attitude towards open-source solutions to create an opportunity for businesses.
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If eZ Systems isn’t a name you’re familiar with, allow us to introduce ourselves: eZ is a commercial open source software vendor. We provide a content management system (CMS) and platform known as eZ Publish, which will soon be known as eZ Platform. eZ serves as a foundation for digital businesses, providing value-added solutions on top of our open source CMS platform.
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Funding
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Are you cheating if you download open source software without paying for it? Recently, Linux distribution elementaryOS angered users by implying that you are — an opinion that is hardly new, but no more valid than the last dozen times anyone voiced it.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Guile-SDL is Guile plus SDL. Simple, no?
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Running free gate patterns on FPGAs could potentially be a useful method for making digital devices that are free at the circuit level. However, to make FPGAs usable in the free world, we need free development tools for them. The obstacle is that the format of the gate pattern file that gets loaded into the FPGA is secret. Until recently there was no model of FPGA for which those files could be produced without nonfree (proprietary) tools.
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At Apple’s “Spring Forward” press event on Monday, March 9, the electronics company expounded upon its plans to release a smartwatch and revealed updates to its MacBook computer line, among other announcements. Underneath their focus on “innovation” and “design,” however, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other participating speakers neglected to address growing concerns about the proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management technologies distributed with its products and services, which only serve to extend the company’s oppression of computer users and their freedoms.
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This year again Guix participates in the Google Summer of Code under the umbrella of the GNU Project.
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For our March “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected GnuCash, an easy-to-use personal and small-business finance manager with a checkbook like appearance. The GnuCash team shared their thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
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Project Releases
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The Kodi development team has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Kodi 14.2 media center software for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Apple TV, and Raspberry Pi. This release brings a bunch of fixes that aim to improve the stability of the application on all supported platforms.
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Public Services/Government
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The Greens in the German parliament want the Foreign Ministry to revert back to open source software solutions on its workstations. The ministry in 2010 abandoned its open source desktop strategy, pressured by staffers struggling with interoperability problems. The Greens are now asking the ministry to justify the proprietary licence costs it has made since then.
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Is the alternative that every government agency bear the cost and effort of writing its own software? Clearly this doesn’t make much sense either. As often happens when an economic arrangement becomes impaired over time, cutting out the middleman solves the problem—the middleman here being for-profit enterprises that manage the production and costs of vital software systems.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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At the Open Compute Project Summit this week, startup Vapor announced a new open-source specification designed to help manage data center environments.
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Open Education Week (OEW) is an annual, global event and will take place this year from March 9-13, 2015. The event aims to raise awareness and celebrate achievements of the global Open Education Movement.
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Access to high-quality human biospecimens such as blood, saliva, plasma, DNA, and RNA is integral to developing a better understanding of diseases and advancing molecular technologies, clinical trial research, personalized medicine research, and clinical practice.
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Open Data
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Recently, we’ve been covering the Open Data Platform, recently announced by Pivotal, which is shaping up to be very influential in the Hadoop and Big Data market. Now, WANdisco, a provider of continuous-availability software for global enterprises working with Big Data, has announced that it has joined the Open Data Platform (ODP) Initiative. WANdisco has patented technology that enables Hadoop availability across data centers that can be very far apart, while also securing data.
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I recently attended the Triangle Open Data Day (TODD) conference at North Carolina State’s campus in Raleigh, an event sponsored by Code for America. On the surface, the open data movement is about getting local, state, and federal government to publish data in a way that citizens can use it. This means publishing reports, spreadsheets, and other documentation online — and it scales to mean publishing data sets with APIs, so applications all over the place can build upon and extend those data sets.
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Open Hardware
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That was the question many Italians were asking recently when reports appeared in local media that Massimo Banzi, co-founder and high-profile figurehead for the popular open hardware project, was stepping down from managing the initiative. The lead was to be taken by Federico Musto, CEO of Dog Hunter, an Internet of Things company that had previously contributed to Yun, a family of wi-fi products that combine Arduino and Linux.
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Programming
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Part of being a good open source citizen is contributing to the projects and programs you use and care about most—and learning how to code can be a big part of that. But with so many programming languages out there, picking the right entry point into coding can be a challenge.
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Today, I’m putting my foot down. I helped start this nonsense, so I’m going to help stop it. If a DVCS is great for your workflow, fine. If the trade-offs it imposes are good for you, great. But let’s stop claiming that they’re free, because they have a cost, and the cost is sometimes not worth it.
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In July of 2006, I first wrote about Google Code, as a new competitive alternative to SourceForge for open-source project hosting. Times sure have changed in the last 8.5 years and Google is now shutting Google Code down.
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I’ve had my own GitHub account since March 2014, where I host all the code for my personal open source projects dating back to 2004 (previously, I was using SourceForge). My first-ever project was a blogging script and simple content management system that used PHP and MySQL.
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There are endless ways to share files between devices. Some of them are complex, ftp and Network File System (NFS). Some, such as Apple Bonjour and Windows Homegroup, work with only a few operating systems. Still others, like Dropbox and Google Drive, require you to use a cloud. Then, there’s BitTorrent Sync 2.0, which is easy to use, works with most devices, and doesn’t use a cloud.
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So I got up very early this morning after suffering through the night with a new oral sleep apnea appliance. I haven’t gotten much sleep so I’m a bit bleary-eyed as I write this post. Anyway, I checked my email as I usually do and found a note from a friend mentioning that something had happened to Google+.
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In today’s integrated world, no software can stand on its own. So CTOs need to create APIs right from the start — and consider developers as they would end users. That advice comes from Uri Sarid, CTO at MuleSoft, which helps organizations connect data, applications, and devices. In this interview, he shares his thoughts on the importance of interoperability.
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Science
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GOP stalwarts are trying to cut millions in university funding, and critics say the moves could spell disaster.
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Why are Republicans constantly bashing college these days? I was one of them — and the answer may surprise you
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Hardware
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The dramatic trend in GNU/Linux page-views seen on StatCounter may well continue for years.
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Intel has lowered its revenue forecast for the first quarter of its fiscal 2015 by nearly a billion dollars, citing a weaker than expected PC market.
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Security
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IBM today is publicly disclosing a flaw that it found and reported to Dropbox, impacting the security of the popular file sharing and sync service. Since Dropbox functionality is embedded in multiple applications, the risk and potential impact is larger than just the Dropbox app itself.
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Adobe has issued patches for security vulnerabilities in Flash Player — 11 of which are deemed critical.
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On Thursday, Cisco security researchers reported that a problem in the Google Apps engine, used to renew websites registered through the system, has results in the public disclosure of 282,867 domain owner records.
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Over one million websites running the WordPress content management system are potentially at risk of being hijacked due to a critical vulnerability exposed in the WP-Slimstat plugin.
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Lenovo’s Superfish debacle seems to have drawn the ire of the Lizard Squad hackers.
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It’s starting to look like Superfish and other software containing the same HTTPS-breaking code library may have posed more than a merely theoretical danger to Internet users. For the first time, researchers have uncovered evidence suggesting the critical weakness may have been exploited against real people visiting real sites, including Gmail, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, and Gpg4Win.org, to name just a few.
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Internet traffic for 167 important British Telecom customers—including a UK defense contractor that helps deliver the country’s nuclear warhead program—were mysteriously diverted to servers in Ukraine before being passed along to their final destination.
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Researchers at Trustwave today said that over the past few days, several hundred messages have been corralled that are trying to exploit users’ trust in Office documents with some clever social engineering thrown into the mix in an attempt to convince users to enable macros and thus download the banking malware onto their machines.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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…NSA has worked to ensure that anyone can use packet injection to hack into computers.
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Initiative by Palestinian terror organization to ‘introduce itself to the world’ met with mockery
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On Sunday, an image circulated showing Islamic State supporters allegedly threatening Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, in retaliation for the social network engaging an escalating war against the militant group.
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The “anti-Western anger” has been “fed by the powerful antagonism on Russian federal television channels” since “Putin cranked up the volume after protest movements in late 2011 and 2012, which he blamed on the State Department.”
[...]
Funny thing, though–the anti-American sentiment in Russia is pretty much a mirror image of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States, which has likewise risen to record heights since polling began roughly 25 years ago.
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Transparency Reporting
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Swedish prosecutors have offered to travel to London to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over sex assault allegations.
Prosecutors had previously insisted on questioning Mr Assange in Sweden, after seeking his arrest in 2010.
Mr Assange denies the assault claims and has been living at the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spent nearly three years in an Ecuadorian embassy in London in an effort to avoid both charges from the United States regarding the dissemination of classified information as well as a nearly five-year investigation that alleges Assange committed sex crimes in Sweden. With the statue of limitations in the latter case set to expire this August, Swedish prosecutors hope to travel to London to interview Assange in the near future in a last-ditch effort to decide whether to pursue charges.
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Even for a Republican White House that was badly stumbling through George W. Bush’s sixth year in office, the revelation on April 12, 2007 was shocking. Responding to congressional demands for emails in connection with its investigation into the partisan firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the White House announced that as many as five million emails, covering a two-year span, had been lost.
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Audit checked 165 federal offices, found only 67 with updated and populated online libraries; Some 17 “E-Star” agencies disprove common excuses of cost and disability compliance
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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No one told Bart Bibler not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” during his six months on the job at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Then, on March 4, he walked into a Florida Coastal Managers Forum, a teleconference with representatives from other state agencies.
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This week, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), took to the Senate floor to call upon America to “wake up” to the damaging effects of climate change denial and the fossil fuel industry funding received by groups that promote it, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate bill mill that has been pushing a destructive agenda of climate change denial.
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Inhofe (R-Ok.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, took to the Senate floor recently to try to debunk what he called the “hysteria on global warming” by holding a snowball. While the Washington Post editorialized that the performance was a “national embarrassment”–despite the paper having columnists on staff who make similarly absurd arguments (FAIR Blog, 3/3/15)–NBC’s Meet the Press (3/1/15) had a different reaction to Inhofe’s performance.
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A study conducted by US Geological Survey scientists found traces of the Monsanto Corporation’s Roundup herbicide in 75% of rain and air samples tested. The study, “Pesticides in Mississippi air and rain: A comparison between 1995 and 2007,” appeared in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, in 2014.
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Finance
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Prof. Wolff discusses with Jessica Desvarieux of The Real News Network the latest unemployment figures, and says the raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve during a weak recovery would be disastrous for our heavily indebted society.
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Wall Street moneymen loot companies and destroy jobs, but need to see themselves as liberators. The press lets them
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Censorship
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In an attempt to make it harder for people to find pirated copies of its movies, NBC Universal has tried to remove several TorrentFreak articles from Google’s search results. Apparently, talking about piracy is already enough for websites to be hit by takedown requests.
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Privacy
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China wants the encryption keys from U.S. technology companies as part of a counter-terrorism law. The draft law leaves U.S. tech giants with two options: Play ball or get out.
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The Cryptocat developer’s new team aims to get easy file and message encryption into everyone’s hands, which could give Gmail and Dropbox (and the NSA) a run for their money.
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Encrypted communications provider Silent Circle has raised approximately $50 million in a funding round aimed at pushing the company forward in the enterprise market.
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Silent Circle, the Swiss manufacturer of the super-secret Blackphone, has announced a second in its line of secure handsets for the masses along with a seven-inch tablet running its own PrivatOS 1.1 and a suite of new apps for business.
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As we start to connect more and more of the things in our lives to the web—from our cars to our to thermostats to our barbecue grills—it’s hard not to worry about those things being hacked. No one wants their toaster to become a spambot, after all.
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Well, this is disappointing. Back in September, we were happy to see both Apple and Google announced that their mobile platforms would be encrypted by default (for local storage, not for data transmissions), which has kicked off something of a new round of Crypto Wars, as law enforcement types have shoved each other aside to spread as much possible FUD about the “dangers” of mobile encryption (ignoring that they also recommend mobile encryption to keep your data safe).
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Another security-focused development in the European mobile space: Finnish mobile startup Jolla, which develops the Sailfish mobile OS and its own brand mobile hardware, has just announced it will be partnering to create a “security hardened” version of the platform, called Sailfish Secure.
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FINNISH MOBILE PHONE FIRM Jolla is working with partners to bring a toughened version of its Sailfish OS to a range of hardware.
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With each passing day, it appears that new revelations come out, detailing how the Komodia/Superfish malware is even worse than originally expected. If you don’t recall, last week it came out that Lenovo was installing a bit of software called “Superfish” as a default bloatware on a bunch of its “consumer” laptops. The software tried to pop up useful alternative shopping results for images. But in order to work on HTTPS-encrypted sites, Superfish made use of a nasty (and horribly implemented) “SSL hijacker” from Komodia, which installed a self-signed root certificate that basically allowed anyone to issue totally fake security certificates for any encrypted connection, enabling very easy man-in-the-middle attacks. Among the many, many, many stupid things about the way Komodia worked, was that it used the same certificate on each installation of Superfish, and it had an easily cracked password: “komodia” which was true on apparently every product that used Komodia. And researchers have discovered that a whole bunch of products use Komodia, putting a ton of people at risk. People have discovered at least 12 products that make use of Komodia.
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Last week we noted that while AT&T has been trying to match Google Fiber pricing in small portions of several markets, it has been busily doing it in a very AT&T fashion. While the company is offering a $70, 1 Gbps service in some locations, the fine print indicates that users can only get that price point if they agree to AT&T’s Internet Preferences snoopvertising program. That program uses deep packet inspection to track your online behavior down to the second — and if you want to opt out, that $70 1 Gbps broadband connection quickly becomes significantly more expensive.
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Some people have noticed I’m writing for a VPN service, and having my regular commentary on liberties presented by that VPN service: by Private Internet Access VPN. Seeing my previous stance on advertising, I think it merits some explanation why I’m choosing to associate with a service brand.
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Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled “torture” with the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand “mass surveillance” as “bulk collection” in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal). In the past several weeks, this is the clearly coordinated theme that has arisen in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the last defense against the Snowden revelations, as those governments seek to further enhance their surveillance and detention powers under the guise of terrorism.
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First, that the recent attempts by politicians to demonize strong encryption look like an attempt to cover up the fact that most digital systems are already vulnerable using one or more of the techniques that have been revealed over the last year or two. That is, the NSA and GCHQ can probably access most digital content stored or transmitted in any way — either because the encryption itself or the end-points have been compromised. Even standalone strong encryption systems like PGP — thought still to be immune to direct attacks — can be circumvented by breaking into the systems on which they are used.
Perhaps the dark hints that encryption could be banned or backdoored are simply part of a cynical ploy to present such an appalling vision of what could happen, that we gladly accept anything less extreme without complaint. In fact, the authorities have no intention of attempting anything so stupid — it would put all online business at risk — because they don’t need to: they already have methods to access everything anyway.
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Weeks after The Verge published internal memos from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in which he said “we suck at dealing with abuse,” the company is rolling out new tools to reduce harassment on the service. Under the changes, users who receive temporary bans may have to verify an email address or a phone number to resume using Twitter. (Other users can be banned permanently.) Email addresses are relatively easy to obtain, but phone numbers are harder — and by checking phone numbers against a list of banned users, Twitter could be able to keep more abusers and harassers from creating accounts.
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Despite the feds’ best efforts to keep IMSI catchers (Stingray devices, colloquially and almost certainly to the dismay of manufacturer Harris Corporation, as they head to becoming the kleenex of surveillance tech) a secret, there’s still enough information leaking out around the edges of the FBI’s non-disclosure agreements to provoke public discussion.
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But aside from ideals and growth markets, the report highlights a tension inherent to the question of access: When Facebook sets sail to disconnected markets, what version of the internet will it bring?
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The billion-dollar lawsuit against the producers of the Edward Snowden documentary CitizenFour rolls on, gradually unraveling as it does. Since we last covered the story (where the United States of America was added as an involuntary plaintiff — a plaintiff since forcibly removed by the court), a lot has happened. For one, CitizenFour won an Oscar for Best Documentary, something that can’t be sitting too well with Horace Edwards and his legal representation, which sought to have the film removed from consideration during the early days of this lawsuit.
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And that’s it: basically, the ISC is saying that all that is needed is a bit of a legal tidying-up. In terms of more detailed recommendations, the report suggests that the abuse of interception powers should be made a criminal offense — currently it isn’t — and that a new category of metadata called “Communications Data Plus”, which includes things like Web addresses, needs slightly greater protection than “traditional” telephone metadata.
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Civil Rights
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In his appearance as the Council on Foreign Relations today, a woman with Human Rights Watch listed (starting at 56:30) a number of abuses our “partners” in the fight against ISIL engage in, including,
The ABC report of egregious abuses committed by some of Iraq’s elite military units
Iraqi militias carrying out ISIS like atrocities
Beheadings and violent attacks on journalists in Saudi Arabia
She then asked, “How do you think Iraqi Sunni civilians should distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys in this circumstance”?
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This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen nefarious alterations to Wikipedia entries, and it won’t be the last. But the disclosure of NYPD’s entries by Capital New York come as the Justice Department announced a national initiative for “building community trust and justice” with the nation’s policing agencies.
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A little-known EU law could force vendors to stand behind their products for up to two years — instead of the one year warranty typically offered. Each year the Finnish consumer authority receives thousands of complaints about warranties for electronic devices.
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With the abuses of asset forfeiture being loudly publicized, there has (finally) been some legislative pushback against these abusive programs. Wyoming’s legislators — hoping to institute asset forfeiture reform — ran into pushback themselves from the state’s governor, who vetoed the popular bill (which passed out of the Senate with an 80-9 vote) when it hit his desk.
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After a U.S. court ruled that Kim Dotcom is not entitled to contest the forfeiture of his assets because he is a “fugitive” facing extradition, the government has just tightened the noose. In a filing before the same court yesterday, the U.S. requested a default judgment to seize the assets of Dotcom, his co-defendants, and their Megaupload empire.
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We lost one of the “good guys” when Magistrate Judge John Facciola retired late last year. Facciola was a leading figure in the small — but important — “Magistrates’ Revolt” that emerged in the wake of the Snowden leaks. Multiple times the government approached Facciola for a signature on overly-broad warrants seeking the entire contents of a phone or an email account, only to find the judge unwilling to help it pack for its fishing trip.
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Floridians, we need your help to stop a dangerous anti-anonymity bill. This week, the Florida state legislature is considering a bill that would make it illegal to run any website or service anonymously, if the site fits a vague category of “disseminat[ing]” “commercial” recordings or videos—even the site owner’s own work. Outlawing anonymous speech raises a serious First Amendment problem, and laws like this one have been abused by police and the entertainment industry.
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It’s an interesting time to be a computer security researcher. Last week, Kaspersky Lab released a report about a new family of malware from an entity they called “The Equation Group”. The report demonstrated for the first time that firmware-based attacks, previously only demonstrated in lab settings, have been used in the wild by malware authors. This should serve as a wake up call to security professionals and the hardware industry in general: firmware-based attacks are real and their numbers will only increase. If we don’t address this issue now, we risk facing disastrous consequences.
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A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin has been hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, after he allegedly received threats from Islamists.
The body of Avijit Roy, founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site – which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation – was found covered in blood after an attack that also left his wife critically wounded.
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He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.
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Philadelphia cops put Tony Wright away for a brutal crime he didn’t commit. DNA tests have exonerated him.
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Less than one quarter of the 119 detainees named in the US Senate Intelligence Committee 2014 report on the CIA’s secret torture program are actually housed at the Guantánamo Bay military prison.
Research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism recognized just 36 individuals originally sent to Guantánamo after CIA interrogations. Of these, 29 remain as of January 2015.
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A phone video of a homeless man who goes by the name Africa being shot and killed by the LAPD went viral Sunday night. The video was raw, the outrage on display from those watching the killing unfold in real time, palpable.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Today was, no hyperbole intended, probably one of the more historic — albeit at times one of the dullest — days in FCC history. The agency, led by a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries few expected anything from, bucked a myriad of low expectations and voted 3-2 to approve Title II-based net neutrality rules after an unprecedented public-driven tech advocacy campaign. While net neutrality will likely get the lion’s share of today’s media attention, the FCC also today voted to begin a prolonged assault on ISP-driven, protectionist state telecom law.
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted today to accept FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal that the Commission “use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open Internet protections.” Or, to put it in plain English, your ISP must provide equal broadband access to you or any site — Amazon, Netflix, etc. — without slowing down or speeding up sites for additional fees.
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When the months-long financial disputes between Netflix and Internet service providers ended last summer, a lot of network congestion problems that affected Internet consumers were cleared up.
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Tom Wheeler tells the world’s largest telecoms trade show ‘there needs to be a referee’ even as European officials propose fast lanes that don’t impair traffic
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While the FCC may have buckled to public demand and voted to finally approve tougher net neutrality rules last week, if you thought that meant an end to the hysterical over-reaction to what appear to be some fairly basic consumer protections, you’re going to be gravely disappointed. From editorials lamenting the FCC’s attempt to “strangle startups in their cribs”, to claims the agency is murdering “innovation angels”, we’re clearly entering an entirely new, bloody chapter when it comes to divorcing net neutrality reality from rhetoric.
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Net neutrality supporters won a major victory this week when regulators issued the toughest Internet rules the country has ever seen, but their battle is still far from over.
New Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations are already coming under new scrutiny from Capitol Hill and are bound for a gauntlet of legal and legislative challenges assuring that the rules are anything but set in stone.
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Andrus Ansip, Europe’s Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, wants to abolish geoblocking. Restricting user access to content based on their location, which Netflix, YouTube and others do, is discrimination, he says. “I want to pay – but I am not allowed to. I lose out, they lose out,” Ansip notes.
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The definitive definition of net neutrality by the experts for the kids (and adults, too)
America’s Federal Communications Commission’s has voted three to two in favour of its chairman’s proposals for new net neutrality regulations.
The proposals will have a huge impact on how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) treat Internet traffic, but what the heck is net neutrality anyway?
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A few weeks ago, after it was more or less confirmed that the FCC was going forward with full Title II reclassification of broadband, we noted that the stocks of the big broadband companies actually went up suggesting that Wall Street actually knows that reclassification won’t really impact broadband companies, despite what they’ve been saying publicly. Perhaps this is partly because those same companies have been telling Wall Street that the rule change won’t have an impact.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A leaked draft of what the European Union wants excluded from a new trade deal with the United States has been obtained by the BBC.
The document describes itself as the EU’s “initial offer” in negotiations over the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks are stalling while the White House assures its trading partners that this secret trade agreement won’t be amended when it comes back to Congress for ratification after the President signs the deal. That’s why the Executive is scrambling to get its allies in Congress to pass Fast Track. If they succeed, the U.S. Trade Representative can block remaining opportunities for the examination of the TPP’s provisions by lawmakers who could ensure that this secret deal does not contain expansive copyright rules that would lock the U.S. into broken copyright rules that are already in bad need of reform.
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Copyrights
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This week is Fair Use Week, according to the Association of Research Libraries, and that’s as good a time as any to remind everyone that it’s wrong to refer to fair as merely a “limitation or exception” to copyright law — or merely a defense to infringement. It is a right that is protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has regularly referred to “fair use” as a “safeguard” of the First Amendment, allowing copyright law to be compatible with the First Amendment. As such, it seems bizarre that fair use is not seen as the default, rather than the other way around. If we are to protect the First Amendment, and not allow for speech to be stifled, at the very least, we need a greater recognition of the importance of fair use in guaranteeing that the First Amendment’s principles of free speech are allowed to thrive.
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Back in November, the DOJ argued that it should get to keep all of Kim Dotcom’s money and stuff because he’s a “fugitive”, which is a bizarre and ridiculous way to portray Kim Dotcom, who has been going through a long and protracted legal process over his potential extradition from New Zealand (though he’s offered to come to the US willingly if the government lets him mount a real defense by releasing his money). Dotcom’s lawyers told the court that it’s ridiculous to call him a fugitive, but it appears that Judge Liam O’Grady didn’t buy it.
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After coming under intense pressure PayPal has closed the account of cloud-storage service Mega. According to the company, SOPA proponent Senator Patrick Leahy personally pressured Visa and Mastercard who in turn called on PayPal to terminate the account. Bizarrely, Mega’s encryption is being cited as a key problem.
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Kim Dotcom was in court today pleading for access to his seized assets. A reportedly “destitute” Dotcom asked for the release of US$152,000 a month for living expenses and as much as US$3m for legal fees. The Megaupload founder said if funds aren’t forthcoming, living in a mansion may no longer be an option.
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It shouldn’t even be controversial. If you’re lying about holding a copyright monopoly to something, you’re infringing on that work’s distribution, and should suffer the same penalties as any other infringer does today.
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THE PIRATE PARTY UK is steadily increasing its position in the political spectrum, aided perhaps by the actions and behaviour of the big three parties.
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